The Computer Vet Weblog

You know, when I go on vacation in January, I expect cold weather. It’s what I’m hoping for and wishing for. And then, I go down to Southern California, and what do I get? A record-breaking heat wave. I mean, it was 100 degrees in Anaheim on Friday. What did I do to get on Mother Nature’s short list?

Anyway, if you could ignore the sweltering heat, it was a good vacation. It’s always fun to go down south, even if it’s equally a relief to come home and return to a normal life. It’s nice to do some of the tourist-y stuff, like going to Disneyland and the beach. And, this was the first vacation we’ve had in two years that didn’t involve a funeral. So, I feel like we’re making progress there!

Plus, it’s nice to go offline for a while. Everyone does it, except for those few freaks that sit down and blog from places like airports and cruise ships. It just doesn’t seem right to go on vacation and spend the whole time with your nose stuck in laptop. For one thing, it feels too much like a working vacation. Even checking my e-mail every morning was too much of a reminder of the daily grind. But, beside that, I’m down there to see my family. It just seems rude to tune out and pay that much attention to the computer. So I didn’t read any weblogs while I was down there, and I got my news from a pile of dead trees on the front porch every morning and Paul Moyer on Channel 4 every night. There is a price to pay, though; I’ve got a lot a catching up to do now. I peeked at my work e-mail, and there are 1,500 messages waiting for me. Yeep. Of course, they’re all from web design mailing lists, so there will probably be a few hundred going back and forth about the proper way to build a regular expression in Perl, and another few hundred about why you should use pixels for font size, or why you should use ems, or why you should never use smaller than 1em… I should be able to breeze through them pretty fast.

Oh, the joys of vacation.