This week has just really been a bad one all around. Family issues have resulted in late-night phone calls all week—leaving my whole family extremely short sleep in addition to the general stress associated with “family issues.” Last week I sent my monitor off because of a white line at the bottom edge of the screen; today I get it back with “no problem found.” (Of course, the line was there when I first plugged it in again… and then promptly disappeared. And then reappeared.) Things that were supposedly cancelled shipped, and things that supposedly shipped (a month ago) never arrived. Etcetera.

Did I mention that I’m sleep-deprived?

Overcoming the odds, I did manage to get Octave completely up and running yesterday evening. Turns out I don’t have to use Apple’s X11 application (at least directly); I can run the program out of a plain terminal window. And now that I have it set up to look for function files in a folder of my choice, it pretty much acts as MatLab used to act—a pain in the ass, but usable. Only time will tell if I’ll ever actually use it.

I darn well better, after all the time I invested getting it up and running.

Work has decided that tomorrow will be a “wacky and wild (but still decent)” dress-day. Although I never got the official announcement email, the chatter of the office sufficed to inform me…. Of course, that chatter was of all kinds of indecent things people would be wearing talk about wearing. This talk of everybody dressed up all sexy-like (recall that almost all the chatter in my office is between females) prompted me to ask if I was supposed to dress up like a pimp tomorrow. People seemed to enjoy that idea.

(Little do they know how little I know about being a pimp; I’d go so far as to call myself the pimp of last resort.)

Some people have decided that this event should really be a “wear something related to what you do outside of work” day. In that vein, I have a couple old Macintosh t-shirts floating around somewhere. (Mac OS 8.5 featuring Sherlock, anyone? How about a shirt listing all the great Mac OS innovations, including such gems as OpenDoc?* Both shirts, of course, are way the hell too small for me.) I also have a handful of anime t-shirts (the kinds that came with artboxes**), the majority of which look terrible. Or, of course, I have my ancient high-school yearbook shirt***.

[*OpenDoc died an obscure death a long, long time ago.]

[**I’d never pay for an anime t-shirt by itself. Unless it was one of those black NERV shirts—those are nifty.]

[***The Ampersand of Quality, featuring both a large ampersand and the frog that graced the cover of the Spring Supplement. A modern-day classic.]

What’s a dork to do?