Oof. I haven't posted anything in almost a month?! Yeesh. What the heck have I been doing with myself all August? Working, I guess.
I was pretty busy with the day job, plus one of my freelance clients is, uh, "transitioning to a new business model" and there was a lot of work to do with that. My other freelance client is also transitioning to a new business model in that she's going to be retiring in about ten months, so I keep telling myself that this time next year I won't have to be doing [fill in the blank with whatever task is eating into my slacking off time].
Ah, yes, slacking off time: You know what's awesome for that? The iPad. I'm using mine to compose this blog post. Mostly I use it for ebooks, email, Facebook, music, Web surfing. . . All stuff I could do on the iPod touch, but with a bigger screen. Then again, my laptop has a much bigger screen, but it takes a few minutes to boot up and it's too big to hold in one hand. So, iPad FTW, I guess.
I was showing it to my parents the other weekend, and they were pretty much like, That's nice, dear. My dad said something about it seemed like a way to waste a lot of time. I'm like, Have you *met* the Internet? Wasting time is its middle name! And you have 800 cable channels, so Pot, meet Kettle. My mom couldn't get the finger-swipe gestures down at first — I think perhaps she was using the nail instead of the pad of her finger, and then somehow she was tapping it too hard/too long? Whatever. I'm not sure exactly how she was doing it wrong, but she was doing it wrong. Then she got the hang of it, pretty much, and was on Facebook looking through some photos/videos of the kids of someone she had in her first grade class about twenty-nine years ago. She couldn't stop laughing about the deja vu weirdness of it, since apparently his kids look and the act the same way he did when he was their age. After that, I freaked out my dad and my grandma by showing them how Google Earth can home in on your exact location. Fun!
At any rate, to maximize the time wasting capabilities, I signed up for a Hulu plus account. However, I'm having second thoughts because I'm not sure there's enough content available for iPads to make it worth $10/month. Most of the stuff I want to see is only available through the Web site, which is free. That might change once the fall season starts, though, so maybe I'll give it another month or two before I cancel it.
Speaking of fall TV, it's almost time for me to make this year's giant spreadsheet of the shows I'm going to be watching/taping/viewing online. I already know that Thursdays at 8 are going to be a train wreck:
Community vs.
Bones vs.
Big Bang Theory. I'll probably tape
Bones and
Big Bang, and watch
Community online. So, that's one hour of prime time scheduled; now for the other twenty!