Hurricane Katrina donations

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I normally don’t share too much insight with what happens at my day job because I’d like to continue keeping it, but yesterday we got an e-mail that I just can’t help but boast about. In a mere ten days of fundraising for hurricane relief, employees made over $38,000 in donations…which was matched by another $38,000 from the company itself. Along with a special grant from our Employee Association, we donated a total of $86,000 to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts… :O

It’s stuff like this that reminds me just how good of a company that I work for, despite some of the other things that might bother me from day to day. Certainly good to see that our little group of about 800 people could step up to make a difference!

curious about cardio

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Does anyone happen to know much about doing cardio exercise…specifically if there’s a set maximum duration to which after it’s not efficient for weight loss???

I’m wondering because I’ve been having trouble finding time to get to the gym over the past couple of weeks. For example, I was supposed to go tonight, but I didn’t finish up my work until just a few minutes ago and I decided that between bed now or bed after 1 AM, now would be better for keeping my job, which is also important! My original goal was to go every other day, which works out to about three times a week, but I usually end up pushing forward a day or two and it tends to screw with my overall schedule. I had conjured up the idea of penalizing myself an extra five minutes for every day that I missed, so that would make tomorrow night’s run a whopping 70 minutes plus cool-down…but if there’s a threshold to be met after a certain amount of time, I do have other things that I could be doing! 😛

Thoughts?

Mmmm…cookies…

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Seriously, is there anything better in this world than warm cookies straight out of the oven with a glass of nice, cold milk?

…

Ok, so I can think of two things, but as I don’t seem to have access to either of them right now, sweet, old Betty Crocker is just going to have to subdue my cravings in the meantime… 😛

sheesh…

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I lifted the server-wide ban on hotlinking for, like, a week because it was causing referral issues with the new L7 RSS feed – just pulled a server log and freaking MySpace users are going crazy with leeching bandwidth! WTF?!

Just finished putting directory-specific redirects on the ten most popular images getting leeched – maybe the next rebuilds will require all non-sharable images to be in the same directory or something…a total mess for organizational purposes, but I don’t know any other way to keep them protected. What a tremendous waste of time… 😛

weekend…what weekend?

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  • Spent a great deal more time than I had planned on learning just how damn picky XML can be, but the good news is that ump-teen hours later, I finally did get a working RSS feed out of it. For the three people out there who currently appreciate RSS, check out: http://www.l7comix.com/newsletter/themuffin.xml
  • And on that note, things are coming in line for Lori and I to bring the comic back, with any luck shooting for a new one to hit the ‘net Friday morning. I’m sure a nice, promotional e-mail will get sent out to remind everyone, but feel free to visit the website in the meantime to catch-up!
  • Also, currently my apartment complex isn’t exactly on the best of levels with me – I’ve got calls into both the “community manager” and the “district manager” and neither has bothered to call me back yet. You see, I received my lease renewal letter last week and they want to charge me anywhere between $70 and $130 more each month…and this is after I spoke with the leasing office and was informed that rent wouldn’t be jumping up, despite all of the rennovations taking place. And believe me, the last thing I want to be thinking about right now is moving with everything else that’s going on, but like I left on the manager’s voicemail last week, why should I pay them more money when they can’t seem to fix the hot tub and the racquetball courts and the pool door as it is?!
  • And while we’re on the subject, I read a nice article in the newspaper about our local utilities requesting approval to increase rates “because of increased transportation costs” – you’d better believe that a column is getting written up about this one! D.C. won’t let price gouging happen at the pump, but you just wait as everyone from utilities to retailers to even restaurants are going to start jacking up prices to compensate. Funny how these “costs of living” always seem to skyrocket in times of crisis, and yet if I were to request a “cost of living” raise from my employer, how far do you think I’d get? ‘Nuff said…I’ll save the rest for the column! 😛
  • It’s hard to tell after ranting over the last two bullets, but I’m experiencing somewhat of a writer’s block again…even though it seems to be more of a lazy man’s block because I’ve got tons of ideas, I just don’t want to sit down and write them out. And the longer I put it off, the more buried I get…I need some motivation already…
  • Lastly, I finally started Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tonight and it sounds like it might actually be pretty good. I only got through the first chapter because it’s late enough already, but I’ll probably shoot for one a night and pick up the pace as it gets more interesting. Here’s to just hoping it picks up a little faster than Order of the Phoenix, though…

Barbara, please introduce Mr. Foot to Mrs. Mouth…

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Wow – the Bush family is just full of compassion these days:

Barbara Bush: It’s Good Enough for the Poor
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20050906/cm_thenation/120080

“Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them,” Mrs. Bush told American Public Media’s “Marketplace” program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

You just can’t make that kind of stuff up…