Big huge news is the total office reorg. As of this week, there is no more CCSO, CET, or office of the CIO. Nope, we're all one big happy family called CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services). From my point of view this is extremely good news. Look for more details to come on the verk page soon.
This past Monday, April 1st, the Urbana City Council voted to pass the living wage. Yep, it's in in Urbana, and the vote was unanimous - both parties, all members, plus the mayor gave a nice speech afterward. That makes the fourth local governing body to pass it - it's in effect at the Champaign County Board (by an 18-3 bipartisan vote), the Champaign County Housing Authority, and the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District too. Next stop - Champaign!
Things have warmed up a bit but not a whole heck of a lot. Today's high was in the upper 30s F. Crocuses are pretty much done, seems like, and my daffodils aren't back yet, so the yard is looking fairly boring. However, the good news is that it appears the vinca is making a comeback. Yep, it is extremely tiny still, but you can see tiny, tiny little brand new leaves coming up next to the old dead stems! I'm probably not going to be doing anything really groundbreaking (heh) in the yard until after the porch and painting stuff is over, though, so the more that is filling in naturally, the better.
As for the porch, the shingling is now done. The steps are also in place mainly. The floor should get installed sometime this week if there are a few days of no rain, as the floor has to be painted the same day it is installed. I'll be picking out colors in the next few days. The house will be hot pink... no, actually the house will be a greyish/green, the trim will be off-white (or possibly true white - not sure, but thinking off), and the porch floor, back stoop, and back door will be dark green (well, dark greyish green, I guess). It's the dark green that I have to pick out now. I'm debating about the front door - could be that same dark green, but I'm also toying with the idea of red, just because.
As of this weekend the pringles can goes up on the gable! It will sit on the gable, and then the wire will go in through the vent, drop down through the (right now conveniently totally open) porch attic/ceiling space, then get tacked into the corner by the door, go through the porch floor, through a tiny hole drilled into the wood beam that sits on top of the masonry foundation for the basement, and thus into the basement, where it will hook into the back of the computer that sits down there. We swapped out computers for one that doesn't have evil RF interference problems, but now something is wrong with the bridge to the wireless card so it's over at Zach's getting fixed, it will be reinstalled to go with the pringles can Saturday. It looks like we should have total line of sight from the gable to both Zach's and Sascha's houses (where the T1s will go) so pretty soon there should be total happy wireless internet paradise all up and down my section of Race St.
Alas, the closed captioning situation ain't gonna work out. I learned more about it and it turns out that US style closed captioning is this really lame Line 21 standard that is only designed to be bare bare bones, so it doesn't even do justice to lowercase letters, much less any other fonts. Japanese closed caption is a whole 'nother beast, and involves their HDTV. Ah well. One day maybe it'll all work. Interesting thing is though, in Japan you can get special modules to decode the crappy US standard that plug in between the VCR and the TV, so that you can put US style closed captions on the Japanese TV for imported shows that have it (notably the McNeil Lehrer news hour or whatever it is now) and thereby hide the Japanese subtitles. These are aimed at people who are trying to learn English by reading and listening at the same time. Hmm. Imagine that...