very simple

After a somewhat lengthy hiatus, the Friday Five returns:

1. What do you do for a living?

It’s been mentioned before – I’m corporate/securities lawyer.

2. What do you like most about your job?

Again, something I’ve touched on before – I pretty much love my job for reasons that are apparently not explainable. If I had to pick one thing, I guess it would be the really great people I get to work with – that makes such an incredible difference when you work the crazy hours that I do.

3. What do you like least about your job?

The crazy hours. But I find it hard to even complain about that – I knew what I was getting in to when I signed up for the gig. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of information out there about the hours associates at big NYC firms are expected to keep.

4. When you have a bad day at work it’s usually because _____…

I have a tendency to get incredibly cranky if I don’t eat at regular intervals – it’s a low blood sugar thing. When work is so crazy that I forget to eat, it can get to be a problem.

5. What other career(s) are you interested in?

Hmm. I always wonder about this sort of thing. I mean, I’m pretty much doing exactly what I want to be doing right now. If I was actually capable of stringing more than two sentences together, I think I would love to be a travel writer/reviewer. Mainly because I love to travel, and if I could get paid for it, that would be pretty cool.

Thanks to the forums over at ibloggers.net, I finally figured out how to get that darn picture in my banner. iBlog does it for you on all the sub-category pages (with your "category" image), but I spent a few hours tonight trying to get the hack right. Part of the problem was that I actually have to store the image file somewhere completely outside of all of my iblog files, because they get re-written whenever I upload changes to the template. The picture may change, depending on my mood, but at least now it’s just a matter of replacing the image file.

I’ve also been trying to create more categories for the blog. I realize, particularly with the older entries, there’s some overlap, but moving forward I’m going to try to keep to one subject. Even if it means multiple entries in a row.

I just added trackback to my site. I think I’m getting pretty good at faking knowing what I’m doing! Sort of.

update. let’s hope this works.

So I finally got all of my photos on my powerbook as well, with only a few hiccups along the way. The process did teach me how to link my two computers by firewire correctly. You may notice that if you go into any of my photo albums (except Prague – I haven’t gotten to that one yet) that I’m actually simplifying them. When I originally created them, I used this program that seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s so complex to use that I would usually have to spend 5-6 hours to get the album the way I wanted. And then, after creating the "album" on my desktop, I would have to export it again into an entirely different file format in order to upload it to my idisk. And it also ate up a lot of space – I just didn’t see the need to be using 15+ MB of disk space for one album – at that rate, I’ll be doubling my idisk space every 6 months. It’s cheap, but it’s not that cheap.

So now that I’ve taught myself some basic html, I’m supplementing the simple iPhoto export program with some tweaks of my own. Even manually going into each "page" in order to tweak the link sizes and colors takes significantly less time than the "automated" old program. Right now they’re really basic, and I’m hoping to dress them up a little bit more, but there’s really no need for frames and such for a bunch of photo albums that, like, 5 people in the world even care about. and then, I’m pretty sure they only care about the actual photos. And since the page scripting is so simple, it makes it really easy to go in afterwards and figure out exactly what I need to change.

This really couldn’t have been a more boring entry. wow. I’ve even lost interest in it myself.

I know – it’s my third entry of the day, which is quite a bit for me. I guess this is what happens when I finally get a day off (sort of – working from home counts as a day off, right?). I haven’t even begun to discuss current events – with Haiti and Spain in the past few weeks, it’s been a bit overwhelming. So overwhelming that I spent my day getting sucked in to the vh1 Bands Reunited marathon. Who knew that Berlin and Flock of Seagulls could be so compelling?

I also finally realized that after a number of false starts over the past few years, I’m actually going to keep this thing maintained. it’s been almost 8 months since I’ve been writing, and I really enjoy it. So today, I officially registered my site at dotmac.info, and have been somewhat deluged with new visitors. So to all of you, hello! This site is pretty random – I generally just write about the things that either interest or bother me, with little updates on my life here and there. There’s not too much of an overriding theme or purpose. as evidenced by this incredibly boring entry.

And the most depressing factoid that kept getting shoved down my throat by the TV today? That Prince has been around long enough to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, Purple Rain wasn’t that long ago, was it? But the idea of a jam session with both Prince and ZZ Top is making me giggle like crazy.

it was that one darn preferences file, that’s stored somewhere completely different than every other file related to the blog. But all of my settings are here – the revised datelines, the custom borders that I actually learned how to edit in html in order to insert manually, and, of course, the orange. This makes me happy. I just have to remember to back up everything whenever I’m done making new entries on one computer so that I don’t accidentally overwrite something. This is definitely cool.

OK. enough about that. This week at work was kind of crazy. We’ve actually all been joking about how much work there is to do (because, really, when you’re all there at 10:30 every night, including the partners, and there’s no end in sight, there’s not a whole lot you can do to keep your sanity in check except laugh about it). The thing is, I’m one of the few people I know who actually really likes there job. I like the work, I like the people that I work with, and I can’t complain about the money. Sure, there have been plenty of nights recently when all I’ve wanted to do is go home and go to sleep, but even then, I don’t develop any overwhelmingly bad feelings towards my job generally. I just think, "gee, it’ll be really nice when Saturday rolls around and I can sleep late."

I suppose it’s good that I feel this way, but sometimes I feel like an oddball because most people I know don’t feel this way about there jobs. And also, I’m a corporate lawyer, so most people I know think that it’s just weird for anyone to enjoy doing my type of work (and honestly, before I got into this line of business, I had abstract thoughts about how boring and horrible it would be, based on nothing more than a "corporations, eww!" line of logic). I’m glad I gave myself the opportunity to prove myself wrong, because otherwise I’d probably be jumping from one litigation job to the next, trying to figure out why I hated my job when it was all I ever wanted to do.

I’m going to try to plan another vacation for April. At this point, I haven’t figured out anywhere to go, and given some timing issues at work, I’m not sure exactly what week I’m going to be able to take off. I’m thinking I’ll just pick a week and then see what e-savers are available to somewhere beachy.

I’ve been attempting to get my blog, which is ordinarily native to my computer, rather than internet based, to update from both my desktop computer and my powerbook. I’ve managed a few times to get all of the files/entries to sync using backup with my iDisk, but for some reason, whenever I try to create a new entry on the laptop, I lose some of my customized settings. I’ve been doing some research, and I did discover that there’s at least one additional file that I should have been sync-ing. so this is now the test of that. Of course, if this doesn’t work, you’ll never know because I’ll erase everything that I’ve done here (yet again).

You have just won one million dollars:

1. Who do you call first?

That’s easy – my Dad.

2. What is the first thing you buy for yourself?

The first thing I’d actually do is pay off my student loans. Then with the $12 I have left, I’d buy a sandwich. Actually, I’d buy an apartment, and then I’d buy a sandwich.

3. What is the first thing you buy for someone else?

Since we’re talking about the first thing I’d buy for someone else, clearly I’d buy everyone I knew a round of drinks (and I wouldn’t even insist on bottom-shelf liquor!).

4. Do you give any away? If yes, to whom?

After taxes, and the loans, and the apartment, and the drinks for everyone, I’m pretty sure there would be nothing left. Although there would be a significant portion of my monthly income that would be freed up from not having to pay loans and New York City rent, so I’d probably give larger donations than usual to my regular charities, which are places like National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood.

5. Do you invest any? If so, how?

At this point I’ve not only spent all the money, but have started dipping into my normal income to give more away, so I’m pretty confident I’d have nothing left to invest.

I decided to change the name of the blog slightly. It used to be called "sam.i.am", but I noticed that there were a bunch of poor people who were accidentally stumbling across it in attempts to find the infinitely more important Dr. Seuss book . I thought I’d help them out. Plus, even though I am obviously making no money on this little endeavor, I decided that even theoretical copyright infringement was not at the top of my list of things to do.