Well, it’s a lazy Saturday around these parts.  [insert comment about the heat here]

I’ve not posted much of late because I’ve been lacking inspiration.  I’m between two workshops at work, and have been living in active fear of our office accountant such that I’m not giving her any payments to process unless I know that I will be present for the inevitable question after question after question that we have to endure for the simplest procedure.  Just a taste: I gave her my receipts for reimbursement for the trip I took last month.  All of the destinations were already in the University mainframe, because we have to get authorization to travel from the Accounting office (technically there’s a freeze on, but it only applies to state funds, which no one uses).

After: 1) I had supplied her with a cover memo that had in the subject line “Reimbursement for travel to Spain and Morocco;” 2) I had already signed the completed reimbursement voucher that she herself had already prepared, which she could only have done by 3) working with the previously mentioned travel request extensively, I got an e-mail from her asking what countries I had traveled to.

When I say I live in fear of her, it’s not because I’m afraid of her, so much as I’ve hit the point of saturation where I can’t deal with the endless rounds of questions I’ve answered repeatedly, but to which she can’t find the answers because I either gave them to her verbally or (more likely) she wasn’t paying attention at the time because she was actively engaged in another crisis altogether.

She’s still far better, however, than .  We do not speak of anymore.  We all pretend that it never happened.

Moving right along.

Ray and I entered our latest massive dork phase on Thursday with the release of the Samsung Instinct, the Sprint answer to the iPhone.  I’ve been carrying the same phone for several years (ironically, it was the Samsung/Sprint answer to the Motorola Razr, a phone which was–and still is–apparently far less likely to break).

Ray finally convinced me that it was time to retire the old phones.  He wasn’t wrong, and when Samsung dropped the price on the Instinct like a rock, I agreed to participate in the first-day festivities.  The Instinct is quite swank, and has a couple of features I never particularly thought I’d need in a mobile telephone (weather reports, including live radar?  GPS?  E-mail?).  I’m a fast learner, though.

I feel like a massive dork carrying it — more than normal.  I mean, it is an awesome phone, and I already spend far too much time fiddling with it, but still.  I’ve probably sent more text messages in the past two and a half days than I have in my entire life up to that point.  What, exactly, does that mean, I wonder? 

Anyway.  When he was playing with his phone the other night, Ray took the following (I hope it works) video of Mocha.  The voice is his.  The buzzer is the drier.  The living room is a mess.

Happy Saturday!

Tags: geeking out, iPhone, Mocha, Photos, technology