The plan was originally to visit the American Museum of Natural History with my family tomorrow. That has now been changed to visiting the Museum of Sex.

I rarely see any activity on there now. All new items on there for the past three months have been the result of integration with something else like Twitter, Flickr, or Google Chat status updates.

I had a meeting on Tuesday to discuss my proposal for redesigning a diamond jewelry website. It's for a company that has two sites. One is performing well. The other hasn't made a single sale yet since it's launch in March. The current site is ugly, not optimized for search engines, and inconvenient to use due to complex navigation. The shopping cart was totally non-functional when I looked. They told me that it was probably just a bug in a new update, but I wonder why nobody else tested it. Considering how things currently are, I would not be surprised if the shopping cart had never worked.

My proposal was accepted, which theoretically should be a good thing, but I was given only 6 weeks to build this site, and it has to be done entirely from scratch, because it differs significantly from other projects that I have worked on. I had originally offered to build this in 2 to 3 months, but they don't want to wait that long. Assistants are on the payroll, but no money is coming in, and they don't want to fire anyone. Because they are operating at a loss, fixing things quickly is a priority. This means I will not be getting much rest for the next 6 weeks. Adding to this is a week-long visit from relatives that begins tomorrow, so I actually get only 5 weeks to work on this.

My grandmother didn't have an air conditioner and she seldom used an electric fan. She did things the old way. She had an old Chinese bamboo fan which was also sometimes used as a giant fly swatter. I always avoided the air stream of her fan, because I worried about maggots being flung at me. When her arm got tired from fanning, she sat next to the window and called the wind. I didn't know anything about confirmation bias when I was 5. I believed in her magic. It always worked. When the wind didn't cool her enough, she soaked a cloth in alcohol and rubbed it on her skin. Not understanding specific heat and evaporative cooling, I also believed that this was magic.

I awoke to one of the worst sounds I ever heard. It was a vuvuzela full of saliva blown by someone with insufficient lung power. It sounded like the painful cry of a demonic beast.

I have known for a long time that pepper tastes much better when freshly ground in a pepper mill than when preground. What I failed to realize until now, is that it is even better when the grinding is done inside my mouth. I discovered this when my pepper mill broke, spilling whole peppercorns everywhere.

My contract with Verizon expired a few months ago, but I am still getting phone service from them. I had delayed on the renewal of my contract, because I wanted to see what new phones were going to get released, and because I was lazy. Now it's just procrastination. They called me twice today. No message was left, but I checked the number online. It's a number that their sales department uses. They typically contact me around once a month to try to sell me an upgrade/renewal, but this is the first time that they have done it twice in a single day.