I wrote the Inbox that will go out tomorrow, and working ahead, wrote the Inbox for next week as well.

I finally grew completely exasperated with the stupid chair mat at work. Around the 11th, they put chair mats at all the desks. The problem is that our carpet has no pile, but they bought the kind of spiky mats that should settle into the mat. As there’s no pile, instead, we have mats up on little stilts. Everyone has been having problems rolling chairs on them. Because I am exceptionally large and heavy however, mine chair ends up stuck in indentations. Wherever the chair sits, the mat gets pushed down. Then when I try to move, I can’t. I’ve nearly fallen out of the chair several times. Today, I decided I was fed up with it. I took the mat out from under my chair. Eventually someone will notice and make me put it back; but for today, it felt amazingly assertive and so much better without that horrible, cheap mat. Every time I tried to roll on it, I had another remind of how big and fat I am. It had to go.

Technology woe of the day: I bought a refurbished wireless keyboard and mouse, but I can’t get it to work. Try as I might, the two of them won’t connect to the computer. I finally gave up and packed the thing back up. I spent very little money on it, so it’s not a great loss financially. It does bring up an ongoing problem for me through. What am I supposed to do with the technology graveyard of junk that I have collected? I feel so guilty just throwing things away, but I don’t know what else to do with them. The stuff ends up piling around in the way. What the world needs is a thrift shop for outgrown technology. Someone would probably be overjoyed to get some of this junk, and it’s just causing me to feel unhappy and wasteful.

Installed Download of the Day: TaskBlaze, mentioned on LifeHacker. I always have trouble keeping track of when I’m working for NCTE at home. I usually make my best guess, and usually I underestimate because it’s so hard to tell for sure. This little tool is basically a stopwatch that you can start and stop at will. When you stop it, the tool exports the information to your Outlook calendar. It looks as if it will be very useful. I end up with clearly marked blocks of time on my calendar for when I’ve been working. You can enter a title for your task, which is exported to Outlook as the title of the appointment. I’ve added it to my Start Up folder, so that I remember to turn it on when I’m working.