The guy I was supposed to meet with yesterday called me up and said he owes me lunch for missing our meeting. He apparently left his cell phone behind at home, which would explain his unreachability. We rescheduled until next week.
Around 12:30 I had a meeting with a representative of the National Association of the Self-Employed at the Lighthouse Cafe near my apartment. I need to figure out whether I should use them for health insurance or if I should use the Microsoft Alumni Network plan. The legal service benefits might also be useful for me for document review and so on. I'm not sure if the other features are all that useful to me. I'll have to think about it a bit more. When one files for a business license, all sorts of people line up asking for one's money... it's not always straightforward to figure out what's worth the cost.
I finished setting up some ASP.Net code that snips content from my weblog and places links to them on my personal home page. (Home page sounds especially quaint these days... so very 1990s). I basically used RssFeed, as is, from 4GuysFromRolla.com in four different places. The only tricky thing was figuring out how to format date strings in a databound template, which would be easy for anyone who regularly uses ASP.Net but I have only played occasionally, so it was new to me. Anyway, the net gain is that essentially I no longer need to manually update anything on that page. The remaining static content is the conversational text, the snapshot image, and the links on the right side... I do have some plans to write add some code that will cycle the snapshot displayed over there.
My samples from Hong Kong finally arrived today. FedEx decided not to ring the door buzzer again, but this time, thanks to the signed waiver I put on the door, they at least left me the package. Interestingly, it looked like customs sampled the product; one of the tubes of the candy was torn open and a piece of the candy was missing. I guess they didn't find any evidence of bioterrorism.
I have to wake up extremely early tomorrow to take off to Chicago–about 3:30 am–so I'm going to go jogging around Greenlake for a little while to wear myself out, then make a small dinner and finish up packing. I ate a big salad and a little homemade asparagus pizza in the afternoon... kind of a late lunch. I had some buttermilk waffles in the morning, so I might have eaten a little too much for one day...