Anyway, a good lunch and an hour poking around the Barnes and Noble computer books, catching the free electric bus back to the office. We were looking for something technical on Active X and Office 2000 Outlook that would ease our virus worries as in we don't want no viruses on our desktops, thank you very much, but nobody's talking. Or writing. Least of all Microsoft. I found a PhotoShop book I liked written for photographers and artists that was bunged up a bit by people like me thumbing through it, so I'm going to order it from Amazon tonight. Not fair? No. It's not.

The company is having a "reception" for participants in the Y2K project over in San Francisco this evening and although I was invited, I, along with most everyone else, decided to pass. There was a certain amount of I'm a good trooper (and it was expected that all good troopers would attend), but I figured I was also a known techie and therefor socially primitive and couldn't be expected to understand the "good trooper" concept. So I said the hell with it. Better to write the journal and get to bed at a decent hour. Curious though, a three hour party with cocktails and a band on a Thursday evening from 6:00 to 9:00 across the bay from the office, a gesture of good will and incompetence both, I suppose, on the part of the company, oddly timed and out of character. Our company doesn't have parties anymore except for an annual Christmas party in early December that I'm going to get around attending one of these years. I joined as a contractor in the middle of a reorganization and half the people I first met and got to know (drinking with them after work) left for better pastures before my first year was finished. The old company once knew how to eat and drink and raise hell in half a hundred cities around the world. Once. Long ago.

The car goes into the shop tomorrow for an emissions test that's required to renew my registration. I wonder if it will pass.