It’s been a while since it happened (it’s happened two times previously); I’ve tried to be careful but I guess I just can’t be trusted to keep my USB memory stick out of the wash.

The good news is, though, that the cord that’s attached to it is nice and clean! And it still works! Hooray for modern solid state hardware!

A while back I put my USB stick through the wash and, after drying, it worked fine. Well, I did it again — and yes, after drying, it’s still fine.

I’m sure my luck can only last so long.

Justine prefers to do the clothes washing, because when I do it, I don’t do it “right”. Whether Justine’s standards for clothes washing are incredibly high, I’m simply inept or I’m trying to get out of it I’m not sure. Probably a combination of all three.

As a result, Justine does most of the clothes washing. However, it’s up to me to ensure that I don’t leave any junk in my pockets, as it ends up getting washed.

Most of the time there’s nothing in my pockets, but occasionally I might leave some change or something equally unimportant to go through the wash.

Yesterday, however, I left something slightly more important in my pockets — my USB stick. I’ve read numerous reports on the web that people have put their USB sticks through the wash and they’ve come out unscathed but we all know that I’d never be that lucky. Still, I hung the stick out in front of our heater last night in the hope that it’d be usable.

I took the stick to work as usual, and connected it to my work PC — I didn’t want to test it at home in case it damaged the hardware. Better to damage work’s equipment than mine.

I was happy to see that the unit worked flawlessly and has been running for the past couple of hours without issue. Awesome.

This morning, on my way out to work, I grabbed my usual stuff — keys, phone, USB stick, loose change, sunglasses, wallet… no wallet.

My wallet wasn’t on the small table I use for the dumping of stuff, which is quite odd. I figured I must have left it in the car, which is something I do occasionally but no, it wasn’t there either.

Perhaps I left it on my desk at work? I did that once too; the wallet wasn’t on my desk when I arrived at work this time, though.

I called Justine — as she was at home (some of) today — and asked her to check the pants I was wearing yesterday for my wallet. Sure enough, it was in the pants.

I have no idea why I forgot to remove my wallet from my back pocket when I got home last night, but I did. This is weird because I took everything else out and put it in the usual spot.

Must be going senile two or three years earlier than I expected.

I know I don’t talk about Firefox often enough, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to do so.

I’ve just spend a little bit of time this morning configuring and installing Portable Firefox onto my USB drive. Firefox wasn’t running especially well over a network drive at work; and since I take my USB drive home every night, and back to work every day, it makes sense.

So now, all my favourite extensions (bar Greasemonkey) are installed and running from the USB drive. Unfortunately it’s Windows only, but since most of the computers I’m likely to use it on will have Windows installed, I don’t consider that a big issue.

There are a few other limitations (such as no cache, no history etc) but this is almost a non-issue. There is even a ‘Live’ version of Portable Firefox (a ‘Live’ version of software or an Operating System means that you can run it directly from a CD-R and write little-to-no files onto a hard disk — Auditor is a good example of a ‘Live’ OS) though it’s still early days for this version.

Today was Glenn’s (my now ex-boss) last day. Lesly and I went to Geelong to ’see him off’, so to speak. Glenn’s been at Deakin for fifteen years, and worked there for ten (and at Buildings and Grounds Property Services for five). He was a good boss, and I enjoyed his enthusiasm and… interesting sense of humour. It’s a shame to see him go, but to be honest I feel he was underpaid for the job he was doing/hours he worked.

As a parting gift, we bought Glenn a very nice flash drive (I wouldn’t mind one of these myself, they are rather swish) and also got it engraved (I went to two places — a shopping centre type engraver and a trophy engraver, and neither of them would do it; a place in Geelong had no qualms about doing it though… strange). Of course, since I’m awesome (and modest!), it was all my idea. Glenn seemed to like the gift, so I’m hoping he’ll enjoy it.

So, like I’ve done before, I’m the boss again… for now. To be doubly honest, I’m not sure if I’d want to do it permanently — the amount of pay compared to the hours (I’ve seen Glenn work a lot), stress (I’ve also seen him extremely stressed) and responsibility doesn’t really seem like enough to me. Obviously, it would be good for my ‘career’ (since when has that ever bothered me?), but I’m not too sure at this point if I really want it to move in that direction (where else would it go?). This time around, I’ll try to guage whether I’m interested in doing it permanently, but at this point I think not.

Glenn, I wish you the best of luck at Matchworks, it sounds like you’ll be doing some great stuff there!

P.S. The first thing you should do is get the web developers to make sure the web page works properly in Firefox (since I know how much you love anything non-Microsoft ;).