i installed the client M interactive onto the industrial laptop i'll be taking with me to chicago. i'll be in chicago for exactly 10 hours, i'm not sure if that's enough time for me to do any sightseeing (actually, probably only 8 hours, since i'll need to be back at the airport 2 hours in advance). i also sent a version to the client to look over but i haven't received any feedback yet. it doesn't matter anyway, since i can continue to make changes even while i'm there.
the rain continued into the late morning. i didn't think drew would go to the office today but he left around 11:30 for a faculty meeting. the rain had stopped by then, and there was even some patches of blue sky. drew took the bicycle.
after a shower and a bowl of oatmeal for lunch, i left for my 2:00 meeting with client R in watertown. had it been raining, originally i was prepared to take the bus. but since the wet weather seemed to have mostly stopped, i took the bicycle. i hindsight the motorcycle would've been the better choice, but i was worried i might get caught in the rain (i rather prefer getting rain-soaked on a bicycle than a motorcycle). it took 25 minutes (3.6 miles) to get there and i was a sweaty mess by the time i arrived. since i was there a few minutes early, i walked around the neighborhood a little bit, trying to cool off.
i'd been to client R before, back in november 2009 when they were still company C. nothing ever came of that meeting. i've only been in touch with the company again because erin informed me they were looking for flash developers. actionscripting isn't my strong suit, but i'd sent them a flash interactive i'd worked on, which seemed to qualify me to work on one of their projects. after the meeting i chatted with erin briefly before leaving.
since my parents' place was only about a mile away, i stopped by on my way home. after finishing a can of pomegranate seltzer, i returned to cambridge.
drew wasn't home and came back around 5:30. there was no more danger of rain as the weather became progressively nicer.
for dinner i made a spinach ricotta cheese pie. instead of bacon - which i find messy to work with - i used kielbasa sausages instead. the pie came out okay but i think it tastes better with bacon. i ended up eating 2 slices although i almost didn't finish the second slice. drew came out from working in bedroom to watch clinton's speech at the democratic national convention.
since my cambridge soundworks pcworks speaker was broken, i felt obligated to take it apart and look around inside. there was an interesting technical landscape of resistors and chips and capacitors on a circuit board. 
i should've paid more attention in my intro electrical engineering class because i couldn't make sense out of any of it. there was a patch that looked like something had melted, a gooey sticky stain. could that be the cause of the one-sided-speaker issue? but i looked online and saw another pcworks disassembly and it had the same exact staining (a feature, not a bug).
it was only much later did i realize the left-right balance on my macbook pro was set to right-only after i plugged in a pair of headphones and noticed the sound was only coming from one side as well. that meant the pcworks isn't broken after all, and i was just too stupid to check the balance. problem solved!
before going to bed, i ordered an ozeri bathroom scale for $13 (on sale) and a memory card reader ($8.98, transcend P8, to replace my broken SD reader).