a day of rain kept me confined to the house. i was hoping to work on some projects, but the only thing i managed to do was to update some weblog postings from last week. i had planned on doing some behind-the-scene code work for the weblog itself (like fix the archive indexing feature), but didn't have the time. harvard sent me an e-mail today, officially notifying me that i'm out of the running for that part-time museum cataloging job.

for lunch i had some oatmeal, for dinner a can of soup. mary came home late, around 6:30pm (normally she's back by 5pm). her question for me today was if i knew how to recover a document on her computer that might've gotten corrupted after she closed her laptop. it was something she'd been working on for the past few days, and she didn't have a backup. i told her i'd take a look at it but she never did get back to me. after she ate dinner, she showered, then cooked something for tomorrow's lunch. i was surprised to find her already asleep by 9pm.

the nstar technician from 2 days ago came back again. apparently my upstairs neighbors were getting their gas meter replaced as well. they could've told me about it since i started to smell gas afterwards. i know it's a natural temporary side effect of replacing the meter, but had i not known, i could've panicked and called the fire department.

i bought a USB tester tonight. i was going to get it off of amazon.com, but i found the same tester (at least it looked the same) on ebay for less than half the price. the only downside is that it's coming from china so could take 2-3 weeks to arrive at the earliest.