You always have at least two options. Sometimes one of them is Ctrl-Alt-Del.

(Not in context with the rest of this post: Hooray M!)

In one of the early Space Quest games (I think I only ever completed one of them, and that with Dad's help) Roger Wilco is at a space station McDonald's. You can have him buy food, and when you do the server says "Would you like fries with that?" and your options are "Yes" and "Yes." In the same way, my computer has just asked me "Do you want to shut down your computer in order for updates to be installed?" My options are "Now" and "When the timer runs out." I'm glad I was at my computer at the time. The interminable transcription is finished and saved. Now I've been sent two more, 5 hours in total. I don't think I'll get to them before Las Vegas as I've got more urgent, and orders of magnitude more interesting, other work to do.

So I passed this paper I'm writing for a conference to Maggie. Maggie has recently taken over the project the paper is on. I'm lead author for the paper. The idea was that Maggie would look it over, add some things, and give it back so I could coordinate with other people's reviews. Instead, Maggie kept it and said she'd work on it and then pass it to Rose. Bess (person in charge of formatting it and actually sending it off) has just told me that she got an e-mail from Maggie saying Maggie was working on it now and would get it to her soon. Key fact: It's due this Friday. Other key fact: I passed the paper to Maggie four weeks ago. I've sent her a reminder e-mail every week since saying "How are you doing? Are you finished yet? It's due the 24th. What's going on?" She's replied with "I'll get to it soon." Key conclusions: (1) It doesn't matter how early I send things to Maggie (or a number of other people). They will always be late. (2) It doesn't matter that I'm lead author. It only matters that Maggie is more important than I am.

As I was discussing with Eric yesterday, I'm starting to suspect I'm only ever going to be happy working if I'm working for myself. Who knows a geek venture capitalist who'd be willing to invest in TBC?

(And: 376, or something, last night. My parking-lot memory has failed me, but anyway it was below quota. I did have to stop to diagram a castle, though.)