Hi ho, hi ho...

... it's back to work I go.

Well, I've been re-hired at GE Healthcare for a week. I was surprised to find how hard the folks here had to push in order to get permission to bring me back for a week. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, though. GE is such a gigantic company that it's next to impossible to break the corporate mold and actually get something done. I was actually really surprised when they told me they'd been able to get permission to bring me back. I guess I didn't realize how hard they were willing to pull for me.

Monday after work, Liz and I went to Nate Landon's birthday party. Nate is a neat guy who organized the Lindy Exchange a few years ago (and actually took some heat because of a little-known law about dancing after 2 AM). Recently he had a nasty bout of meningitis and they had to amputate some fingers, half of one of his feet, and a fair portion of one of his legs. I had no idea that meningitis could do that. Anyway, he's home from the hospital now, though he'll be going back to get some prosthetics and such. So a bunch of us Swing Kids went over to his house to wish him a happy birthday and hang out at his house. After that, Liz and I went to see Robots at the dollar theater with Mary and Dave Jones. It wasn't spectacular, but it was a lot better than I'd expected.

Tuesday after work, Kristen (another swing kid) brought her dying laptop computer over for me to fix up. After trying some basic stuff with it at Nate's house the day before, I was convinced it would take a clean reinstall of Windows to get it really working right, which meant I first had to back up all of her files to my external hard disk, and then reformat her hard disk, reinstall Windows with its Dell drivers, upgrade it to Windows XP Pro (which for some bizarre reason takes about as long as installing Windows XP Home in the first place), and then install any programs that she'd need and finally copy all of her files back to her computer. It took most of the night, mostly due to transferring her large music collection back and forth, but we finally got it running really smoothly, complete with Antivirus software and a couple of anti-spyware programs to keep her computer protected in the future. I always get such a rush out of making computers run smoothly. I think if I'd been born 50 years ago, I would've been really into cars.

Anyway, now I'm just sitting here waiting for some guy in Milwaukee to return my voicemails, emails, and/or chat messages from the past two days, so that I can get on with the project I'm working on.