I made it through eight hours of work today, the first real work day in five weeks. It wasn’t super hard, but it was a fresh reminder of suckling a paycheck at the corporate teat. I’ve worked for maverick, startup-style companies for the last nine years and CenturyTel is definitely not a startup. They are well organized and efficient. They have the infrastructure to back up their sales force.

It’s only been one day, but things look good.

Mark on WordPress: “My wife Sarah and I were in Wal-Mart last night, when we saw someone walking around with a shirt that said ‘Girl’s go’in wild.’ We had a good chuckle over the atrocious and arbitrary punctuation. Then I thought ‘hey, this might make for a good blog.’

4 hours later, Wordsplosion was online. It’s pretty amazing that you can go from idea to execution in a matter of hours using WordPress. Wordsplosion showcases ‘the best of the worst of the wide world of words.’ It contains (and will continue to contain) all manner of grammatical errors, punctuation gaffes, misspellings, horrible typography, etc. It’s LOL cats for smart people.”

Tomorrow morning, I start a new job, start new relationships and start new professional development.  Tammy took time to get me a “new job” gift — a new photo of her for my desk.  I can’t think of a better gift and a better way to start my work days.

Thanks babe!

MAKE Magazine: “Hafsteinn Júlíusson’s ‘Growing Jewelry’ via BoJ”

Growing Jewelry is a redefinition of modern values. It is a clash of jewelry an gardening; couture and organism. The collection of this hand jewelry is designed for people in metropolitan cities and is an experiment in drawing nature toward man, as nature being the presupposition of life.

I start a new job on Monday and it’s finally staring to feel “real” for me. Earlier in the week, Tammy and I went through my clothes closet, putting together some outfits for work. This job is a little different in that I’m wearing a shirt and tie each day so while I’ve got plenty of both, it was important to make sure they actually work with each other.

We found some ties that just didn’t cut the style standard any more, so they were out. One tie had a run in the fabric that I hadn’t seen before so it’s in the trash. The rest were paired with the right shirts and pants and I’m set for the week. It feels like the first day of “school” where you have to make new friends and find your place in the social structure

[Apple](http://apple.com) shipped their latest (iPhone)[http://apple.com/iphone] software update, version 2.1, with fixes for several customer complaints including poor battery life. I applied the update last night and was rewarded with something I haven’t seen in quite awhile: a nearly full battery in the morning.

The update includes fixes for many other things like email handling, dropped calls, signal strength display and security fixes. One big issue for me was the phone’s responsiveness when searching contacts or switching “states” from home screen to contacts. There always seemed to be a large delay, a long as three seconds, when making the switch from one state to another, before the UI would allow me to interact. This had become a constant frustration and with the new software update, it’s completely disappeared.

I’ll post in a few days about call quality to see if it’s really changed.