I'm not sure how I managed not to mention it before, but there've been actual developments at my place of employment. Very many people have found it utterly ridiculous that I could go for months at a job where I come in promptly on time and retreat to my office and sit with nothing to do all day, but that's how it had worked out. The person who had originally hired me was unavailable for months due to his injury in a car accident, and as it happened the very first day that he was ready to meet with me and with the person who wanted a particular web design job done was one that I had to use to appear in court (and the next day, which could have been managed, I was too sick to get out of bed). So it was not until a very short while ago that we were able to arrange time when he, and I, and the person this job was for, were all simultaneously available.
Even better is this was an ``off-site'' meeting, which is easy to cherish because it implies many things, among them not buying lunch for yourself. And particularly happy for me is that the rendezvous point for going up to the client was not at the office but at the owner's home, which is about half as far away from me, and the meeting time was an hour and a half after the normal start of business, so it was perfectly reasonable to skip going into the office at all and just go right to his place. The net result: sleep in two hours longer than normal and still get there right on time. I thought the meeting time was too late for us to get up to the client's location at what I thought was the appropriate time, but the boss didn't think so, and it turns out he was wrong and spent time on the drive up calling to apologize and move the meeting to an hour or so later on.
What the meeting came to was I got to see in action the system that's currently being used, and to hear how they'd like it replaced with a web-browser version that was not designed by the slightly misanthropic programmers who infested computer systems of the early 80s with text-based menu schemes. You know the kind, where there are some pages with two options and some with twenty, some identified by number and some by a key letter, and no matter what and no matter how many pages you go through, the key that brought you ``back to previous page'' on the current screen is not the same one used for the same function on any other screen. Still, despite the roughness of the system and lingering vagueness on everyone's parts about certain aspects of the database (which was not designed so much as happened), it means that I finally was given something specific to do. If you can imagine.
Trivia: Street lighting was restored to Kuala Lumpur following Japan's January 1942 invasion by early October. Source: Forgotten Armies, Christopher Bayly, Tim Harper.
Currently Reading: King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led The World To War, Catrine Clay.