February 8th, 2010 § 4
Update: yays! I got a call from my supervisor: she said our lot probably isn’t cleared off of all the snow, the roads may not all be clear yet, etc., so I should come in around noon to give them time to clear the snow away. Huzzah!
Guess what I’ve got to go out in in about fifteen minutes:
that's 'effing cold
I have about two blocks to walk to the covered parking lot where I left my car. Let’s see if I make it before I freeze solid.
February 7th, 2010 § 6
…Sarah Palin used crib notes she wrote on her hand during a post speech question/answer session at some place.
WE. ARE. SO. DOOMED.
Seriously, if you had any doubt that the United States has become a permanent high school in which we are all perpetually trapped, this should be the final proof. I haven’t seen people so upset about inked hands since… well, since I was in high school and some kid got caught looking at the test answers that he’d Bic’d onto his knees in Geometry I. I mean, I write stuff to jog my memory all the time onto the palm of my hand, though I have been informed that that is sloppy and I should carry around a pack of index cards at all times. Index cards that I can drop or forget. One thing about your own hand, it usually remains attached to your body.
Really, I can’t believe that people are freaking out at this. There is just something about Sarah that sends people off into the stratosphere that I just don’t get. Reagan apparently had the same thing. I recall at the time (when I was much, much more liberal than I am now) he sort of mildly irritated me and I still don’t get the adulation but I thought that many of the jokes at his expense (not to mention the masks and the puppets and so on) were in bad taste. There’s just something about people taking politics so personally that I don’t get. Somewhere someone is developing a fine case of acid reflux because they can’t stand the way Palin parts her hair. Anyway, if you want to get the full flavor of “Sarah Palin is going to lead us into DOOOOOOOM” paranoia, feel free to visit the Fark and Huffington Post threads. (Yeah, this all comes from those RELIABLE two sources.) And here is my tribute to palm-of-the-hand note-takers everywhere.
Update on another yet somehow related (as I am too lazy to write a new post) topic: get a load of the compassionate and concerned lefty side of the blogosphere as they basically accuse Jim Treacher, who is still being treated for his broken knee, of lying about what happened when he was hit by a van driven by a government employee. Yes, I really want my future in the hands of people like these.
February 7th, 2010 § 0
It’s currently 3 degrees Fahrenheit according to the weather widget on my Ubuntu menu bar. Brrr! It’s pretty warm here, but I think I’ll wear some socks to bed.
Anyway, I’ve fled here to my home space because I can’t take the Doctor/Rose shippers on Tumblr tonight. Translated from the fannese, that refers to young kids who just discovered there’s this cool British scifi series called Doctor Who, and it stars this fab tall skinny guy, and he traveled around in his time machine with this needy — excuse me, loyal and loving — blond chick who is totally his girlfriend and they love each other but oh noes! they are tragically separated forever and ever which means for just the end of one season because the whole next season is spent with him mooning over her (his new girl is some other person of no significance) and then the next season he is still mooning but now he’s traveling with a fab red-headed older woman who is So Not His Girlfriend but she is fabulous because she totally understands his need to moon over the blond chick, who then comes back! because “forever” means “until the plot demands it and the actress who played Blondie has time in her busy schedule of playing a prostitute on another tv show” but then — oh noes! tragedy! the Doctor has to lose her again (but he fobs her off on a Xerox copy of himself, but sadness he has no telepathic link with his other self and in fact doesn’t seem to like his clone very much — insert OOC psychiatric problem of your choice here — so he won’t even get to feel Blondie and his other self make sweet sweet love in their parallel world) and he also loses the redheaded woman to Plot-Induced Amnesia…
…And then we forget about the blond chick entirely for the next season of specials. Really entirely — I don’t think Rose is even mentioned. This is possibly because the new object of Blond Emo-lust is the resurrected Master, who I now think was turned blond not because they wanted to show that something had “gone wrong” with the Master’s return — all the people-eating and Skeletor-zapping pretty much illustrated that — but as outgoing head writer Russell T. Davies’ way of inserting a little trubute to Rose.
And this is how a character I used to like got ruined for me. Anyway, seeing people gush about the Doctah an’ Wose on my Tumblr list really irritated me tonight. So good night.
February 5th, 2010 § 11
Oh look — as if I needed one, another reason not to join Facebook. Call me the last holdout if you like, but I’m an antisocial misanthrope (as opposed to the kind who like to hang out with people just so they can torture themselves with all the stupid things humans do), so why would I join yet another social networking site, especially one as overrun with sheer stupidity as Facebook? WTF are those “games”? I don’t even game. I play Solitaire, or the Mahjongg game my Ubuntu setup comes with. And I haven’t had a computer virus in years, and I don’t want one.
Facebook and other sites like it have nothing for me. I do like Tumblr, mostly because it has a simple interface and lots of nice themes, and the social networking stuff isn’t too intrusive — but at the same time it’s becoming something of a headache. For one thing, there are too many Obama fans (but I might as well say that about life, and I can at least tweak the Tumblr folk with one of my obnoxious posts — I can’t do anything about the real life ones except roll my eyes at their bumper stickers) and the Doctor Who fans on Tumblr all seem to be the young type who just got into Tennant’s Doctor and they’re all Doctor ‘n’ Rose shippers, barf.
But that leads me to my next topic. I’m getting less and less pleased with Wordpress. Not that it’s a horrible program — it’s not — but it’s getting more and more complex as it gets more and more popular. I’d say it’s about as popular now as Movable Type was a few years ago, and it’s getting more and more commercial in its focus. I don’t have anything against a commercial focus in general, just not for me and my site. A few years ago I briefly experimented with ads on my blog, but I decided to dump them. Ads just aren’t for me, no matter how skint I am. All there will ever be is a Paypal link at most, and you see that I have even taken that off the front page and put it over into a page titled “Coffee Fund.” Anyway, Wordpress is very complex and heavy these days, and it just does more than I want a blog program to do. Here’s what I want: a simple interface where I can post, a simple way to set up the site theme, a way to control comments so you can weed out spam and trolls, and… that’s it. The only extras I can think of that I’d also like would be a way to add static pages, but they aren’t absolutely necessary. Even configurable side menus for links and latest entry lists and so on aren’t absolutely necessary, though some kind of archive listing is good for people who want to read your back catalogue. Most of the Tumblr setups do this sort of bare bones thing, and their interface is easy as pie for adding posts. They also have split posting types into different things: regular text entries, videos, audio files, links, and chats. They also have this reblogging thing which is nice but it’s internal to Tumblr blogs. I don’t entirely like the setup but it is easy to use and uncluttered. I’m sick of clutter.
Anyway, I’ve been trying out different blogging programs, some of them in their infancy or at least toddlerhood, and I will be reviewing them here over the next few posts. If I find one that comes closest to what I want I may do the site over. We’ll see.
February 4th, 2010 § 2
I’ve been getting some really stupid spam lately — not the usual “grow your penis!” and “I am the widow of Major General Nesesesese Seko Ubambi and I have a million dollars I need to deposit into your account” and “(Cyrillic gibble garble)” offerings but things like “I really like your site! Good article! I am a two-toed sloth — can you write an entry entirely composed of mashed cassava mixed with drool?” Here is the latest thing I got. For some reason it struck me as especially hilariously braindead:
I really like what you wrote here – it’s very good. Thanks for posting this. I’ve been trying out with WordPress lately. Do you use WordPress? Any tips for me? Click here if you’d like to check out my site. Have a fun week!
There was a link to some website but for some reason I’ve neglected to include it in my quote. How careless of me. Anyway, enter your reader tips in the comments for this hapless person and/or cyborg, who or which apparently is unable to read the footer at the bottom of my blog where it says “Powered by Wordpress.” Hm — I guess that’s my first “tip” for my mysterious correspondent: if you want to know what software powers a blog, it often says so right on that same blog, right there on the front page! Crazy, I know.
February 4th, 2010 § 2
No sooner had Jim Treacher got settled into his new job and life in DC when he gets hit by an SUV driven by someone working for the State Department. The kicker? The driver didn’t stop to help — he (or she) just kept going. Our tax dollars working for us!
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
Update: I’ve stuck this post to the top for a while, just because.
Second update: what the fuck? I had forgotten to mention the fact that they’ve charged Treacher with jaywalking, which I’m sure they do to hit and run victims every day in our nation’s capital… You know, getting run over by a government vehicle and not being able to bring the miscreants (the driver, that is) to justice is an old Washington “urban myth” but the vehicle was always affiliated with one of the foreign embassies (and thus the “foreign diplomats can get away with murder!” addendum to the tale), not our own government. Really, I love how they are stonewalling being thuggish and not being cooperative and basically acting like “we’re the government, we can do anything to you we want.” Possibly this has been endemic to DC bureaucracy long before President God was elected, but this whole incident just underscores the fact that thinking voting for cute liberals will make everyone nicer and more humane is laughably childish and naive. (Via Kathy Shaidle again.)
Third update: okay, off the top with you.
February 4th, 2010 § 2
Very clever — you’ve programmed your bot to almost communicate like a person. For half a second I thought that the person with the rocketmail address and the website that was nothing but a loud, ugly acne treatment ad (the ad did effectively resemble an internet version of the condition it was hawking a treatment for) was serious with the comment asking if I had ever thought of adding videos to my site because “I enjoyed your article but I guess I’m more of a visual reader.”
But only for half a second. To spammer oblivion the message went. IF, however, you do happen to be a real person and are confused by my actions, allow me to invite you to fuck yourself with a Flip camera. They’re on sale at Amazon.
I hate spammers and people whose websites are nothing but a single ugly page hawking an overpriced product that does the same thing as a generic brand I can get at Rite-Aid for a few bucks and people who tell me to add memory-hogging junk to my own website because they are too lazy/stupid/both to read THEM BIG WERDS.
January 31st, 2010 § 3
Well today was fun. I’m on day 5 of my cold, and feeling a tad better, but only a tad. But my friend is coming down with it, so I had to go out and walk all the way to the covered parking lot where his car is and get out the snow shovel, then walk all the way back — this is over snow and slush and some ice, down and then back up a hill — to my car, and dig it out. Fortunately the sun was out and it had warmed up to about 30 degrees from 0 this morning, and the snow was mostly of the light and fluffy variety, but that was still quite a workout. And when I got back not a half hour later the other manifestation of this virus or whatever it is hit me, and I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. But I think the worst of that has passed… Anyway, I broke down and made a brandy-and-soda, and am about to watch Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Well it was that or Cherry 2000 and I passed my threshold for enduring Melanie Griffith’s high-pitched breathy voice sometime back in the 80s.
Later: oh God, the Eighties. That’s all I can think of to say about that. Just… the Eighties.
January 30th, 2010 § 8
It started snowing last night, it snowed all day, and it’s still snowing now, after the sun has gone down. Everything is so pretty and white and the snow looks so fluffy and inviting, but unfortunately I still have my damn cold so I can’t go outside. Grrr. Also, I am trying not to think of how I have to be at work early Monday to open the office and they even gave me my own key. I’m just going to think positive: “Of course they’ll have the roads cleared. Of course I won’t slip and slide all over the place. Of course I’ll be able to get my car out from under a pile of snow… at seven o’clock in the morning. And I will be over my cold!”
Grrrr.
How not to comment
January 31st, 2010 § 0
Do not comment here using an email address you got at one of those “disposable” email address websites. Those go straight into Akismet’s spam queue, and no matter how coherent or on-topic the comment is I will delete it permanently just like I delete all the other spam. You must use a real, permanent email address. It can be a secondary one that you rarely use, but it has to be real.