Category: Life

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As one of the many working stiffs who can access the internet from work but has to share a connection, I would like to make a request of the corporate world at large:

STOP REQUIRING FLASH TO VIEW YOUR SITE!!!!!!

Everything I look at on the net while at work has to go through a server in northern CA, which doesn’t have Flash capability and probably never will, because it would be even slower if the 250 people using it were allowed to view bandwidth-hogging all-Flash sites. With the economy being what it is, bandwidth costs being what they are, and connection power needing to be split at most offices, I’m not sure any company should be upping the ante this far in the name of pretty pictures. And the defense that people can look at it at home isn’t too great, either, since DSL is out of reach of more working stiffs than web geeks want to admit, and Deity-of-Your-Choice only knows when it might creep into affordability.

So, please do what you used to do, and keep your non-Flash site online after the upgrade, instead of routing us to a page exhorting the wonders of Flash and attempting to bully us into downloading it. (Baaaa.) You’ll widen your audience with very little effort–and hey, aren’t non-Flash sites easier to maintain?

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I just looked up and found out that I was so out of it yesterday, I left my iPod sitting out on my desk here at work all night…..

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So I caught some kind of bug at the right time last week to have it really fully hit me on Saturday evening, while watching X2. I’d already been having the sinus pressure and sore throat, so I had my box of Kleenex with me, and I had fun timing my nose-blowing during explosion scenes. I slept 14 hours that night (getting up at 1:30 the next day) and lounged around doing nothing much yesterday, and decided I was well enough to come to work today. Well, in trying to rip off two packets of DayQuil, I ripped into the plastic of a third and had to take both pills. Normally, I only take one. Can we say “medicine head?” It’s supposed to have worn off by now, but I’m still a little spacey.

I was coming back from the bathroom and the receptionist asked, as I was punching in my door code, “How’re you feeling?” I don’t remember what I said, because her next line was:

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

That about knocked me flat. I wanted to say, “WHAAAAAT???”, but settled for “Absolutely none,” and went in. I’m still trying to figure out how a stuffy head, sore throat, cough, body aches, and tendency to sneeze can be caused by pregnancy. Of course, the people in this office have tried to pin all sorts of my physical ailments on pregnancy. I don’t know what they find so cool about the idea, but I’m getting a little tired of it. Thing is, if I say so, they’ll just say, “You’re really irritable. Is there any chance you might be pregnant?”

Grrrrr.

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Now that we’re mostly moved into the new server room, we’re running the air conditioner and keeping the door closed. Or at least trying to. The door frame is just slightly off, so that the door doesn’t close easily, and if it doesn’t latch, the air pressure difference pushes it open again.

It’s a bit disconcerting to walk into the room and close the door behind you, only to have it open again thirty seconds later… and no one’s there.

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A few weeks ago I purchased Precious Things: The String Quartet Tribute to Tori Amos from Amazon. I was looking through my recommendations tonight and started finding all these string renditions of popular music, including…

The String Tribute to Nirvana.

This had me laughing, but then I looked further down on the page:

Buy this album with String Quartet Tribute Nine Inch Nails ~ Various Artists today!

WTF?!? Nine Inch Nails string tribute?
Hmm… I wonder if anyone has done a string album for The Who.

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About a year ago, I decided that my little universe needed its timeline cemented. I’d already adjusted it several times, and it was getting hard to keep straight. So rather than have to redo it yet again, I decided to do it right, and figure it out by generations rather than arbitrary dates. From the beginning.

I wrote a good chunk of my info down on paper before realizing that making corrections was going to be a royal bitch. And it needed corrections. So, after an abortive attempt at organizing things in a plain old text file, I started looking online. First I checked out timeline programs, none of which were really suited to my purpose. One that I downloaded would only work for dates in or after 1900–not wonderful when you’re dealing with years ranging from 191 to 730. But I did get a lead on what would actually help me here: genealogy programs.

The one I found is simple, inexpensive, and capable of exporting data to the majority of other programs out there. However, there are three main features that I find inconvenient for my purposes. I don’t anticipate that any future versions will allow you to change the calendar the program uses, but that’s what my text file is used for now. And not allowing same-sex marriages probably wouldn’t cause too many problems in the real world, much, but it’s kind of important in my world. The most annoying bit is the way it deals with children out of wedlock. They show up in a descendant tree, but if the parent whose family you’re looking at later married, the child will show up as being from that marriage. If you do an ancestor tree, the later marriage doesn’t show up at all unless you have it in Verbose mode, which is a pain because then everybody has their marriage information listed, making it very redundant and cluttered because just about everybody on the tree is listed twice.

In the interest of finding something I could customize the bejesus out of, I went DL’ing earlier this week. The open-source program looked promising, but since I can’t program and I don’t feel like sharing my data with Kelson yet, I ditched it. The other one I got is great fun to play with, and (drumroll) it allows same-sex marriages! I don’t know if it’ll give some kind of fatal error trying to save a file with that in, because the demo doesn’t let you save, but I’m willing to risk it. Even though if you tell it to display information for the parents of a child of one partner, it’s anybody’s guess whether it’ll back up to the biological parents or the married couple. It’s also very good about children out of wedlock; one of the standard display formats shows all unions by default.

But the original program might be even better if I figure out how to use ResEdit without trashing my computer. The manual says you can create new types of events and links between people. Can we say “Alternate Marriage” event link?

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Yesterday was a complete Monday, and Kelson and I decided that since we needed to go to the market, we’d split up and he’d grab food at the Pick Up Stix in the same shopping center. As I was looking at yogurt, he came into the store and reported that they’d changed their menu yet again and the Buddha’s Feast (mixed veggies) that I’d wanted was now labeled a “Veggie Saute,” but otherwise had still seemed all right to get. Okay, fine. We finished our shopping and went home.

Come to find, when I opened the carton, that not only had the name changed but also the contents. I’d been expecting the old ingredient list, which to the best of my memory included baby corn, eggplant, and snow peas. None of that here. Just a lot of carrots and zucchini, with a handful of bean sprouts, a couple of mushrooms, and a sprig or two of broccoli. Not even any onions or peppers.

Then I found the meat. Not just one piece, either. Three pieces of beef and one of chicken. And it wasn’t stray chicken from Kelson’s dinner, since his was dyed brown with soy sauce and this was lily-white. So they managed to bring in bits from not just one but two dishes that weren’t even in our order! I have never been so happy not to be a strict vegetarian (or Hindu).

This is still very bad news. If a place that does kung pao is this careless about cleaning their utensils, we can’t eat there anymore. Not that it’s worth it anymore since they’ve been systematically getting rid of everything we really like. I didn’t often get the Black Bean Shrimp (aka Double Indemnity Delite), but it was nice to know that if I needed a fix, I could get it. Not anymore.

Nasty letters, here we come. And if you know anybody with the potential to be affected by this kind of sloppiness, you might want to tell them too, if they don’t already know.

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