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.
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…
This had me laughing, but then I looked further down on the page:
WTF?!? Nine Inch Nails string tribute?
Hmm… I wonder if anyone has done a string album for The Who.
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?
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.
I spend a lot more time dealing with spam than I used to, mainly so that all our customers won’t have to. (Most of it is spent adjusting or training the server’s spam filters.) As a result, I often look through spam that I used to just delete. One had a real gem of an unsubscribe notice:
Don’t want to receive our emails anymore? It’s very easy to oppt out. And yes, doing so really will allow you to opppt out. We aren’t just saying that so that we can put on the facade that we’re legitimate advertsers, whilst laughing away, blatantly ignoring remvve requests. If you remove your name from our list, you definitely will be remm,oved. Your name will be marked as r,emoved in our email database, and you won’t receive mail again. We don’t really know how more clearly we can explain this. Just take our word for it. Otherwise, continue toreceive these emails. Now is your chance to opp,t out. Do so by clicking this UNSUBCRIBE link. P.S. – It really works
The best part was the URL:
http:// /optout.php?mail=(my email address)
Now, you don’t have to be a net guru to realize that there is no way that link could possibly work!
It sounds to me like they might be laughing away, blatantly ignoring remove – excuse me, remvve – requests.
On the rare occasion that I answer an email, my “about” fields indicate that I am Brown Ajah, of the Salidar faction. In recent weeks I have come to realize that I may have jumped the gun on my designation. Salidar I may be, but as yet I think Accepted is a more accurate term.
One of the women whose work I handle has made an annoying habit of checking up on what I’m doing (and not doing) on a very regular basis. Like every time I’m not at my desk. I understand that she has a professional stake in what I get done, but there’s a practical limit to the amount of work you can require of someone and expect them to complete it when you want it and how you want it. If you have a standard way in which things are done, that’s good. If you trust the person to do things in that way, that’s even better. Unfortunately, any time there’s any deviation from the standard, I have to get confirmation that what I’m doing is appropriate. Which, when she’s not here, is a bitch.
However big a bitch this job can be, it’s infinitely better than the job I had that gave me damane syndrome. Everything had to be done exactly the same way every time, not because of any legal requirements I could ascertain but because my supervisor found it easier to nitpick that way. I was supposed to proofread, but I wasn’t allowed to correct about half of the mistakes that were the most common. I was pressured to go faster, but if a report came back to me more than once, she’d say, “You know, you can take your time.” If something I’d done was returned to her for further correction by her superior, she’d make a production of it and have me change it just to make her point, and blame me if it didn’t get done on time. And perfect wasn’t good enough. If I went more than a few days with no mistakes, she’d find something I “really had to watch” and explain for five minutes why it was vitally important that I always do it, apparently not realizing that the world had failed to end in the last few weeks that I hadn’t known to do it. In the three months I worked there, I had maybe five days that I didn’t get criticized, and received maybe three positive comments on my work, two of those on the first day. I know there had to be three because about a month and a half in, she said something positive and I caught myself being unreasonably happy to have earned her favor. It was pretty chilling to realize that she was training me in more ways than one.
Here, on the other hand, they pay for me to go to class, like the food I bring, let me wear jeans on Fridays and carry my Swiss Army knife, and appreciate things like henna, magnetic poetry, Dilbert, and paper laundry. And they pay better. So nyah to the cube-kennels.
And I’m asking for a Great Serpent ring for my birthday.
I went into the lunchroom a bit ago and saw that someone had tied a very large rubber band around two chairs for no apparent reason. So I decided to give them something to think about: I went back to my desk, cut out several articles of miniature paper clothing, and taped them over the rubber band between the two chairs. Let them try to figure out who did it.
******
About ten minutes after posting, my phone rang. The nifty little text console said “INTERCOM FROM KELLY.”
“Hello.”
“Did you leave your little paper dolly clothes in the lunchroom?”
“I dunno. Did I?”
“Well, it just seemed like something you’d do.”
Damn, I’m getting predictable.
******
At lunch I found out who hung the rubber band in the first place. She walked in while everybody else was remarking on how the clothes culprit must have too much time on their hands. And it turns out I’m definitely getting a reputation for this sort of thing, even not having done it often (or much at all really). Two other people had me pegged before I confessed. Fortunately, everybody I talked to thought it was funny.
