Everyday Stupidities

wading through the existential crises

2009-08-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

Hey, all. I've been visiting long-lost relatives, working on the yard, filling my life with croutons, nurturing carnivorous plants (if the needs of Drosera binata are that much different than of Venus flytrap and pitcher plants, why do they put them together in pots?), noodling to the point of going limp, and ever-so-slowly still trying to find something suitable to do with my life. Some of those things are going well, not all, especially the last one or two. But at least I've got some swell new bubblelights and a set of dishes! And I saw Depeche Mode live on the 10th, with a slight seat upgrade and everything. (I'm still wearing the earplugs.)

I'm at a loss for what to point out as an everyday stupidity, since the world is full of them. The most recent low-octane one was looking at a sign about some dishes at IKEA and seeing that they were patterned after "flower pedals." Flowers go biking? No one in proofreading caught this? But I suppose this is overshadowed by the hack of the Sears website where descriptions of barbecues were edited to say they were baby-roasting devices. (Why hasn't that been a bigger headline? Oh yeah, because it was overshadowed by Microsoft's editing a white guy's head onto a black guy's body on their Polish webpage. Way more relevant than grilled squab.) Plenty of stupidities between my ears but I'm trying to grow past them, which is an ongoing process. And you should be happy -- especially you, Jamie -- that I'm keeping the tales of wiping my main computer clean and rebuilding -- always a good excuse to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP -- due to a worm that I couldn't kill (you know something is wrong when a voice comes through your computer's speakers telling you about setting up a home business when you do not have any programs running!!) and of battling Winders Genuine Disadvantage popping up on my notebook to tell me I'm a dirty p1r4t3 without me having a more recent backup of the drive to fall back on. (You have to love a message that comes up saying "You may be the victim of piracy!" when what it really means is, "In 30 days, you will be the victim of draconian copyright protection disabling your ability to use your computer!" Linux to the rescue!) All is well in computer land now. The neighbors across the street in the hovel are having a yardsale, which seems 90% comprised of little kid toys, and it begs the question: Where the heck have they been storing it, if this is taking up the entire front yard and the kids' bedroom (they have a 5 year old girl and 7 year old boy, plus "others" including a 7 year old girl are always over) is 8'x10'?

Giggle from a minute ago: While writing the above, my mother-in-law's heterosexual life partner called (I shoulda left the earplugs in) asking whether I could fix her computer when next they're in town; I quote her, "I need you to get the viruses that are supposed to be on this machine off."

your conscience is beyond suspicion

2009-07-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

So the place where my wife and I went for dinner tonight -- me sticking to a side salad since I'd already had two tacos a couple hours earlier (her request to go out to dinner when she got home from work came as a surprise), then a big slab of chocolate cake cuz life is short -- has a bar on the other end of the place and it's open mike night. There's a young man with a guitar singing like young men with guitars sound, a.k.a. bad Dave Matthews. And it wasn't until he got to the end of the song he was crooning like a young man with a guitar on open mike night that I figured out what it was:

"Hit Me Baby, One More Time" by Britney Spears.

I was out of Pepsi or I would have done a spit-take.

Life is coasting merrily along, which is to say it's not particularly doing anything at all. I'm raising from some of my passing funks, there's nothing new to say about the yard except that the tomatoes and pumpkin are filling their cages, the sweet peas are climbing but the beans are still kinds scrawny, we've been eating the lettuce as it comes, and there are cute yellow flowers on the squashes which probably are more tasty to me than the veggies that these will be produce later. For the past year I've been doing a daily picture on Flickr under the title "Lyrical 365" because the photo is connected to song lyrics, and that ends in two days... I'm not starting a new daily series, which will be weird for me since it's forced me to push myself and try new things, but I think something in the ennui family inside of me has to be settled before I can start afresh and anew. Anyhow, that's a blog post, a week after the last one for once, so hasta yer pasta. The photo is from my front porch with almost no tweaking.

one summer never ends, one summer never begins

2009-07-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

Hmm, a couple weeks got past me but you didn't miss much. The green stuff has gotten bigger (except the flats of Corsican mint, which officially completely died a couple days ago) and some stuff will be put into swell cages; the only addition to the path is the laying of five round stones on the outside and immediate inside of the gate to give the illusion to passers that good things have happened. I went to see the new Harry Potter film and as it was intended it left me wondering and wanting more (it's not giving anything about the story away to say this: all the other films ended with an exciting struggle then happiness when the battle was won, but this one doesn't end like that... but I'm sure it's in anticipation of the final chapter -- or as it is being filmed, two chapters because the last book is being broken into two movies, so this saga won't end until 2011 and you know there will be plenty of people next summer hopping around impatiently). July 4th was spent in front of the computer, neither of us did anything at all the entire day including look out the window. And as the pictures in today's post tell, my bride and I went to Nile Valley Days north of Yakima on Saturday then coasted south for the evening. If my brudder or others familiar are watching this channel: Hey, have you seen our neighbor's house at 1401 lately?! What a hole it has become!! We got home around 3:30 a.m. and I'm pretty sure that I was in bed totally asleep at 3:35 a.m.

That visit to the old neighborhood brought something to me, how things change. When we first moved to that suburban area, called the Berger Addition, it was essentially a series of dead-end streets with empty field on one side. Bonnie Lane two houses away on the right when facing down my street didn't even exist yet, it was just a gap between two piles of dirt that became houses in 1977. You could pretty much guess that someday those dead-ends were going to be connected and houses built in that field, but with the exception of the new section of Bonnie Lane going forward fifty yards to take a curve and link up the existing section a block away we didn't see much happen. It wasn't until after I left for college and moved out of town that the entire field where I used to spend my afternoons as a kid finally got roads laid and houses built, and the spur at the end of my street which was about twenty yards long grew to three blocks and links with an extention of the far street of the neighborhood. What I noticed in walking through the new section was that that while the houses built in the early 2000's pretty much match the houses from the late-1960's, and the new section hasn't been completely paved so you can easily tell where old meets new by that detail, the flavor of the neighborhood has changed, and that's a more palpable difference between new and old than just looking at house structures and road construction. Upper middle-class mostly-Caucasian on one side of the line, lower middle-class mostly-Hispanic on the other side of the line and seeping eastward as the older residents pass on or move away. I'm not trying to paint that demographic detail in a negative way, I don't have any idea how the neighborhood dynamic is anymore; I'm just pointing out that the face has changed over time, and I am curious how much of that is due to the rest of the fields nearby returning to being used for growing hops (the entire area was a hopfield a decade or two before we moved there, and some sections continued to be used for that crop through my living there).

I came across a giant puddle which reflected the twilight sky as I was hiking across the hopfield from my friend's house to my old home, so I took a picture of it. The next afternoon I realized what had been where I was standing: When we first moved to Toppenish, I met this kid from the far dead-end by the name of Eric, and he showed me this spot across the field at the edge of the next field, where there was a giant tree and a big hole in the dirt where we could play. There was a source of water causing this swamp with reeds and cattails -- and the occasional duck hunter -- to appear nearby. In the years that passed, the swamp was cleared but the water source still produced water so it was made into a small reservoir that inexplicably had fish in it one summer. The body of water I was standing by the other evening was the latest iteration of that water source. I didn't see the tree and hole, despite Google Maps' satellite view showing them in place; reviewing the route I took on foot, I would have walked right through the space because the dirt road next to where the stand is shown was flooded so I followed a row or two into the hops. I felt a moment of happiness when I realized where I had been standing... as much as things had changed, part of the place where I spent so many hours as a child had neither been smoothed over to become part of the hopfield nor paved over to become part of the housing development. As much as it may have changed in appearance, it was still the same in nature. And that, my friends, made my day.

you sing first, I sing last

2009-07-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

Hiya, folks. I've been busy with the back and side yards, plus ruminating through my own internal collection of distractions. I guess you could say I've been more social lately than usual, with the result being that it's great to have contact with the larger world but when the day of mirth ends or the conversation that made me smile concludes, I slip into a little bit of a funk because I wish the mirth and conversation could go on and on... it's all very addictive when life is too quiet and sparcely populated. As the old song says, "I had too much to think last night." But sometimes I channel that energy into shovelling and putting up edging, as today's progress photo shows. I dug out the path, laid down an inch or so of gravel, and added sand to hold that in place. The original plan for today was that we were going to get outside with a roller which Paige's coworker was going to bring over and get the gravel/sand you see tamped down; the next step will be to put stepping stones on this path, add more gravel and sand to hold them in place, and work on the areas around the boxes with dirt and stuff... just noticed an hour ago the two flats of Corsican mint I bought for that area is dying of thirst. Anyhow, the roller in question rusted solid so it wasn't brought over, thus tomorrow we'll get a different tool ourselves to compress the path because we didn't get out of our jammies today. The tomatoes and squash and pumpkin starts are there looking healthy but not really getting larger; the pea and bean and lettuce/spinach seeds have germinated and when kept damp enough the leafies' sprouts don't go flaccid by noon (this keeps happening!). That's my third of July, when plenty of people got the day off because no one likes having a holiday fall on a weekend so they don't get that extra day of slacking off. I don't have fourth of July plans.

Many years around this time I bring up that I went to a Methodist summer camp for a week every year in my teen years to try to bring some fellowship and spirit into my life, recharge my internal batteries, be around people on the same wavelength, remove my mind from the noise it perpetually had running through it, hopefully find something close to the heart, and of course get the hell away from my family and that hot dusty town for awhile. I have mentioned in the past that I miss the camp because I lack the escape from the noise in my head, and lack that kind of fun and fellowship. But since this blog is about everyday stupidities, there are two things about the progression of time that bother me. (Okay, there's a lot about the progression of time that bother me, but specific to the camp thing.) First, the camp system offered weekend retreats for young adults between 18 and 30 as a way of helping the post-teenagers find their centers and faith again... and never in that span of my life did I ever attend. Second, I always swore when I was a camper that I would "give back" by coming back as a counselor... have never made an effort to get back into the church, demonstrate any sort of youth leadership, etcetera with which to apply myself to be a counselor. And I am fully aware that both of those shortcomings are my own doing.

Until next time...

another photo of progress, another entry without substance

2009-06-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

Fence and gate up, potted starts in at last. Then comes the hard part, putting in the path and adding dirt so planting of smallish stuff can go on around the path and boxes.

"it ain't easy getting to heaven when you're going down" -- David Bowie

2009-06-14T02:24:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite up to writing a new post with anything interesting to say, but I did kind of promise something "next week" so I'm fulfilling the contractual obligation tonight. Here's the big change, click the pic for a bit larger; compare to last time's picture of the side yard, circa yesterday afternoon. This isn't how the day ended; this was shot after getting the land tilled and weedblocker laid, boxes installed in the area, and four wheelbarrow loads of gravel laid down for drainage -- but right before six wheelbarrow loads of composty matter went into the boxes. My arms are pretty sore right now (shoveling in, shoveling out...) and it's bound to get worse since I will be dumping probably another six or more loads of composty matter in the boxes, plus eventually a bunch on the weedblocker so it can host foliage one can walk on (only plants obtained thusfar for that purpose being Corsican mint). The fencepost goes in where that hole front & center is later today, and I've got 90 pounds of concrete to make it stay there. Tomorrow I'll mount the fence and gate up on that post, soon as the concrete is set, so the world won't have to watch any longer.

Hmm, could always add -- mercifully briefly -- that I added the Linux operating system to a partition on my notebook. That has been an adventure, and not just because I know no Linux command language. In terms anyone can grasp: There's a lot of hype in the support and geekery worlds for a distribution of Linux called Ubuntu because it can be run directly from disk -- helpful if Windows on your computer got broken so you can't boot up from the hard drive, so you can get in there and fix things. I started with that, and discovered an odd quirk: If I boot from the CD, I can get online; if I install Ubuntu (more accurately Xubuntu, a smaller version meant for low-memory computers like my notebook) everything works except networking, it refuses to use the connection... and also inexplicably has the same effect on Windows, which it shouldn't begin to meddle with. That's not right. So I guess I can use this disk for what people are always hyping it for, but that's it. Okay, still wanting to get a taste of Linux, I did some research and found that my best friend Chrome's preferred version, Slackware, has a tangental development called Slax which is very compact, runs faster!, boots off a CD, was constructed so you can just add programs by dropping a compressed file into a folder (think in Windows terms: "run a program from a Zip archive without having to unpack and install it"), and if one can install Slax to their hard drive (the latest version doesn't make it easy or obvious how, like the previous one which had an installer right there on the programs list) it does work just fine for getting online and so forth. So I've got that, I've played with it for a little while, and I'm happy... now to actually learn something practical from this.

3 a.m. and I need to go to bed, I know I'm gonna be sore and stiff when I wake up, but you got an update of sorts anyhow. Here, have a rose from my garden, I gots plenty of them.

after a month's silence...

2009-06-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

Wow, has it been a month? Sorry... I remember saying that I would blog from the road, and I did have online access every day (if you follow my Flickr stream you had daily updates), but as for writing? I kinda put it off. We left Tacoma on May 11 (happy 41st birthday, Karen) and drove to La Grande, Oregon for the night... We buzzed halfway through Idaho and spent the night in Tremonten, Utah... Drove all the way through Utah for a surreal night at the Tropicana in Las Vegas... visited Hoover Dam and since we had the Grand Canyon on our agenda we spent the night in Williams, Arizona and then visited the Canyon in the early afternoon... Finally we got to auntie's house in Sun City, Arizona on the evening of the 15th. Here's the Grand Canyon [click picture for a screen-size version]:
We stayed with her through the weekend, taking a day trip to the ghost town of Congress and the future ghost town of Yarnell, and saw other relatives. So we picked up our stakes on the 19th and cruised over to Banning, California... California is a long-ass state so we had a second night there, halfway up the map in Merced... Determined to get the hell out of California we stopped driving in Ashland, Oregon, home of the perpetual Shakespeare festival... We had a date in Portland with a friend of mine after he got off of work at 6 p.m. so we had a great time in the historic town of Jacksonville to pass the time, then met up with him for a fancy dinner, and since it's only another 120 miles to Tacoma from Portland we were in our driveway at ten minutes until midnight on the 21st (see the odometer, posted at 4 a.m. May 23nd).

We slept and lounged for the next three days. So since that point, once we got our butts back in gear, we've acquired materials for our next home improvement project: we're connecting the edge of the in-spite-of fence we put up between us and the neighbors a year ago to the unused side of the house (having ripped out the rotting fence that was there over the last few months), ripping up the weed-choked ground on that side of the house -- an 8' by 25' area -- to lay down weed blocker and put in a couple 8' by 3' planter boxes which I'm currently building, plus there will be the cleanup / weed-blocking / re-doing of the path between the porch and the side of the house as well as the planting area in the front yard next to where we're doing all this work. I haven't posted any pictures on Flickr of the progress yet, so the two below are more than anyone else in the world has seen unless you come by the house (y'all are welcome):
The big picture on the left is the Before image, the huge mess that side of the yard has become. The smaller picture on the right is the visible progress -- stained and bolted a 4x4 to the corner post (because of where the phone boxes are on the side of the house, the gatelatch post on the house side has to be back a bit) plus stained and rigged up a 2x6 to close the intentional gap between my front fence and the neighbor's back fence, and I've cut down the weeds so I could spray them with Roundup. Once those are dead I'll rake up and rototill the area, plant the center post for holding up the fence and a gate, etcetera ad nauseum.

What else is there to report? Eh, probably plenty. Maybe next week.

More useless information, all the time!

2009-05-05T00:44:00.000-07:00

Hello... It's been a busy two weeks and will be a bit more before I get back here to talk, since my wife and I are going to take a vacation drive down to Arizona next week. I intend to take a flock of pictures, digital and on film, though I hate to say the thought of the area doesn't excite me much. How can I not be excited by the Grand Canyon, Arches, several Indian reservations, and so forth? I don't rightly know, I've never pictured that part of the country as being my cup of tea. However, if I find a ghost town with a pioneer cemetary I might sing a different tune. The occasion of us having the time and ability, beside it being our 11th anniversary (a couple days ago), is that her library is having its air conditioning system replaced and that will take one to two weeks. I'm told that it's a necessary update since one can clean the counters at 9 p.m. before leaving for the night and there will be dust on them when the staff comes in at 9 a.m. -- personally, I think changing the air filters every three months as indicated rather than every two years might help some. I will be updating my Flickr stream as close to daily as possible, but I won't waste your time by blogging on my trip... or more than maybe once, depending upon accomidations.

This is the part of the entry where I usually write something about some stupidity seen out in the world, and there's always plenty to choose from. I don't have one that sticks out in my mind right now, which you should consider a good thing because I can only think of nice things that have happened lately... like two friends from different compass points driving over 120 miles to visit me on the same day, I spent an afternoon with my junior year locker partner the other day, my sister sent me a couple photos of her kids, and I have the big-ass boxed set of Depeche Mode's new album (it's overkill but there's some cool stuff in it). I can set aside my bothers and concerns for another week or so, or until I get back from the desert trip anyhow. So I'll catch you next time. Hope all is good with you.

How to record on one channel while watching another channel on Digital TV

2009-04-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

Background: The Sony Betamax was introduced in 1975, and the VHS hit the market in 1976. By the late 1980's, most people were recording programs they would have otherwise missed by being absent as well as recording something on one channel while watching another channel. Advances in technology gave us the digital video recorder (DVR) in the 00's which did the same functions, recording something on one channel whether you were watching another channel or not at the time, and this activity became known as "time-shifting". Further advances in technology have caused the Federal Communications Commission to rule that all future broadcasts (after a date that keeps sliding, from Feb to June) must be transmitted in digital format rather than analog. Up until recently, all televisions and recording equipment people already own were analog devices. There are several converter boxes available, either on the shelf or provided by the cable television sources (I got one from Comcast free the other day) to accomidate this, and some new recorders (DVD as well as VCR/DVD combos) have digital tuners. DVR's should already have digital tuners.

Issue: Pretty much every new recorder, however, lacks the ability to record on one channel while viewing another channel. Not even the Panasonic VCR/DVD model displayed at Costco with a big placard saying "you can watch while recording" lets you do what those words appear to mean -- what they meant was that you can watch a videotape while recording programs to a DVD (or vice versa), not watching one channel while recording another. The wiring diagrams for converter boxes and digital tuner recorders may include how to hook multiple items up to one television, but none of the manuals say how one is supposed to watch "American Idol" while recording "NCIS" on your average (analog) TV.

Solution: I was looking at the wiring diagram for my new VCR/DVD recorder with digital tuner, which for the "to use with cable box" (if you have premium channels thus require one) section showed the wiring going from the wall to the RF jack on the recorder, the recorder to the RF jack on the cable box, cable box to the RF jack on the television, but then additionally cables going from the A/V-in jacks on the television to the A/V-out jacks on the recorder, and the A/V-in jacks on the recorder to the A/V-out jacks on the cable box. Hmm, maybe if you have a digital TV since the recorder has to be turned off to record (just like VCRs always did) and the TV would be doing the signal processing, but this is not what most of us have. So I got to thinking, what if I put that free converter box back into use -- a nice idea anyway since what the recorder determines as channels is vastly different than what the cable box lists (example: HGTV is 68 on the cable box and 102.7 on the recorder) and Comcast's special offerings are exclusive to their box -- on a splitter, then had the recorder going to the TV's RF jack and the cable box going to the TV's A/V jacks? I could flip between the two by pressing the TV/AV button on the television's remote, same as I already was doing before the changeover to go between cable or VCR and the DVD player. And in a few minutes of rewiring, I had things working such that I'm recording a Maniners baseball game on Fox Sports Network at this moment while watching "Good Buy, Bad Buy" on HGTV. Had enough of my balloon juice?

Procedure: I had a coaxial splitter from Radio Shack laying around, it's a pretty common piece of equipment. All the new equipment came with wires and cables, which I didn't necessarily need because I'd replaced the old VCR and DVD players so had existing rigging. I went from the wall to the splitter, then on one splitter jack the coax goes to the RF-in on the recorder, then from the RF-out to the RF jack on the TV (what comes this way is shown on channel 3) -- and on the other splitter jack the coax goes to the RF-in on the converter box, and connected A/V cables from the A/V-outs on the converter box to the A/V jacks on the TV (what comes this way is shown on the Video screen). See my rather bluish diagram below, cut-and-paste pieced from the Panasonic manual for my purposes, for a schematic. The TV/AV button (also known as TV/Media) does flip between the two, and both paths are providing crystal-clear digital signal to the TV.

a short pair of statements that aren't about computers

2009-04-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

Hiya, party people. So let's see, what's worth reporting... First thing that comes to mind is the stupidity of this whole teabagging thing. I don't mean sticking one's testacles in someone's face, though there are creative uses for that mental image. I mean all these mock Boston Tea Party protests people are staging. I haven't been keeping up as to what kind of taxation without representation people are talking about, though suspect that the folks who were at the original party in 1773, protesting against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, might get a weird look on their faces and say "what are you people bitching about?" (or the 1770's equivalent) to the riled citizens. I'm just curious: Where do these people think the money to fund the things they are also concerned about comes from? Do these people have a better plan or know of some elected/running-for-office figure that can get the country out of an economic crisis without anyone having to inconvenience anyone or spend any money? Of course not. If you're not about the solution, you're about the precipitate.

I will be visiting my beloved Yakima Valley one day next week for something to do, weather permitting. (Those who don't live in Washington: maaan, it's been weird here lately. Hailstorms one day, 70's and sunny the next... It's confusing the hell out of the plant life.) In an odd twist, one of the people I was going to visit at his work will be coming to my house this weekend so the things I'd want to give or show him when I get there I will have already done so. :-D I'll be letting the folks on Facebook that are on the travelogue know what's up. In other visitation news, I had the opportunity to see the inside of a local craftsman-style home that's between owners and needs a few repairs (most noteably the wood floors need to be stripped, sanded, and refinished); it's an odd case because it's probably the oldest house in that neighborhood and has the most history and character -- the other older houses there are either small or run-down, and the rest of the houses are new and pretty yet pretty much without a soul, and someone put a stupid friggin' duplex (also vacant and run-down) in the lot between the house and the street. Here's a picture of the art-glass window as taken from the livingroom. The ones I took six weeks ago when last I was through there were shot through the side windows, doing it little justice.

Geek Ranting Alert 2: how the optical media was lost

2009-04-08T04:07:00.000-07:00

Once again, if talking computers isn't your thing, drop down a couple entries. A regular one will be coming soon... just gotta bitch right here, right now. In the same itemized form as previously:

* Attempt to buy dual-layer DVD media from same low-price location as the dual-layer DVD burner. Curiously they don't have any.
* Find two-pack of dual-layer DVD media at drugstore for $10. Knowing it's way more expensive there than other places, buy it anyway.
* Spend an hour copying two single-layer DVD backups of files to the hard drive.
* Spend an hour or two sorting through the files to lessen the number of duplicates, misplaced items, and incorrect file/folder names.
* Open up burner program, spend less than an hour double-checking that there are even fewer duplicates, misplaced items, and incorrect file/folder names. With each change, update file list in burner program.
* Single-layer DVDs are advertised as 4.7gb, but really hold about 4.5gb. Dual-layer DVDs are advertised as holding 8.5gb (not 9.4 like you'd think) but really hold 8.1gb (not 8.5gb). Move some less imperative folders out of the list until the barometer at the bottom of the burner program is to the left of the limit-line.
* Insert one dual-layer DVD media, spend the next hour burning. Notice that despite the fact that the burn rate is 2.4x, computer lagging to hell when writing an email anyway.
* At the wrapup portion of the burn, discover that I forgot to remove one reference to one file that got moved. Which I find out in the summary message, saying that I've created a $5 coaster. See, "disk-at-once" style burning requires everything expected to be there before it will create the Table Of Contents index... so basically, it's spent the last hour burning a disk, but claims that there's no disk in the drive after because the list of files didn't get laid down. Not even the SmartErase program mentioned last entry recognises the disk.
* Get angry, cut up unuseable yet undestroyable disk with scissors [see illustration].
* Insert second dual-layer DVD media, check "Simulation" so it will make sure everything's fine with the file list before doing a burn, set burner program into motion.
* Notice this is going to take longer than expected, cancel operation. As usual, the burner program doesn't want to stop and the light on the burner flashes long after the program has been forced to close. Reboot computer.
* Pull out disk, see the widening white ring on the underside, and discover the damn thing was actually getting burned! Wonder what part of "Simulation" the computer didn't understand and cut up my last $5 coaster.
* Make plans to buy more disks, this time at Target which sells ten-packs of dual-layer DVD media for $15. Stop blogging, go to bed cuz it's quarter-til-5 a.m.
[oh but wait, there's more...]
* Actually get up, actually go to South Hill Target, actually buy the only package of $15-for-10 dual-layer DVD media, actually listen to the new Depeche Mode album to and from so I wound up sitting in my car for half an hour finishing it out.
* Turn on computer, open up package... discover half of these disks are used. Nice ploy, putting one's coasters in a package then returning it for a refund, so Target will put it back on the shelf. This was the only one, like I said.
* Go back to Target, get refund, go looking at other places nearby which don't carry dual-layer media if they have blank disks at all. Refuse to go to that drugstore.
* Go to the Lakewood Target, they have three boxes and the plastic wrap is intact, purchase. Come home, burn that disk, call it a night.
* Next morning, find 50 more files that didn't get burned because they were not in the right place (forgot I had, could not find when searching originally so thought I'd deleted, overnight updates to what I had archived). Toss out good ($1.50) disk, make better disk, NOW we're done.

Geek Ranting Alert 1: how the optical drive was won

2009-04-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote "All is well now" at the end of the paragraph about having to replace my CD-RW drive, and that's still true. But there's more to the story that came along later. If computer wrangling talk isn't your thing just skip this and go to yesterday's entry, I'll understand. Seems everyone I've told the bare bones of the story to so far (having Facebook and a couple messenger programs open while I was doing the work) has universally used the phrase, "if I understood what you were talking about..." So here it is in bullet point form:

* Noticed on the drive's box that "SmartErase", which can securely destroy a CD or DVD that you had previously created (this doesn't work on store-bought disks so your music and movies are safe), is prominently mentioned. Also noticed this is not mentioned anywhere in the owner's manual, which does go on at length about the LightScribe label maker (which this drive doesn't have -- its sister model the HAP422 does that trick), and that the drive came with Nero 7 Essentials, a very basic burner software that is two full versions behind the current Nero version.
* I am using Nero 8.1, so I don't see the point of downgrading. But I want that SmartErase feature. Nero 8.1 doesn't offer it on the menu. Checked a drive review website, it mentions only Nero 7 Essentials and has a description of SmartErase being used. I am thinking that maybe the software didn't 'adjust' when I put in the new drive so I should reinstall it in hopes it will say, "oh, you have a LiteOn HAP322, let's add the option to the utilities menu!"
* Uninstall Nero 8.1 and reboot.
* Download Nero 9 from the maker's website. Download manager crashes twice due to other things I was doing. I remember when Nero 4 was like 14 megabytes because all it did was burn CDs; Nero 9 is like 835 megabytes and wants to be your everything. So this takes about an hour to complete.
* 23% of the way through the unpacking of Nero 9, error dialog: File corrupt.
* Delete and re-download Nero 9. No crashes.
* Gets 100% of the way through the unpacking of Nero 9, program disappears completely. Repeat this a couple times, it doesn't begin the install. Look up available hard drive space, figure 900 megs isn't enough, move my photos off that drive to another and this frees up 2 gigs.
* This time it completes the unpacking before putting up an error dialog: This will not work with this version of Windows, see website for details.
* Takes me 10 minutes to find the product specs, and this is the first I see anywhere that Nero 9 is for XP and Vista only... they dropped Windows 2000 use?!
* Spend time hunting for version 8.3.13, since if I'm going to be stuck with version 8 I might as well make sure it's the latest one. Don't find it offhand on maker's site, don't want to Torrent it, find that someone's made it available on Rapidshare as two RAR archives. Not being a member it's gonna take me an hour and being sneaky due to the site's limitations to download both parts...
* An hour and one modem powercycle later, I have both parts of Nero 8.3.13. They reintegrate fine. The program installs fine, and as usual I spend five minutes cutting down the install options of this 250 meg program into the three components I will ever use. I do not see SmartErase mentioned.
* Run program, insert an old CD-R of music, I still don't see how to erase a disk. Look on Nero's site, it mentions nothing about the SmartErase. But Nero 8.3.13 is working otherwise so that's one victory.
* Do yet another search on Google, and this time it points me to the SmartErase application which is available for download from a CD/DVD tweaker site's utilities section, uploaded in the same month in which the sticker says my drive was manufactured. The application looks like the screen pictured on the box, and the description only says it was part of a software bundle. Not Nero 7 Essentials, a different package. Hey, whatever's clever.
* Search the Nero 7 Essentials disk for this application as a stand-alone program, do not see it readily, figure it might be hiding in one of the CAB files but I'm not going to go hunting all over the disk for it if I can download the thing.
* Download SmartErase utility, run, erase the music disk as proof of concept, happy happy. Wonder aloud why this was so hard and why this is the only place with the utility. Add to the "Nero Tools" folder since that's where it should have been in the first place. There's no credits screen in this program to tell where it came from, who wrote it, or anything else that would be useful for seeking the source or newer versions. I visit LiteOn's site and find a few disk utilities but not this. Shrug.
* Mission accomplished, it's 3:30 a.m., consider myself victorious and go to bed.

a nice orderly rice pilaf with a side of Sizzlean (no joke)

2009-04-01T01:47:00.000-07:00

Greetings, people. I'm amused by the Conficker worm panic that is brewing because all the reports say, straight up, that despite the fact the virus keeps have known about this beast since last November they don't know what it does. And fear that today it will morph into some other form and/or be launched into action, whatever that is. Not to be a total cybercynic (oh wait, I am) but really, anyone remember Comet Kohoutek or the Y2K scare? I was thinking just the other day that no one talks about April Fools' Day anymore, but whatever media coverage that worm is getting might just make up for it. Anyhow. Pictured here is something more real, the first LED-based spotlight that screws into an average indoor light socket that I've held in my hands (after years of hearing about their development). While most reports about this type of lighting say that they have a life of 100,000 hours thus last 10 years, ergo why the outlets offering them charge so much, this one is a 45 watt equivalent that only uses 3.5 watts and cost $9. Stronger exist. Candelabra-style LED lights are also available at the same discounter I got this at.

I haven't taken the time to confirm this as a user error or an actual stupidity (it could be either, I was monkeying around inside my computer installing RAM afterall and could have knocked a cable loose) but at this moment my CD burner is listed in My Computer and reacts when the icon is clicked, but isn't actually reading disks. If it's a connection error, fine, I fix in seconds. If the drive actually has bit the electronic dust, which wouldn't be the first time (this Hi-Val internal was the replacement for a Phillips that died a poorly-timed death in front of company), I might have a spare sitting behind me but not as fast as this one. Grr. [later that same day...] Not the connections. Yes, I have three drives behind me -- one I know is broken because I replaced it for someone, two work but they are 2x CD-RWs made in 1999 -- so I hopped off to everyone's favorite store and bought a 22x dual layer DVD burner. All is well now.

A confession to make... For a long while I've sneered at sites like LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. I've even bragged about my sneering at those sites, because I like to be far too l33t about technology. Well, three out of four remain the same -- LiveJournal is way too emo, MySpace has too many vain kids, Twitter has a name that speaks for itself (lots of twits with only about 160 characters' worth of things to say), but... *sigh* I did join Facebook a couple weeks ago. Primarily to keep in touch with friends "back home" (or originally from there) who can't seem to write the same things in a direct email, share photos from a concert I went to beside those old friends with the folks in the bands as well as those 20 year high school reunion pictures only one other classmate had ever seen before, and chat with a couple people that can't seem to install a dedicated instant messenger program. Five people begged me to join, I did, and after their initial "we have converted j00!" messages haven't been on much themselves... figures. So beside the benefit of obtaining the phone numbers of a couple people I lost track of about twenty years ago, I say it's "just there." A nice tool for some purposes but not all that and a bag of coleslaw as some people act like it is, and (sorry, little brother) I wouldn't consider blogging or sharing anything personal there since the only people who would see stuff are people I've dubbed friends. That leaves out so many! The 80's trivia games are kinda cool but whomever wrote that "What flavor of lip gloss are you?" quiz needs to sprout some pubes. Oh, and whoever created that IQ Test bullshit, which has a game-looking ad on every Facebook game page and the tip-off that it's a scam is where it asks for your cell phone carrier and phone number, needs to die in a fire. So I bring up my Facebook presence, with a bit of sneer intact, not to invite anyone to look me up [don't] but because by now a number of the people who I told "I will never join!" for ages are aware that I have indeed joined and I don't want to be a total hypocrite. (Part-time, perhaps.) Just rolling with the new, since the previous edition of this exact same concept (realtime chat, message boards, special interest groups, email, door games) is something I subscribed to heavily in the late 1980's and through the 1990's, dial-up bulletin board systems... this is just on a more nationwide/global basis than Backwaters Of The Mind BBS ever was, and having broadband it doesn't tie up my phone line. :)

your love's contageous, one kiss is dangerous...

2009-03-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

Hello, one and all. The most interesting thing I've done lately is going to a show at a cafe/bar in Seattle a couple days ago to see a guy I hung out with in junior high perform with a couple bands, having been invited to this by my junior year locker partner, I got to talk to his sister who I had a class with when I was in the sixth grade, and I was joined by my best friend from elementary school [at right], another classmate, and the drummer for the band I was in during college. If you find that Mighty Shiny and/or Mountain Kids Fantasy are playing near you (it could happen) go see 'em. Yeah, yeah, everything was orchestrated through Facebook except getting me in, which used good old-fashioned email. I spent all of Sunday recuperating. :-D Paige meanwhile was on the other side of the state visiting relatives for their annual St. Patrick's Day festivities, with several people flying or driving hours to get there, and got back this afternoon because the mountain passes were being snowed under. So we both had an exciting time over the weekend.

The silly thing, some would even call it stupid (six people definitely would) is that 3/4 of the people in that place were there to hear the first two bands. And left when the bands did. The headliner, a six-piece band which included a steel drum and a violin, didn't have much of a crowd left by the time they started playing a Dave Matthews cover... My group felt kinda sorry for them as we left. Only kinda.

Trivial ~~life~~ computer notes: At long last the memory for my computer arrived so hopefully there will no longer be 20 seconds between when I click on the browser when I've been reading email and when it's ready to browse, and I spent a bit of time refurbishing an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) that I have had laying around for a year. It's a completely different model than the one I have been using for a few years so I had to make a communications cable (that's how the computer knows how much juice is in the battery and can shut it down if the AC goes out for more than fifteen minutes) and buy a replacement. After installing the software everything is good, things work as expected, except for one detail... The old one, for home use, would put a dialog onscreen when there was a problem with the backup power. This new one, meant for servers, will send an email or a network message to someone but not display a dialog (because admins don't sit at a server terminal all day; they have smoking out back and first-person shooter games in their office to do). But the solution was easy and what I rely upon with the previous UPS: a buzzer comes on if the power's been out for several seconds, and beeps a few times every minute while it's out. The UPS is less than 3 feet from the computer and about one foot from my legs so it's not like I'm going to miss the alarm.

The weather here has improved a bit, now we're up to rain (sometimes plain, sometimes blotchy sleetish) instead of snow. But it's still wonky because you look out the window to see if it's still raining, the sun is out and shining, then by the time you've gotten your shoes on it's dark and raining hard again. Plus there have been windstorms lately, not too bad where I am but the news has been filled with trees-on-powerlines stories from places 50 miles north.

Hope it's good where you are for the next week, Jamie, and decent where the rest of you readers are.

freshmen do it enthusiastically -- but bless them, they aren't that good at it

2009-03-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Howdy hiya. The game was still on with the eBay seller for the battery until yesterday. *sigh* Here's a summation of the dialog. I hate bringing this up yet again but it shoulda been friggin' over by now! Okay. You saw a couple weeks ago, around Feb 20, that I had done a Return Merchandise Authorization through their website. Days pass and I don't hear anything from them except a note saying they'd left me positive feedback. It's not often sellers give feedback before the transaction is totally over, but left hand didn't tell right hand, etc. We're into March now, and the story resumes on the fifth through to today...

me: Hi, I haven't heard anything from you about my RMA so I was wondering what's happening.
them: Oh, that got sent out on Feb 26.
me: okay...
them: sends the shipping notice I didn't get earlier, saying it went out on Feb 25 and click this link for tracking.... USPS page says they didn't receive the package from the seller.
me: Hi again, you know that tracking link you gave me? It says the package didn't go out. Could you look into this?
them: Uh, what was the eBay item number and your username?
me: gave them item#, username, and RMA# - quoted the earlier email with the package tracking number and USPS's didn't-receive message. You already know how I hate techs that don't read ticket notes.
them: Oh, that got sent out on Feb 25.
me: Not according to your shipper! It's been over 10 days, it should have come by now. I'll be following up with you on Wednesday, two weeks after you say it was sent out. In the meantime, could you figure out what's up with that package?

Why is this so bloody hard? [twelve hours later] Okay, I have the replacement battery now and it hasn't gone 'poof' yet. Wait, before you say, "you should be patient, Mushy!" -- the postage label on the package is dated March 7. Saturday, when they got the second-italicized-above message from me. I'm good with them realizing the shipping error and correcting it, but am unclear why the next volley still said it went out on Feb 25, not "whoops, error, we're sending it now"...

So, the previously-promised review of the Bio-Ear tinnitus remedy by Nature's Answer, which is $20 a half-ounce. What I've read says that one will see results in as little as a week... I decided to give myself two weeks just to be on the safe side. "Designed to safely and effectively stop the ringing and buzzing in your ears, this natural herbal remedy contains aloe vera for nourishing nerve endings and ginseng for stimulating blood flow so you can experience that inner peace and quiet you so desperately desire." So far, after probably a week and a half, I've heard no difference. Possibly because I'm paying attention to the noise, which I normally don't do. I realize there are various causes of this issue, and knowing me it might be from damage to a cranial nerve from popping my neck or damage to the eardrum itself from a cotton swab (I have had scarring before from overzealous earwax removal) rather than something this can remedy. It's not bad, it's just there, and before you say "go to a doctor"... like a lot of people, I will when I have a job with health insurance again.

The weather here in the Puget Sound area has been really stupid. It'll be totally sunny and warm, then ten minutes later there will be a driving hailstorm. Or you'll go out and get the paper off the porch, it's mildly overcast and a bit cool outside, then when you look up from the front page it's snowing heavily. Other than some Kodak moments and head-scratching, the only effect that it's had on me directly is that my wife and I didn't go out this weekend like we had planned. See, her mother was going to drive across Snoqualmie Pass to do some shopping at IKEA on Friday and it was all planned out how we were going to have lunch with her. Night before, the pass is closed because of heavy snow. Friday we sleep in. Friday afternoon we get a call from her saying that it's open so she'll be over on Saturday morning. Snowing again, and she calls at 10am to say cancel our noon rendezvous. More sleeping in. She's now saying Tuesday, when Paige has to work at noon, or failing that this coming Friday, which will be the last chance for her to do her furniture shopping before her granddaughter with the hex wrench shows up for their St. Patrick's Day festivities. Furthermore, since the nightly news says to expect 20 inches on the pass in the near future, it's possible that Paige might not be going over there for St. Patty's either. It's too warm for snow to stick in Tacoma because it's MARCH... enough with the pointless frozen precipitation already! Oh look, a snow flurry has just started [noon 3/9] and it's sticking in places...

So this morning [10am 3/10] the phone rings. Backstory first: Now, maybe I've mentioned this before, but I'm listed in the phone book by my first initial B, and there's some guy named Benjamin with the same last name that has been ducking his creditors since the late 1990's. We're not related, but the phone solicitors see the initial and immediately think I'm that deadbeat. Now then... The woman asks to speak to Benjamin. Nope, no Benjamin here, I tell her, and never has been. Now, most of the time the creditors will say "oh, sorry, I'll remove your name" or somesuch. This woman, after being told that I am not the 'droid she's looking for, corrects herself by saying this is Comcast and they want to send me a free digital converter box, they just need to confirm some information. *Click* Had I not been 1/4 asleep I would have said what came to me about a minute later: "Please work on your social engineering skills. Comcast knows my name." Needless to say, later when I checked the Caller ID box it was listed as "toll-free". FAIL

and wisdom to know the difference

2009-03-01T00:45:00.000-08:00

Hello, adoring public of my adorable public blog. There's only one item to offer, an update to last issue's story. A word of welcome to my seventh reader, my younger brother, who offers a word of greeting (by name!) to my second reader, Jamie. He wrote me back to clarify that he did indeed write the previous letter himself, and in this latest letter demonstrated further that his writing style is very much like that of our mother so I am convinced. He did show her the letter before responding, though, so it was not absolutely without influence. :) He also stated, pardon my lack of quoting, that what was said before was indeed the opinion he holds of me, and that he wishes to stay on the porch with our parents (yes, he phrased it in response to what I said here last week). There was more said but it's not germaine to the original issue; we did seem to agree on one thing, that I should [and do] praise God every day that I have never had children. And that as they say is that, his family and mine won't soon be having a weenie roast. I haven't heard anything from my youngest brother yet, and this email I got from my sister wasn't a reply -- it was a forwarded patriotic story making the rounds.

I had originally planned to send my mother an email on March 1 with a status report: who wrote, what they said, and who didn't respond. But I realized a week ago that word gets around so she already knows the score. What I was going to say in that letter was that due to something my mother had said in her Christmas card, I made a New Year's Resolution... and I kept it. I wanted her to know I found her advice to be correct and that I followed it. Good or bad, win or lose, come what may, I reached out to my three siblings and asked them for an opinion about reclaiming some lost ground. I couldn't rightly say whether my mother, in pointing out that I've been distant from my siblings and how this is hardly commendable, had any notion at the time of whether they agreed or disagreed with our distance, but I suppose she and I both know now. I didn't a month ago, for sure. Hey, I tried, so the subject should be off of the table now.

I'll write something more upbeat and stupid next time. The other things that come to mind right now, like getting positive feedback early from the eBay seller that will be sending me a replacement for the defective battery or how this homeopathic remedy for tinnitis is working, are fairly trivial and disorderly. And in looking back over the two posts for the month of February, I've said parts of this already (but as I learned at my last job, there are people who like it when you repeat what you said a couple inches downscreen because they're amazingly lazy). I just wanted to get this out in the open, say some hello's, and remind myself that I should accept the things I cannot change while finding courage to change the things I can.

contractual obligation

2009-02-20T22:48:00.000-08:00

Hiya... I'm not terribly inspired to write and the one major stupidity that I have to share is indeed major but I don't really want to relive it. It took me a couple days to get my head around and past this, and I suppose it was a happy (for me) coincidence that a dear friend was having absurd times with her family regarding wills and financial arrangements, and elected to tell me all the sordid details. [Thanks, Bertie, I needed the laugh... glad that you can laugh over them too.] I will quote something I wrote elsewhere however to get my point across. These are real quotes from the letter that I sent my siblings and a response received the other day from my five-years-younger brother:

Feb 2, 2009
Dear younger brother: I have not been much of a part of your family's lives. At no point in my adult life have I ever had a dislike for my siblings, and I have embraced that they have found special people and produced beautiful children. I would like to bridge the gap that has long existed between me and you, it just doesn’t seem like something that should exist. But it’s not as simple as just resolving to fix things, I want you to send me an email and tell me what you think. You can be honest if you are comfortable with our distance, but I want to know what your thoughts are regardless so please give me a response. I’ve long made no effort to keep in touch with my family and now I am making an earnest effort to reach out to you.

Feb 17, 2009
Dear older brother: I received your letter in regards to reconnecting and becoming a new and improved part of our lives. I must admit I was a little surprised to see a letter from you. Being that you have never really cared about anyone in this family except yourself, I must ask why you write this letter now. Is it really that you sincerely want to reconnect, someone trying to push you to reconnect, or maybe its even this years New Year’s resolution? Whatever your reason for this attempt to connect, I will play along.

Wow. I don't consider it paranoid to say that my mother wrote that, not my brother, and here is the evidence: First, the letter was an attachment in .doc format, not something that was typed in the email program. Second, there were two weeks between when I sent the letter and when I got the reply, which is ample time for my sibs to contact my parents and say "what shall we do with this?"... and my mother to jot something up for my brother to pass along. Third, while I have no idea what my brother's writing style is nowadays, that was most definitely my mother's writing style and phrasing. The first thing I wrote in reply was, "do you really feel that way?" I haven't had any follow-up from him or others just yet, but I decided after mulling for a couple days that if this is how my siblings think of me, it pains me but they will have to stay on the porch with our folks. See, it's been said in various ways and places, but I keep my parents at bay because I am happier without the drama and disregard. I'm the black sheep of the family and they let me know it at every opportunity. I would hope that my siblings realise (I know that my sister totally understands, she grinds an axe harder than I do at times!) that our parents' approach doesn't work, and not use it themselves. If they do, sigh, then they've made a bad choice and I'll stay over here in my world. They're welcome to think whatever they will after that.

There has been one other stupid thing... Okay, I told the story earlier about how the three laptop batteries I have are all nonfunctional (2 not recognised, 1 not charging). I had bookmarked a couple sellers online who offered them for under $30. I decided to wait until the tax refund was lined up, then I went on a shopping spree. Both of those websites had raised their prices above $60. Fine, I went to eBay and found someone offering the batteries for $29.95 and bought one, which came in the mail yesterday. I put it in, it's recognised! And charging! But inside of an hour later, after the charge level had gone from 59% to 68%, the red light on the notebook came on. The charging firmware says there's been a failure in the battery... and I can smell burned circuitry ("the magic smoke got out" as we techies say). Fuuuuuhh. Cooked. The seller's procedure says: email us, and if you don't hear anything within 4 business hours email us again, and if you don't hear anything from us within 8 hours call us at the number eBay has on record. Nothing in 4 hours, or the next morning. I can't find any phone number through eBay or the seller's website. Sent another email, they replied to this one telling how to plug in and charge a battery (I love script monkeys!) but to their credit also advising to go to their website and click on the "generate RMA" link at the top of the page (wow, had I known I would have done that yesterday!), and send it back. Bonus giggle: I went to the eBay page to get all the model details for the RMA, and the price they are charging went up to $33.95 -- what's the sudden rise, everyone? That's what I did around 4 p.m. today, so they should be replacing it shortly... Just bugs me that I have to wait some more. But they appear to be good sports so far so I'll just think positive.

Actual stupid thing someone said dept: Phone rings. Caller ID gives the name of a business I did a cattle-call interview with years ago, they sell air filtration systems and at the time were looking for demonstrators (a.k.a. salespeople) by advertising with the line "do you like to eat Doritos and chug Mountain Dew?"... when to do the job you had to be anything but a slacker. I didn't take them up on it because they repeatedly said this "was not sales"; sorry, selling an item is sales, not merely the operators who are standing by to take your order. I answer the phone, the person says this isn't a sales call (giggle!) but a survey about air quality. I answer the standard questions about my home and life, and the one that tripped me was, "okay, now what age bracket are you in... 21 to 75?" Only one. That's quite the demographic.

in case of emergency: scream a lot, it feels good

2009-02-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

Hi there. There isn't a lot to report about the world we live in and life in general, though I am probably overlooking something, but it is blog update time and I don't want to let the lot of you down. Right now I'm downloading a well-known software bundle that most new computers have preinstalled, which I cannot name because I don't really need the attention, but I think you know the one... you've seen the commercials with the guy in a suit and a bearded young man in casual clothes, which start off with the two announcing what form of computer they are? And the eventual message is that the latest major release by the suited guy has been somewhat of a disaster? Yeah, those ads, and that new product. But not for me, of course, it's for a friend who paid for that product (indirectly, with the purchase of a computer for her daughter) but cannot find the disks due to bad management and a recent move across the Cascade Mountains.

You have seen in previous entries how a friend deposited a desktop machine and a notebook computer at my house last year, so that I may invoke the power of Saint Dogbert -- heal broken technology with the wave of my paw and rid them of their demons of stupidity. The upshot of that tale, I think I reported, was that the owners of these computers needed to provide me with the CDs that came with the machines, a feat they could not and still cannot seem to accomplish. (The happy announcement "I found it!" which was followed by disks of one software package, some printer drivers, and the notebook's how-to-use guide was a letdown for all.) In time my friend said she would purchase new disks, not realizing that both the older stable version and the newer flaky version have a list price of $200 for the base installs, more if you want the ones that have psychic powers over kitchen appliances. So she's out hunting for better prices on those packages. Meanwhile, I'm taking the more direct route and downloading them from disreputable sources. I have one computer fixed using a ready-to-rock stripped down version of the older stable package, and according to BitZip (which somehow went from a beautiful and detailed Torrent client to a video player that, psst, also downloads Torrents and does a great job of it yet has lost all its beauty and detailedness) I have about twelve more hours to get the stripped-down version of the "ultimate" new package. I was given an option by my friend, after she'd made a couple calls, of me ordering it and someone else paying for it later so she could go pick it up tomorrow... no, I'm pretty sure that you have to pay when you order, so that won't work.

In other computer news, I haven't ordered the battery for my notebook yet but will do that sometime soon. Not a pressing issue. I want to have the tax refund on the way before I do that, and I would have gone on H&R Block's site a week an a half ago to do that had my wife not said, "We got this email at work, saying the office had messed up on our W-2's..." So far as I know the matter has been resolved but it's not as though she checks her email or remembers to ask anyone (or finishes the half-gallon of milk that expires in a week before starting a new container) so I have no idea. I'll do the taxes when I remember to do it in a lull.

And speaking of email and family nuttiness... I think I have mentioned that my mother gave me some grief in her Christmas card about not being tight with my siblings and their families. I did follow through on my New Year's resolution to get a letter drafted to my sister and two brothers by February 1, added ink to the printer, and sent them out on Groundhog's Day. In it, I asked them to each send me an email telling me their point of view about Paige and I being a new and improved part of their lives... I did it like that because I don't have my brothers' email addresses (they both Facebook so they do have computers and email) and my sister doesn't read her email. I have not received a response at this moment from any of them, but it's still early; they've only had those letters for 3-4 days. I plan to write my mother an email on March 1 to tell her who said what (or didn't say "what?") and politely add that I did take her words about my connection to my nestmates and their families to heart afterall. Little to no presentation on their part about wanting to be connected means she will never be able to give me any further static on the subject for the rest of either of our lives.

I used to write such fascinating posts...

and if it ain't that, what the hell is it?

2009-01-27T00:13:00.000-08:00

So the moment you've all been not particularly waiting for... After the last posting I got online and hunted up a new mainboard for the notebook, cheap ($10 plus $10 shipping, as opposed to $25-$250). And in fact, it's an upgrade -- I'm going from a 400MHz to a 500MHz so it's faster. Dell may suck at providing an owner's manual that's worth anything, but as for the Service Manual, it's amazing. So I spent an hour or so carefully taking the machine apart [photo] per the instructions, swapped out the motherboard, put everything back together, and it fired up on the first try so I did something right. But... It's still saying the unrecognised batteries are unrecognised and the one it does recognise isn't taking a charge. I know I asked last time, "what are the odds?" Well, there you go; the longshot wins, it's the batteries. Batteries cost $50-$125, though I've located two online dealers offering this model for $30. Hmm, welcome to my upgraded machine that for now I still have to plug into the wall?

On that other stupid issue I mentioned last time, the 2gb memory stick that isn't universally recognised... Kingston lamed out on me. If there's a known issue, for goodness sake, admit it. In this Information Age, we will know if there's a known issue courtesy of Google, possibly before the manufacturer is aware of it. So the end result of the back-and-forth was the guy suggesting I download USB driver updates from Dell (sorry, there are none) and ending that my port isn't compatable with the drive (gee, why not?). I thumbed my nose at the dude and told him there's a known issue, probably related to its power rating accidentally being higher than standard... look it up or own up to it, techie, Kingston 1gb and 4gb drives work where the 2gb drives fail. When I was checking notebook and UPS battery prices at Batteries Plus near the Mall ($33 for UPS cells is way good, $129 for the notebook battery is not so good) I noticed they had a pocketknife-folding 4gb drive made by MaxFlash [who?] for $20, so picked one up. Yeah, of course then I went across the Mall parking lot to BestBuy for a doodad and found they have Geek Squad branded 4gb thumbdrives for $12... I think I'll stick to no-name, I find myself assuming their Geek Squad drives are as reliable as their techie reputation. :-D

Photo: I was meandering through an abandoned house a few miles away with my camera, and the neighbor cat was looking through the big hole in the front door at me...

if it's not one thing, it's another -- or it's nothing realistic at all

2009-01-21T01:10:00.000-08:00

Hello, people. It's so good to see a new President inaugurated into office, and unlike most of the ceremonies that came before yesterday's this one actually had some spirit, some involvement from the citizens, instead of just being pomp and circumstance merely for the sake of expectation. It was a day! A day of celebration, excitement, joy, and enjoyment that everyone could share in. I watched the two swearings-in, followed by the next two hours of (in the words of the first President Bush, whispered to Barbara and caught by a CNN camera) "hurry up and wait". Then I went back to bed for another four hours because this boy does not live on five hours of sleep alone.

I have a serious stupidity or three to share. Here is the basic information which these apply to, which I will be repeating parts of in the context of the issues I am going to state: My new notebook computer has developed a new problem -- I hadn't touched it in a few weeks and had plugged it in the other day to charge, but it only looks like it is charging. The battery power remains at 0% after several hours. I have two other batteries, which the computer insists it cannot charge; the indications that it cannot recognise the batteries are a red light on the panel where it is usually green (okay) or yellow (charging) -- and a built-in utility in the computer's hardware [a BIOS feature for power monitoring] gives messages about not being able to identify the battery's manufacturer. Yes, the computer works fine when plugged in, but being a notebook the ability to run on battery alone is expected behavior. The same thing had happened to my older (Pentium 166) computer a few years ago; for whatever reason the recharging circuitry built into the mainboard can get fried if you leave it plugged in without using it for an extended period. I was looking up details about my issue on the Web, specifically "what does the battery charge light turning red mean?" because this isn't covered in the manual or anywhere on Dell's website. (That is a stupidity of its own.) I rephrased this at some point to something about the computer not recognising or charging the battery. After several hours of searching and reading things, I concluded it the recharging circuitry gone bad. I have ordered a replacement motherboard off eBay for one-third to one-twenthieth of the standard prices; notebook computers are similar to automobiles in that a new engine costs more than the value of the car, so the scrapyards collecting such machinery make a killing parting out the "useless" item you may have given them for free.

Let's start with one that can be considered universal: We have come to rely upon Internet search engines to answer our questions, which usually isn't that bad a thing (though teachers and librarians are beginning to be annoyed by students whose only source of information for reports is Wikipedia, one that is often correct and definitely more up-to-date than books for subjects that evolve, but yet offers information that is as subjective, slanted, or incorrect as the writers and contributors make it). But as with any cataloging system, the question has to be asked before it can be looked up, and it has to be answered before it's worth looking up. Additionally you have to understand the issue or have certain keywords before you can attempt an effectve search. There is an unbelieveable number of websites devoted to technical issues and specific computer-related subjects. Complaint number one is the uselessness of web resources. An example: Someone on WikiAnswers, a site whose name implies you can find answers, described a similar issue about how their brand new battery is not recognised when plugged into the computer. WikiAnswers operates like a cross between Yahoo Answers (if you ever wanted a serious question answered by a 14 year old) and Wikipedia. The "approved" answer: Someone quoted from the optional battery charger's manual to tell how to, are you ready?, plug the battery into the charger. That's the sort of thing that makes me want to go into impromptu colorectal surgery; someone needs to be torn a new anus for such a totally "I didn't actually read the question" reply on an ANSWERS webpage. Another example: My search took me to Microsoft's public forums, because I figured they might have something useful. Now, I've been teching for ten years so I should know by now that this isn't normally the case, even if you have the specific error code Windows or Microsoft apps generate. I found four or five instances where someone was repeating the error dialog that I was trying to look up, so my heart leapt and my spirits rose -- and the response each of those questions received, repeatedly from different people, was "you're in the wrong forum, case closed." As you can guess, the question was neither forwarded to the right forum nor was it ever re-asked in the right one as far as my search could conclude. Final example: Approximately half of the times I saw the question asked, whether it was 'around' through Google or on Dell's own forums, there was no answer at all... years pass and not one response, or the singular responses don't add anything meaningful ("what operating system are you using?").

An issue specific to my day but seen frequently from others: Notebook computer batteries often have a little bit of circuitry built in that measures how much energy there is inside the cells so that the battery life can be estimated. No one wants to be going along, going along, going along then suddenly *blah* they're out of juice and the computer dies without warning. But Dell seems to have taken this to a bonus level: Complaint number two is stupid battery identification. A few years ago there was a flap about how printer maker Lexmark had put chips in the ink cartridges for certain models of printers, with the result being that if you ran out of ink you had to buy a new ink cartridge, because if you refilled the cartridge you already own and put it back in the printer would refuse to use it because it 'knew' that the cartridge had been emptied. [The fix was simple -- have a second cartridge, put that in to 'reset' the identifier the printer got from the chip, and then you could use your first, refilled, cartridge thereafter.] For the battery situation, it too has an identifier built into the battery circuitry, which contains a manufacturer code or something. The result is that if you put a battery not sold by Dell into the computer, it may be a good battery but you will get an error message saying it doesn't like the battery. Ahem. My issue is that all three batteries I own are Dell parts indeed, but two of them it claims are not (or that it can't recognise them as being such). One of these two I took directly out of the package, so it had never been used, which nullifies the first thing people said in the web results I found: "you have a worn-out battery, it needs to be replaced." Several other people who asked the question to get that response also were not using old batteries, so that battery identifier thing has jinxed other people on various models. (The second thing people said, "update your BIOS", didn't fix my issue and apparently has only resolved one person's issue on one specific laptop -- only because that error was an actual known bug on one model so Dell created a new BIOS version explicity to fix it.)

The third issue is, "okay, tell me more now!" Summing up, I came across something from a former Dell employee online which talked like the issue was so well known as to be boring (I know the feeling, regarding some software and devices I gave tech support on in the past), and he made reference to a "BIOS hack" he'd often administered that would turn off the battery identifier check. He said that the caviat was that while this would get rid of the battery-not-recognised error and even lead to longer battery life, it also meant less monitoring of the battery thus a higher chance of battery overheating. (And the computer industry has had several lawsuits over instances of batteries bursting into flames while in use. A flaming notebook on your desk or in your lap is not a happy thing.) This message was posted in 2005, so let's consider him long-gone. Okay, this sounds like the fix I need to get those two spare batteries in gear, presuming the one that is recognised but is not charging has gone to seed (which is a possibility, it's likely been in the computer since the notebook's original sale around 2001). Did he say what it was? No. Did he say where to find it? No. Can I find this in a Google search? No. Do I find anything useful about BIOS editing on Dells through Google? Only as pertains to changing the Dell logo at powerup to something else, or removing a security password that keeps nosy people out of the BIOS. I am annoyed. But like I said, I'm attributing my battery recognision failure to the broken charging circuit on the hardware and not to the batteries themselves or the BIOS (which isn't getting passed the data from the circuit) so I can put that annoyance aside for now.

I do have one other computer annoyance tangentally connected to the notebook but isn't related to the battery and charging system... Circuit City, the second largest retailer of electronics in America, has decided to close its doors, putting about 13,000 people across the country out of work. (And that's yet another stupidity of its own, with several bad consequences.) I went there to pick up some stuff on sale, though their discounts were not that good considering that their prices were higher than their competition and the key items I wanted were gone. One of the things I wanted was a 2 gigabyte USB thumbdrive, which they had at $25 and up. Uh, no. I went to Big!Lots which always has plenty of memory devices, and found a bin of Kingston DataTraveler 2gb thumbdrives marked $10. It rang up as $8, so excellent. Kingston is one of the major reputable memory makers so I had no second thoughts about buying one. I got home, tried it out on my main computer, and all is well. But then I plugged it into my notebook, and it went through this loop of saying it couldn't figure the device out then checking again with the same result. I did a little web searching and the Kingston DataTraveler 2gb came up with some frequency. Hmm, this could be why there was a bin at Big!Lots... not because it was passé (like my wife's 128mb JumpDrive, another purchase from them awhile ago; you don't see anything smaller than 512mb nowadays except at back-to-school sales) but because it was problematic. None of the sites in my search that mentioned this make and model identified a known issue or named fixes that worked for everyone; one did imply that not all computers have enough power going to their USB ports to make them work, and that's probably the case here. My notebook has only one USB port (two when it is docked), which rules out the first suggestion made, "if the ports on the front of the computer don't work, try the ports on the back." Since Kingston gives free support, I've submitted a ticket to them with the full details, and if the issue is as widespread as the help forums imply they best offer a solution rather than teching this in ways that I have already been covered or asking questions that have already been asked. Nothing annoys a computer geek more than having their relevant teching or provided data ignored by a scriptmonkey. Okay, there is one thing: when someone closes a ticket without any sort of attention, or the tech throws out a blunt statement like "is it plugged in?" as though the person were an idiot and closes the ticket. This does inspire impromptu colorectal surgery.

Update, 3pm: I got a reply back from the scriptmonkey -- gawd, I was hoping not to get a scriptmonkey -- who did a cut-and-paste reply saying this: Reboot, try a different port, and we don't support USB 1.1 devices. I'd made it clear in my original ticket that this machine only has one port (and repeated that the thumbdrive works fine on other computers and other thumbdrives work fine on this machine) and he should know by the model that it's a 2.0 device. I deleted the words "please try again" from the end of my reply before sending, but left the two para-sarcastic "as you read previously..." statements in. Since he didn't.

Hmm, this may be heavy on computer ranting but if you're reading this, you have undoubtedly encountered something on your machine that made you say, "but WHY is this problem happening?" The picture of the day was taken a mile or two from my house on a back road. I looked up at this little field I drove by that I keep wanting to wander with my camera and there was a coyote! I turned around, drove back slowly with camera at the ready, the critter got camera-shy and trotted off, and so I could only take one photo... and what does the camera's autofocus pick up on? The big canine? Nope. The two milimeter wide stem of a weed.

raindrops keep falling in my life...

2009-01-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, each and every! So far not a lot has happened here, and I haven't broken any resolutions because frankly I haven't started doing any of them yet. The big news is that it's rained so much that there's flooding in my area... hasn't touched me but a block away on the roads along Clover Creek, where the two photos were taken, it's pretty ugly. It's worse on the Puyallup River. There's more rain coming (it restarted half an hour ago) so we're not done with this mess. Life is okay, such as it is, and people have been bringing me computers to f1x0r. One was easy, the power supply got nuked in a surge and that's the only damage I've found -- luckily I had a spare on my bedroom floor. One is still thorny, Windows needs to be reinstalled (blame Microsoft for Windows Genuine Disadvantage) and the batch of disks I was sent from the other side of the state doesn't contain the Windows CD. The third... well, that's what I should be working on instead of blogging or wading through puddles taking pictures.

[Later: Wrap-up of that third one... It wouldn't boot into Windows because the antivirus program was corrupted, so I uninstalled that in Safe Mode and it came up. It could go online but the first thing it wanted to do was download the latest version of the "XP Antispyware 2009" spyware, which attaches itself to a key Windows component so it will run even after you've deleted the program itself. Removing that worm from services.exe leaves Windows unable to go online because it breaks the networking ability (Windows knows there's a modem or network card yet doesn't "see" them) and also disables other Windows components. So she's going to have to give me her Windows XP Home SP1 disk for an operating system reinstall, since the obvious fix of upgrading to SP2 won't work -- the piece in Windows that checks installer file integrity (Cryptographic Service) depends upon the broken component thus won't let the SP2 installer install anything after unpacking the files, and the piece in Windows that lets one move and copy files (Remote Procedure Call Service) is also broken so I can't just replace that damaged file either. That's the simple version, and as Shannoon From The Caboon back in college said, "computers are diabolical."]

Here's today's major stupidity; An agency called me today to ask if I'd like to do a weekend stint, removing computers from a bankrupted bank office in Seattle. Yes, just manual labor, I'd be taking these things apart to put them into boxes or pallets or something. Gruntwork, the machines won't even be powered up. And the woman asks me if I have an A+ certification because this would somehow be beneficial. (Yes, I've submitted that to TSC.) She also asked me to send her my résumé again since she claims the copy she has from the last time she pinged me is "messed up", and I did soon after she called. I know from previous contacts that she's not going to call me back [this sentence is being written a day or two later so it's not pessimistic speculation] but it's nice to feel wanted for half an hour.

The way things go with my family is that my mother will call me a couple weeks before Christmas to ask if we're going to be in the neighborhood to visit their house. Most of the time we stay on this side of the state, so I say no and my mother sends a box of gifts. Longtime readers know I loathe this to a degree because my mother is a horrible gifter... I get the same stuff I got when I was 12, and I'm 41. Well, this year there was no call. There was no package. I finally called my parents on Christmas Eve morning to say hello and indirectly inquire about why I haven't received any contact. I can't say I received an answer, but my mother did ask if we got the Christmas card, which arrived in the mailbox about an hour later. So in one batch of mail I got a picture card from my youngest brother, a Christmas letter from my younger brothers, and a card with Christmas letter and personal stuff written in a card. I speculate that having wives has provided my brothers with a means of communication -- letting someone else make it. (This does not explain why my sister doesn't write.) But my mother's personal note contained four separate instances of attempting to apply a guilt trip, only one of which took hold because it's true that I've had no connection to my siblings and their families. That's one thing I want to change in 2009, I've never had anything against my sibs or their spouses [truth: I once did with my sis but I've been over that state for more than a decade] and children. But the sillyness unto stupidness that I want to state here: My mother is giving me flak in the note about how I don't play along with her, yet the annual Christmas letter doesn't mention me at all. Not even a token "Paige and Brian are doing home improvements in Tacoma" sentence. Hmm. At least I didn't get a crate of stuff that I'd be passing along to charity, which is something odd but I could get used to.

So I leave you with a couple photos from the next block over. It's sunny at this moment -- uh, it was raining and grey when I started this! -- but we're scheduled for another massive dump of rain for the next few days. Send hip-waders! Actually, the newspaper and nightly news say it's gonna be horrible, but the online weather services and the sky itself say things will be okay. Which should I believe?

I give you... Christmas Tree 2008

2008-12-22T21:54:00.000-08:00

Set up on the evening of December 21. Green and purple themed tree, with an overkill amount of tin stars and glass icicles. The snow crystals are just part of being married to a flake. We're happy with it.
Click image to see at 1064x1416.

Is your item bigger than a breadbox?

2008-12-18T22:58:00.000-08:00

Okay. Perhaps you have been wondering why I've been so quiet. So have I. I couldn't rightly tell you... Blame the holidays, since I have been gone a lot, but it's deeper than that. Frankly it's depression. I've spent too much time at the computer, not enough time doing practical things... and it could be true that idle hands (or minds) are the devil's playthings. I still need to try to figure some stuff out but there's always something shiny!shiny! in the path to stumble over. Heh, as a friend and I joked about his stepfather, who would come home from longhaul trucking and have my friend's mom cut the dingleberries off his butt: "There was a pretty blue rock, so I pulled over to look at it. I stared at that rock for two hours. Pretty blue rock. Damndest blue rock you ever saw."

So the image of the moment is some lights I have obtained for this year's tree... very unique in that they're avocado green and burgandy purple, along with the orange which I'll swap out when they go up, and that it's only 3 colors rather than 4 or 5. We haven't put up our tree yet, but we will this weekend I suppose. Sure, a little slow on the draw this year but we keep having guests over so don't want to get anything started when we're going to need the space. Also, since I haven't blogged yet this month (whoops), we've filled the display case at the library with our wonders for the sixth time in seven years... this year the theme is "A Homespun Christmas" and contains items you can either make yourself or look homemade. :)

Stupid thing I've wanted to say for awhile: There's this handheld toy gadget called the 20Q – actually, several of them – which plays 20 Questions with you to guess items (or sports figures, or TV shows, or whatever other specialty ones you find). I have discovered that if your thought is really good, it will go out to 25 questions before giving up. Okay, here is how you totally screw with a 20Q, the one intended for general subjects: Think about genitalia, whichever kind you prefer. The questions become very funny in that light, like playing an adult version of Mad-Libs. And twenty-five questions later, it will fail to have guessed the item... someone seems to have left those parts out of the database. That's today's holiday gifting tip; pass it along!

Okay, so, well, I can now say I've written something. Happy holiday of preference to you handful of readers, and I wish you a bountiful 2009. With the way the economy is going, that's not just a "how are you?" ersatz statement, I really do wish you a bountiful 2009 because you could probably use one. Hasta.

What part of the cow does 'angus beef' come from?

2008-11-26T01:08:00.001-08:00

I always know when it's time for me to get to bloggin' when I get a surge in comments from folks who have already commented before. This often means it'll be several more days before I ever get a new comment on my new entry because everyone has given up for the week. But hey, I have four readers; the impact of my tardiness is minimal upon the world. It's when other Blogger sites like Not So Motivational don't update in a month, then post a note saying it'll be another five or six weeks before there'll be another entry, that things get ugly. But in happier news, I have just posted the December '08 update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul, half of which is on a birthday theme (courtesy of a bunch of pictures I scanned for a Flickr group a few months ago), and it ends with a brand new Christmas fable. Enjoy!

The stupid of the moment is par for the course but pretty damned annoying. I got a call last Friday morning from an employment agency, asking if I was interested in a helpdesk position with the local rail transit authority in Seattle. She described it pretty much like what I'd been doing at PleaseGoAway dot caaaaaahm -- answering questions and helping people with issues on their computers and cellular ~~dildos~~ devices. She emailed me same information and asked me to get back to her about scheduling an interview after I'd read it. I'm not sure why she didn't offer to schedule an interview right then, but whatever. I got up once my sinus headache loosened its grip, wrote her back, and waited awhile. Around 3pm I called the number in her email to respond directly, and the front desk told me she'd already gone home for the day. That person took a message and I was told she'd get back to me on Monday, which seems reasonable. Today is Wednesday, and not a word. I'm unclear of why it is employment agencies play that game of tag... what is there for them to gain by teasing folks like that? You have an offer or you do not have an offer, you want me or you do not want me. You say 'jump!', I say 'how high?', then you tell me!... that's how it's supposed to work.

I am trying to get myself motivated to start a new craft. I've been gathering spare or broken computer parts for awhile (among other things, my room is a mess!) and I have seen artistic uses of technology around. [I won't add links; just Google "computer part art" and there will be nice image galleries.] Someone at the Sumner Arts Festival a few years ago was selling wall-hangings and other cool stuff made from old computer mainboards and parts, and I have plenty enough pieces laying around to do something swell. Or at the very least, I've been meaning to make a whole lotta keychains out of memory sticks. As a Libra, I know art when I see it but don't find it easy to create it... That's one thing that's holding me back, I need some ideas and inspiration. I was always the kid who saw the curvey line on the paper and made a snake out of it, not a clown's forehead or the profile of a woman reclining in a chaise lounge.

The image of this paragraph is from a special swell thing that the local power company did: They sent each of its customers five compact fluorescent lights, and good ones too (two 60W-equivalent, two 75W-equivalent, one 90W-equivalent)... click on the image to read the attached letter. But you will notice in that letter that they make no mention of how you're supposed to discard or recycle them; they contain mercury so they are not to go in the household waste, and if every house on the block gets 5 bulbs that quantity of quicksilver does add up. The letter should have told where to go to recycle them, and I can only think of one waste site on the other side of town that takes them. The monthly newsletter came with the bill, and it did have an article about what to do with them -- which only said to call the local waste removal company (which happens to be across the street and up three blocks) or check the EPA's website for what to do. That's not a direct answer, and how many people read that usually-meh newsletter? I went into their office the other day to thank them, pay my bill, and then give them a piece of my mind about not closing the loop (they care about being good corporate citizens and helping people lower their energy bills by sending items out, they need to continue this by providing proper information about recycling those items) and the woman at the counter seemed nonplussed... "I think they take them at Lowe's and Home Depot," she said like it was common knowledge. (I have yet to verify that data.) I replied, "And THAT is what the letter in the box and the newsletter needed to say," as I exited.

gimme the Costco-sized box of holiday cheer

2008-11-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

Hello, party people. I've been sitting on posting an entry because I can't think of much which bears writing. Sure, that's never stopped me before, but still, there's nothing worthwhile to say and then there's nothing at all to say. Life hasn't moved one way or the other, which I suppose is the result of finishing the kitchen project a week ago. 'Tis the season to attend holiday bazaars, work on the Christmas clutter collection (we've already obtained 3 pretty ornaments and 6 glass icicles in the last week), and gird your loins against the upcoming Thanksgiving fêtes. Well, for me, two out of three; Paige and I are following our recent-years tradition of going to the Black Angus for Thanksgiving dinner and maybe preparing small quantities of stuff we like (mashed potatoes, stuffing, etc.) after so we can have a managable amount of leftovers without having to stage or attend a family feast to get them.

I'm spacing right now on what in the world is stupid. There's plenty but I'm disremembering. In bright news, the price of gas has hit $2, but I think I talked about curious it was that it would drop so far and so quickly in the last month or two in my previous entry. My sister-in-law has made a mega-stupid decision to hook back up with the guy who was trying his damndest to wreck her life (and succeeded), but that's on the private side and I try not to think about her. I still haven't tried to think about what I'd prefer to be doing with my life, but I did put in an application with the City of Tacoma for a techie thing they were advertising. (I'm presuming a hundred others have too because this place is lousy with techs and geeks who would prefer to avoid a commute north, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.) My high school locker partner Kenny went back to the old 'hood to jam with my best friend from elementary school Richard, the first time those two have played together in about 23 years when they recorded a song about my best friend from high school, "Randy! Randy!"... wish I could have been in attendance. And the replacement hard drive for my notebook computer arrived but the extra memory (necessary for installing a few things!) will be here probably tomorrow. I told you I didn't have much to say!

One of the silliest things I ever did in elementary school was passed a note to my best friend Richard. Oh, it's a little more complex than that. First, the note was passed through the crack in a wall -- the classrooms had a windowframe in the corner that was shared by the next room, so one could slip things between the rooms through the gap between the wall and the frame. Second, the content of the note was derived from a Kurt Schaffer Bloopers album: this innocent nun voice was announcing there would be "a peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy's Church", so of course I illustrated this spectacle. Now, in retrospect I have no idea whether Richard got the note and had it taken away, or whether the fifth grade teacher on the other side of the wall snagged it. (I should ask Rich.) I do know that not long after I was sitting in the principal's office, having a chat with him about my line drawing of two guys swinging each other around by their anatomically exagerated private parts. (A cock-fight of sorts.) I also know that while I usually had a healthy fear of authority growing up, in this case I was aware that I just had to sit through this guy's wigging out because, since he was a friend of my parents, I had it from firsthand info that he had shit for brains. (My wife had that guy as a teacher for some education class a few years later when she was in college, so she found out his head's stuffing the hard way. Gail, you're a tool.) All's well that ends well; at the end of the school year when he was giving out awards to people who had not received any referrals [had not been sent to the office for breaking rules], and this is where I have to interject that there wasn't a Perfect Attendance award (which I would have also received) because the principal's belief was "why would we reward people for coming to school sick?", I got one of those no-trouble awards. He hesitated for a moment as he gave it to me because he knew that I'd been in trouble -- but see, my teacher wasn't involved in this issue so a written referral was never created for it, and neither my friend's teacher nor the principal bothered to write me up because it wasn't their job. No paper trail, the issue was swallowed by the cracks, now suck this and ante up. I displayed that award on my wall proudly all the way through high school.

hope and change (and pass it on)

2008-11-06T00:19:00.000-08:00

Well, the election is over and America did its duty to try to improve the nation's lot. It's good to see that some voters, unfortunately not all of them, conceded that they made a mistake four years ago (hell, eight years ago, but they had proof positive by the last election) and did not wish to repeat it. I was talking to a friend in Texas (red: 46% voted for Obama) last night after the results were in, and we came to the following conclusion: Several of the states that went red have a long history of being in the nation's jokes for seeming backward. Think about it: Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky... and the private militia compounds of Idaho? Yee-haw! But anyhow, the best part of the conclusion of the presidential and other races is no more political ads!!! Or for another two or three years anyhow, so enjoy the silence while we have it.

There isn't much to say about me and my life, really. I have done a little work on the trim around the kitchen but not finished it, I'm still waiting for the last two boxes of floor tile, I haven't received any earth-shaking news that would improve my well-being, gasoline is $2.239 the last time I looked (hey, that's two dollars less than earlier this year, proving it was all bilking and not supply issues), and I made some beigli using Ariel The Thief's family recipe, which she gave me in 2004 but now I have a proper kitchen to prepare it in. That's it on the left. It was a challenge and my results were good and edible but not great and "looks like what we think it should". Will I do it again? Mmm, probably, now that I have a little better concept of what I could do differently for better results. :) Paige came home from work and saw it, tried a couple pieces, then took a few slices back to her work (at her coworkers' request!) so others could enjoy it.

Okay, I have but one stupidity on my mind. Saturday of last week, which would be three days before people went to the polls, the phone rings around dinnertime (as if we eat at that hour). The Caller ID box listed the name of a polling company, and we're okay with surveys, so Paige picked up. But it wasn't a polling company, it was some pro-life group's recorded message making a statement about Obama's position on partial-birth abortion and got pretty graphic about how the procedure is done. Now, never mind your [the readers'] point of view about the subject of abortion, that's not what I'm addressing here. What was irksomely stupid about this call was that the subject was addressed during the second presidential debate, in detail, and broadcast on at least five networks -- and what this recorded message said did not bear any semblance to what the candidate himself said when asked the question this call was attempting to answer. In other words, the call was an outright lie, and a very easily disproven and corrected one. No protracted research needed, it was right there on TV on all the channels and in the newspapers. This sort of call is effective only to people who feel strongly about a subject yet don't pay attention to available facts. I don't care what topic we're talking about, it drives me batty when people purposely spread misinformation that everyone should know the truth on... about as batty as how somehow not everyone tries to learn anything about what they're talking about. ('Cheesepuff' back in Yakima, that'd be you. You can't seriously believe all the crap you forward me in email is true.)

Parting thought: Yesterday I was walking into a supermarket as a woman I was very close with ten years ago and still occasionally spent time with over the next few years was walking out. First time we've talked in five years, and since it was sort of a surprise I didn't ask half of the things I'd want to know, like "how's your family?" She almost left without me giving an answer to her asking how I have been doing, she was in that sort of hurry. Here's the thing I want to get off my chest... A year or two before the end of our acquaintance she had an appendectomy which for some reason caused her to get a little paunchy (no extra weight gain, just a pooch below the belt), a detail she was not happy about, and was doing everything she could to try to get rid of it. And here she is standing before me -- probably seventy-five pounds heavier than she was five years ago. I was too much of a nice guy, still too much of a friend (long gone), to say anything to her but I'm saying it here: dear heart, daaaaaamn!

I've got eight drive platters and a microphone...

2008-10-29T17:38:00.000-07:00

ZOMG, a second blog entry in a week, posted before Jamie could see the first! Okay, really this is to show off two photos, the second of which I didn't take. At right is the new and improved WiFi booster antenna developed from the prototype seen a couple days ago. It's not elegant but it's shiiiny and functional. So what it is: I took a regular slim CD case, folded it open, covered the inside with aluminum foil, hot-glued a couple Twis-Ties to the corners so the WiFi card can act as a tripod to hold the antenna up, and did some cutting/filing so that the case would close flat. If you looked at the video linked in the previous post, these are variations from what the Turkish guy advised -- gluing the case into a 90° angle permanently which reduces its ease of portability, foiling what was the outside of the case, and constantly having to prop the antenna up somehow. I've only given it a test run from the end of my driveway, I haven't gone out looking for trouble, but it works and unlike the model shown online it can be folded up and put away in the computer's totebag.

For an actual stupidity, this one just became evident about half an hour ago: As you may know, on Sept 1 the skanky people across the street moved out of the hovel. The owners of the hovel are again trying to rent it out, initially without doing any work on the place first but I think they saw the light so there have been some workers in at random intervals to do various things. Okay, so I'm sitting here and a pickup hauling a hot-tub backs into that driveway, and four people get out. The magnetic sign on the truck says they're a hot-tub installer but also do verandas. They go in the front door, wander through the house, go out the back door and look at the back yard (the renters of 20 years had an above-ground pool back there which they took with them, so basically the back yard is a large round hole surrounded by tall grass and weeds), and then three of them leave with the hot tub and the fourth starts in on painting the master bedroom. My wife and I said to each other, "how can they be planning a hot-tub when they need a new bathtub?" [See that house's bathroom for what I mean.] Okay, to be honest, we don't know what the plan is, or if they were just friends coming to see the house rather than a professional call, but we have no doubt that with all the lipstick the owners have applied to that pig corpse of a house (the neighbor says they plan to replace the roof; that's long overdue since it's concave on one side) beautifying the back yard would come before fixing the inside.

The Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul site had its November update, y'all.

Okay, now for something especially for my bud The Illiterate: After we ~~were shoved out of~~ gracefully left vee-zed-dub for more competent cellular teledildonics technical support management, there was a large backfill that should have required the use of more office space but, true to form, dub-dee-ass couldn't get authorization from the vendor for more equipment. So here's what their office looks like now... and aren't you glad you're not still there?:

It's the Information Superhighway version of a string and two tin cans

2008-10-27T03:01:00.000-07:00

Hello, my two ~~disciples~~ followers out of four readers, and the rest of ye mythical folks as well. Yes, I survived my 41st birthday... wasn't really that hard, the day was busy yet not what anyone would call exciting in a "it's your birthday!" way. First, before I tell you about the day, dig my birthday present on the left! It's a Dell Latitude LS400 notebook computer, courtesy of my dear friend Wayne. More on that shortly. I'll itemize now how the day went:

I got up around noon, which isn't unusual for me, and it was Paige's day off. We eventually got ourselves moving, we had a couple events down the street to attend -- a Lutheran church having a rummage sale, and the Lutheran university having a surplus sale. I spent 10¢ total. We got home and sat down to watch the Saturday morning ~~cartoons~~ home improvement shows on HGTV on tape, then started working on painting and putting up the trim in the utility room. Eventually my friend Wayne from the other side of the state showed up, with a box containing three notebook computers in tow. His mother had gotten them as surplus from a family services agency that was getting rid of the junk in the closet. Also in the box were three sets of external CDROMs and 3½" drives, six batteries, five docking stations, several pairs of Harmon/Kardon powered speakers, and other "wow, you got this free?!" stuff. (Summary for the geeks: 700MHz, 6gb HD, 128mb RAM, 1 USB 1.1 and 1 PCMCIA, 56k and NIC, Win98, circa 2002. See YouTube for how fast it can run XP.) So we had them on my livingroom floor... One booted just fine, and I got to keep that machine. One took 15 minutes to get to the desktop. One never got to the desktop (unless booted into Safe Mode), it was even slower. Performed some stupid Windows tricks (doo dah, doo dah...) and got those two functional. So once that was done and Wayne left, Paige and I headed to The Outback for dinner, and we were nearly the only customers so it all worked out. We got home and there were cupcakes... I blew out the candle on my carrotcake cupcake. A little checking of email and off to bed.

So I got a computer, two docking stations (one in box), two spare batteries (one in original package), CD and floppy drives, power supply (and a spare in the docking box). I'm not going to change the CDROM to a burner until I have a larger hard drive, and the stray 30gb 2½" drive I had laying around died a clicking death after finishing the Windows install so no rush. But one upgrade I did see fit to make...

After doing a little research and a system overhaul on my notebook, I ordered a WiFi card on eBay for cheap, which I had by the end of the week. (And had not noticed that I had received a 10% off coupon in eBay's messages before making the purchase, d'oh!) Today I did a little experimentation. There is no WiFi signal in my house, so I took a trip to the library to see how well it worked outside the building. Hmm, one bar in the parking lot outside the periodicals, three to four bars in the parking lot by the front door and the children's area. I had noticed yesterday when I was at a crafts bazaar at the Masonic Temple there was someone online on his notebook so I thought, "hey, signal!" So I drove over to the funeral home parking lot which is next door to the Temple. (I sense a connection between the Masons and the morticians. Both are even named after the same person.) Check for signal... woot, four connections listed, one of which is unprotected and has one bar. The connection name coincides with an office in the next building, so I drove around the building checking for better signal. Left side, same. Right side, same. Front side, same -- but a new unprotected connection was listed, with three bars. I grinned as I thought, "Someone could sit in the supermarket's parking lot across the street and do some serious browsing unnoticed!" I came home and decided I'd try something I saw on teh intarweb, making a WiFi booster antenna out of aluminum foil and a CD case. I didn't follow the directions exactly because I disagree with the guy's gluing a case together backwards into a stiff angle -- I think it should be able to fold up flat, like a CD case, for portability. Here at right is a photo of the result in use from the edge of my driveway. It's ghetto but it works. You will notice it found that open connection again, maybe it is the supermarket two blocks up the street that is the source of it since it is in line-of-sight from where I was sitting, with one or two bars depending on how I aim the case. Yeah!!

Hmm, I don't have any real stupidities to report (you all know about the political races, that'll be stupid for another three weeks) and here's one thing I hope does not evolve into stupid: I've been using the same Unemployment claim since Internet Identity gave me the boot on Oct 20, 2007 (I've worked at two places since then, and just keep reopening the same claim when I need to) and since there's a year expiration that one's done and I need to open a new one, which will only take a few minutes to do and (sigh) possibly a week or two for them to approve. My wife discovered a different kind of stupid yesterday -- she had been taking these round purple pills, and when she got a refill she noticed the new ones were white and oblong. The paperwork with the bottle says they're supposed to be round and purple. A few calls and a followup from a pharmacist in a different city later, and it turns out those are the right pills, just a different maker of them with a different appearnace, but no one had updated the computer to reflect this change. Anyhow, it's 3am and I needs to go to bed. Hasta yer pasta.

In a world full of green dust and grey floor

2008-10-14T21:09:00.000-07:00

First things: Just noticed that there's a "Followers" thingie on Blogspot nowadays -- and I had one follower listed, smitty1e. The list of blogs this person follows is kind of random, mostly dealing with several programming languages. I hope you don't mind if I block you, Smitty, since you've never commented on any of my posts and I suspect you are a bringer of spam or other bad things.

Well, hello everyone! The Marmoleum flooring is nearly done, hurrah! I say "nearly" because as I suspected, the person at the flooring store went by total area, not perimeter rounded to the nearest whole foot (since these are 12" square tiles), thus I need another 21 tiles to finish this job. That's today's real stupidity, that I should have been done!! at 10pm last night but now have to wait until the end of the week for tile I ordered today to show up. The picture at left is from the pile of sawdust and effluvia generated by cutting flooring tiles to size. Don't worry, Marmoleum is all-natural so this isn't going to harm the environment. The picture at lower right [which you can click on to enlarge to screen size] is how the kitchen and diningroom look from the utility room. Like?

Appliances and furniture and such have been slowly returning to the kitchen and diningroom. Not entirely since there's still one more thing to do before we can really re-settle in, but as long as everything we have dragged back in is portable enough to get away from the walls for a little while (which is why the washer and drier are still on the back porch)...

Next I need to measure the baseboards, doors, and cupboard tops for new trim. The next hard labor won't be cutting the trim to size, painting it, or putting it up. No, the difficult step will be in Paige and I agreeing on what kind of trim to buy. It will have to be tallish, like 3", because of the crummy crap the previous crackheads™ had glued to the walls and we had to literally tear out. It will have to be widish, like ¾", because the instructions for Marmoleum say that the gap between the floor and the wall must be 10mm when most other flooring it's more like 5mm, and some of the gaps I cut are a bit more than half an inch. It'll all look really awesome when it's done. It had better.

So our kitchen project is nearing completion. :) Hmm, there isn't much else to report about life in general... it's still right where I left it. (Where was that?) I saw a gas station today that had standard grade unleaded for $3.019 so that's a good sign. And a block away from that station was a bearded guy with a cardboard sign at the island where the onramp meets the city road. The sign however said "Bad Day. Need Beer." I like honesty in a man. And the inevitable aging event happens in three days and some hours. I don't have any wishes that I can say out loud except for the one that involves being employed locally so I don't have to commute 40+ miles, though in what capacity I still haven't given enough thought. Tech support has been fun but it's time for a change.

[Edit: 10/16 2:30pm PST] Half an hour ago, Flickr forced its new homepage layout on its users -- and it really bones stuff. One "recent activity" link rather than separating comments you made from comments you received, clicking that link on the homepage messes up your preferred layout, etcetera etcetera. That's the new major stupidity. And gas went down to $2.879

Enjoy the white space. Oh, and Oliva of Buzz Marketing... No shit, that's why we chose Marmoleum, that and (you fail to mention) it's earth-friendly. Preachin' to the choir, so could you take the spam elsewhere?

My favorite weapon is the look in your eyes

2008-10-07T00:35:00.000-07:00

Hello, folks. I'm going to say very little about the home improvement thang today [audience: "yaaay!"] because there isn't a lot to report since last time. The flooring hasn't been started, the pantry door is being painted (translate: paint one side, wait a day, paint the other side, wait a day, we're busy so let's wait another day, time for a second coat... etc.), and I'd be putting up the cabinet doors right now but it seems those hinges that have been sitting around for months are chrome not nickel so I need to go get another package at yonder big-box store. Along with some coarse-grit sandpaper, since it seems that Ace may offer Black & Decker and 3M brand sandpapers for my Mouse™ but only in fine. But anyhow, the project is wrapping up, with only the floors and the painting of the utility room walls and the replacement of the utility room doors and of course cutting and sticking up new trim around the doors and kitchen cabinets left to go...

What else is dumb beside Ace Hardware not carrying 80-grit sandpaper? And my lethargy regarding both small home projects and replying to an email that's been in my box since mid-September? Well, daily-dose Cialis ads (and the notion of taking Cialis on a daily basis... do you know how much that stuff costs?) are making their way to the top of the heap. Banks and mortgage lenders falling into the toilet is exceptionally stupid since, gee whiz, they're the ones with the money. I can think of a couple three new friends from Flickr who the longer I know the more confusing they become (how exactly does someone tell for two weeks how they're going to take a vacation from looking for a new love due to some recent-past issues, then disappears for four days only to post a few pictures of them with someone never previously mentioned, with cryptic captions about weekends being too short?) but I don't consider the people stupid, just the situations they put themselves into and how they treat others in those situations' wakes. I could call Sarah Palin stupid but that wouldn't be accurate -- she merely says ignorant things when she gives speeches and is condescending when she discusses things with others. (Stupid would be to vote for her and McCain, of course, but there are people who believe in staying the Bush course another four years... apparently those people heard the same rumor about the Rapture that Bush did eight years ago so have no issue with running this country into the ground even further, thinking they won't be here to pay for the shortsightedness; those people are stupid.) The constant misuse of the word "maverick" is particularly stupid and annoying -- look it up, it means "not thinking and acting like everyone around you." And I think anyone who claims they miss talking to you but make no effort to get in touch with you in the many means they have available is definitely acting a certain way, you can guess what it is. (Hint: There isn't a firm parallel between saying you have been "too busy lately against my will" and that 'busy' being going out on dates every night with different people. Sounds like it does require your planning and consent!)

But I think the most stupid thing I can think of is: Turning 41 in eleven days. How the hell did this happen? Sure, I'm happy that I'm above-ground, no doubt about that, but I don't feel a day over 25 most of the time. While working on some projects, I'm so worn out I feel 75, but that passes. I don't look a day over 25, and in what I've accomplished in my life I may as well be 25. Can I call this my twenty-sixth birthday without sounding like one of those vapid people who claim to be, for example, "turning 29 (for the fifteenth time)"? I know... I tell people that I have a given name and a taken name, since I prefer Mushroom Mandrake to that thing my parents called me. How about a practical age and a chronological age? No lying involved, just here's what my license says and here's what I prefer you think.

I promised you'd see my new flooring

2008-09-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

And I'm a man of my word. But we haven't started putting it down yet. So here is what it looks like (darker is the body tile, "arabesque"; lighter is the accent tile, "virgin blue") with my faithful orange cat testing it out.
A real blog entry will come soon, there's nothing good in the home improvements or stupid around me (or that I care to share -- sometimes you gotta keep your gripes about people to yourself) to repeat. Just wanted to keep my pledge, since I spent a couple days sanding and stripping a small desk for the diningroom and the cupboards in the utility room but we have yet to start painting them. Painting those were the only things we had on the list for the weekend -- Friday: shopped for supplies; Saturday: did yardwork, which wasn't on my list at all -- and Paige said she wanted to do them both herself (and has touched neither).

you wanted even more pictures, Jamie, you got s'more pictures

2008-09-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

Hello, observers! Let's see if my mad formatting skills worked out on the two pictures below. Click for big. As you will see, many good things have happened including cleaning up our mess so the progress will show. And the real impetus (and today's stupidity) was other people... My wife's coworkers knew that we were working on our kitchen, and some even would check out the semi-regular status photos on Flickr. She plays Michigan Rummy with a group of them, and one of them said at their monthly meeting awhile back, "Hey, you'll be done with your kitchen by, hmm, September twentieth... We're going to have cards at your house to celebrate!" Well, needless to say, despite this date not being our idea we chose to abide by it (and if you see our spines anywhere...) so we worked our asses off to present a clean, organized, painted and functional kitchen by 5 p.m. Sept 20. Oh, here is where I interject that we had FIVE houseguests one night -- her sister, her sister's girlfriend, two of their kids, and on a separate itinary her mom -- which certainly served as a reason to get the tons of kitchen's boxed stuff out of the familyroom put away and a crew to clean that room. We still need to work on the paint around the ceiling edge, the flooring isn't down yet, we need trim around the baseboards and such, and we're just now attending to the utility room (one cabinet to strip and paint, washer and drier to move out so we can floor, etcetera), but we can cook in both the microwave and the convection ovens, the stove does tricks, the sweet green pendant lights light in green sweetly, and we have plenty of cupboard and counterspace. And the two switchplates we ordered for over the main counter, I was sent an update a couple days ago, will be here on the 24th.

I suppose there's nothing else new to report. Except that the skanky neighbors across the street have indeed vacated their hovel. And left five cats. The next door neighbor let me know that two of them died (likely of hunger) the other day and two are at this moment in a cage trap (with food and water) on the porch so the Humane Society can pick them up tomorrow; that last white one I haven't seen in a couple days but it had been hanging out in our backyard. That neighbor has only been saying they're going to move for the last three years. One strange note, I took a tour of the house earlier today and discovered it's a two bedroom, neither of which is all that big; the larger at the front of the house was the woman's room, and the smaller is eight feet by nine feet. The next door neighbor's comment was, "...and her son and daughters all stayed in that room." But equally as sick and twisted as that concept was the floor and wall tiles in the bathroom (click for more detail):

You're seeing right: there are three different vinyl floor tiles in use in a stupid arrangement, and you have to think that the mirror tiles and ceramic mosaic tiles on the wall were done that way originally (including the bad choice of not having the tiles under the spout gridded in the same rows as the rest); bonus note, the linoleum wall strip with the knee-hole was also used for sliding doors on the space under the sink. But enough of this blog entry. You may see my new flooring next episode!

you wanted more pictures, Jamie, here's another.

2008-09-17T00:38:00.000-07:00

Hey there. We'll start off with an amusing picture, this being a screen capture from the website of an auto dealership in Brazil. You can say that four-letter word out loud and proudly because it's the family name of the owners. In these parts, it'd be hard for someone with that name to get through twelve years of public school. (I wonder about one of my mother's classmates, Janice Boob. Everyone I've ever known agreed that one of our college classmates, Rodney Schmoe, was a schmoe and so much more... "Rodney Shmuck" is what people called him behind his back. And then there's the Seattle Mariners closing pitcher JJ Putz, who pronounces his name with an "oo" sound, like "pootz".) Anyhow. Maybe you wondered how the kitchen remodel is going. Yup, it's going. Below is a photo taken a few minutes ago as an update: the cabinet and cupboard doors are back up with new hardware, and the painting o' the green (color = "field of pines") has begun.

At the moment I'm sort of in an odd place in my head. It's all juxtaposition. I'd been talking frequently with someone on Flickr that lives in Houston whose last email said, "if I get quiet for a few days it's because of Hurricane Ike, which I figure will pass by us in the night." Well, apparently it didn't just pass by, and so I haven't seen hide nor hair of her since she was blithely going to bed. Then there's the local who keeps talking about wanting to meet me, have chai (neither of us drink coffee), and get her moved into a new place. Well, I was busy on moving day and she won't commit to a day and time (I've suggested a couple, she's said they sounded good but that's it) to get together, so at this rate I'm figuring that it's all talk. I got email from my bestie Chrome, who says he's hating himself and the world around him but school starting for him next week should snap him out of that, and once he's done... hmm, moving in with his half-brother in Branson, MO? I have not devised an opinion about how I feel about that yet. But I think the thing that has me a little imbalanced is when I met up with my favorite cowgirl, Karen, at the Fair for a little while ("I'd love to hang out with you and talk," she said when I first stepped up to her, "but I have to go to something at the top of the hill in a little while"... and I'm not planning to go back to the Fair this year) and without much information or prompt she said "I'm worried about you" and basically said a few things that I'd been thinking which I didn't believe anyone could know, and I wish we'd had the time to hash that discussion out fully. But hey, a couple people I'd lost touch with months or years ago have resurfaced so I have some blossoms to pick as the present flowers fade.

And now, a few words on the progress of the kitchen and of course something stupid found along the way. Click the picture to make it big. A few comments to make about this snapshot: a) The white thing at the right is where I patched the hole where the phone jack was... I wired this back out the side of the house, into the attic, and ten feet to the inside wall behind where I was standing to take this picture, so the phone will be on a little desk by the refrigerator. I sprayed on a little texture so the patching and damage to the wall from what had been there before won't be so obvious. b) Yes, that's the color we're doing the kitchen. We'd originally bought a lighter green, which turned out to be too light, so we are using it as primer to cover the nicotine-ish yellow [original kitchen color] and sunny yellow and flaky white [what the Crackheads™ painted it in the 1990's]. There's only one coat of this darker green up presently and it's not everywhere, so what you see here is by no means 'done'. c) The ceramic outlet covers with nickel framing are on order from MyKnobs.com -- I thought we could save some time by ordering online, since it was going to be two weeks before any Lowe's in the entire Puget Sound area are going to get another shipment (seriously, their computer says they're available in Bremerton and North Lacey), but it's going to take a couple weeks that way too. And now, for that stupidity... The trouble is not so much that when we took the doors off the cabinets we didn't mark them somehow to say where they'd come from. It's also not that in January my wife bought new hinges, but didn't look at the old hinges first to see what style the doors require (there's a 1/4" inner ledge on the doors, so the new hinges have to have this right-angle bend to compensate for that) so we had to find a way to exchange them nine months later. The stupid thing is that when putting the doors back on, they don't friggin' fit. Okay, that and the fact that several of them are a bit warped so don't close right, but seriously, I'm securing the hinges on the frames and the doors are overlapping yet snugged into their places on the hinge sides. So far as I can tell, the previous folks who put the doors up in 1959 must have pushed and pulled on the doors to bend the old hinges enough to where the doors would close. (The Crackheads™ left them up and painted over all the hardware.) I've done a little of that manipulation, a fact I'm not proud of, plus on a couple of them pulled out the tools and planed or sawed a fraction of an inch off the meeting sides. I'm standing there shouting "why the hell aren't they the right size? they were up, right here, and worked fine previously!" as I try to hang the doors on the cupboard which houses the spices and cereal. They always make mounting cabinet doors look so effortless on TV...

you wanted pictures, Jamie, you gots pictures.

2008-09-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's a picture on the right of the new countertop showing the breakfast bar, with the sink I just put in a couple days ago. The icon is purposely small so you have to click on it to see it in all its glory. The flooring project starts in the near future; the boxes of Marmoleum tile are under yonder diningroom table. First, we must paint the walls and put the cabinet doors back up. We also have some swell pendant lights (which would be cropped in that picture if they were up yet) to hang once those two tasks are complete.

There's a whole lotta stupidity to report about putting that sink in, but the minutae in words gets pretty cluttered so let's see how well I can sum it up. I thought it was going to be a half-hour project, because it should have been. Apply caulk, drop sink in, hook up plumbing, ta-daa! But no. I laid the caulk then put the sink in....The hole I'd cut and tiled around was a little small (by 1/4 of an inch), and I'd put the sink in while I was putting the counter together to try to avoid that but failed anyway. Quick, dash to the hardware store, get a $20 carbide wheel for the grinder, trim the front edge a mite. This is where the Three Stooges style slapstick comedy comes in -- the grinder wouldn't start because the switch inside wouldn't go far enough forward, I'd have to pull out two screws to turn it on with the power unplugged, then I'd plug it in and within seconds the protective shield would slide off so I'd have to power it off (the external switch worked for that!) and take the wheel off to fix the shield... This comedy happened twice. Finally I got all the components together long enough to make that trim, hurray. But now the whole kitchen is covered in grey dust, obviously including all that caulk, and the air is thick. So I have to peel that caulk off and lay more down after I clean the place up. (Yes, I have a professional dust & vapor mask. It's pink.) I get the sink in and it doesn't lay flat on half of the front side, but the back and two side sides are fine -- the tiles where everyone can see aren't level. Nothing I can do about that except stuff caulk in there, and by this time I'm stepping on the tube because it's 99.5% empty.

Finally I get to the point where I can do the plumbing. Let it be known that I like doing electrical but I hate doing plumbing. Electrical, the light either goes on or it doesn't; you either get shocked or you don't. Plumbing has more variables and weaknesses, and less of an immediate indication that there's a flaw. Summing up, I had to redo the drain elbow part five or six times, plus take the faucet back out because there was a leak in a place that there shouldn't be. And there was another run to the hardware store because the water taps on the wall are 1/2" diameter but (surprise!) the connectors on the water lines to the faucet -- which are built onto it, I can't replace them like the guy at the hardware store believed I could -- are 3/8" diameter. Genuine stupidity: they don't sell the adaptors themselves. I had to buy two kits which contained the adaptor plus a water line and another adaptor for a different size tap. Guys? Do something about that. But eventually I had a drip-free plumbing arrangement that worked with my pretty new sink. <3 And the next day, the instruction sheet for how to install the sink fell out of the box bottom, where it had been hiding under the flaps... tossing the box onto the back porch once the project was done dislodged it.

The rest of the current project, as you will see in all its glory if you click this little picture on the left, is doing well also. We got the oven along with the microwave, it's in the driveway waiting for us to do the flooring. The cabinet's countertop is swell, the little pan cabinet is in place and has been fitted with a butcherblock top, the overhead cabinets are up, and the hooded microwave is present and functional. Oh, I have some teeth-gritting stories about getting the microwave up (simple version: the manufacturer's paper template I followed when drilling holes didn't quite match where the holes really needed to be) and fitting the exhaust pipe (the words "powerlifter's prolapsed rectum" describe part of the fun) but you don't want to hear them. I still have all my fingers despite the exhaust pipe adventure, I purchased my first roll of duct tape ever and actually used it on ducts -- for the record, the instructions said to use it, this wasn't a default guy thing, though I will concede I used 3/4 of a roll on one project -- and happily that's all in a cabinet no one will look in lest anyone accuse us of being Crackheads™, and my wife believes the truly good news is that since the new microwave is on a different circuit than everything on the left side of the house (as our old microwave is) you can now run the toaster and the microwave at the same time without dimming the lights. Personally, I think that's a flaw of her toaster. Oh, and the custom-order 12" wide cabinet turned out to be too wide -- we made a mistake measuring (we should have measured from the SIDE of the existing cabinet to the wall, not the edge of the old countertop, since the new countertop is half an inch wider than the old one), and the cabinet place claims it can no longer get 9" cabinets suddenly. So that thing in the right corner came from Lowe's, and that $70 thing in the driveway is going to Habitat For Humanity's thriftstore. All the bare wood you see will get painted shortly.

Final stupidity, which has nothing to do with the house: My mother-in-law called to say her new coworker at the place she volunteers is my ex-fiancee. Well, hmm, that's a little uncomfortable... Small freakin' town, that's all I can say.

when the going gets tough, the tough go driving

2008-08-30T00:39:00.000-07:00

So you might be wondering about the status of the kitchen. Here is the most recent photo, a couple hours after finishing the grouting of the backsplash and a few days after finishing the countertop. We'll seal this soon so I can put the sink in. There's still plenty of work to go, such as putting in the new floor (the place called today to say... well geez, they didn't really say anything, but details about those guys later) and putting up some cabinets (they're in the shed) and installing the new hooded microwave and oven (those arrived today), as well as wiring and hanging lights over the peninsula and sink, plus we still haven't hung the cupboard & cabinet doors back up yet. So many things to do! But it will all look stunning when we're done. We're taking a much-needed day off (like half of the time in the last month or six hasn't been "a break from the kitchen"?) to go to Packwood, WA to roam around the communitywide yardsale, and then we'll start in on the other side of the room... I've already hung backerboard for the wraparound backsplash and installed a new outlet, but now I need to find some help putting up the cabinets. Anhow, that's our kitchen progress. So far it's looking pretty good, don't you think?

Another design element to mention, and a silliness (not stupidity per se) to make it happen: We decided upon some Asian-inspired tall stools for our new breakfast bar, and most places carry some style of them (we first saw them at a Target last year when they were on a 'world market' kick)... cheesy from Bed Bath & Beyond for $30, sturdy at Cost Plus for $100 [on sale for $80 right now], and well-crafted at good furniture stores for more. The problem we have been having is that with the cheesy cheap and the sturdy spendy, we find offerings in the middle where there's only one specimen available. There are two of us, you know. But we did pull a gambit today... We went to Ross Dress For Less in Puyallup and they had one black one, originally from Thomasville Furniture so it's of good quality, for $30. We bought it. There are two other Ross stores in the area, so we drove to another one -- and found its sibling. Lucked out!

Speaking of looking good, since I had some 'sage' grout mixed up for the backsplash and not all of it got used Paige decided to put it into use on that bathroom windowsill art she started in 2006 when we were renovating that room and never completed. NOW we can call the bathroom completely done.

Okay, now for the stupidity story about the flooring place. Months ago my bride decided that we would be putting Marmoleum down in our kitchen, and I got to choose the pattern we will put it down in. We went to the local flooring place which carries Marmoleum and asked some questions months ago, looked at samples, and so forth. So the other day we go in to order some. Hmm, never mind that our salesperson took fifteen minutes -- ten of which was spent twenty feet away at another desk just looking at us and saying "I'll be right with you" without actually doing anything -- to sit down with us. Marmoleum comes in two forms: vinyl squares that have to be professionally laid and do-it-yourself click squares; the click squares come in two sizes, one-by-one foot and three-by-one foot. You'd think the salesperson would know this, since afterall there are samples there in the showroom, the display describes and gives prices for all of the sizes and pieces, and it's been months since we first expressed interest to her that we want some of this flooring. Nope, she wasn't aware that there were 12"x12" squares, or that the two sizes use the same connecting system so they can be used together ("you have to get one size or the other"). And she didn't know how it was installed (whether it requires an underlayment, etc.). We gave her the dimensions and we calculated how many of the two colors of tile we need, and she said she'd give us a call at 11am the next day with a price and further information about what is needed. Time passes, I'm walking around the livingroom at 1pm and the phone rings. Paige has consciously decided not to get up even after I've shouted that the call she's been waiting for has finally come. The woman gave me a timeframe when things would be ready for pickup, and I gave her my credit card number to order this. I get back to the bedroom and Paige asks, "how much did it cost?" I dunno, she didn't say, and I didn't ask because I thought Paige already knew. The ensuing discussion ended with me saying that if she'd gotten up and taken the call like she was supposed to, the questions that needed to be answered would have been. Here's where I add that at no point after Paige got up did she call the woman back like I suggested she do. Anyhow, the woman said that the flooring was coming from Portland, and would be in Kent the next day. I said we were going to pick it up in Tacoma, so she said it'd be ready for us the day after. For some reasons she kept saying it'd be in on the 27th though I knew she meant the 28th. So on the magic day, we get the invoice -- the flooring cost less than we thought it would, no special materials needed, and a $35 charge to have it delivered to the Tacoma store. But we don't get a call from the woman. Late in the afternoon Paige called to ask about the flooring, and she said "It'll be here on the 27th." Paige replied, "Today is the 28th." Woman ponders how time flew. Okay, so where is the flooring? Woman gives some shuck and jive about it coming from Portland to Kent so it'll take awhile. Paige reminds her that she said it'd be in Kent on the 27th and Tacoma on the 28th. Woman says she'll call us tomorrow with more information, adding that we could drive up to Kent and get it right now. Paige replies that we were charged to have it delivered to Tacoma, we told her when we ordered it that we would pick it up in Tacoma, and please let us know when it arrives in Tacoma. Okay, so today is that tomorrow, Friday the 29th. She called us, yes, in the afternoon while we were out, but the message she left only said to give her a call so we could discuss the flooring. We were kinda expecting "come and get it" or something more informative. We're out of town on Saturday, they're closed on Sunday and (Labor Day) Monday, so it's going to be a little while before we can go get it. Or get answers as to where it is, though maybe we will be able to call there before we leave town tomorrow.

Up to my aligators in asses

2008-08-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

   Funny how I check my blog every day or two for new responses but it didn't occur to me that it's been a couple weeks since I added anything. But I was waiting for Jamie's return :-D and as a semi-valid excuse I have been working on my kitchen and watching the Olympics so have been busy doing things that are worth talking about or taking pictures of. (It's semi-valid because it doesn't account for the other 18-20 hours of the day, heh heh.) How y'all doin'?
   The kitchen project has gone into full swing. Our target is to have this done by Labor Day -- yes, Illiterate, I will be in Packwood on Saturday; see you & yours on the back porch? -- and I suppose the word "done" means the painting of the cabinets and the completion of the countertops, acquisition of the stove and microwave (and potentially their installation), the installation of the new sink, and possibly the cleaning and painting of the walls but that's pushin' it. Somehow this doesn't include the reinstallation of the cabinet doors, the installation of new lights, the floor still hasn't been decided on, and the baseboards around the room and cabinets can't be done until a new floor is in. At left [click for larger image] is the newly-widened peninsula breakfast-bar countertop as it existed while writing this: after adding the trim strips but before the grout has been laid.
   This project is fun and exciting because I've always lived in houses where the only thing that ever changed designwise was what was hanging on the walls. The kitchen of my parents' house looked essentially the same when we moved in in 1976 and when they moved out in 2002; the only thing that ever changed was putting carpet over vinyl tile squares, and that was probably more about my mother wanting warm feet than about the tile pattern being fairly blah (and as I recall it, yellowish-beige). Even less changed in the bathrooms, including the parts that genuinely needed replacement because they were broken. And the walls? The only rooms that ever got new paint were the kids' bedrooms, neutral blue for the two rooms occupied by boys and neutral pink for my sister. The bathrooms were white. The kitchen was mostly wood panel so I won't complain about the lack of paint (paint on wood panel is tacky!) but the wall over the drainboard and all the walls in the diningroom that weren't brownish wood... white. As were the livingroom and the hallways and the master bedroom. Those HGTV personalities that carry their own paint sample card batches would have gone ga-ga for such a blank canvas, while others would have commanded, "Let's get this room out of the 1970's!!" seconds before going ape with a crowbar and an 8 pound sledge. That's where my wife and I come from, and while we're not into radical like some people (we have a friend with a stippled maroon livingroom and hallway, which looks great in strong natural light but like a dark cave down the hall where the only light is an incandescent bulb in a sickly off-nicotine fixture) we want color. It's subtle but present in the livingroom and hall, mostly light grey with two medium grey walls and in low light the two appear the same color, and the bathroom is a tasteful light green, but our kitchen will be purple and green and grey, dammit. Let there be color! But in the interest of full disclosure, you get one guess what color we painted the master bedroom a couple years ago. Uh huh. They can't all be revolutionary, we have to sleep in that room.

There is new hope in my universe

2008-08-09T23:34:00.000-07:00

I think I may have found my electric car.

For about a year the electric vehicle sites have been talking about Mitsubishi's project, the i MiEV (I-series Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle), being tested-marketed in Japan in 2010. Well, last month one of sites reported it's coming out a year early, summer 2009. Same site showed that the car was premiered at the New York Auto Show [YouTube] months earlier. The statistics say that it can go 100 miles to the charge, can get up to 85 miles per hour, and has the ability to recharge its lithium-ion battery while driving (along with using standard household 110VAC to fully juice up). The street price in Japan will be about $23,000 when it comes out in pre-release and the eventual North American price is estimated to be $17,000. Of course, no hard guesses when it will make it to America since there are hoops to jump and petrocentric agendas to joust with. Heck, with bureaucratic delays Mitsubishi might be able to extend the battery life a little.

Bring it, baby.

picture-perfect stupidity and I'm not done being silent

2008-08-05T23:47:00.001-07:00

   A couple split days this week, a friend from college and her two foster kids are visiting town and staying at my house. I say "split" because they were here yesterday and they'll be back tomorrow, so tonight there will be silence. Once they're gone for good, my mother-in-law will be with us for three or four nights due to my oldest nephew getting married this weekend. I took a flock of pictures of the kids and, as a surprise, my bride and I wanted to surprise the family with prints of some of the best photos. (Which will be welcome since the matriarch left her camera here when she took them to the beach early this morning. D'oh!!) Things are not as simple as they seem sometimes... I tried to print my pictures on my printer, which I'd purchased months ago for the purpose of printing photos. Hmm, they're not looking right... Yellow is absent. I clean the cartridge with alcohol and add ink. Now we have yellow. In fact, we have too much yellow. Everyone is jaundiced. A few full-page prints later and it's tamed down. Halfway through the first picture of seven I started as a batch then walked away from, we're back to almost no yellow so they look washed out -- except in random bands, where it's suddenly yellow streaks. So my wife suggests I go have them printed by the machine in the photo/sound department of the grocery store. I've had good luck with that store's machine before and the people pay no attention to the content of your photos, which is important to me. Plus they're terrible at math so they charge you the 4"x6" price when you get 5"x7" prints, and don't mind much when you look over their shoulder at the machine's activation code they have to punch in, thus letting you start the process on your own later that day if you must return to reprint anything. Their machine spits the prints out the front of the machine right then, which is also important to me, and their pictures' color balance is very good.
   I drive up the street to the grocery store, and my expected concern is getting someone to come to photo/sound at 9:30 p.m. to punch in the code for the machine. No, actually, the concern I have once I get there is that there's no machine here. Well, crumbs. So I decide to do the next best thing and go to Walgreen's next door. Which stopped being my first choice a long time ago because half the time their machines were out of order, and half of the time when they do work their color scheme is totally off. But this is a different store than the one I won't go into (blame a clerk named Hagitha), and I want to get this done before the family returns tomorrow, so what the hell. I go to the machine, go through the gyrations to get the number of prints I want from each and crop each photo correctly (by default, the machine will cut your face in half; this is a vast improvement over the system at Target which doesn't let you tweak your photos, takes a week to process as though they were being sent somewhere, costs more than anywhere else, and will print your vertical pictures as though they were horizontal for some serious head-lopping cropping issues), and start the order. Being a tidy bureaucrasy, the slip you get says they'll be ready in half an hour, as though humans had any part in this process other than looking at the screen to see if your images are copyrighted (since they care and won't let you have your pics if they think you're a pirate); you really don't want to contemplate getting anything naughty printed there for that reason. So, sigh, okay, I'm going to wander around this 15,000 square foot store for the next thirty minutes and see if the subliminal messages in the Muzak™ make me shop more. Dum de dum, look! a laser level for $2.99!, la la la, I think I'll have some Brach Nut Goodies in rememberance of my grandmother, doot de doo, who picks the programming on this music loop anyhow? I'm in the car doodads aisle when this woman who looks like she gets her clothes out of the dumpster behind Fashion Bug comes down the candy aisle facing me and she's on her cell phone. I'm trying to stay occupied and she's blabbing away to her friend about a chick they know giving a guy they know herpes (but none of them knew that's what it was), and he gave this pregnant chick they know some oral action, and now that pregnant chick is concerned for her stuff [oh, now...] and her baby. Then she says the magic words, "Hey, I'm going to take you off speakerphone now..." Not that this made any difference since she went to the next aisle, yard doodads, and continues having this way-too-much-info conversation four feet away from me through the pegboard wall. The guy who keeps coming up to ask if she's seen the guy who is supposed to come pick him up sounds dumber than a bag of hammers, but one could speculate that since he's with her it's a good bet he is.
   I went up to the counter in photo/sound at 20 minutes after my order, figuring "I'm the only customer, surely this wait is just so they have plenty of time to examine my photos." The cute woman stocking the dairy case comes over to the register, comments that there's still ten minutes left to go, so I wander off again. I waited 15 more minutes, just to be on the safe side, and come back. This time after putting up a couple bottles of fruit juice she goes to the machine and... oh, it had never started printing in the first place. A detail she didn't bother checking earlier, she was going by the clock. But no problem, they can get this printed now (after changing the drum) in three minutes. Hmm, so if it only takes three minutes to print my pictures, what is the purpose of the thirty minute put-off? Oh yeah, getting me to buy some more candy and a 2 gigabyte SD card for my camera for half the usual price (my old one fell apart; honestly, it disintergrated a couple days ago). This counter guy who seems twitchier than myself rings up my purchases, gets the display unlocked to retrieve that SD card, takes my payment, and out the door I go. Bag of hammers is still standing outside the door, waiting. I've now been in the store for an hour or so, a fact that did not escape my ever-observant bride. And neither did the fact that I got one print of a photo she wanted a copy of, despite her not answering the question "do you want me to get two of this?" when I asked her twice (a fact that did somehow escape her).
   So here I am, in the relative quiet for one night, experiencing a sugar shock and fearing that I'll have bad dreams about strangers sharing the gift that keeps on giving, VD. The prints actually came out very good, better than my printer would be capable of even if it weren't alternating between hepatitis and dehydration, and almost worth the unnecessary 35 minutes of my 38 minute wait. And the whole experience gave me the missing impetus to blog for the first time in twenty-five days.

I'll be waiting for your change of heart

2008-07-12T01:38:00.000-07:00

Hello, folks. I was afraid someone would comment between when I uploaded the image and when I found the time to write the entry at work (days elapsed) but no such luck. :) I figured out what caused the thing I uploaded a couple entries ago -- and was affecting the image we have here likewise -- to be sideways. Apparently my phone's camera puts in EXIF information with orientation. It doesn't name the phone or do anything practical, but does mark whether an image is supposed to be horizontal or vertical, even if the presumption is wrong. I found the "discard EXIF orientation tag" toggle in IrfanView so all is well. Anyhow. Here we have a "Kurrant" made by American Elecrical. I won't rave on about it because it gets 40 miles to the charge and, since it's classed as a neighborhood vehicle, can go 35 miles per hour max, but the price is $1000 plus dealer fees so it's great for errands and downtown commutes. I'm still looking for my electrical distance-commuter car. Someone said that in Finland they are developing a Smart that's electrical -- I suppose this would be competition to Norway's Th!nk (which Ford had begun to market here in 1999 before getting stomped on [see Who Killed The Electric Car? for more info], but may come back under a different partnership). Okay, bring some of that love over here now...

I have been a member of Classmates.com for many years, but never paid for their Gold membership, which gives one the ability to read the bulletin boards and send email and see full profile details. (Not that most people write anything.) I'd been looking for my old friend Carrie Cockrell who sort of disappeared in 1997, and it turns out she's got a nice profile there. The site offered me the ability to write an email to her. And upon hitting Send, the site says "Okay, now buy a Gold membership so we'll actually deliver it." Sonovabitch... So I ante'd up for a three-month stint, enough to look at all the stuff I'd want to (then discover a couple hours pretty much covers all the bases, so the other 89 days is for waiting for my contact efforts' replies?). And this let me see who those three people who signed my Guestbook are, and discover that "signed your Guestbook" really means "visited your profile (as 64 people have) but didn't click 'Don't show that you've been here' after looking", not something actually special. I emailed everyone who had left their mark, then looked up a few people so I could leave my mark and email them (hey, I paid for it, I'll damned well do it!). Funny, nearly a week later, only one person has replied (and it's not Carrie) -- and this is someone that a mutual friend is always telling me the whereabouts and whatabouts of so it's not like neither of us had lost touch for real. Tangental thought: my wife's 30th high school reunion is coming up in a couple months, and she keeps throwing away the postcards and so forth because she's not going.

Stupidity of the day, as of several days ago, is that my boss-unit decided it was time to move everyone around, to put the old people who solve problems together, new people together, the morning shift together, the swing shift together, and the graveyard shift together. Thing is, now it's only the old people and the new people who sit in the section where all the call/ticket monitor display screens are. This means that the morning and swing shift people can stand up and look at the screen over the cube walls (if they are at the right angle), and the night shift people are too far away. Call hold times are increasing because now we don't know that there are calls holding. My boss had me moved to this corner with the office sociopath (this cube has never been used for that reason, because he's like a betta fish), and had me do this at the beginning of a shift when we were getting call after call rather than later in the day when there would be few to no calls. I emailed him asking if we could get one of those monitors (since two are like eight feet apart on the same wall) moved the the wall off to my side, where it would be clearly visible to 2/3 of the techs. "Nope, nope, probably can't do that," he said out of hand, casting an image of laziness about making a request. Days later one of those old guys said that the reason was probably based on how much of a pain it was for him to get the monitors we have put up in the first place: there was the request and the waiting, there was the monitors sitting in boxes for two months doing nothing, there was the eventual actual ceiling work to put those in, followed by a month before those monitors actually worked... Still, you never get anything if you don't ask.

you have to wonder if the state recycles

2008-07-02T21:46:00.001-07:00

Stupidity of yesterday: My wife called me from her work about ten minutes after she left the house, and told me there was a photo opportunity on our street because there were cop cars and fire trucks and so forth blocking her way out so she had to turn around and take the back way. I hiked a block with my camera and... Seems a couple people missed the fact that it's 25 miles per hour on this street. A black small pickup and a black van were on the right side of the street, both on their driver side doors. Judging by their roofs, both had rolled once. No idea how the people involved fared because they were evacuated a few minutes before I got there and the story somehow didn't make the papers. We were in bed at the time of this event and somehow didn't hear a thing, not the crash and not the sirens.

Stupidity of today: Yesterday I got a notice from the state Dept of Licensing, saying it was time to renew the tabs on my car. Fine, dandy. But they also said that when I get my new tabs they'll be attached to brand new license plates with a completely different number. Or for $20 more, I can keep the number I have. (That seems like paying to have your phone number unlisted. No time or labor is needed to keep things the same, but you pay for the priviledge.) When I got my new plates, I found out that the difference is they've added a new security feature, a hologram down the middle, so that's why they're replacing everyone's plates. Which my wife thought was pretty rediculous since she got her car ten months ago, thus her plate will be replaced yet isn't even a year old. So I suppose that $20 is to pay an inmate a dime (if that) to press a special non-sequential plate. If I'm going to pay for a license plate, it's going to be a vanity plate, and that's something I have wanted to do for many years. Used to be Washington vanity plates would benefit the Department of Wildlife (which I'm all for), but I think there are other agencies nowadays that one can kick in for -- and I'll take any one of them except the Law Enforcement Museum. No idea if I'll ever actually get a vanity plate, all I know is that now I have to memorize a brand new plate number and it's a good thing that I no longer work in a place with parking permits that are based upon license numbers.

TMI is my TM

2008-06-22T02:55:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. The photo in today's entry is of a DeLorean that passed me on the highway. It would have been better except my cell phone has this habit of going into voice command mode when I am trying to get to the camera, so lost 10 seconds. I need to find a way to disable that, I have no idea what I'm pushing to get voice command and I do have the left button below the screen set for camera so it's not like I have to fumble for it. Now, as for why it's sideways -- not a clue. It was straight on my computer screen when I uploaded it! Call this a bonus stupidity.

Today's stupidity comes from a certain tech support rant forum. Yesterday there was a person in the Internet Relay Chat channel who stepped in and first thing said, "I just got done sleeping with my ex-boyfriend's best friend." Why getting on the computer after sex was the first thing she thought of doing is beyond me, but I understand the concept of bragging about shagging an ex's bestie well enough. (Not that I've ever had the chance, or that I care to discuss in this particular entry.) So we're all talking about how weird the conversation between her friends could get, as well as how weird the stuff in her head was starting to get (she admitted she was starting to think things she shouldn't), and I said that the older I get the more I sound like a tired old man when talking about polyamourous relationships and that friends like that are why we no longer host our yearly barbecues in Portland. A private chat window comes up from one of the channel operators, asking if I was referring to him. Uh, what? He starts telling me all this stuff about his own personal life, which contains him and his girlfriend and his girlfriend's husband, which I have no use for. I tried to find some way to politely let him know that I not only didn't know about his private life, I don't care about his private life, and that he wasn't a subject of that conversation in any form. He just kept going on, talking about how this had all been discussed in the channel (apparently before I came in) and how people must have figured things out so the cat's out of the bag. How can I tell this guy to shut up and not put his ego in places where it isn't? A guy I went to college with, Victor De Long, had a theory: When you hear information that you have no need for, it gets stored in your brain, filling up space that could be taken up with information you do want. So the De Long Theory was applied here. (And for the record, I thought it was ironic that he was a big fan of Batman comics. Wouldn't that be useless data?)

Not much else to report about my life -- work is okay, home is okay (and the kitchen hasn't changed), everyone so far as I know is okay. Will say that I took down this heap of old fence the other day into lengths of wire mesh and chunks of wood, and after the garbage truck came half of the contents (all of the household trash in bags) were still in the can because some wire mesh got snagged and held stuff in... But that's a different kind of garbage retention. The latest update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul should be up by the time you read this.

stupidity history lesson: the electronics repair shop interview

2008-06-13T03:07:00.000-07:00

   Today's stupidity comes from like 1999, when I was driving a froggy green Plymouth Satellite names 'Sputnik'. I might have told the story, or some abbreviated form of it, on Say Something Cryptic at one time, but I want to flesh this out because it still sticks to me as rediculous. Bear with me if you've heard it somehow.
   Once upon a time there was a chain of repair places in the area called Martha Lake Electronics. They would take most anything in, mostly TVs but whatever required electricity and needed fixing, and they were based out of Lynnwood (where you find, duh, Martha Lake) but had a shop on 38th in Tacoma. They were hiring for counter people, so I turned in an application and was called up to Lynnwood for an interview. I got dressed up in my interview clothes and drove Sputnik there to meet the owner of the company.
   The first thing I noticed about this champion of industry was that he had a very tall bookcase in his office that was completely filled with management books. Some people are born leaders, others need a little guidance, and then there was this guy who had a hundred or so different manuals on how to lead people. Knowing that no two management books give the same advice, in fact some give contradictory advice, I suspected that this guy knew a lot about management but did not know how to actually do it cohesively. But hey, I've just met the guy so let's just see what kind of interview questions, likely culled from said manuals, he throws at me. He started with the standard ice-breakers about past experience and education, threw in the interview oldie of "where do you see yourself in five years?", and after this period of getting to know all about me as a person and student he then picked up my résumé to go over my work history.
   One of my previous jobs, which lasted all of two weeks but I put on the list anyway because it was one of the only things I'd done parallel to what I was applying for (that and my seven months at Radio Shack, their competition), was with a computer store in Olympia. The owner brought up this job and asked, "what was the manager's name again?" Since it had been awhile, I had forgotten the man's name so I said something that was pretty close -- "Rhinegeld" became "Ringgold" -- and the owner said said slyly "Oh, yeah, I know him," before asking me more about my duties. Okay. You lose the Jedi mind game, sir. I figured that this was a trick from a management book, that if the interviewee thinks the interviewer knows a past employer personally the interviewee isn't going to tell any lies. Which is true, if the interviewer doesn't blow all credibility by proving he doesn't know the person by not catching the name error.
   So his next manoeuver is to ask me to do this personality inventory, the kind that requires filling in ovals with a #2 pencil on a scan sheet while reading a thin quiz booklet. This is the kind of test where you know what the answers they expect are ["If you found a $5 bill under the till and the money in your till was balanced, would you: a) keep the money, b) report it to your supervisor, c) put it in the till, d) leave it under the till"], but you're a horrible person if you either answer every question "correctly" or if you answer them completely honestly, because either of those reactions proves you're a shifty untrustable dishonest person. He told me that the results would come in later because he would have to fax this answer sheet to Chicago. Okay. You're now full of shit. I've administered enough of these tests during my stint as a tutor to know how an overlay answer key works -- put this stiff paper with holes across it on top of the answer sheet, line up the dots, and mark on any spaces that aren't filled with pencil lead, then tally up the marks. That, and there's no way a faxed copy of anything is going to be gradeable with a scanner.
   The final nugget was when he leans back in his chair and says something about me applying for a management position. Hmm, no, the sign said counterperson and I was by no means (at that moment) qualified to supervise a store. He wants me to agree to apply for a management job. The catch, though, is that if I don't make the cut to be a manager, I am removed from consideration for the job that I was qualified for and had applied for. Interesting double-or-nothing situation there. I figured this was another management trick, looking for the people with leadership ability and aspirations, which seems counterproductive to me because why would you want a whole building full of people who think they should be in charge? As the old and totally un-PC notion goes, "all chiefs, no braves." Someone's gotta quietly do the work, you know.
   So I left the interview after being told it would be a couple hours before the personality test was graded by someone in the Windy City, so I went to an abandoned house on the Martha Lake waterfront, sat around on the dock for a long while until some construction guys showed up (and since I was dressed in business uncasual, I strode out without a word like I was a Realtor or county building inspector and no one said a thing about me trespassing), then went back to the office to be given the expected bad news that I failed my personality test and thus could not work in any capacity for Martha Lake Electronics.
   They went out of business within a year.   [contents of the auction of their assets in 2001]

a cocoon in the butterfly effect

2008-06-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, I have come up with a stupidity. You know how I've been whinging about this eBay seller not anteing up with the product? I filed a PayPal claim on them to get my $45 back a few days ago, and then later bought the same variety of CPU in a reputable seller's auction. What shows up today? Three packages. One is the memory that I'd ordered on 5/11 but apparently the seller didn't get the PayPal email about, so when I emailed them twenty days later they were like "oh, uh, you did pay afterall, sorry... sending now." And two... are Barton-core Athlon XP+ 2800 CPUs. Seems the original seller finally stuck it in the mail on JUNE 3 (you will recall that I won it on May 3 and was told it'd been mailed on May 16, lies! all lies!). Grrr. But I'm going to put the first one back up for sale on eBay and recoup the price. I had enough time between when the mailman came and when I had to leave for work that I was able to get the memory into my wife's computer and test browse about, and take my Behemoth apart (my thumbs are not as adept at pushing spring clamps off heat sinks anymore) and pop in the reputable seller's CPU and fire up the computer long enough to leave positive feedback for both items. Assuming the first CPU actually works (since I'm not taking stuff apart to test it) and the second works through the night, all is back to well here. (For bonus related stupidity, the original seller put the CPU in a paper towel and padded it with a supermarket coupon booklet -- yeah, that's pretty anti-static. This is no surprise, since others had said in feedback before that guy got deleted that he'd sent motherboards wrapped in aluminum foil, thus shorting out the BIOS battery.)

I have one less sister-in-law in my home, and the best of luck to her in Arizona where she's taken a temporary nursing job for the next couple weeks. Nothing new has happened with the kitchen improvement juggarnaut, and it could be a little trouble to get that fire engine jump-started since now my workdays are swingshift on Thursday through Monday; my wife's are Sunday through Thursday, thus we do not have any days off together. Not that we were all that motivated to act when we both had Saturdays off, of course, but any excuse will work. :-D Life otherwise is pretty much there, and if the volume of blooms on the bushes in my front yard are any indication this year looks like it may be quite rosy. Yeah, that was bad, but I'm serious that my plantlife looks better presently than it did last year. I am loving my Sansa Clip MP3 player, which arrived two days after I ordered it. Notice that "Sansa Clip" means it has a clip, and "Sansabelt" means the pants do not require a belt. Ugh, sorry. Too many Lillian Vernon et aliis catalogs as a youth... I was the only kid in the seventh grade who got the joke when the English teacher said, "The only kind of 'constant comments' I like is my tea." (My grandmother knew that woman well, and hated her.)

Not much of a blog entry but it will do for the moment. I haven't really been keeping up very well (I'll blame work) but you do get entries. And the latest update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul was posted several days ago so I'm not yet behind on the important stuff.

these are not the dykes you are looking for

2008-05-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

Hey there. I haven't really pondered today's entry so here are a few general basic generic things... First, I'm sitting here at the computer because my wife is at a Mariners game with some coworkers. In her place is her older sister, who has been couch-surfing here lately. Apparently it was either us or her mother, and Mom is already shouldering another sister and dyke-in-law and their daughter who suddenly decided, "hey, let's move out of our house and... uh, eventually move into a new house." Not enough room in that inn for comfort. I'm happy that David Cook won American Idol and have no predictions or faves as yet for Last Comic Standing. Work is okay when people aren't waving their superior positions around. That would be today's stupidity. Today being Memorial Day I was making double-time-and-a-half, so the Sandisk Sansa Clip 4gb MP3 player I bought during my lunch break was already paid for. I may have mentioned earlier that I bought a new CPU for this computer on eBay on May 3, and following the seller's feedback it should have arrived around May 16... well, no, I got email from him saying that since he was out of town and his wife didn't mail anything in his absence, it went out the 16th. So I'm still waiting, and I noticed yesterday that the six most recent feedbacks from his sales (posted in the last few days), for sales which happened in late April to May 3, are negative so I'm not the only one who was affected. They all got their stuff, but as for whether it was timely or if his return policy was still honored that is another matter. [5/28: eBay alerted me that the user was deleted today and has "cancelled" the auction -- an interesting thought since he says it was sent 5/16 and I paid on 5/3 -- and I'm still waiting, so if it doesn't materialize in a couple days I'll follow eBay's procedures. And here I was going to leave him positive feedback, now I can't.] That's not the only thing that I'd be doing in spare moments or over weekends if I just had the thing which someone is sending me, so the past two weekends have been spent doing nothing I intended to do. That's where my sis-in-law comes in, she likes yardwork since right now she doesn't have a yard. And there's your token entry for the day. Good to see you moblogging, Illiterate. (Are there distinctions between a Crackberry user and a PocketPC user beside hardware and that vacant look in a Crackberry user's eyes verses the ire of a PocketPC user whose toy just crashed or autowiped?)

it's a good kind of busy

2008-05-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

Hello, handful of readers! I've been so busy lately that I haven't taken the time to tell you about it. First, a wee bit of ketchup from the previous entry. Yes, we have the C&B cabinet now, but we haven't put it together because we have nowhere to put it until the kitchen project is done, beside moving it out of where it belongs to who-knows-where every time we do anything to the room. So it's still flat-boxed in the familyroom with the rest of the project elements. Also, I mentioned the phenomenon regarding my wife and jugs of milk... here, see?, she's doing it again. I just took this picture a few minutes ago. As I was closing the fridge she walked in and asked what I was doing, so I told her, "proving that you start a new container of milk before the previous one is done." She just said in a kiddie voice, "That's just my way. I get the good milk, you get the bad milk. Ha ha ha!"

Work is an adventure. I say that because I don't know what's around any given corner. My training hasn't been linear, and I usually hear what I'm doing wrong after it's happened rather than during. One amusing note, my trainer messaged me on Friday to say that our supervisor noticed that when I'm not told what to do I tend not to be on task. "That's because I'm the trainee and I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing! He didn't bother to give me direction on [the days the trainer was out sick] and I didn't learn anything from any of my coworkers." So I'm still keeping my mind open because I don't know enough about the work or the office dynamics to make a statement about like or dislike, comfort or discomfort. I do know my innards have been in less-than-happy states, I did something weird to my back a week ago (and my sis-in-law with a nursing degree was couch-surfing here that weekend, so let me know that it was just a pulled muscle and not a kidney problem), and I've already figured out one coworker to whom even saying "hello" to is a risky proposition. Okay, two coworkers, but that's different; the one I fear considers average interaction a form of harassment, and the other just has a bitter distain for the world but is the office hermit so conversation never happens (so it's my life I fear for with that person, not a talking-to by higher-ups). I noticed, in retrospect of the previous two weeks, that whenever anyone gives me a talking-to about something, it's very seldom about how I answered a customer question or handled an issue. Which I take to mean I am doing the publicly visible things right.

This is also serving to be a different experience in how I handle work-related matters. I'm being much more meticulous and confirming that I'm on the right track, or confirming what the right track is, before saying or doing anything for a customer. I think what happened was, at my previous gig whenever I'd get pulled aside by my supervisor and he'd ask why I took whatever course of action I took, his response to my answer would inevitably begin with the words "you're assuming again." I have coworkers who may know the answer, they should be consulted if I am not sure. Thing is at the previous job, I wasn't aware that I wasn't sure and I didn't just pull something out of my ass ("I don't know that I don't know" as I told him)... at this one, it's more clear due to what we do that I either know what the correct answer or procedure is, or I do not, and this time I'm not taking any chances. Which is a little frustrating at times because I have the tools, I see the information I'm being asked for, and I could very well do what someone is asking me about... but it's oftentimes not my job to do them or share anything. And that gets really annoying when the people who are supposed to be handling the issues are not, which is why the customers are contacting me in the first place. It's an adjustment but one I'm embracing because unlike previous jobs, there are actual laws and bigger rules this company didn't create on how things are handled, not some company policy that if it's sidestepped the only thing that gets harmed is some muckity-muck's ego.

I'm sure I have a few stupid notes to make but they're slipping my mind, and usually when I have been missing my blogging appointments I say here's-life stuff then tell what's dumb around me in the next entry. I will conclude on this note which I consider fairly happy: In the recent past in popular culture, the concept of a life-list was proposed -- a list of things you want to do while you're here on earth. I haven't sat down to write down these things and chances are if I did some of them would be unreasonable (partially because they involve either time travel or other people's opinions of me being vastly different, or both). Last Spring I notched one, and then earlier this year I notched another, both of which I'd been vocal online about wanting to resolve because they involved old girlfriends. But I did this afternoon get to check one of the things that's been on my mind for years off. I hesitate to say what it is because it's not something the general public would consider a wise investment of time and effort, but everyone has their priorities, and no parties or property involved were harmed in the fulfillment of this dream. Heck, I like to believe my day wasn't the only one that was made. So with that one checked off, I need to figure out a new attainable-with-effort goal. In the meantime, the front yard needs to be mowed...

"Would you like to eat or screw?" It all depends upon how hungry I am.

2008-04-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

Hello, my two to four readers. I've been reading Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! by Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert", of late. The title of today's entry is an example he gives of how to sum up the universe in one sentence. Apparently there was this empty drawer at one of his jobs years ago, and a debate was initiated as to how to use the drawer -- keep the shop's tools in it, or a place to store snacks (ergo the "eat or screw?"), and when one particular person was asked for his opinion of the drawer's purpose, the title was his thoughtful response. As verbose and explanatory as I am much of the time, which I credit to my parents because "why did you do that?" was always meant as a rhetorical question and they weren't after any actual information no matter how much the context of why something was done was necessary to state (don't you hate it when people interrupt you while you're answering their question with demands that you answer their question?), I like succinctness when I can find it in me. My history professor in college said many a time he'd like to award me the "Golden Shovel Award" because I'd fill out the answers to his quizzes on the back of the quiz paper, rather than going on for two separate pages like my classmates. (This is where I have to note that I never bought lined paper while I was in college, thereby necessitating that I write on the test papers.) In retrospect, it's amusing that the name of his award was the opposite of what it was recognising, that my quiz answers were not stacking the bull like everyone else's. Back to the book, it's mostly compiled from his blog (which I don't read) so it's very observation and witty, with only a handful of cartoons; the strips are ones that either didn't get run at all, inspired some debate by viewers about intended meaning, or were edited for newspaper publication so he shows us the Before and After versions. I'm not used to reading so much at a go so I've been tackling it in 50 page chunks several days apart.

I try to be green (as in earth-friendly, not like Kermit The Frog since as he said "it's not easy" but neither is being earth-friendly in our disposable society), which suddenly became a big word a week ago even if most people or businesses flaunting it were totally misusing it. One of the Sunday insert papers, possibly Parade, had an article with six or seven items: things that sound green (like using paper bags instead of plastic when shopping), and things that actually are green (like bringing your own canvas bag). So the place I'm about to start working at -- first training day is Wednesday, but I have an orientation tomorrow (Tuesday) which, like I said in the previous entry, "who is paying for the gas?" -- claims that they try to be green. Which would be why they handed me a plastic cup of water that went into the garbage when I was done with it, rather than a paper cup that may use renewable tree products but actually will biodegrade and/or go into the paper recycling bin. Anyhow, here's a stupidity that came up a day or three after the previous post. I was emailed these forms in MS Word and Adobe PDF format to fill out, the standard stuff when one starts at a modern business, and told to fax them back. That sounds like an all-electronic method, sparing some trees, right? Uh, for most it really means you print the form onto paper, fill it out, then fax the pages over, so now there's a messy-looking paper copy on that end too. I attempted to save some paper on this end and took screenshots of the forms' pages, pasted my scanned signature and the date onto those images, then used a fax program to send those over. [This is why my dialup modem is still attached to my computer, for whomever asked.] So I sent the stuff over, and didn't put breaks between the pages so 9 pages arrived there as 6. I got an email asking to resend. I inserted the page breaks, sent again, and now 9 pages arrived as 10 pages. But then I got an email saying that they couldn't be read, so she asked me to email the image of one form she needed immediately (this I had, it's what I put into the fax document!) and print out the other documents to bring to work on Wednesday. So the end result: Earth-friendly company goes through 17 pieces of their paper before deciding that they really wanted one email and 7 pieces of my paper. The fun never ends.
And on that note... click the cartoon to enjoy this Retail strip from last Wednesday larger:

In other stupidities, perhaps I've mentioned this cabinet available at Crate & Barrel that I've been wanting for a month or two. Every time I'm there, I want to get it but get the spousal statement that we need to wait because of my employment situation, despite the facts that a) we have the money, b) we're going to buy it anyway, c) it's on sale now, and d) merchandise selection gets changed regularly there so if we dawdle it's not going to be available any longer. This is the same spouse that will open up a new container of milk when there's still one glass or bowl's worth of milk left in the old container... she won't finish it but she won't throw it out, or until a week later once it actually does go bad. Anyhow, so I had the weekend to myself and I thought, "I'll surprise her by going and buying that cabinet on Sunday." I checked the website, it's still listed and still on sale, and the shipping data screen says it's in stock at the Bellevue store I always visit (there are only two stores within 500 miles). So the next day I clean out the car, put $10 of gas in for the trip, and drive up there to buy it. Cute Michaela with the cute accent checks the system. Their computer says there's one in stock. Their stock manager, however, can't find the damn thing. Michaela checks the computer to see if the Seattle store has one I can go get, and they don't have any of them there at all. She offers to do a backorder, so I'll be able to come get it in 7-10 days. Since I now work about three miles away and my car is cleaned out, sure, what the hell. I hoped she'd call today to say "oh, we found it!" so I can have it now but that didn't happen. Like I said, we should have bought it before but no...

I've already forgotten what that funny bumpersticker said, sorry...

2008-04-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a remarkably busy week for me. I've always been told that you have to go out and look for work, businesses aren't going to try to find you. But that's the opposite of what I've been seeing. Quite literally agencies have been crawling all over each other to get to me, and I've not put out even one application in order to get anyone to look at my Monster.com profile (there wasn't anything to jump for last time I looked). So let's itemize the items on my plate:

• Mentioned last week that I interviewed with Agency #1. Haven't heard another word from them.
• Agency #-3 (the one that helped me 3 jobs ago but never responds when I try to inform them I'm looking) emailed to ask me if I was interested in something, but it was a place I've worked for before so I asked if they had anything else. Through a series of emails, she says she does have something then the next day she doesn't have it anymore, and asks me why the place she's representing churns through techs so quickly.
• Agency #2, which isn't an agency but the HR department of a major domain name registrar, calls me to ask for a phone interview. The next day, we talked and I was invited in to meet face-to-face.
• My friend Illiterate's employer (let's call them Agent #0) calls an hour after #2's phone interview, asking for a phone interview the next day. Let's see, 3 weeks elapsed between my applying and them replying? So at 10am I did a phone interview with #0 and then went to meet #2. They liked me, so invited me to come back the next day -- hey, who's paying for the gasoline here?! -- to do a second interview with a couple managers.
• I get home from that trip and there's a message on the answering machine from Agent #3, asking for a call. But wait, there's more...
• Minutes later I get online and check my mail, and not only is there an email from #3 with some nebulous job details, there's an email from Agent #4 who wants to talk to me. I've responded to neither.
• I had my second interview with the domain people, and half of this process was like no other job interview I've ever been to before. Like mental acuity tests similar to the ones they gave in school ("what's next in the series? 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, __") and some interview questions that challenged my listed experiences (I'm guessing it's a way to see how much grace I have under fire). I wasn't sure what to make of my performance, but I kept it together. They said someone would get back to me before long, not sure when that would be because neither are the hiring folks.
• I get home from that trip and there's a message on the answering machine from Agent #2, asking for a call. But wait, there's more...
• Phone-tag time, and about twenty minutes later she returns my call. With an offer. Which I accepted before she even spelled it out. I start next Wednesday.

So hey, Illiterate, they snoozed and they losed. Thanks for trying! :) Oh, still talking to you -- remember Matt from that place we used to work at, the semi-sullen senior tech from my end of town? He works there. Will let you know what other faces I see, and am told there are several. Am also told the headhunter there goes searching Monster's résumés for keywords like "Earthlink" for candidates, so there are said to be other people I know there. Bonzer!

Above is Jimmie "JJ" Walker, remember him as a lanky guy in a denim bowl hat in the 1970's show Good Times? He was at the Paradise Bowl doing a standup set last night, and he was astounding. He's not the same "Kid Dynomite!" he once was, he's Grownup Dynomite. Fits him well. I don't necessarily have any stupid things to report on this time, unless you consider all these employers cold-calling me when the agencies I have worked through -- and I've been in touch with three of them -- say there's nothing out there for me, even when they contacted me first to ask if I was interested in some job they had minutes earlier.

in a world full of stupid, a shrub is president

2008-04-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the delay, I've intended to sit down and write this for days and have had the time, but... So last time I pledged to share some stupid stuff. Where to start? Well, so far I've not got any job leads, and I've received unofficial confirmation that the place that hasn't called me in the last three weeks isn't going to. No surprises there but it's nice to at least hear that while I'm just as qualified and experienced as half the people already working there, the HR people don't think I'm qualified or experienced enough. (Ask them to do the job...) I spent a few hours in Seattle yesterday at an agency to get myself some possibilities, and won't twiddle my thumbs waiting for them to get on the ball since the dude asked me the same questions in person as he had on the phone the day before and as were on the online application. Was rather comical when he asked for my résumé since he'd gotten my name and details to get in touch with me in the first place off saidsame résumé... and how I didn't get an email from him asking for it because he passed that duty off to a receptionist who, surprise, didn't do it. I didn't catch the name of who had called me in for an appointment (call me at 10am while I'm sacked out and dreaming about being a mercinary, complete with a Bon Jovi soundtrack, and these things happen) and there are twenty-some male agents there, but I think the receptionist figured out who I had my appointment with when I mentioned not getting the memo, causing her to think "okay, who didn't I send an email for again?"

Break for a moment: The above reminds me of a funny story from probably fifteen years ago. Lance from the old 'hood called me, first time in many years, asking for my address because he lost his addressbook. I asked where he got my phone number, and he said it was on a postcard on his desk (of a French soldier at a pissoir on the street in Paris, circa World War I), to which I added, "...which also contains my address." He looked. Yes, indeed, there it was. Lance is like that. Like the time I sent him an email talking about how Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode was putting out his first solo album, and ran down a bunch of details about it, and his reply days later was, "Hey, did you know Dave Gahan's putting out a solo album?"

At this moment I'm listening to the hot-pink MP3 player that I bought from Woot.com two weeks ago and arrived yesterday. $5 for a gigabyte and it's got very good sound quality. The stupidities are numerous (and half are geeky so I'll spare you) but the top two are: #1 - Know how you skip a song on a CD or other music player because you don't want to hear it? You can do that here, but as soon as the song you chose is done, it goes back to the one you skipped and moves forward from there. And even if you didn't skip anything, it jumps back and replays stuff! Funny how you can't put a play-list file of your own on the device, but when it generates one on its own it sticks to it no matter what. #2 - Whomever designed the controls for this should be institutionalized. This has to be one of the only electronic toys I own where reading the pidgin-English manual is actually a necessity due to where they've hidden basic functions and what to push to get to them. Pepto-pink, you ask? That's the color they had, and the reason why they're $5 (okay, along with the fact that the maker got out of the consumer electronics business after being acquired by a car audio/video products maker and deleted all references to the players and support info from their website).

I had an odd confluence last weekend: My bestie Chrome was spending the weekend (and we did get some good conversation in this time) and on Saturday my dear friend Wayne showed up with a couple rather pricy Dave Gahan import records (singles from his second solo album). Odd having two friends who've never met materialize in my home at the same time since, you know, I only have like two friends. I haven't done anything to improve my home in a couple weeks, beside getting a plant shelf from IKEA and some slide-out racks from The Container Store for the kitchen cupboards -- which I can't install until those cabinets get de-shelf-papered and painted, a task my wife has put dibs on but not a start or completion date. Oh, speaking of the import singles, here's a bonus stupidity: One of the records came with a CD of the same eight songs as the record had plus three bonus songs. I played the CD for the first time on my way to Seattle yesterday and it was okay, especially the tenth (exclusive) song. I played the CD on my way back and it died during the tenth song... eject, huge circular gouge made by my car's player for unknown reasons!! No amount of repair tools I have is making this playable, so I've mailed the CD back to Wayne, who works at a used music store so has access to a professional disk buffer.

to Livros e Revistas: Please stop spamming people's blogs. My Portugese is good enough to know the book you're trying to promote is total bullshit.

a fortnight can come and can go

2008-04-08T12:32:00.000-07:00

Hey there. Sorry about the delay in blogging, but plenty of stuff has happened in the last week and while I've probably had the time to sit down and write I've had other things to attend to. Let's ignore that last full week of March because there's not much to say about it, so starting with one week ago...

• Monday (3/31) I got a call at 8:05 a.m. from my agency, saying not to go to work. My contract was terminated a couple weeks early. My agent seemed disappointed that I wasn't all busted up about it, but a) we all knew the end was coming and when, b) I was already aware that I wasn't going to be sticking around there since the new agency for PleaseGoAway didn't invite me to come join them, c) she'd already told me a week or two earlier that she doesn't have anything new for us yet. No flowers please, I'm rather enjoying being able to get 8 hours of sleep a night and have finally been able to move forward with home projects [ugh, did I just use the phrase "move forward with"?!] that have been avoided over weekends.

• Tuesday (4/1) I updated my résumé and submitted it to a friend (hi Greg!) to pass along to his present job's people, as he'd wanted me to do for a couple months. Of course I haven't heard anything back from those people a week later, but my my résumé has now been updated so I can do good things with it... eh, next week, I'm busting out some home projects this week. Starting with cleaning and priming the empty ceiling space where the soffet had been (see image in previous entry), and applying wallboard joint compound over the wonky fissure between sections of wall (apparently that soffet was put up before the drywalling was complete?). I decided not to clean and prime the wall part of this juncture just yet, only spackle over that fissure, because the window casement was put in so bad that we're going to have Paige's brother, a general contractor, have a look to see what can be done to make that whole space prettier first.

• Wednesday (4/2) I attended to applying texture to the ceiling section then hours later giving it a coat of bright white paint so this span would match the rest of my new ceiling. It's not an absolutely perfect match but it's also not dead obvious from a distance that there was something different here. Not much thought has been given to what new light fixture should go here yet.
• Thursday (4/3) I bought a reciprocating saw, a Black & Decker 'Firestorm' 8.5 amp for $50 at Lowe's. This allowed me to finally trim down the tops of those fenceposts I erected last year and put on the pretty caps (see image at the right of the first couple paragraphs). And while I was at it, I tried to level out the boards on the fence I replaced long ago due to a tree going through the fence, and my aim wasn't quite true *sheepish grin* but that's how life goes. That may be the neighbor's fence, technically, but I paid for those boards and I can screw 'em up if I want.

• Friday (4/4) was my wife's day off so we went up to Bellevue to scope out Crate & Barrel and IKEA. We still haven't bought the buffet or cabinet we were looking at in a catalog, but after much roaming we're now pretty certain that if we're gonna get that piece of furniture we're going to get it from Crate & Barrel because no one else seems to have one that fits the space we intend to put it in, looks as good, or is as well priced. Of course, we'd like to have a word with whomever is in the design department about how the white ones have brushed nickel hardware and the black ones have copper -- when what we want is black with brushed nickel. I suppose this is why they make paint?

• Saturday (4/5) and Sunday (4/6) were spent on a surprise project. When the house was built in 1959, back when that section of the house was a garage, there was a door between the utility room and the kitchen. Previous folks took out the door and slopped paint over the frame, but it still looks like an old doorframe, complete with bolt hole filled with bathroom caulk. (Crackheads!!) So I bought some drywall and taped corners, and spent all of Saturday cutting those to size and putting them in place. By the end of Saturday I had mudded the corners into place. Sunday saw me apply two layers of wallboard joint compound, sand things smooth, and put a coat of primer over the spackle so it'll be ready (after a light dash of orangepeel texture) when we get around to painting the kitchen. Here's the Before & After:
I don't really remember yesterday, Monday, other than applying for unemployment (which took all of one minute, updating the state's website with that last job, because I was re-opening my claim from last October) but what I should have been doing, and will hopefully do today, is run a Swiffer through the house! Seems the sanding I did when I got the drywall strips up in the doorframe so the edges would be flush with the wood, then the sanding I did once all the spackle over the drywall was ready, produced a rediculous quantity of white dust that has drifted down onto every surface within a twenty foot radius (I say "radius" because this includes the far corner of the livingroom, on the other side of the kitchen wall, somehow). Gypsum doesn't taste so bad, if you wondered.

That's the update on me. Next time I'll have stupid things to report.

in a world of silence, in a world of sound

2008-03-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

I still don't have much interesting to say, as far as I know, but should post so my three readers don't think I've fallen off the earth again. Today is Sunday and Chrome is asleep in my familyroom, having gone to bed early then gotten up at 2am to engage me in political discourse until about 5am. I should still be asleep but I'm not. The image at right marks about half of what's happened improvementwise to the kitchen -- Paige got a wild hare up her bummie and decided demolish the soffet. What's not entirely clear in the photo is that there's bare drywall at the sides, only the middle where one might see looking up the light hole has been painted. And it's original paint (or lack thereof) so the soffet is original to the house, where I had suspected it was an afterthought. There will be a bunch of work to make this span match the ceiling and wall, and the light needs to be replaced and rewired, but it should be worth it. The other half was taking all the magnets and random scraps off the fridge, putting them into the box of fridge juju that has been under a table next to the cat's bowl for as long as we've lived here, and finally sorting through to put the photos and neicephew art into one place, the magnets we use or want to keep into safekeeping, lose some outdated garbage, and give the rest to charity. It was such a small project but one that's been put off for nearly a decade...

I got yer stupidity right here: It was revealed that all three major political candidates had their passport records viewed by unauthorized parties within the passport system. Condoleeza Rice held a press conference where she said "none of us wants to have a circumstance in which any American's passport file is looked at in an unauthorized way." Okay, here are the bits of meat I have picked off these bones of contention:
a) Ironic she'd say it was wrong to snoop in people's records when she's been a major part of this administration's domestic spying effort. Do as I say, not as I do; it's only bad if it's someone other than us doing it.
b) The three candidates not only have nothing to hide, but being such public people there's nothing to 'discover'. If your agenda is publicly posted and the media is at the airports of departure and arrival, the nightly news will tell you more than looking up where one's passport has been used. It's that shifty-looking guy you've never heard of over there who they need to have a better look at.
c) Strange that the three candidates would be told that they'd been snooped on, since no one else in the United States ever hears that their privacy has been intruded upon, or at the government level anyhow since your credit card company or Internet provider may eventually let you know that someone may have swiped your data.

So here's what's happening with my temp job (some could file this under stupidity -- I'd call it that if I found this out at the last moment)... At this moment 70% of the calls to my department are being routed to the Canadian outsource center, and for periods of a couple hours the rest of the calls get shipped up there too. We still get all the mail because there's no way to just share a part of it. Now, come the end of March, 100% of calls and all email will be going to the Canadian center, and we're going to be kept around for two weeks to take care of the existing queue of mail (the other center's using a different database system so can't see what we already ahve) and be an emergency backup in case there's trouble with the transition. The existing mail will take about one week to properly shuffle, so between April 7 and 15 we're all going to be spending our eight or ten hour shifts goofing off. (Not that we don't do that already but there won't be duties to fulfill as distraction.) I'll work on my résumé soon, ya rly! srsly! The way the system is supposed to work is PleaseGoAway tells OutsourceAgency what's up, and OutsourceAgency is supposed to tell OurAgency the deal, so OurAgency can make good on their pledge to find us new jobs. Just in case one party decided to just drop this info into another party's lap in three weeks, I told OurAgency what the schedule is so they have 3 weeks to find us new gigs, and coworkers thought OurAgent's response of "thanks for letting us know, we can't make any guarantees but..." reply was a wee bit canned but there are not going to be any surprises.

Happy Easter, and here's hoping some computer stores are open today so Chrome and I can go shopping!

the times grew silent... corpora lente augescent cito extinguuntur

2008-03-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hello, party people. It wasn't intentional that I failed to blog last week, I apparently didn't have anything to say and didn't attempt to fake it. :-D I can't say I'm much better this week either but you should at least have some notice. Life stuff: Yes, I'm still working, though I notice my account's expiration date advanced by a month from a week from now until the end of April so apparently we're not quite done here yet. The guy pictured in the January 2, 2008 entry left the company (practically on a stretcher) yesterday morning because he's moving to Austin, TX so I'm a little sad. It's wild to be a sensei to a grasshopper who reminds me a lot of myself at that age. Home project-wise, I'm finishing up the ceiling, an issue of my own cause. See, I might have mentioned a week after the texturing, and discovering the texture paint ("so you don't have to repaint!" -- bzzzt, wrong!) was a little more dingy yellow than bright white, I painted 4/5 of the kitchen/diningroom ceiling and ran out of paint. I bought another can, which didn't quite match (slightly grey, which I kinda like), and finished the job then touched up the weak parts of the rest of the ceiling. But, uh, then there were these grey sections on the white ceiling. So I went very thinly over the rest of the ceiling to make it match, and now it looks fine... but was in a hurry and didn't have good lighting when I got to the end (my wife and sis-in-law wanted to go out to dinner, and I was starvin') so it wasn't until the next morning that I saw where it was thin, so now I need to touch those up. At least it will match, presuming I stir the paint correctly (the likely cause of the grey last time). As for the rest of the room... No change, no cupboard doors have been touched in three weeks. However, I did get confirmation yesterday that the construction zipper that one can put on a cut in a plastic sheet which I ordered from Lee Valley Hardware is shipping, so we'll be able to seal off the kitchen/diningroom from the rest of the house and start stripping the cabinets without (hopefully) making the whole house unbearable with fumes.

Stupidity of the moment, related to the rising price of gasoline: There was a guy from the Attorney General's office on the radio, talking to one of the chatterboxes about what is causing petroleum prices to be so high (and forgot "greed"), and what we can do about the price of fuel. He listed four or five things, and yet he completely left out "use less? drive something that uses less or doesn't use any gas at all?" We know which side he's on, since 54¢ on every gallon of gasoline sold is state taxes. I have absolutely no objection to paying taxes. It's that other $2.90 (up from half that a year ago) that I want some relief from and explanation of. According to the radio, the state is converting some of its ferries to biodiesel derived from vegetable oil and the City of Seattle is requesting taxi services move from 15mpg Crown Victorias to more efficient vehicles... where's a similar concept being suggested to the taxpayers?

Wayne visited last Saturday and my sis-in-law Patrice visited on Sunday (welcome to the world's newest camgirl!), there's a comedy show tomorrow and Chrome's coming over this weekend. Otherwise nobody wants to be around me unless they have to be.

What did I get on the SAT? Barbecue sauce!

2008-02-28T01:23:00.001-08:00

First, a few words on today's image. Paige and I went to see Dante do a stand-up set at the local bowling alley yesterday, and he was amazingly funny. He's also quite personable and friendly as all getout. He is however currently going out with his opening act, a physically attractive young lady whose wish upon a star is to be Sarah Silverman. However, the position of Sarah Silverman has already been filled by the real Sarah, so her act fell on its face. That detail didn't escape her. Anyhow, so after the show he was out in the lobby to sign autographs, pose for pictures, and sell his DVDs, and she was right with him. Paige and I came up to say hello, he offered an autographed headshot (yaaay!), and then he suggested a photo together. Dante tells his girlfriend to step aside so I can snuggle up with him. I handed my cell phone to Paige to take the picture, and shooting photos with a cell cam is a dicey enough proposition, which is why this is so blurry. She's standing in the middle of the lobby framing him and I up, when she jumps into the frame on my right shoulder -- which I was not aware of at the time because I'm wrapping myself around a famous comedian. Paige sees the intrusion, thinks she should ask her to get out of the picture but figures it would be rude to tell her to push off (but I would have done so had I noticed!), takes another step back to get the three of us in the frame, and shoots. We got home, I'm sorting through the pictures and find the two major faults with the photo, and unable to do anything about the sharpness of the image I improved the part I had power over by Photoshopping her out of it to restore what was supposed to be pictured.

So here's the status of the kitchen: The ceiling is done! What I wrote last week about the ceiling isn't how things played out. Yes, I think a very light green would have been great, but bright white is better. We decided that we wanted to apply a texture to the entire kitchen/diningroom ceiling to bring continuity -- what was up there was a fine orange peel on one side and an even finer orange peel on the other, with a diagonal division between the "rooms" which was probably created with masking tape in 1959. Paige had painted white up there, as I mentioned, but the texture paint ("if we use texture paint rather than a texture spray covered with paint, we can have it done in one try") proved to be dull white, closer to vaguely yellow, so we DID have to paint over it anyway with bright white. Rolling on the texture paint was somewhat of a challenge because the texture roller put on too much and the regular wooly rollers put on nothing at all, so I wound up using a 6" edge roller on the entire ceiling. And by the time I ran out of white paint, there was still a 30' section left to go. But I made sure to take care of the two fixture areas and the fissure between "rooms" so those two trouble areas would be painted in a consistant color. Okay, once those were dry around 11pm, I decided to put the kitchen lights up at long last... it's only been since October we haven't had overhead lights in the kitchen. (And found some screws in the shed that would work; I still have no idea where the baggie with the real screws went.) So now we have light in the kitchen! But it's very direct task-lighting; the places where we work are illuminated but the kitchen as a whole is dark. Ugh. Time to move along to the countertop, backsplash, three walls, and floors...

Anything else I was contemplating saying here is slipping my mind so more words can wait until next week, which isn't that far away. Will toss out here that for a department that's going to be going away soon, we're sure bringing in new people at a fast clip. FIVE this week! In the morning it seems evenly matched, longtime employees and newbies, but after 2pm the ratio slides amusingly. And it's likely one of those vacancies which we're filling was caused by the termination of the least competent member of the crew, who everyone jokes about. Unfortunately the person who has taken his place (there was a one day overlap) is someone I worked with at a previous job (and our supervisor of the time hated with the fury of a thousand suns), so I know he's a completely different breed of annoying. The old guy may have been stupid but he smelled good and didn't provide Too Much Information about personal subjects to strangers, two attributes the new guy did not exhibit two years ago and doesn't now. My friend who was giving him some training today told me at lunch that I was right, he does truly reek of fungus or something ass-like and tells you unprompted about his health problems, to the point that my friend here (and I quote) wanted to pull his own testicles out. Such is life. Cheers...

Make no mistake, you're wrong

2008-02-18T22:33:00.000-08:00

   I was handed some good news today: Remember last May, when I had my car checked out and they said I had $1500 and three days of repair work ahead of me? [refresher] The money for that has been saved up for a few months, and I think I mentioned the last time I called them they claimed to not have a record of what was said at that time. I also recall claiming the person who told me that was a complete frigging idiot once I was off the phone. Anyhow, my bride went to the dealership and found a competent person, who set up an appointment for Wednesday (day after tomorrow) for me to bring the car in, hooked us up with a presumably free rental (read: "service loaner" from Enterprise) so I can get to work, and it'll be done in one day. The quoted price for the work is the same, and they did find the earlier results afterall. I should bring up the brakes when we take it in.
   The kitchen work has sorta kinda almost started again. Yesterday I painted the patches and texturing I'd done last year, and discovered that the ceiling paint we'd been using in the livingroom is much brighter than the paint on the kitchen ceiling. Given the choice between painting the entire ceiling bright white (and there isn't enough paint in the can to do the whole thing) and finding a very very light green that would work with whatever shade of light green she intends to paint the walls, I think we'll go with the green. So that part of the project isn't done. I was going to mount the two lights in the middle of the kitchen because we haven't had overhead light in there in months, but it seems that when I took the four screws from the fixture boxes off the fridge (thinking they'd get thrown out or assimilated into something) and put them into a baggie for Safe Keeping then put the bag in a Safe Place... I'll be damned if I know where the hell I put that bag of screws. Well, we gotta paint anyway so not a huge loss, but I sense that after I buy new screws at the hardware store and get everything up and working, those missing four will rematerialize... probably two weeks later. The cabinet door cleaning has resumed, now that it's warm outside, and we have yet to ponder when the cabinets themselves will get five layers of latex paint and two layers of stain removed. (Paige has the week off so maybe we'll get there by next Monday?) And I have to vent this rant somewhere. *deep breath* Why does my wife put stuff in the middle of where work is being done, and it's usually stuff unrelated to either what we're doing or where we're doing it, then complains about how big a mess the place is and how there's always something in the way?! Which must be the collerary to her usual procedure, asking why things which are currently in use have not been put away, right in the middle of the project. I swear, there are times when I could be vacuuming up plaster dust in the kitchen and she'd prefer to move the canister vacuum to the livingroom entryway (and leave it there for two weeks).
   Here's a stupidity for you... The ballot which is supposed to be submitted tomorrow contains both the presidential primary and local school measures. Washington has this totally rediculous system where you have to declare a party (Rep or Dem) via a checkmark on the outside of your ballot (which itself was something Washington voters voted on a few years ago). Without a checkmark in a box, they discard your ballot. Serious. The votes for school measures aren't counted despite being completely unrelated to the thing they want people to claim a party on. As it is now, thousands of absentee ballots across the state have been tossed aside according to the evening news, which isn't fair to the schools, but it is nice to see that the idiots who voted for this system are being shown how stupid it is at last.
   And in the "scratched LP" department: Someone kindly explain how I bought enough gasoline for my commute at $2.95 a gallon at 9:00am from the place down the street, then when I was coming back home and did a fill-up at 8:00pm it was $3.05 at that same place?

Change your mind until it's just the way you want it

2008-02-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

A "just-so-you-know" thought: Hansen's Natural Green Tea Soda, Lemon Mint flavor... tastes like aftershave. Dead serious, the flavor is like what my sainted grandfather used to smell like in the morning, Williams Lectric Shave. My stomach isn't sure what to do with it but my face feels refreshed. Will have to try the Ginger and the Pomegranate sometime. I found this at the Canned Food Warehouse, along with some 99¢ Scharffen-Berger chocolate bars (which is totally amazing, that stuff is usually $5/bar at the upscale markets). I guess there was one good thing about Hershey's obtaining that chocolatier...

Observation to make about the current political race, or at least in viewing the local media: The cover of the newspaper the other day had pictures of Clinton, Obama, and McCain, and under were brief statements of what they wanted to accomplish. The two Democrats' synopses were about things that matter to all people, like health care. McCain's synopsis merely said he was seeking "party unity", which doesn't have much to do with the real world. Maybe Huckabee was absent from this article because he didn't stump here, or possibly there is a little creedence to his recent conspiracy theories about the Washington caucuses. Ron Paul also wasn't mentioned, which in this liberal hippie college student state is odd because he got 21% of the constituents at the caucus (where the national average is like 5%). I liked the 'Jump Start' cartoon this morning where a little girl says "there's more than just Clinton and Obama running" but then confesses she'd have to ask her dad who else there is.

What I consider very much stupid: There are people with the right to vote who are against Hilary Clinton simply because they believe that her husband Bill is trying to find some back-door way to get back into power. Somehow I think the people spreading that layer of chunky dogbutter are the same ones that, twelve to sixteen years ago, claimed that voting for Bill Clinton was a back-door way to get Hilary into power. Warning!: If Hilary Clinton makes it into the highest office in the land, be prepared to hear the detractors use the condensation "Bilary"... yet again. [And I'm still undecided.]

Least compelling ad line, courtesy of McCann Automotive: "And all of our Hummers take regular gasoline." That's nothing to brag about.

Blog subject line of the day comes from what I thought I heard come across the PA system at Target yesterday afternoon. If only it were true that I could. Not quite the same as my favorite, "Did you leave the store without buying any Extra Strength Pain Reliever?", but still pretty mindbending.

you're on my mind like a song on the radio (Al Stewart)

2008-02-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

I had a great surprise yesterday... The bowling alley down the street has a comedy night every two weeks, and the last one was a week ago, which I didn't attend because I've seen that headliner before and wasn't keen on him. So when I was passing by yesterday I thought "let's see who's coming up next week", and to my surprise the show was that night and the act was Michael Winslow, whom I've wanted to see since the 1980's. I dashed home, grabbed my wife, and fifteen minutes later the show started. I wish we would have known earlier because tickets at the door cost $5 each more than buying ahead of time, but that's probably our own fault. Next show with four comics is in 2 weeks and soon after, Dante will be coming to that club!

I know I had a thing or two more to report but I'm spacin'. Politics are amusing me. Yesterday a guy I worked with at both Earthlink and Verizon became the new trainee in my department at PleaseGoAway, so that's three places... geez! Yes, Illiterate, I still intend to pass you my résumé but haven't updated it yet. The fine folks at Cornfield Electronics have not only updated the TV-B-Gone keychain remote with more large-format televisions, this month they've started selling a new powerful unit that can turn a set off from across a football field (if their promo material is true; they said "100 meters" when it seems they might have meant "100 feet"). Dumb ad premise: There's a radio ad for a car battery store, featuring a guy trying to start his car and getting nutty because it won't go. The voiceover is about the pain of a dead battery. But the sound effect used is a starter engine cranking healthily, over and over. Bud, your issue is not a dead battery... try the fuel system or spark plugs now? And maybe if I remember what the interesting things were I'll write again...

your memory rests on my mind like toilet paper hanging from trees after a rainy weekend

2008-01-28T17:17:00.001-08:00

There is no significance to today's title, I just wanted to come up with a unique mental image as a way to make up for lacking worthwhile content. :) No, really, sometimes I plot all week what I want to write and sometimes I think "it's the usual day of the week to write, but now what to say?" And this is one of those "now what?" moments. I'm playing hookie from work today, or more accurately I'm taking a snow day because it was coming down pretty heavily when I got up to prepare for my commute so I called in. Granted, by noon about half of it had melted (the pretty half, I must add, not the part where I have to drive) and while the weatherman says today will be the coldest day of the week it'll still be below freezing level for a day or two more so that water and slush will be ice which I intend to drive on tomorrow. Gotta make the dollas, baybee, to fund my lavish kitchen improvin' lifestyle, and there's still $500 left to earn to pay off the new couch we've ordered from La-Z-Boy. And no, I still haven't gotten that master cylander fixed yet... we haven't found here the documentation Saturn can't find there, but that $1500 is in savings waiting (and I'm gonna throw in a brake job when I do get that surgery done).

I was quite gleeful last week because I had filed my taxes, and when it came to the 1099-G amount (unemployment compensation) I put in the amount of the one check I received in October. Two days later, the actual 1099-G showed up and... uh, I forgot about the nine weeks at the beginning of last year I was collecting, so the reported sum is $2600 off, reducing the refund by $400, which is greater than 25% so by law I have to fix this. Since my taxes had already been submitted, I have to file a 1040X to fix the issue and paid H&R Block online $80 for them to get in touch with me so we could get this fixed. (Yes, doing it on paper is probably free. Yes, by law I have 3 years to do this.) It's been several days and no email or call, so I'm getting miffed.

Ohhh, you touched my tra-la-la... mmm, my ding-ding-dong... -- Gunther

The embarassing moment of the day: I've become friends with one of my coworkers, this 20-year-old blue-eyed devil, and he showed me this web video one night from some really cheesy-sleezy 1970's porno that featured a black couple copulating and a white 'mad scientist' Gene Wilder-wannabe type overseeing the process while commanding some absolutely rediculous stuff in baby-talk. One line was so over-the-top that I had to record it with my phone: the scientist gets insanely angry and shouts "You clamp down on that g** d*** dick, and you bite it ah-ah-ahhff!!" (The couple slowly looks up at him like 'what the hell?!') That is my ringtone for this coworker's calls. So the other night he called; I was in my office on the computer and the phone was in the livingroom, so it took a couple plays of the sample for me to get there. My wife and mother-in-law, both sitting on the couch four feet away from my phone, were rather surprised shall we say. I spent the first thirty seconds of the conversation laughing.

Despite today being the perfect day to catch up on some long-ignored projects, I can't say I've accomplished much beside paying the bills I intended to take care of a week prior. And I can't blame the snow for that. The February update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul was posted right before I started this so go have a few laughs. I hope your weather is better, wherever you are...

very exceedingly random thoughts

2008-01-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

Don't expect linear today. I'm going for a train of thought. I'm back on my daytime schedule at work (10am-2pm) and while that may have been my choice four weeks ago it's no longer what I want now that I have grown used to goofing off for most of four hours a day, not getting up before noon, and not having rediculous traffic when commuting in either direction. But it'll be okay, this job won't last forever. (Yes, Greg, I'll send you my résumé soon.) Tonight I filed my taxes because I could (definitely an accomplishment when there are three W-2's, a 1099-G, and a couple 1098's to tally up), so likely will have a refund of a cool grand in the credit union by Groundhog's Day. Which will be spent on floor covering of some sort for the kitchen, I 'spose. I'm still looking for the paperwork saying Saturn already knows what the hell they told me they need to do to my car. The photo jaunt with the locals went very well, and where we were invited into shop last year as we wandered this time we got invited into two... a City Works building with a sort of museum in it, and a glass-blowing shop where two guys were making vases. (And with the witch's brass bra chill in the air, the furnaces were welcome.) Answering a question: I have no idea, it just got quiet suddenly. I think the onset of osteo-arthritis is setting in, in the joints of my two index fingers and moving toward the thumb, which isn't a welcome thought since I type a lot. I was surprised to find out that Yazoo is reforming after over 20 years apart! Five concerts in the UK scheduled, none as yet elsewhere. And on that note, I'm going solo to see the Blue Man Group this Thursday. My wife gave me a ticket for Christmas and said she'd considered getting herself one but wanted to be thoughtful by not interfering with my felicity; I told her that concept only applies to Depeche Mode (which, if you haven't heard me say it before, I am never taking her or my best friend Chrome to see ever again!!) but I know she doesn't really like them, and weathered one show with me years ago. The outdoor Christmas decorations are neatly put away now, but there are still boxes in the diningroom of stuff my wife brought out. *sigh* I got a haircut. A couple days ago we got a wild hare up our bummies and went to the home improvement warehouses for new light fixtures -- I replaced the new one in the diningroom with a better one (one that puts out enough light for the room and looks good, unlike that IKEA one I'd erected in September) and the light in the master bedroom (which was probably 30 years overdue), and it only took about an hour total. And yes, there's green to it, the diningroom has compact fluorescents so they're recyclable and we're getting an equivalent of 225 watts of light for only 60 watts of power. (It's just so... bright white!) Where did my schizo friend Bobbie move? I went to where she's lived for prolly 15 years the other day and she's moved out! I gotsa go to bed early nowadays so I leave you [by "you" I mean Jamie Dawn] with this church sign from six miles down the road, which makes God sound like an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie character. BTW, it's spelled "milquetoast", after the H. T. Webster cartoon character from The Timid Soul, Caspar Milquetoast... the only time he was ever not jelly-spined was when his wife offered him some Russian salad dressing, to which he thumped the table and said NO! (Would you believe I learned that from a Reader's Digest condensed book my father had?) Mid-song the 30 gigabyte USB jukebox drive died a death, and I hadn't copied all the music coworkers had given me to another location, grrr. Embrace the abstract and the arcane keeps me sane.

does Roto-Rooter do sinuses?

2008-01-15T19:10:00.000-08:00

I warn you in advance, some days I start a blog entry without having stuff in mind, just for the purpose of posting something "on time", and this is one of them. I don't stew all week trying to think of this stuff, it just comes to me (or not). But if you want a valid stupid thing, see the photo at the bottom of this entry: people think they can keep ample space next to their car if they do a shitty job of parking, and for the most part it works. However, some wiseacres like me (in my midsize Saturn SL1, who likes to dream he drives something really compact like a Smart -- which finally made its official American debut last week, and shortly after came the preview of Tata Motors' fifty miles per gallon Nano, seen here) park in the damn spot anyway, and squeeze out of the car any which way they can. Walking through the lot it looks like I was already parked there correctly and the other clowns came along and boxed me in.

An update on the sleep situation: A little sleepy-time medication helped for a couple hours on Wednesday night and a little more of that magic elixir helped more on Thursday, but I had no such problems on Friday or the weekend. Or it'd be hard to notice since I don't have to rest up for work or get up the next day. So stuff is back to normal in that realm right now. There are other aspects that are a little wonky right now... the insects in my head are doing a picnic dance (similar to a rain dance or fertility rite), and they have lousy rhythm. Possibly contributing to that odd feeling between my ears is that the first signs that my temp job is temporary have surfaced; representatives to the outsource center this company has long said it was sending this department to -- not Georgia as we'd been told, not India as is the practice, but Canada! -- have been sitting in with us to learn what we do and how. It's got my boss kind of doldrumming but he doesn't lose his job, he just changes to a different position, but it's very evident from his face and how he talks that it makes him sad, and that transfers over to we who have no actual job or job security. [ZOMG, they just walked in... it's 8:15pm, WTF?] I love chaos as much as the next person but I'm kind of confused (not fully confused, because I'm confused about how confused I am) and as yet it doesn't show.

I called a friend tonight to see how things are in her world, and she immediately launched into a rather scary story she needed to get out of her. Short summary is: Her 6 year old daughter's bus is always the first in the queue at the school's curb, but today it was the last due to being late and having a different driver. Without looking up at the number, the girl got on the first bus in the queue and off she went. This is the sort of episode that one could write Lifetime channel horror movies about. Happy ending: the girl got home fine an hour and a half later, in a much better state of mind than her mother was in by that time.

If I think of anything interesting to tell or complain about, I will. Take that to mean I have nothing to complain about. Home improvement will resume soon, since we spent $220 on recycled glass tiles last weekend to trim out the backsplash that we're going to build sometime soon. Just need more body tiles! :)

another amber leaf falls into the backwaters of the mind

2008-01-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

   It's a Tuesday night, I'm at work, and the Bay City Rollers are playing on my computer's new speakers ($6 at a PC parts recycler). And I'm working on being bored snotless. I haven't really slept in the last two days, and I really don't know why... at least this morning I was dreaming about being at a home products exposition like you see some Sunday nights on HGTV. Who knew Campbell's Soup was coming out with a new canned product made of fourteen types of cheese? That's what you dream of when you haven't slept in a couple days, I guess. I never claimed that I had much of an entry today, but at least it might be amusing how off-target it could get. Or not. And maybe it's through the veil of 30 years, but I am sitting here wondering what the appeal of the Bay City Rollers to anyone over the age of 18 at the time would have been -- or of any age under 40 would be nowadays. (It was a 25 year old former coworker that I got the "Greatest Hits" album from last week.) Prophetic that at this moment the song playing has the chorus "we don't wanna be yesterday's hero." And to think that Sid & Marty Krofft replaced Kaptain Kool and the Kongs with them (on Saturday morning, Saturday morning)...
   On the stupidities front, there is this minor annoyance which is growing every few days, after these four backstory items: I work on the third floor of a five story building, and the cafeteria is on the fifth floor. The building has three elevators side-by-side and two button panels (one is specifically for the leftmost elevator, used for freight). I take the stairs, from the basement parking garage to my floor as well as teleporting between my floor and the cafeteria, for a little stairclimbing exercise. Public parking is available in the two basement garages, and since this building isn't really near civilization (though there is a Metro bus terminal a block away) the number of nonemployees who park here is likely pretty marginal. Now then. The powers-that-be for the company I work for and/or the building management decided that they should have a little more control over the parking area, and are now putting a keycard system with booth (so the nonemployees can pay rent) at the two garage entrances. Not my problem so far, though the space between the booth and the wall is really tight so I can picture that booth getting run into about once a day and/or being scraped as wide vehicles try to enter. The issue is that in preparation for adding our building keycards to the gate that's being put in, they've taken our keycards out of most of the other places that we normally use them... such as the sensors on the doors of the fifth floor cafeteria. And the stairway doors, so you can't get into your own floor. And today (not exactly the first cock-up in this realm), keycards aren't working on the freight elevator -- though that is usually the one that comes first when the regular elevator call button gets pushed, and I wind up stepping in to push a basement floor button to get it out of the way so a working lift can come. I hope they finish that project soon so they can un-screw-up our keycard access and focus on what will be their main priority: nope, it's not handling toll-paying traffic... it will be making frequent repairs to that pesky booth.
   Since there is balance in the universe even when it doesn't seem like it, viewing only what you can see around you, I've come to realize that every time someone who should stick around leaves, there are several people who need to go that stay. Okay, so as a tech support agent it's more like every other caller, but I mean for every person in real life who should stay but goes, there are a host of transient people who occupy more time in your ear than they need. Like on your way to the big climbing tree you encounter a few bees that mistake you for a flower that need to be shooed away a couple times, and when you get to that tree you find that the branches you want to be on break when you try hoisting yourself skyward on them. (Whether you take a nasty fall or not depends upon how high up you were able to get.) I miss tree-climbing, I was great at it as a youth. I miss having plenty of friends too, I was great at that back in the day as well. And anymore there seems to be a little confusion... I wish them to be sturdy trees but they regard me like one or the other of us were bees; they fly away or want me to buzz off. This keeps happening to me... guess I'm barking up the wrong trees? I suppose there's one similarity between the temporary annoyances and the hoped-for long-term comforts: One person wants to be happier in some way, and the other can only do as much as they're capable or willing to. When trying to figure a direction for my life in high school, I said that fixing computers is easier than fixing people... later I learned that this didn't account for the fact that it's people who use computers.
   I have another couple hours on the phone, hopefully without another person saying "I don't recall how to do that, I haven't been a network administrator for awhile" (like being an admin is at all relevant to the issue or like they ever were an admin of any sort anywhere) when trying to configure their email program in a way they have no reason to ("how do I configure Outlook to send mail when I'm not online?"... uh, you're not online, so you don't?), so I'm gonna call this good enough. I wish I remembered more of my sleepless dreams, they were pretty interesting as I recall, but maybe there'll be more tonight... a prospect I'm definitely not looking forward to, and hopefully won't encounter. [edit the next morning: Less sleep, more vivid dreams, sigh.] Toodles!

like the dust that you will find in the cobwebs of my mind

2008-01-02T01:37:00.000-08:00

   Happy New Year to each and every! May your 2008 be bountiful and peaceful, and to a certain few I hope your depression lifts. I arrived at home right at the stroke of midnight, thereby once I was actually in the house it was ten seconds into the new year. Saw the fireworks, confetti, and singing -- missed the countdown and the ball drop. Can we try this again? But that's probably what the guys behind the Space Needle fireworks show are saying too, since partway into the spectacle the software crashed and halted the display. That'll teach you to use Windows for important things!
   I did get one interesting New Years gift, as you may have noticed in the comments of the previous entry: an old girlfriend I've mentioned here twice pinged me and now I'm caught up on her life and have been informed about some mutual acquaintances. (But if you've been reading my blog for a year or two and you lived here in Tacoma until a couple months ago, why didn't you speak earlier?!) So that rounded out my 2007 and I can't readily think of anyone else I've been curious about for twenty-some years like that. Now that is a weird feeling, reaching the end of the list, as though I have a void where there had been a pool of curiosity. Not the first time I've stood there thinking, "okay, that's done... now what?"
   I received my new Epson scanner on December 27, so I've been doing some scanning of slides and negatives for the [now updated, go see!] Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul site, with plenty more to go. I've also rescanned almost all of the Brownie negatives in the collection (there's one image that hasn't resurfaced because it's not with the rest of the negatives, and I'll have to go digging to find it) but I'm not redoing the pix on the Spackle site; I have however uploaded them to my Flickr page (or done replacement uploads on the ones that were already there) so you can see them in their glory.
   I do have one stupidity to report, which you should find amusing. I order you to find this amusing! Last night I was doing a little research on hands-free headsets for my cell phone, looking for specific things -- how much the plug-in-ear-with-mike-at-throat things that come with the phone are should I want a spare or replacement, what other styles are made which are better for my way of life, and these all have to plug in because I don't trust Bluetooth. (You support a technology for a year, you know whether you believe it worthwhile.) My phone is a hot-purple Motorola W490, which is the narrower relative of the much-ballyhooed Moto RAZR. (The other day at work one of my coworkers, pictured above, called my cell a "Zoolander phone" because of the color, to which I pointed out his dainty little phone is half my phone's size so it's even more "Zoolander" than mine.) Most accessories for the RAZR line will work with the W490... same data cable, same wired headsets, same Bluetooth hands-free kits, and so forth. I could see the cases and other size-specific items being different, but I was seeking stuff that plugs into the mini-USB jack on the side of the phone. So I did a Google search for the RAZR accessories because they're more prevalent, and came up with a flock of stuff including the kind of headset I'm used to as a tech support geek with the hoop over the top of the head. I can't get the plug-into-ear-mike-at-throat earpiece to stay in my ear so it's pretty useless when driving, gimme something I can strap on! Just on a lark, I changed the search criteria to W490. Same list of items, as you can imagine, but five dollars less. Not kidding, exact same items and model numbers but the site was spitting out different prices. I thought this only happened at dry-cleaners (where the significant price difference between a 'shirt' and a 'blouse' is based on which side the buttons are on) and at teriyaki restaurants (where the exact same dish of food is $2 different between 'lunch' and 'dinner'). But no complaints here since my phone isn't the one being bilked based on name alone. Caviat emptor y'all.

Boxing Day was never such an orgy

2007-12-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

Hello, friends and strangers. You will be relieved to know that I had a pretty nice little Christmas. I spent Christmas Day at home with my wife, and we woke up around 1 p.m. (we don't have any kids beside Cheddar Meatloaf to demand we get up any earlier) to open our gifts sloooowly one by one taking turns. Then we spent the day on the couch watching a lot of HGTV, played Scrabble™ [I got a 7-letter word on the first round, she never caught up] and Boggle™ [she wiped the floors with me, as always], and occasionally answering the phone when her family would call to say hello. We both got the one item we asked for, and this year we were either frugal or just hadn't thought about what we wanted: she wanted an emerald 'journey' necklace, I wanted a polarizing filter for my camera. (Unfortunately when the note said "linear, not circular" and she showed it to the guy at the camera shop so he could read for himself that it said "linear, nor circular", the douchebag still handed her a circular filter. It's being exchanged tomorrow.) We surprised each other as well: I gave her a photo album of pictures I've taken over the years and have mostly lived in digital format; she gave me a ticket to the Blue Man Group show on January 24. Beyond that, it was how things usually looked (all is calm, all is mild, and my mother gave me a sweater and my wife some dishtowels As Usual) and that's something I'm thankful about. We already have a theme picked out for next year's tree.

I think I expended all the tip-top stupid things last time, thought there's no actual shortage of them. I suppose now we should be thinking about the New Year, and all the standard auld lang syne nonsense associated with resolutions. I don't make resolutions, as you know, but I do intend to become more fit because desk jobs are starting to show on my physique. I don't want to do the fourty year sprawl which I seem to be actively engaged in, it's avoidable! (the sprawl part, not the fourty year part... sigh) 2007 hasn't been that bad to me; both of the jobs I've had have paid pretty well and been tolerable, without a bothersome gap other than the two months of silence at the beginning of the year, I think I've accomplished a few things and gotten to know myself better, and I accepted turning a round number divisible by ten with some grace (to my surprise). People from the past that I've longed to reconnect with for a decade or two have reappeared (some more briefly than others) and I think I've said what I've needed to say to them. There's plenty to be thankful for. And there'll be more once that kitchen renovation ever gets completed.

I hope everyone else had a decent Christmas, or whatever you celebrate...

if kisses were snowflakes, I'd give you a blizzard

2007-12-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

If "ifs" and "buts"
were candy and nuts
we'd all have a very merry Christmas.

Hello, readership! It must be the holidays because I've got a Santa bag full of stupidities! Leading the pack is that I didn't realize how much I liked a certain F Minus cartoon from a month or so ago until later, now I can't freaking find it online (Comics.com only goes back 2 weeks, Google Images-fu is failing me, etcetera)! The cartoon in question shows two adult humans talking to a collie, the caption is something about "If Lassie had a speech impediment", and the people are saying "You say Timmy fell in a whale? Quick, get a marine biologist!" That one tickled my funny bone more than I knew at the time so I didn't clip it...

Here's something that's the opposite of the standard nonsense about the religious snoots demanding to put the Christ in Christmas and the non-Christian snoots demanding to take Christmas out of the classrooms: The local Christian station, Spirit 105 FM, has a billboard on 56th & Pacific Avenue with a big picture of Santa Claus, with a caption something like "Even Santa listens to Spirit!" Hmm, uh, okay... Good to see some effort to get along, I admit that.

There's this amazing, jaw-dropping TV ad for a firm that specializes in divorces. (And broadcast just a week before Christmas!) Woman is sitting at one end of the couch, frumpy. Man walks in and rips the remote out of her hand and plunks down at the other end of the couch. She sneers "whatever!" On their TV comes a talking head who gives the expected "get your share in a divorce by calling us" speech. The two estranged people look at each other for a second then dive at the phone. The clawing for the phone after that is a little unsettling. They must be the firm's intended demographic...

Roadwork is an inevitable. Choosing the right time to work on a road is crucial. Choosing which roadwork projects should go on concurrently is important. So... I hope the bright person or people responsible for having work on the right lane of 405 outside Renton, which affects traffic coming onto it from Valley Highway and 167, take place at the same time as work at the Renton end of 167 has a merry friggin' Christmas. Double kudos to the folks at 167 who are doing stuff on BOTH sides of the road at night.

There's good-ish "green" news: President Bush has just signed some legislation saying that by the year 2020 all new vehicles must get 35 miles per gallon. Now why it's in the stupidities column: First, this legislation has been on the table for TWENTY YEARS. The first Bush could have approved it. Clinton could have approved it. Shit's sake, Reagan could have signed it. Why'd it take the guy who doesn't accept the Kyoto Accord regarding greenhouse gasses to get this into gear? Second, this legislation should have been standard already as of TWENTY YEARS AGO... back when new cars were getting 30+ miles per gallon because of fuel prices in the late 70's and early 80's, a state we somehow lost in the last decade as sub-20 mile per gallon SUVs and Hummers gained popularity. What this all boils down to is... For all intents and purposes, this dictum should have taken effect and the vehicles in question produced somewhere between 2000 and 2010. Now. Not giving the oil industry a license to gouge for another 13 years and the auto industry more time to sit on their thumbs when they know how to do it right. The future came and went.

It finally happened: I got a cell phone. A purple one. This had some truly stupid moments leading up to The Big Purchase, namely: Baiting advertising. There was this flyer in the paper showing purple and green phones. This intregued my wife and I. I went four places in search of these colored phones before work. Each of them had nonfunctioning demo models to caress and ogle in green. But did any of them have these phones? Nope, not a one. I've been told by a coworker who is about to start working for the cellular provider in question that the mall kiosks and other dealers don't get the same full stock line as the company stores, so I'm willing to accept that they would have to order the product, but still.... the advertisements show the colored phones prominently and that's the lure they're using, so you would think they'd carry them since that is what people are coming in for. I wound up getting the phones on my lunch break at the company store at the base of the hill in the town where I work ("it's the one between the Starbucks and, uh, the Starbucks" -- not kidding, there are two Starbucks in that strip mall), which, as you recall, is 40 miles away from my home. Why the pressing need to pick up the phones when I could have ordered them online? Because my wife is crossing the state to spend the pre-Christmas weekend with her family, and an order would arrive on Boxing Day or so.

Which leads to a superb stupidity that reader Illiterate can comprehend: how cellular carriers (and phone makers) try to make money off every aspect of a phone. My analogy is how printer makers sell the machines cheap then make the money off of ink. The cellular industry gives away phones cheap (mine was $25 with a $50 mail-in rebate) then charges you a couple bucks to add ringtones and wallpapers and has plenty of charges for putting music on your phone plus charges $30 for the cable so you can back stuff up, get your photos off, or add your own pix/images/music. This little grey mushroom however has beaten that system: first, I'm not going to use my phone to play MP3s, I have a player with way more capacity and great headphones and better sound quality; second, the USB cable from one of my portable hard drives works with this phone (so much for the company and various websites claiming the transfer cable is "proprietary") and the phone's USB drivers are available for download on the maker's site and I've found free 3rd party software online which allows adding and removing content from the phone; third, the special "ringtone making" software out there does the exact same thing as any program that can save a music file as an MP3 and there's plenty of free stuff out there that can do that. So without paying anything extra, I've created a couple ringtones -- a keyboard loop from Depeche Mode's "A Question Of Time" (I dreamed for years about using that) and a sped-up sample of the "ooga chucka ooga ooga chucka" from the beginning of Blue Swede's "Hooked On A Feeling" -- and put some photos I've taken with a real camera as the wallpaper and phonebook entry images, plus can get any pictures I take with that cheesy 1.3mpx cell cam onto my computer. Booyeah!

Finally, just a quick grin. Know how people always snark on Britney Spears for being white trash because she's, uh, got some character flaws? Her 16 year old sister is knocked up, something you wouldn't really picture someone in her spot in the limelight [and a tweener-appeal show on Nickelodeon!] doing. (Yeah, we said similar about Brit a half-dozen times.) Jamie Lynn, dear, you could have asked your big sister to go buy some rubbers for you while she's in Rite-Aid getting Tampax...

saying something for the purpose of saying something

2007-12-10T21:28:00.000-08:00

I'm still missing the final stupid thought of last week. However, I do have a couple new ones. Stupidity is everywhere, you know, especially in the Christmas season, though these two have nothing to do with the holiday.
• I saw this advertisement last night for Presto Logs or a similar product. Rather weary woman wanders over to the wood bin at the supermarket and has the choice between real split logs and pressed sawdust logs. A squirrel puppet shows up on the scene and tells the woman why the synthetic log is better than good ol' fashioned hunks of tree: the Presto Log now contains no petroleum products. Seems they used to be held together with parafin. Woman is convinced and grabs the synthetic log. And I said back to the television: "The real log doesn't have any petroleum products in it either. Never had it, never will, ah ah ah." Reminds me of the ad campaign for some chewing gum Wrigley put out years ago: Moistens your mouth. The woman I married ten years later saw that and responded, "So does sucking on a pebble."
• This is mostly directed at some unknown male coworker(s) who need the memo: You are a grownup. You work for a leading corporation. No one is impressed with such things. So for those reasons, stop wiping your boogers on the walls of the restroom stalls. We don't care how big of flakes of nasal crust you have extracted from your nose, this isn't a museum for you to display them. There's two rolls of paper at your right; kindly make use of a couple squares and deposit them in the bowl. 'snot what we wanna see at work. Okay?

To make your spirits bright, here's our Christmas tree. Enjoy the spirit of whatever holidays you celebrate!

and there were leftovers for the rest of the week

2007-12-07T11:33:00.000-08:00

Okay, the second-to-last lost thought from the original set of five days ago:

First and foremost: when the hell did "My Favorite Things" become a Christmas song? It's a great song from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music and I've heard it covered by several people though my preference is still the 1965 movie's singer, Dame Julie Andrews (who has done a few different renditions over the years). Despite the wintery images it was sung, in the movie, during a summer thunderstorm! This one has been on my mind for a couple years. I have heard a couple not-actually-Christmas-songs get played on the radio or included in CD compilations this year, most recently Robson & Jerome's cover of the 1953 Frankie Laine hit "I Believe", which at the time was essentially the Korean War's version of Bette Midler's cover of "From A Distance". (Curious parallel in a second way: she re-recorded that song for her Christmas album. Off-topic comment: It always cracks me up when Jewish artists like her or Barry Manilow make Christmas albums... A great album it is despite that track, for the record.) I'm not one of those people who criticizes whether Christmas music or celebrations should be about the birth of Christ or about being visited by Santa Claus; I believe they can coexist, and most of the singers record music from both camps -- some even putting the two together, like the unsanitized version of "Here Comes Santa Claus" (such as Gene Autry's rendition) or Max Headroom's "Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You're A Lovely Guy)" having the Baby Jesus saying the song's title. [Okay, hmm, maybe that was a little off...] I don't get technical if the song is just about winter without a holiday involved, like Rosemary Clooney's "Here Comes Suzy Snowflake" or the Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye ode to "Snow". I even try not to get weirded out by the logistics of David Hasselhoff singing "Feliz Navidad", which he did. But regardless of what one's interpretation of the season or holiday, c'mon, make sure your seasonal or holiday music IS about the season or holiday!!

The last one is better... and slipped my mind again!

and a dollop of stupid for dessert!

2007-12-03T22:02:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read yesterday's entry yet, do that and then come back up here. Thanks!

Okay, I remembered one stupid thing I was going to kvetch about yesterday: Bing Crosby Christmas albums. Or more accurately, how I haven't found a complete and comprehensive collection yet. Okay, everyone is familiar with White Christmas (a.k.a. "Merry Christmas"), which is the biggest-selling Christmas album in history. The legacy only begins there. I have a Bing album of more well-known Christmas songs called Songs of Christmas (which I refer to as "Sofa King Bing" because it was put out by La-Z-Boy)... see it. It doesn't end there. Yesterday I was in Costco and came across a Bing boxed set which was $4 off, containing three CDs and a bonus DVD of a 1935 production of "Scrooge" (which I've seen several times in the dollars stores... 1935 plus the 72 year copyright life equals "just came into the public domain this year, woo!"). Disk One is a very obscure Bing album, where every song is original and new -- ergo no one has heard any of those songs since then (with exception of "Christmas Is..." which Johnny Mathis has covered, and for the record "'Round and 'Round The Christmas Tree" is not the same song as Gene Autry's "'Round 'Round The Christmas Tree"). That's different and welcome. Disk two is mostly popular Christmas songs sung by Bing on TV and radio specials, and songwise half of them don't have a studio version so this is a treat. Disk three is what pisses me off: They could have put in Songs Of Christmas since it's uncommon, or at the least made a compilation of fun well-known Bing Christmas songs which weren't on White Christmas such as "The Holly And The Ivy" and "I Wish You A Merry Christmas" plus added offbeat numbers like "Christmas Dinner Country Style" and lost B-sides like "That Christmas Feeling" (which I have the single of as well as his short duet with Frank Sinatra used as a radio show's closer). But what did they do? They put together a random collection of Christmas music, added one Bing song -- his duet of "Jingle Bells" with Frank Sinatra from a 1940's radio special (available on several inexpensive holiday collections) -- and titled it Bing And Friends. Bzzt, wrong! I'm seeking an actual compendium of Christmas music by Bing Crosby, everything he's ever recorded for the holidays, and I have yet to see anything that even comes half-way. And to prove it, I did a search in a P2P and found another CD's worth of obscure Christmas music!

Okay, so I realize this rant is about as obscure in nature as Bing's "Is Christmas Only A Tree?" but it matters to me.

stupidity enough for us all, in bite-sized servings

2007-12-02T23:47:00.000-08:00

To make up for how I've been talking more about myself (which is understandable in the holiday season) and last post was not very structured, this time it'll all be ~~things I consider stupid, daft, senseless, or anticlimactic~~ about my new printer. Leading the pack is how while I am writing this I've got a print job spooled to my new printer which is taking about 10 minutes to even arrive there. You'd think computers could do everything all at the same time without massive pauses during typing... which apparently isn't the case here. I'm just happy that everything's working.

   So speaking of this new printer, an HP Deskjet D4260 that was on sale at Office Depot, I've had plenty of issues. Not with the printer's function on its own -- the machine itself is working nicely -- but with the software. Let's start from the beginning. I followed the instructions on how to get it physically hooked up and the disk that came with it installed, and printed something using my favorite image editor, IrfanView, just fine but I have to do a bunch of twaddling of options to get it to print 4"x6" photo size in high quality. There's this button on the front of the printer with an icon of a stick figure holding a frame (it is an HP afterall) and I wondered what it was for. The instruction sheet alluded to PhotoSmart software and reading the manual. Hmm, pushing the button does nothing. There is no PhotoSmart software listed in the Programs group (or any other HP software). And I can't find the manual, as either a book in the box or a file on the computer. Further research, I can't find the manual or the software on the installation CD either. Surely this can't be right. I go to HP's website and download the manual as PDF. Good reading, and it too alludes to the function of that button as being to invoke the PhotoSmart software. For kicks I uninstall the driver software, which is the only thing listed, and remove the registry entries and any driver files I can find in the Windows folder so that when I plug the cable in again it's going to demand the disk (rather than use what it finds on the hard drive), just like the instructions say it will. Run through that, and once again on the road of life there are drivers and there are... uh, nothing else. Read manual again. The troubleshooting section says that if the PhotoSmart software isn't there, stick the disk in again and click on Add Software. I insert the disk, and there is no Add Software option. Hmm. How can it not be on the disk?
   Search on HP's site for the software, it's not making itself apparent. Use Google, it points to the correct download page on HP's site (yeesh!), so I download it. Computer crash 75% of the way through, reboot, Windows says the file is corrupt at boot, so delete that and start over. Okay, I have it now. The button still doesn't do anything, which is not how it's supposed to be but that's fine. This software is capable of many things, and with a little tweaking (a little less than with IrfanView) I can get photos sent to the printer... uh, but it keeps wasting my photo paper. For instance, the first photo will come out okay, and everything after that is acting like I'm trying to print something twice the size of a piece of photo paper. I printed a picture of both of my eyes, and only one appeared, with a really wide left and bottom border. So I thought "okay, how about I use a regular piece of paper instead to test this?" I put one in, and not only did the printer eat the paper, but it was still trying to print that one-eyed half-the-image with rediculous-border across the full sheet! I'm thinking the manufacturer's software isn't going to do it for me... there's just something inherently wrong with the maker's software being worse than third-party software.
   My ace in the hole for awhile has been PhotoELF, so I figure it's worth a try to see if that produces better results. Download the newest version, confirm I've removed the older version so it doesn't mess with the 30 day trial period. And it did print well, with no tweaking of the printer options like the other two programs required; I was so impressed I even shelled out the thirty bucks and bought it tonight. It even represents the paper boundaries correctly, rather than showing the full image in the print preview but cropping 1/8th of an inch off all sides. And now the only really stupid thing I'm seeing is that the print preview keeps coming up blank, as does the paper if I click on the Print button in it. I think that just means the computer needs to reboot, I broke them drivers with all my printing earlier, but still that shouldn't happen. [rebooted] The print manager is saying "cartridge empty"... wait, I've only printed 30 4"x6" photos, how the flying Fig Newtons can it be empty?! Stuuupid! (But it's printing fine anyway... again with a 10 minute delay where the computer gathers its wits.)

I know I had a couple other stupid things to report, but it's 1 a.m. and I've misplaced them. If printer stupidities is not your thing, I apologise, maybe next time I'll remember what else I was going to kvetch about. It wasn't work and it wasn't politics, though both are rich in dumbness some days. Hope you're working your way into ready for whatever holiday you celebrate!

get your feet wet in my stream of consciousness

2007-11-25T21:39:00.000-08:00

There's a joke I tell about the green Energizer rechargeable batteries in my camera: if you charge all four of them and put two in the camera, when you have to change pairs because you've drained the first pair from use the second pair will already be flat from sitting around, so you had better bring some alkalines also. That got a little annoying, it was like both pairs have an expiration date of ten days no matter whether they were ever tapped. So after asking my fellow local photographers what the best rechargeables are and doing a little reading online, I've invested in some Sanyo Eneloop AA's, which if fully charged and left alone at room temperature will still have 85% of their charge left one year later. Another investment was an HP Deskjet D4260 printer, replacing that Lexmark-made Canon printer which hasn't done a job right in over two years. Once I figured out that horizontal on the screen really means you put the photo paper in vertically and found out Preview is your friend because the software has this nasty habit of changing all your high-quality photo printing settings back to regular full-page settings and wanting to print on just 3" x 4" of a 4" x 6" paper when all settings are set to (and are displaying the test image as) filling the paper, all was well. I encountered some serious stupidity with my house wiring yesterday by surprise. My wife and I were about to hit some long-overdue home projects (her: painting the lavendar touch-ups on the accent wall cran-plum; me: stripping some paint and varnish off the kitchen cabinet doors) and I flipped the light switch in the diningroom... and half the lights in the house went out. And the breaker did not trip. I have now learned how to take the panel out of the breaker box and remove a breaker switch, a valuable skill, but the switch wasn't defective. It wasn't until that night that I found out where the problem was: The wiring goes from the breaker box to the inside of the light fixture in the mudroom, where it splits to the porch light ahead and the rest of the lights on that side of the house (kitchen, diningroom, bathroom, master bedroom, and my computer's socket). The mudroom light wasn't coming on, yet the porchlight was. Predictably, this morning when I opened up the light fixture to look for loose wire and test voltages, ding, suddenly the light and the rest of the circuit works. I have no idea how some wires under a cap (in a light that wasn't on at the time) could act like a breaker but, hey, whatever, all is well now. Work seems to be okay, but then again I worked on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, when the street traffic to work was way dead and the call traffic at work was even deader. That kind of goodness can't last (said 11 hours before my Monday morning shift). My Thanksgiving otherwise was tolerable -- I don't consider the lettuce and cucumber sandwiches with one slice of meat each from Subway, courtesy of the agency, a "feast" -- and on Saturday my bride made a turkey and some fixin's so I didn't go without much. I even had my cranberry sauce on Sunday: I dropped a can of Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash on my floor and it did precisely that, it splashed cranberry all over (and under) the stack of cabinet doors; the 'sauce' comes in because despite my efforts to wipe the floor clean with a wet rag I noticed in my stocking feet that the linoleum is a little tacky. There's probably more or something actually useful to say but there's always later.

fill your life with croutons!

2007-11-19T00:46:00.000-08:00

Hello, friends. I'm a week and some overdue in my writing, but I will claim that getting into the new job is to credit/blame for that. So far it's pretty good, just a matter of learning what goes where and the answers to questions you wouldn't picture people asking. The commute is stupid but bearable and, as I determined a few years ago when I worked just down the hill from where I am now, sort of a relaxing down-time (though I prefer to do something with my down-time... you can't read or get on the computer while driving). And then there's the price of gasoline, which is mega-stupid, but sometime I'll evade that by abandoning or augmenting the internal combustion engine. The picture of the day came from the latest Tacoma Photo Gang jaunt... a barber chair on a business' porch roof wrapped in rope lights.

Noted last time was that we can't start decorating until we put our tools and stuff away. Well, we haven't made much headway into that, however we now have all the cabinet doors off and five of them have been stripped. The rest will be stripped shortly, I presume. As for the drawer fronts (the drawers will be dipped end-first in stripper, not taken off) and the cabinet bodies (spray-on stripper!), those will likely wait until January. Then we can clean up and put stuff away? I believe we're at a stopping point with the kitchen (once the doors are stripped) so we can put away the tools that fill the diningroom and move diningroom items out of the livingroom. We're working on the color scheme for the cabinets now, one shade of grey for the doors/drawers and another for the cabinets. The Christmas tree will be going up likely the second week of December. As much as I love Christmas and decorating, some rules of decorum such as not before Thanksgiving!! have to be followed. Stocking up on goodies, though, that I do year-'round.

The latest tale of stupidity, as of today (my wait to write had some benefit!), turns out to have a happy ending. Okay. As you know from flipping back a couple entries, I lost my job with the antiphishing place on October 20. When I was signing the termination paperwork, I asked the supervisor to promise that he would not interfere with my attempts to collect unemployment, and he said he wouldn't. Hmm, well, three weeks later I get a call from a case manager at Unemployment, asking for my side of the story. It seems that he told them that the site I mistakenly blocked was legitimate and that I had not made any improvement in my work pattern since my written warning of August, when I did put a couple bank sites on blocking. "That's inaccurate," I said calmly, and told her what happened once she asked. And to my surprise, I received two envelopes from Unemployment today: one containing a letter saying they took my word for it, and that incompetance [heh] is not the same as willful misconduct; the other containing a $249 check for the one week I was able to claim before starting my new job. I closed my claim last week. It's a small victory and one that I wasn't going to pursue unless I hadn't gotten this job, and the real value is that in case I wind up leaving this job in the next month I can re-open my claim without so much hoop-jumping. That, I should hope, is the end of the story.
[And CR: you should have stuck to your word and to the truth.]

Okay, actually, I do have one real-world stupidity: how does lying to a grand jury have a larger penalty than murder? Seriously, Barry Bonds (whom I could care about since he doesn't play for the Mariners) is facing thirty years in jail for perjury. Not that I believe he'd actually do a day in the pokey, but the penalty threatened is a lot greater than what people who actually commit grevious crimes sometimes get. There's only one person who needs to be put away for telling lies, but he's still in office for another year.

I didn't say this was an exciting entry, just an overdue one. You want exciting? Check out the new electric vehicle, the Aptera. I know, that's Latin for "without wings", but this is an affordable plug-in electric or gas-electric hybrid with a low-weight futuristic look. I razz on "futuristic" and unrealistic looks, but the form follows the function.

in exchange for a floating life

2007-11-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

   Hello, blog buddies and any other sort! As you may have derived from the previous entries, things have been eventful. Doors closing, doors opening, timing and placement conspiring to change things and it's yet to be seen whether it's for the better or not. But let me catch you up on the rudimentaries of the last week, and all sales are not final so please hang onto your receipt in case of product malfunction.
   I went to meet the guy at the well-known travel business on Wednesday, and finding the right place was interesting since there were five buildings across four distinct lots which had the same sunny word in their names. The gentleman himself was very cordial and seems like a good guy to work for. At least I know that the dress code in the helpdesk is casual. The thing that struck me is that I'm dressed up for an interview and he's in a dirty t-shirt, with a large belly that shook like a bowl full of jelly as he nervously wiggled his knee while I spoke. (That will derail your train of thought.) The placement agency person said I'd hear later in the day how things went, then she escorted another candidate dressed to the nines with a pleather LifeRunner in. I went to IKEA and a gourmet hotdog franchise afterwards, waded through traffic, and got home at 4 p.m. to a call on my answering machine saying the dude liked me so was offering me the gig.
   I went to the placement agency on Friday to fill out the standard paperwork -- W-2, I-9, auth to snoop through my background, auth to check my credit history (I still don't understand how that's relevant in any way but I know my score is improving), and auth to enjoy a sample of my urine. The staff at my agency is very easy on the eyes, though I didn't ask why the receptionist had to offset her radiant hawtness by getting an angel (or is that a ghost with a halo?) tattooed on her left wrist. Oh well, we all make decisions we're stuck with that don't make sense to others sometimes. Once I was done there it was another jaunt to the Crate & Barrel and the Cost Plus, just like my last visit to their office... it's a good thing I don't work there, that's all I'm gonna say. I went from there to the drug testing place, giving the bored person behind the counter with emphysema some amusement, and then gave her a few fluid ounces of what I was just going to whiz away anyway. As soon as they ascertain that I live cleanly despite residing in "Methlehem" (Parkland/Spanaway is known for its methamphetamine labs and Tacoma has a higher-than-average per-capita population of alcoholics) they'll tell the agency who will then tell me I can start, so it will be Tuesday or Wednesday that I actually begin working. And the poppy seeds on that gourmet hotdog two days earlier had better not make it look like I'm a morphine addict!
   "How go the home improvements?" you ask... I think we're approaching a bookmark. The original goal was that we'd do the entire kitchen and dining area over the summer. Uh, yeah, molars and motors got in the way financially. So autumn has been more forgiving, having painted one wall (which needs repainting courtesy of my wife and her sister fidgeting with flawed spots one night) and converting a fan-holding hole in the ceiling to a hanging fixture with a drywall patch two feet away then converting a two-foot-by-four-foot fluorescent trough into a flat surface with two fixture boxes and a bad memory. You knew all that already, so that was a refresher before moving into the "and now?" part. Paige and I were sitting in the livingroom yesterday discussing what we want to do with the Christmas tree this year -- the theme will be just like last year, which was green/silver/white/clear with snowflakes, but with blue replacing the green -- and she said we can't decorate the house until we reclaim it. Stuff that belongs in the dining area is in the livingroom. Stuff that's in the dining area is covered with plastic tarps and has paint cans and such under. Half the kitchen has tools and building supplies on the counters. And then there's the matter of those cupboard doors she took off so we could strip the paint, but haven't done that yet. So I proposed that we finish the obvious pending projects of painting that wall and stripping the cabinet doors, put all of our toys away for the winter, and we can get to the replacement of the flooring plus painting of the other walls and ceiling plus redoing the counters and cabinets next year. Let's see if that happens.
   Oh yes, speaking of the kitchen light replacement project: yes, I completed the ceiling patchwork the other day. I kinda let four or five days elapse between the second and third plaster coats, that's why it's so tardy, but when I finally did that finish coat I applied primer and texture soon after so it's ready for a coat of paint. Will the patches be invisible? Not entirely but you will have to know where to look and what to look for. In the meantime, I really need to get up all that plaster dust and stray texture that went everywhere... I consider that part of the pre-holiday cleanup. Anyhow, that's the blog entry and I won't try to think of anything stupid to report. Okay, I do have one thing but it's someone else's problem so I won't hash it out here (I will give you this much: if you move 4,000 miles away from someone because you can't stand being with them anymore, and they call to ask if you could make airline reservations for them to come visit you at Thanksgiving, you have to wonder... did someone not get the memo?). Cheers and hope your Halloween was hunky-dory. Mine, for the record, was almost as quiet as it ever is... we don't get trick-or-treaters anyway, but we did have one knock at the door because I forgot to turn off the porchlight after getting home from the new Home Depot behind the apartments I used to live in a decade ago.

don't try to live your life in one day, don't go speed your time away

2007-10-28T02:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary... it's me again!
   The law of averages doesn't normally work for me, but oddly it had some effect... I only submitted one online application Thursday night. And at 11 a.m. Friday I got a call from that one application -- helpdesk, internal support telling coworkers to reboot, for an online travel company everyone's heard of, fifteen dullards an hour and no requirements on average handle time (I was told twice that 30 minutes per call is kosher). Which surprised me because every other position with that company I've ever seen listed was handled through a different placement agency; in fact at least one of the interviews with that placement agency I've done for some techie job in the past was conducted in the travel agency's office. I was at the placement agency's office in Bellevue at 2 p.m. to chat them up, and am told to expect a call from the travel agency's person on Monday since he wasn't available at the time. This gives the appearance of things going well, though I know appearances can be deceiving. One word: Woot! More when I know it.
   Now I've updated the Spackle site. I think I'm a better writer of humorous captions when I first see the picture and still have some of that spark when I'm putting it on the scanner, but lose much of it however much time later when I'm putting together the page for the picture. I try to give them names that will remind me of what I found so funny when I first saw them, but it doesn't always work. I may have said this before (I know I have said it on the Spackle site itself), but after several months of not having a guestbook when the site changed hosts I finally got off my duff and implemented a new one, using the one Indeterminacy suggested. And after all these years and a few suggestions, Yahoo Groups still hasn't added Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul to their list of found photo sites. They added some others which may not fit the definition or are flash-in-the-pan sites, which only salts the wound. But I can't help it if they suck. Anyhow, have a gander, at least some of the captions are funny.
   A funny thing happened to me in the supermarket today... I was checking out and the cashier looked distantly familiar. I looked at her nametag to see if it matched what I thought it was... surprisingly, yes! This was Leticia, whom I haven't seen since the fifth grade! I didn't get the courage to confirm this with her (the nametag had the correct first initial of the last name though) but it was kinda neat and/or weird to cross paths with someone I haven't seen in about twenty-five years. The person I really want an update on is Cassie Garnes, the tall redhead I was dating for a short time in my senior year and whose family I took a liking to for being so kind. (It's odd, I lived 2 blocks away from them for 3 years while I was in college but probably only wandered over to say hello once at most.)
   Since my blog is "Everyday Stupidities" it'd be fitting to tell this story there. Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a fluorescent light fixture and tubes?! I found out on Saturday. I was under the impression that I could just waltz into the Habitat For Humanity ReStore and donate the light trough I took out of the kitchen ceiling plus the tubes, since I've seen tubes in thrifts or somewhere for sale cheap recently. It's obvious by looking at it this fixture was recycled itself out of some other building. So does anyone want it? Noooooooooo. Habitat, as well as St. Vincent de Paul, do not take fluorescent fixtures (or the ballast part anyway) because of PCBs, and don't take fluorescent lights because of the mercury. So where do contractors and regular people get rid of these things then? Seems that the best place to go is to a landfill that handles hazardous waste. The one I usually go to in situations like this met me half-way: they took the fixture (considering it household waste and charging the minimum dump fee of $19), but I'm going to have to take the light tubes to a different landfill which has the benefits of not charging to get rid of hazardous waste, specifically claims to accept fluorescent lights, and is open on Sundays. While I feel a little bad about getting rid of the lights because somebody must have a use for them and would probably like to save a few bucks over going to the store for new ones, and they do still work, they'll be out of my hair and properly recycled. But my research brought an interesting gap to light: The Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology are very much in favor of recycling fluorescents and other mercury-using items. They encourage people to recycle them at every turn. IKEA (where I recycle the compact fluorescents) doesn't take the big tubes but also is big into having people recycle and has various links recycling resources which in turn have links to recycling businesses, one of which is just up the highway in Seattle. But does any of this info from the EPA, the WA DoE, NEMA, or Ecolights NW tell where and how to get the tubes recycled? No. Or not in any clear terms. I had to Google "fluorescent recycling pierce washington" to find out where in this county to take the tubes, and came up with two locations (one I'd been to and takes lights twice a week, likely with a charge; the other is where I'm going today and it's said to be free). With the increasing popularity of compact fluorescents, and the continued popularity of fluorescent tube lights (which have been around since the 1940's), you'd think this information on what to do with fluorescent lights -- and watch batteries, which also contain mercury -- would be widespread. Nope, so people put them in the trash. It's not the consumers who are stupid in this case, they don't know better because they haven't been given any info. The lack of widespread information and education by those who should get the word out, that is stupid.
   I haven't done any further home improvements (not even the sanding and final coat for the kitchen ceiling) but did have a look at a new flooring liquidator down the street, which it turns out we've visited before at their old location a few miles up the highway. The cat wandering around on top of the hardwood flooring stacks looked familiar. I need to finish that project today, as well as give the lawn a final mow for the year. But there has been no talk about when the patch jobs will be textured and painted, which you'd think my wife would be very eager to do or have done. Oh well, it'll come. And with that, I must go to bed. Goodnight, Diary... and you voyeurs of this, don't miss the previous entry, it has been one of those rare instances I wrote twice in a week.

a room full of faceless strangers, here I am again

2007-10-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary...
   Life is what happens when you had other plans. I always seem to stumble into that around my birthday, usually because I'm more acutely aware of the world around me or because other people just happen to pick that particular week to change things around. This year, this last week more to the point, is no exception. The other day I downloaded Sheena Easton's "You Could Have Been With Me", which has always reminded me of Pablo Cruise's "Cool Love" because of the introductary line even though the two are going in opposite directions; Sheena's singing about a breakup due to never being on the same page, Pablo's singing about a meetup courtesy of finding yourself on the same page. The mind works in strange and mysterious ways. But so does the world, which is what brings me to scribble here when I should be putting together an update to Spackle or updating my resume on Monster.com and Jobdango.com...
   It happened for the second year in a row and I-dunno-how-many-times in my life: Shortly after I emailed my mother on my birthday to tell about my excellent job, the employment carpet was yanked out from under me. I take pride in the fact that it wasn't because I was caught in a mop closet with a manager's daughter or a Girl Scout troop walked in on my nude calesthenics or because I'd packed more than a pad of purple Post-It Notes™ into my coat pocket. It was because I'd rated a clearly fraudulent site as phishing, when it was more like trademark infringement. If this sounds stupid, you're onto something. Some years ago I discovered that there are managers who enjoy the power of managing, and enforce the rules they create with an iron hand no matter what the circumstance is. I'm not saying anything bad about my workplace or my supervisor, I very much liked both; I'm saying that there are times when an action or a failure to act means more to the people who make the rules than to the business or world in general. I lost my job over a clerical misjudgement, in so many words, that didn't cause anyone to die or any business to lose money, and a supervisor or two was very much married to the concept of "final written warning" when a similar error (affecting a couple businesses for a few hours) was committed months ago. It's like they have chosen to ignore or deal with at another time the consequences of their actions, being that the coworkers on an already stretched-thin team now have to take up the slack and absorb the newly-vacant hours of the shift. Since I liked my coworkers I certainly wouldn't intentionally inconvenience them like that. Hell, I covered for their asses on many occasions when they had plans or emergencies, I wouldn't want this to be sprung on them, as it was. But this is all water under the bridge; I must look forward because there's no way to go back, and spite hurts the spiteful more than it affects the spited. I suck at spite so I don't carry that if I can help it.
   Filling out unemployment forms is difficult. Not because it is time-consuming, or requires research to get dates and data, or even because one has to find accurate yet muted ways to explain the situation to the state. It's difficult because it takes some mental hurdling. It's a concession that you have fallen down and you need help. People hate admitting they need help; that's one of the first things one learns in tech support, people don't want to call you but after looking at the situation and trying whatever they can they have to call you. It's an admission to myself that I lost a job, and in this case one that I was not unhappy with, and that I must now dust myself off and find a new steed to mount. But I still haven't found the space within me to complete the initial steps of getting back on, being updating my résumé and submitting for jobs. I have done some other contact work to let the agencies who have placed me before know I'm back in their fold, so I haven't sat totally idle on that front, but more people need to know. And will. Soon. Just not in the last five days.
   This has, bright side time, given me the opportunity to tackle some home improvement projects that I'd normally have to put off to a weekend. The huge fluorescent trough in the kitchen ceiling has been removed and the 4' x 2' hole has been patched over with drywall. Some electrical work has been done to make things safer. Two lights will be installed in the new panel as soon as the ceiling patch resembles the rest of the ceiling in color and texture. I have that sense of accomplishment that self-renovation brings. Now if only that could spread to other facets of my life that could use the moral[e] boost...
   I woke up this morning dreaming that I was 80 years old and conducting a yardsale. I was selling everything. The plan was to go completely nihilistic and move into some retirement village, hopefully not a nursing home (which I refer to as an "ossuary" because that's what it is, a repository of forgotten bones), so that when my number was up there'd be almost nothing to haggle over or dumpsterchuck. It was an interesting dream, not as depressing or morbid as one would think when one is frankly preparing for the inevitable. I'm not that keen on my mortality, and hate thinking about it, and find myself sometimes saying "shit, is the second half of my life going to be filled with this? uh, yeah, it is, and it just gets worse with time". But I have no say in the matter of getting old and dying, I just have a bunch of stuff to accomplish before then and like most people not a lot of drive to do the not-fun parts of it. (And if blogs have any power of attorney: cremate and scatter, dammit -- don't buy me a friggin' stone and bury me, I'm not that vain and my nutrients should be recycled!)
   Hmm, since that last paragraph was sort of a downer, Diary, let me make it up to you. There's this website full of colorful, family-friendly Flash games called Orisinal.com which I stumbled across at work the other day... I'm writing this more or less between games of Bauns. If you can get past the soft cushy anime aspects of the page, you can have a lot of fun here. I'm pasting into this entry a photo of me wrangling with some aluminum flashing that I pulled out of the attic, which had been around the fluorescent trough to keep the insulation off. So I'm "flashing" you. Ahahahahaha! I'm done, so wish me luck on getting back on the horse. Any horse. So long as it's heading my direction. It's the mounting that's more challenging to my head right now than the riding.
   You're such a good listener, Diary... see you again on Sunday.

upon reaching the big four-oh

2007-10-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty busy with work and home improvements so I have been tardy with a post, plus decided that I wanted to wait to write something on my fourtieth birthday because I didn't get anything out over last weekend. You'd never know my age by looking at me, that's one thing that God has blessed me with, and people are always surprised -- even demanding to see my driver's license -- when I let them in on the fact. My youthful look has seldom gotten me anywhere with the female of the species (my beautiful eyes have though), which made getting married to the person who stuck around the longest waiting for me to grow up that much easier once I'd reached age 30. It's a strange place to me, I can't "act my age" and I can't act the age people think I am (I'd have to completely forfeit having any taste in music at all to fit in with that crowd)... I feel 25, but with more direction and income than I had when I was 25. And let me tell ya, I'm sitting at home alone in the suburbs with the cat right now -- that's a far cry from what I was doing on my 25th birthday, when I was living in a mobile home on a lake mostly alone, but the statute of limitations has not passed yet so I can't talk about that all-day dyonesian event; however one nice difference is that I had to work for six hours at Pizza Hut that day, where today was one of my scheduled days off. (Though the interruption of work was welcome that day so I could catch my breath!) I took this photo especially for you ten minutes before I started writing this. The white mark on my left cheek, which I didn't know about until I was adding the text, is from sanding the ceiling plaster an hour ago (see third paragraph).

I haven't opened or received any gifts yet, so there's nothing to report except to name the people who have emailed me without prompting or sent me Hallmark cards. My fellow blogger and longtime rainbow Ariel, my old buddy Wayne, my northern light Bertie, my mother (who made with a check), and my wife's Aunt Janet all gave me greeting. Coworkers are oblivious as far as I know (I'll find out tomorrow), which is fine by me but it is on the calendar. My circle on Flickr have it listed in the "our birthdays" discussion thread in the private group we hang in, but have said nothing thusfar. And I'm sure that girl back home who I'm shunning remembered, she always does. Don't feel bad for forgetting, Illiterate, you recall what happened at my last birthday... and I still have that unopened pint of vodka you gave me last year as a ~~birthday~~ sudden going away gift. :) Jamie and Indie, I don't think I ever mentioned the date to you so it's not an issue. Anyone else reading... uh, AFAIK there isn't anyone else reading, but if so now you know too.

A few seconds of home improvement notes: This week's project was to patch the hole in the diningroom ceiling, and that's almost complete. The square of drywall is in place, taped up, and a shortly ago the third coat of plaster was put over it. Pictures next entry, I suppose, or whenever it's totally complete with texture and primer and paint so it will be like it never happened.

For this week's stupidity, we turn to the computer. Note: It gets geeky here. I can't help it in this case, but anyone should be able to understand the basics. Okay, a coworker gave me this metal case so that a notebook computer's hard drive can be used as a portable storage device. [This is NOT the same story as a few weeks ago, when I bought my own case and salvaged the drive out of a dead Windows Millenium notebook.] So I needed a notebook hard drive to put in it, preferably of larger volume than the 6 gigabyte one I used the last time I did this. I went to the local computer recycler and they said the next largest drive after 6 gigs is 30 gigs, and after a check they said they didn't have any so offered me a 40 gig. I brought that home and... hmm, not powering up in the case, not powering up when plugged into my computer using an adaptor, and (after much screw-pulling) isn't powering in my laptop. It's dead, Jim. So I headed back to the store in the 5 p.m. traffic, explained the situation, and they exchanged it for a 30 gigabyte drive -- wait, an hour or two ago you didn't have one, so huh? -- and a ten dollar credit. Go home, put it into my laptop since it was already open, boot into Windows 98 off floppy, and prepare the drive with FDISK and Format. But I wasn't babysitting the process because I had housework to do and the format should have taken half an hour. Anyhow, so when I got back to the computer, I pulled the drive out of the laptop and put it into the case, the computer recognised it, and I start copying music over from the other portable drive and walk away because it's going to take ten minutes. I come back right before I'm going out to dinner and... there's a dialog onscreen saying that I'm out of room. How does copying 5 gigabytes of music fill a 30 gigabyte drive? Because the notebook only set it up as a 3 gig drive, not 30 gig. Fine, okay, I use the FDISK utility built into Windows 2000 under System Management, and it recognises it as a 30 gig drive and sets it up accordingly... er, no, scratch that, it FDISK'd the drive but doesn't give me the option of either formatting it OR doing another FDISK. It's just there. Okay, off with the gloves. I disconnected one of my storage hard drives inside my computer, plugged the 30 gig drive in, booted off the Windows 98 CD, did an FDISK and made absolutely sure the decimal point was after five digits not four, rebooted into Windows 2000, it sees the drive and offers to format it, it does the job, and then I was free to put it back into the external case and it works correctly. The end. There is one bonus stupidity that isn't too geeky to this business... The case I was given is of a weird design. Not only are there no brackets or anything inside to keep the hard drive from flopping around (I've got it cushioned by using some Post-It Notes on the far end), and there's no power switch like my other USB external drives have, but the indicator light which tells you when it's powered on and when it is transferring data is on the same end of the case as the cable. That's not the end of the beast you normally have facing you. But anyhow, it's all good. So thank you, my friends and strangers, for serreptitiously enjoying my birthday bash, even if you didn't get any cake. (I haven't yet either.)

stupid in a deep shade of purple

2007-10-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

    I'm sitting at my desk at work right now, with two piles of deep purple lights and one pile of light bases on the desk along with some other light string related effluvia, plus an empty black light string at my feet with cord from a power supply to some consumer electronics (3VDC) snaked across it. Let me explain the reason for this scene.
    Two years ago I bought a string of deep purple Halloween lights at Big!Lots for $1.59 and used it at my cellular tech support job until the Powers That Be said we couldn't use company electricity for light strings or heater fans. Last year I saw purple lights in Wal-Mart and they offered replacement bulbs, 5 on a card, but I didn't buy any. Welcome to 2007. I pulled out the box of lights from Big!Lots and they aren't lighting. This is not an issue to me since I've been playing with Christmas lights since I was like nine, all I need is some replacement bulbs and a little bit of time to test the individual bulbs. Halloween lights are special in that it's such a dark purple; the purple strings sold at Christmas in the last few years (it's not a 'classic' color) are several shades lighter.
    Big!Lots is offering orange lights this year only, and does not have anything with purple lights except some holographic bat figures. Wal-Mart has purple light strings but no cards of replacement bulbs. Fred Meyers has several kinds of light strings, including the sugar lights seen in the previous entry, but no cards of replacement bulbs. Kmart has some lighted figures but no light strings. The nearest Spirit store (a yearly Halloween specialty "chain" that materializes in abandoned stores for a month, if they don't appear in your area) offers orange strings, orange and purple strings, orange and purple and green strings, and some nice screw-in strobes along with the expected blacklights, but no purple strings for some unknown reason. And on, and on, and on, and I admit I haven't been to Target yet. [edit: Target no has either. But they do carry strings of tiny bulbs that are top-half-orange, bottom-half-purple.] And I still can't find 14W fluorescent candelabras in stores. So at this rate I may have to bag finding replacement bulbs, other than the kind one pulls out of dead strings... like the one at my feet, if I can't get things fixed.
    So I bring in the string and some spare bulbs from other dark purple strings which frame my office shelving, plus this power supply so I can test bulbs, and get down to it. My usual method is to plug in the string and start testing bulbs one by one. A few bulbs in, I haven't found one that lights. The spares light so it's not a problem with the power supply. So I've removed all the bulbs from the string and their bases, and tested each one. I have no idea how this works out since if one bulb goes out the string goes out which protects the rest, but I have TEN working lights and FOURTY that aren't. I think it's not a matter of them being dead but the copper wires at the bottom being oxidized and not conducting... but scraping them with my thumbnail and soaking them in window cleaner before wiping them with paper towels (which did remove some corrosion) didn't cause more than three of them to start working.
    I think it's all in industry's desire for planned obsolescence. I'm not a conspiracy theorist (no matter what I say about the auto industry regarding efficient cars because it's demonstrably true) but what's the standard response nowadays if a string of Christmas lights doesn't light? Replace the string. The two replacement bulbs and a fuse are provided with the string for the same reason there's a sprig of parsley on your plate in a restaurant -- just for show, an edible garnish, which you might use if want to take a moment but no one expects you to. And not providing spare parts for the product you sell definitely encourages a disposable culture mindset. And this is stupid.
    I guess for sure I have ten spare bulbs and three spare fuses for other strings now... technically I also have a spare string as well. I'm ready for the future.

two illuminating images for Illiterate

2007-10-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

My old buddy asked in comments here a few days ago what I thought of LED arrays. I'm for them economically even if I can't always deal with the spectrum of light produced and, in the case of some AC-powered ones, the 60Hz flicker (fluorescents bug me the same way). But there are a couple small LED lights that are new to the market which I like:
Left: One of this Halloween's new items -- a string of 10 purple LEDs, powered by two AA batteries [yaay, DC!], available at Fred Meyers. Also available in orange. The "sugar coating" is a throwback to a style of Christmas light that was popular in the 1950's or 1960's, and the color is really very nice. (Digital cameras don't handle the color purple very well, but this photo is close to yet not exactly how the human eye would see the color.)

Right: Saw this at Walgreen's today -- a two-pack of C-7 base lights, containing three white-blue LEDs, for use in replacing the white/pink/blue/clear-crystal bulb in an incandescent nightlight, but since it's the same size base as a Christmas light it could be in the star on the top of your tree. The package trumpets that it's got a 50,000 hour life, uses less than 1 watt of 'lectricity, and costs less than 25¢ a year to operate.

Something more real and bloggy coming next time I post, honestly.

another car we need to see in America

2007-10-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read yesterday's entry, please don't forget to do that!

Car: A2 by Audi.
Mileage: 75 to 90 miles per gallon(!!) - 2 to 3 litres per 100km.
Where are they: 175,000 across Europe.
What happened: Produced from 1999 to 2005, discontinued due to consumer disinterest for being too forward-thinking (according to Wikipedia). The pendulum has swung back, small is in again.

Hope of return: Audi intends to market a similar car, the A1, in 2009, to compete with the Cooper Mini [hopefully keeping the A2's gas mileage, which is three times that of a Mini - 25mpg average].
Hope of it showing up in America: pppthttthhhhttt!

actually, it's the cosmos that's adrift in you

2007-09-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a fairly busy and productive week since last we spoke and kitties were (hopefully) saved. Paige took the week off so we could make headway on the home improvement projects du jour...
• Cleaning up the wall in the diningroom (removal of a shelf, patching divots, priming to get rid of the heinous yellow paint) and giving it a couple coats of fascinating purple paint to make it an accent wall;
• Changing out the old chrome tap handles and escutcheons in the tub with brushed nickel models, which is the only thing we didn't do a year ago when we renovated the bathroom;
• Removing the big lighted fan from the diningroom ceiling, then putting in a fixture box a couple feet toward the wall and hanging a new lamp from it.

I could babble about the minutae but you prolly don't care about all of it. So I'll just relate some of the dumber details as a cautionary tale:
• Paint project: Since the rest of the room is still two shades of yellow, this accent wall is really quite a bold statement. [LOL!] It's being handled by my bride and I haven't kibbitzed so I don't have any editorial comments to make. I will say that the purple is one that's not in the chit chart at Lowe's because we'd bought three little sample cans of varying shades to see what we liked most, then wound up mixing them together to come up with something I call "cran-plum". Came out pretty nice!
• Handles project: Previously I was buying brushed nickel items online because they could not be found in the stores (or cheaply, or individually). This time it was more easy than it seemed, because Lowe's had some great handles and the escutcheons in their "zomg brushed nickel!!!1!" display... these parts of which are not found on their website. Seriously, I stayed up until 5 a.m. Googling for the things that go between the handle and the wall, and no one offers them other than as part of a whole-tub renovation set ($65-$110, but you know the unneeded showerhead is $50-$90 of that price). Turns out that Danco, maker of those tub kits (for Ace Hardware), sells the parts separately (at Lowe's), woot!
• Light project: There are only two real beefs, since getting the old fixture out and unwired and the new fixture in and wired wasn't that tough (and I no longer consider itching for two days from the blown fiberglas insulation a beef because it's my choice to not protect my arms). First, there's a big freaking hole in the ceiling from where the fixture was -- partially due to the crackheads that put the fan in, because they did a bang-up job (they used the right fixture box for a fan, but they cut the hole too big and they tried to hide the mess using bathtub caulk!! around the top of the decorative sconce), and partially due to my attempt to remove the fixture using the prying end of a hammer (apparently the drywall was not as sturdy a fulcrum as I had expected, so the hammer sunk through the ceiling). I'm learning to drywall so I'll fix the hole soon. Second, once the new light was in and working, that's when we realized the glass bells around the lights are, shall we say, "nicotine yellow" when lit (which doesn't work well with "cran-plum" but almost fits with the old room colors, eek!), and we're having a hell of a time finding replacements of the right size (the standard is larger) and in clear glass (the ones in the right size either look fragile or are all opaque-deco or milk white), but we haven't been back to IKEA to see if they offer alternatives.

I do have one real stupidity tangental to the lighting item: As you may know, I'm all about energy conservation -- halogens and fluorescents and dimmers are my friends, even though I prefer incandescent for any room I have to sit and read in (I can indeed detect the 60 hertz flicker if I look long enough). The fixture holds three incandescents in candelabra size with a maximum wattage of 40 per bulb. Fluorescents are lower wattage with higher light, so I think I can get more light by going that path. Now, next time you're in the lighting aisle of a store, I want you to look for fluorescent candelabra bulbs. Home Depot has one -- 3 watts for an equivalent of 15 watts' worth of light. Thhhpt. Lowe's has one -- 7 watts for an equivalent of 40 watts' worth of light. Nice but the point is I want more light. But a couple companies do make 14 watt bulbs with an equivalence of 60 watts of light. Where are these? Mail order through 1000bulbs.com, Amazon.com, and so forth online or by walking into Seattle Lighting or Lighting Universe (the suckers are not on their websites) to request them. Why are energy-efficient solutions like these so hard to find? I will say that if you order fluorescent light bulbs, you get more choices as to what color of light they produce -- warm white, cool white, full spectrum -- for the same price, where stores only offer you one.

To conclude the post on a more tolerable note, I received a bunch of pictures from my friend who moved to Alaska the other day, and (with her consent to share on Flickr) there are a couple that bear sharing. The night before she left the state, she was driving around her rural hometown and tried to take a picture of rain coming in front of the sunset. In a word, they took my breath away. She also told me something I didn't know... she Googled her full name, and the first and third of the five things that came up were things I'd written about her. (The other three were from geneology sites where it just happened the first and last names existed on the page.) Since I don't want to take up all my Blogger storage space with the full images, you can see them through these two links: this one and that one. The update to Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul is up, and it's got cute furry things in it. Until next time, hope all is well in your universes.

the lacrimal extraction post (tearjerker alert!)

2007-09-23T03:58:00.000-07:00

Hiya, readership! I finally made good on updating the Daybook and Rant on Say Something Cryptic, even if I didn't have all my thoughts together, so that's one accomplishment since then and now. My bride has taken this coming week off of work and one of the projects she has in mind is to stain that fence we put up, weather willing. Speaking of the in-Spite-of Fence, the woman next door gave me a $200 check to partially cover the cost and intends to hand over some more soon. Now, as you have read before, we don't want her payment or partial ownership. Of course, there's no rule that says we have to cash the checks. The fence may have put a crimp in our finances for the month, with plenty of other expenses we need to save up for to face (dental, auto, kitchen improvement), but we still don't see fit to compromise our beliefs.

On my way to work yesterday there was a bit of traffic on Yakima Avenue and I'm casually scooting along behind some other cars. I see about twenty yards ahead of me this cat go bolting across the road, then get rebounded onto the yellow center strip by the vehicle two cars ahead of me. I emitted "youch!" The car didn't stop or slow down, and off it went. It took a couple blocks before I could turn my car around and go back, then like thirty seconds once I got pulled over near where the cat was laying for the cars coming my way to break. He was still alive. Every ten seconds his legs would flail like he was trying to get out of there but couldn't get off his right side. I got out when I could and walked over to the cat, asking him if he was okay. I worked quickly to scoop him up by the right shoulder with my left hand and right hip with my right hand, and carried him like a cake back across the street. Cars slowed to a crawl, and I presume many of the drivers saw why I had delayed them.

I set him down on the grass of the yard which he'd run out from, which was sloped down to a sidewalk so others could see him. I didn't see any sort of activity at the house so I hoped if this was their cat they'd take notice. I petted his head gently, him still giving that shocked look and breathing in forced bursts every five seconds, and then said goodbye and resumed my travel to work. Certainly I know that there was more I could have done, but I did something other than let him remain in the middle of the road at high risk. This was the first time I've prayed in a long time, and it didn't even start with "Father, forgive me my sins"... it wasn't about me. It was about a scared and broken kitty that didn't have a collar but likely had a home and people, that needed to either find mercy quickly or someone who could put the human into humane.

When I got home from work ten hours later, the first thing I did was hug my own cat. I'd be devastated if that were Cheddar which got hurt.

Another brief rant about the American automotive market

2007-09-15T03:32:00.000-07:00

First, I want you all to bear in mind that I want to be a "green" auto owner the next time I buy a car, preferably something full electric or a gasoline-last hybrid (as opposed to the current crop of gas-above-40mph [which is okay but not as numerous as it should be] and stupid electric-only-when-stationary models on the road now). But here are two petroleum or diesel vehicles that I'd like to see more of:

<- The Nissan Micra, also known as the March. It's been in production since the 1980s, can be found in Canada and is a staple in the UK, and gets around 35 miles per gallon. [Wikipedia] [nissan.co.uk] (down right now) [TV ad]

The Škoda Fabia, which is now a part of the Volkswagen Group. It's been in production since the 1990's (and the company itself has been producing cars for over a hundred years), can be found in Central America and all over Europe, and gets between 45 and 65 miles per gallon. [Wikipedia] [skoda-auto.com] [TV ad] ->

So my question... Why the hell aren't these vehicles offered in the United States?! If there's any place in the world that needs fuel-efficient vehicles, it's here. So why aren't they here? Why does America seem to be the only place where personal cars which get less than 20 miles to the gallon (8.5 km/l, or 11.76 l/100km as is the popular measure in Europe) are hyped?