August 2006

Why do I have a sudden impulse to vid Deadwood to a Coldplay song?

No! Bad fan!

Credits! Trumpets of Pomposity! Flashbacks! Last night, I had a sour apple margarita, and now we’re ready for part two of the original Pegasus episodes.

“You’re finished, Adama!” Baltar has yellow teeth. He cackles maniacally, and rather convincingly. The cylons retreat! Adama asks Cain to land the fighters on the Pegasus, since the landing bays on Galactica are in flames.

At the meeting, on Galactica (sure fixed the landing bays fast, didn’t we?) Cain insists on his original plan - attack the base on Gamoray. Everyone argues fine points of strategy - Apollo, Tigh, Adama. Back in his office, with just the two commanders, Adama worries that the tanker incident will happen again - he doesn’t want any more surprises from Cain. His wooly eyebrows jut out in a particularly concerned way. But, there’s no other choice but to go with Cain’s plan.

Cassie finds Cain in the corridor and she emotes at him, wants to go with him, but he won’t let her. I guess that’s the last of the relationship conflict. We won’t see Cain again, from the way this is headed.

Sheba and one other Pegasus pilot are assigned by Cain to the ground crew. Apparently I’m the only one who can see what Cain is doing? Starbuck makes a pass at Sheba that goes nowhere - one of his better attempts, actually. They’re packing up to go. Why a ground crew? I have no idea. Apparently it takes a ground crew to do whatever it is they’re doing.

Cassie finds them and proves that I’m not the only one who sees what Cain is doing - she insists he doesn’t intend to come back from this. She also decides she’s going to go with the ground crew as their med tech. Sheba insists she’s right and Cain isn’t coming back, but Apollo overrides her and insists we’re going to follow orders.

A shuttle takes the group down, and they parachute into the capital city of Gamoray, firing as they come down. They run around in the dark firing at centurions. Starbuck says they’re taking out anti-assault batteries - oh, that’s why they did this! Guess I missed that.

A cylon is giving a speech about furthering the perfection of the cylon race. The bombs our team set are going off, and the cylons start scrambling. Starbuck in his black leather/pleather/vinyl stealth suit climbs up into the control room with Boomer and shoots a bunch and pitches a bomb, and they bug out.

Apollo and Sheba, delayed by a dramatic moment with a wounded Bojay, arrive just as the control room blows up. Oh.

Cylons are lurching out into the street just in time to be blown up by vipers. Civilian cylons apparently wear face masks like kabuki performers and satin robes with hoods. They appear to wear uncomfortable shoes, judging from the way they walk before being shot.

Baltar and his Rubber Jowls want to attack the fleet. Lucifer informs him that Imperious Leader is on Gamoray, and that IL no doubt will think ill of him for letting the fleet Baltar was sent to destroy have their way with Gamoray.

The fuel depot is secured and the tankers are sent in. The ground force takes off in the shuttle - who’s going to protect the tankers? They land on Pegasus because Cassie insists Bojay is hurt badly and needs attention asap. Starbuck and Cassie exchange words - she still can’t make up her mind.

Apollo argues with Cain - again, Cain’s changed up and is going after the four - three? - base stars and Baltar. He reminds Cain that Sheba will be going into battle too. So he goes looking for her, and Sheba is in sickbay where apparently Cassie is the only person there other than Bojay, and where is the Pegasus doctor? Sheba walks away from Cain, and he looks at Cassie and goes after Sheba. Sobby scene, goodbye dear dada, yadda yadda.

Everyone takes off in their vipers. They clear a corridor through the fighters and go right through, with Pegasus right behind. Baltar misinterprets and decides on a strategy based on what he thinks they’re doing, not what they’re actually doing. He thinks Pegasus is a decoy.

Pegasus is on fire, under attack, and darn if it doesn’t look like exactly the same footage as when the Galactica was on fire. Baltar orders the cylons away to Gamoray to protect the Imperious Leader, unintentionally giving the Pegasus a break to recover.

Sheba comes back wounded. At this point, it’s hard to keep track of who’s where, and why, but it’s looking like Apollo is taking the wounded back to the fleet because he knows what Cain is planning.

Adama contacts Cain, as all men in his family are apparently mindreaders, and orders Cain to come back — Cain tells him the wounded and nonessential personnel are on the way and he’s gonna do what he’ll do and you can’t stop me Adama, neener neener.

Baltar’s fuming over ‘what is he doing WHAT WHAT’ and Lucifer is miles ahead of him — it’s Cain. And Baltar realizes it’s not gonna be fun, and demands all fighters come back. So much for protecting Imperious Leader.

Cain is psychic and knows the cylon fighters are on the way back, and so tells Starbuck he’s not sticking around - he’s going back and Cain’s going forward, and that’s that.

Sheba, going by on a gurney on the way to a shuttle, begs her daddy to let her stay in a manner more like a four year old than a twentysomething fighter pilot.

With the shuttles and extraneous personnel gone, Cain waves around his pokey stick and struts around his bridge, and orders the ‘electronic defense shields’ to maximum power. Plug in fresh D cells, guys, we’ve got to deflect lasers!

Oh look, there goes Apollo and Starbuck disobeying orders. Surprise, Surprise. Let’s watch them each take on a base star. And win. What good fortune, to be cast regulars and therefore invulnerable.

Pegasus launches missles, which look like nukes rising from silos until you see the base stars, when the missles seem to morph into huge orange energy beams. Am very confused now. Guess I know how the special effects folks must have felt.

Adama, Apollo and Starbuck visit Sheba in sickbay and welcome her to the family, since Cain’s vanished into the depths of space. Or something. Did Cain survive to chew more scenery and whack people with his silver-tipped pokey stick? Guess we’ll never know.

“Tomkitten’s” ‘first poop’ goes on display in New York - Yahoo! News

Like, WHY?

As it turns out, it’s possible to burn half a spindle of DVD-R disks before discovering that the Powerbook just doesn’t like that brand. There’s nothing wrong with my laptop that buying different media won’t fix.

I’m about half done with the inventory at Geekfarm. I was pulling out hundreds of tools from a messy pile on a floor-level shelf when my phone rang - my friend, when told what I was doing, said ‘So you’re rearranging a closet?’ When I stopped laughing I told her it was more of a high-ceilinged room full of shelves and boxes from floor to ceiling, and that the boxes on top were actually blocking out the fluorescent lighting. I’ve had to be extra careful as the piles are so disorganized it’s possible to run across a hand saw without realizing it. As I demonstrated today. Luckily it had a sleeve on the blade.

Wednesday, I will be counting IDE ribbon cables. Also CPU fans and heat sinks, and bags and bags and boxes of zip ties and patch cables and BNC cables and connectors. Aren’t you jealous?

Tomorrow, I will be putting the finishing touches on my room - I rearranged the furniture, which was about the only way to get things clean. The back of my desk had an inch of cat hair clinging to it.

I have still not gotten my diploma, nor have I had one phone call to set up an interview. I am enduring lots of questions from well-meaning people - ‘how are you marketing yourself? how are you at interviews?’ I DON’T KNOW, I CAN’T TALK TO ANYONE - ALL I DO IS LEAVE VOICEMAIL. PLEASE STOP NAGGING ME ABOUT THINGS I CAN’T CONTROL. THX. BUH-BYE.

Sore subject, yes. ‘Marketing yourself’ at this point is essentially spamming the world with resumes and eager cover letters. No one has a budget for novice interns.

I will be offline for an undetermined number of hours/days, as the Powerbook is going in to be looked at. The haphazard rejection of blank DVDs and some not-blank ones has me thinking the drive might be doing what so many other Superdrives have done, ie. going bad. With about six months of Apple Care left, I can get this looked at. There’s finally a local authorized service I can use.

In the meantime, I’m leaving you with Far Afield (see above links), a very-first-drafty Captain and Counselor/Voyager crossover, and also a time travel story, and also very likely a J/C story, because watching most of Voyager in a minimal amount of time has me thinking about it again.

See you in a few hours/days.

Someone moved into the complex with a wildly-screaming sprog. This is not doing anything for my already shaky ability to concentrate. It starts about six in the morning and continues to happen randomly throughout the day, as the kid protests some one thing or another.

My neighbor with whom we share a wall has three kids, one of whom apparently likes to bang on the wall. I rearranged my furniture so they aren’t banging directly over my head at night, which is when it gets bad.

Kids. Hmph. I’m not likely to see any of them in my family - adopted nephew is already a teenager, and it’s not looking like sis in law is slowing down any time soon. She’s working her way through to be a nurse. I’m certainly not going to have any, as in a few months I will have hit the magic threshold beyond which having kids only increases the odds of all manner of defect, and I’m not a gambler. Nor am I sufficiently paired with any entity who will assist me in raising one. Roommate offered to buy me a bookcase for a graduation present, but that’s not in the same league with 18 years of nurturing and lunch money and clothes and college fund building.

I will probably continue to work with them, however, which is fine with me. I’m told I’m pretty good with kids. To which I think, yeah, I know when they’re going home. I can work with anyone as long as I know when they’re going home. Even Evil Bosses. Who, in retrospect, are a whole lot like kids - impulsive, demanding, loud…. No wonder I’m good with kids.

Today I shipped back a defective video/alarm device. This sounds simple. Box it, label it, call for pickup. It was not simple.

Firstly, it was picked up in the store in the LA area by Boss. He handed it to me and wrote out a list of projects including ’set up DVR for H.’ So I took the DVR, which is a metal case enclosing a removable drive bay and a system board with a couple of cables, and the hard drive, garden-variety 120GB IDE device, and followed the instructions in the manual.

The thing didn’t give me a menu. I swapped the hard drive to the other location with the other setting - no menu. I swapped the whole works to a different monitor. Then I called tech support, who walked me through the whole thing again and said “exchange it for a different/new one.”

Okay, well, that does it for this project for the day. But wait! I don’t know what shipper we use, nor do I have account numbers. A call to Boss reveals that we have an account with !Shipper, and I should call them. Which I do. No, I don’t have a preprinted label. “hmmm. hold please.” *canned music* “I’ll have the driver bring you a label. Write this on it.”

A call to Store, and I have to explain to two different people what’s wrong and why they should exchange it. “We’ll test it when it gets here.” Okay, lady, you’ll see. There’s not much to it — if you plug it in and there’s no menu, something’s wrong. There’s a whole single board in the thing - it’s pretty obvious it’s something to do with that board. I could sit here plugging it in and unplugging it and it would do the same thing each time. I know - I tried it about two dozen times already.

So. With RMA number and shipper arranged, I set about packaging it. So far, it’s taken an hour of fiddling about with swapping parts and doing it over with tech support, and another half hour of horrible hold music and repeated begging to get to this point. Aaaand the box falls apart when I pick it up by the handle. It’s a sort of clamshell thing, and the bottom pulls apart if you do anything too strenuous, like… pick it up. I can’t ship it this way. I need a box big enough to hold it. For an hour I search — through the inventory room where none of the boxes are the right dimensions, through the junk room which is keyboards and monitors and hardly anything boxed, and then to the neighbor’s to beg for something. I wind up cutting and taping and making my own box, which looks like crap and isn’t too stable. I return to the junk room and… wait. There’s an old computer box in the corner I didn’t notice before. Sure enough, the styrafoam wedges that used to cushion an HP Pavilion work just swell in cushioning this fall-apart retail packaging.

Half the day is now gone.

I spend the rest of the day trying to build a computer for another video surveillance project. All I need is a case that works with the parts. I find, in the labyrinth of boxed cases and flotsam and jetsam in the inventory room, a full tower with an appropriate power supply, and I’m prepping it, pulling out drive bays and setting up the risers to put in the main board and organizing all the parts and dusting it out, and hey! there’s a hard drive for it in stock, and we even have cd drives handy. I know we have power cables because I only counted all 78 of them last week. Everything’s spiffy until I realize… the back panel of the mobo doesn’t fit. The small rectangular opening where the outputs are is too small. The motherboard won’t sit right because the panel won’t go in. A WHOLE .5 CENTIMETER ruined this.

ARRRRRRRrrrrrg.

Boss isn’t too upset. I’m the only one bothered by my inefficiency. But, ARRRRg.

Some days, you just want to take a power saw to life.

I’ve recovered enough from the last round to pick up where I left off with… BSG Old Skool Reviews! Good grief. You’d think I would learn.

We have Lloyd Bridges starring as Commander Cain in this round. John Colicos and his rubbery Phlox-like jowls are of course starring as Baltar.

Go, vipers! Go Apollo! Go Starbuck! uh oh. Someone’s snuck up behind our friends and started shooting. You know, it looks like another viper. Two. Confusion all the way around. Finally someone recognizes someone else and they fly off to land on the Pegasus. Apollo won’t shut up as ordered. He’s busy exclaiming over the wow-ness of it all.

Back at the fleet, they’re out of gas. Okay, Tylium, but yeah. And they’re picking up… civilian cylon transmissions? What’s the difference between a cylon civilian and a cylon centurion? Maybe civilian cylons have interchangable face plates? LED jackets? Bluetooth connectivity and optional MP3 player features?

Starbuck and Apollo walk into a dramatically dark room and meet Cain, who’s about as arrogant as any narcissistic CEO you’ll find. He tells them they’re going on the offensive against the cylons. Apollo’s a little agog. So am I.

Galactica picks up Pegasus and can’t figure it out. Until the signal comes in and Cain is calling Adama an old war daggit. ???? He’s not quite furry enough, but all righty then. A shuttle brings him right on over and much swaggering and hugging and cheering ensue. Adama’s having a bit of shock and awe. After the cheering dies down and Adama and Cain talk privately we find that Cain wants to take on a cylon base called Gamoray (an evil part of my brain is now singing, “when a guy hits Colonel Tigh with a big pizza pie that’s Gamor-aaaayyy”).

Scene change - Cain asks Starbuck and Apollo to help him locate the love of his life. He plays a 3D image of Cassie saying, “help me obi-w — ” No, bad fan! She’s saying “come back real soon, you old war daggit.” And then he asks if they’ve met his daughter Sheba, and plays a bit of Sheba wishing her dad a happy birthday. WHYYYYY? There is no point, other than Cain forcing family vids on them. They’ve met her. She nearly shot them down.

Starbuck goes to talk to Cassie, and thinks she’s going to have to let the old guy down easy, but when he finally spits out the message, she whirls and races out. How she finds Cain I’m not sure - maybe there’s a neon sign outside his door? They snuggle and huggle and cuddle and confess great angst and missing you and she’s all glowy. And she tells him Starbuck is in love with her, and she needs time to think. She didn’t say ‘I’m in love with Starbuck.’ Hmmmmmm. So, Starbuck’s the substitute, perhaps not as dear to her as the Big Man Cain?

Starbuck, meanwhile, is talking to Apollo about it. He’s all nervous about the situation, but denies any intent to marry or whatever, and also says she wouldn’t marry Cain, and who cares? Not Starbuck. Uh huh.

Boxey perks up when Starbuck leaves - “poor starbuck, well, at least he’s still got Athena. And Miriam, and — ” Apollo’s a bit aghast that a kid who’s all of eight could possibly have noticed all the chicks Starbuck hangs out with. Like, you couldn’t miss it - even a blind man walking around without a guide daggit would bump into one or three of them wimmen. Srsly.

Sheba’s bragging about all the bases they’ve knocked out. Apollo’s all insistent that their upfront tactics won’t work for the fleet cause they have lots of civilians to protect. Sheba’s as argumentative and arrogant as her daddy. Who arrives just a few minutes later with Cassie, and Sheba gets upset and runs out. Aw, grown daughter doesn’t like dad hanging out with a hooker. Okay, former hooker. But given the timeline it’s pretty sure she was one when they first hooked up, unless the canon’s been rearranged and she was supposedly a nurse back then instead.

The commanders try to agree on a plan of action - Cain wants to do it with just his warriors, Adama wants to merge squadrons. Tigh and Adama are all gaga about this guy. Apollo tries to console his Pa by saying everyone admires him and respects him just the same and Adama sort of does the accept-it-and-brush-off thing before seeing him off.

Sheba argues with her daddy as he’s sitting in a viper - don’t go, too risky, no, it won’t be — geeze, this sounds a little like Star Trek where the first officer and the captain argue over the mission and whether it’s safe for the captain. Cain wins. Apollo and Boomer are among the vipers flying toward the base, and suddenly Cain is changing plans right and left, claiming he can ‘feel’ the enemy and knows what’s really happening, and Apollo’s not happy - but what can you do? They fly into some sort of cloud. Apollo finds the tanker they’re after, then another, then cylons come in fighting.

Cain’s all swooping around shooting cylons. He sends blue squadron (the Galactica contingent) after some fighters veering away, and Cain destroys the tankers while they’re gone. Sheba helps him. He denies knowledge of where the tankers went. Back with Adama, he blames the situation on mixing the two squadrons together. Now he’s saying they need to go after the base, since the tanker thing didn’t work out. Adama orders him off - he wants to work on a battle plan right away, but Adama holds firm, and won’t let Apollo complain after the meeting either. Adama just stands there and stares him down until he leaves.

He finds Sheba and she says the tankers were caught in crossfire and it was accidental. He doesn’t believe it. Sometimes, Apollo can be smart!

Cain insists his plan will work. Adama wants to split the Pegasus’ fuel among the fleet and make it somewhere they can get more fuel without tangling with the enemy. Argue, bitch, moan - but in this version Adama is also the President. Cain then insists upon carrying out the mission anyway. Adama confronts him on the tankers. He doesn’t deny it but froths that they must take Gamoray! (evil brain! stop singing!) Adama repeats orders and furthermore puts Tigh in command of the Pegasus. Oooooo. Lookit them balls! That’ll teach Cain to tap Adama on the chest with his silver-tipped pokey stick.

Cain goes drinking. Sheba arrives and tells him she and the men will follow him wherever he goes. He says he knows what they mean, but no mutiny - he won’t pull out and leave civilians defenseless. Hmm, changing your tune much?

Baltar and his Rubber Cheeks strut and brag about how complete their victory will be to Lucifer the Christmas Tree Light Cylon in Red Lame. He says ‘Gamoray’ about fifty times, and my brain won’t quit singing…. Ugh. Oh, saved by the centurion who interrupts them. Baltar decides in a moment of supreme hubris that he will lead the strike force to destroy the fleet. He grins, turns around, and takes out a wall with his cheeks. Well, not really - but it could happen.

A shuttle docks on the Pegasus and Tigh is in charge. Lt. WoodenMan informs him of bad feelings against him aboard ‘this ship’ = Tigh informs him that Adama’s will be done, forget feelings.

The Pegasus fighter pilots are blocking the way, however, and for some reason it’s Apollo’s trying to reason with them, tell them Adama’s the fleet leader, and threatens to pull… a tape recorder? but when he yanks it out, it’s a ray gun. Huh. And the red alert sounds, and everyone runs off.

Adama announces the presence of the largest task force he’s seen since the destruction of Caprica - he gets a ‘you were right’ from Cain and he tells Cain he needs his ‘tactical wizardry.’ Cain exits to head for his battlestar, saucy and willing.

Baltar’s cheeks hardly fit in his helmet, as he grins and flies a cylon ship toward the fleet. And then vipers launch, and Cain heads for home, and all his people cheer madly when they hear him inform Tigh he needs to leave now, don’t let the door hit him on the way out.

Galactica fires at the cylon raiders and the vipers come in to show off the same stock footage we’ve seen in every episode so far. Guns shoot, explosions happen, and once more the landing bay’s on fire. Baltar’s plan seems to consist of burning out the landing bay so the vipers can’t refuel, then flying the vipers around until they’re dead in space. Which the cylons could probably have done before now, but it’s more dramatic at this point, when Cain can sweep in and save the day.

Baltar is all ‘wooo! we’re winning! we’re about to destroy the last battlestar!’ and the centurion deadpans that maybe he should look over here at the other battlestar. Baltar’s slow on the uptake - he thinks the centurion means Galactica. Then he looks, and says ‘that’s impossible’ and the centurion says ‘no, that is a battlestar.’ That’s a great line- for once, I believe the cylon is actually a machine/android. Baltar pulls a great ‘oh shit’ face, and ‘to be continued’ flashes across the screen.

Please insert margarita to continue.

I have decided that the only thing to do is move parts of one WIP into another.

The transplant will require some significant rewriting, of course, but I think that it will improve both stories immensely. It will make one WIP much shorter, and the other much more cohesive and complete.

In other news, I have so far in my time at Geekfarm, counted system components, drank too much soda, and run across a software package that will not total the items you enter unless the video resolution is just right. The mind reels at the stupidity of programming so that the math doesn’t work at 800×600, or 1024×1024.

In other other news, no interviews, no calls returned. Grr. Arg.

Cast of Characters:

RM: Roommate
ME: Lori, fixer of computers
LT: Laptop of DOOM
BSOD: BLUE SCREEN OF DEEEEEATH
MS: Microsoft, purveyor of inadequate error messages

Act 1

Enter: BSOD!!!!!! MUHUHAHAHAHA! ::munches loudly::
RM: Oh no! My nice new laptop given to me by my whole nice family for my birthday! Woe! And I didn’t even save the game!
LT: eeeeeeEEEEEEE ::blink:: ::crash::
ME: Well, shoot. ::reboot, insert diagnostic cd::

– a year passes –

ME: ::reads another book as chkdsk ticks slowly through its verification of the hard drive::

– another year passes –

ME: ::watches memory test crawl through its sequence, reads another book::

– another year passes —

ME: Time to reboot.
BSOD: HAHAHAHAHAAAAA! NOT SO FAST! BEHOLD, CRYPTIC ERROR CODES THAT COULD MEAN ANYTHING FROM BAD HARDWARE TO BAD DRIVERS TO BAD SOFTWARE!
ME: Geeze. Where’s the little icon of Windows twirling its mustache?

Act 2

ME: ::inserts XP disk, reboots:: Let’s see if it can repair you.
LT: Oh, hey! watch me boot to the CD! No Problemo!
ME: I’ll go look up the BSOD codes while I wait. On my Powerbook. Well… yes. It could be anything. Still. Guess I need to work on it some more. Finished rebooting?
LT: I want to run chkdsk again!
RM: Oh no! the screen is blue!
ME: That doesn’t mean anything at this point, it’s running chkdsk again. It may be done sometime today.
RM: Guess I didn’t want to get that proposal done today either.
LT: ::thinks really really really hard, increases another percent toward done::
ME: ::takes shower, reads blogs, edits webpage for a while, watches hummingbird family feeding outside, drinks another cup of tea, writes fic for a while, edits another one, returns to check on progress::
LT: Look, another ten percent!
ME: Sigh.

Act 3

RM: AH! BLUE!
ME: That’s the sky. Relax.
LT: Hey, I finally finished and rebooted! I’m working again!
ALL: YAAAAY!
Error message: Boo! I don’t work!
ME: ::removes AOL:: No. You don’t.
RM: Hey, I was getting error messages from that before.
ME: I suspect we may have solved the issue. It would appear not to be hardware, and now that AOL is gone it should speed up the system in general and make the world a better place. Would you like a tombstone for your AOL?
RM: No thanks. Would you like a margarita?
ME: Does Windows crash?
::canned laughter::

THE END

I’m not sure, but it appears to be.

the new fic site?

I think I like the aggregation of everything in one long tree. By category. The link to the image on the archive page appears broken, but it’s a rotating image script with a flaw in it that I’m trying to fix. Every hour there should be a different image from my library, but something in the script goes “boink” every time. I’m doing research into php and textile.

Also, not all the fic is there yet. Also, still figuring out special codes, like italics and so forth - textile does things differently, but it’s a matter of search and replace to fix. But it’s like a blog, only not, and with a few tweaks it will be ready for public consumption.

… with a calypso beat. It was the soundtrack of my day. We were trying to recover files from a hard drive that did this 10-15 times, paused, did it again, etc. for as long as the power was on.

Also, cleared two shelves of inventory and crap, separating the two — inventory to orderly piles/boxes/shelves, crap into disorderly boxes.

Also, the blog must have been down for a while. Thanks, random MySQL error.

Also, fixed the PDA that Geekfarm assigned to me. Pocket PC - not fun. Found free games for the Pocket PC. Hopefully it will stop having random Windows system errors long enough to play them.

Also, five pages of fic yesterday, and two today.

Also, tired.

No interviews. No calls. Bleh.

For the fourth or fifth (losing count these days) time in my life, I’m deciding to ignore the news sites and news radio and news on tv. They found JonBenet’s killer, and now it’s going to turn US news media into an endless cycle of specials, bulletins, and 24/7 coverage that borders on assault.

I do not need to hear about the guy in intimate detail. I don’t need to hear about his history as a sex offender, his spotty job performance, his habit of eating kittens for lunch, his horrible childhood, his bad wardrobe choices or his ex-wife’s testimonial as to his impotence or general inability to be a man. I do not need to hear the neighbors he’s had in the past 20 years exclaiming that he was ’such a nice man.’ I do not need to hear townspeople exclaiming how they suspected it was him because x, y and z. I do not need to hear from the police who found him nekkid in a back alley in Bangkok with a child prostitute. I do not need to know his favorite website was Myspace, he was left-handed, he was Republican, he was OMG! feeling so guilty! never would have hurt her! I do not need to hear endless jokes and top ten lists. I do not need to see his face photoshopped into images or videos. I do not need to see endless posting across the internet as to how he should be punished, whether beheading is too good for the SOB or whether he’s just sick and misunderstood.

I only needed to know he’s been caught. I’m actually relieved, for the dad’s sake.

Now can we move on to catch some other child-killer?

Note: I don’t know that any of this is true. Some details I’ve seen mentioned in blurbs, the rest I made up, but I really don’t know. Because I don’t want to. Because I have better things to do than waste energy sharing yet another cultural obsession.

Either way, I won’t be participating in the bread and circuses.

After many redesign-no-don’t thoughts about my website —

which, y’know, takes my mind off such dire thoughts as “I will never find a job in my field WAAAA!” –

I hit upon an evil scheme. I have yet to discover the hideous consequence embedded in this scheme, but I’m sure there is one. Something along the lines of breaking every link on the site, perhaps. Stranding half the stories in limbo, perhaps. Losing some file or deleting a mysterious directory that hasn’t been changed since 2003 only to find that it was the one critical piece of the whole works.

Anyway, the evil scheme? Install Textpattern and tweak the thing until it looks the way I want and contains all the fic and stuff, then add a few redirects and wait for error messages to pop up, then add more redirects, until people are retrained on how to find the fic. I can update where I know there are recs or links (seriously, there are maybe six of these places, and they show up in my web stats). I don’t have a lot of files, and could probably keep the old static pages up as well, just in case. At least for a while.

Why would I do all this? Why not? I keep threatening to learn more about web design and whatnot. I keep thinking I’ll redesign the static pages. Part of me says ‘what’s wrong with them? they’re portable and they’re uncomplicated.’ But if there’s one thing I’m really good at, it’s complicating things. And anything’s portable.

Today, I decided to migrate my site to some sort of content managing software, thinking it would simplify the whole process if I could a) cut and b) paste and c) click a button that would immediately post the Big Wad of Text to the internet without my having to match all the little code widgets with the little slash that turns ‘em off, miss a squillion, then have to comb through the pages looking for the missing thingie.

I should probably sound more technical than that when discussing my revamp of the Geekfarm’s website, shouldn’t I?

Anyway, when I came back from my reality check (me? revamp? BWA! that would be work!) I then decided to actually do some job searching. Which I do every day without fail, really, what with being underemployed and all. So I hit the major job search sites, signed up for yet another bot that will email me jobs that match my criteria, altered a bot I had set up at Huge HMO’s site so it would stop sending me nursing job ops, and twenty minutes later I’d sent another resume and moved on to a glass of tea and some serious reorganization of my iTunes folder.

And then I read some fic, and totally fell for the author’s site — wow. I could make my site that organized and wonderful and easy to use. So now I’m staring at instructions on how to do that. But I can guarantee that now that the LJ feed is fixed, I will look at the complexities involved and say, uh, Self, y’all’s crazy. And I might have a fic done soon at this rate.

If I can quit playing Civilization IV. Man. It’s great to be queen!

ADHD? Only since I got the internet. Seriously, every five minutes it’s something else. I used to be able to focus well enough to read WHOLE BOOKS in a sitting. I am so jealous of my younger self.

Daily Show - Aasif Mandvi

To the person who has tried and tried to restart the car outside in the lot, like, 2,000,000 times:

TOW. TRUCK.

It’s not starting. The starter turns over. The engine doesn’t.

CLUE.

You have my sympathies with the bum car thing, really, but there is nothing more annoying than LISTENING TO YOU try to start a car that WON’T. You’ve heard that definition of insanity, where it’s “trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results” — please learn from it.

Get Triple A.

No love,
your neighbor

Potter’s “Prince” Set for Thanksgiving ‘08 - Yahoo! News

I’m confused. The first line of the article is “Muggles have something to be thankful for next year.”

In reference to a movie coming out in 2008? Is Dr. Who going to drive us all to the premier next Thanksgiving?

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager (via Neil Gaiman’s blog)

I was popular in the 60’s and 70’s, but not so much anymore.

And I see no one names kids Helga or Dudley anymore, unless they’re writing a book. Heh.

I was reading a column at Bookslut, The Spy Who Didn’t Suck, and thinking about series– specifically, ones spawned by a single creator who does the writing which then gets turned into movie versions by others, or not, and then the whole series goes down in history like the Narnia books or James Bond or Nancy Drew. Or V.C. Andrews, whose books haven’t been written by V.C. since s/he died but continue to run her name on the cover.

If you were writing a series that saw wild success, how would you feel about the notion that, on the event of your death, someone else would not only pick up where you left off, they were going to finish works in progress? It’s not precisely the same thing as fanfic, which some authors don’t mind and largely ignore while others go batshit insane lambasting ficcers with letters from attorneys. Fanfic is like looking at set characters through a kaliedescope, with hundreds of versions that may or may not be similar to the original; there’s no question really that the originals exist elsewhere. Characters would be reinvented by another person and that would be canon.

How attached to your original characters are you? Would you care if your son (like Christopher Tolkein) published all your drafts and notes? Or wrote more adventures of Mary Sue?

Over the weekend Roommate decided it was time to hit the road, and so I climbed in his small Honda SUV and rode with him to Yosemite, land of really long lines at the park entrance and really big buses of tourists. A hundred or so miles later (a heartbeat in California terms) we reached Hetch Hetchy via long narrow roads built before Tahoes and Hummers were a part of the landscape. And roads in the 30’s would follow the contour of the land, rather than cut through hills and mountains, so switchbacks and digressions were the order of the day. It took around 40 minutes to travel the 16 miles of road in to see the lake.

There’s a movement to restore the Hetch Hetchy valley. The dam was built in the early 1900s and John Muir, among others, protested — it was already a park at that point. If you look at photos of the original valley, you see something not unlike Yosemite Valley itself — huge granite cliffs and a river winding through a gorgeous broad valley. (The photos are black and white, but still.) I can see why people want to do it, but the opposing side says this lake is part of SF’s watershed and needs to continue to exist. There are signs and patrolling rangers to keep you from swimming in the lake, watering your animals in the lake, or otherwise tainting all those gallons of water that will end up in some San Franciscan’s drinking glass.

We hiked part of the way around it, about two miles out and back, to a falls where we found a shady spot under a huge boulder to sit at the foot of the waterfall and drink gatorade. I, of course, sweat away my sunscreen and had to borrow Roommate’s hat for the return trip.

I managed to whack my forehead with the door of his SUV. Lovely knot over my right eye. And then, much to my consternation, I left my Ray-Bans in the restroom at the lake, and realized it only when we’d driven all the way out to the highway, and as they were hundred dollar glasses and a Christmas gift we went allllll the way back and found them right where I’d left them as I changed out of grimy stinky hiking clothes — on the toilet tank in the end stall.

Sunday was quiet and productive, in that I cleaned like a madwoman. And then burnt up my battery charger. If you hear sizzling and smell cooking synthetic material, don’t dismiss it as a dream like I did. When I finally got up to look for whatever it was, I found one toasted rechargeable AA battery and a melted charger. Close call. I don’t understand what that was about, but good deal that I was home to prevent the eventual incineration of the apartment.

I wrote lots yesterday in between cleaning projects. I need to continue writing lots. It’s good for me. I actually find myself looking forward to the week.

PLEASE stop trying to make me crazy.

The next time you want to randomly stop accepting blank disks and then just as randomly start eating them for breakfast, I will be one click away from buying a Macbook I cannot afford. Or, possibly, a 17″ Powerbook refurb.

Feh.

I put the unfinished but much-edited Home in a Handbasket back up for public viewing.

The muse has once again jumped off on another story - I have three WIPs that are all related to one another. To finish one, I need to finish all of them.

Why do I do this to myself?

Your problem is, the problem is never the problem.

It’s been a constant, in therapy and at Geekfarm, that people will come in and say, “My problem is A.” Inevitably, I research that problem and find it to be sort of true, or sort of not, and talk to the client about it, and as the person is walking out the door (in the case of Geekfarm, walking out with the computer), he/she will say something like “it was also Y, did you fix that?”

Uh, you said the problem was A. Not Y. Don’t expect me to know your songs vanished from your iPod when you plugged it in, or to magically fix the issue, when you A) did not mention it and B) did not bring in the iPod and C) in fact you brought in your Office install disks, which I did not need, thereby proving that you really didn’t know what you meant when you described the problem.

Likewise, if you say to me “I keep arguing with my husband” and get annoyed when I ask you a series of questions designed to diagnose what, exactly, is going on and the results come up “looks like bipolar,” don’t get all shirty about my suggestion that you keep track of when the arguments happen and see if it’s not when you’re feeling very UP or very DOWN, and that you speak to a psychiatrist to discuss medicine that might stabilize your moods and prevent you from gambling away the house or sleeping with the pool boy at the Y, all his friends, and half the local football team. The problem is not the arguing at that point. The problem is your inability to face up to your symptoms. You came to someone for an objective, clinical perspective. Stop spitting at me.

Of the two career paths, computer stuff actually starts to look less complicated, doesn’t it? But a coworker failed the MCP exam the other day, and when I think about all the exams it would take to make it in the computer world, I get a headache and long for a chat with a bipolar person.

The problem is a symptom, not the problem. Like the computer I was working on yesterday that wouldn’t install antivirus software — ten minutes of geeking tracked it to improperly installed Windows. Typically, repairing the installation via the XP install menu didn’t work due to wackiness with the key/registration, and left me in endless reboot-restart-glitch-reboot mode. All the splash screens announcing how easy to use XP is get really annoying when you’re trying to install it for the tenth time. The problem is not the person, or the hard drive, but the hideous paranoid copyright crap M$ does to be certain no one pirates their software.

In short - the problem might really be the problem, or it might be a symptom, or you might think you understand what that little error message meant but clearly your command of the Microcrap Help Language is lacking. Yes, it does require telepathy sometimes. No, you can’t have any of my magic beans. Next time mention all the error messages up front and I’ll chat with the little metal box in more detail.

(This ‘you’ of which I speak is not ‘you who read the blog,’ but ‘you who can’t figure out where the CD goes and think the mouse with the really long tail doesn’t need to be plugged in.’ In other words, I’m venting, oh yes.)