September 2006

I drove 200 miles (plus a lengthy side trip) today. I submitted an app to another county mental health and all of a sudden, three calls in two days for interviews. Of course, I called two back and got one interview, no callback, and the third was a message left on the home phone while I was driving to the first interview.

It was a decent interview - I think I acquited myself well, although you know I spent the drive home thinking of what I could have said instead and/or in addition to. I stopped off to visit a friend who’d moved that direction a couple years back - she bought me dinner and we yakked a while about what we’d been doing lately.

And now I have to go back. There appears to be a number of positions available in various departments - it’s just a question of who they pick for what positions.

Roommate, just to be nice that way, loaned me his nice new Honda for the trip so I’d arrive in cool, unrumpled style rather than windblown and hot after two hours in the Car of No AC. I could get used to that. Although, it took a lot more gas to fill his mini-SUV than my Saturn. Still, it got really good mileage, even after I wandered through miles of orchards and fields.

There comes a time in every live-together relationship when you want nothing more than to break something over the head of the other party.

Roommate tends to get really short and snippy and hissy when he’s really focusing on something he’s doing on the computer. So I’ve pretty much stopped trying to talk to him then, instead saving things for tv time, as he’s generally watching something on dvd and those can be paused.

I, too, get snippy when focused on something on the computer. Especially when it’s bills, balancing the checkbook, or some iffy online application that has hideous inconsistent cooperation with my attempts to fill it in.

So what happens? He gets back from four days of incessant relaxation and computer gaming at his brother’s house, and I’m getting home. He’s all bubbly and talkative, and I’m focused on two things. Paying bills, and filling out an application that MUST be mailed tomorrow.

RM: *boing boing boing* sohowwasyourweekend!
Me: *updating financial software* grrrrr. fine.
RM: Did you (endless stream of things I didn’t hear)?
Me: *glare, opens application*
RM: I blah blah blah — You’re not listening, are you?
Me: *stares at pile of open bills, stares at open job application on screen, looks at RM* Do you actually listen when I talk to you while you’re doing this stuff?
RM: Oh. I’m ordering pizza for us. *zzzoooom*

Happily, we both have a license to grump at each other, without getting all wounded and whimpery about it.

Unfortunately, the neighbor’s kids started screaming when Roommate left the room, and I can’t growl at them.

I bet you don’t even remember this movie.

I bet I won’t remember it tomorrow.

Lots of pretty scenery, lots of actors in warpaint and/or grubby clothing, minimal dialogue, lots of voiceovers, and did I mention the scenery? I nearly fell asleep in the opening credits.

I have deleted Office. Yes, I dragged that folder to the trash, buh bye, no more half-a$$ed grammar checker trying to make meaningless sentences, no more accusations of piracy.

I have new software to do my bidding, and oh the joys of not having Word’s hideous code cluttering my hard drive!

Kiss my asterisk, M$.

No more bloatware!

Nude wet meat soil bandit caught | Metro.co.uk

And from the headline, you would expect… a guy stealing nude wet meat and maybe soil?

No. But it’s still pretty doggone weird.

Tonight I fixed Roommate’s sputtering laptop. Ever since he went through the two days of BSOD (that icky blue screen that causes reboots and crying), the sound in Windows has been stuttering and annoying. Reinstalling drivers didn’t work.

So I reinstalled XP. You have to boot from the cd, hit setup, wait for it to detect the installation you have, and repair the existing installation. (Don’t fall for the Recovery option - that will give you a command prompt.)

It took a long while but it came back up and the sound is fine. I just had to brutalize it into working.

I went to the local Sprint store. I must say that cell phone stores are an experience. I’ve always gotten mine online, so this was a first, but I wanted to know what my $$ would be getting me into.

Boy, what a bunch of toys. Like crackerjack prizes. Flimsy plasticy things that look like they should knock three digits off the price. Of course, you don’t really pay for the shell, you pay for the Bluetooth and the fancy MP3 ringtones and whatnot, but if the thing is going to ride around in the end pocket of my purse it shouldn’t scratch easy, nor should it be the size of a Cheerio.

Do I want a camera phone with video, with still, or no camera? Do I want speakerphone? What about web stuff? They all have web stuff, or at least they’re capable of it. Even if the screen is thumbnail-sized. One of them had a click wheel. Another had a hideous coloration, another had buttons I’d have to use a stickpin to press. The free phones seriously look like they belong in the hands of toddlers — icky pastel colors and totally cheap plastic.

I’m tossed between a nice matte-finish Motorola and another black phone with Bluetooth and a tiny display that shows who’s calling without opening the clamshell. But it’s a sure thing I’ll order on the web - activation is free that way. Which brings me to another thing - why they have stores at all. The place was totally empty, and the sales guy practically jumped into my arms. Distraction! Of course, he also had a really neat phone he could play games on, between customers.

A while back, I posted about Mellel, and the torture of Word deciding it wanted me to stop being a pirate. (Since Office is the only software other than Tiger that I paid money to install on my Mac, I find that funny in a sad, Microsoft-hating sort of way. Everything else came with the Powerbook or was free for downloading.)

Well, now that I have a nominal income, I can actually pay for some software. And I revisit Mellel, and go on a walkabout to look at other OS X friendly possibilities, only to find that it’s still pretty much Mellel, since the others have some not-so-happy-making features.

Pages (comes with iWork, sold by Apple) will save to PDF and a variety of other formats, but I dislike the way it handles documents.

AbiWord is free, runs in X11, but doesn’t seem to import/export doc files and has other limitations I dislike.

NeoOffice and OpenOffice… eh. Hate the interface.

Nisus Writer looks like Mellel, only doesn’t quite do everything and costs more money.

Mariner Write looks almost exactly like Word. Costs more than Mellel. I’d be more inclined to keep Word and pay nothing.

I suppose I could always move to something like LaTeX. At this point, though, I’m too tired to get totally geeked out and into learning something all over again. A word processor suits my time and energy better.

Which brings me back around to Mellel, which does everything including footnotes, bibliographies, outlines - not just in-text outlines, but an actual outline of the document you’re working on, for use in navigation - sections, tables, and all kinds of formatting and style-making and so forth. If I ever wanted to write for publication in the academic, non-fiction way, this would be the bee’s knees. And it would be just peachy for churning out a nice long complicated novel.

Tomorrow’s my supposed day off - I’ll be running errands and visiting my second semi-part-time-almost-job, and probably balancing my checkbook. At which point I’ll make the decision and press the paypal button.

The Big 40 Hour Training, which runs two eight hour days per week then one day the third week, is supposed to be all about domestic violence advocacy. Whether I’m interning at the local shelter or merely a volunteer, I intend to have something to do with it soon. It will help give my part-time-boring-job life meaning.

What I’m learning is a lot of stuff I already knew, plus a lot of stuff I didn’t, and not all of it has to do with domestic violence. For instance:

1. Alcohol is a poison, not a drug. Like so many other things we ingest, alcohol is in fact capable of killing us. It is not a drug because it does not affect the synapses. It affects the “soapy water” in the space between the dendrites in our nervous system, slowing the neurotransmitters and rendering the membranes between the different regions of the brain temporarily impermeable. Which is why our judgement suffers — the lobes of the brain that control things like reasoning, long term memory, and that little voice that says “I shouldn’t drive right now” are cut off from the “wooohooo!” lobe. Guess who wins. It’s possibly also why people black out. Stuff happens while under the control of your non-remembering brain. Stuff you will regret, probably. Coroners examining the membranes of the brain can tell a corpse belonged to a chronic alcoholic by noting the holes in said membranes — the brain is determined to function so punches holes in the constantly-impermeable stuff.

Drugs, on the other hand, affect either the transmitting or receiving ends of the dendrites, impacting the sensation of pain and pleasure and outside stimuli. Which is why I saw oozing purple blobs crawling on the wall when the doctor gave me vicodin. Suddenly, my nerve endings were getting all kinds of information that had nothing to do with reality.

Some heart medications aren’t drugs, but poisons with a side effect of altering the behavior of arteries and the heart tissue. Arsenic was a heart med until it was superceded by more effective treatments.

2. People have no clear grasp of relevance. I know I’m totally Ms. Tangent of the Year, myself, but I feel so much better after sitting in a room full of random access champs. Personal anecdotes flew, and neither proved or disproved or really had a lot to do with the point being made.

3. People have no grasp of word choice or meaning. One lady asked a question about masochists that had everyone sitting around with question marks floating overhead, until she elaborated a little and we realized she meant misogynists. I counted ten different uses of ‘loose’ for ‘lose’ in the powerpoint presentations.

4. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has more merit than I gave it credit for.

5. Attachment issues are key.

As a member of the Microsplerf Provider Outlet Geekfarm, I note with a certain … bad taste in my mouth the oncoming wave of Vista upgrades in our near(? who knows with M$?) future. Having seen the previews/promo crap, I have thoughts of becoming an unwashed hermit living under a bridge. Or possibly going back to basic clerical and pretending I have no knowledge of this thing called Winblows, excuse me, I need to answer the phone.

Already, the fun begins, in a conversation with Friend Who Moved Away via phone the other night.

FWMA: I hated Macs! I couldn’t figure out the Macs in the labs at school. blah blah blah confusing blah argh splutter.

Me: *thinking about all the ways Vista looks like Tiger* Uh huh.

FWMA: Remember when we took comp exams on them? I was so stressed out already! And then I clicked on something I thought would do blah, and it did bling, and I was all, AAAAH!

Me: *thinking about how I won’t want to answer the phone at Geekfarm ever again* Uh. huh. Tell you what - don’t ever get another computer.

FWMA: Whaaaaat?

Me: Use what you like - what you have right now, just the way it is. Transfer the hard drive to the next computer you get. Burn backups of it and keep them safe. Trust me. You’ll be happier.

Because people don’t like change. Think about how hard it is to give up something you like - soda, chocolate, ice cream - or start something new, like an exercise program. The litany, every time we read about another woman who’s spent a lifetime being abused, is “why doesn’t she leave?” Well, she doesn’t like change. That’s her normal. She’s going back to him because he’s the devil she knows. The next man might drink AND beat her AND beat the kids, not just beat her. We learn patterns of behavior and they stick like super glue. The effort to change eludes us — and in the case of domestic violence, it’s the effort to change, plus the economics of being deprived of money and freedom for so long, plus the realities of learned helplessness, of chronic low self esteem perpetuated by verbal putdowns, and of being convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that he WILL find her no matter what and kill her/the dog/the kids/her parents, which might actually be a real danger, plus the shame….

I think Windows is abusive. M$ is abusive. They’re the bully in the schoolyard, the fascist government with all the money and power, and the uneducated masses who think reinstalling every few months is normal just can’t find the right path to freedom. The guys at Geekfarm quote off hourly rates and I don’t doubt some people strapped for cash just go buy another $400 computer rather than fix the one they have, out of sheer frustration. The ones that do pony up the money keep right on using the software. There’ll be an update next week, which is the equivalent of flowers and gushing promises that it will never happen again baby, just come home…. And the cycle continues. Tension builds. The little signs begin — the occasional error message, having to ctrl-alt-delete to end a program that won’t respond, that one time the computer “can’t find system disk” and then it starts to happen more often, and before you know it, you hit a key out of desparation and the disk formats, and those six years of files are gone.

At which point you go to the PC shelter for crisis services, and the case manager has to call in a specialist to help you recover. You get the PC back all shiny and working, your data back in place, and it’s as if nothing ever happens. Until the tension builds, and the messages start…. For someone who relies on the computer for their livelihood, this is costly. You’re at the mercy of the whimsy of a capricious, uncaring, unpredictable creature that sometimes appears to like nothing better than torturing –

I really do need to find a job in my field, don’t I? I’m seeing pathology everywhere.

Bleh.

Don’t worry. I have a therapist.

Amazon.com: Torpedo Juice: A Novel

Either I have read too much fanfic, or that title sounds too much like an offbeat metaphor. The cover art does not help matters.

I figured the guy would have something with squid, looking at the other titles with his name on, but alas.

If you have commented and it didn’t show up, it probably was eaten by the insanely effective spam trap and deleted along with the billion or so card game spams that bombarded my blog comments all weekend. It’s just insane how the spammers believe I’m going to waste money on backgammon, texas holdem or any other online game.

Though I’m not sure they’d get it. Unless of course they are totally trekkies too, in which case they’ll love it.

YouTube - Family Guy TNG Skit - “Lemonade”

Also, not for those who wish to avoid squick. But I watched and giggled.

I found a pocket of adults who do not automatically connect the internet with porn. How do I know? We (50 of us) are in social services type training (one of my many attempts to further my skillz in order to get a job that’s actually supposed to help my career as a therapist) and the current topic is gender roles, society, what reinforces the old static stereotyping, blah blah. The presenter is showing slide after slide of ads depicting women. One of the ads shows a cpu being held by a pair of tweezers with a circuit board in the background. Across the bottom is the Lycos search window and logo. The right half of the panel is … a pair of large, round women’s breasts, in a blue bikini top.

The speaker announced “talk about pointlessly connecting something to sex in advertising.”

I’m all, “Dude! It means: On the computer connected to the internet you can search for P0RN using Lycos! DUH!” Because of course, the closest to showing actual nekkid boobies in a magazine ad is really big boobies in a bikini.

Everyone else (nearly, I think there was myself and two or three others who just stared) nodded and agreed with him. I said nothing. It only would have made eight hours in an uncomfortable chair into more than eight hours, and possibly annoyed staff of a clinic I hope to work in.

“This laptop needs a new power connector soldered to the motherboard. Take it apart and see what you can do.”

“Okay.”

About a zillion tiny screws in four sizes and two lengths later, pieces of laptop are scattered across the workbench. I have a motherboard. And no soldering skills. My boss gets out his gear. A while later, I’m able to put it back together.

I have one extra screw. Hmm.

Aaaaand, I forgot to put thermal paste on the heatsink. The laptop works for a while and abruptly turns off. System monitor indicates the cpu is too hot.

Disassembly is quicker the second time, and I don’t have to totally break it down - just lift the keyboard, the fan assembly, the heatsink, and then clean with solvent, apply paste, carefully reseat heatsink… eight dinky screws, two not-dinky screws, a pop and a crack later, it’s all back together.

Still overheats and shuts off.

I make a boot floppy off a downloaded bios update, to see if the motherboard is giving the fan wonky instructions that might be fixed with the update.

Floppy drive won’t work.

I make a floppy-emulating boot cd off the bench system (the one with all the nifty software, like Nero). I boot to the cd.

The bios update program says I don’t have the adapter plugged in. Which is true - I’m using a universal adapter, as we discovered the one that went with the laptop was defective. I switch adapters and boot again. This time the bios update goes smoothly from the cd.

Still overheats. Still shuts off.

I left it that way. If you ask me, when the system won’t boot with the battery in, has a burnt out adapter, and randomly shuts off? Mama needs a new laptop. If it were only the battery and the adapter, well, those aren’t cheap but they’re cheaper than a new laptop. The motherboard on top of those things, however, is very likely to cost more than the system’s worth at this point. But it’s up to the boss to do something with it.

And in the second reassembly, I had… a different screw left over. Oy.

don’t feed the birds

This is the English caption for my reaction to a Japanese Anime I’ve been watching. I kept seeing icons and caps and so forth for Bleach all over the internet, so I thought, eh, I’ve seen anime before. I’ll give it a try.

Well, let’s just say I’ve learnt my lesson.

The top ten reasons Lori won’t be finishing the series Bleach:

10. The conventions of Japanese anime include some seriously annoying shit. Yes, it’s a completely different culture with different conventions in fiction. Yes, they mostly speak in Japanese with English subtitles and frequently there are sweat drops and little angry cross hatches and so forth. That would all be fine if not for certain other things in combination with the little things, such as–

9. Fights must always upstage all fights that have gone before. In Bleach, they use swords that transform into all kinds of things, and each time someone whips out a sword, it has to do eleventy zillion different things that no other sword before it has ever done. It has to flame, or break into a bunch of little pointy things, or into a long sea serpent-y flaming thing, or into a snaky sharp thing that turns out the lights and makes awful noise — everyone’s sword does something different. This is because –

8. They are traveling through the spirit world. They, meaning the handful of teenagers — a bouncy-breasted ditzy girl, a tall hunky quiet kid who can literally punch you through a wall, and the ground, and anything else that might be there, a hotheaded main kid who fights with great power and very little discipline, a cat who sounds male until he transforms into his second shape of a spiky-haired saucy gal, a skinny kid with glasses who’s quiet but smart and can make a wicked energy bolt/arrow out of thin air — defeat everything in their path, somehow leaving enemies alive and winning them over to helping them, and again, every battle must top the last one. And anything can happen because it’s the spirit world, where they went within the first ten or so episodes of the series to save the last main character, a goth samurai girl who gives her powers to the hotheaded kid Ichiguro, and then she’s taken back to the spirit world to pay for granting a mere mortal her powers, which is something you just don’t do. She’s going to be executed. Ichiguro MUST SAVE HER. He doesn’t love her or anything - he just owes her his life. So –

7. He trains, with a variety of folks who just happen to be legendary fighters who have long since fallen out of the limelight of the spirit world they’re from, which is where he’s going to save Rukia, the goth girl. The training is like the fighting - each round must be badder and flashier than the last. And, of course, just like the fighting, the training must have flashbacks….

6. All of the fights must be interspersed with flashbacks. And more flashbacks. The life history of each character must be explored, sometimes between the upswing and downswing of a sword. Flash- AAAAAA- *flashback of character’s entire childhood highlighting each moment leading up to the moment of the battle so that everyone will know just what’s at stake and every iota of motivation this character has for what he/she is doing* -AAAAGH!-*sword comes down, clashes against opponent’s sword* This is tolerable once. It’s happened once an episode for about a season and a half. It’s the heart of every episode, because -

5. There are a hundred characters and counting in this damn show. Seriously. There are thirteen captains, and lieutenants for each of them, and underlings, and servants, and people who are added into the group as they go along, and we have to know where they grew up and how they came to be where they are today, evidently. And then we have to take side trips back to the Real World to see how the siblings of Ichiguro are doing. Everyone who fights gets a biography. Everyone has to be a tragic character.

4. Comic relief. For a while, it was a hyper annoying stuffed animal possessed by the spirit of some experimental fighting dude. Ichiguro’s little sister dresses the thing in pinafores and bows, which it hates and screams about frequently. Seriously.

3. Long frakkin’ speeches. Every single fight, every single participant, back and forth with the speeches, on and on and on, showing off the shininess and metaphysical fun of their weapons, to hyper-dramatic music played by mitten-wearing pianists. Looooooooooooong speeches, man. Long. Like, the driest, boringest math prof you ever met, times ten, and you in the back row just wanting the grade and not daring to shriek SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPAAAAAAH!

2. All I want to know is how they rescue the chick! Third season. No rescue in sight. Oh, they got her away from the death machine of the ages, but everyone’s still kung fu fighting! I don’t even care who wins any more. I just want to see what happens to the goth girl. Everything else is pointless!

1. The songs in the opening credits change every few episodes, progressing from annoying to more annoying to AGH HIT FAST FORWARD! I suspect the trend will continue, as will all the other trends.

Star Trek, how I love you. At least you’re not obviously monotonous.

I’m not even sure if Labor Day is one of those occasions you want to wish someone a happy of, but for what it’s worth.

I moved a few items from the pages here to the new fic site. Still moving other fic as well. I have episodes of various things running in a small window of my screen while I’m ficcing and editing and whatnot, and right now Archer is trying to get out of his shuttle, following his first muck-up of trying to be honorable and so forth - third or fourth episode, I think. The Gigantic Claw Ship o’ Doom has disabled the ship and is scanning them. Whee.

Multitasking is fun!

So much depends on
Hoshi Sato
learning how to say pump

From: Mr.Ahmed Rafaaia
Email:ahmedrafaaiaXXX@she.com
Tel:+855-XXXXXXXXX.

Attention:Sir&Madam
Having gone through your profile ,I am contacting you based on trust and I believe you will treat this offer with keen interest and utmost sincerity.

Right. Like there’s a profile on the internet anywhere that contains my super sekrit email address.

My name is AHMED RAAFIA 23 years,a citizen of Lebanon.My father got maried to African American from a speaking colony of Cote D’ Ivoire were I grow up and the family was blessed with two children I and my younger sister sarah who is 15 years old although she is late.

The grammar leads one to believe your sister is pregnant, though I doubt that’s what was meant. Also, not sure what a ’speaking colony’ is.

Following the recent crises between the Israeli forces and the hezbollahs militant group in lebanon, During one of the Israel air strike in lebanon, my parent became victim of war as my parents lost there lives on their trip to our home in lebanon. Our building was razed to nothing leaving 13 people dead and over 65 injured.MAY THEIR SOUL REST IN PEACE!!!! Nothing like taking advantage of the news, right? We all know there were air strikes and people were hurt - I feel for them. Which makes your little scam all the more irritating.

My father was a cash crop merchant and an international business man on exchange of international currency.He deposited the sum of $9.6 Million US Dollars under the coustody of a security company here in a secured trunk box without the knowlegde of the security company that the box is containg money for security reasons.Because of the love he has for me,he told me in confidence that the security company can only realise the consignment to his foriegn partner based on my authorization as my next of kin.So you and daddy were the only ones who knew, and conveniently, there really is no foreign partner? Freeing you to choose one? What “secure” agency, bank or otherwise, would accept this arrangement? None.

Please I need your sincere help now!My life is in danger due to frequent war and political crises in Lebanon and Cote D’ Ivoire as I do not want to stay here for them to hold election because anything can happen.Please help me and save my life.I want to introduce you to the security company agent as my late father’s business associate so that you will help me claim the consignment and we can make an arrangement for the transfer of the fund to you for investment. Are you also going to give me the plans to the Death Star? The Holy Grail? Maybe keys and security codes for Area 51?

I need your assistance in getting a residence for me and also help me in investing the fund in profit yeilding business in your country. and your willingness to treat me as your son will be appreciated.Moreso, as soon as the consignment is delivered to you, you will invest the fund. Oh, look! He wants me to adopt him! awwww.

I will offer you 30% of the total fund for your assistance alone.As soon as I here from you I will give you all the information you need about the fund you may require from me thereafter.I am presently living in camp now.Please get back to me as soon as posible and endeavour to include your telephone Because it’s so easy to call from ‘camp.’ Whatever that means. Just like it’s easy to email.

Please reply with this id what ID? oh, the string of letters in the subject? and called me with this number +855-1XXXXXXXXX.

Await your call.
BEST REGARDS
AHMED RAFAAIA.

Guess what? Your IP address says “Thailand.” BUZZZZZZ. So sorry. No suckahs at this email address. Have fun polluting spam filters.

Geeze, scammers really chap my hide.

…now include my sis in law’s schedule.

We’ve been following this pattern. We talk on the phone, usually because she called — my cell doesn’t always ring through to her phone, for some reason known only to the folks at Cingular, or possibly TinyTown Phoneco. She says, next Saturday. And then the weekend comes and she doesn’t call or show up, and I realize that this isn’t happening quite the way I believed it would. So now I’m practically a sis in law atheist — it’s hard to believe she exists when she never shows up.

Well, I take that back - she did show up for my graduation. But my brother drove her here.

Another little mystery — why am I so unmotivated these days? I think perhaps that I am beginning the slide into depression, partically induced by the complete silence from everyone to whom I’ve sent a resume. I know I have no experience BUT YOU AREN’T HELPING THAT, you people who think I’m useless just because I graduated a few months ago.

Each morning, I wake to the dulcet tones of MY ROOMMATE’S BLARING ALARM CLOCK, which he leaves going when he gets in the shower, and which I must march down the hall to turn off before it drives me INSANE, and of course by then I’m too awake to savor lounging about half-asleep until my own alarm bothers to go off. This morning I was THIS CLOSE to throwing his alarm clock in the shower with him.

Although I think burying it in the kitty litter might be more satisfying.

Or in the garden. Or perhaps tie it to his muffler.

And I have a spider bite that itches mightily. Hmm, maybe the grumpiness/depressedness isn’t so mysterious.

Nor is the package I got from Costco. Although it totally took me aback. They sent me a single razor. Rather than an ultimatum to shave, I took it as ‘buy the cartridges to refill it.’ They’re so confident I’ll like the Gillette Fusion enough to buy cartridges in bulk, they sent me one free. Of course, it’s not the battery operated version, so I’m not too impressed. Also, it’s a little alarming-looking — all those sharp edges in one place. What if I shave off a layer of skin with my leg hair?

Who knew there was so much competition between disposable shaver manufacturers? Learn something every day, around here.