goblinbox

In which there’s lolcats.

I’ve been giggling at icanhascheezburger in between calls for the past hour or so; it’s the only thing keeping me sane at work this evening.

I have a really hard time supporting people who can’t read (srsly, it’s really hard) or who make up their own words for things (there’s no such thing as an “Internet cable”) or who keep talking over me telling me to slow down or that they’re “computer geeks” (meaning computer illiterate) instead of just hushing up and listening.

If a customer tells me to go slow, I’ll go slow. If they tell me they’ve never been on a computer before, I’ll do everything in itsy bitsy baby steps. But when they just won’t shut the fuck up, or keep interrupting me to tell me about totally unrelated crap from last week that they saw on their sister’s computer, it drives me batshit! PARTICULARLY when I’m the only tech on the clock and I’ve got seven calls in the queue!

Thank God for the Intarwebz and all its funny websites, that’s all I’m sayin’.

In which there’s another unrelated list.

Friday, I played a tasting room with the boys. Got drunk on wine.

Saturday, I did this.

Sunday, I napped. A lot.

Monday, I worked.

Today, I upgraded my WP installation to the latest version, and downloaded some jazz from here.

How the hell have YOU been?

In which I snivel, bitch, and moan.

I am so waterlogged today that I can barely stand being in my own body.

I gained upwards of 15 lbs. this month (guess who totally wasn’t watching her sodium intake in the past month?) and I literally cannot wait for it to go away. I’m grossly bloated and uncomfortable, my feet feel like sausages, and I’m tired and crampy. The Curse will be here any minute.

Old age sucks. I love sodium, damn it, and vodka too, and I used to be able to indulge in both with no side effects! But now? Oh hell no: a few late-night drunken trips to Shari’s and come cycle end I’m bloated up like a corpse left out in the sun.

My wrists, fingers, face, belly, legs, and feet are swollen. My fingers tingle if I hang my hands by my sides for more than a minute. I’m tired. It’s 100 degrees outside and walking over to Main street and back for a sandwich was like hanging out in an oven.

And to add insult to injury, I went to the dentist this morning and my gums are kinda sore, which is really wimpy of me but hey – I’m feeling sorry for myself so might as well be thorough with my litany of misery!

Heh.

The gig Saturday night was fun, but hot. Really hot. Really, really, really hot.

Like, 103 freaking degrees. And the stage? Was a black flatbed semi trailer in a parking lot under no cover whatsoever. KJ forced me to take a bottle of SPF 45 that probably saved my life (and the necks and ears of the rest of the band as well).

We traded sets with another band for five hours. Curtis nearly went into heat shock but was saved by a cold towel, a generous application of ice cubes to his wrists and earlobes, and an ibuprofen. I drank a lot of water and a quite possibly more vodka than one would generally drink under such conditions. My cute boyfriend and Curtis’ cute girlfriend got pretty trashed and danced with me during the other band’s sets.

Sunday I made KJ drive me around in the relentless heat so I could spend all my gig money at Walmart and Andy’s. I bought food and a floor fan and HABA items. We spent much of the day in Kaje’s basement, where it was coolest, lounging on the couch in front of the new fan. I read. He blogged. We ate chips & salsa. I napped.

For dinner, he made portabello burgers. Then I read. He blogged. Later we gossiped about people. Then I bitched about being bloated (he poked my ankles and knees and said “Oh, weird! gross! cool! your skin’s full of water!” noises). I made him take me home at midnight, because I had a dental appointment at the ass crack of dawn (9:20 am) today.

In which there are links.

A new Twitter-like site was launched recently. It’s called, for no apparent reason, Plurk. It’s basically Twitter with a cuter GUI, and doesn’t, as far as I can tell, do anything new. I signed up for an account (because I’m a whore and have to try all the new junk on the ‘net) but won’t switch entirely to Plurk until there’s a WordPress plugin for it and/or it proves to be more stable than Twitter.

Feeling conflicted about cheating on Twitter, I started using Ping.fm (per Vuboq‘s advice) to update all my services simultaneously, and now I’m running totally redundant content all over the damn web.

I really hope all this shit is useful to my beloved future AI, who will mine it all to use in personality modeling. (Other people have children or build monuments. My beloved future AI will immortalize me by basing part of itself on all the shit I’ll leave on the ‘net when I die. Blog posts, book lists, tracks listened to, purchases, blah blah blah. I’m so well-documented!) Because there really can’t be any other good use for all this meaningless chatter.

Although I do love reading my friends’ Twitters on my cell phone (when Twitter’s actually working, that is) as I go about my day. Keeps me feeling close to people who live on the other side of the country, or even on other continents, and that’s really the most hopeful application of technology, innit? Community!

In other news, teh BF is still hawt and I’m having way better sex than you. Srsly. WAY better. Like, omfgwtfbbq better it’s freaking ASTONISHING I am so totally not kidding!

In which you gotta check it OUT.

My brother’s site is up.

Meaning, it has content.

Meaning, you gotta visit it. This post in particular fuckin’ cracked. Me. UP! Teh funneh! Teh ha-ha-ha! The not about beer at ALL!

*giggle*

In which all my base are belong to these sites.

I totally love the Internet, yea verily! Here’s where I’ve been spending my time lately:

• Facebook
• Ravelry
• LibraryThing
• last.fm
• Meebo

I never fell for the social networking mystique of Friendster or MySpace (prolly because they’re butt ugly), but Facebook freakin’ pwns me. And Ravelry – a knitting site – even though it’s still in beta and is invitation-only, totally RULES THE freakin’ WORLD. LibraryThing is just plain cool if you read a lot, last.fm is what you listen to when your iTunes library is on an external hard drive out in your jeep, and I use Meebo to keep from having to install eleventy-hundred IM apps on my laptop.

I’m going to go knit some clogs now.

In other news, even though I got my iPod USB cable yesterday (thanks, AmmZon!) apparently I didn’t leave for Washington today. Maybe tomorrow.

God, I’m so lazy.

In which there’s an amusing little quasi-quiz!

To take the quiz thing, go here and click the image that best answers the question.

Here are my results:

The site’s ultimate aim appears to be to sell stuff, but it was still an amusing waste of time!

In other news, if you don’t get up until one, five o’clock in the afternoon sure rolls around with unseeming haste!

I think I’ll go get some falafel. Damn I love falafel.

In which xkcd continues to be one my most favorite strips.

I love xkcd because interspersed among the math/geek strips are random gems like this one:

Heh. Guess what I’m doing this weekend!

In which it’s not just an old John Cougar song, it’s totally a sincere goddamn declaration of devotion.

I have fallen in love with the math geek who does this comic:

His name is Randall. His degree’s in physics and he did robot stuff at NASA for awhile. I’ve read his strips off and on… all kinds of clever folk link to him (and /. got him last year for his map of the Internet strip) so I knew about him. Read the rest of this entry »

In which I introduce you to the LOTD¹.

I was reading through trouble tickets at work today, and found one that was virtually incomprehensible to me. (Yay! Learning curve!) The resolution of the ticket, was, and I quote:

‘gem install money’

Uh, WTF?

So a-googling I goed. Went. (Whatever.) Turns out that ‘money’ is a ‘gem’² for Ruby, a server technology, which runs on Rails (a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications).

In other words, I need to read much of rubyonrails.org.

That site in turn led me to sites using Ruby on Rails, and I ended up at 43things, and then 43places, and then OMFGWTFBBQ!! HOW DID I EVER LIVE WITHOUT THIS the ever-so-fan-fucking-tastic allconsuming, where I can track my voracious reading and even stick it in my sidebar. Finally, I ended up at the creators’ blog(s), which I blogrolled.

Oh, and there’s also listofbests.com (yes, I’ve read 42% of the Nebula List – I’m such a geek! – without even trying) which also rocks my socks.

So I still don’t really know shit about Ruby on Rails, really, but I think I love the people who love it. I’d better go read some more.

—–
¹ Link of the day.
² Extension.

In which I complain about my DH, mourn the loss of another dog, and comment on work.

Bread blew off going to work again today, which kinda pissed me off for some reason. The night before last he’d told me he was going up to Cedar Rapids the next day and would stay up there until Friday, then yesterday morning he decided not to work. He decided this morning not to work yet again.

It’s not like he’s lazing around; he’s been cleaning the property. He’s created a “fence row” and towed a bunch of vehicle carcasses back there. He’s shuffled a couple trailer loads of garbage and crap over to the burn pile (which is now half the size of our house). He’s removed the dead appliances from the driveway, moved piles of wood, and picked up garbage. He’s graded the driveway, and mowed an acre or two. (His mom gave him a tractor recently.) Yesterday he even did the dishes.

And it’s not like I can blame someone for not wanting to go to work. I mean, work sucks, and it’s Spring and gorgeous outside.

But. We’ve got maybe $90 until the next time one of us gets paid, which is probably him — and not until next Friday. We can’t keep gas in his truck for that, not to mention keep me in lemondrop martinis. (The lemondrop martini is my new drink. Summery, don’t you think? And delicious. Yum. And plus I’m sick of cranberry juice.)

~+~+~
NLW and the ever-gorgeous Mr. J had to put a dog down yesterday. (Everyone I know knows someone who has lost a pet recently, it’s like they’re all checking out at once.) I met NLW at the bar after work last night and bought her a drink. Funnily enough, she’s now drinking my old cocktail-of-choice, the Scarlet O’Hara. (The problem with online drink recipes is that no one makes them the same. I had to read nine lemondrop recipes to find the one I like. It’s ridiculous.)

Re-re IMed me today. She misses Dhuma. Says she’ll be fine for awhile, then will start crying.

Fuck.

~+~+~
“Oh, no,” intoned Buzz from behind me, just now.

“What,” I said.

“Look back at picasso,” he said.

I did.

Oh shit. BSOD. (Picasso is one of our very important internal servers here at work.)

I walked over to read the error. It said INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE. Trying to make Buzz laugh, I said, “Well, that’s not the worst BSOD you can get.”

He said, “It is about the worst you can get!”

If that box doesn’t come back up, he’ll start throwing things. (Last week he threw his phone and startled one of the people from the admin building. *giggle*)

~+~+~
Last night’s Windows Update is fucked. If you haven’t installed it yet, wait a few days. It breaks some computers display drivers.

Our boss rebooted his computer after the update and his display went to 800×600, so he right-clicked on his desktop to edit his Properties, and Windows promptly rebooted. It also rebooted when he tried to navigate to the Display Control Panel. Same thing happened to another engineer. Both have flat panel displays.

Aren’t Windows Updates fun?

~+~+~
This cracked me up. If I got a letter from my representative with curse words in it, I’d love it.

But I’m a person who deliberately uses the f-word as many times as I can in any given day, so the a-word wouldn’t rattle me even if it was totally out of context.

In which time is wasted.

Vuboq sent me this link today. Addictive. It’s fastr – a flickr game. I freakin’ love it. Don’t click on it. I’m serious. Just… don’t.