All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

This is what's wrong.

Life

In which I think my world is weird.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n advertisement outside a gas station:

Image of two plastic bottles of soda. Price of $2.50 above them. Text says, “Wow!”

The image is printed in full color on cardboard that will be thrown away shortly.

The product is sugar water in plastic bottles.

The sweetener is HFCS, implicated in a myriad of health problems. The container is plastic, which is expensive to produce, expensive to recycle, and impossible to get rid of.

I have no idea if $2.50 is a good price for two bottles of soda, but I do know that you can dissolve pennies in it.

A blog post.

Web

In which apparently I am too busy.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] check my website daily to see if anything’s happening. I think some part of me seriously expects to find brilliant posts that I haven’t written enjoying all kinds of comments and traffic.

In lieu of content, this:

Adam sent me this and I finally got around to watering it.

Dumb things lusers say.

Work

In which this shit really happens.

“But it worked yesterday!”

The fact that something works today does not guarantee it will work tomorrow.

Have you ever had an appliance that quit working? Computers are like that. One day it works, the next day it blows up. Shit happens.

“But everything else works fine.”

This is exactly like telling your mechanic that you can’t have a bad water pump because your electric windows still work.

Continue reading Dumb things lusers say. →

Normal life.

Work

In which I bitch about my good fortune!

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] spent two years unemployed. It was — after blocking out the stress and fear of being only moderately employable during a very deep recession — freakin’ wonderful.

I didn’t have to get up five mornings a week and get my ass to work. I could avoid leaving the house for days if the weather was bad. There was no rigid schedule. I could eat whenever I wanted, sleep whenever I wanted, stay up all night if I wanted, sleep all day if I wanted (sleeping is so cool it gets mentioned twice), go for a coffee whenever I wanted. I was nearly always caught up on my household duties because I could do them whenever.

Continue reading Normal life. →

Droid probs.

Gadgets

In which Gingerbread broke my camera app. And there’s a question for you to answer!

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] take the majority of my photographs with my cell phone. They’re spontaneous pictures and don’t have to be high quality, but on the other hand, they do need to not actively suck.

My phone is an LG Optimus S. In the beginning, it took acceptable pictures even though it has always sucked in low-light conditions. It worked for my needs. It’s a fucking phone, after all.

But since the update to Gingerbread, it takes pictures like this:

Lovely January morning

That picture was taken in broad daylight, in bright sunlight. It was not taken at dusk. It was taken at ten o’clock in the morning on a sunny day. But see how dark it is? And how blue everything is?

Continue reading Droid probs. →

SOPA and PIPA.

Web

In which each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his site is going dark on the 18th in protest of SOPA and PIPA. Yes, people should be paid for their work. Yes, pirates are jerks. No, I’m not going to give up my civil liberties in pursuit of what is essentially a personal problem for an industry I don’t really spend that much time worrying about.

Tech support.

Work

In which it’s not jargon if that’s what it’s called.

Circular explanations are circular:

Customer: Connection slower than usual
Me: What speed are you connecting at?
Customer: I don’t know….SLOW
Me: Hold your mouse over the dialer icon in the system tray. It will show you what speed you’re currently connected at.
Customer: What is the dialer icon?
Me: It’s the icon that represents your dialup connection.