All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

Much Ado About Nothing, Now With Moar Vodka!

Play

In which a tradition is born.

A year ago, Left Coast Girlie and I went to see the Shakespeare Uncork’d production together and had such a great time we did it again this year.

Here’s how it went:

She said she’d be here at six, but for some reason I remembered it as seven and fell asleep. G’ma called up the stairs at ten of, inviting me to watch something about daredevil pilots on television and woke me; I grabbed my phone and saw that LCG was going to arrive in moments and damn it why didn’t I take a shower earlier?

I dressed quick like a bunny and we got into her car and went to the Peony, where we sucked down a couple cocktails each. We got to the amphitheatre just as the show started; the weather was perfect and the show was great. (We both totally cried when poor Hero was defamed.)

Shakespeare Uncork'd

After the show, we went back to the Peony for a couple of rounds and hooked up with TonyG, Toni, and Renee. Then we picked up Jayrob and went to the Green for awhile. Afterhours was at Jayrob’s place, and LCG and I sat on the patio and hollered at each other about organized religion and spirituality until we decided we were exhausted. I threw her into the front bedroom and went to bed myself.

At eleven the next morning, I woke up and went and found LCG. I made some falafel; we watched Screamers on SyFy. She hung out until she had to pick her son up at three. It was a supremely mellow day.

Yay Shakespeare! Yay hanging out with friends half the night!

An open letter to "SEO Experts," Internet-wide.

Soapbox

In which I tell a world full of “SEO Experts” that they’re all fucktards and that the loss of net neutrality, when it happens, will be their stupid fault.

Last week, my bro mentioned a jobs website for freelancers, said I might want to check it out.

So I did. And I signed up, and I bid on a job moving a WordPress site and the guy and I exchanged five or six messages. His last message said he’d be getting me my down payment and the server logins so I could begin the work…

That was Sunday. Haven’t heard from him since. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I get about seven messages a day from the freelancer site, telling me of work I might be interested in.

~+~+~
Okay, so, you know how sometimes you stumble across a website that offers you something for free, and maybe you’re under-caffeinated or you’ve just been lobotomized or you’ve never been on the Internet before or you’re just plain stupid, and you click on the free thing – like a button that says you can watch a movie that you know, if you think about it, isn’t even out on DVD yet – and on the next page it says you have to “click on one of these offers” before you can see your TOTALLY FREE MOVIE and so you choose something like, “Have you ever shopped at Home Depot?” and a new window opens, and you’re supposed to sign up for a Home Depot account, and after you do the movie page comes back up and says “Offer Completed! Click here for your FREE MOVIE!” and when you do, about five windows full of ads launch and you end up watching a video about the power company and there’s no way to see the movie online because it was never there in the first place because it’s still in the fucking theatres and you knew that and now you’ve signed up for something you don’t even want and somebody’s going to get paid for tricking you into doing that?

Well, I always wondered where the fuck those websites came from. There are millions of them, maybe billions, and they come from somewhere. Someone had to buy the domain and set up the hosting and install the CMS and design the theme and write the copy and build and place the ads to drive the traffic. These things, ugly and stupid and irritating as they are, don’t grow like weeds: they’re made. And they must be worth it or people wouldn’t do it.

~+~+~
In the past few days I’ve found out where they come from. Some asshole in the US or the UK, some self-styled “SEO expert,” pays people in India and Thailand to build them. Somebody like this douche, who says his areas of expertise are in “advertising, branding, Facebook, Internet marketing, PHP, SEO, Twitter, and website design,” and whose latest job posting says this:

I have set up a wordpress theme very similar to this one watchmovieonlinefree.com. I just need someone to copy paste the last 35 posts text and pictures from watchmovieonlinefree or other sources, and add 5 new ones from my choice.

This job can be done in one day, if you focus on it. I would prefer to change the content of each post, or at least add on it from other sources.

Please bid and be ready to start working on the project, give your time frame, that you will need to respect. Payment will be released once the job is done.

Yeah, he says right there that he intends to copy a site verbatim, and then “change” or “add to it a little.” Isn’t that, like, plagiarism? (Not that it matters, since the original site was built by a fucktard just like the guy who intends to steal it.) And he won’t pay until the job’s complete, even though the site’s standard is a percentage up front, a percentage at halfway, and the remainder on completion? Yeah, real honorable, buddy.

The target site itself is a lie; the movies aren’t available. They don’t exist. People fill out the offers and get bored after being bombarded with ads and crap, and they wander off to do something else because they have no recourse. They can’t complain about the fact that they were mislead, because there’s no one to complain to, and THIS IS THE SHIT THAT’S GOING TO LOSE US OUR NET NEUTRALITY. This crap – this confusing, unregulated crap – is going to cause people to think, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if there were some way to stop those guys. We need regulation.”

I literally can’t stand the advertising/marketing/SEO people. They’re making money where there is none, simply because they’re immoral fucktards and they’re capable of badgering people just to make a little ching. They’re paying overseas workers crap wages to do technical work that is immoral if not illegal, and they do it simply to make money.

Now, I like money, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a limit to what I’ll do to get it.

These people are designing misleading ads to drive traffic to sites that outright lie, and they do it in such a massive way that it’s somehow worth it to them to get a cent or two for each completion. They outsource the grunt work to India and keep the click-thru checks from big advertisers for themselves… NO ONE is getting anything decent out of it. It’s real money for imaginary services rendered. The advertisers are serving ads to badly targeted and/or confused demographics. The survey info is untargeted. The signups are full of errors and lies (I always make up information when presented with a demand for personal information). It’s all crap. It’s all greed.

I opened a ticket with the freelance site to find out what their standards are; I know I’ve seen several job listings disappear so there’s some kind of surveillance. I mean, you can’t just ask people to build you illegal automatic voting programs in public.

~+~+~
Is it some kind of mental imbalance, then? What makes the vast majority of people do real work for real pay, but misses a few immoral freakazoids who can somehow manage to sleep at night after doing what is, obviously, total crap all day long?

It’s like self-mutilation: there’s a line, but nobody can say exactly where it is. If an intelligent, competent person gets their ears pierced, nobody blinks, even though piercing one’s body hurts and carries a risk of infection or worse. Tattoos, ritual scarification, forked tongues, implants: we accept these things.

But if someone decided to, say, castrate himself, we’d all think that was going too far… but is it? Really? It’s no more extreme than the body mods you see on your typical tattoo parlor employee, in terms of pain and risk.

I think there’s a type of salespeople who are crazy like that. They act pretty much like normal people, but they’re psychologically stunted in some way that enables them to do wrong things for money and think it’s not only okay, but that it’s good. Exciting. Challenging. They’re incapable of knowing that some things just Shouldn’t Be Done.

You’re going to say, “But it doesn’t really hurt anybody.”

And I’m going to say, No, of course it’s not life-threatening to corral someone into filling out a form or taking a survey so that you can earn your couple of cents per completion… but it’s still wrong. That you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

It’s lying, plain and simple, and lying is wrong. And making money out of nothing is also wrong. There’s an entire industry now based entirely on lies and greed. Advertiser’s greed, who think they can get real data for a couple of cents per database record. “SEO Experts'” greed, who think it’s okay to build all this crap to entrap people. End users’ greed, who want to see a pirated movie online for free.

And no, “SEO Expert” person, you don’t get to snicker and think to yourself that only the stupid end up in your trap. They’re not stupid; YOU’RE just a DICK.

And because you’re a dick, you’re going to lose the Internet for everyone. You’re going to pester and confuse the unwashed masses, and they’re not going to want a free and open Internet, and then you’re going to have to go back to scamming people in person. You fucker.

~+~+~
I applied for a couple of virtual assistant positions that looked like they might actually be real. Maybe somebody will hire me and give me something to do for the next few weeks.

~+~+~
A friend of mine told me a few days ago that he’s starting a new job soon, and will be team-building immediately after that, and asked me if I would be interested in working on a QA team? I said something along the lines of omgwtfbbq!!1 WOULD I EVAR and he said “I know you were looking forward to school” and I was all planz change omg srsly d00d.

And now I’m trying not to think about it. It was an idea, not an offer, and who knows if he’ll even get to make his own hiring decisions, or if I’m qualified (or if I’m clever enough to make myself sound like I am), but the point, I guess, is that as totally fun as school sounds I’ve just discovered I’d be way more stoked to get an interesting job.

If no interesting job presents itself before September 20th, however, I will be going back to school with a bunch of 20-somethings to study freakin’ LAN architecture. Which should make for hilarious blog posts, at the very least!

There is no underlying narrative thread here.

Blurbs

In which there’s, um. Psssh. Yeah. Whatever. Gah.

1.) Kid behind the counter: I know you look at me and see an ol’ lady, but seriously. I’m capable of irony. Hell, I’ve done your stupid shitty job and tons more just like it. Don’t roll your eyes at me, punk, when I smile at you after some conehead customer does something stupid, because I could totally beat up your mom.

2.) My hair is now about 20% gray. WTF, over?

3.) In my WordPress installation, on the Add New Post page, is a Categories window. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years. The only way I can edit or add categories is to go to a whole ‘nother part of the interface, which I don’t, which is why my categories suck. I’ve never been able to figure out how to fix it.

4.) There’s this website called freelancer.com. I spent an hour this morning looking at the jobs posted. My observations:

  • You can get a part-time virtual assistant with pretty much my entire skillset for $200 per month. That person will live in India, and that $200 will probably go much farther there than it does here.
  • There are persons or companies out there who need teams of ten or more to type CAPTCHA entries. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, unless they’re using cheap human labor to open doors for irritating fucking ‘bots. The pay is $.70 per thousand CAPTCHAs entered.
  • There’s a huge market for “writers,” where “writers” equals “people who bang out enthusiastic three hundred-word articles about meaningless crap and get paid $1.50 to $3.00 per piece.”

Apparently if I wanna work in this world, I need to get new skills or move to India.

5.) I painted my nails red yesterday.

6. I have no idea if starting my EB while they were still debating EUC has fucked up my school plans or not. I have still not been awarded any financial aid, but they don’t even mail the stuff until August 20th.

7.) I sleep much too much.

8.) I cleaned my room and did my laundry, but I need to vacuum.

Guru Purnima

Spiritual

In which yesterday was guru purnima. (I celebrated with a Lalita Sahasranama and some midnight meditation under the full moon.)

“The great Adi Shankara (the first Shankaracharya) of the 8th century summarized the entirety of Advaita Vedanta (non-dualistic philosophy) in six stanzas. When a young boy of eight, wandering in the Himalayas seeking to find his guru, he encountered a sage who asked him, “Who are you?” The boy answered with these stanzas, which are known as “Nirvana Shatakam” or “Atma Shatakam.” (‘Nirvana’ is complete equanimity, peace, tranquility, freedom and joy. ‘Atma’ is the Supreme Being, the true self.) The sage the boy was talking to was Swami Govindapada Acharya, who was, indeed, the teacher he was looking for.”

NIRVANA SHATAKAM

Mano-budhy-ahankara cittani naham
na ca srotra-jihve na ca ghrana netre
Na ca vyoma bhumim na tejo na vayuh
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am neither the mind, nor the intellect, nor the ego, nor the mind stuff. I am neither the body, nor the changes of the body. I am neither the senses of hearing, taste, smell or sight. Nor am I either the earth, the fire, the air. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na ca prana samnjo na vai pancavayur
na va sapta-dhatur na va panca-kosah
Na vak-pani-padam na copastha-payu
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am neither the Prana, nor the five vital airs. I am neither the materials of the body, nor the five sheaths. Neither am I the organs of action nor objects of the senses. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na me dvesa ragau na me lobha mohau
mado naiva me naiva matsaryabhavah
Na dharmo na cartho na kamo na moksah
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I have neither aversion nor attachment, neither greed nor delusion, neither egotism nor envy. Neither Dharma nor Moksha. I have neither desire nor object of desire. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na punyam na papam na saukhyam na dukham
na mantro na tirtham na veda na yajna
Aham bhojanam naiva bhojyam na bhokta
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am neither sin nor virtue, neither pleasure nor pain, nor temple, nor worship, nor pilgrimage, nor scriptures. And I am neither the act of enjoying, the enjoyable nor the enjoyer. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na mrtyur na sanka na me jati bhedah
pita naiva me naiva mata na janma
Na bandhur na mitram gurur naiva sisya
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I have neither death, nor fear of death, nor caste. Nor was I ever born, nor had I parents, friends and relations. I have neither Guru nor disciple. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Aham nirvikalpo nirakara rupo
vibhutvacca sarvatra sarvendriyanam
Na ca sangatam naiva muktir na meya
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am untouched by the senses. I am neither Mukti nor knowable, I am without form, without limit, beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything, I am the basis of the universe, everywhere am I. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

OM NAMAH SHIVAYA

A day in the life.

Life

In which I share my quiet Saturday afternoon.

I live upstairs in my grandmother’s house in a mustard yellow room that hasn’t been redone since the 70’s. This is the landing:

Saturday, July 24, 2010

I keep my chrome citrus juicer and my bowling ball on the landing because I don’t have places for them in my room and I use them frequently enough that putting them in the attic is a pain in the arse.

I received the juicer as a wedding gift. I love it so much that I made a point of getting it from my ex-husband’s house and hauling it three thousand miles to the left coast. The bowling ball is reactive but I have it drilled as a straight ball and therefore haven’t been able break 120 with it in five years of not really trying. The poster picture is my uncle as a child; from the wall above the banister hangs a bundle of club cards from Vegas casinos.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

I bought live basil from the store; it cost four dollars for three rooted basil plants. It’s been on the window sill now for four days and I think I’m considering potting it so it will last longer there on the sill above the sink, because it’s such a dear thing, a living herb plant.

I hate doing dishes but if I have to do them, this is the kitchen to do them in. Have you ever seen a bigger, better kitchen window? It’s gotta be six feet wide. Such a view.

My grandmother’s house is way cool.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

I finally got a load of laundry in, after stating my intention to do so last Tuesday. Few things more satisfying than the view of a load of whites, drying on the line in the sun.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Besides also cooking and walking to the store and back and the laundry and the dishes, I read that entire book – five hundred and twenty pages – in one day.

Gawd, I hope they extend EUC tomorrow.

Life

In which I’m trying to figure out this back-to-school thing.

When I hatched my spend-a-year-getting-certs scheme, EUC was a given. The Training Benefits facilitator even told me I’d get them.

Then time passed, and EUC expired 16 fucking days before my benefits ran out, and now I’m using my training benefits months before I’d expected to tap into them.

My school plan depended on getting many weeks of EUC before having to use my 20 weeks worth of Extended Benefits.

I guess it really was too good to be true, the whole go-to-school-for-a-year-while-getting-deposits thing, because now if I don’t get EUC, I’m going to run out of benefits in mid-November and I have to go to school now that I’ve started receiving training benefits, otherwise I’ll have to pay them back.

Long story short: it’s not free money after all, if EUC fails for me, because I’ll be borrowing more than I wanted to. More damn student loans.

The current EUC bill is still in the Senate, and they’re supposed to vote on it tomorrow… problem is, if they make any changes it goes back to the House. Again. Which means it could easily be weeks, if not months, before there might be any EUC relief for yours truly.

The uncertainty is kinda freakin’ me out, but I guess I’ll muddle through somehow or another. If I get EUC, I’ll borrow less. If I don’t, well, the financial aid portal thinks I need $16k worth of aid for nine months in school and I’m nowhere near the borrowing cap, so I guess I’ll be okay even if I can’t find a P/T job.

Saturday Randomness

Blurbs

In which I wanna post but don’t really have anything to say and am doing it anyway!

The latest WordPress upgrade looks nice! I’ll have to upgrade my dad’s installation this weekend.

I’m using a new template. I like it. Do you like it?

Amazon is pissing me off. It’s been three days and they haven’t answered my question about why their custom software DOESN’T FUCKING WORK.

This was my breakfast:

Bento #182: Breakfast

The onion festival is this weekend; I’ll be going to see Vaughn Jensen play Land Title tonight with Becca ’cause it’s her birthday.

I have fewer than three dollars to my name.

I called about my extended benefits; they had me leave a message and said I’d get a call back in two days.

I need to wash my hair more than all of you put together.

I’m spending tons of online time here and here.

Update: I finally decided to RTFM and the Amazon software works fine, I just need to feed it UPCs I don’t have. Bleggh.

This is why I'm pudgy.

Recipes

In which there’s a recipe. Sort of.

After my last post, I went to the kitchen feeling poor and dejected. I knew I had corn tortillas, some cheese, and half a can of refried beans in the fridge. I figured I’d nuke the beans and have a taco or two. AGAIN.

Instead, I made enchiladas!

Bean enchiladas

Not only was there half a can of refried beans in the fridge, but also milk and most of an 8 oz container of sour cream, and some grated Parmesan that was just about expired. I also had a can of fire-roasted chiles in a cupboard.

I nuked three tortillas to soften them, put in some beans and rolled them up. Then I covered them with a chile cream sauce and nuked them, finishing with some leftover salsa and a chopped green onion.

The sauce loosely follows the one in this recipe, but made use of what I had lying around, so it contained Parmesan and cumin instead of Swiss.

Not only was this totally delicious, but I have enough sauce leftover to pour over eggs on toast in the morning. Yum!

Bean enchiladas

This is the job market today, bitches. Srsly.

Finance, Work

In which I complain about living in a state with a 9.1% unemployment rate.

I just read a job listing at WorkSource. The job is called PT ORDER ENTRY SPECIALIST II.

The description says, and I quote verbatim, The FT Order Entry Specialist II will check accuracy of and enter orders for equipment and parts, balance daily order reports, request closing reports and acknowledgments daily, provide various bookings and shipments reports, maintain integrity of open and closed sales orders. Review initial sales orders for completeness and accuracy and input into log book. Perform file maintenance, update sales orders, balance the “shipment to customer” with accounting daily. Track and verify customer purchase orders for each piece of equipment ordered. Produce weekly order and shipment reports for both business units. Monthly, generate and mail verification of bookings totals and reports to appropriate personnel. Provide support for product specialists and field sales as required.

Yeah. It’s glorified data entry and report-running. Anybody could do it.

What’s fucked up is the part where they list the necessary qualifications to be considered for the job: Two year Associates degree (A.A.) accounting degree, plus four years business accounting experience.

A fucking associate’s in accounting? To enter sales orders? Are you fucking kidding me? Four years’ BUSINESS ACCOUNTING experience? Really? With that kind of qualification, you’re a fucking ACCOUNTANT, not an order entry specialist. Jeez.

~+~+~
I was idly looking at job postings because I haven’t received my EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) ruling yet, it’ll take the EB (extended benefits) people two days to call me back, I’m totally broke, I haven’t been awarded any financial aid for school yet, and:

The EUC program expired on June 2, 2010. The U.S. House passed legislation to extend the dates people can apply for and receive EUC benefits, but the bill is currently stalled in the Senate. The Senate is not expected to take the bill up again until July 12, 2010 or later.

If the bill becomes law people will be able to apply for EUC until November 2010 and receive benefits until May 2011.

Long story short, I don’t know yet but I might not be able to do the school thing if I don’t get EUC and/or a financial aid award.

Which would suck, because I was really looking forward to a year in community college, taking computer science classes with twenty-year-old geeks.

~+~+~
I haven’t paid my rent, I’m a month and a half behind on paying my settlement company, I need new glasses, I want new books, I need to pay my dentist, and my dog’s eating shitty grocery store brand kibbles.

My debit card is ten dollars overdrawn, I’m about to disable my Netflix and eMusic accounts, and the only reason I can drive anywhere is because there’s still half a tank of gas in the truck from when dad was here and filled it up. (I don’t drive much.)

G’ma lets me eat her eggs and bread and has offered to buy me groceries when I run out of my own, but I Do Not Want to cost her money. I’m stalled on my little data entry project for NLW because the Amazon Seller’s Desktop application isn’t working and their ticketing system is backed up. My next paying gig isn’t until August.

Long story short, I was surfing WorkSource because a part-time job right now would be freakin’ excellent, and data entry is my bitch.

Now please excuse me while I figure out the best way to spend my last $20 at the grocery store. I’m thinking tofu, ramen, and beans. Maybe some lentils, too; they’re cheap protein.

Hopefully poverty will help me dominate next week’s competitive diet stats!

Twelve of Twelve

Memes

In which I do a meme.

A quick google doesn’t reveal to me where it came from originally, but the 12 of 12 idea is that on the 12th day of the month you take 12 pictures and put ’em on the innertubes. Vuboq does it sometimes. It’s what I did today.

Behold, twelve images of my twelfth of July:

12 of 12 - One

I made eggs for breakfast. Mexican eggs. This is mainly because all I had in the pantry was tortillas and a can of tomatoes, and not because I love huevos rancheros. Honestly I’m pretty indifferent to the dish, but it fills the belly. Plus: it’s Mexican food.

12 of 12 - Two

I worked on a data entry project for NLW. It was pretty fun until the upload failed and I couldn’t fix it ’cause I had no freakin’ idea what to put in the PID field, since there were successful uploads with blank PID fields. I was all, WTF, AMAZON DOT COM, YOU COQUETTISH BEAST, YOU.

Continue reading Twelve of Twelve →