Category Archives: Work

Ceilings and moonshine.

Domestic Goddess, ,

In which I’m a domestic goddess AND a rock star IN THE SAME DAY!

Cleaning

Not too terribly long ago I was standing in the shower and saw something on the wall. I reached up above the edge of the shower shell and smeared it with my finger, and it turned out to be dust. I left a big ol’ streak on the wall (because dust storms and condensation leave streaks on your latex paint, and that’s just that) and the next time I showered I stared at it I realized that it was driving me ape-nuts-batshit-crazy. I therefore determined to use my next day off for good, and vowed to wipe the walls down.

Holy shit! That’ll teach me to NEVER TOUCH A DAMP WALL AGAIN! I spent 3 hours Saturday morning cleaning the front bathroom! I scrubbed the walls, the ceiling, the fixtures, washed the valance, cleaned the mirror, washed the windows both inside and out… When I was done you could not only eat off any surface in there, you could have safely eaten the bathroom itself.

But at least there are no longer any streaks on the walls.

Or the ceiling.

Or anything else, by God! That bitch is spotless.

G’ma said, “You’re a good kid.”

Gigging

KJ left work early Saturday afternoon and picked me up at home. We stopped at the Taj on 2nd for gas then headed for Roosevelt, WA. The Gorge was all moody and foggy, and we got rained on a few times. We talked our faces off.

After two hours in the car, we rolled into a town that looked like this and went into a ‘venue’ that looked like this. We sat around crowd-watching (if you can call 32 persons ‘a crowd’) in the beer garden, listening to Junkyard Jane finish their set.

Investigation revealed that the only food within a 50-mile radius was the pork, beans, and coleslaw laid out on the bar… a bar that only served beer and no hard alcohol.

It should be noted here that I don’t really drink beer.

So, to recap: no food, no cocktails, 35 rednecks in attendance TOTAL, and a rainstorm coming up. The scene had Hell Gig written all over it. I was reduced to drinking Coors Light, of all things, and wondering why the bar couldn’t at least sell me a freakin’ bag of potato chips. KJ, the doll, worked his charm and managed to make the bar’s kitchen open up just long enough to produce a salad for me while we were setting up our gear, but that joy was short-lived because then it started to rain.

The band was under a shell, but I was all bummed because I was in BFE and I figured that the few people who were there were going to leave and we’d be playing in the rain for no one, but the folks from Roosevelt totally surprised me and stayed ’til the bitter end – half of them even danced in the rain!

Some biker dude got KJ half-crocked on moonshine out in the parking lot, and Syl befriended the town’s lesbian couple. The bartender brought me a free beer. No one requested any Janice Joplin. It turned out to be one of the best crowds ever! I ended up having a really good time, and would have counted it a lucrative gig if gas wasn’t freakin’ four bucks a gallon!

In Other News

The AC adapter for my laptop is bad, but I can buy a brand new one off of eBay for $20. I may be laptopping again soon!

My dog really thinks running water is cool.

I actually broke into my knitting bag for the first time in half a year and worked on the Big Brown Sweater. Superfine alpaca, bitches!

Sunday I made a falafel feast for G’ma and KJ and ate myself into a very happy stupor. Yum!

A day in the life of a support tech.

Work, ,

In which this is pretty much what I do. All day, every day.

“Okay, so, if I understand you correctly, you can’t connect to the Internet and you swear that your computer is giving you absolutely no error messages. Is that accurate?

“Well, before I can offer you any useful tech help, we need to get an error message. My records say you’re using Windows Vista, is that correct? Yes? Okay. Well, frankly, Vista’s dial-up networking implementation pretty much totally sucks, so we have to force it to give us a useful error message. To do that, we have to dial up from a particular place.

“Are you in front of your computer now? Is it booted up? Good.

“First, let me have you click on Start, and then go to Control Panel. Do you have something called Network and Internet? No? Okay, well, there do seem to be a couple of different versions of Vista. How about Network and Sharing Center, do you have that? Yes? Great. Okay, let me have you click on that for me.

“Yeah, that’ll be a left click.

“Now, on the left, under Tasks, the second-to-last item in the link list says Manage Network Connections. Do you see that? Yes? Okay. Click on that for me.

“Now, under the Dial-up header, do you have an icon labeled BMI? Yes? Good! Double-click on that.

“Double-click. …No. Double left click, please. It should open a new window called Connect BMI for you, once you do it right.

“Okay, now: are we speaking over the same like the computer uses to connect? We are? Okay, well, I’ll hang up now, and if you don’t connect to my server in 60 seconds, I’ll call you back. Remember: if you can’t connect, I need you to write down or remember the three-digit error code you’ll see, okay? Okay. Talk to you soon.”

Or if not that, then:

“So you can’t get online with your DSL. Gotcha. What brand of modem do you have?

“Uh, your modem is the little box you have plugged into both the wall jack and your computer. I need to know what brand it is.

“You don’t know where it is? Um. Okay, well, how about this: is there an Ethernet cable plugged into your computer? There is? Okay, trace it back to see what it’s plugged into.

“Yeah, see, that’s your DSL modem! Good job! What brand is it?

“It’s an Actiontec? Okay, well, do you see the Internet light on it? Is the light green, or is it red?”

And so on. Over and over, all day, five days a week. Srsly. Freaky thing is, I actually like this work. What’s wrong with me? (Wait. Don’t answer that.)

    tech support n. a service provided by a computer or technological company for aiding or advising customers of its product or service, usu. by telephone or email; see ha ha. ha.

Twitter, Plurk. Zing. Pow.

LOTD, Web, , ,

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!

ET phone home! And buy me some clothes!

Geek, Health, , , ,

In which there are both aliens and my ass in the same entry, but I totally wasn’t abducted or anything.

SETI@home sent me a lovely email today reminding me that I’ve been a member since 1999 (!!!)… and that I haven’t returned a work unit in 153 days. The last unit I returned was from my work machine, but my employer made me remove BOINC about a week after I installed it – the bastards – and I just never got around to installing it on my laptop.

Until now! Let the data crunching begin!

New topic. Ready for the segue? Too bad, ’cause there isn’t one! Dieting is, in its fifth week, suddenly getting difficult. My caloric intake has been inching up steadily for the past week, and now I’m closer to 1500 calories – on a typical day – than 1200. I’ve just been hungry lately. (It’s probably the damned curse messing with my hormones.) I seem to have my hideous water retention problem under control though; restricting calories and exercising (well, a little) has the unintended benefit of reducing my overall sodium intake and keeping me from bloating up like a waterlogged corpse.

After losing 8 pounds right off the bat my weight has remained the same for the past two weekly weigh-ins, but I’m still losing inches: there’s just no reason for someone of my height to be walking around with 40″ hips, just none at all, and I’m safely back into the 30’s now and boy does my ass look better. Yay! (Note: If you know me IRL and tell me I don’t need to lose any weight, I’ll smack you, swear to God, right in your face.) (I mean, the whole weight-loss process and the necessity of it just irritates me, but one does what one must.) Long story short, both my dog and myself should be utterly svelte by late summer.

Speaking of summer (ta-dah! a segue!), I’ve got gigs coming up all over the place. (RB is a gig-booking fiend, especially considering that the band he’s booking has never done a show before and is therefore entirely imaginary thus far.) What I don’t have is gig clothes. I have got to go shopping, but I keep giving my money to dentists and veterinarians instead. Maybe I’ll get Becca to use some of her second-hand store fu to help me find a few cool pieces of clothing, before I start showing up to paying gigs in my fucking pajamas. Or maybe I can just get a t-shirt with an alien on it, and wear it to every single gig we ever do, and become known as “that singer with the one alien shirt she always wears.” A gimmick’s a gimmick, right?

Dorkiosity!

Geek, ,

In which I tell you about my plans for my weekend, but you find it boring. Because it is. Boring, I mean.

laptophdd1.jpgI’m working until six. After that, I’m going to type up some lyrics for my band book and organize some MP3s for band practice tomorrow afternoon. After that, I’ll probably stop for a quick cocktail and then head home…

…where I have a brand new hard drive and a Windows XP CD waiting for me. UPGRADE TO A BIGGER HARD DRIVE!!! YAY!!!

This really is terribly exciting. Really.

It's Saturday, Damn It.

Work, ,

In which I bitch and moan.

It’s Saturday, and I’m at work.

I’m cold. I’m tired. And I’ve already been on the phone for an hour and I’m usually not even out of bed by ten.

My beloved dog made sad eyes at me when I left the house this morning.

Oh, and I feel crappy on top of it. Wanna be in bed with a warm dog and a good book.

Work makes me boring.

Work,

In which I explain why my content sucks so bad lately.

I really like paydays. Twice a month, they put hunnerts and hunnerts of dollars into my account and then I can do neat things like buy lattés and pay off November’s surgery.

I like the job itself, actually. I work in a call center, talking on the phone all day. I actually enjoy most of the humans I speak to, and I enjoy the challenge of figuring out what the fuck they’re talking about and then fixing it. The job’s not the most stimulating I’ve ever had, but it’s certainly not the worst. (I’m understimulated, of course, but then when am I not understimulated at work? At least it’s busy and I’m not bored.)

Money’s good and the work’s fine. So what’s the problem, then?

The problem is working full-time.

It’s too much. Seriously. Five days out of every seven, all I do is work and sleep and feed myself. Who the fuck thought this schedule up? Does ANYBODY actually like it?

Sunday and Monday I try to clean house, do laundry, socialize with Gramma, love on my dog, rest, read, call friends, and maybe go out if I’m lucky enough to be invited somewhere.

If this were a high school writing assignment, I’d be comparing and contrasting Working Full-time to Not Working Full-time, and you know what would win? NOT WORKING FULL-TIME.

I just need to figure out how to earn what I need in far fewer hours of work. I just DO.

Drat.

Geek, ,

In which I’m foiled.

I was just about to install my new 120Gb hard drive into the laptop when the whole project was derailed before it could even get going.

I lack a 2.5mm Allen wrench, first of all. And my Windows XP installation disc is missing.

I could probably get the thing open anyway, but even if I did I have no operating system to install.

Well, that’s not true. I have Win98SE, Win2kPro, and Vista, but not only do I not want to install any of those operating systems, I don’t have drivers for them anyway.

I wonder what the hell I did with that XP disk.

*sigh*