I’ve bid on a Saitek Slimline Keyboard over at eBay. The auction ends in three hours and I’m the only bidder, so I might actually get it.

Last winter I bought an iPAQ kit that included a “keyboard” (and I use the term loosely); Tahmi told me I wouldn’t like it – she said all the reviews said it sucked eggs – and she was completely right.

The entire kit – screen protectors, PDA case, and keyboard, by iConcepts – was useless shit. The stylii are almost acceptable and I’ve actually used one a couple of times. The driver disk for the “keyboard” didn’t work (“The disk in drive A: is unreadable. Would you like Windows to format this disk?”) and I spent forever trying to locate the driver on the net.

I found one at the manufacturer’s site that installed onto my device properly, but the keyboard didn’t work at all. I mean, if you pushed “t” the Windows menu would drop down, if you pushed “s” it would type a “k,” and none of the app keys worked.

I did a little surfing for reviews on the Saitek keyboard, and the few I found were positive. Hopefully this means I’ll soon have a working PDA keyboard again; I never really use my keyboards much – I’ve had one for every PDA since the Newton – but when you want to use it, you really want to use it and it sucks not to have one.

Now what I really want out of life, besides for this joy-killing life-sucking uncomfortable fucking sinus infection to GO AWAY, is a USB hub shaped like a flying saucer and lit up from within with green LEDs. Why don’t I have one of those?

I woke up sick again this morning, for the 11th day in a row. We, and I use the royal, were not pleased.

So I called Medical Arts and talked to a nurse. I tried to get her to just give me antibiotics, but no – I had to go into the office so they could weigh me, look in my ears, feel my tonsils, and charge me $51.00 for the priviledge.

My appointment was at 9:40 AM. I was back in the Jeep, exiting their parking lot at 9:59. FIFTY-ONE DOLLARS?!?!?

I guess you have to be friends with your clinic for them to call in script for you without seeing you. I know they did it for my mom once or twice when I was a kid… of course, I had chronic bronchitis way back then so it wasn’t like there was any question of what I required: codine cough syrup and antibiotics.

I suppose your average 35-year-old can’t tell for sure if she’s got a sinus infection, so by gosh we’d better look in her ears!

My doctor doesn’t impress me as being particularly bright, either, although he is terribly good natured and friendly.

At DrugTown I picked up my first Western meds in years: $12 worth of generic antibiotics. I’ve only taken one so far and I don’t feel at all better. The literature tells me to drink lots of water, so I’ve been drinking lots of water.

Recently I went to make myself some snot-clearing herbal tea with echinacea in it, but noticed the flame looked weird. I turned off the offending burner and tried another. The flames were flickery and more yellow/orange than blue

Damn it.

So I waddled out to the LP tank and flipped back the top to read the guage: 10%.

Damn it.

I pulled the bill and it said I owe them $187. I checked my register and I gave those people $125 on the 25th of March.

I have my LP co-op in my cell’s phonebook, so I called them up:

Her: Farmer’s Co-op.
Me: Ah — (rattling phlegm)
Her: What was that?
Me: Two things. (more phlegm) First, my tank’s at 10% and I need fuel like three days ago. Second, I paid last month but it doesn’t show on my bill.
Her: Last name?
Me: Mook. M – O – O – K. Mook, rhymes with book. Probably under “Brett.”
Her: Okay, Mrs. Mook (said to rhyme not with book but with touque), no, you’re actually overpaid. Does the bill say 131 on it?
Me: Um… (glancing around for the bill I know is in another room) yeah.
Her: There’s a little minus sign next to it. That means it’s positive.
Me: Oh?
Her: A positive balance.
Me: (cough, hack, sniffle, sneeze)
Her: And what else?
Me: My tank is at 10%, the flame on my stove is all yellow.
Her: LP tank?
Me: Yeah. (like, what are we talking about here?!)
Her: Well that’s a good indicator you’re out!
Me: I checked the gauge and I need fuel.
Her: Okay, I’ll call {guy’s name I can’t remember} and it’ll be today or tomorrow, but definitely before Monday.
Me: Cool, thanks. (hack, cough)

Now I’m wondering… I thought they put us on budget in order to avoid having to pressure-check tanks when dumb asses like me failed to monitor their gauges. But if I’m calling them for fuel, then apparently they aren’t coming without a call. Which means we only used one tank of LP all winter. Is that even possible?

And more importantly, does 10% mean 10%? Or does it mean “It was 10% a few days ago and I’m not sensitive enough to register below 10% pressure.” In other words: can I cook dinner or will I run entirely out of gas?

Die, you nasty little bacteria, you’re making my sinuses hurt and I’m tired and I’ve been sick so long without it getting any better that I’ve actually become grumpy about it. Rar!
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This is the plugin that will allow me to display RSS feeds on my MT template. Yee-haw!

Hmm, I wonder what I’ll be doing tomorrow?
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Now I’m installing David Raynes’ MTRandomComment (v 0.12), an MT plugin.

I think I’m brutally in love with MT. Ah, Spring!
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I found the MT Plugin nest. Yay! And therein I discovered the GetXML Plugin for Movable Type, which means I may be on my way to XML news feeds.

Not that my blog particularly needs news feeds, but I want to learn how to do all this crap for the sake of learning itself and for salable webmistressing skills.
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I was browsing through my blog, reading comments. Sometimes I miss a few, and I like to know what my commentors are saying.

Guess what I found? ADVERTISEMENTS. I don’t know if actual people have to do it, or there’s some kind of bot that does it, but there are fucking penis enlargement and other ads posted to my blog as adverts.

I don’t know if I can explain how terribly mad this makes me, but I’ll try:

I DON’T WANT SPAM ON MY FUCKING SERVER!!! If you’re here to post ads in my commenting system, a pox upon you. Get a real job, fuckwad, and quit wasting space on my box.

Fucking adverts! Fucking bots! Fuck!

I took an online quiz. And it told me the truth: I know my damn grammar.

Take the quiz here.

I have nothing to show for my time, but I have learned something. Here is the arc of my surfing for the past two hours:

Today was the day I decided I wanted to understand feeds. You know how all those portals have fresh news all the time? Clearly there’s something going on behind the scenes, something groovy and automated, ’cause no one’s hand-coding all that shit.

And when I installed MT, I ended up with that funny link on my blog: “Syndicate this site.” What the hell does that do?

Hey… lots of sites have feeds like the one on my blog. Many of them have an “RSS” icon.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs.

In order to read RSS documents, you need a client (an aggregator) that runs on your desktop or in your browser.

Or you can display the stuff in a web page.

But how?

Hmm, if your page is PHP, you can run a little parser – like CaRP – to parse the XML RSS link and display it on your page.

But my blog isn’t PHP. Which means I need to learn some other way of parsing RSS feeds if I want to display news feeds on my blog… or (more importantly) on clients’ sites.

Ah, it’s late and I gotta hit the bank before it closes. Wish me luck in my knowledge hunt.

Ciao!
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