In which I hope yours was lovely.
In which I have waited until the last minute.
[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]esterday I got on Amazon and ordered a bunch of stuff for Christmas. Luckily I still have Prime, so I got 2-day shipping for free. (Free!)
All of which means that I very well might avoid a hellish Christmas eve midnight run to Walmart. Yay!
In other news, G’ma has already made at least three different kinds of cookies (including those amazing molasses crackle things). My company’s owner sent the office about thirty pounds of candy and cookies (including a huge box of chocolate truffles). I’m trying very hard to avoid these things, but all I want to eat is macaroni and cheese. Ah, Christmas: it’s not the goose that’s getting fat.
In which this was originally posted elsewhere, but I’m moving a copy over here because I wrote it and I can.
Overweight is a metabolic issue and not a behavioral one.
It’s currently the fashion to believe that overweight people suffer from sloth and gluttony; however, adipose tissue is not the result of character defects but rather of metabolic function. Most of what you know about diet and exercise and health, it turns out, is completely wrong.
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In which there’s a sendlog.
When mail is transferred from server to server across the net, this is what it looks like when the servers talk to each other. More or less.
LOG: MAIN
< = root@server.bmi.net U=root P=local S=381
[root@server ~]#delivering 1Raxum-0002J0-Cc
Connecting to blahmail.goblinbox.com [66.240.255.128]:25 ... connected
SMTP<< 220 fc8255128.aspadmin.net ESMTP
SMTP>> EHLO server.bmi.net
SMTP< < 250-fc8255128.aspadmin.net
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-STARTTLS
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
SMTP>> STARTTLS
SMTP< < 220 ready for tls
SMTP>> EHLO server.bmi.net
SMTP< < 250-fc8255128.aspadmin.net
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
SMTP>> MAIL FROM:
SMTP>> RCPT TO:
SMTP>> DATA
SMTP< < 250 ok
SMTP<< 250 ok
SMTP<< 354 go ahead
SMTP>> writing message and terminating "."
SMTP< < 250 ok 1323903521 qp 8064
SMTP>> QUIT
LOG: MAIN
=> sender@goblinbox.com R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp H=blahmail.goblinbox.com [66.240.255.128] X=TLSv1:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:256
LOG: MAIN
Completed
In which you experience part of my day.
Phone rings.
I answer, “Technical support. May I help you?”
A person immediately starts a harangue. She does not identify herself. She opens with, “Your message is wrong, because I live in Dayton and my Internet is down!” and ends with “There’s nothin’ comin’ on here at all!” and I’m pretty sure I can hear her gesturing at her monitor over the phone.
While she’s speaking I grab her number from the HUD, search my database for her account, discover her account type, verify the account isn’t suspended for non-pay, and quickly check the Radius logs and run the MNPP tool. I now know two things: her DSL is up and she doesn’t know how to communicate.
At all. Because she’s been talking the entire time and still hasn’t identified herself or made any sense. I’m not even clear on what it is that isn’t working.
“—and I know something’s wrong ’cause it only has two bars!” she finishes up, triumphantly.
“You have DSL,” I say, knowing that she’ll think it’s a non-sequiteur. (I can see from her account that she doesn’t have a wireless router, so her bars comment is completely irrelevant.)
“And it’s just not doin’ nothin’,” she says, “it won’t ever load your web page.” Ah-hah! Bingo. By this comment, I am able to infer that she’s running Internet Explorer 8 and that bmi.net is her homepage. I am able to do this because I’m a goddamned genius, and because it’s my job to guess what the lusers are talking about and to solve problems with hardly any clues whatsoever.
I am Sherlock fucking Holmes, people!
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In which Charlie just ups and gives me a whole entire box of old cameras.
So this happened yesterday:
That’s four Polaroids! And a Kodak! And three packs of Spectra! OMFG!
In which I accidentally buy a Kindle Fire.
I did not need a new device. My Kindle 3 (the model now known as the “Kindle Keyboard”) isn’t even a year old yet, and it works just fine. After I sprung (sprang?) for the expensive but elegant and cleverly-designed OEM leather cover with the built-in light, I could even read in the dark. It’s eminently portable, wireless, holds 1500 books, and I’d hacked it to display custom screen savers. It did not need to be replaced.
It’s just that I have a job now, and therefore there was money in my account on the day my clicking finger went ahead and decided for me. And now I have the Kindle Fire!
The Fire is a seriously great deal for two hundred bucks. The hardware is really nice for such a low price point — I hear they’re being sold at a loss (Amazon’s favorite market-cornering trick, see: the entire ebook industry). The device is fast, responsive, and has very nice screen resolution. It’s many, many times more elegant than that knock-off tablet I had briefly last year.
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In which there’s a post of no interest to anyone who does not wear acrylic nails.
Sunday I went to my favorite nail salon, LT Nails, over on Issacs street, for a fill.
“A fill” is the procedure in which, after your nails have been growing out for two or three weeks, they “fill” the part closest to the cuticle with new acrylic. Accomplishing this requires polish remover, a Dremel, two kinds of filing and buffering devices, an anti-fungal, and new acrylic, which is applied with a paint brush.
The guy who did my nails observed a discoloration about the size of the tip of a ball point pen on my left thumbnail. This is interesting, because my acrylic nails are fairly discolored due to the fact that I’ve had them on for quite awhile and they age; even though you get fresh acrylic every couple of weeks, the stuff on the tips is always many weeks old, and becomes stained by contact with food and heat. This tiny little dot of discoloration concerned him enough that he just went right ahead and removed the entire acrylic overcoat from my nail, and then tried for a while to buff the discoloration off my very thin natural nail.
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4 random books from my Library!
