fine whine

[So much for saving my drafts and revisiting them. Either I had nothing to say or I have since forgotten, as this just said “sunday 31″.]

[So much for saving my drafts and revisiting them. Either I had nothing to say or I have since forgotten, as all this said was “saturday 30th”.]

[So much for saving my drafts and revisiting them. Either I had nothing to say or I have since forgotten, because all this said was “friday 29th”.]

Another October means another Halloween, and that means little kids demanding candy (and parents tagging behind reminding them to say “Thank you”) and cheesy costumes and carved pumpkins and more candy and so on and so forth. The difference this year is that I have a house and as such am definitely on the other side of the whole candy giving/taking relationship. Before I filled out the demand part of the equation and now, well, I handle the supply.

It got me thinking to the days when I was the little kid, running across front yards and acting in an impolite fashion, and I was reminded to the people who didn’t give out candy. There was always one guy in my neighborhood who gave out pennies. I’m sure he had the best intentions, but until the penny-swallowing-and-choking lawsuits hit he’ll just be thought of as the guy who’s too good or too cheap to give out candy.

I was thinking about that, and then it hit me. We should give out floppy disks! You can’t choke on a floppy disk, and (would you look at that) we’ve got an awful lot of them laying around.

As it turned out I handed granola bars and Smarties and Tootsie rolls out to probably fifteen kids, and Jessica did some ten before me. Whilst waiting I watched Songs from the second floor, or as the Swedes and the original language people would call it, Sånger Från Andra Våningen. There isn’t much to say about the film, other than the people who call it mesmerizing need to work on their standards of mesmerization.

In five days I will embark on a perilous journey, the likes of which I have seen only once before.

I’m going to write 50,000 words (some might consider that a novel) in thirty days or less. This year I intend moreover to write fifty thousand words of fiction, not three thousand words of fiction, forty thousand complaining about being stuck at three thousand, and seven-odd thousand of fictionalized weirdness just to pad things out to the target.

This time around I have a better idea, a longer story and, if I do it, an outline to follow. I’ve got five days to make that outline.

Tonight was the first of probably two or three local meetings of the other foolish writers in town. It was everything I expected it to be other than half an hour short, which wasn’t that much of a problem for me. I threw in my requisite two or three jokes and tried to be sociable and whatnot with the others, most of whom I will not see until the end celebration.

I think I’m okay with that. Now, to that outline …

There’s a Post-it note stuck to my monitor.

The message on it is written in my handwriting, and it reads:

HAPPY
APRIL
FOOL’S
DAY

I’ve long since forgotten what it meant. There’s a chance it has to do with something work-related that would have expired at the beginning of April of 2003 but I’m no longer sure. Moreover, it could well mean something else, something yet to come.

I wonder why I did it, and also why it has stayed on my monitor for over a year while just about every other sticky note I put up falls down well before a month is over.

A week and a day and then it’s all over. Assuming there’s no subsequent fracas (as in 2000) the two sides, as they have now polarized into only two, will suddenly find themselves without a cause.

At which point a great many people will swear off politics and activism and wander away from it altogether. So it goes. I can’t wait to get my airwaves back.

I’ve only got a week and a day, though, to educate myself about all the other candidates and issues. We all have a lot of work to do.

Courtesy of the party yesterday I have this new catchphrase, but unfortunately I cannot remember the context nor the meaning behind these words (and I could well be misquoting myself): It’s a good thing I work in pants.

Hmm. Maybe you needed to be there.

Well, five minutes or five dollars. I found out today that the party we’d been invited to attend tonight was in fact a costume party after all, and we had about an hour to create a costume from scratch.

I spent at least a couple minutes thinking about this quandary. What could I do with my fedora, for example? Then I thought of splashing some paint on some old clothes and going as a painter. Then the idea struck me for a truly easy costume: a lawn and leaf bag.

I could merely take the four-foot tall cardboard bag and poke some arm and leg holes in it.

In the end, I kept my jeans and SETI@Home shirt on and donned an aluminum foil beanie and went as paranoid.

It got a laugh or two.

Lacking anything better to mention, I’d like to take a moment to complain about my computer at work. More specifically, I’d like to complain about using it, as one of my issues is with Microsoft Outlook and another with Last.FM and yet one more with my Wordpress pages and web email.

First, my AutoCorrect doesn’t work. For a long time I’d disabled it completely without incident, but lately as I send out more emails I find myself signing them with THanks, MIke and that’s unacceptable in a professional environment. Unacceptable to me, that is, as I am constantly barraged with emails rife with typos and the wrong names and all sorts of errors (heck, I’ve sent one or two myself lately). It just bothers me to make such a fat fingered mistake, and so consistently to boot. Enter AutoCorrect–it was designed for situations just like this, right? Too bad it just calmly ignores my double capitals, even when I have specifically entered every possible permutation of “THanks” down to “TH” and still it mocks me with its inaction. There’s no possible way this can be user error other than spending a little too much time on the SHIFT key.

As for Last.FM I’ve grown somewhat tired of hearing the same music over and over. I’m unwilling to make the effort to listen to new music, though, despite that being the main object of the service; that is, to introduce new music to people based on what they already like (and dislike). I think I’m just to finicky, or just too lazy to go back and hit “BAN” every fifth track or so when they try to slip in some bad reggae or worse.

Also irking me in a vaguely computer-related fashion is the recent onslaught of spammers trying to slip links about casinos, porn, grey market drugs and roulette table plans (I kid you not) onto my pages. They’re wasting my server cycles and my own cycles as each one generates an email and a link I must click to destroy them. I’m looking into adding some WordPress plugins to take care of them, but I only care so much.