25 October 2004

eight days and counting

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.

24 October 2004

no apology, just another catchphrase

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.

23 October 2004

Five minute costumes

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.

22 October 2004

computer complaints

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.

21 October 2004

on the spam front

It would seem that online gambling is more fun than having sex, since almost all of my recent spam comment (attempts) on this 'ere site link to poker sites and online casinos and very, very few are for performance enhancing drugs.

I haven't seen a shift like this since the whole anthrax/cialis thing a year ago or whenever that was.

20 October 2004

envy from the cube

A girl who works at the other end of my cellblock (oops, I mean aisle) has defected to one of our competitors after some nine-odd years of working. She too had transitioned out of the distribution center (warehouse, you could say) into a job that she was good at and thusly known, but I could tell she was looking forward to moving up again. Or moving west, at least.

Lucky her. I tend to dread my transitions. So I envy less that her life is just about to get flipped entirely and more that she's so darn excited about it.

As I mentioned, I got my job in something of a sideways fashion, having started in the distribution center cutting open boxes and driving pallet jacks. Somehow I turned that into a desk jockey position measuring women's jeans and answering emails. The novelty's starting to wear off, though.