Claustrophobia

It's possible to spend *too* much time with or around people.

TV Interruptions

Was watching a semi-interesting movie (Man from Earth) but couldn't finish it, interruption free. Not meant to be, I suppose.

Not an Art Flick

Ok, so, "Stan Helsing" will never be confused for fine cinematic art. But, Desi Lydic is mad-cute.

IRL Cartoon

Funny moment of the day: Donna sneaks a bite of my food, not realizing I'd JUST spiked it with tobasco and hadn't stirred it in, yet.

Pleasant Scents

I do believe I smell the odor of baking brownies wafting in from the kitchen. Must go investigate...

Wut 2 Do...

So... Watch mind-fuck movies, listen to nihilistic music or just try to force myself to sleep?

Being Physically Manifested Is Highly Overrated

Overall, I can't say that I'm a fan of corporeal existence. Somehow, using a meaty conveyance to carry around my mind, my soul, my ...whatever... Just doesn't seem to be the best way to go. Granted, physicality allows for niceties such as sex and enjoying a really good meal. And, perhaps, physicality is just a transitory state in a larger existence so that we can have one particular way of experiencing the Universe. Who knows. Just can't say I'm a fan. My body feels heavy and redundant around me. It feels like more of an impediment than an aide.

I already live mostly in my mind. My body seems like more of a distraction than anything. While I could be off thinking about things, I have to occasionally process, "oh: I don't recall having that pain, before" and other bits of pointless trivia.

Hopefully, I'll get a chance to speak to someone about the sense of this.

Google Ain't Always Perfect

I are a tad unhappy to see that Picasa appears to be failing to sync metadata when uploading (and losing stuff you've manually web-added).

Shaken, Not Stirred

The worst part about milk is the chunks.

Don't Abuse The Language

I can sorta understand there/they're/their and your/you're, but I just don't get our/are errors.

Poor Baby...

Donna, as a goth, is offended by how pink her cheeks look (like, "I look so alive, dammit", or something).

That's Too Simple

I wonder how much of my music could be summarized as "a coupla angry Germans and their Macbooks"?

She Is Teh Yumz

ok, so Donna looks pretty damned good when she puts on her "anime bra".

Professional Perspective

Dunno if working in IT makes the various (ab)uses of the modifier "cyber" easier or harder to understand/take.

What Means ".ch"

I am afraid of the agents of the Helvetica Confederation.

Hell, I Say!

Mein Leben ist die Hölle

What's Your Measure

"German-Americans are the United States' largest ethnic group": Are we talking by number of individuals or by weight?

Back to Oblivion

Just noticed I have a couple Dr Who episodes on my DVR. Just haven't been compelled to watch the latest installments (sorta like Torchwood). I'm not the only one, in my circle of nerdy friends, either. Oh well. They got like four or five good years out of the "new" Doctor Who. Suppose I should be happy with the efforts of Eccleston and Tennant (and the bits of tastiness they each had at their respective sides).

Gotta Get...

May have to get me one of these. My CA friends would be so jealous! http://ping.fm/akZGE

HA! http://ping.fm/WXz5b

BLTs for Dinnah!

Looks like BLTs, tonight. Donna got a nice "mortgage-lifter" and a Cherokee Purple out of the garden, earlier. Gotta go fry bacon, now. Too bad we're currently short of homemade sammich bread. Oh well, homemade rolls will have to do.

I am [insert favorite euphemism for heading out into the traffic-fight to go home]

...ghostlike.
...outtie 5000.
...off like a prom dress.

Moving Targets

I really hate trying to build to and/or document a moving target.

Somnus Interruptus

Having a bed partner that laughs in her sleep is *not* conducive to sleeping through the night.

Life-Sapping Linux

Apparently, used up all my energy being driven crazy by Linux dependency hell. Going to bed.

Slamming the Message Home

How to teach: http://ping.fm/vo9y8

Sorry, But I Was Joking When I Asked...

So who's this "Modest Yahoo" feller I keeps hearin' about? Related to Yahoo Serious?

My Internal DJ Is Evil (A Continuing Series)

Woke up with Britney Spears stuck in my head; now I've got the damned Slinky song tootling about.

Eye-wash, Please

To the people whose asses are bigger than my torso, PLEASE stop wearing skin-tight jeans, leggings-as-pants, etc. It's *not* a good look.

Gnashing of Teeth

Curse you, Linux (and our automated build implementation) for making it so I actually have to work from the office, Friday.

The Little Things...

Something kind of funny about hitting the "Hide" button on a posting from the Bones fan page and having it ask, "hide Bones"?

Tip-over Taxi

Every time I see a Smart for Two, I want to tip it over on its (trying too hard to be cute) side.

Linux as Soap-Opera

Still in Linux-dependency hell. Worse: the system that's supposed to prevent this kind of problem actually seems to be exacerbating it.

Ouch, My Liver!

Hopefully, this will be an available, insurance-reimbursable treatment option by the time my epilepsy meds finish off my liver http://ping.fm/eDxSD

Fitness Tracking

Kinda cool but kinda scary, too: http://ping.fm/9379N

I mean, I'm all for documenting my life. I'm even for sharing it (there's probably enough posts on this blog to show that much). I just want it to be voluntary. My big concern with things like this is that, eventually, someone gets the Good Idea™ to compel usage.

Opportunities for Silliness

One of the nice things about using 24hr time is that there's a greater variety of palindrome times in a day.

Thanks for the Stabby

I'd really like to thank the 2.5 decades of epilepsy drugs for the chronic stabbiness that frequently emanates from my liver-area.

Linguistic Devolution

I sometimes wonder how we had the linguistic progression/devolution from "I am going to" to "I'ma".

Disappearing Acts

It's amazing how quickly a bag of jellybeans can become an *empty* bag of jellybeans.

Shudder-inducing

One of the awesome things about words like "vajayjay" is how much the use can be used to annoy others and amuse oneself (via the annoyance).

Banking Fail

US Bank's online mortgage payment processor/partner's payment system is full of lossage and utter fail. Of course, I'm spoiled. Previously, I'd used GMAC's system for paying my mortgage. It was decently linked into my main bank's account-tracking system (my main bank wrote the loan and sold it to GMAC). One would think that, given the integration of prior mortgages, US Bank would be similarly hooked-in. Notsomuch. Worse, US Bank's mortgage site uses an external payment process to handle the stuff. So, not only do I not have my mortgage balance shown in my main banking dashboard, but when I go to manage it via US Bank's web site, I'm shunted off to yet ANOTHER financial services company's site. To add insult to injury, that company's web forms are hideously broken. You try to punch in that you want to put an extra $200 on your principal payment, and, instead, it registers it as $2000. Ugh. And it takes a lot of dinking around with their form to make sure that the values you wanted to put into the extras are all correct.

Perspective, I Suppose

Gotta love when the weather forecaster is saying he's happy that the humidity has dropped to the low 80s. Gah. DC in summer.

Why *CAN'T* The "Badguy" Win

Every time I watch "Law Abiding Citizen," I still hope that the he completes his plan.

Quote of The Day:

The reason British nerds are so content is they're not outcasts. The whole country is ugly, misanthropic, too smart for its own good, works at a record distributors, collects Dr. Who DVDs, and is married to a chubby nurse with a kid from another marriage.

Misleading Titles

"Women Behind Bars" is not a soft-core porno ...at least, the version on WE Network isn't.

Candidate for Standardized Testing

Donnie Wahlberg::Clint Howard as Markie Mark::Richie Cunningham

Unexpected Utterances

"You look good covered in balls," is not a quote you expect to hear coming from broadcast TV (left the room for dinner).

It's Only a Paycheck That Keeps Me From Beating You

I really don't give a rat's about "but I was using that". Who told you that you could use that???

LockDown for Sanity's Sake

When creating network temp shares, lock em down. Else they WILL be found and used by all and sundry, (who'll whine when you do "cleanup").

Keep It In The Damned Box

Dear Cats:

This overboard stuff is really annoying.

Garden Progress

The last of the asparagus crowns has shown itself; Donna pulled two pole-beans off the corn: one of 13" and one of over 21" length. WTF.

Accidental Horror

So, they apparently made a remake/ripoff of "Fantastic Voyage" in 2002 called "Antibody". Such an all-star cast. Ech.

A Matter of Time

Hate time-sync issues. Nothing Kerberized works with inconsistent time-keeping. You wouldn't think that, in 2010, time synchronization would be an issue. I mean, pretty much every OS has a method for pulling time synchronization data from a central source, now. Given how critical time accuracy is, you'd think it'd just be a "given" that it was set up and working correctly in any kind of business entity. Newp.

Admittedly, In bad taste

Steinbrenner had a heart?? Bad day to be a Yankees fan, maybe.

Markings

I guess that's one way to spice things up a bit? Maybe support that "girlfriend in Canada" story? http://ping.fm/lP9h0

So, what does it say?

There's a phenomena in psychological studies called the "just world" phenomena. Basically, it states that most people, to one degree or another, equate outcomes to actions or choices, even when the two are either not closely or not at all related. An interesting quote I found on the subject was:

“Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to ‘feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims.’”
-- Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez from an essay at The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

So, it kind of makes me wonder, when politicians or people of a "progressive" mindset talk about "fairness" and things that people "deserve", are they exercising "just world" thinking? Are they more or less like what's described in the preceding paragraph? I suppose, in the end, it comes down to what you do about your perceptions of "just", "fairness" and "deserve": is it the basis for taking action or is it just the basis for bemoaning the state of the world.

Maybe it's only loosely related or not even related at all.

When's She Drop?

So, what's the dead-pool on Lohan looking like, any ways?

Corporate Defacement

It still sickens me to see the Oracle logo tagged all over the old Sun sites (like BigAdmin) like some kind of lame corporate graffiti.

"Snuck" really should be a word.

On the menu this evening:

• mustard-grilled porkchops
• deep-fried okra and horseradish sauce
• succotash (with just off the stalk corn and beans)
• tomatoes w/ pesto

Who Cares About the Law

So, I read things like this, and it really makes me wonder whether cops bother to know the laws they're charged to enforce http://ping.fm/XceRe

Things Best Left Unsaid

So, the plastic surgeon says, "any more questions." I was sorely tempted to ask if you really can make soap from the lipo leftovers.

Which Is My "Good Side"?

I have no "best angle" when it comes to photographs: they pretty much all look like "axe-murderer".

Dear Chase:

Fuck you and your "invalid payment date". If it's too late to use that date, don't fucking offer it. Asshats.

The more I use other banks' web portals, the more I like USAA's. How hard is it to do a banking portal correctly. I mean, USAA manages it on a regular basis and is often in the vanguard for offering things. So, at the very least, these other banks have existing examples of how to do things right. It's not like they're innovating and fucking it up because there's no good available "prior art" to use for guidance.

Too Close to Maryland

One of the (many) bad things about living in Alexandria: so many PG county drivers. Is PG really that awful (rhetorical) that you have to fuck up Alexandria, too?

Parking and Retail

So, they built this lovely new "destination" retail center in PG county: the National Harbor complex. It's like they took a bit of northern Virginia and tried to transplant it into Maryland (hell, they even went as far as to dig up a long-time piece of art from Arlington and move it over there). They're still in the "attracting patronage" stage of things. While there are many stores already there, there's a LOT more storefronts that are empty or in the "coming soon" phase. They're in that phase where they should be concerned about attracting customers, not trying to scare/piss them off. Establishing a retail center by having fascist parking enforcement generally isn't "recommended". Ticketing would-be-customers within two minutes of the expiry of the time on the meter really doesn't seem to be part of that whole "create an inviting shopping experience". Then again, when you have very successful, very established places (like the Tysons Corner shopping complexes) that don't charge for parking (let alone charging $3/hr), you really gotta wonder who it is they're trying to attract at National Harbor. I mean, they seem to be trying to set up something more suitable to the area where Fairfax and Montgomery counties border each other; not repurposed PG county ghetto.

Gotta Be In There, Somewhere

I need to find a copy of the MD driver's manual to see where it says "drive in the far left lane as soon and slow as possible"

Dreamland Funtime

Never a night's sleep so refreshing as one in which you're in some kind of zombie FPS.

Garden Progress

looks like five of the asparagus plants have decided to grow. The daily tomato harvest has gotten too big for the one container, too.

Too Well Rested?

It's kind of amazing that 2 days in a row of more than 6hrs of sleep and I feel more tired than days I only manage 3 or so.

Release the Hate

Sometimes, you just feel like being hateful.