My dignity, like a bottle of Gauthier ’88, shatters on the prow of Alison’s new blog.
Category: Angst
I have whiplash now! Great! Dammit! This is from about eight seconds of headbanging during “Blister in the Sun” at Erin and Stephen’s wedding. I used to be able to dance like that for hours, and now my limit is less than eight seconds.
I guess having ruined my spinal column in college is worth some cred. Maybe.
This is going to seem unprovoked but go with it
Who the fuck sent me the creepy email with the talking monkey?
Update 2307 hrs: Ken did.
Live the good life on the offworld colonies
Think of somebody you knew briefly, for a week or two, maybe one night, maybe a month: a camp counselor or a host sister, a bad date or that guy who dropped out before midterms. Think of somebody you owe.
You’ve got one afternoon and one present, no larger than a garment box, to give this person. You have a table at a restaurant anywhere (except Paris) in the world.
Where do you eat lunch? What’s in the box?
This is called a business trip
Meanwhile, here I am in New York on September 11th, having flown up yesterday evening with a cadre of FDNY firefighters and a pilot who looked about ten. (Years old.) I nearly lost my luggage; my cabbie got lost. I’m on an expense account but I won’t get those reimbursements for two weeks, and this morning I walked eight blocks the wrong way. No idea when I’ll be allowed to leave work tonight.
It’s going okay!
We’ve officially been in Louisville long enough to hit a residency landmark: The Favorite Restaurant That Always Seems Packed But Now It’s Closing. That’s right. The Mayan Gypsy is going away in a little over two weeks, and the world will be poorer.
To get in while we can, Maria and I are telling you to come eat with us there at 6 pm EST this Sunday, June 25th. Update: Not Sunday, they’re not open on Sunday. Monday? Call, email or comment if you want in on our reservation. We’ll get corn cakes and chocolate. I envision a pitcher of sangria and an 18% gratuity. Walls will tumble. Men will die.
After almost exactly three years here, it finally happened: my work internets have locked everybody out of LJ, Blogspot, and every message board I even tried to keep up with. Curiously enough, Facebook and Myspace remain unaffected. The same disparity means that Flickr is banned, for being “remote network storage,” but GMail is untouched. Wait, did I say “curious?” I meant “blind and stupid.”
Anyway, the man remains unable to hold me down, and I’m learning Lynx. The guys in IT, by contrast, are learning nothing.
We got new evacuation instructions for our building today. Before, we had to alternate in the east and west stairwells by floor, which was a pain to remember. Now, the instructions are to go to the east stairwell if you’re on the east side, and the west stairwell if you’re on the west side. You got to whichever stairwell is closest. It’s that simple!
In the last ten minutes, I’ve heard two people come up and ask the Lady in the Next Cube whether we’re on the east or west side.
HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA
At work, we have this client we pay for data. The client likes to know that only humans are seeing this data, presumably because they are stupid and bill by the hour rather than the byte (and maybe because of HIPAA, whatever). My employer likes to have computers get the data for the humans, so we can stop paying the humans to do extremely tedious copying work. This is why I have spent a significant amount of my time over the last year creating and maintaining a kludgy application that gets the data by pretending to be human. It can trick another computer, but you would probably not be fooled.
As of this weekend, the client in question deployed a whole new method of connectivity: a tiny embedded custom applet that works okay for humans, but doesn’t have the features necessary for our kludgy impersonator. They disabled the old connection, of course.
This is why my boss and I spent two hours, this morning, trying to hack in to a system we are paying to access.
I need a new job.