“‘It’s hard to put a price on Britney Spears’ urine,’ Golden Palace spokesman Drew Black told The Associated Press Wednesday.”
Category: Angst
Brendan Pretends to be Pat from Achewood
Okay, double-clicking is a terrible interface, all right? It’s TERRIBLE and STUPID. It’s wildly unintuitive and it distributes a conceptually atomic operation across two distinct actions!
This is, for all of you who come over to my place and try to use Firefox and get a surprise, why my mouse’s wheel button doesn’t open a new tab. It’s set to act like a double-click, as have been all my mice since 1998. I could tell when I was seventeen that double-clicking is bad usability, and all Jakob Nielsen cares about is whether my links are blue! I HATE EVERYTHING FUN!
This has been “Brendan Pretends to be Pat from Achewood.” Except I’m serious about double-clicking, dammit.
The elastic band on my pocket Moleskine snapped off this morning. What the shit! I had my first pocket Moleskine for over two years, and its elastic band is still on. This one’s barely seven months old! You’re fired, pocket Moleskine!
I don’t actually think this will actually make much of an actual difference, since it actually stays closed in my pocket and I don’t press things between the actual pages.
Update 1427 hrs: THANK YOU FOR POINTING OUT MY SHORTCOMINGS, DAVID FLORA. I HAVE CORRECTED THE REDUNDANCY.
Not going in Anacrusis
“Is a personal narrative really the optimal form for mocking one’s own childish desires?” muses Jake. After a while he writes a note to himself to consider that later, then goes back to his excitingly decorated office in the airy production building where he works hard all day with his friends from college and the interweb on fascinating, lucrative projects until they go home to the same apartment complex and play games until two in the morning and also they can eat pizza and fried chicken sandwiches every day without getting fat and his ankle doesn’t hurt and nobody ever dies.
Reprostitution
Just so’s you’re aware, I’m a large.
You know, I could use a frisbee.
I guess I have a birthday later? Coincidentally, I am annoyed in general (though not necessarily in specific) by the practice of posting one’s Amazon wishlist to one’s weblog; it’s passive-aggressive avarice, and I don’t think anyone really deserves presents for putting words in a little box on a screen for ten minutes a day. If that.
So when I link to my own wishlist, you understand, it’s only for the benefit of humans who feel the need to buy me physical objects once a year but lack any helpful specificity of vision. I don’t actually want any things off there–it’s more like I don’t diswant them. What I really want is for you to come over on the afternoon of the third and play Ticket to Ride with us, and then once it’s dark and cooler we can go play frisbee by the river.
I have to go get some sackcloth and ashes now.
Pookie
He was a canine Houdini, absolutely brilliant at escaping whatever fences, gates or other barriers we could set up to keep him safe. He was brick-stupid about everything else: glass doors, bigger dogs, cars. Those two things in combination don’t make for a long life expectancy; it’s kind of surprising that he lived to be eleven.
Pookie was always nominally my dog, although Ian took care of him more often, and after we moved out he was really my mom’s. She found him, Friday afternoon, on the wrong side of the fence around Kelly Ridge. There wasn’t any real evidence of what exactly happened. Could have been a car, or another dog, or some unknown medical problem.
He was a shih tzu, the kind you see like little furry hovercraft on shows: glossy, legless, gliding. Pookie never looked like that. His fur was short, tangled and dirty; he smelled like a dog. He lived outdoors, and always seemed satisfied with that.
After Mom sold the house, Pookie spent much more time with Joe and his giant antisocial dog, Greg Brown, out on the ridge. I don’t know how Greg and Pookie first behaved around each other, but by the time I saw them together they were inseparable. Pookie was already nine, but he acted like a dog finally growing up: his body got thicker and more muscular, and he seemed more reserved, less goofy. Greg never let anyone he didn’t trust near his protege.
When he was wet he looked like a rat, but when his hair was just the right length he looked like those Chinese statues of lions. I’ve never met anyone more confident, or more trusting, or who spent his entire life in such a happy mood.
Ninety minutes later, I still don’t feel well
I gave blood for the first time at GSP, which was, hideously, almost seven years ago. I haven’t gone a year without donating since then. At my current job, I’ve given at all but one (I was sick) of our company-wide blood drives, which happen every two and a half months. I’m fairly experienced at these things. I always prep with lots of water, and I eat a decent lunch, sans french fries.
But dammit, it keeps getting worse. I used to get nervous and shaky, so I started bringing my CD player along, and that helped. Then I started getting light-headed and hot at the snack canteen; last time I had to lie down with my feet on a box and drink nasty Powerade. Today I took twice as long as usual, so they had to reseat the needle–a new and disturbing experience–and I didn’t even make it off the donation table before I almost passed out. Giving blood sucks!
Not gonna stop, though.