Hey, I found another reason cell phones suck!
Page 165 of 181
this should have gone up last night but I’m slow
Finally fixed the “Journal last updated” indicator on all the other pages, for those of you peons who still don’t have an RSS aggregator. It’s pretty hacky (I finally got it by string-manipulating the aforementioned RSS feed), but I’m kinda proud of its ingenuity. It should be pretty adaptable, even if some of the preceding fields change length.
Yeah, I bet I could lift a car. If I wanted.
The Story of King David
Once upon a time there was a king, and his name was David the Flora.
And King David WAS a good king, and his minions, they DIDST love upon him; and David the Flora was well pleased with them.
And his minions did ENJOY his presence; such that at certain times they WERE unable to keep from WRESTING him to the floor; and that at others they DIDST pile themselves upon him.
And there was among these minions ONE whose name was Alison.
And it CAME to pass that on a night in Virginia, David Flora DID bring himself unto Alison; and she held in her hand a long, flexible plastic lily, which she HAD stolen from a restaurant.
And Alison said unto David Flora, in a calm voice: “I’m gonna hit you with this.”
And David Flora DID smile, so that his eyes SEEMED almost to disappear.
And Alison said unto David Flora: “It’s probably gonna hurt.”
And David Flora SMILED again; for he WAS drunk on whiskey.
And Alison DID hit him with the flower, which was like unto a whip; and David Flora FELT greatly hurt.
And Alison DID hit him a second time; and both of these were in the top part of his breast.
And David Flora WAS in incredible pain, and he wept, and he was like unto a woman. And yea, Brendan Adkins did laugh so hard he almost WET himself.
Lord. That WAS so goddamn funny.
The End.
Power’s out in the whole northeast world, which, when I heard it, made me really nervous. I thought they were supposed to get better about this kind of thing! But then they say in the same article repeatedly that it’s not terrorism. So it’s one of two things:
- It’s really a power grid screwup, not terrorism.
- It’s terrorism, they just don’t want to cause a panic.
If it’s the first, I feel perfectly justified in posting this; if it’s the second, I will pretend I’m aiding the effort to keep things calm by relieving the tension with humor.
I mean, it’s big. It’s not terrorists. That really leaves only one possibility, you know?
Update 8.15.2003 0839 hrs: Oh, never mind.
Weirdly, googling for sites related to the Tuesday comic gets this site as the top result (under Tuesday itself), and my favorite band as the next one. Maybe it just daisy-chains through links? But that can’t be right. Or maybe somebody posted about it on their message boards.
Either way, though, seeing those two sites bracketing mine is really kind of cool. Google’s generally pretty nice to me, which I like to think of as a measure of karma. I do kind of wish, though, that I weren’t the “feeling lucky” result for people trying to find lyrics to some Mudvayne song.
In which I worry and ramble
My boss just officially pitched me the do-you-want-to-keep-working-during-school question, and I’m torn. Working in a cube isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot more comfortable whatever retail or counter job I’d otherwise have this fall. Plus it looks a lot better to have months of programming experience already on your resume, even if it’s just as a part-timer.
On the other hand, I don’t like this job. The people are great and the environment is comfortable, but the work is boring, boring, boring and I’m only even halfway talented at it. At least if I (hypothetically) work at a bookstore I’ll be busy and competent, even if I’ll also be on my feet all day.
I just want to DO stuff. I want to be minting clean lean extreme code, not patching bugs in this enormous ugly proprietary system. It makes me tired and I look for distractions, and with broadband right here at my workstation, that’s not good for my productivity. That in turn makes me feel guilty about my work ethic, which makes me more stressed, which makes me tired, lather and rinse and so forth.
I know that I’ll probably start out bug-fixing wherever I go, so I should probably get used to it. The other thing, though, is that I have no idea what my workload is going to be like in grad school; my boss would clearly prefer that I keep my job uninterrupted, just dropping down to part-time, but by the time I get to midterms that could very well kill me. I don’t like taking twelve hours out of my day now, and I don’t want to find out what it’d be like to do that with homework. Also, I’m REALLY tired of getting up at 0630. I want an evening shift.
(It occurs to me that I’m posting this from work, and there exists the possibility of a random IT guy picking it up on a sniffer and sending it back to my boss with a cocked eyebrow. Just in case: Hello, IT guy! Your sister was great!)
Forty-five google minutes later, I’ve got a list of ten book or comic stores I could bus to. I think I’m going to make a bunch of phone calls tonight. At least thinking about this got me to dust off my bum and actually start thinking about what I’ll be doing in the fall. Sometimes questions find answers.
There’s one other thing to consider, too: if I keep up my secret practice project, it shouldn’t be too long until I’m confident about writing publishable short fiction. I know the money’s not great, but it beats all my other options until they spit candy. I also know that chances are slim, and that everybody and her grad school duck tries to write short fiction, but I do have one little in: not everybody or her grad school duck knows Nancy Zafris.
At least I’m in process now, which I think is the important thing. I could live on just my student loans, but I’d rather not, and it’s nice to be able to buy a comic book once in a while. I just need to figure out how and how much I can work. Hey, old people, anybody want to tell me what to do?
Argh.
Okay, so at some point my subdomains stopped working. That’s fucking great. No wonder people think the site is down–I’ve been giving out notfallingdown.xorph and shamzmam.xorph (for AZWP) forever, and now they give big old 404s. This is ridiculous. I really need to change webhosts, but I need several hours to get through such a transfer and it’s time I don’t have.