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dragonlady7and the check doesn't go through until thursday anyway, so it's sort of moot.
thursday i'll give dave his rent check (though i've paid down some of the balance by stepping in while his atm card was missing, although he found it after 2 days, so it wasn't much) and then i'll do a little math and see what kind of pain my money is in. there shouldn't be much left.
bleagh.
i didn't get much done last night, just transferring some more files from the pc to the mac. Dave got a wireless card in his Newton, which rules-- the thing is so ancient and obsolete that it cannot connect to the Internet except for a hack by which it uses homemade drivers to use a strange, off-brand wireless card as a modem-- so he can check email and surf the web from his 1997 e-Mate 300. It's very cool, but sort of... well, useless. Still... if either of us goes back to school, that thing will be worth its weight in gold. It doesn't weigh much, which is part of its worth. (It's a primitive version of a PDA-- almost full laptop size, with a full keyboard, a touchscreen monitor, absolutely indestructible, with a handle on the side and a rainbow Apple logo on the back.)
It's cool.
I have the website into a form the boss actually likes, and now he's (for the first time!!) giving me material to put in it so I don't have to generate time-wasting and futile filler text... I get yelled at if my text is obvious filler, but I can't put nothing there, and the people who promise me filler text don't actually mean it. But he's doing it now! So some of our pages may make sense. Jesus, I've been working on this for four months, and he's finally telling me what he wants. As long as he doesn't blame me for how long it's taken, that's fine; I can be philosophical. I won't be happy, but that's not important.
Ah well. So maybe I'll finish that.
I'm becoming a total Internet recluse nerd. I post on webmaster and seo forums all the time, and last night I actually posted to a usenet group as well. Oof. That's sort of rewarding and sort of not-- on the webmaster forum, I posted a question, got a ridiculously condescending answer, and started to flame back but then bit my tongue and wrote a very tightly controlled, precisely biting matter-of-fact answer, and got a personal message from the forum moderator thanking me for my self-control-- my antagonist was an obnoxious 14-year-old who routinely posted thoughtlessly, and my reply was far more effective than anything the moderator could have pm'd him. So I felt good about that.
Last night I posted on rec.pets.herp about my frogs-- they're active, and singing, and all that, but they just haven't been interested in eating very much, which doesn't jive with their behavior from last year as I recall. I asked if anyone had any insights into this behavior, but I did quite a bit of rambling first so I didn't expect much by way of clear answers, and had planned on probably clarifying a little later. And then I asked if anyone had any good solutions for not having to go out to buy crickets so often-- mail-order, keeping large numbers, breeding them? because I found it annoying to have to go to the store, which is in an inconvenient location. I was mostly just hoping for a link or something to the huge thread I remembered from about six months ago about cricket breeding, which I was helpless to find.
I only got one response and it was like "if you can't take care of your pets you should give them to someone who can."
Which really pissed me off. I went back to see what I'd written and it was pretty clear that my frogs didn't really seem ill, and it was also clear that I did do everything necessary for them. So I wrote an incensed answer this morning, but edited it down before I sent it so that I think it was pretty reasonable. "A question on how to improve a task does not indicate that the asker is not capable of doing the task in the first place." Etc.
All of this makes me a hopeless dork, but I'm not getting much joy anywhere else. My coworkers are odd people that I really don't jive well with-- they're nice but they think I'm hopelessly weird, and I just can't figure out what they're talking about half the time. So I get no socializing there. I get few comments on my livejournals and few emails, as everyone's having fun and doing summer things.
I do see people once in a while-- had the cousins up for dinner not long ago, went up to my folks' for a party last weekend, and this weekend I went down to Manhattan and hung out with Masako from UR for a while, and Dave's cousin's boyfriend was over the other night just hanging out (he came to get a CD of a program from Dave and stayed several hours. An entertaining guy), and we'll see the pair of them Friday night probably...
I dunno. I've always been somewhat asocial. I do enjoy hanging out online, and it's more useful to me to be posting in forums and the like than it is to be just surfing around. And I might as well do something useful while I'm at work-- they've solved innumerable little problems for me, on the webmastering and seo forums, so it's not like I'm just farting around instead of working. I'm getting help instead of being trained. I've gotten a tremendous amount done in the last couple of days because I've had some real breakthroughs in my understanding of HTML and CSS, thanks in large part to the forums I frequent.
But they're so time-consuming. I never have any time to get things done. I come home from work all exhausted from staring at screens and manipulating virtual objects all day long, and all I want to do is play with my new computer. Of course. But...
Man. Well, that's life. At least I spent a while last night organizing iPhoto, which at least is about my life. I imported all the images from my old hard drive, some of which are quite old. I need to scan more of my old photos, though. I have to sort through my physical photos and organize them so that I can digitize them, put them in iPhoto, and make CDs and webpages out of them. I found my photos of Greece-- those are mostly organized, so I'll have to scan those at some point and make a webpage. Maybe I should try optimizing it for the names of the other people in the photos, so that if they Google themselves they'll find me... I don't know how else I could get in touch with Branwen and Alayne again, but I doubt they'd be pleased if I made webpages about them. I should probably just contact Emma and ask the alumnae assoc. about them. At this point in our lives we're more concerned with avoiding Emma, because it keeps sending us begging letters and we have no money. Later in life we'll be more amenable to it, but I don't know...
Right, I've rambled on long enough about how nondescript, blah, and computer-centered my life is. Maybe we'll go grocery shopping or something, just to do something in the real world. We've been living off of leftovers for two weeks now and we've actually done damn well. Which is good-- less money spent on food means more money to save towards the trip to San Diego.
Oh yes-- I got 2 days in August to spend a long weekend in California. I'm very excited, as I've never been there. So that will be cool. I guess I'll fix my attention and hopes onto that, or something. It'd be nice to be somewhere else.
We have to go back to Buffalo sometime, because we're all out of Buffalo goodies.
Reading these forums, a lot of people on them own their own small businesses in webdesign and search engine optimization and the like. It sounds more and more tempting to start one myself. With Dave, we could do it, and then we could live anywhere we wanted.
There's not a lot of money in it, though. We'd need a money person. I know a good art person-- well, a semi-good art person. Actually, we know several. So we could all work as independent consultant-types...
it's a nice fantasy but there are far too many obstacles. So I sit at my desk and daydream of how nice it would be. Live anywhere I want-- on the Web, geographic location's not so important-- work at my own pace on my own schedule, do something interesting and challenging... etc.
It's a pleasant daydream. Maybe if I had time to go back to school for business or management or something. I dunno... I doubt it. Blech.
Well, working in the real world is doing what I hoped-- making me think about how much I hate it and how much I want to find another solution! Process has begun. Now what?
thursday i'll give dave his rent check (though i've paid down some of the balance by stepping in while his atm card was missing, although he found it after 2 days, so it wasn't much) and then i'll do a little math and see what kind of pain my money is in. there shouldn't be much left.
bleagh.
i didn't get much done last night, just transferring some more files from the pc to the mac. Dave got a wireless card in his Newton, which rules-- the thing is so ancient and obsolete that it cannot connect to the Internet except for a hack by which it uses homemade drivers to use a strange, off-brand wireless card as a modem-- so he can check email and surf the web from his 1997 e-Mate 300. It's very cool, but sort of... well, useless. Still... if either of us goes back to school, that thing will be worth its weight in gold. It doesn't weigh much, which is part of its worth. (It's a primitive version of a PDA-- almost full laptop size, with a full keyboard, a touchscreen monitor, absolutely indestructible, with a handle on the side and a rainbow Apple logo on the back.)
It's cool.
I have the website into a form the boss actually likes, and now he's (for the first time!!) giving me material to put in it so I don't have to generate time-wasting and futile filler text... I get yelled at if my text is obvious filler, but I can't put nothing there, and the people who promise me filler text don't actually mean it. But he's doing it now! So some of our pages may make sense. Jesus, I've been working on this for four months, and he's finally telling me what he wants. As long as he doesn't blame me for how long it's taken, that's fine; I can be philosophical. I won't be happy, but that's not important.
Ah well. So maybe I'll finish that.
I'm becoming a total Internet recluse nerd. I post on webmaster and seo forums all the time, and last night I actually posted to a usenet group as well. Oof. That's sort of rewarding and sort of not-- on the webmaster forum, I posted a question, got a ridiculously condescending answer, and started to flame back but then bit my tongue and wrote a very tightly controlled, precisely biting matter-of-fact answer, and got a personal message from the forum moderator thanking me for my self-control-- my antagonist was an obnoxious 14-year-old who routinely posted thoughtlessly, and my reply was far more effective than anything the moderator could have pm'd him. So I felt good about that.
Last night I posted on rec.pets.herp about my frogs-- they're active, and singing, and all that, but they just haven't been interested in eating very much, which doesn't jive with their behavior from last year as I recall. I asked if anyone had any insights into this behavior, but I did quite a bit of rambling first so I didn't expect much by way of clear answers, and had planned on probably clarifying a little later. And then I asked if anyone had any good solutions for not having to go out to buy crickets so often-- mail-order, keeping large numbers, breeding them? because I found it annoying to have to go to the store, which is in an inconvenient location. I was mostly just hoping for a link or something to the huge thread I remembered from about six months ago about cricket breeding, which I was helpless to find.
I only got one response and it was like "if you can't take care of your pets you should give them to someone who can."
Which really pissed me off. I went back to see what I'd written and it was pretty clear that my frogs didn't really seem ill, and it was also clear that I did do everything necessary for them. So I wrote an incensed answer this morning, but edited it down before I sent it so that I think it was pretty reasonable. "A question on how to improve a task does not indicate that the asker is not capable of doing the task in the first place." Etc.
All of this makes me a hopeless dork, but I'm not getting much joy anywhere else. My coworkers are odd people that I really don't jive well with-- they're nice but they think I'm hopelessly weird, and I just can't figure out what they're talking about half the time. So I get no socializing there. I get few comments on my livejournals and few emails, as everyone's having fun and doing summer things.
I do see people once in a while-- had the cousins up for dinner not long ago, went up to my folks' for a party last weekend, and this weekend I went down to Manhattan and hung out with Masako from UR for a while, and Dave's cousin's boyfriend was over the other night just hanging out (he came to get a CD of a program from Dave and stayed several hours. An entertaining guy), and we'll see the pair of them Friday night probably...
I dunno. I've always been somewhat asocial. I do enjoy hanging out online, and it's more useful to me to be posting in forums and the like than it is to be just surfing around. And I might as well do something useful while I'm at work-- they've solved innumerable little problems for me, on the webmastering and seo forums, so it's not like I'm just farting around instead of working. I'm getting help instead of being trained. I've gotten a tremendous amount done in the last couple of days because I've had some real breakthroughs in my understanding of HTML and CSS, thanks in large part to the forums I frequent.
But they're so time-consuming. I never have any time to get things done. I come home from work all exhausted from staring at screens and manipulating virtual objects all day long, and all I want to do is play with my new computer. Of course. But...
Man. Well, that's life. At least I spent a while last night organizing iPhoto, which at least is about my life. I imported all the images from my old hard drive, some of which are quite old. I need to scan more of my old photos, though. I have to sort through my physical photos and organize them so that I can digitize them, put them in iPhoto, and make CDs and webpages out of them. I found my photos of Greece-- those are mostly organized, so I'll have to scan those at some point and make a webpage. Maybe I should try optimizing it for the names of the other people in the photos, so that if they Google themselves they'll find me... I don't know how else I could get in touch with Branwen and Alayne again, but I doubt they'd be pleased if I made webpages about them. I should probably just contact Emma and ask the alumnae assoc. about them. At this point in our lives we're more concerned with avoiding Emma, because it keeps sending us begging letters and we have no money. Later in life we'll be more amenable to it, but I don't know...
Right, I've rambled on long enough about how nondescript, blah, and computer-centered my life is. Maybe we'll go grocery shopping or something, just to do something in the real world. We've been living off of leftovers for two weeks now and we've actually done damn well. Which is good-- less money spent on food means more money to save towards the trip to San Diego.
Oh yes-- I got 2 days in August to spend a long weekend in California. I'm very excited, as I've never been there. So that will be cool. I guess I'll fix my attention and hopes onto that, or something. It'd be nice to be somewhere else.
We have to go back to Buffalo sometime, because we're all out of Buffalo goodies.
Reading these forums, a lot of people on them own their own small businesses in webdesign and search engine optimization and the like. It sounds more and more tempting to start one myself. With Dave, we could do it, and then we could live anywhere we wanted.
There's not a lot of money in it, though. We'd need a money person. I know a good art person-- well, a semi-good art person. Actually, we know several. So we could all work as independent consultant-types...
it's a nice fantasy but there are far too many obstacles. So I sit at my desk and daydream of how nice it would be. Live anywhere I want-- on the Web, geographic location's not so important-- work at my own pace on my own schedule, do something interesting and challenging... etc.
It's a pleasant daydream. Maybe if I had time to go back to school for business or management or something. I dunno... I doubt it. Blech.
Well, working in the real world is doing what I hoped-- making me think about how much I hate it and how much I want to find another solution! Process has begun. Now what?
