Looking into getting electric service started for the apartment I’m moving into next week. Here’s a quote from the site: “Are you in the dark? Report your power outage through our convenient online system.”
Do you see anything wrong with that idea?
I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one, but my computer doesn’t run on hamster-power.
(Okay… so the site also lets you report streetlight problems and downed wires… But it’s funny until you figure that out.)
Coinstar‘s commercial is kind of funny, but there is one fatal flaw with the idea of the Tooth Fairy turning in all of her quarters for crisp twenties — what is she going to do when she gets to a kid’s house and has to leave something under the pillow? Ask his parents for change? Are the kids just going to get really lucky? Or reallyunlucky when she makes use of the pliers to get some extra value out of your mouth (as Terry Pratchett imagines)? And what about after she’s collected all of the teeth? Those have got to be a bitch to carry around, too. Is there a Toothstar machine that changes teeth for sand dollars or mermaid’s purses or whatever the hell they use for currency up in fairyland? And what is the value of the different types of teeth? I think molars must be worth the most.
I found an article that claims that one of the useful purposes of lying about the Tooth Fairy is “giving a child a sense of faith in things unseen”. Yes. That’s great. And then once they discover that Santa and the Tooth Fairy are damn dirty lies, hopefully they’ll learn a valuable life lesson and become skeptics. Critical thinking is a good thing.
I have another question. If the Tooth Fairy was my parents, and Santa Claus was my parents… just who is this God fellow? Are parents really that egotistical? I mean, well… I guess a lot of them do seem to think that they’re omniscient.
While I was learning about the Tooth Fairy, I also found an interesting example of a situation where it would be to one’s disadvantage to be omniscient. In a game of chicken “if A knows that B is in fact omniscient, then A will simply decide to never swerve since he knows B will know his logical decision and B will be forced to swerve to avoid a collision”.
Ha! And this site says that I can’t play chicken with God and win. Shows what they know! Unless God doesn’t mind getting into a huge car wreck (and why would he mind, really). But I think that’s a tie, isn’t it? Good enough for me, against a fucking God!
I’m not really too sure what’s specifically supposed to be memorialized this weekend, but from what I can gather it has something to do with grilling, football, beer, and car sales. Kind of like May Two Four in Canada, but with slightly less beer (Canadians must drink an entire “two four” over the weekend), slightly worse (and wussier) beer, and it seems like camping is not entirely obligatory. I don’t know if there are fireworks, but I can only assume that there are because these kooky Americans seem to find any excuse to blow things up. Is that kind of thing really appropriate on a “memorial” day? I don’t know. I wouldn’t figure that it would be. It’d be like fireworks on Remembrance Day. Seems perverse. Maybe it’s a celebration of the dead. Like an Irish wake. Or maybe everyone is full of shit, doesn’t know what it’s all about, and doesn’t care. Either way, I don’t have any beer or the potential to get any, so screw it!
HHGG Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick
But what followed was an interesting process because several names were bandied about and I even met with one of them (and we’re talking A list directors here). And the general sentiment from all of them was “No thank you, I don’t want to be known as the guy who screwed this one up.” And part of me understood and another part of me was saying, “Oh God does that mean I’m going to be known as the guy who screwed this up?”
He’d better not be, that’s all I can say.
Hopefully people will give it a chance and remember what DNA wrote about the script: “Whenever I sit down and do another version of Hitchhiker, it highly contradicts whichever version went before. The best this I can say about the movie is that it will be specifically contradicting the first book”, and not go all LOTR-fanoboy-like — I don’t want to hear <nerd voice> “Aaaaaactually, Marvin is supposed to be constructed of brushed steel, not plaaaastic, and chapter seven of ‘The Restaurant at the end of the Universe’ says that Marvin was ‘not in fact a particularly small robot’ [speaker pushes glasses up on nose]– and now he’s being played by a dwarf. This is a complete insult to Douglas Adams’ literary integrity.” </nerd voice>
Actually, I have already heard that. And it made my brain hurt. And it made me want to hurt people. Because the size of the goddamn robot is so crucially important to the stroyline.
And oh no! Ford Prefect is being played by a black, non-British man. Nevermind that last time I checked, England wasn’t “somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse”. Personally, I think the only important description of Ford in the book is (in reference to what the difficult to identify odd thing about him might be) “perhaps it was that he smiled slightly too broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he was about to go for their neck.” Other than that, I don’t give two shits. Or even one.
Mark Kate and Ashley Plus Size.
I don’t think I’ve noticed plus size clothing for girls before. Have kids gotten that much fatter since I was 11? Or maybe they were just faced with a problem like mine — having to buy women’s sizes that didn’t exactly fit right, either (but er… more horizontally for them than vertically, I guess).
Also sad: There are a couple of payphones nearish to where I live. Based on their location (say, not somewhere where random people would probably need a payphone very often — not a terribly busy street except for residents, not near much of anything but townhouses) I am assuming that the people I see using them (and there is ALWAYS someone using them) are nearby residents with no phoneline of their own. Nearby residents who can’t manage to pay for their own phoneline, but who CAN manage to get a nice shiny automobile to drive up to use the payphone in. And I think I will agree that it is probably more important to have a car than a phone around here.
Parliament has been dissolved, and the 38th Canadian general election has been called for June 28th.
Waiting to see how long CNN takes to figure this out. The BBC has the story up… But at least CNN has a “world” section on it’s site. It’s more than I can say for FOX.
I’m in a new riding this year — that looks somewhat likely to end up being won by the Conservatives. Blech! Paul Martin and the Liberals are bad enough…
I get to vote by special ballot this year. Because I’m special. Or out of the country. One of those. I’m still trying to find good sources of info online, since it’s all I have. For my own reference: Canada 2004, Canadian Federal Election 2004 Wiki, Blogs Canada: E-Group Election Blog, Election Prediction Project.
I can just see a nine-year-old, the shortest in his class, stealing mommy’s credit card to buy a bottle of “male enhancement” pills he saw on TV, and being extremely disappointed to find that they do not, despite guarantees, make one 25% bigger.
Could the ads be any more vague? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my feminine.
After two hours of driving, four hours of sitting in a waiting room, and another two hours of driving… I can now work legally in the United States. Which means I will shortly be complaining about my crappy job, instead of how crappy it is to be forced to sit around all day doing nothing. Once I get a crappy job, that is. I took a look at the classifieds. Truck drivers, hairstylists and dental assisstants sure have it made. But unless I want to work at Burger King, things are looking pretty sparse for me. I’m afraid that I’m just not a dynamic self starter. Not a team player. Not results oriented. Not suited for a fast-paced environment. Not motivated towards excellence. Not able to read Tom Peters without vomiting.
I’m back…
But back from where, or whence, or whatnot, you may wonder.
Well. I wasn’t really anywhere in particular. That’s not really of much importance on this world wide interweb, since it is, after all, world wide. On the other hand… even if you can look at web pages from Antarctica or orbit or whatever other unfortunate, desolate, lonely place you happen to be (I, for instance, am in Indiana), those files still have to live somewhere. And mine were killed. One day I woke up, and my website wasn’t really anywhere in particular either. Good thing I had a backup.
Now, the thing about backups is this… You don’t often think to back them up. You start backing up backups, and you don’t know where to stop. Should you backup your backup? Maybe. But should you backup the backup of your backup? Or the backup of the backup of your backup? You get carried away, so sometimes it’s best just to stay out of the whole argument. One was good enough. Right? Yeah it usually is. But not when there are people around stupid enough to move your laptop out of the way, and directly onto very large magnets. Computers and magnets have never really gotten along.
That’s okay, though. Screw the website. Nothing I could do about it. Don’t know who killed it, didn’t know who to kill. I was kind of sad that my computer didn’t work anymore, though. Took it into Best Buy. A few weeks later, they were able to tell me with some authority that it didn’t work. Uh. Thanks. I had kinda noticed that little problem. They tell me that they can’t get anything back, but I think they are damn liars, because even I had managed to pull some stuff off of it. But since there was nothing terribly important on it (or at least, nothing worth many many of my dollars), I just asked to have them replace the DVD drive (never did work properly) and the hard drive.
Now, Future Shop is owned by Best Buy. They look the same, they sell the same shit at the same prices, and I read some stuff a while ago about integrationary boogaloo between the two. Apparently they aren’t very integrationated so far, though. Because I had to send my computer to Canada to get fixed. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a Future Shop vs. Best Buy problem. I think the problem was that my computer used the metric system and was set to spell many words with superfluous U’s. The language differences must have been too much. Whatever. Who cares. Sending it to Canada was inconvenient, but at least it would be fixed.
And it was. Hooray! They even got some data back. Good deal. Then it came time to send it back to me. Done. And then it came time to receive it. Er. Okay — so it got held up at the border, hm? For er… three weeks and counting? Somewhere in there, we began to think that there might be a problem. Later on UPS found my box. They did not find a computer in that box, but damn them, I wish they had at least had the courtesy to at least deliver to me my empty box! So there I was. Computerless. Boxless. Headachelessless.
Fine, though. If the universe is going to inconvenience me, it had better have fun doing it. Good joke, universe. Ha ha ha. Was my website really that bad, or what? The thing about acts of god (or big meany UPS employees who subsidize their measly paychecks with a little grand theft every now and then), though… You can insure against them. So there, universe (or thief). They might have gotten my computer (I surely hope that the large melted spot on the cover hurt its resale value), but soon I would have enough money to buy a much better computer. The one that was stolen was over a year old, so to hell with it.
I would have this money because the package had been insured. The package had been insured, because insurance had been paid for. I don’t think that UPS should be in the habit of allowing one to purchase insurance for things that are uninsurable. Apparently, this includes shipments that cross the border, unless they are business related. Or something. I didn’t get to argue any of this myself — the sender got to deal with it. But, UPS is full of whores. The computer WAS business related. Obviously, the universe was just grabbing at straws now. This was a fight it could not win. Eventually (eleventy-seven months later), I got the money, and UPS cried and cried and cried.
After all of that, I thought that buying the new computer would be the easy part. The fun part. And it was. After THAT, I thought that having the new computer arrive on my doorstep would be the even easier part. The even fun…ner part. And it was. After two months or so. Why is anything I ever order backordered until the end of time? I don’t think this “just-in-time” inventory thing my business textbooks keep raving about is necessarily so great.
But anyway. After a million and a half years for shipping, my new computer came. And after a million and a half more, I worked up enough motivation to put my site back up. But now I am several hundred million years old, and everybody I once knew online is long dead. It is a sad story, is it not?
A few shelves in the local grocery store usually contain a number of items that clearly do not belong there. This happens throughout the store — somebody with a limited amount of money makes the decision that they really can’t afford everything they’re carrying, and drops a few things off regardless of where they’re standing. But nowhere are dropoffs more common than the beer aisle, and nowhere do they consist of more basic items. Dropoffs in other aisles might be candy or cookies, things that someone didn’t really need. But the shelves in the beer aisle often hold bread, fruit, milk… I can just see somebody standing there with a sixpack in one hand and dinner in the other, trying to decide between the two and choosing the beer. Good old beer.