Yeah, that’s what I said.
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Category Archives: General
In which Candice complains about her landlord… again
I bet our landlord is glad this cold weather is almost over!
For reasons he doesn’t bother to be aware of or give a shit about!
Guess what happens when our furnace keeps breaking down (won’t ignite) and you don’t do anything to properly fix it besides jiggling some wires until it works one single time before you leave again, guy?
First of all, one of these posts. Probably you should start reading here. But if you’re masochistic and are still reading, this:
- The motor runs constantly whenever it gets cold enough in here to kick on until such time as someone comes home to bash it with something and make it work or we wake up (freezing fucking cold) too bash it with something and make it work.
- Since you pay our electric bill, you get to pay for a furnace that is running all day and night while accomplishing nothing.
- Since the furnace doesn’t work, we plug in four space heaters and run them at full blast 24/7 instead.
- Since you pay our electric, you get to pay for running four space heaters at full blast 24/7 instead.
- You risk having your shitty building burn down because we are running four space heaters at full blast on shitty wiring because we have a non-working furnace that won’t ignite. Problems with ignition… probably not a fire hazard, right?
- I get really fucking annoyed.
I don’t know how much extra he must be paying on the electric bill every month, and I don’t care. But I’ve really been saving on our gas bill this winter. And freezing my fucking ass off.
Soon I get to be annoyed with the fact that our back door needs to be replaced completely because it doesn’t fit its frame properly anymore and there are huge gaps around all sides that no weatherstripping can fix, meaning that bugs (cockroaches, FUCK) can just walk right on in whenever they feel like it. We have an SRO across the 6-foot alley out back. I dunno if you know what that means, precisely, but approximately: dirtbag everything-infested disgustingness (it’s almost The Whistler season…) I guess he likes constantly paying for exterminators just as much as he liked paying for the extra electric use (instead of gas, sucker) caused by the icy cold draft coming from that fucker all winter. And by draft, I mean wind. ‘Cause this shit is not up to code. Neither is the lake that keeps appearing out our back door and threatening to overflow under the door and into our kitchen. Or you know. Actually doing it.
For the record, I’ve avoided cockroaches two summers ago and apparently ever since then going totally OCD on our apartment with caulk and expanding foam the first time I saw the bastards. I filled in every motherfucking crack in this place. You have nowhere to hide, you sickening bastards! Every crack. Every one. I’m not kidding. Most of the other units still get exterminated every few months. I hope he doesn’t mind the mess caused by my frantic and unprofessional crack-filling. It’s only due to his failure to consider his own preventative measures. (BTW, not exterminating every unit, guy? Just means the cockroaches move to the next resident’s unit temporarily. They do not go away. But I don’t care, because they don’t come here, so continue blowing money.)
I hate landlords, man.
I have to go bash our furnace with something now (damn, I am sick of listening to that thing run), so rant over.
Until next time I have to do laundry, probably.
This blog is mostly about how much I hate to do laundry, I think. And also I think I’ve made this exact post about sixteen times.
Urge to kill… rising…
I go to start some laundry.
Some guy is in there putting his laundry into the dryer at the same time I am putting my laundry into the washer.
The washer takes half the time of the dryer, so I wait for the amount of time the dryer takes to go switch my laundry from the washer to the dryer.
I’m a few minutes late.
The dryer has probably been off 5-10 minutes when I head to the laundry room.
When I get there someone else’s clothes are already in the dryer.
Their laundry can’t have been in the dryer more than 5-10 minutes.
My wet laundry is on top of the dryers.
They must have taken my laundry out of the washer almost immediately after it finished washing and snuck their crap into those machines in the extra time between my washers finishing and the first guy’s dryers finishing.
That’s already rude.
And pointless, unless they were planning to do exactly what they did next.
They decided their laundry should get to go immediately into the dryer.
No jumping in line, asshat!
Had half a mind to take their sopping wet shit and put it on the table, but I’m not that crabby today.
Complaining here instead.
Still contemplating murder, but only theoretical murder.
I hate doing laundry so very much.
How do spelling mistakes happen? Serious ones, I mean.
Not typos.
Not grammatical errors.
Not putting i on the wrong side of e.
Not anything from the list of commonly misspelled words.
Not screwing up some absurd foreign word with too many or not enough vowels.
Not mixing up homophones or near-homophones or not-even-really-close-at-all-but-I-can-sort-of-see-a-resemblance-homophones.
I’m talking about spelling mistakes where the person must have known they had no idea which letters to put in which order.
I recently saw a Formspring question that contained “exhorbent” (exorbitant) and “execorbate” (exacerbate).
If you’re the person typing those things, you’ve got to realize that you’re unsure of how to even pronounce what you’re trying to spell. Right?
Right?
So why do these people try in vain to guess? They know they’re guessing. Don’t they?
Don’t they?
I can almost see pulling this kind of shit in a situation where there’s no access to a dictionary, but substituting another word would be my preferred choice.
Online, two seconds spent with Google will fix everything. And if someone can’t manage to figure things out that way they can still substitute another word.
Unless they don’t care if people think they’re stupid.
Is that the problem?
Do people not care if they seem stupid?
That doesn’t make sense, does it?
Because if that’s the case, why are they trying to use big words in the first place?
Explain this shit to me.
…
Thing-a-Day: Days Eight and Nine (and Ten) — FSM Postcards
Painted the background of these postcards two days ago, but couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with them, so I left them blank. Good effort, me! Yesterday a stencil appeared in the mail that was coincidentally just the right size, so ta da! Flying Spaghetti Monster postcards. Messy ones. Needed a smaller sponge and some adhesive, maybe. The top right one was last, if that’s not obvious… Paper stencil got a bit warped.
Does the following minimal effort count for day ten? Because that’s today, and I still feel like I belong on my couch watching MST3K. Maybe eating leftover chili and chocolates counts? I vote that it does. And since I’m the one that imposed these rules upon myself in the first place…
Thing-a-Day: Day Seven — 47 Cans of Beans Emptied into a Pot
I don’t care about football one bit, but there were so many mentions of chili in my Twitter stream… so I made some. Tastes much better than it looks as a photo taken with my cell phone and its dreadful flash.
Did you know some people use a recipe to make this stuff? Here’s how I make mine: whatever I feel like, to taste. This pot’s got beer, orange juice and Worchestershire sauce. I don’t think most people put mushrooms in, either. My mom always did, so I do, too.
We like our chili runny around here because we add billions of crackers. Which I forgot to buy at the store, along with sour cream and cheese. Good going, me! Well, whatever. It’s nearly 5am. This stuff is obvioiusly for “tomorrow”, anyway.
Day six’s post in MIA. It requires the assistance of the husband to finish it, and he’s been too busy. I’m sure it’ll turn up eventually…
Thing-a-Day: Day Five — Froebel Star
Someone posted some of these with a link to instructions earlier. They’re pretty, so I tried it. And then I slapped twelve filters on it in Photoshop because my heads hurts and I couldn’t be arsed to do a proper job with my camera (I still haven’t figured out a way to take macro photos properly — it probably involves turning some of the lights in my apartment on…) and I do not want to stare at my computer screen much longer. Not sure where the original post went, so… sorry original person who will probably never see this!
I see myself making many of these. They’re geometric busy-work. I enjoy geometric busy-work.
I had other stuff I was going to post today, but I guess I’ll group it all together tomorrow. Because… did I mention that my heads hurts!
Thing-a-Day: Day Four — 100mL of Water
Tonight, in preparation for the 10:23 Challenge, I will be preparing a homeopathic “remedy” (I will actually be using the resulting liquid for purposes of attempted murder and/or suicide).
Since I’m planning to keep on potentisating my remedy until I’ve got a dilution of at least 24X/12C, which may very well take me all bloody night, I have nothing to show just yet. I plan to create a video of the process. At the very least I will be taking pictures.
In the meantime I present to you the photo above, which is 100mL of water. It contains just as much of the active ingredient I will be using as my final product will have (approximately none), and has exactly the same medicinal effect (somewhat hydrating).
Thing-a-Day: Day Three — Batch Character Replacement
My favourite ebook reader for my Android phone is FBReader. It seems to handle ePub files the best, but not every ebook I download is available in that format. I convert those files with Calibre (which I also use to organize my library), but in certain cases the conversion isn’t perfect. The most annoying problem is incorrect character encoding. A lot of the time I just deal with it because the only effect is to ugly up the formatting a bit, but a book I was trying to read today was missing all of its em dashes. Usually FBReader will display � or Ͱ or whichever very wrong character applies, but these em dashes were replaced by nothing at all. Words on either side would runtogether likethis, and the author had used what I would consider an unacceptable number of em dashes, really, so the text was unreadable. Well, I could read it, but it was making me very angry.
The issue with this book turned out to be that most of the text was correctly encoded as UTF-8, but the em dashes were encoded as something else entirely (probably was originally CP1252). I could explicitly specify the input as either one before converting, but that gave me only two choices: em dashes incorrect or all other punctuation incorrect. This will probably be of no use or interest to anyone, but what I did (so I can remember later!) was this:
I renamed my ePub file to zip (because ePub files are zip files with some particular contents) and dug into the html files that were inside. I used ClipSpy to determine what the hex code for the invalid em dash character was that Calibre was choking on, this table of characters to figure out what the correct UTF-8 hex code was and Useful File Utilities with the Batch Replace plugin to go through and replace every instance of 0xc2 0x97 with 0xe2 0x80 0x94. When I checked the results in Chrome things looked good, so I zipped everything back up and loaded it back into Calibre. Great success was had.
It took me far too long to figure this process out so I went ahead and fixed a whole lot of other ugly stuff from other books, and then, since I was on a roll, I went through my library and made sure everything had the correct metadata while also deleting file formats I don’t need. Now everything in Calibre looks nice and uniform. Also, poof! Half of my day gone. I get a bit obsessive when I start doing stuff like this… However, I will never suffer from having to stare at ����� in my ebooks again.
Goggling at hex code made my eyes droopy, so I went to sleep and didn’t wake back up until midnight. Posting this at 12:22am, but I won’t consider it to be the 4th until I wake up after my “night’s sleep”. So shush. It’s how I always operate. Makes things less confusing when you’re the sort of person who doesn’t generally wake up until sometime in the afternoon! TV guides don’t flip the date until something like 5am, so… let’s assume I’m on that system, shall we?
Thing-a-Day: Day Two — These Envelopes are Decoys
I can’t tell you what my thing is today. I can’t even give you a hint. I can, however, give you certain non-vital project information, such as the fact that production cannot begin until my entire kitchen has been thoroughly cleaned, and that I’m going to go initiate that process as soon as I’m done posting this. I am very, very afraid.
Here, in place of the thing of which I dare not speak, are two envelopes that I just made from paintings I’ve had sitting around on my desk. They really don’t look very nice beside each other, do they? Who wants mail? It’s possible that I will even remember to buy stamps sometime soon. I’ve been in need of quarters from the same service desk that provides me with stamps for a few weeks now, and clean undies are a diminishing resource around here.