Got Lemur?

It pissed down rain today. Black skies, no daylight til at least 8:00am. Took three cups of coffee just to get out of the house.

No accidents on the way to New Jersey. The first time in a month without a jam up. I'll take it where I can get it.

Key card. Parkade. Elevator. Home Sweet Cubicle.

Boot pc. Hit the ladies.

Aaaaargh....the bathroom smells like crotch rot.

Not that I have any experience with that – it's what I expect it to smell like: BO and barnyard - with a hint of rotting flesh. Usually it's just pooey, but this was definitely not last night's chicken vindaloo.

Spent an HOUR on the phone with our business people, deciding how to make a screen more user friendly. Bear in mind that our users are also our employees, so they're supposed to be trained, reasonable people with more than just space between their ears.

The offending item causing all the fuss? The “save” button. It was confusing people.

My suggestion was that, at some point, you have to let people make mistakes and they should be held accountable for them. Why are we treating them like idiots?

Or we can make the system completely self sufficient. We wont need humans then.

Maybe we'll just hire lemurs. Evil lemurs.

In Summer-y

So yeah. Just a bit of blog neglect there.

I guess I slid into a funk. For a while there, I didn't even log in to my home laptop when I came home from work. Too tired, too bored, too depressed. Just didn't feel like it.

One problem though - I need the diversion. Poking around on the internet is better than flopping on the sofa for an evening of House re-runs.

So let's see.....what's been going on?

We had one of the hottest summers on record. More days over 90 than since... FOREVER. Well, maybe. I don't know - but it was a total stinkfest.

Don’t get me wrong, heat is lovely. In Hawaii.

Here in Pennsylvania, the air becomes a sponge. A thick, sweaty, smelly, damp sponge. And it never ends. Just this past week, we had two more days in the nineties. Last Thursday it hit 93 degrees. I'm sorry, but that's just stupid hot for late September.

Anyway, school started. Yay!

To recap, we decided the local, public school was woefully unqualified to impart a reasonable education. The teaching staff was filled with an inordinate number of inexperienced teachers (owing to the population growth in the area), and way too many liberal educators. No dissenting opinions – even politely presented - would be heard. And yes, they had no qualms penalizing any student who didn't think the same.

The school refuses to separate children that want to learn, from the ones that don't give a shit. So they have classrooms they can't control, and end up teaching to the lowest common denominator.

Instead of book reports, they had collages of crayons and glue, representing the theme of a story. Almost all the required reading for the “advanced” Lit class involved only stories of victims – they're the real heroes! No classic literature whatsoever.

What's worse is, every other day I'd see something in the news about gang violence, or kids getting knifed because someone didn't like the way they looked.

So The Teen is going to a different school. This was preceded by several months of hemming and hawing about what a mistake this was, that the uniforms suck, and what if her old friends forget her, and she doesn’t make new ones? What if there's no cute, swooshie-haired boys? What if the girls are bitchy?

So far, the hope of a more serious education looks promising: they had a required summer reading list. Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, To Kill A MockingBird and Pride and Prejudice to start. All must be read by the time school began, and there will be tests. Hooo-boy!

Sure, I would've hated that when I was her age - but hey, as an adult I can see the benefits of having been forced to read the classics. Some kids grow up and “get it”. Others blow it off and never pick up anything other than teen angst novels.

And they're reading Orwell. ORWELL. How awesome is that?

Thankfully, now that we're a month into the new school, my daughter's adjusting, friends have been made, and things are finally settling in nicely. Unfortunately, I am told there are no swooshie-haired, Justin Bieber wanna-bees. Sadness.

In other news, work continues to suck loudly and powerfully. I was moved to a failed project that somebody, somewhere up the food chain is attempting to resurrect. It's horrible, and nothing works right. The IT department decided this doesn’t matter, they intend to cram it in anyway.

It's my job to help fix it, with no documentation or resources. Departmental politics prevent me from actually interacting with the other members of my team, because they're technically still tied to other projects. It's a bit of a spy game communicating with one another on bug fixes.

Which leads me to another thing about fixing other people's crap. I'm burnt out on it. I'm not talking about fixing little oddball scenarios where the user right-clicked a field, on a Wednesday, during a full moon, and the web page failed. I'm speaking of the large, gaping holes where someone overlooked an entire business process. I'm tired of trolling through thousands and thousands of lines of code, Scotch-taped together by at least 200 other people, trying to find the mystery exception. Or, in this case, finding whole sections that were apparently not finished – made obvious by all the “add such-n-such here” notations.

I used to think I wanted to just do development work, creating applications from the ground up. Too boring, and a huge personal sacrifice. Our developers put in an average of 60-80 hours a week. Maybe ten years ago I would've had the patience, interest, and extra time, but now I just want to do the best job I can, go home, and take care of my family.

GOLD....1979

"......cuz people out there turn the music into gold...."

This song brings back memories. It's not a great song, just a piece of fluff from the 70's.

And it totally cracks me up.

Some background: The song is by some dude named John Stewart. No, not from the Daily Show. This guy was from the Kingston Trio, and all I know about them is they're probably a band my parents listened to.

Anyhoo, Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks appeared on the track. Lindsay's guitar work is obviously apparent – and probably a large part of why I like this song - and Stevie Nicks lends her voice. It's not credited as a duet, but it might as well be – you can't miss her vocals.

However, every time I hear this song I get the vague feeling Miss Stevie is singing a completely different song than Stewart.

It's like she's singing along to something in her head, and it doesn't quite match up. Quite possible – it was during her drug addled years.

Still, it works.

I went YouTube-ing hoping to find a live version of them performing this song, but instead found Mr. Stewart's 1979 appearance on Solid Gold.

AWESOMENESS. SQUARED.

Hello....McFly ????

Since it was Thursday, I went grocery shopping. This is a weekly trial that's always more difficult than it seems. Mainly because people turn into complete morons there. Maybe it's something they pump into the air conditioning system. Or maybe not.

Aside from the usual aisle-hogs and human speed bumps, there was only one real incident. Allow me to share.

I got lucky and nabbed an empty checkout line. No sooner did I have four items on the conveyor, a woman appears in line behind me, slams down the plasticky divider thingy and begins emptying her cart, using the entire swath of conveyor - including the area I was using.

So, the conveyor keeps rolling. Little Miz Impatient's groceries float past me, all the way down to the checkout clerk, effectively leaving me with a cartful of groceries and nowhere to put them. At this point, I might as well just hand them one by one to the clerk.

I shove the plastic thingy along with some of her crap back up towards her, and she barely takes notice. She's all blurry arms flying, tossing everything from her cart en masse onto the conveyor. Thankfully, the clerk realizes what happened and stops it from rolling.

My initial reaction was that maybe she wasn't paying attention.

“Excuse me, ma'am.....could you wait til I've finished?” I said.

She just stares at me, then goes back to putting her stuff on the conveyor.

Hello.... McFly !! Bonk bonk....

So I try again. “Ma'am, I still have a cart full of groceries, could you wait til I've finished, please?!?”

No response.

She's looking at me with irritation. I'm motioning to the conveyor and my cart. I swear something behind her eyes stirred with recognition for a split second.

Then she said, “No habla Ingles”.

Really? .....like, really??

Personally, I don't care what language she said it in, or where she comes from. She could come from Germany, Japan, Iceland - or the moon. I don't care. I'm more than sure she's been in a grocery store before.

Maybe I'm just crabby again, but I'm pretty sure not speaking English is not actually an excuse for being a jerk.

Heyna

Northeast Pennsylvania has an odd dialect.

Many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to get rid of it.

It's hard to describe.... but I think some of it originates from the Irish coal mining settlers. I hear it mainly in the way locals say "tink" instead of "think", or "tree" instead of "three". But I'm just guessing.

The best one is "heyna" or "henna". Basically, it means "isn't it" or worse, a bastardization of "ain't it".

I don't know why I didn't post this before. A friend sent it to me ages ago - as a joke about where we grew up. The funny thing is, I realized I knew a few of the people from this comedy troupe.

It's quite funny - particularly so if you grew up here.

Brought To You By The Letter Q

A few months ago, I cut several inches off my hair.

Many, many inches.

It was time. I figured if I hated it, it'll grow back. This was inconceivable just a few years ago. I spent most of my life with long hair, and suffered under the delusion that if I cut it, it might never grow again. Or I might die from lack of follicle. Crazy shit like that.

Anyway.

Six inches less later....and I loved it. It felt liberating. So at the next appointment, I had a few more inches knocked off.

I shouldn't have tempted fate.

My hairstylist/hairdresser/hairartist - whatever they're called these days, is great. Really. This is the only salon I've stayed with for more than two years, and I've been completely happy the entire time.

Until now.

I decided to go with one of those neat angled bobs - short in the back, long in the front. The Anti-Mullet.

She cut, dried and straightened my hair. It looked great. Then she used the thinning shears. Who knows why - I thought it looked fine. Afterwards it just looked...wrong.

Stupidly, I figured I needed to style it myself, and it would be fine. Don't we ladies always do that? We convince ourselves it'll be fine once we “fix it” at home.

Um...no.

The full impact didn't hit til I tried to do my hair the next day. Somehow, the angle was lost, and it looked like a standard, straight bob, except for two looooong chunks on either side of my face. They swooped out from my head like tentacles.

From the side, I looked like the letter Q.

I went back in for an emergency appointment, with the excuse I was apparently too hair-challenged to style it like that everyday, and asked if she could just even it up. Which, of course, the only way to fix that is to remove more hair.

So yeah. It's short. It's also pretty. I'm mature enough to handle the new look and still feel damn good about myself.

Still, I think the experiment is over.

It'll grow back.

Got The Fever

I saw this on may way to the grocery store:

Because really, what could be better on Father's Day?

Of course, it had to be a joke. With a little googling, I found it was supposed to be a concert: The Twitty Fever Band.

Someone removed the “W”, consistently, as both sides were done.

Heh.

Aaaarrrrgh!

Blogger is really starting to annoy me. Recently, I find I can't load the site at all or login, yet any other site loads fine. A tracert shows it leaving my network, my ISP, and going out for about 15 hops then dropping into a black hole. Nuthin. Just dead ol' time outs. Then it'll come back a few hours later.

Yesterday, I couldn't even connect thru my phone. I kept getting site overload messages - but that could just be my service.

I hate computers. Heh.

Supernatural

I'm a bit late to the party on this, but I only just discovered the TV show Supernatural.

It's been running on the CW for years, then TNT picked it up in re-runs. Since they ran it every day, I blew through the first four seasons in about two months. Now I've been waiting for CW to re-run season five from the beginning.

Supernatural reminds me of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but with two brothers, Sam and Dean, traveling around the country hunting demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, ghouls – you name it. Then there's a whole subplot about how Dean made a bargain with a demon to save his brothers life, and spent forty years (hell-time) in hell. Then he gets pulled out by angel Castiel, only to find out there's a “greater purpose” for the brothers (isn't it always like that though?). In this case, it's to prevent the end of the world. Of course.

The end of last season Sam was tricked into releasing Satan from hell and - you guessed it – brought about the apocalypse. So now they're working with a rogue angel to find out how to stop it, and in the meantime, try to find out where God went - because it would seem he's missing.

The first season wasn't so hot, and the stories a little flimsy, but once the show got going, the writing improved dramatically. And it's quite funny. If you've watched Buffy, it's similar to that. It's all scary stuff, with clever one liners mixed in:

Dean: Where's Cas?
Chuck the Prophet: He's dead... Or gone... The archangel smote the crap out of him, I'm sorry.
Dean: Are you sure? I mean, maybe he just vanished into the light or something.
Chuck the Prophet: Oh, no. He like exploded... Like a water balloon of chunky soup.

The summation at the beginning of every episode is quite cool. It's called “The Road So Far”, a collection of previous clips detailing what's happened in the previous episodes, scored to excellent classic rock music.

This is the opening for season five, which is so neat, to AC/DC's Thunderstruck. I tried to embed the whole video, but the party-poopers are insisting it be viewed thru YouTube. (I can alter the code so it'll play here, but I don't need any copyright grief.) Anyways, you'll get a message, but then click again and it'll take you to the folks at YouTube and it'll run there. It's worth it.

Red Admirals!

There were about fifty of these little guys on a flowering shrub in the garden. Friendly things, I had a few land on me.

They don't stay still for long, so it was difficult getting photos.

Click to enlarge: