Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

My brain just exploded

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My brain just exploded. Here is one of our felonious Illinois politicians (mail fraud, ghost payrollers), former U.S. Representative Dan Rostenkowski, talking about why we should not consider all Illinois politicians to be scumbags because of Blagojevich. Ooooooo-kay.

In Defense of Chicago Politics – The Daily Beast

I find myself wondering what the late Mike Royko would have said about the Illinois scandal du jour. When I was growing up in Hawaii, our local newspaper carried Mike Royko’s syndicated newspaper column. His topics often featured the quirks of Chicago politics. I thought he must surely be exaggerating about the things that went on in Chicago. It was not until I moved to the Chicago area as a journalism student that I saw for myself that there was little to no fiction in Royko’s columns.

Speaking of other Chicago columnists, or perhaps Chicago scumbags: as I poked around the ‘net today catching up on the news, I was shocked to see Bob Greene now writing for CNN.com. Apparently I totally missed anything he wrote during the election. He really dropped off the face of the earth after he was forced to resign from the Chicago Tribune in 2002. For those who didn’t follow that story, he was involved in a sexual relationship with a then-17-year-old girl some years before that. Totally ironic and screwed up since much of his public persona in his columns was that of a crusader for children and family.

It was a personal love-hate thing for me, and a huge disappointment. I was a big fan of his earlier writing (as in everything before “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine” which simply made me want to hurl). The long-ago days when I wanted to be a journalist were also the days of Woodward and Bernstein. Of course, everyone my age said they wanted to be the next great investigative journalist and bring down a president or at least a crooked businessman. When I was being honest with myself though, bringing down a powerful personage was not all that high on my personal list of goals. I’d rather do something more cool and fun, like Bob Greene or Cameron Crowe, and go on the road with a rock ‘n’ roll band and get paid to write about it, a la “Billion Dollar Baby” or “Almost Famous.” Hey, that was then, and all that.

Okay, bring it back home. I think I still have a copy of my favorite Bob Greene book, a collection of his early columns called “Johnny Deadline: Reporter.” In its introduction was a little description of what a “Chicago story” is. It’s a story that is so strange or gross or sick in some way, but can still make you choke out a little laugh and an “ohhhh Gawwwwwwwwd!” That is what this whole week has been here, every time I click to refresh Chicago Breaking News.

In other brain-exploding news, I also see the news that WordPress 2.7 is now out, and according to my blog Dashboard, it’s time to update. If this site disappears sometime after you see this, you’ll know my attempt at updating was not quite successful. But I will think positive, and say I’ll see you all back here in a day or so!

Pieces of my life (29 of 30)

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Today I finally completed the task of moving my life from my Palm and various scraps of paper to my BlackBerry, and syncing BlackBerry with portions of my online presence. In the process of reviewing my available BlackBerry features, and updating my to-do list before moving it over, I’ve discovered some annoying stuff that needs to be fixed. Nothing to do with the technology, everything to do with carelessness or stupidity on either my part or more so, on someone else’s.

I am 99% sure that I was sold a more expensive mobile data plan than I really need. Shame on me for not going in there already knowing the differences between Verizon’s various data plans, but more shame on the customer service rep for not coming up with the right solution given the answers I gave on how my work email is set up and what functions I expected my BlackBerry to perform. So that’s got to be taken care of sooner rather than later.

Also, there is a health insurance issue that should have been easily corrected, yet apparently nothing has been done. I have been covered under my husband’s insurance for 7 years. I have not been covered by my own company’s group plan except for the first few months of his employment while waiting for him to be able to add me to his plan. Yet, all of a sudden, after 7 years of properly handled claims, they decide that my primary carrier is the company that I have not been insured with for almost that entire time. I called 2 weeks ago when the problem came to my attention. I was assured it was a simple matter and that it would be taken care of in a few days. Um, not so, apparently. I hate wasting time on multiple calls about the same issue, especially when someone said it was “easy” to fix.

And I have to stop doing this. Not like I don’t have enough to do already, and still I have spent time today looking for a Rottweiler theme for the BlackBerry. Not finding one to my liking (yes, there were a couple of them available) I then spent time looking for information on how to create my own. Stop me before I hurt myself!

A chance to get caught up? (26 of 30)

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I’m looking forward to the possibility of a relaxing four-day weekend. Yes, it is Thanksgiving weekend, but since my husband is at the firehouse on Thanksgiving Day, I’ve opted to neither entertain nor be entertained. As you all know, my family is in Hawaii and we just got back from visiting them, so there is nowhere I’m truly obligated to be tomorrow. So I am planning to spend a peaceful day alone with the animals. For the record, I don’t like turkey anyway. Ham is my idea of a perfect holiday meal.

In fact, I have only one definite thing scheduled for the entire weekend, so it might be a good opportunity to get caught up on a few things that never seem to get done. Stuff like backing up the computer, getting rid of documents that are no longer needed for tax purposes and getting my office area organized a little better. Oh, and editing the contact list in the new BlackBerry. I probably should have edited the list on the Palm before transferring it to the BlackBerry (Palm Desktop Manager would have made it so much easier). Some of the contacts are quite dormant, but at least everyone on the list is still alive. This was not the case when I moved from Palm IIIc to Palm Tungsten E2.

Speaking of right now though, I’m not sure how I ever managed to watch TV before TiVo. I’ve been trying to watch the season finale of Sons of Anarchy since the first showing started, and between the phone and the dogs, I’ve paused and rewound so many times I’ve lost count. It’s quiet now, so I think it’s a good time to finally finish watching the show.

More technological fun (25 of 30)

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There is a lot of swearing going on here as we work at getting our new cell phones set up. Mostly not from me at this point, though, because I forgot the cables for my Palm Tungsten at work. I’m saving my heavy swearing for tomorrow when I attempt to transfer years of data from that Palm to my new BlackBerry.

Despite my attraction to the touch screen phones, I ended up getting the Curve rather than the Storm. After finally getting a little more time to play with both phones (and also the Palm Centro since I’ve been a Palm PDA user for about 8 years), I surprised myself by deciding the Curve worked better for me than the Storm. I think I would have preferred the Centro over either BlackBerry, except that VZNavigator won’t run on the Centro and that is something I definitely wanted to keep.

Now off to do the really important stuff… set up my ringtones!

Kennel website again (24 of 30)

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It looks like Axe might be going out in search of that championship sooner than I had originally thought. I talked to his soon-to-be handler this afternoon, and there’s a good opportunity to hand him over in about two and a half weeks. So the health tests and the kennel website now move up on the priority scale. The health tests are a priority because there’s no good reason to send an unbreedable dog out to get a championship (unless of course you’re doing it yourself for fun; it is still a sport as well as a measure of breed worthiness), and the kennel website is a priority because I’ll need some place to brag!

Here’s the comp I mentioned in my post on November 22:

I think I still like it. Yeah, I know the photo of Freya makes it look like she has an underbite. She doesn’t, and a better one has been taken since then. Axel was still in utero when this was designed so I’ve had ample time to locate photographs of both dogs. My dogs are not photogenic but fortunately they show a lot better than they photograph.

I’d better try to turn it into a working website before I get caught in the trap of second-guessing myself (grunge version? 70’s version? Web 2.0 version? I could go on and on and on and on, and I don’t even like designing stuff).