Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

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

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

Trying to look on the bright side

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I have not been a Generally Positive Person over the last few days, so I will take a moment to look on the bright side.

  • I had less than a minute, total, of any type of sighting or contact today with any of the neighborhood jagoffs that I hate. Let’s hope for more days like this, and try and get that less than a minute down below 10 seconds.
  • It was a beautiful sunny day, though slightly chilly for this time of year, otherwise known as “Rottweiler weather.”
  • The very lovely Miss Jules, Axel’s grandma’s French Bulldog, got her first two points towards her AKC Championship this weekend in Kokomo, IN! Yay, Jules!
  • I went in to work today for a little while to change everyone’s email settings (due to the domain move that I’ve talked about for the last couple of days) so I won’t have to go in early to do it tomorrow morning. It took only about an hour and since I am not a morning person it was well worth it.
  • Rottweilers are extremely quiet and well-behaved as long as they believe you are going to eventually feed them some Spam.
  • TV shows Dollhouse and Chuck have been renewed for next season! I am a big fan of Dollhouse although it did take several episodes for it to grow on me. Chuck really hasn’t grown on me, but I have friends who love it, so am happy for them that it was renewed.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 17 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 113 of 274)

Good stuff, bad stuff

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Good stuff: Switching over DNS for the domains on the new VPS went well. I remain impressed with WiredTree. I may not have mentioned yesterday that they are local to me. Downtown Chicago location, local tech support, not outsourced. Life is good.

Next week I will be moving most of the personal domains, and strangely enough, that is going to probably be more complicated than moving the company domain. The personal domains have things like guestbooks (I know, I know. I don’t do guestbooks for my own domains, but some people still want and like them. Not me personally, but I don’t judge) and photo galleries. I have this blog and a couple of others. So there are quite a few MySQL databases to move. The company website doesn’t currently include a blog or forum, so there was no MySQL to deal with yesterday or today. I don’t think I’m going to have an issue with PHP versions (maybe on one domain) but you never know.

Bad stuff: Spammers finally found this blog. It was sporadic up until the last couple of weeks, but since then it’s been a daily occurrence. No real comments here in a day or so, but the spam from jagoff spammers from foreign countries continues. Screw you all, foreign spammers, and yay for Akismet, without which the issues of keeping up with spam killing would be much more onerous.

More bad stuff: Some of the jagoffs who live in this neighborhood truly make me sick. I really do like some of my neighbors. I won’t say I actively wish harm upon the others. There is that Clarence Darrow quote I’ve always liked, though:

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

There ya go!

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 16 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 112 of 274)

Does high school ever go away?

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Most days I am a Generally Positive Person. But no one can do that every day. Okay, maybe you can, but I can’t. I’m tired of people today. So what’s new, some of you ask? Yeah, you’re right. Not much is new on that front. Most days I am better at pretending, though.

Today I have decided that the internet is like high school, and I don’t mean that in a happy memories of happy fun times, best years of your life kind of way. I mean the exclusive little cliques that claim not to be cliques. The “communities” that are just bigger collections of cliques. A venue that’s supposed to break down barriers just puts up the same ones, only now you can’t actually see them.

If you are, and have always been one of the “cool kids”… right here (please imagine the accompanying extremely rude gesture). For then, and for now. And for later, too.

I feel better now. And if I offended anyone, this time I’m not sorry. Thanks for listening.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 12 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 108 of 274)

Vote early and often (22 of 30/88 of 274)

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Even though I’m not a big fan of online contests in general, I am always happy to vote for the children, pets and creations of my actual friends and family members if you ask via email, even mass email. I’ll even post your request to one of my blogs and/or social networks if appropriate.

Same goes for friendly acquaintances and their voting requests. And I might even vote at your request if I don’t know you, but you post it to a forum, mailing list or social network where we share a common interest or mutual friends. Or if your Tweet is cute and clever enough.

That is, if you post a polite request or two or maybe even three. NOT if you post every freaking day with multiple thread bumps, or if you email me and I have no clue who you are. If you do that, I will go out of my way not only to NOT vote for your child/pet/artwork/photo, I will vote for one of your competitors. If multiple votes from the same IP address are permitted, every single computer in my house and in my unfortunately rather small office will vote against you (that is still a total of approximately 25 computers).

That is all.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha

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Hanzi Smatter is one of my favorite websites. The subtitle to the blog—dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture—says it all. Or almost all, as the blog does address Japanese characters (Kanji) as well. Let’s just say that rampant misuse seems to be a problem regardless of which Asian characters are involved.

One of the most frequently-addressed topics within the blog is bad Kanji tattoos, and this has got to be one of the best entries ever:

Co-worker’s Tattoo
Q: [My co-worker] thinks it means “Bitch”
A: What this woman tattooed really means “cheap whore”

Even though I know it is wrong to laugh at other people’s misfortune, I am still laughing and I have shared the link with my co-workers so that they may laugh as well.

And yes, I am a teeny bit smug about having a team of “Kanji advisors” who would never let this happen to me! Although I speak and read only a very little Japanese, my parents, uncles and aunts are completely bilingual and if they don’t know a specific character, they have their own “Kanji advisors” to get more help from. Although I must say I wanted to die when my mom asked the reverend at her church about characters on a particular tattoo (thank God, and I mean that in every sense, that it didn’t say something filthy), at least I know I will never need a tattoo saying “cheap whore” removed from my body!