That is so not the response I expected.I will make SO MANY TUNA MELTSOpen mayonnaise jars?Do you really want to see what I would do with The Force?Ever since moving to the state of Iowa, one thing that continues to stick out to me is the absolutely mind-boggling number of custom license plates.
Probably about half of them are sports-related, revolving around either the Iowa Hawkeyes, ISU Cyclones, or Chicago Cubs-- variations on "Cubs Win" being a favorite theme. Some notable examples: CUBSWIN (got there first, apparently), CU85W1N (for the numerically inclined), CUBSWN (ambiguous), CUBSWYN (a baseball-obsessed medieval bishop?).
Then there are the pop-culture references, such as GRYJEDI (I'm assuming this stands for Gary Jedi)
I made salmon fish sandwiches for lunch.
I cook naked, yes
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*Swaggers into the room, props sagaris against the wall, helps herself to the wine.*
Objectively true, but if we wanted a male's opinion, we'd give it to him. ;)
In tangentially related news, signed up for a textile art workshop tomorrow which I hope to draw on for my embroidery work, as a hot Scythian. Which means visiting my favourite local craft shop and trying not to raid it too energetically.
Alsoalso, inquiring barbarians want to know: has anyone printed tights in the reconstructed patterns for ancient statues of Thracians in national dress? Several of my friends and I would be on that like a ferocious cavalcade riding down some poor schlubs intruding on our territories. :)
... why is the word "opinion" written on the side of your sagaris?
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So, it turns out that there are a few remaining "good" math teachers out there.
I've been impressed with Impus Major's teacher's approach to homework, where each assignment is 3 straightforward problems that follow basic learning theory: Problem 1 is a guided walk-through of the general process. Problem 2 is a simplest-possible case. And Problem 3 is a more general case. They take Impus Major 15-30 minutes to complete, they reinforce his understanding, and they make him feel good about how much he understands in the class.
But Impus Major's greatest weakness has always been his attention span; he is practically incapable of learning from lectures unless the teacher is an incredibly engaging speaker.
So imagine my surprise when I started trying to explain differential annihilators to him (far less cool than they sound) and he immediately said, "Oh, yeah. I get all this. My instructor did a really good job of explaining it to me."
For the first time in 13 years, Impus Major is learning his math and doing all his homework with no help whatsoever from me.
I am really impressed with this instructor.
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Baldur's Gate grows faster in size than I manage to free the space on the disc...
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I swear, the pettiness of petty bureaucrats is a wonder to behold.
I managed to refrain from tirading about it yesterday, but yet again the city is doing street and sidewalk work in our neighborhood, and yet again they told us we'd receive 48 hours' notice before any work was done, and yet again at 7:30 am they closed our street for construction work with no warning and without even giving residents a chance to move their cars out of the construction area. Needless to say, there was much honking and displeasure that morning.
So yet again I wrote a complaint to the city manager, pointing out that promising us 48 hours' notice and then giving us none whatsoever was worse than nothing, so could he please stop promising on things he couldn't deliver.
And yep, in front of my house today is a sign indicating that work on the street will start in 48 hours, along with a couple of guys with concrete saws cutting up the sidewalk because they don't need to give 48 hours' notice for sidewalk work.
Unfortunately for whoever sent them, I have double-paned windows so they're barely an inconvenience. But it's funny to see that, "Complain to the city, get noisy workers in front of your house the next day," is alive and well in Albany.
*Swaggers into the room, props sagaris against the wall, helps herself to the wine.*
Objectively true, but if we wanted a male's opinion, we'd give it to him. ;)
I'd never heard of a sagaris before, and now I know what one is. Smashing.
In other news, last night's game determined that failed spell checks are caused by Wizard Constipation, which can only be cured with Wizard Prunes. You are very welcome to this information.
You really wonder how some people's brains work -- it's fascinating.
Presenter: So be sure to run the session warmer scripts before you do a demo.
Audience Member: Do I have to run that script for every demo user, or just once overall?
Presenter: Yes, you can.
Audience Member: What does that mean? Is it a requirement to run the script for every user? Do I have to?
Presenter: You can run the script for every user and it won't hurt anything.
I can't fathom how the presenter, for whom English certainly sounds like their first language (no accent), can't understand that question.
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differential annihilator
My old work truck?
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I'd never heard of a sagaris before, and now I know what one is. Smashing.*Swaggers into the room, props sagaris against the wall, helps herself to the wine.*
Objectively true, but if we wanted a male's opinion, we'd give it to him. ;)
I've never seen a real one, sadly. The Museum of Fine Arts back home, of all places, in its section of "antiquities and other foreign stuff we acquired before the relevant UNESCO treaties came into effect" does have an honest-to-goodness chakram in its collection of odds and ends from the subcontinent, though, which made the Xena fangirl in me squee with embarrassing enthusiasm last time I visited.
And on that note, having made my way to my favourite craft shop, I find myself living down to Virgil's catty remark about Camilla getting distracted by shinies. Managed not to blow the budget with silks I don't need quite yet, or more thread generally, but may have gone a bit overboard with beads. *Shakes fist at Maro for revealing, if not the sisterhood's greatest weakness, at least one of the more inconvenient ones which we'll admit to.* :)
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Wooooow... it's even worse than I imagined.
We have signs in front of my house and my two neighbor's houses that there's no parking in front of our houses for the next week. There are no other restrictions on the rest of the block.
So, "Complain to the city and get concrete saws and your parking privileges revoked for a week."
I'm sure they included my neighbors just to prevent me from lawyering up. Otherwise I figure it would be worth $100 to consult a lawyer to see whether I could do anything about government harassment.
We're short-staffed today, so I'm helping to cover phone support while people take lunches.
Since I haven't had one of these installments in a while, it's time...
User leaves his office, gets in the car, starts driving, and then calls in to complain that his laptop isn't booting up. He starts giving me non-specific descriptions of what he remembers from the screen during the boot process. "It's telling me to reprogram something."
Fun fact: We have someone staffed at his office on Thursday mornings, and that person is still there.
I bring this up to him.
User: "I didn't see him in the conference room. I guess I can turn around. What room is he in?"
Me: "I'm not going to attempt to troubleshoot a non-booting laptop with you while you're driving, so this seems like your best option. I also have no idea what room he's in, because I'm not there."
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So in between fall and we turn on the heat (around thanksgiving) I am the cats source of heat.
there will be 17 minutes of lap time for the cat to warm up.
Removing the cat before 17 minutes resets the timer to zero. after which there will be 17 minutes of lap time.
Because the vet trimmed sharpened his claws, he has to go on a blanket/towel/ something to stop his claws from getting into my flesh. of course this just means he has to reach around the towel/blanket/whatever because he enjoys sinking his claws into flesh. Not that that's exactly fun, but cat scratch fever itches for MONTHs.
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It's always disappointing to watch people live down to your expectations.
As expected, I complained about the construction on Tuesday, they put up No Parking signs in front of my and my neighbors' houses on Wednesday, and they didn't show up at all on Thursday. So a simple, "You complained so you're no longer allowed to park in front of your own home," maneuver.
On the bright side, our hopes are that we'll get the Celica back today. (The service manager's original estimate was 2-3 weeks, but when she called on Monday she said she expected to be done today, and she's a good communicator, so I'd think if they ran into any serious delays she'd've called me by now.)
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Weather's a bit bad today.
Had to navigate a flooded road.
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So there's a wasp hanging around my desk.
Take an empty gatorade bottle, here you go. Wasp goes in. Put wasp to window.... wasp hangs out in wasp heaven . Ok fine.
30 seconds later YEEOOOOOOWWW sting right in the middle of my palm. First thought "g*@%!#it the dms cheating i made that wild empathy check". Look at the wasp... no. Its still in the gatorade bottle. Look down.. there's a second one that somehow went into the back of the fan and got launched into my palm. toss him over to the window with the other one.
Dm definitely cheated.
Weather's a bit bad today.
Had to navigate a flooded road.
today i learned how to replace the impeller on a transfer pump. Because gurgle gurgle rrurmrrgle gurgle.
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The Good: We have the Celica back! Woo hoo! And somehow the estimate for a full paint job dropped from $7000 to $2000, as if the general manager had a serious talk with the repair guy and the repair guy opened my file and realized just how long I'd been a customer. So we're going to get a real paint job instead of a krappy Miracle one.
The Bad: A couple of the parts didn't work, so now comes the "fun" of trying to do eBay returns.
The Ugly: All of the No Parking signs on the street have been removed, except the one directly in front of my house, and no work is being done. So now we have concrete proof that the city is being vindictive towards me. I'd ponder lawyering up just to make them suffer for their pettiness, but I have better things to do with my time... like drive my fixed car!!
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Oh, and for those of you waiting with bated breath to hear how the construction is doing, at 3:08 pm a truck pulled up and slipped a note through my door:
Duration: Monday [09/25/2023], 8:00 am to Friday [09/29/2023], 4:30 pm.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
So instead of giving their workers any semblance of competence (such as giving them a pen so they could write in the correct dates), they have their workers distributing flyers telling us that our street work has already been performed, or will be performed in the next 76 minutes.
I swear, having dealt with both government and private contractors, I think government contracts require a certain level of brain damage, or at least the inability to communicate.
Even our most-incompetent private contractors never showed up unannounced and blocked off our neighbors' driveways with no warning. I've talked to at least two neighbors who had appointments on Tuesday, only to find their driveways blocked in and the road closed. "Surprise! You can't get anywhere! Don't you LOVE your city?"
And of course the workers themselves are awesome -- they stopped what they were doing, moved the equipment, and let my neighbors out. But it's management's job to let us know said workers are coming, and management has utterly failed.
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Oh, and for those of you waiting with bated breath to hear how the construction is doing, at 3:08 pm a truck pulled up and slipped a note through my door:
Duration: Monday [09/25/2023], 8:00 am to Friday [09/29/2023], 4:30 pm.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
So instead of giving their workers any semblance of competence (such as giving them a pen so they could write in the correct dates), they have their workers distributing flyers telling us that our street work has already been performed, or will be performed in the next 76 minutes.
I swear, having dealt with both government and private contractors, I think government contracts require a certain level of brain damage, or at least the inability to communicate.
Even our most-incompetent private contractors never showed up unannounced and blocked off our neighbors' driveways with no warning. I've talked to at least two neighbors who had appointments on Tuesday, only to find their driveways blocked in and the road closed. "Surprise! You can't get anywhere! Don't you LOVE your city?"
And of course the workers themselves are awesome -- they stopped what they were doing, moved the equipment, and let my neighbors out. But it's management's job to let us know said workers are coming, and management has utterly failed.
is the message of "pipe down, 'citizen', officals are official-ing" not quite loud enough yet, NH?
i hate that you don't have the time to lawyer up, though traveling in a rezzed ride is always a good thing.
congrats!!
dangit. i missed the typo. :/
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Tomorrow is the first day of October, and yet the drive-thru line at the Dairy Queen is six cars deep. Why? Because it's 97. Texas bites.
Note: I was not actually going to the dairy queen. I was driving past it to find a store where I could buy my daughter a new pair of flip-flops for her school science trip this week. Because public showers.
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A bear-hunting, knight-carrying dog.
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** spoiler omitted **
What I understood by that is that the first large jug of the day managed to produce three lots of pancake (or possibly Yorkshire pudding?) mix during a series of monthly special dances for heterosexuals, and all before getting taken out of the cupboard.
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Yay! Just when we were certain that our yard man was permanently ghosting us and we would have to find yet another new yard man, he showed up today. As a bonus, he did not annihilate our Lantanas this time! And he has promised to come back next Sunday afternoon to clean up everything dead around the trees and shrubs and cut back all the parasitic vines.
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** spoiler omitted **What I understood by that is that the first large jug of the day managed to produce three lots of pancake (or possibly Yorkshire pudding?) mix during a series of monthly special dances for heterosexuals, and all before getting taken out of the cupboard.
So if I say: “Batter up!” You would make a big mess in the kitchen? ‘Cause I’m OK with that.
Rural living vs. urban living:
- Shiro lost his internet because the guy who laid the fiber optic cable just ran it along the ground. The gardener showed up to mow the lawn and that was it for the cable. He called the cable company and they had someone out in under an hour. Yeah, the guy just ran another cable along the ground, but he did say, "Yeah, we probably oughta put that in a trench. We'll send someone out to do that some time next week."
- This morning I woke up at 5:50 am to no internet. At 8:00 am I called my ISP (Sonic). Since they're leasing the lines from AT&T, they couldn't help me, except to say AT&T was having an outage about a mile and a half way. By 2:50 pm (9 hours later), AT&T finally updated their outage map to include our area. Still no indication of when it will ever get fixed.
On the bright side, we can choose from over 100 restaurants to go out to dinner on a very pleasant evening, so it's not a complete loss... other than the risk of having no internet for work tomorrow.
Rural living vs. urban living
Which one of you is rural?
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The one who can dig a trench without waiting three weeks for permits.
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Rural living vs. urban livingWhich one of you is rural?
Shiro moved back to his old family plot -- 40 acres of forested land with a lake in the middle of it and an hour's drive from the nearest town. Which, admittedly, is bigger than Berkeley so most would consider it a major city. But he pretty much has two choices for takeout dinners, and one of them is fast food, so fine dining it isn't.
But he gets great service from the locals!
Tomorrow is the first day of October, and yet the drive-thru line at the Dairy Queen is six cars deep. Why?
because there's parking in the rear?
A bear-hunting, knight-carrying dog.
Bleh. Give me Dire Cat.
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Rural living vs. urban livingWhich one of you is rural?Shiro moved back to his old family plot -- 40 acres of forested land with a lake in the middle of it and an hour's drive from the nearest town. Which, admittedly, is bigger than Berkeley so most would consider it a major city. But he pretty much has two choices for takeout dinners, and one of them is fast food, so fine dining it isn't.
But he gets great service from the locals!
.. he's the local lord?
Bleh. Give me Dire Cat.A bear-hunting, knight-carrying dog.
There are seven cat monsters versus three dogs on my blog. I think that's a decent ratio.
Disclaimer: The actual numbers might vary, depending on what will be counted as a cat or a dog.
No idea about NPCs, though. I should be going to sleep hour ago, not going through old entries.
woof
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As we arrive at 24 hours without internet, I am not surprised in the least. Politics politics politics.
What'll be interesting is whether or not that now that it's a work day AT&T will get their act together and actually fix things.
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As we arrive at 24 hours without internet, I am not surprised in the least.
Politics politics politics.What'll be interesting is whether or not that now that it's a work day AT&T will get their act together and actually fix things.
I would have gone mad long ago.
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I would have gone mad long ago.As we arrive at 24 hours without internet, I am not surprised in the least.
Politics politics politics.What'll be interesting is whether or not that now that it's a work day AT&T will get their act together and actually fix things.
Even with our appalling cell phone coverage we managed to do Baldur's Gate online last night, and so far work is going fine. We have unlimited cell phone data and each person is tethering to their own phone, so it's mainly the difference between 980 Mbps fiber and 1 Mbps cell phone tethering.
But it's a bizarre business decision by AT&T. Assuming a standard mobile service technician costs $100/hour and they pay 50% overtime on weekends, it would cost them $115,200 per month to keep a dozen service technicians on call over the weekend, and they could cover the entire Bay Area of over 8 million people.
Losing service for 24 hours? Even GothBard was talking about switching to Comcast because of it. And at AT&T fiber prices, they'd only have to lose 1200 customers a month due to poor service to start losing money.
Failing to provide decent customer service is a business killer if you're not the sole monopoly. Since the whole area has Comcast, Sonic, and AT&T available, it seems like a pretty brain-dead business decision to me.
Are the competitors better, though?
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Are the competitors better, though?
OK. Politics.
I suffer from one of the biggest boondoggles in ISP history: City councils, apartment buildings, and pretty much anyone else with control over large numbers of living units were all bribed by AT&T and/or Comcast to provide "exclusivity contracts", though they're not called that.
So, whether it be an apartment building or a city or a housing development, they allow ONE ISP to come in and build the infrastructure for a particular type of service. Albany was typical: We got phone lines and cable lines years ago, but AT&T owned all the phone lines and Comcast owned all the cable lines, and the city forbade any other company from building new infrastructure because "we've already got one". Same thing with fiber: Only AT&T was allowed to install fiber in the city because they don't want "redundant services". Thus, if you want a particular service type, the infrastructure is not state-owned, but rather owned by a private company, which is then required to lease the lines at a reasonable rate to any other ISPs that come along.
Thus, my ISP is Sonic. They are fantastic. My call to tech support this morning was answered in two rings. But tech support had to tell me, "We don't own the lines that are down, so there's nothing we can do about it. You're at AT&T's mercy until they decide to fix them, and they won't even give us an estimate of when that will be."
Aaaaand... the standard curriculum development experience:
July 28: I sent out an announcement that I was updating the course, along with a design that showed what I was planning to do and a dedicated web page.
Weekly Since Then: I've sent out a weekly update on progress and content.
October 2: Someone finally looks at the content and says, "Hey, you need a lesson and a practice on this new feature that nobody's ever mentioned before!"
So pretty typical: Wait two months after an announcement until the development is almost done, then demand last-minute changes.
*SIGH*
I'll get it done. But I won't like it.
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Aaaaand... the standard curriculum development experience:
[snip]
So pretty typical: Wait two months after an announcement until the development is almost done, then demand last-minute changes.*SIGH*
I'll get it done. But I won't like it.
So your work flow/plan does not include 'standard' or 'typical' events that you can predict will happen?
That seems inefficient.
My former manager was old-school: If you couldn't be bothered to look at the design when we presented it to you, then any change requests you made would get pushed to the next release. That was efficient and we stayed on a tight schedule.
My new manager wants to make everyone happy so we have to accept these requests "if we can". Thus, I have to pad my project schedule by two weeks to take into account these expected surprises. That is inefficient.
Scope creep is the bane of every project. Having someone request changes well after the window for such requests has closed is standard throughout the industry. It's all about whether your manager correctly pushes those changes to the next cycle, or incorrectly asks you to fit them into the existing cycle.
At this point it looks like we're going to hit 48 hours with no internet, while simultaneously living in a cell phone "valley" because Berkeley don't do cell towers.
Frustrating is an understatement.
You are 'Murican deprived of your divine rights! You know what you need to do!
:P