I’m noticing a trend on The Facebook these days: the people who used to be the biggest trustafarian hippy wanna-be hardcore druggies at my college are now the ones spamming my news feed with right-wing links from FOX news, Glen Beck, and every Tea Party nutbag out there. Seriously, guys?
I’m slowly continuing to add content from the static archives into WordPress. I’m noticing that I used to write more back in the day.
I picked up a set of TORX bits in preparation to remove the sunroof from the Slattern sometime this week(end). Hopefully I can get it back down and into place without having to dismantle half the interior of the car. Hopefully. I also picked up a bag of locknuts for the Tuffy console in the Scout; it’ll take 5 minutes to get that bolted in permanently.
I stumbled upon this last week and found it too good not to share:
This is part one of six. Shane McGowan looks like an absolute mess (and this was filmed five years ago).
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This is getting funny. Police Seize Jason Chen’s Computers. To recap: this guy is an editor at Gizmodo, which bought a prototype iPhone that someone mistakenly left at a bar, from the original finder, who never really meant to did a piss-poor job of attempting to locate the original owner. These guys (Gizmodo) bitching about “invalid police procedure” is just humorous.
I don’t know how to play chess, but I understand the basic concept—it’s the rules I never bothered to learn. It can be used as an allegory for many things in life. Like yesterday, for example. Jen had an early morning client meeting, which meant Finn needed daycare. Which meant I needed to get her there in the CR-V. But Jen had to be able to pick her up, so I had to get the CR-V back to the house and swap it for another vehicle.
Meanwhile, Pep Boys replaced the defective battery they’d sold me late last year, but I hadn’t had the time to drop it into the Slattern, so I was going to have to take the Scout on her inaugural test drive to work when I brought the CR-V back. Got all that? Good.
Jen made it to her meeting on time, Finn made it to daycare on time, and I made it to work about 30 minutes late, but the Scout did just fine. No leaks, no spitting coolant, and everything felt great.
During the day, I called Bank of America to replace my ATM card for our joint account, and after one abortive attempt I was able to get a CSR to order me a new card. before I hung up I asked her to verify the account she’d altered, and she gave me my primary checking account, not the joint account. (This, after punching in the joint account number and my soc in order to access the main menu, then repeating it to the CSR as soon as she got on the line. Isn’t technology amazing?) So I corrected her, verified she had the right account and verified she hadn’t cancelled my primary checking card. See where this is going?
On my way out the door from work, I called to order some kebabs for dinner, because Jen didn’t have time to get anything set up and because it was a LOST night. I turned the key in the Scout and got a lovely click-click-click from the battery, which had fired up just fine in the morning but decided to crap on itself sometime during the day. The guy downstairs in the booth, who couldn’t have been nicer, didn’t have a battery charger, and the garage was pretty deserted by the time I was there, so I reluctantly called Jen, who was in transit with Finn, to come and give me a jumpstart. She made it into the city in record time, and after some fiddling with the jumper cables (they will be replaced next month) we got the Scout to fire up. Driving back to the ‘Ville, we separated so I could go pick up dinner, and I left it running while I ran inside. When the guy ran my ATM card—you guessed it—declined. The BoA lady had, indeed, cancelled my primary card. I made like I was going to run home and get cash, but the proprietor, who couldn’t have been nicer, told me to take the food and come back to pay when I could. So I will endorse Cafe Kebab on Frederick Road not only because their food is delicious, but because the owners are exceptionally nice people.
Returning home, Jen had food ready for Finn, and we all devoured our dinner a full hour past our usual schedule. I ran out to pay for our meal, and then hurried back to help Jen give Finn a bath (she had played outside for a good portion of the day, and thus was covered in sunblock). After putting her to bed, I had 15 minutes for my next mission:
- Pull the good battery from the Jeep, which was parked across the street.
- Drop the new battery in the Saturn.
- Move the Saturn out of the driveway.
- Drop the Jeep battery in the Scout.
- Pull the Scout into the garage.
- Pull the Saturn into the driveway.
- Put the bad battery on the charger for one more test.
Thankfully, I made it inside just before the first commercial break of LOST. Which kicked ass, by the way.
Jen also informed me I’m not allowed to drive the CR-V, because she’s afraid I’m going to fuck it up somehow. Which, after all of this mechanical drama, is probably true.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This is a great idea, but with one fatal flaw. Emeco’s 111 Navy Chair is made from old Coke bottles, 111 of them to be precise. Of course, because it’s being sold at Design Within Reach, they want $250 for one.
For the record, I love the design of the Navy Chair. But there’s no way in hell I’d spend $250 for one made from soda bottles; $25 is more like it. (via)
We saw Brian Williams in the hall at NBC a few years ago visiting our friend S., and she tells us he is as cool and down-to-earth in person as you would hope he is.
Wow, for an art school, I can’t imagine designing an uglier custom license plate than my alma mater did. Does the URL need to be in all caps? Really?
My physical therapist and I have a certain weekly routine, where he puts electrodes on my back and I lift weights and watch Harry Potter on my iPhone and try to ignore 120V of direct current that’s making my muscles tense into iron rods. Then he does ultrasound, which is like having a mostly relaxing massage with a warm curling iron. Next, he does manual massage, including a technique where he grabs my skull and attempts to pop it upwards off my spinal column like the head of a dandelion. Usually, that’s about the worst point; after that, I stand in front of a machine with a big crank and do six repetitions with each arm, and he slowly turns the resistance higher. The result is a slightly sore but satisfying ache in the muscle that usually leads to fitful sleep and an increase in mobility.
Last night the other therapist put the electrodes in the usual place and I made it to the end of the quiddich match in Half-Blood Prince, and then everything went to hell. She is a quiet lady with a thick European accent, and her timid demeanor hides a frightening ability to inflict pain for extended periods of time. She started with massage around my neck, and when she found the knot in my left shoulder, she said, “aha!’ in a quiet voice, just before she attempted to push it through the other side of my body and out the front of my chest using only the tip of her finger. After about five grueling minutes of deep-tissue torture, I was ready to confess to anything Dick Cheney could dream up in his worst paranoid fantasies. Then, she used a pair of iron-hard knuckles and about thirty foot pounds of pressure applied directly to the screaming muscle mass and told me to turn my head to the side five times, slowly. Once I’d gotten through that and fought off the urge to puke, she had me do it facing the other way.
After that, it was back to the old routine, but my enthusiasm for turning the big crank was gone. Especially after the front desk guy changed the music from classical to the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which made me feel even more foolish than I normally do. This afternoon, I’m sore and creaky and tired from tossing and turning all night, which hasn’t happened in a week or so. I know that often things have to get worse before they get better, but I think I want to go back to my original therapist next week, because I don’t know what I did to his partner to make her dislike me so much.
I’m still here. I had PT on Monday, and the doc says it’s stress, bad posture (due to sitting in a chair all damn day) and no exercise that’s got my neck muscles wired tighter than a drum. Two Advil over breakfast seems to dull the pain to a mild ache which allows me to get through the day. Of course, the high-pressure system sitting overhead gives me a sinus headache, which means mornings are a challenge not to throw up or pass out until I get moving. All of this sucks because I can’t help Mama with Finn that much, I can’t do anything around the house, and I can’t sleep very well. I’m going in for more PT early next week, and hopefully I can start loosening everything up before spring passes us by.
Strangely enough, I was wondering about this earlier today when doing a search for toner numbers: an explanation for HP’s ridiculous ‘License Plate Domain’ URLs.