While she’s in labor, her husband is running about like his hair is on fire, completely flipping out.

And then goes and gets himself some leftover apple cobbler, surveying the debacle from the kitchen table.

All the while his wife is still dropping babies all over the g-ddamn place.

And then, after the whole ordeal is over, he has the nerve to complain that HE is tired.

So I killed him.

She continues, suggesting that if kids just get jobs at McDonald’s then they will receive free food on their break.

I pretty much hope that the 20% of children considered hungry in Missouri go and eat her.

Ms. Davis neglected to mention when her hunger strike will begin so she can get motivated to resolve the hunger issue in her state. She also avoided the question of how she manages to sleep at night.

Colbert is amazing, as per usual:

However, this does not mean you can throw a shopping basket at me when I tell you that the Transformers DVD that is on sale today (or, rather, Saturday when this happened) will not be on sale tomorrow, even if you put it on hold at guest services.

Yes, I’m serious. A “guest” threw a shopping basket at me because he was supposedly freaking out whilst trying to find provisions, but apparently had enough time to pick out a Transformers DVD set.

Everybody is freaking out because they think they’re going to lose power. Everybody is foraging for food. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

After I told him he wouldn’t get the sales price, he started going off and spewing a bunch of nonsensical bullshit:

1. “I’ve been living here for 30 years and…” (So what? My store hasn’t even been there for 35 years.)
2. “I’m ex-military and…” (Is that a threat?)
3. “I’ve been to three stores trying to get provisions and I don’t need this right now!” (Dude, you’re buying ping pong balls. How is that helping your search?)

Then he threw the basket at me. I backed up into the corner of my little register section and he began yelling at me to not freak out on him because he “doesn’t need this right now.”

I informed him he couldn’t attack me and that pissed him off. He said he wasn’t attacking me, to get better customer service skills, and that his generation had to deal with “it” and so I have to as well.

Excuse me? Your generation wasn’t typically known for throwing things at shop girls.

After I give him his receipt and run away, I get sort of freaked out. When someone’s in my face, I don’t really back down. I finally found my manager, who I normally hate, and she went over with security and kicked him out of the store.

This is where it got interesting: He started rambling about being ex-military and war and some incident in Germany and whatnot.

Here’s the thing: he was only about 35, max. There is no way he was ever in a war in Germany. And again I say, so what? What does Germany have to do with throwing a basket at me?

Bastard.

We were going to have a huge party today, but due to Snowpocalypse ’08, nobody from out of state can get here and most people in-state (including my family!) are stranded as well. Plus she (the birthday girl!) has a terribly unfortunate cold.

My aunt doesn’t want to deal with weather issues again so she wants to postpone until February.

Now, my great-grandma might be healthier than the rest of my family combined…but 100 is really effing old. You cannot postpone someone’s birthday party for two months–especially if they are into the triple digits.

My uncle is going off about how he’s never planning a birthday in December ever again. Because we get actual snow every five years or so? Seriously?

He’s even angry that she “decided” to get sick. Really? She decided to get sick? That’s a new one.

I love my uncle, but needless to say, he can be a bit of a self-centered bastard. My mom showed great restraint in not strangling him over the phone when she heard that.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to condense the multitude of reasons I hate MySpace so much (and yet use it anyway) and managed to limit it to four. This is amazing since I generally lack the ability to condense anything into under a 200 item list.

1. The shit that people do to their pages. If you think hot pink text on a sparkling green background is readable, you should be sent to aesthetics hell.

2. A lot of my offline friends are idiots on the internet. My friends can’t type, don’t understand about spam, and are emo on the internet. It’s embarrassing to be associated with these people.

Why do you care if you’re not in my Top 4?

Oh, yes. I do not have a Top 8. I don’t like my friends enough when they’re online to keep most of them on there. In fact, I have Barack Obama and Dexter Morgan in my Top 4 because MySpace wouldn’t allow me to have a Top 2.

3. MySpace is now a verb. The first time a friend said “I’ll MySpace you later”, I nearly wept. It sounds dirty, but not in a happy way. :(

4. Now I use MySpace as a verb with certain friends who need to contact me. It’s terrible, really.

And yet I have a MySpace purely to keep up with people I might not have otherwise. I’ve found people I’ve not talked to for five to twelve years. I’ve found a girl I went to high school with only to find out he’s not a girl anymore which was handy to know up front the next time I saw him.

Months ago I had a dream about a girl I knew in primary school. She was a cool kid so I figured she may have grown up to be awesome. And, as a sidenote, I was sure she was gay.

Oh, how gaydar and cool-kid-detector failed me.

I decided to look her up on MySpace only to find out she’s now stupid, skanky, greasy, blonde¹, alcoholic, and the kind of straight girl that makes out with other girls just so she can post pictures on the internet.

What are other problems with MySpace? And are any other social networking sites necessarily better? Or are there other aspects that make them just as annoying?

1. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;)

I’ve been in love ever since. As much as I defend Apple though, there is one thing I cannot defend them on and that is the shitty MagSafe adapter.

I can see where they might not have been testing it for a year before they released it and they may not have known that around that year marker they’d begin to fray. And that fraying? Would inevitably cause a lot of them to melt and burn.

There are scorch marks all over mine. It’s almost completely destroyed and, of course, right when it happened to mine? There was a three week back-order on the MacBook and MacBook Pro adapters. I have clips–like the sort they use in salons to keep your hair out of the way–pinching in just the right places otherwise it won’t work.

I think it’s a short or something because only when it’s charging does it start to heat up. I’ve small burn marks all over my fingers from the past couple weeks.

Now they aren’t back-ordered anymore online, but I still plan on taking it to my local Apple Store to see if they’ll give me a free replacement. Word is that they’re giving replacements to anyone whether or not they still have AppleCare¹.

Technology hates me this year which is sad considering how much I love it. I’d elaborate, particularly on more recent incidents, but 1) I’m sure something else will happen within the next few days, and 2) even the abridged version would be novel-length.

That said, I still love Apple, its products, and I’m dying to get Leopard. I’m just not happy with this particular product.

1. This is really good for me because of the effing disastrous milk incident which voided my warranty.

First issue was that in my welcome email they sent me the wrong nameservers and they took a fairly long time to give me the actual ones after I sent in a support ticket.

Second issue was that the FTP wasn’t working for any of the accounts I had set up so the faulty nameservers wouldn’t have made a bit of difference anyway since there was no way I could upload thousands of files via file manager.

Third issue: Someone I host needs domain.com/icons/ and icons.domain.com/icons/ to show what she actually has uploaded in those directories to keep her links alive versus a listing of Apache icons (which you can see demonstrated here if you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about¹). The subdomain, icons.domain.com, shows what she has uploaded to the icons directory, but domain.com/icons/ does not and neither does icons.domain.com/icons/.

I read in the Site5 Forums that they have been able to change this in a case-by-case basis. I explain very simply what is needed. I even include links. They email me to say:

Hi,

I’m able to access http://domain.com/icons/ without any problems. Are you still unable to access it? What is the error that you get?

I said nothing about errors in my original ticket. I even specifically said that when I access it it’s a directory listing of Apache icons and how that’s not what is needed.

I just ended up explaining to tech support how Apache servers work. I should be on their payroll.

I wake up this morning to this lovely message:

Hello,

What you can do is to create a symbolic link for the /icons folder. That way both icons.domain.com/icons and domain.com/icons will show the exact same content.

Please let us know if you have questions.

Dude, that’s like the exact opposite of what I want. Why would I want to do that?! I want it to display what’s actually uploaded to them, not display the exact same content².

And why would they just say ‘create a symbolic link’? How many people emailing technical support will actually know what they mean by that? Just because I understand why /icons/ displays what it does doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll know the ins and outs of .htaccess. It mostly means that I’ve been messing around with different servers for the past eight years and have seen a lot of different hosting and server situations. It also means I am a master Google-ninja extraordinaire so if I don’t understand something, I’ll just fucking Google it before I ask questions.

Does someone have good stories about Site5 and/or Site5′s support? Because right now I’m about ready to rip out my hair and I paid for an entire year in advance to save myself $100USD and because everyone says they’re so great.

Update: Partial victory! Apparently they understood enough to enable domain.com/icons/ which is good…except for the part where I said at least three times that domain.com/icons/ could be lived without and icons.domain.com/icons/ was what we were really looking for. I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult to get that enabled, but I’m not getting my hopes up. ;)

1. In that directory I actually have a file called rss.png uploaded and nothing else, but you won’t see rss.png at all, much less be able to link to it from elsewhere, like what she needs.
2. Which it’s already doing, technically speaking, since both are displaying ugly Apache icons used for FancyIndexing.

Now, this would have been posted on real Blog Action Day had it not been for my server switching issues and the fact that I lost power due to a wind storm, hence my lack of posts as well as the lateness of my replies and returned comments.

I’m an avid lurker at Hugg, the environmental version of Digg, and EcoGeek¹ because 1) I’m really big on the environment because hey, it keeps us alive and 2) I’m a geek who loves technology.

I’m sort of obsessed with turning lights off and electronic things I’m not using and it drives my family mad. My family is fairly ignorant when it comes to the environment, no matter how much I babble. My dad, as usual, sort of makes stuff up if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’d be amusing if it weren’t infuriating half the time.

I’ve learned to tune him out unless he says something extremely stupid. Like people driving cars (and you know, breathing too much) doesn’t matter because Mammoth Mountain and other mountains release more carbon dioxide per day than cars.

Yep. He wasn’t particularly happy with me when I told him that the “Well, this mountain is killing trees so therefore it’s okay for humans to kill the entire planet” was possibly the worst argument I’d ever heard…and I’ve been involved in big e-drama. E-drama is notorious for it’s idiotic arguments.

My brother (age 15) says I wouldn’t be against gas-guzzling vehicles if I drove². I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

Right. If I drove I’d cease to care about the environment. Because nobody who drives cares about the planet, clearly. I never said the men of my family had good logic skills (because they don’t and generally lack common sense as well).

If the entire world owned cars at the rate USians³ do, we’d likely all be dead.

What You Can Do

Last week was No Trash Week. I didn’t participate, but I’m definitely going to try in the future. It’s a really interesting site as they have tips to help you reduce the amount of crap you throw in the bin, a FAQ, a few projects you can undertake, as well as a forum.

The Compact is a project in which you do not buy new items for an entire year. This means you don’t buy new products of any kind from stores, web sites, etc. You buy used, borrow, barter, etc. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions because I know I’ll never stick to it, but I think I’m going to seriously try this in 2008. It’ll definitely be difficult because I have an addiction to buying books. It seems the Amazon Marketplace, eBay, second-hand shops, as well as Freecycle.org will be my friend in 2008. I also need a new computer since I fucked up my beloved MacBook Pro a few weeks ago with evil milk. I’m still crying about that, by the way.

10 of the More Obvious Things

1. drive less
2. take public transportation
3. walk to your destination
4. ride your bicycle to work
5. recycle
6. don’t let water run unneeded
7. use rechargeable items instead of disposables
8. don’t litter
9. turn off lights and other things when you’re not using them
10. donate even $/£/€1 to an organisation listed at Blog Action Day’s website or one of the top 12 environmental organisations who use their donations well.

17 of the Perhaps Less Obvious Things

1. eat less meat
2. use your own bags at shops
3. download music from iTunes and other online music stores instead of buying physical CDs, cassettes, and/or records
4. use a laptop instead of a desktop computer
5. buy local produce rather than imported produce
6. buy water-efficient showerheads
7. pay attention to packaging
8. use fluorescent light bulbs
9. quit smoking
10. start a vegetable garden
11. bring your own cup or ‘travel mug’ to your coffee shop
12. volunteer
13. join Greenpeace
14. reduce or offset your carbon footprint
15. offset your blog’s carbon footprint!
16. educate yourself on green issues–it’s a fantastic way to start
17. do something

For Teens

Many teenagers feel as if they don’t get a say and that’s often true. Your parents may not care about green issues, but talking to them (and not just once) is a great first step. There are things just you can do without involving your parents as well.

• Eight Ways to Go Green at Red is an article geared towards teens.
• Forum Thread: Looking for Suggestions for Teens to Go Green at the TreeHugger Forums
• Green Teens Hug the Web at News.com is an article about a study that says more environmentally-oriented teens flock to the internet.

A Few of Random Earth-Related Links

1. Ten First Steps from Lighter Footstep has ten ways for you to get started towards a more sustainable green lifestyle.
2. 13 Easy, Inexpensive Ways to Go Green from MSN Money is a great article for those of us for whom money is an issue.
3. Yahoo! Green is Yahoo!’s contribution to the fight against global warming. Hank Green of EcoGeek (and Brotherhood 2.0) was involved in the project. One thing you should never say to Yahoo! is “I’ll google it” because people at Yahoo! do not google things.⁴
4. 10 Amazing Sea Creatures You Didn’t Know About at Green Expander reminds me why box jellyfish scare the shit out of me. That plus sharks and the brain-eating bacteria that live in lakes remind me why I like pools. As long as the filters don’t suck out my innards.
5. Daughter’s Efforts to Save Planet ‘Really Annoying’ from the Nashville Scene includes a cute kid and irritating parents who whine about their daughter’s interest in saving the planet and her stuffed polar bear, Blanco.
6. The 10 Rarest Animals in the World and 10 of the Most Endangered Animals at Green Expander are both prime examples of how much humans have harmed the earth in the past 100+ years. Many of these species were thriving 100-150 years ago, but some are now down to as low one individual animal of the species left. Some of them are an example of how much humans harmed the environment long before cars were invented as well.
7. 10 Amazing Animals Saved from Extinction at Green Expander has some of the success stories–many of which would be far more fantastic if global warming wasn’t such an issue today.
8. Extinct in the 20th Century at Green Expander shows that while there is still a chance to save many of the species listed as endangered now, for others it’s too late.

Pictures of Seals

If you hate seals, you’re probably evil.

All images contained within this post are royalty-free and come from stock.xchng.

1. Which I found via my favourite vlog, Brotherhood 2.0–go nerdfighters!
2. That’s right, I don’t drive. I drove around a local church’s parking lot a couple of times when I was 17, but never even tested for a learner’s permit. Not only am I afraid of driving, but as it says on my about me page, I’m an avid pedestrian and I’m actually fond of taking public transportation.
3. A term I’ve nicked from others to refer to Americans from the US. I quite like it, but I may be alone.
4. Secretly, they probably do. We all know which is the superior search engine here.

Below are examples of idiotic things said to me on a weekly basis as well as either the response I give or the response I wish I could give depending on who is doing the commenting.

“Oh. A useless degree.”

First of all, kindly fuck off.

Is there such thing as a useless degree, honestly? I don’t believe so. Least of all a degree in languages. Many people in English-speaking countries are monolingual; being multilingual is a sought-after skill in today’s job market. There are tons of things you can do with a BA in Spanish and French. Many people are unwilling to learn a second language. For some reason, this seems to be more rampant in countries where the predominant language is English.

Mostly, I’m getting a BA because I love languages and I like to learn, not because of the job I’m seeking.

“Nobody speaks French.”

I think the people of the 29 countries of which French is an official language would disagree with you. About 300 million people on the planet speak French. There is a French speaking country on every continent aside from Antarctica–as far as I know, emperor penguins don’t speak French. Or at least they didn’t in March of the Penguins which is clearly a vital source of penguin language information. It’s also an official language of both the United Nations and the European Union.

“French is useless.”

See above.

“Can you get a job with that? What are you going to do with that degree?”

I’m not getting a BA in Spanish and French to get a job; I’m getting a BA to learn more about something I love. I love to learn. I’ve always been that girl who’s constantly reading up about random things. When I was a kid, sometimes it was animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. Sometimes it’s still animals or dinosaurs or space or Sweden. I’m filled with tons of random bits of information about everything.

And, as I said earlier, multilingualism is a sought after skill even in non-interpretation or translation fields.

Why in the hell do some blogs make it so impossible to subscribe to their feed? Do you not want readers to be able to keep track of your updates? A couple times recently I’ve just given up. I had even tried random URLs such as http://evilfeedwithholder.com/feed/ and http://evilfeedwithholder.com/index.xml

It’s bad enough to remove the <link href="http://evilfeedwithholder.com/feed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="The Forbidden RSS 2.0 Feed" /> bit as it is, but then not have a link anywhere on your website? Not in the sidebar, footer, site page, or anywhere else? Evil.

Don’t make me work for it! Make it simple! I’m likely to never return to your site again no matter how much I liked it.

2. Mixing trackbacks & pingbacks with your comments.

Often it’s difficult to tell where the trackbacks end and the comments start again, particularly when there’s just one or two comments nestled between seemingly endless trackbacks. I generally skip over all trackbacks or anything that looks like one. I might be missing something integral to the flow of conversation in the comments because that one important comment was stuck amongst the trackbacks.

3. Lack of context in your posts.

Sometimes I’ll find a new blog that could be interesting…if I knew what the hell they were babbling about.

I hate the feeling that I’m coming into a conversation late or that I’ve just walked into a room and everyone else has just started laughing, but I’m stuck in the dark.

When you’re referring to something that’s happened in the past, particularly a specific past entry, it’s generally a good idea to link to those entries that give it context for your new or occasional readers. If it’s not in the posts displayed on your main page, chances are, I’m not going to find it and I’m not going to waste my time finding it.

Now, this woman has been banned from every board ever created. She even got AOL for the dynamic IP addresses so she could no longer be permanently banned by IP. She posts with a million different usernames, but apparently you can always tell it’s her because of her writing style. Clearly, since she’s been banned hundreds of times from other boards, this one ban shouldn’t have been any big thing, right?

No. She went insane. For some reason, she targeted my mom and blamed her for the ban; perhaps because my mom has been the only one to stand up to her in the past. My mom and the moderators eventually just closed the board because they were sick of putting up with her friends as well.

Now when my mom posts at other boards about random completely unrelated topics this lady starts attacking her, accusing my mom of being obsessed with her¹, makes extremely rude comments, spreads my mom’s personal information, etc.

Yesterday my mom posted about something–perhaps French toast², I’ve no idea–and this lady started her attacks again except this time she’s gathered about fifteen minions and they’ve started mocking my mom for having cancer³.

You know what? Fuck. You.

These women are over 40 and they’ve spent the better part of 24 hours relentlessly spamming my mother and now two other people and acting as if my mom has no life. If you’re over 40 and you still gather your friends to gang up on one person and flame them, I almost pity you because you’re pathetic.

Oddly enough, my mom finds this all hilarious.

Ahem. And this is why the internet is like high school.

1. Who’s obsessed with whom here? I mean, my mom never mentions this lady anywhere, but she goes about looking for my mom so she can attack her! Somebody’s brain is in off-mode.
2. Example of this lady’s madness: My mom will post about French toast. This lady will come along and go “G-D, WHY ARE YOU SO OBSESSED WITH ME?!” and then proceed to spend the next few days flaming my mom.
3. My mom had surgery two days ago because she has breast cancer. She’s doing fine right now and will likely be completely cleared after she undergoes radiation therapy.

Said beverage turned out to me milk.

Milk that turned out to be very bad for my computer. Particularly when I didn’t turn it off right away because my cold-medicine-induced stupor made me, well, rather effing stupid. I’m not even computer illiterate. I just wasn’t thinking.

Very, very, very expensive mistake. Expensive mistake that made me cry. Very expensive mistake that made my keyboard act as if it was possessed by Samara¹.

My dad fixes computers for a living. Spilling milk on it voided my warranty anyway (any problems it has can be blamed on aforementioned evil milk) so he popped it open, cleaned it out, cleaned under the trackpad, tried everything.

Keyboard is fried, trackpad is done for, has massive start-up issues (hit the button, wait for a minute before it makes any indication it’s going to start up at all — and sometimes it doesn’t start up at all) and won’t stay in sleep mode properly.

So today I go to the Apple Store at the mall because 1) I need an external keyboard² for now and 2) I’m applying for a job at another store in the mall. I asked for a quote on what a repair would cost.

Turns out said repair would cost about $1,200 USD. When I could just get a brand new iMac or MacBook with 2 GB of RAM, 2.16 GHz processor, and 160 GB of space (as opposed to my current 1 GB of RAM, 2.0 GHz processor, and 100 GB of space) with about the same amount of money with my student discount.

The thought of spending that much money on an item after only a year and a half of having my MacBook Pro makes me want to cry even more. I was planning on having this computer for several more years. I love this computer–I don’t want a new one! This one is the perfect size, sleek, sexy, and exactly what I need. But I’m definitely not putting up the cash for a brand new one either. I’ll live with a new MacBook despite my dislike of glossy screens, assuming I get this job. I’m probably going to wait until Leopard comes out to buy it to save myself US$119 (again, with student discount).

Hey, whatever computer I get it will always be better than what I had before my current love–a third-hand 400 MHz Dell laptop with broken hinges, 256 MB of RAM, and a 20 GB hard drive that only ran when I got it into the mood.

1. Well, perhaps not as much as that one time on a very, very old Dell laptop I had where I was typing and then everything was inserted backwards (siht ekil tsuj) and my then-girlfriend did not help with my fear that I was going to die in seven days. Have I ever mentioned that I went to a Christian summer camp where part of The Ring was filmed? And I’ve been in the cabin?
2. Turns out it’s very difficult to do anything on your computer when 1) you cannot type and 2) it’s in various naked pieces.