Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Trouble in Georgetown

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I had some errands to run this morning on my way in to work — hitting the bank, picking up a new bus pass and the like — so I ended up taking a different bus into Georgetown than usual.

As I got off the bus and started walking down the street, I heard a little commotion in one of the alleyways to my left. Looking over, I saw a young lady frantically running down the alleyway, coat open, trying to keep her footing in the fresh snow. Since Georgetown is a more industrial area, and there are occasional reports of problems in the area, this was more than enough to get my attention.

Suddenly, her pursuer rounded the corner of the building. He stepped into the alley, saw the lady, took aim…

…and a snowball went flying through the air, arcing up and then back down to explode across the windshield of a car that the lady had just ducked behind.

Laughing, she popped back up, scooped some snow off the hood of the car and hastily packed it together, sending it back towards her friend, then ducked around the front of the building, as he started running across the street to find another fresh patch of snow.

For a city that doesn’t get snow very often, a good old-fashioned snowball fight isn’t a bad way to start the day at all.

Happy New Years Eve Day, everyone. Have fun tonight with whatever festivities you may find — fireworks, friends, dancing, champagne, snowballs, or whatever you might have in store.

And save a New Year’s kiss for me (well…except for the guys, in which a hearty handshake will do just fine)!

Truth in advertising

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'We're not sure why we bother with the words.'

I found this wonderful ad for the Filipino edition of FHM (For Him Magazine) in a roundup of ten ads America won’t see, via this /. thread.

While there are some interesting ads mentioned (from a Gucci ad deemed ‘too racy’ for the US with our bizarre cultural mores regarding sexuality and the human body to the absolutely astounding Honda Accord ‘Cog’ ad), the self-deprecating humor and honesty in FHM’s ad made it by far my favorite of the bunch.

One of the great benefits of living a TV-free lifestyle (and one of the reasons I went to a TV-free lifestyle) is that I don’t need to sit through the neverending stream of stupid, pandering, insipid ads that eat up a quarter of every show on television. However, every so often, some ads are rather entertaining to see, and it’s nice to be able to take a peek at them from time to time.

While I hate, hate, hate the appearance of what’s so euphemistically called “pre-show entertainment” in the movie theaters lately (the ten minutes of advertising that runs after the advertising slides, but before the fifteen minutes of trailers before you finally get to see the movie you paid for), I saw a great ad for HP photo printers that used a ‘flipbook’ form of animation. The spot opened with a 20-something guy standing in front of a staircase, and you watch him jump up and down a couple times. The scene then cuts to a pair of hands holding a flipbook titled “I defy gravity” made of photos taken of the guy at the peak of multiple jumps, creating an illusion of him flying over the ground, up and down staircases, and over parked cars. Once the flipbook finishes, you get a couple more shots of him jumping up and down, and then it’s over. Quick, simple, amusing, and sticks with you — nicely done.

But I still wish I didn’t have to sit through it before watching a movie.

Don't feed the trolls

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The ‘net has given rise to many varied technical, pseudo-technical, and not-technical-at-all-and-often-very-silly terms over the years that it’s been around. Aside from ‘spam’, quite possibly one of the more frequently used terms is ‘troll’.

These days, troll is more often used to describe someone who is just more or less randomly spewing offensive garbage in chatrooms or messageboards in a blatant attempt to tick people off. This type of post is described in the Jargon File’s entry for ‘troll’ as sense two:

  1. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand – they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, “Oh, ignore him, he’s just a troll.”

However, prior to this usage, troll was primarily a verb:

  1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase “trolling for newbies” which in turn comes from mainstream “trolling”, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.

I’ve always preferred this usage of the term, though this style of troll has become far less common as of late. My best guess for this is that quite simply, it’s far easier just to blatantly spout off some offensive drivel without taking the time and effort to craft it in a creative enough way that more experienced readers will merely read it, recognize it for what it is, and move on, leaving the more clueless to vent their anger in the ensuing thread.

Today, I stumbled across a somewhat rare item, in a posting that actually lies somewhere between the two definitions. It leans a little more heavily towards the second definition, but the author did take the time to craft a misleading first paragraph before moving on to the actual content. I’d dock them points for a few reasons (it’s a bit too blatantly attempting to aggravate; doesn’t have the subtle wink-between-the-lines that a true definition one troll should; and its posting in a general-purpose forum — the Seattle LiveJournal community — means that there’s no specific topic for the author to work within, giving them more reign to just pick a topic intended to offend), but I do have to give them a few points for at least making some attempt to be a little creative.

As the original LiveJournal post will very likely be deleted before too much longer, here’s what triggered all this.

My lovely wife and I have a new baby girl! We just brought her home today. She was born on Christmas eve at exactly 9:24PM. She is 6 pounds and 2 ounces, and she is so perfectly beautiful!! I was hoping she would have been born on Christmas day, so she would have the same birthday as the baby Jesus, but no matter, I’m just so happy!!

Anyway.. my question is.. Does anyone know where in Seattle I can take her to be circumcized? They wouldn’t do it at the hospital… the doctors just gave me a funny look. So if anyone knows of a place in or around Seattle that specializes in female circumcision, I would appreciate the info. It doesn’t have to be a certified doctor or anything.. as long as he knows what he’s doing.

Thank you all! Merry Merry Christmas!! :)

Seen any other worthy definition one trolls around lately?

Books, sir…books.

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What did we do for endless and disheartening time-sinks before computers? I never lost twenty hours trying to make a fridge work properly, or to make a chair I’d accidentally upgraded turn itself back into something you could sit on.

&mdash Neil Gaiman

Still digging

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(This post is mostly me whining. Feel free to ignore it.)

I’m so frigging tired of time and time again finally getting to a point where I feel like my finances are coming together and getting under control, only to have some catastrophe send everything spiralling downhill again. I end up in this same frustrating cycle over and over and over again, and it’s getting really old.

A few months ago, things were looking up. I had a good job, doing work I enjoyed, getting more experience under my belt, and getting a halfway decent paycheck (just a touch above $12/hr). I wasn’t out of debt — far from it — but I at least felt like I had a handle on things, and could foresee being able to pay everything off eventually.

Then I goofed up, and everything fell apart again. Suddenly unemployed, I had a month without any income, and if it hadn’t been for the kindness of friends and many strangers, I wouldn’t have been able to make rent that month. Even with rent being covered, all the other little day-to-day expenses (food, laundry, transportation, etc.) still ate away and what little savings I had, until things were looking pretty dire.

Thankfully that only went on for a month, but it dug a pretty decent hole, and now I’m facing troubles getting out of it. While I’m employed again, I’m earning about $2/hr less than I was before, and I now have more expenses (as my current employer doesn’t supply me with a bus pass as my last one did), plus I’m having to adjust from a weekly pay period to a bi-weekly pay period, which makes a huge difference in being able to plan and budget bills.

With the way pay periods since I’ve started have worked out, I had to float my rent check for December. The property management company apparently took their own sweet time putting the check through, which normally would be a good thing under the circumstances, but it ended up hitting my account at the same time some other bills did — sometime within the last two weeks.

I just deposited a $700 paycheck, and got my balance back as $175, indicating that I was around $500 overdrawn until my check went in — and another $650 in rent is due in about a week, with my next paycheck not appearing for another two weeks. ARGH!

Gah. It’s just frustrating. I’ll make it through, though it’ll probably be with a few bounced check fees here and there, and hopefully should at least be caught up to paycheck-to-paycheck living (rather than last-paycheck-to-last-paycheck living) within the next couple of months. I just hate being in the situation I’m in now.

Anyway. Just had to bitch and moan for a few minutes. Sorry ’bout that.

Nothing to see here…move along…

The miracles of Christmas

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The real miracles of Christmas, according to me:

Miracle One: In thirty years of Christmas seasons, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen either It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Never. Not once. I haven’t gone out of my way to avoid seeing them, but I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to attempt to see them, either. For one reason or another, it just hasn’t happened.

Miracle Two: That despite having no less than three different versions of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” programmed into the in-store Muzak at work, resulting in my having to listen to that insipid song no less than 240 times over the past month (three times in a two-hour repeating block of music over eight hours, twelve times a day, 40 times a week, 240 times since Thanksgiving), not to mention being treated to innumerable different versions of every other Christmas song ever recorded every time I stepped out of the house since Thanksgiving, I still managed not to devolve into a gibbering psychopath and start randomly destroying speakers, PA systems, stereos, and random carolers whenever I passed them.

It was really, really, really tempting, though.

A quiet Christmas

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It’s been a nice Christmas holiday this year. Due to financial difficulties, I wasn’t able to head up to Anchorage to be with my family for Christmas, so I ended up spending Christmas on my own for the first time in my life. While I missed being able to see family, all in all, it really wasn’t such a bad thing — there will be plenty of other chances for me to head back up to Alaska in the future (possibly even a few that aren’t in the dead of winter!), and it gave me a few days of just “me time” to kick back and relax without having to deal with the rigors of travel.

I’d originally thought I was going to work on Christmas Eve day, but things were slow enough at work that I ended up getting the day off after all. A nice surprise, though if I’d known earlier, it might have made the trip to Anchorage more likely, so there was a slight element of frustration, too. However, not being one to complain about an unexpected day off, I spent most of the day just relaxing at home, with a few hours of wandering around downtown Seattle watching all the last-minute holiday shoppers hurry from store to store.

On the way back home from my wander, I decided that I might as well do what I could to celebrate the Christmas holiday in my own particular style — and ducked into the theater to see Bad Santa. What a wonderfully horrid little movie! The entire thing is very, very wrong, and very, very funny. Definitely not a movie for everyone, but if you’re into black comedy and don’t mind a film taking quite a few outrageous shots at the Christmas season, it’s worth checking out.

After a bit more time goofing off at home, I headed up the hill that evening for Christmas Eve at the Vogue. What better way to spend Christmas Eve than at a goth club with a lot of people dressed in black and listening to dark music, right? ;) Hey, it works for me — especially as there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun with the night, and among the songs played at the club that night were a few of the songs from the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.

Today’s been another day of nothing. A little dinking around on the ‘puter, a little reading and zoning out, and seeing Return of the King for the second time. My only frustration was that I’d intended on calling home to wish Mom, Dad and Kevin a merry Christmas — but I don’t have long distance, and I discovered today that my phone card had expired a couple of months ago. Of course, this being Christmas day, I don’t know of any open stores close to me where I could pick up a new phone card, so I may have to take care of that sometime in the next couple days and call them this weekend instead. Hopefully they’ll understand!

The Dangers of Molasses

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One of the country’s most bizarre disasters ever happened to the city of Boston, Massachusetts, on the afternoon of January 15, 1919. An unusual warm spell had cheered people at the north end of the city, raising the temperature from around zero to the mid-40’s, and business went on as usual.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, disaster struck. On a hill above the city, a 90-foot wide tank of molasses intended to be used for production of rum suddenly ruptured, sending two and a half million gallons of molasses in a wall eight to fifteen feet high down into the unsuspecting Boston neighborhood at speeds of up to 35 miles per hour. 21 people were killed, and 150 were injured.

That day’s Boston Evening Globe described the scene:

Fragments of the great tank were thrown into the air, buildings in the neighborhood began to crumple up as though the underpinnings had been pulled away from under them, and scores of people in the various buildings were buried in the ruins, some dead and others badly injured.

The explosion came without the slightest warning. The workmen were at their noontime meal, some eating in the building or just outside, and many of the men in the Department of Public Works Buildings and stables, which are close by, and where many were injured badly, were away at lunch.

Once the low, rumbling sound was heard no one had a chance to escape. The buildings seemed to cringe up as though they were made of pasteboard.

Legal battles followed, of course, but eventually the fault was laid at the feet of the owners of the molasses vat for failing to properly reinforce the vat, and they had to pay out more than a million dollars in damages.

The terrible thing about this disaster was that it was entirely avoidable! In fact, the people of Boston were wary from the beginning of having a large molasses factory on top of a hill. They saw what could happen. However, the head of the factory spoke to the mayor, who in turn spoke to the people of Boston, and succeeded in convincing them that with the amount of money the factory would make, the people would get some of it as the factory spent money and bought goods et cetera. The people accepted this, and allowed the factory to be built.

When you look at it, it’s terribly sad.

21 people were killed — all for the treacle down effect.