Monthly Archives: March 2004

Orange Day

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Thursdays. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

It’s been one of those weeks thus far – my team leader was out sick all of Monday and Tuesday, which put me in the “acting team leader” hotseat. I don’t do much other than walk past her desk to check the call-monitoring display to see if anyone needs a reminder to go on break or to lunch in order to adhere more closely to their schedule. It’s a benign way of checking up on people, but soulless and somewhat degrading to have your entire worklife revolve around your ability to log in and log out correctly while juggling calls and hoping not to get caught on a long call. Sometimes phones are just evil instruments of the corporate devil.
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Past, Tense St Paddy’s

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One of the stated purposes (purpoi?) of this blog is that it’s a collection of random-access memories – a purpose that’s been sadly neglected of late. Howerver, I’ve got some doozies that came back to me all in a rush, because they’re topical, today being what it is (or was, by now).

In the bad old pre-David days, when I was still living the carefree, (bored) bachelorette (lonely) (anti-social) life in Seattle, I used to go out occasionally for holidays like St Patrick’s Day. There are a lot of Irish bars in Seattle, and I lived within walking distance of a particularly famous one, Jake O’Schaunnessy’s. Jake’s was famous for having the biggest St Pat’s crowds in a town that was known for the green-beer drinking excess that leads to people painting green stripes down miles of city streets just so the entire St Pat’s Day Parade doesn’t get lost on its route from one Irish bar to another. In fact, the building I worked in was the home of Jake’s, and every year on a weekday St Paddy’s I’d have to work all day and look out the front windows (it was like an arcade) and see all the happy throngs of college-age drinkers having fun (early) and throwing up in corners (later). As I wasn’t so long out of college myself, this seemed like a fun thing to do all day, and I hated having to work. By the time I did get off work, Jake’s would be too packed out to enter, so I’d mostly just go home.

However, one year, I actually made plans to go out with a friend. The previous weekend, we’d mostly had an amazingly good time at another Irish bar downtown, dancing jigs with visiting Irish dignitaries and random faux-Celtic wack-jobs in kilts. We had a guy that played the Uilleann bagpipes with us, too, who played a hell of a tune called “The Clumsy Lover” for us. This was a pointed insult to the aforesaid wack-job, who didn’t get the joke. Now THAT was a fun time had by all.

The actual night of the 17th, we tried to repeat the magic, but it was not to be, and in fact was the beginning of the end of the friendship. Nothing much really earthshattering happened, I just reached the point of terminal fed-upness to a surprising degree. With red warning flags flying, and steam coming out of my ears.
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Baghdad, Pakistan, Spain, et. al.

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Something tells me I might need to have quick access to some of these feeds from The Feed Room

I spent a lot of time looking at raw feeds (not live) there during the first couple of weeks of the war. There’s been a lot of breaking news in the last few days, and I don’t have good access to news at work unless I walk into the break room where the TV lives. On the other hand, I watched the fall of several statues in Baghdad “live” right here on this computer at work, and also watched a news guy deliver his nightly report over the live feed from the roof of the Baghdad Hotel one day (he kept asking his New York contact between takes “does my hair look all right?”). I got rather addicted to that particular webcam.

I don’t really want to get obsessed with war and terrorism news. Plenty of other people out there in Blogistan covering that beat. But I feel the need to be able to monitor it. Just in general. Just a gut feeling. Crap.

Green Day

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Yeah, it’s Green Day in America, as in “wearin’ o’ the.” The resident Irish lass on the team, who has red hair and has an Irish surname AND maiden name (and was married at Old St Pat’s, a Chicago landmark) is wearing o’ the green. Various people who aren’t Irish are a wearin’ o’ the green. Since we’re at work, nobody has started in on the pukin’ o’ the green, but it’s early yet.
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Century City

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The Reviews:

BostonHerald.com – the Edge: Time trials: CBS’ legal drama ‘Century City’ avoids future shlock

Welcome to Dullsville, er, Century City

So the reviews are mixed, but David and I enjoyed it. It gets the geek crowd and the Law & Order crowd on one sofa…

cc_boyband.jpgAnd hey! In the “geriatric boy band” subplot, they killed Martouf again, those bastards! At least he got to play a hot looking 72-year-old.

But on the other hand, they got freakin’ Anthony Zerbe to bust a few moves at Martouf’s funeral. Now that was funny. He looked like he was having a hella better time than when we saw him last in “Matrix: Revolutions.” Danced better, too.

Anthony Zerbe Is In The House

Yes! MT 3.0 coming soon…

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Okay, why do I as a non-technogeek (I am merely the moll or sheila to a technogeek) think this is way damn cool:

Testing Begins & More Info about 3.0
03.16.2004
We’re taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we’re now opening the testing to a larger audience (we’ve picked 300 random addresses from those who applied and will be adding more as time progresses).

The testing that we’re conducting will not only help ensure a stable final release but will also give us an opportunity to receive feedback on feature implementation from both users and developers.

Starting today, we’ll be giving all of our users much more information on what to expect in Movable Type 3.0.

Yay…. ::horntoot::
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Now how does this thing work?

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Okay, so Accordion Guy made me do it.

BlogPolling Voting System seems simple enough, but for a doofus like me?

Actually, I’ve been asking David to set up polls for me, but it was pretty far down on the list of to-dos around here recently. So this may be the way for me to go, since I got good results from using both Blogrolling and Bloglines. Yep – that’s the Amerkin way – outsource it!

Let’s give it a shot…

Well, I’ve got the right style elements working, but the radio buttons don’t show up once they’ve been clicked.

Hmm. More pondering required.

Updated to add:

Hmm. I had assumed the CSS stuff went in the stylesheet, but the source on their main page makes it look like it goes in the index file?

Hmmm.

(later)

Okay, now radio buttons back – no, they’re gone again.

Hmm.

Even later still…

Aha! The source code of Blogpolling.com’s page pointed me in the right direction. I was trying to put the custom CSS in the CSS page… apparently when using the (style type=”text/css”) tag (brackets switched to parentheses) it goes in the main index.

Another aha! I had originally set 5 minutes for allowing another vote. Just wasn’t waiting long enough for the buttons to appear. And now it’s wide enough for my typically wordy stupid questions and answers. Also I think I have it set to “reset” in a minute, and not allow ballot box stuffing (using cookies).

Although – “vote early, vote often.” Maybe I should re-think the cookie thing.

Okay, so that was a little harder than it looked, but eventually I worked it out (probably bass-ackward, but it’s working and not broken)((now it probably doesn’t validate)).

Hey, Timmy!! Don’t worry about what it all means, just push the button already.

The Other Americas

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A resort for “Family Friendly America”
Casino- and vice-free resort fun for Mom, Dad, and all the kids (other kinds of families need not apply)
Orrin Hatch’s American Dream.

Unconstitutional and/or against the law, in Orrin’s Perfected America:

  • Abortion
  • Equal Opportunity race quotas
  • Flag burning no longer protected free speech

Constitutional:

  • States would have the right to refuse to acknowledge same-sex marriage
  • School prayer
  • Foreign-born US Presidents (the “Ahnold Amendment”)
  • Balanced budget – okay, but at what cost to critical social services?

Even among conservatives, Senator Hatch has the reputation of a constitutional gadfly, repeatedly pounding away at his pet amendments (sometimes more than once in a year).

Constitutional conservative activist Chuck Muth suspects political posturing is behind many of Hatch’s proposed changes.
“The senator appears to be using constitutional amendments as a way of ducking an issue legislatively, knowing the amendment is not going to pass but proposing it to get on the right side with his constituents,” said Muth, president of Citizens Outreach.

Yep, I’m just keeping a weather eye on the theocratization of America. And this is just in the West – there’s tons more like it in the Southeast.

Now it appears that Hollywood bigwigs are wondering if they shouldn’t start making more movies about the religion thing, and catering to a market they’ve mostly ignored – the “people not like us ” market.

Oh, boy, here comes a Samson and Delilah remake, you betcha! But who could they possibly get to bring the cheese home like Victor Mature could?

And you know the effects wizards have got to be wondering what they might do with the “Red Sea” scene in“The Ten Commandments” as there’s lots offree publicityfloating around for that one these days.

At least the atheists have a sense of humor about themselves amidst all the religio-political follies – their new PAC is called “Godless Americans”.