Dunno If This'll Work

Looks like WebSense has now totally blocked Gmail, even my sneaky way in. At least it keeps timing out, rather than hitting the page that tells me the site’s blocked.

So, I can’t read my personal e-mail anymore and I’m not handing out my work e-mail, sorry.

Also, I doubt I’ll be posting on my blog for quite a while. Don’t like posting from my work e-mail, if posting from it works at all.

I’ll keep reading for as long as I can, though.

TTFN

Once Again, A Test

Qs & As

Q: What did people do before people all got the 'nets and hung out at their desks not working?

A: They wandered around spending 25%-75% of their time away from their desk talking to coworkers.

Q: Was WebSense supposed to increase productivity?

A: Dunno, but it makes me have to answer the phone and get up to the front counter a lot more even though I'm supposed to be the last in line for those two jobs. Maybe I should learn to enjoy the company of my coworkers so I'm not at my desk anymore either.

Why in the world...

...does it seem like 99% of all french press coffee makers have glass beaker?

I want a french press. Sure, I don't drink coffee, but it'd be nice to have in a cold morning rare visitor makin' ice cream sort of way.

My problem is that I think I've dropped just about everything I use on a semi-regular basis in the kitchen at least once. If my drinking "glasses" weren't made out of plastic I'd probably be on the third or fourth generation of glasses by now.

I know I'd break a french press beaker. I know because while I worked at 'Bucks, I broke at least two. One I dropped, the other I hit on the corner of a counter. I wasn't allowed to use the french press for a while. So, when I buy a french press, I'd like one made out of stainless steel, or something like that, so it'll only dent and not shatter. I'd like it to hold four cups. Is that too much to ask for?

Also, it's not like I need a french press, it's that I'd like one. At least I'd like to look for them and price them. Can't do that with the WebSense being up. Can't only see the ones that they sell at the coffee shops and super stores around here. So far, they all only sell the ones with glass beakers.

Ah, well.

On Trying to Ignore Spoilers

Y'all remember yesterday when I wrote about the comic shop, where I shop, being sold out of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, right?

Well, I stopped by Barnes & Noble, as I said I would, and it turned out they hadn't recieved their books from their warehouse, yet. Also, I wasn't the first person to ask about it. The girl I talked to said I was the third to ask her that day(!) and like the tenth to ask her since Saturday. She offered to put a hold on one for me, though.

I thought about it for a couple of seconds, but since I REALLY wanted it yesterday, I figured I'd go to my apartment and call other local(ish) comic shops to see what they had. They had nothin'.

On my break, twenty minutes ago, I went back over to Barnes & Noble and got them to  pull me a copy. Well, they'll "pull the first one not already saved" for me.

The guy didn't know when they'd get them in. Until that time, I have to avoid reading the reviews that are already coming across my feed reader.

It's hard, people.

Yeah, not hard in any real-live-people-starving-or-suffering-from-disease way. It's hard in a more existential full of ennui way. And that's hard.

An Irrational Concern

Sometimes, I worry that there'll be air bubbles in my pee and the usually steady stream will start to sputter causing the urine to have little to no power behind it thereby making it spit and splatter onto my pants.

SONOFABITCH!

I called the comic shop to have them pull me a copy of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, and they're sold out.

The fucking story opens at 11AM and they were sold out by noon.

First, what the fuck? Did they not realize how popular Scott Pilgrim is, especially with the movie coming out 23ish days?

Second, I guess I'll be stopping by Barnes & Noble on my way to the comic shop this afternoon. Maybe they'll have a copy.

Because I am bitter and hold on for way too long.

On Me Writing Creatively:

3rd Grade
A while ago, my brothers and I looked through a box of old schoolwork our parents had kept. Every story I wrote when I was in 3rd grade started with "Hi, I'm... and I'm from... and I like to... One day I was..." Not the most clever, but, hey, how else was I supposed to get people to know the main character? (Although, one did star a flying walrus from Mars, based on a stuffed animal I have. That was cool.) They were all short and silly, just like an 8-year-old's stories ought to be.

4th Grade
The teacher would give us a prompt -- a beginning sentence, an end sentence, a basic plot -- every couple of weeks and we'd write a story that was a page-ish long. As I think back on it, the writing probably had more to do with handwriting than anything else. I mean, what's a page of handwritten story on grade-school lined paper? 150 words, max? Yes, we were learning the parts of sentences and how to construct them, but I don't remember learning anything about storytelling.

After the stories were graded, the teacher would post them on the wall for the whole class to read. I never really enjoyed any of them. They weren't like the books the teacher read to us in class or that I read on my own. The stories were stilted. Lots of them were dreams. (I know I used the dream thing at least once because the first time I'd heard a story that ended with the hero waking up, I was blown away. By the end of that year, I hated characters waking up at the end of a story.) I never cared for the stories on the wall, mine included.

I liked writing them, though. It was fun. I can only remember one prompt, about being in a cave. I have no idea what I wrote. I was a mixed up little kid, in many ways. I could sometimes be morbid, but usually aimed at pleasant. I probably thought that it would be a check plus instead a just a check.

5th Grade
This was the first time I ever had a story I was writing get away from me.

As a class, we had just read The Castle in the Attic and the teacher wanted us to write a story about how we'd act and react to being two inches tall in the real world. The story was supposed to be simple, I got shrunk and still had to go to school where I'd find everyone else in the class had shrunk, too. The problem was that a lot of stuff could happen between waking up two inches tall on morning and then falling asleep that night because, of course, everything was back to normal the next morning. I went crazy. The stuff I wanted to write about kept growing. The minimum number of pages was probably supposed to be five or so, my first draft was over twenty pages; when I went back and rewrote it in cursive it got even longer, mostly because of the cursive, but also because I added more to the story.

I can't comment on how well the story was written, but that was the most fun I'd had writing, up to that point. I'd never had a story wrestle control away from me. It was like I was describing events as I witnessed them rather than making stuff up. It felt really good.

8th Grade
My English teacher had been a math teacher, mostly, for years and years. Yeah. Still, he'd do these cool writing exercises where he'd put on a piece of music, and he played all sorts of genres, and the class would write a story, or whatever, for however long the song was or until he had us stop. We did a couple a week.

I liked writing them. There was a freedom in being able to do anything I wanted, in being able to describe what I heard in the music. And I went everywhere. I wrote about going to an old-timey car show, although I'd never been to one. I wrote about an epic space battle. I wrote about kids sitting in a car and fighting while their mom was in the grocery store. I wrote about monsters rising from the deep to crush the cities of mankind. The music varied and so did my writing.

After he collected the stories, he'd read a few out loud to the class. Mine were never read which was okay. I hated it when my work was read to classes, especially when I was in that class. The problem was that on all but one writing, he'd give me Cs and Bs, with no explanation as to why. The girl who only wrote romance novel stuff always got As. My best friend, at the time, got As on his crappy stories about camping or riding dirt bikes. They also had comments on their work.

The only A I got was for a write a paragraph contest he made all his classes enter. He commented on that story. This is how it read: "A, Published." Out of the sixty, or so, students he taught English mine was the only paragraph to be published.

That'll show him! I figured. Now he'll have to pay attention to what I write.

School only lasted a month or so more, but I still only got Bs and Cs and no comments on my stories.

10th Grade
The assignment was to write a story at least so long. No other limits.

I wrote about a guy who, while walking through the woods, came across a field with a door standing in it. I described the forest and the field and the door. I had the guy open the door. I had the guy put his arm through the door. I had the guy close the door and leave as fast as he could.

To me, it was a story about fear.

Along with the grammatical errors (mostly run-on sentences) the comment on the last page was, "What's beyond the door? I want the character to go through the door. B-"

I wanted to scream at my teacher that the whole point was that the guy didn't go through the door. Of course, I didn't.

Years and years later, my brother told me that he enjoyed the story I wrote about the door in the field. He liked how the guy was too scared to go through. That made me very happy.

*     *     *

So, why am I writing this?

Well, I'm trying to work up courage and I think part of finding that courage is letting go of some of the dumbass stuff I've held on to over the years.

It's a process. Don't know if it's a good process, but it's what I'm working with, for now.

Well, I think it's cool.

A brief history of computer icons.

Lerner and Loewe

Re-watching my Muppet Show DVDs (Why haven't seasons 4 and 5 been released yet?) and just saw the Pearl Bailey episode this morning.

Okay, so throughout the episode, Floyd is bitching about having to be a knight for the jousting scene in Camelot. Eventually, Floyd just goes along with it, but as that happens Scooter goes to Kermit and  says that the guys who wrote Camelot won't let them do the scene unless they get money. (Kermit spent most of the money on two suits of armor.)

So, Kermit goes out to introduce a scene that's almost, certainly not at all like the jousting scene from Camelot.

The curtain opens and everyone is dressed in medieval clothes and they begin to sing "Ascot Gavotte" from My Fair Lady.

I laughed so hard that I had to back up the show to hear all that I missed.

An excellent joke, Muppet writers. Totally unexpected and, as Bullwinkle once said, "Thousands won't."

(Also, did Pearl Bailey ever play Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!? After her little bit of singing the title song during that sketch all I want is to see her in that role. She would have been so much better than Streisand.)

To Serve Men

I like to cook stuff and I like to watch cooking shows. This, inevitably, leads me to want to cook almost everything I see on TV.

I don't, of course. My kitchen has no room. The counter-space in nonexistent. To do any real chopping I use a table thing on wheel my mom bought for me about six months after I move up. It's not perfect (and it now has a box fan on it), but it works.

Still, I can't really do, at least well, the things I see on TV. I don't have a food processor or blender, see the no room thing, since I don't even have cupboard space to store them, nor do I have a standing mixer. Someday, though, I will. I'll have room and some of the simpler gadgets that aren't necessary, but really great to have.

Anyway, yesterday I was watching Rick Bayless's show on PBS. He was making carnitas. First he used pork and then he used duck.

My entire being wanted to rush out to and buy a boston butt, or two, and start roasting. I didn't. I mean, what would I do with that much meat. I couldn't eat it and my fridge/freezer isn't very large.

His food looked so good. I swear I could smell it through the TV.

In the end, as with, it seems, every episode of his show, he had a dinner party to serve what he cooked to his friends and family.

And here's where the "dream" (for lack of a better word) falls apart, for me. I want to cook the large quantities of food. I want to roast the boston butt, cook massive amounts of chicken and rice over an open fire on a giant metal platter, and bury a whole pig in a pit to cook all day. I want to do that and I want other people to eat it and enjoy it. I just don't want to be with people as they eat and talk and whatever.

Yeah, I want to do everything that Mr. Bayless does on his show. Except for that last part. I could do without that.

Here's Something:

Apparently, it's so ingrained in me that I am an asshole, that I'm an asshole even in my dreams.

All this week, I've made people I care about cry, in my dreams. Three different people in three different dreams last night.

And, in my dreams, I revel in my asshole-ish-ness. In my dreams, I enjoy being an asshole to the people I care about.

Of course, it probably doesn't help that I've spent a large portion of the last two weeks obsessing over an e-mail I sent out about 23 months ago. Yeah, now that's healthy.

Dear Friend,

Since I'm going to be __ ______ on ___ _______ and you're going to be having ____ ________ a bit later __ ___ _____, I've been thinking about ____ __ ___ ___.

It's been hard.

So hard, in fact, that went back and skimmed almost everything you've blogged. And you've been blogging for a while.

I need an ____, though.

The problem is that we're adults, you know. Not just adults, but adults who are __________ ______-_____. You can pretty much go out and ___ ____ you ____, you know?

And then there's the fact that you have ____. You put ____ first, which is the way it should be. Still, you fill your ______ ________ with thing that you ____ ___ ____. But what do ___ ____?

I thought I'd get some ideas by reading what you were thinking _____ _____ ___. You were thinking things that I was thinking, which isn't _________ _ ___ ___ ___.

See, the problem is that I ____ __ ___ you _________ ___________. Something _________. My first idea fell though. You ____ ___.

I'm sure I'll figure something out. I usually do.

Your pal,

ticknart

Transparent Eyeball?

Have you ever had a moment of realization where you know, KNOW, something, good or bad or neutral, with complete and utter certainty? How did you feel? Relieved? Good? Bad? Confused?

I had one, a neutral one, about forty or fifty minutes ago while responding to an e-mail from my brother.

I've been awash with a million variation of nearly every emotion since then. It's almost overwhelming. My head feels stuffed with cotton or wool.

It's doubtful that anything good will come and I'm not sure if knowing is good. It's just what it is.

The Return

This morning TMSV went around asking people, "What's the good news?"

All I could think of was, "Jesus is coming back!"

I didn't say anything, though.

Nothing and Death

Time is encroaching on me. Soon my workday will be over and then I will not have time to write this. Not that I have any sort of goal in mind as I start tapping my chubby fingers on the keyboard. Whatever, right?

There was some sad news this morning. Harvey Pekar died. He was the guy who wrote the American Splendor comics. He also co-starred in the movie based on the comics. The best post that I've read about him today is this one here. I haven't read nearly enough of Pekar's stuff to feel like the Ferret, but I've read enough to know that Pekar's writing is something worth aiming at.

The BASTARD's Posting More About Fan Fiction

It's been nearly 11 months since I started on this most recent fan fiction bender. In the past, the benders only lasted three or four months and then I'd move off of it. This time, though, I see no end in sight. Probably because, this time, I'm doing most of my reading in between the pushing of paper at work.

Anyway, there's a site I can get to while here at work. It's full of lots of fan fiction based on Daria, and the guy who writes it is one of the muchly better writers of fan fiction to boot. (My biggest qualm with his stuff is that he has the characters hug and say, "I love you." too easily. It may just be my problem, though.) As I'm working my way through his stuff (copy/paste into Word and read from there) I've started to wonder about fan fiction writers, in general and this one in particular, and their need to take the characters they love and place them in other times, other worlds, and such and, quite often, changing the character in probably unintended ways.

This fan fiction writer has done this sort of thing several times: In one he has the Cuban Missile Crisis lead to war, although he doesn't explore what happens after the first day and it's really about the childhood of a parent. In another, Charles Manson's dream sort of comes true. Siblings and a ghost. A girl out of time, think The Flight of the Navigator. In the mid-40s, two girls bond over rockets, not yet finished. And a Daria who knew of the girl who hated Mondays moves to Lawndale, after attending an "alternative" school, in 2007. All of these are quite good and very interesting. All of them have characters that are similar to their TV show counterparts, but often not the same in important ways.

(I'd like to be clear that I'm not writing about crossover fan fiction. That's a whole other beast.)

There are always "logical" reason for the differences -- age, zombie white people, a death, aliens, war, Brenda Spencer -- but it's still jarring, to me. And the fact that the changes are often jarring leads me to wonder: Why make these stories, which are in so many ways different than the TV show, into fan fiction? Why not make them wholly original stories with original characters?

Okay, so some are challenges: "Take a character and drop him/her into D-Day." or whatever. But to write an 85000 word novel seems overkill to me.

I suppose people could say it's done for the love of writing:

"its fan fiction. It's not going to be published. I did it because I love to write."

Couldn't you still love writing and use original characters for this original plot?

"But I love these characters."

You altered the characters so much that really only their names are the same.

"I had to change the characters some. A war's on. They wouldn't be the same people in 1944."

But why'd you have to kill her sister? Getting rid of that relationship alters a lot about the main character.

"It increased the drama and let her show her emotions more than she did on TV."

Wasn't the fact that she held onto her emotions with an iron grip part of the reason you love the character, though?

"Yeah. So?"

I could be wrong about that whole conversation, but I don't think I am.

After writing this and forcing myself to think about it, I bet the real reason this kind of fan fiction is written is because putting labeling as such ensures it'll be read. It ensures some kind of feedback.

You won't always get that writing for the love of writing and then posting it somewhere or sending it out to an editor or an agent. And there's no way to track how often it may have been read.

I think a hugely important part of fan fiction, for the writers, is knowing that, no matter what's written, it'll be read by people who will, in some way, appreciate it. Even if it's only because the characters share names and appearances with characters who appeared on TV, or in a movie, or in a book, or on stage, or where ever.

There are always "logical" reason for the differences -- age, zombie white people, a death, aliens, war, Brenda Spencer -- but it's still jarring, to me. And the fact that the changes are often jarring leads me to wonder why make this stories, that are in so many ways different than the TV show, into fan fiction? Why not make them wholly original stories with original characters?

Okay, so some are challenges: "Take a character and drop him/her into D-Day." or whatever. But to write an 85000 word novel seems overkill to me.

I suppose people could say it's done for the love of writing:

"It's fan fiction. It's not going to be published. I did it because I love to write."

Couldn't you still love writing and use original characters for this original plot?

"But I love these characters."

You altered the characters so much that really only their names are the same.

"I had to change the characters some. A war's on. They wouldn't be the same people in 1944."

But why'd you have to kill her sister? Getting rid of that relationship alters a lot about the main character.

"It increased the drama and let her show her emotions more than she did on TV."

Wasn't the fact that she held onto her emotions with an iron grip part of the reason you love the character, though?

"Yeah. So?"

I could be wrong about that whole conversation, but I don't think I am.

After writing this and forcing myself to think about it, I bet the real reason this kind of fan fiction is written is because putting labeling as such ensures it'll be read. It ensures some kind of feedback.

You won't always get that writing for the love of writing and then posting it somewhere or sending it out to an editor or an agent. And there's no way to track how often it may have been read.

I think a hugely important part of fan fiction, for the writers, is knowing that, no matter what's written, it'll be read by people who will, in some way, appreciate it. Even if it's only because the characters share names and appearances with characters who appeared on TV, or in a movie, or in a book, or on stage, or where ever.

Eight Sided House

Stumbled on this website today.

It chronicles a family building an octagon house.

There's a floor plan, although they exclude the basement. (I wish they hadn't. Having grown up in CA I've only ever seen on house with a basement, and it was pretty creepy/disgusting. I'd like to see what they did with theirs, though.) There are tons of pictures. The guy did a journal of building it.

The whole thing's just fascinating and turns out quite lovely in the end.

I think I'd like to live in a house like that when I grow up.

In the Time of Minimum Wage

I got my eyes checked yesterday and then ended up spending more than $200 on a pair of prescription sunglasses.

You know what I learned?

I learned that getting polarized lenses costs an extra $85. That's $10 more than my vision plan covers to get new glasses.

Of course, I did get the polarization. The girl helping me didn't even have to go into her spiel about how its better for the eyes and blocks out stuff and such. I knew all that before.

Here's to hoping my prescription doesn't change much in the next five or so years.

From 25 to 0

Today was okay. I wasn't feeling great, but I wasn't feeling bad either. I was just doing the stuff I needed to do and the day was moving along at a reasonable pace.

After lunch, as I set my book down on the desk, I noticed a largish pile of ratings for me to mail out and scan. "Okay," I thought, "but where are the medical reports and requests?" The rater used to, a long time ago, keep the reports and requests and toss them in her To Shred box. Then the PJ decided that individuals should be responsible for their shredding and not the clerks. (Apparently one of us shredded something that wasn't supposed to be shredded even though it had been tossed in the giant box by the shredder that we were supposed to periodically clean out. Of course it was all our fault. We should have known better than to shred the stuff that was in the box full of paper to be shredded.) After he made that decision, the Rater started sending me all the crap that needed to be shredded by including it with actual ratings. So, I saw that there was no crap to be shredded, something's up.

I looked at the top rating. The injured worker lives in Marysville. Marysville is north of Cowcity. Not our venue. I leaf through the pile and notice that none of the ratings are going to our venue. In fact, all of them are going to the same venue. A venue we were doing ratings for last month for overtime. Overtime which has been canceled because the state still has no budget.

Now, lucky me, I get to do the serving and the prepping and the scanning and the completion and the checking to make sure that all the fucking documents went in the right case or any case at all during my normal hours because, as the PJ said, it was put on my desk to do. That's 90 to 150 minutes of work time, depending on how well the systems work.

It's not that its using up my regular work hours, which it is, that bothers me. (And, yeah, I get the irony of me wasting work time writing this.) I can get over that. I know how to adjust my processes to make up for the extra work and get myself caught up by the end of the week. What bothers me is that it's up to 2.5 hours that I could (should!) be getting for overtime. I feel cheated out of that little bit of extra money.

Also, I'm pissed at the PJ being an asshole. Doubt he'd do some other venues work if it showed up on his desk and was obviously not ours. Bet he'd send it back to that venue and tell the PJ there to go fuck him(or her)self.

Yeah, the day's not so okay anymore.

Nashville is 35

Jim Emerson takes a look at the crowds of Nashville.

Nashville's one of those movies that blew me away when I first saw it. I saw it in a film class when I was 18. I immediately rented it and watched it three more times in the two days I had it.

Emerson says:

This is a movie about the crowd, spectatorship -- about watching, and watching the watchers watch what they watch -- and these faces have become familiar acquaintances, like those kids you saw in the hallways at school but never really knew. One of the glories of "Nashville" is that you imagine the movie could have followed any of these folks and added their lives to the tapestry. As a wise man once said, god is in the details.

And he's so damned right.

I wish I owned it so I could look at it again. (...and again and again and again...)

Because I have (soon to be) family to tell me.

So, I see this blog post (Thanks Google Reader Explore!) and have no idea what it's about. I assume it's a protest. WebSense blocked Google from translating the page, so I had no idea what's going.

Then I turn to someone who can tell me what's going on, my brother's fiancée, who's from Beijing. I ask her if it's a protest and what the protest is about. Here's what she sent me:

hahaha! it is not a protest! it is an art thing! for the fun of it. It's dorm in Beihang University. These are all bed sheets~

it says as such: 

Dear security aunt we miss you. (funny casual sarcasm: security women guards are usually mean women that would do such things as snap at young couples if they kiss or hug.... we tend to not like them and call them aunt in a teasing way... Well sometimes there are good motherly ones too, so maybe this one is real that they do miss her.)

also, 

Any girl that would take me home? 

or,

I walk away with hurt eggs (eggs referring to balls). 

or 

Beihang girls only marry Beihang boys!

or 

goodbye Beihang we love you

Some jiberishes too for fun... I don't see any signs of protest..... why do you think this is protest?

Obviously, I'm a reactionary, ethnocentric American who assumes other cultures don't have a sense of humor.

Fun stuff, though, even if I am an idiot.

MINIMUM WAGE! Heyah!

The court has made a decision!

Of course I expect another appeal to come by Tuesday.

It's the uncertainty that's the killer.

My (lack of) Comments

One of the problems with this Websense things is that there are times, although rare, when I can get to a .blogspot.com page. When I can get there I can read everything and comment and all that. When I can't get to the page, I can't comment on other people's blogs.

I can, however, get to mine. Most of the time.

One of the things I can see in my Site Meter info is out clicks. Sometimes, when someone clicks to post a comment that link will become an out click and then I can get to the comments and add my own. Recently, though, they haven't been coming up.

Such is the stupidity of whatever.

My Bad, We're Getting $7.25 and hour

Something from the Sacramento Bee Article:

Roughly 200,000 state workers will receive minimum wage paychecks next month under terms of an order issued Thursday by the Schwarzenegger administration.

According to a letter delivered to Controller John Chiang in late afternoon, July pay for most hourly state employees will be withheld to the minimum allowed by federal law – $7.25 an hour – and then restored once there's a budget.

So, this happened to us a couple of years ago, too. The Governator sent out a letter telling the Controller to pay us minimum wage, which was $6.75 back then. The Controller didn't. The Controller says he won't do it this time, either. However, two years ago the Controller was sued over his decision and lost. That decision was appealed and the appeal was heard about two weeks ago. Who knows when the judge will give his decision on the matter.

People are freaking out. The union I'm in doesn't have a deal and they're telling us, via e-mail,  that it's "fear tactic" and a "bargaining ploy." Well, duh.

I figure I'll wait to freak out after the appeal's finished.

Smiles, everyone.

Some Good and More Bad

Furloughs are officially over.
That's good.

The Governator wants all state employees to start getting paid $6.75 and hour starting today.
That's bad.

Because the Controller defied the minimum wage thing last year, the whole idea's in court and if it's not decided on by the 23rd, or so, we'll get full pay.
That's good.

If we get full pay, odds are furloughs will come back.
That's bad, but better than federal minimum wage.

We, who work for the state, are once again caught in the time of uncertainty.
That's bad.

The budget was due on June 15th so it could be put in place when the new fiscal year started at 12:01 this morning.
That's bad.

Assembly members and Senators went home.
That's bad.