Archive for October 2007

Stuff

Halloween, bah-humbug

Normally, I love a little dress up. Decorate the house, play a little scary music, hand out candy, the whole shebang.

But this year, I just couldn’t get into the spirit. My plan was to play Halloween Scrooge. I was working this afternoon, so I had every intention of turning out all the lights and hiding in the back of the house while I did my thang. Until about 4 p.m. when T decided that he wanted to do the candy thing (tho, I was *not* allowed to decorate. Spoil sport. ) Admittedly, I’ve tried to hand out candy before in this house. I decorated. Bought a tonne of candy. And I had a grand total of zero kids come to the door. So, you can see why I wasn’t overly excited to do it again.

But, since it’s rare that I can get T into any kind of holiday spirit, I indulged him. And there has been an influx of small-kid families lately, so I thought we should get a nice turnout. So, off we went to pick up candy. Fortunately, I talked him into buying stuff we both really liked so we could eat the leftovers. Except, he also bought Coffee Crisp. Blech.

So, we turned on all the lights, opened the door, put the bowl of chocolate, nibs and potato chips on the front stairs and waited.

And waited.

So far? Eight kids showed up. Eight. Wow.

So now, tons of candy and me with a wedding I need to look smashing for next month. And I’m weak, so weak when it comes to chocolate.

Bah humbug.

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Geekery

Geek-lite

So, I’ve always considered myself a complete and total geek. A nerd girl. I mean, it’s in the name, right?

Until today.

I’d been going through serious, serious withdrawal thanks to Sympatico Unplugged (my Internet provider) who don’t believe in a) providing the service I pay for, and b) actually answering their technical support phone lines. I spent the better part of a week and a half on hold (minimum four hours a night), only to find out that when I finally got through to a live person, having survived the violence-inducing hold music, the department I needed to get through to had already closed for the night. (funny that they always seemed to close *just* before I got through.) Of course, since they deprived me of almost half a month’s worth of service, I’m going to be depriving them of almost half their fee this month. See how they like it.

So, internet-withdrawal plus a last-minute offer to geek out for two days (and wireless access!), had me attending the Free Software and Open Source Symposium. I totally didn’t know what to expect from this… and I confess I spent most of yesterday feeling a little like Charlie Brown listening to any adult (wah-wah-wah-wah… )… but I realized that I am so not a geek. I’m geek lite. Semi-geek. I’m quasi-geek. I’m the margarine of geek. I’m the Diet Coke of geek. Just one calorie, not geek enough. (tho, I think the fact that I just quoted Austin Powers may make me a little more geek than I think. )
These guys? (and I say guys, cuz I was definitely in the minority gender-wise *grin*) They were hard-core. They threw around sayings like “dogfooding your access” (yeah, it was explained to me and I *still* don’t get it.) and.. you know, I was trying to remember other sayings, but so much of it went over my head, I can’t even tell you other things to prove my point. But Derek, who’s one of the instructors in the class where I TA has a great sum up of the two days, complete with some non-geek-friendly words.

Today went a lot better. The lectures I went to were things I could relate to (like a new javascript toolkit called dojo, which has some supercool features and how to build and participate in a strong community successfully.) And in all, I’m glad I went.

But I’m still nowhere near as nerdy as I thought I was.

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Woohoo! :)

You Scored an A

You got 10/10 questions correct.

It’s pretty obvious that you don’t make basic grammatical errors.
If anything, you’re annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs.
As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they’re only human.
And it’s humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It’s Its There Their They’re Quiz

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Stuff

This is why I shouldn't take a vacation

I’ve been working crazy hours for months and months now, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I had three whole days in a row where I wasn’t scheduled at one job or another. So, we packed up the car and headed down to Buffalo for a little cross-border shopping (hey, it’s an at-par dollar, can you blame us? )

I left my laptop at home, determined to not think about work, and just relax while we were away. We rented a hotel room with a jacuzzi in the suite, and other than driving around trying to find stores that didn’t exist (like a certain sprawl-mart that had a big empty lot where it was supposed to be), it was a pretty relaxing few days of shopping, eating, and just sitting in the hot tub doing absolutely nothing.

I gotta tell ya, it was pretty awesome, and very, very needed.

The problem is? My body, which has been on high-stress, go-go-go mode for so long, finally wound down and said, hey, woohoo! I can relax now. And it relaxed right out of keeping my immune system on “fight everything, I don’t have time to be sick” mode.

So, this morning, I woke up feeling like absolute crap. I have a fever and a serious cold. And I’m actually working around people today, so I’m sneezing all over them. They’re gonna hate me when I pass this cold on to them.

What’s even more fun is trying to explain stuff when my brain is totally swimmy.

At the very least, it’s a pretty good excuse to take a couple more days off and do nothing but eat chicken soup and read all the books I bought…

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Stuff

Thinking in a whole lotta pink

I was a little iffy on the layout around here, and just as I was playing around, trying to find a new template in the very limited offerings of the free WordPress blog, I came across this site which encourages bloggers to go Pink for October, to boost support and awareness for Breast Cancer month.

So, I’ve gone pink. It might be a little too much pink… I’m not quite sure yet. We’ll see.

For now, pink it up.

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