the everyday adventures of sabrina

Cleveland Indians pitcher Kyle Denney shot in calf while riding on team bus.

The rest of the team was unharmed in the incident, which happened as the team rode to Kansas City International Airport late Wednesday night after a game with the Kansas City Royals.

Swain said the shot was fired into the side of one of the Indians’ two buses while it was on a ramp between Interstate 435 and I-70, grazing outfielder Ryan Ludwick.

“It went through his pants and then hit Denney,” [team spokesman Bart] Swain said. “At first, there was a little bit of panic. Once we realized Kyle was OK, fears were subsided.”

Police spokesman Darin Snapp said there were no suspects and it wasn’t known if the team’s bus was the intended target. Telephone messages left for the Royals were not immediately returned.

i don’t know whether i hope you’re just a bush-league asshole who was shooting shit on the expressway regardless of what it was, or if you’re actually a pissed off royals fan, but you’re still a shithead. and the royals are still going to finish in the basement regardless of how many opposing players you shoot.

shithead.

also, fuck minnesota, just for good measure. *sulk*

d00d. i totally just signed up for introductory latin at the graham school.

!!! am so excited. i always wanted to take latin. michael and david are doing it, and the class starts tonight, and i said “oh, i’m so jealous!” … and david was like, “well, why don’t you sign up?” so i did.

rock! this rocks hard on toast!

oh, wait:

* tang decides to mring Wheelock anyway, just in case tang missed something
* wasy wonder if /me still has wheelock
is there a bookstore at gleacher?
not sure
* wasy doesn’t think so
or should i just wander through the — OMFG, i just signed myself up for the hell of buying textbooks during first week! what the hell was niqui thinking!

candy is to blame for this link. she comments, “How about we stop sending economic aid to Germany and just start sending clothing consultants and hair dressers.”

and i don’t know which is worse: the video or the lyrics.

i think this is the sort of song that only sounds okay if english is not your native language. and the sort of video that you can only get through without breaking out into laughter if you’re a thirteen year-old boy. me, i was nearly in tears at the … erm … climax. bwahahahaha!

if this is true, by god it explains why no one will pick me up in bars just fine!

You are Fluffy Mackerel Pudding!! You somehow
manage to combine seafood and dessert into your
wonderfully fluffy world. We should all be as
tolerant of New Taste Sensations. And of
big-yolked eggs.

What Weight Watchers recipe card from 1974 are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

so thursday morning the apartment building is bringing in contractors to put reflective film over half my windows, which should hopefully cut down a lot on the “wow, this whole south wall of windows is remarkably greenhouse-like” heat woes which result in an 80+°F apartment on sunny days even with the a/c running constantly.

the upshot of this means that i have to move everything away from the wall o’windows before they get here. this includes my bookshelf of reference materials (soapmaking books, french stuff, english stuff), my desk with computer and printer, my heavy-ass 1600VA UPS, my futon/bed, and two cat trees.

so i stayed in tonight to get started moving shit. i got the shelf moved okay, and so far i’ve cleared basically everything off the top of the desk. woe! seriously, i just *got* all that stuff organized. meep. the cat trees are going in the kitchen thursday morning. michael’s going to come over tomorrow to help me move my desk, since it’s a two-person lift (stupid carpeting! i wish i had hardwood floors again). the futon i can move myself, but obviously i won’t be moving it until after i wake up thursday morning.

then the nice men will come in, stick goo on my windows for a little while — seriously, i don’t expect it’ll take longer than an hour; i’ll spend more than that just preparing for them — and then i get to move it all back. if i’m lucky, i can con one of them into helping me scoot my desk back into place, so i don’t have to con a friend into coming over thursday to help me put it back.

i’m looking forward to having the film up, as i do think it’ll help a lot with the cooling woes, but i wish they were going to put it over all the windows. there are six columns of four panes of glass, in total, and they’re only going to cover the top two rows. they’re doing it for free, so i can’t complain, but i wish they were putting it on the bottom two rows — for one, it would make me feel a lot better about privacy. the apartments across the way are close enough that looking out my windows (and not up) pretty much means i’m watching someone eat dinner or something. so i try not to look out, so i won’t invade their privacy.

and then there’s the blinds; if i have the blinds tilted so that the sun stays out, because of the angle of the windows the blinds are tilted, the neighbors can see straight in (that is to say, the windows are at a roughly 45° angle, so the permanently-mounted miniblinds tilt from basically straight vertical to straight horizontal, instead of how normal blinds, mounted perpendicular to the earth, rotate from one 45°F angle to the opposite. anyways, where was i? right, if i have the blinds tilted to shade the sun coming down from straight above, the neighbors can totally see in — but if i have the blinds tilted so the neighbors can’t see in, more sun gets in, and it gets hotter in here. so, i was way happier when the apartment across the way was empty, so i could just leave the blinds tilted to shade the sun, because nobody was looking in at me.

(why not just change the blinds’ tilt twice a day, you ask? easy, it’s annoying to change them. the poles that you twirl to change the tilt are very long and they’re warped from hanging at the angle for years, becoming melty in the sun, so they’re actually sort of S-shaped now. when you turn them, they thwap-thwap-thwap the walls, and it’s harder to turn them. also, they’re behind my futon, so i have to put the futon back into a couch before i can step behind it to work the tilt-poles. so, yeah, annoying.)

anyways, if i had reflective film mounted on the bottom two rows of window panes, it would make it harder for neighbors to see in (especially while sunny outside), so i would be more happily secluded. (deluded in my seclusion, perhaps?)

the apartment people are doing this for me for free, so i can’t really complain, but for the bother i really wish they were doing all twenty-four panes of glass instead of just twelve. (their official reason is that most of the heat comes in through the top panes. huh? i mean, i’m no environmental engineer or anything, but i’d say that, inch for inch, each pane probably lets in as much heat as any of the others. at best, this is going to help keep it cooler around the ceiling, where my air ducts are located, so the cool air will have a chance to come down before it gets heated to broiling by accumulated heat. oh well. like i said, they’re doing it for free, so i can’t really complain.)

so, having a conversation with a friend today. this friend has the magical — from my point of view — ability to go to bars and hook up with a chick. like, without thinking about it.

this friend also has the magical ability to complain that he never gets laid, for which i suspect him of just the tiniest bit of hyperbole — but i digress.

this brought to mind something that bugs me. and discussion of this is going to sound horrifically self-pitying, especially in light of some more whiny-emo-sabrina moments of the past on this blog, but you’ll just have to trust me when i say it’s an honest confusion and not an attempt to go sit in front of my record player weeping as depeche mode’s violator spins on repeat.

(and yes, you little “i prefer my music to not require manual intervention!” fuckers, you can put a record on repeat. only one side, but if all i’m doing is listening to “policy of truth” that’s all i fuckin’ need, innit?)

okay, so here it is: why does no one ever try to hit on me, or even really chat me up much, in bars?

Looks:
1a. i am not entirely unattractive. i am not hot by any stretch of the imagination, but i think i’m inoffensive enough. also, playfully colored hair, gotta be a plus, right?

1b. yes, i’m overweight. still doesn’t mean i’m a complete dog. also, this should not prevent people from just saying hi, even if they don’t want to take me home with them.

1c. i am fairly well-groomed. i have neat nails, nice table manners, and although i don’t wear makeup, i do usually wear some form of lip color/gloss. (also, for the record, actual makeup usually makes me look asinine, because i have no eyelashes, and accenting my eyes thus just makes them look weird such that people will keep staring at me until they figure out what is wrong with my face, at which point they inevitably exclaim, “you have no eyelashes!” thank you; i had no idea; this explains a great deal.) i have started wearing face powder, mostly to combat shine, but that’s just about the extent of it. i do not wear offensive amounts of perfume.

Dress:
2a. i do, on occasion, dress better than jeans and t-shirts. sometimes it even looks all right on me.

2b. when i am wearing slacker chic, i’m still not, like, completely scruffy.

Presence:
3a. i carry myself well, which is to say that i don’t walk around with my shoulders slumped, staring at my feet. i walk with my shoulders back and my head up, and i look people in the eye. when at the bar, i generally sit basically the same way (unless i’m reading a book, in which case i’m looking the book in the eye.) i don’t glower at people.

3b. speaking of which, reading a book at the bar is not, apparently, a deterrent. more people will interrupt me to ask what i’m reading and if it’s any good, or tell me other things that if i like this i might like that, etc., than generally will make a baseball comment to me if i’m obviously watching a baseball game.

3c. if i do come with friends, my friends are also cool. in fact, several of them are actively hot. i think i should get consolation attention, at least, for this fact if for no other.

Not A Trixie:
4. i am not a trixie. i think that this should earn me fifty cool-person-to-talk-to-at-the-bar points merely as a starting point. in fact, maybe this should be point number one.

All Else:
5. i drink good beer and/or whiskey. i also think that drinking something dark from a pint glass should get me more comments than drinking something watery out of a clear glass bottle, or having a conversation with the bartender over which scotch i want should, although i accept that i don’t necessarily expect anyone to start up a conversation with me merely because i’m drinking good beer.

6. i generally don’t get stupid drunk. i haven’t fallen off a bar stool since 1998. (shut up.) and the 40 ounce cosmo and its attendant walking into trees is also far in the past. (shut up, shut up, both of you.) so it’s not like i’m slobbering all over the bar or something gross.

7. i am on good terms with the bar staff. if i don’t actually know them, at least they will smile at me and bring me tasty drinks, because i tip them well. if i do know them, sometimes we will converse. this, in case you don’t know (all you jerks who aren’t hitting on me), makes me one of the in crowd.

8. finally, if you do actually talk to me, i’m generally pleasant until proven otherwise. which is to say that you have to actively annoy me in some fashion before i will begin ignoring you, so long as you are talking to me. i don’t start out assuming you’re an idiot, although i’m willing to believe it if you try and convince me.

this friend of mine suggests that much of his success has to do with the fact that he really doesn’t give a fuck about them, and so girls will try to talk to him because of that. (such as one girl who, on seeing his rather nifty dyed, twisted beard, reached out to touch his beard and he stared at her and said, “you don’t know me that well” before going back to his book.) i don’t particularly give a fuck about anyone else either, but this doesn’t appear to change my chances any.

maybe it’s because my face is apparently possessed of some bizarre, alien talent, such that when i’m not smiling, several of my friends will occasionally ask me if i’m mad. i haven’t seen my face when this happens, obviously, but i’m pretty sure that this happens when i just have a non-expression on my face. you know, i’m just sitting there thinking about some work problem or my bus schedule or whatever, and it doesn’t need a facial expression — one of those.

so, anyways, i have to wonder what i’m doing wrong, sometimes. is it truly just the overweight thing? i am hypocritical enough to expect people to look past that when it comes to me, but i’ll admit that most of the people i find attractive are in shape. i don’t exclude overweight people, but it’s just a fact that i think many slim (or relatively so) people are pretty. but that could also be due in part to the fact that so many overweight people carry themselves like they’re drudging through life. one of the hottest (i thought) women i’ve gotten to know at all in the past few years was at least my size if not larger, but she dressed hot and acted hot, and by god, she was hot. so i think that if i dress and act cool, i should be able to actually be cool too, extra fifty pounds or no.

so, this mystifies me. i’m not sure what i’m doing wrong, here. i’d just like to know. i’m envious of women who get hit on in bars — it’s asinine, i know! but it’s true. it’s like what i said yesterday about my brain not shutting up about workplace politics and inconsequential shit; it bugs me on a theoretical level why other girls will get random people to talk to them and not i. and it’s not particularly a gender thing either; i haven’t been hit on at t’s either.

so, someone please enlighten poor confused niqui. i mean, what, do i smell? do i exude an aura of “no, really, go fuck yourself”? this is bugging me. brutal honesty is okay, and frankly i’m too lazy to check the ips in my access logs if you want to post something without a name attached.

via john, dejavu.org: Experience the history of the web! using their browser emulators, enjoy the worldwide web as we knew it back in the glory days.

cough, cough, “glory.”

i might recommend cleaning cores twice per hour
or more often
or possibly have coreadm in the chroot set to send all cores to /dev/null?
* tang isn’t sure you can configure coreadm two ways — that’s a kernel property, tang thinks
* niqui doesn’t know how to do that
* tang wants a devnull filesystem
tang may be right
mount -t devnull none /opt/http/var/core
DEVNULL FILESYSTEM
* tang puts a stick into tang’s eye, to lighten the mood
* tang schemes. what if we make directories at /opt/http/var/core/core.httpd.##### or whatever they should be, for all 64k process ids?
hahaha
that would make them not dump. and it would be an evil hack that future generations would curse us for.
* niqui is amused to see the effect that changing the service-init-frequency rate on inetd has had on inetd forking.
inetd is fuck
* niqui didn’t even know inetd *would* spawn children
leave anything that vile alone long enough in a warm enough space, and it will breed.

Yay.

one of the things that i hate a great deal about myself is that i’m generally very aware of the implications of the things i do. (not always, but generally. usually the things i don’t think about are spoken out loud.) for example, i don’t eat a cookie without feeling guilty, even if i really want the cookie and it’s making me happy otherwise. i have this constant little internal conversation going on with myself about everything i do. take this blog, for instance. even the most trivial shit that i post usually gets argued about — “don’t post that, you’re going to waste space on people’s friends pages and annoy them, and no one cares what buildings you like downtown anyways,” or “don’t post that, you might accidentally spoil the ending of ‘Buffy’ for someone who hasn’t seen it yet.” never mind that buffy ended two years ago! — and i won’t even begin to start in on the internal discussions that go on about less-trivial stuff. i resolved to be generally very “fuck you” to my internal voice of caution with regard to posting things here, which is what results in me posting inane shit all over the place. i like the blue light, so fuck you, stupid mental voice; i’m going to post the blue light because i feel like it, and i’ll like looking at the picture of the blue light even if no one else does, and you can just piss right off.

this, more irritatingly, comes out to play in work situations. i’ll get an inquiry from someone, and in answering it, i’ll not only think about the answers, but about the repercussions of answering: am i inadvertently usurping someone by answering, even if all i intend to do is answer? if i continue to answer after thinking that i might be doing something someone else might prefer to do himself, should i stop answering? but the question still needs answering. so is it stupid to not answer? what if by answering, it has the effect of making me look good? should i deliberately avoid doing things that make me look good, in order to avoid the appearance of trying to look like i’m trying to make myself look good? what if i don’t want to look good, i just want to answer the stupid question? what if i only reply to the original sender, instead of replying to all — that way the questioner gets his question answered more quickly, but nobody else has to see me answer, especially someone who might not want me to answer? but if i do that, am i not just playing into the making myself look good, by answering at all, game?

i swear to god, i make myself crazy with this shit. that’s a true transcription of the conversation i had with myself this morning before telling someone that a machine had four cpus and sixteen gigs of core. of all the trivial goddamned shit, honestly. but don’t let me lead you on to think that this only happens with trivial shit. it happens ALL THE TIME. i feel like i can’t do anything at work without spending at least five minutes in contemplation of what it means for my position and the position of those around me. it’s fucking tiresome. i want my brain to shut up.

i need a hundred grand in three years.

Virgin have commissioned spaceliners from the SpaceShipOne people. The service will be called Virgin Galactic.

!!!!!!!!!!!

i think that i don’t usually remember my dreams. sometimes i do, but not usually.

lately, though, i’ve been both remembering my dreams, and irritated by them, because they keep involving real people, and i don’t really want that. in fact, i think it’s safe to say that given the degree of fuckedupitude of many of my dreams, i would prefer them to be as disassociated from reality as possible.

(i typed out a description of the dream i was having when i woke up, but it was just a general stupid dream — sneak preview: when i got impatient with the speed of the brinks armored trucks which were driving around the swimming pool, i got out and swam through the air instead — and didn’t really have a whole lot of bearing on this rant. alas.)

i especially would like it if a couple of certain people stopped showing up all the time. like, a couple people have been in damn near every dream i’ve remembered on waking for the past week. i find that disturbing. it would be easier for me to believe that dreams are the subconscious getting rid of stress, or whatever, if they were just random people. perhaps in black and white, too.

are you listening, stupid subconscious?

i freely admit that i’m a mac person, and more importantly, i can sometimes be one of those mac people (all i’m really missing is the emaciated look and black plastic-framed glasses). i have told people jokingly that i will buy anything with an apple logo on it — it’s not entirely truthful, but it’s close enough. what can i say? i love aesthetically pleasing computers, with aesthetically pleasing — and stable — operating systems, that run unix and run all of the desktop apps i want them to run. and before they were all sexy roundy corners and sleek lucite, running unix and photoshop, i liked them because they were the easiest thing in the world to understand and support. macs are just pleasant to use, and i adore that.

but guys, this just ain’t right.