continue to take dayquil. am so, so not amused at having gotten sick at this particular point in time.
clean living room up. vacuum. finish tree. laundry. order from peapod. put aside book + movie to take to work to loan to dgc.Browsing Posts published in October, 2004
this via kim, who writes, “And to think some people actually used to take this guy seriously.”
“This DVD is a great way to introduce young people to real political issues”…WITH PUPPETS! baahahahahaa. seriously, ralph, what were you *thinking*? i mean, because it clearly wasn’t “my god, i’m going to look like an ass.”
once more i am forced to question why anyone would ever think that ashton kutcher is the hot member of the “That 70s Show” cast.
sorry, it’s the smirking boys thing again. i’ll go off and be quietly drooly in my corner now.
shut up. i am *so* scary.
| You Aren’t Scary, You’re Scared |
 Probably even scared to see how this quiz came out! |
Electoral College tie could be mother of all messes, quoth Reuters via CNN.
Nathan Ritchey, a Youngstown State University mathematician, calculates there’s a 3.25 percent chance of a 269-269 tie in the electoral college. The odds have increased since late summer. “Looking at the 10 closest states, there are 17 ways this can occur — 17 out of 1,024 possible outcomes,” said Ritchey, who has been tracking statistics in this year’s contest between Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. The odds of a tie fluctuates as states move on and off the “battleground” list according to the latest polls. After all, nobody a few months ago saw states like Hawaii, with four electoral votes, or Colorado, with nine, to be in play. As recently as August, chances for a tie were only 1.4 percent, said Ritchey.
seriously? that would tickle me pink. (and i don’t mean just the hair. the hair’s red, and it’s staying this way for a little while.)
the weird thing is that the closer we get to election day, the less and less i’m caring about my individual act of voting, or even really how it all turns out. it’s sort of annoying, because i care about a lot of issues, and i disagree with bush’s stance on many of issues. it’s just — it’s like i’m exhausted from the past several years of caring so much about every piddly little thing, so now i have no energy left to care about anything at all anymore. don’t get me wrong, i’m still going to go vote on tuesday. just don’t blame me if i’m more interested in the web that some industrious little spider built between my miniblinds and my asparagus fern than about anything political for the next week or so. and you know, i would like to be able to psyche myself up by saying things like, “less than a week and it’s all over!” or “only four days left to endure!” but it’s not true at all. no matter who wins, all the whiny brats will be out in force and i’ll still have to put up with their shit. if kerry wins, then it’ll be the “right wingnuts” harping on about doom and the “loony liberal left” chortling and lording it over them. if bush wins, it’ll be the other way around. there’s not really much of a role for ordinary people, or people who would like to be nice to each other despite differences. or, fuck, people who would like to be able to discuss politics without acting like a bratty thirteen-year-old. and so that’s why it would tickle me pink if the electoral college tied and we ended up with a bipartisan administration. everyone would be confused, and at least it’d be a change of pace in terms of what nastiness got spewed. it’d be a different story indeed if you had your party involved up there with what the other party is fucking up, w’dnit? yeah. TIE TIE TIE! GO, TIE!
i loved that store. michael and i used to walk over there for lunch all the time when we were at the jfi, and buy records instead of food.
doom.
i am doing well on having slept last 29 hours ago, for about four hours out of those twenty-four previous. but, yes. bitter, depressed and disappointed, distressed, and unhappy. and gearing up for the inevitable humiliation which will be waylaid by no amount of knowing that i told people so.we have an official logo for our puremessage installation, which we’ve branded “junkmail.”
this logo rocks.
tell me how awesome it is that we can brand things with skulls and crossbones. it’s pretty damn awesome!
YARRR!
you ever have one of those moments when all you want to do is scream, at the top of your lungs, “shut up, all of you!”
i’m trying to get shit settled for this rollout tonight and people just…won’t…shut…up about asking things and “but i thought that was like this” and confusing me and i can’t fucking concentrate and i’m going to start screaming any minute now.now the series is the red sox’ to lose. oh, man, was not tonight’s game fabulous? i will be so sad once the world series is over and i have to wait until april again for the one game that i like to resume.
also: if the red sox spank the cardinals, i am *so* calling my dad to lord it over him. sweartagod.sucks to have made plans with someone who got sick and bailed.
and i have brand new fabulous hair, too. i guess i’m off for solitary drinking tonight. bah.“we’ll tell you anything you want to hear — and if you don’t believe us, terrorists will kill your family.”
seriously, it’s worth the long-distance call. quite NSFW, which didn’t stop me and michael from putting it on speakerphone and laughing uproariously. (hey, we shut the office door.) and as an aside: is this particular election season more sexual, or is it just me? i mean, lie girls, votorgasm, fuck the vote, et cetera. poor now and emily’s list are looking pretty prudish ’round ’bout now. — or is it just that i, personally, am taking more note this time around? i mean, before, we had to rely on the politians to have sex so we could throw big scandal-shaped parties, but now we’ve evidently progressed in self-sufficiency such that we can now intermingle sex and politics ourselves quite effectively, thank you very much. uh, go us!i think maybe i’ll go take a class sometime soon. maybe that’ll be a birthday present for myself.
i’ve been meaning to figure out how to handle a handgun for some time now. (like i was telling keane at work today, it just seems like a good skill to have, in the “just in case” files. not that i expect to have my life turn into a jerry bruckheimer movie any time soon, but, you know… and more than one person freaked out after i told them about going on my road trip alone in august, not carrying a firearm. tell you the truth, i never thought twice about not carrying a gun. my aunt always carries one on her road trips, but it just never even occurred to me. and, since i don’t intend to buy a handgun — chicago resident and all — it’s not like i would be taking one on my next road trip, but, i just think it might be neat to learn how to use a handgun. hopefully it will never be a skill more useful than winning stupid carnival prizes.) it seems like it might be worthwhile as a stress-relief exercise, if nothing else. obligatory disclaimer: no, armchair conspiracy theorists, i’m not plotting to learn how to shoot so i can take out everyone at work. i realize that posting these two articles close together looks creepy, but, sheesh. nor am i planning suicide or anything like that. first of all, suicide by gun violates two of sabrina’s three rules of suicide:- Don’t fuck up anyone’s commute.
- Don’t leave a mess for the EMTs.
- Don’t fuck up sabrina’s shit.
second of all, there’s an unspoken fourth rule of suicide which is “don’t fuck it up,” and although it’s easy to get it right with suicide by gun, people fuck it up all the time anyways. and finally, i am not particularly interested in dying yet, thank you very much. i just want to learn how to shoot a gun. sheesh.
so we finally made the announcement about the impending doom, this past weekend.
people who don’t work here don’t realize the painstaking effort that goes into these mailings. i mean, we argue about every word. see where it says “probable”? there was a debate about that. originally, it was “likely.” or at least, there used to be a huge debate about everything. now i guess it’s just techline arguing amongst themselves. we got tired of them arguing with us over stupid shit (and look, i’m sorry that you don’t like the damn hyphen, but the Chicago Manual of Style says it’s e-mail and we are the goddamn University of Chicago, and i’m going to go by the goddamn CMS for formal communications, so put that in your pipe and smoke it), and we got tired of being told that we didn’t respect the users and didn’t know how to treat people, so we kind of threw up our collective hands and said “fuck it, whatever, you do it if you want it so fucking bad.” i mean, you’d think we’d be involved with announcing the stuff that we are the ones actually doing it, but according to everyone else, we filthy sysadmins are not as knowledgable as all of them on what the users want out of their email experience, and we are therefore not qualified to write announcements. fuck it, whatever. that isn’t what i came to rant to you about. (“i came to talk about the draft.” eh, uh, i mean–) so, support writes this email, and it goes through minimal revision with us — trust me, three days is fucking infinitesimal relative to some of the previous arguments we’ve had — and it goes out to all 27,000-some-odd people. there’s just this one thing, and i’ll admit that in some respects it’s petty: the address was sent in greg’s name and signed by him, and the from header/reply-to were set to support. you’ll notice that each of these has ABSOLUTELY FUCK-ALL TO DO WITH MY GROUP, WHICH IS ACTUALLY DOING ALL THE FUCKING WORK. that’s okay. it’s not like we wanted to get the credit for something we’re goddamn doing right for a change. we like having people scream at us that we should be “taken out behind the woodshed” and beaten because webmail is slow. we enjoy having them call us “the ashcrofts of chicago” because we shove the horribly unreasonable and draconian use of ssl-imap and -pop down their perfectly-secure-if-it-weren’t-for-us throats. we absolutely love it when the maroon takes a quote out of context and twists it to put the absolute worst spin on it, so that we look like incompetent assholes who can’t be trusted with shoes that don’t velcro closed (“When told that webmail was unavailable for much of the day on July 29, [Bob] Bartlett said NSIT was unaware of any problem.” free clue: it’s because it wasn’t down that day. it’s not like there isn’t legitimate bitching to be done about webmail that you gotta make shit up, either.). man, if someone was nice to us for once, i wouldn’t know what to do. probably start weeping hysterically or something. so yeah, i’m angry. bob should have let max sign the letter. it’s our goddamn work! i don’t give a good goddamn if we’re a part of “NSIT” and the letter said that it was “NSIT” doing this. i fail to give a shit that this happened under greg’s leadership. it should have been max’s name on it. instead, max left at five like max always leaves and like anyone could have predicted he was going to leave, and bob wouldn’t hold off, and since the man is incapable of picking up a telephone and calling people, he just asked greg if he wanted to sign the letter. and of course greg says yes, because who’s going to turn down getting the love for turning on spam filtering, which everyone has been begging for for ages? never mind that max goes around every day of every week looking like he’s already had his head cut off and is just waiting for his body to fall down; never mind his favorite joke is insulting himself by proclaiming that — another user’s insult — he is responsible for this madness. and the replies to the letter have to go to support, because we aren’t trusted, and we aren’t good enough. never mind that when we turned on RBLs, the replies to that announcement came to us, and that somehow went all right. no one ran screaming from having the horrible, horrible mean sysadmins say “you’re welcome, thanks for your input.” no, we’re not customer service, so we’re not allowed to talk to them. we can’t be let out of our dank, dark cages; we haven’t had enough socialization and we might bite the children. this morning, the support team lead IMed me to ask me a question, and he happened to mention that the vast majority of the responses they’re getting to the spam announcement are positive, and people saying “thank you.” well, bully for you: i wouldn’t know. i’m not trusted enough to let me see a single fucking bit of user appreciation for this project that has been killing me for months, and is going to continue to kill me for minimally the next two weeks. and that’s assuming the production rollout on thursday goes perfectly. if it goes tits-up, i’m fucked for months, plus we get super-sized helpings of “can’t you people do anything right.” that’s okay. the stress is good for me. never mind that i put ten pounds back on since early summer — ten really fucking hard to lose pounds, fuck you very much — or that i am smoking too much or that i can’t sleep anymore because i worry about work shit all the goddamn time, or that i am thinking about getting my gp to refer me to a shrink for depression primarily because of work-related stress. no, no, that’s all right. greg, you keep the credit because you wouldn’t want anyone to not know how personally involved you are with making them happy, and support line, you keep the credit because you know how to deal with people. we’ll just sit in our holes and try not to fuck things up too much for the rest of you. i fucking hate my workplace. and any of you out there reading this that work on support line, or for all i know greg is reading this, i don’t fucking want to hear it. this is my goddamn blog, and this is my goddamn rant about MY GODDAMN PROJECT, and so long as you people are getting the credit for my work you can fucking suck it up that i’m pissed.getting ever closer to DOOM!.
i’m just sayin’.
