Whee!

I have not mentioned it to most of you...well, any of you really, but I will soon be leaving my current job. I was becoming more and more unhappy, and I was feeling aimless and unfulfilled. I realize this could describe 90% of the population, but there you go. Worst of all, my friendships with the people I was working for were starting to suffer, and I think this is best for everyone.

I faxed off two resumes yesterday at lunch, but I wasn't getting my hopes up too high as usually people need to send many resumes before they get a bite. I just got an email from one of the two companies offering me an interview, which is great. Sounds like I would be buying computers for a middle-sized local government contractor and helping with configuration and that sort of geeky stuff. That stuff, I can do.

I don't want to jinx it, but if I can keep my wits about me, I usually interview pretty well. Hopefully, this will work out. I think if it did, about a half dozen people would be happier than they are right now. And that can't be bad, right?

Urg!

P3240124
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

So close! I came so close! 2 boos and 1 good. On this song, I think that's good. I've really been trying to get the transitions and the timing on the yellows just right.

What I did wrong was that I reversed one set of three steps, an up down up, and did a down up down instead. It must have given me credit for one of the steps and nuked me on the other two.

Oh, so frustrating. So much so that I switched to DDR Max for the past two days, and I'm starting to chip away at it. I even got a B on Candy(star), which was pretty frickin' hard. Had to use my asthma rescue inhaler after that. Heh.

Lord of the Peeps

Lord of the Peeps
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

My husband sent this to me. I have an unnatural love of Peeps. I also like Lord of the Rings.

Imagine, two of my favorite things, together. Council of Peep!Elrond.

See the whole thing, if you dare.

Certainty, Part 2

Thing 1: Down. (personal life related)

Thing 2: Halfway done. (job related)

Both things are still top-secret, yet I feel compelled to post my progress anyway.

On Tuesdays, you can get Premium for a Leg

gasprices
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

Perhaps some of you have seen this or something like it before. I think it would be a funny joke if gas wasn't, you know, nearly twice as expensive as it was five years or so ago.

I suppose that's what happens when you piss the entire world off. But that's another entry.

This is, however, a very good reason to get a Hybrid. I get gas once every six or seven weeks. It always seems to go empty right at the height of the gas prices, though, so I suppose that's the universe's way of telling me it will take my money one way or another.

Helping a pal of mine

Hey all. My friend Amanda (many of you know Amanda—this is quintuplet Amanda) is trying to help a friend of hers in an advertising competition. The topic is "Gaming and Star Wars", so pretty much everyone reading this right now is qualified.

Do your part to help humanity...okay, one human...and e her at adwilla@yahoo.com.

Thanks.

Where'd everyone go?

Have you noticed how quiet most of our blogs have become? Blame it on Azeroth. World of Warcraft should come with a fucking warning label on it:

Warning: You may cease to care about your real life once you load this product onto your computer. You can get a cool ass owl as a pet that will make you wish you were Harry Potter so you could own one in "reality". This thing will put a fast-forward on your clock and make your weekends disappear. Good luck!

I did manage to drag my butt out to a 25 mile time trial in the wind and the semi-cold. It was in the middle of nowhere, and the road that was to take me most of the way through the city to where I was supposed to start was closed. I stopped for directions twice, and both times, they said, "Why are you going there?" Now, I went to this race last year, but I didn't really pay attention because I wasn't driving. This year, though, I noticed what a rough neighborhood it was. And the dogs. Three of which chased me while I was racing.

I would tell you what the results were with a time, but it would possibly be more accurate to tell you that I am chunky and slow. And I hate the wind. And the dogs.

Certainty

Have you ever had a day when you just Figured It Out? The, "Oh, now I know" day?

I just had it. I figured out two things. Now I just need to make it happen. More specifics later, to make sure I don't wake up tomorrow thinking, "I decided to do what again?"

The Worst Luck

Yesterday, they were doing maintenance on World of Warcraft, and mine was one of the last realms to come up.

Today, I took my lunch at 1:00 again, hoping it wouldn't be the same thing. There are, like, four realms down. Mine is one of them. It will probably be the last one to come back up.

If one thing is going to kill MMORPGs, it will be the, "I'm sorry, but you just can't play right now because we only have your data in one place and that machine is open right now with half of its guts strewn on the floor next to the poor guy whose job it is to fix it."

And I'm not saying it's the company's fault, really I'm not. It is a lot of data to store, and you can't keep all of it on every server. However, the frustration it causes in the people who are forking over money to pay will be what kills their interest in the game eventually. Considering that most of us have the attention span of a California Fruit Fly toked up on weed, I can't see how it won't all eventually implode.

Which is a shame. It's a cool game. When I can get in to play it.

WoW and Tivo and no time, oh my.

Lots of changes this weekend, two of which caused the entire Friday night through Sunday night period to blow through here on an express train...do not pass go, do not collect $200.

I have a ten day free trial with World of Warcraft. I was determined to stay in until I got a pet, at level ten. I'm now level eleven, and I'll be logging in there as soon as I finish this, in pursuit of level twelve.

Why do I do this? Time slips by hours at a time while other tasks (the bills, our taxes, the pine cones in the front yard, the laundry, vacuuming) pile up, as I spend my time killing spiders and big cats in a make-believe world where my hair is white and I have an ass-kickin' pet owl.

Then we go and buy Tivo (E, I put in your email address as a referral when I registered) and I have four hours of stuff on there already. When am I gonna watch that? I was afraid that would happen. Maybe I don't have the time to watch all that stuff about which I used to think, "Man, if only I had Tivo, I'd watch that." By 10:00 tonight, I'll have five and a half hours worth of stuff on there. And we hooked it up yesterday.

Oh, and I have a 25 mile time trial this Sunday that I have to train for. I am going to get my ass kicked, but it will serve me right for letting up on my training. DDR has really interfered with my time on the bike. (Worth it when I do those 9's, though, on second thought.)

This was going someplace, but I drank a Hard Black Cherry Zima while I was writing this and now I'm too light-headed to remember what the point was. Oops. Sorry for wasting your time.

Unrealistic expectations

So, we went to see Robots tonight. Now, I don't think anything I say here will be spoilery per se, but if you really don't want even the slightest detail, stop reading now.

OK?

OK.

Nice little movie, really, but something bugged me about it near the end. See, there's this thing with kid's stories. Many of them follow a formula, wherein you face a really big, seemingly insurmountable obstacle, and if you can manage to overcome that one thing in a burst of Herculean effort, the rest of your life gets handed to you and you live happily ever after. No more day-to-day struggle to get to where you want to be, but you get to spend the rest of your life pursuing your heart's desire. All this requires of you is a little bit of luck, a humorous sidekick, and a heaping spoonful of moxie.

Now, part of me still believes life is really like that. You get it pounded into your head in cartoon after cartoon, heartwarming Disney feature after feature, and you eventually decide the world really works that way.

But it doesn't. Not for most of us. Very few people face a brief but harrowing trial by fire that inevitably leads to the Prize, that moment with the Wizard of Oz when we get our just reward. In the real world, progress is sketchy at best, most days, and you spend a lot of days chasing your tail, making no headway at all. When you do move forward, it is at a snail's pace. There are victories, but they are roadmarker victories. They are signposts on the way to that goal sitting over the horizon, not Somewhere Over the Rainbow moments.

It's not that it's so bad, actually, it's just that our folklore ill-prepares us for what life holds. I realize that drama and fiction are an imperfect mirror for reality, but do we really have to beat home 'lessons' that don't really teach us reality?

The fight for uniqueness

I just arm-wrestled my profile a little more. I noticed a few things.

First, I was bound and determined (have you ever noticed that if you're bound, you're usually determined?) to have a few things there that were real answers to the question, but didn't appear in anyone else's profile. I had to get to "easy silences" and "complete exhaustion" before I had that distinction. I still cannot believe "making fun of stuff" wasn't unique.

Second, nothing tells you who you are more than thinking of your list of favorite movies and then realizing that you are embarrassed to admit several of them. Don't assume, if you read my profile, that I think all of those movies are High Art. Several of them are that movie that I have to watch if I find it on, or that I watched at a certain point of my life and they helped me figure things out. *cough*The Cutting Edge*cough*after a disastrous dress rehearsal*cough*because it showed me it was possible to come back after a humiliating defeat and still accomplish something*cough*. Or maybe Love Actually, mainly because I love the Emma Thompson/Alan Rickman storyline, although it's weird to see Professor Trelawney and Professor Snape married to one another. Oh well, I suppose there are only so many upper-crusty British actors.

Third, I have four bookshelves bursting to the brim with books, and I can't find the justification to list half of them as "favorites". I've read a lot of "pretty good" books, many of which I will read again and have read several times before. Somehow, I need more from a book to list it as a "favorite".

I'm a picky bitch, aren't I?

Things I learned today

A watched web page never updates.

Nervous salespeople make me outrageously uncomfortable.

When you hear the figure "30% off wholesale" and you know it's true, it makes you buy things. Even from nervous salespeople who make you outrageously uncomfortable.

When one of your friends forgets to do something and has to fess up to their wife that they didn't do it, it is a friendship test whether he chooses to unfairly throw you in front of the train to save a tiff in his marriage or not. On this particular occasion, count it as a failed test.

Some things are not do it yourself projects.

There is a good reason I wear a sports bra when I play DDR. If I forget it when I plan to play away from home, I should probably just not play.

Trust your instincts when the telephone rings. 90% of the time, some part of you knows who it is.

When you think to yourself, "I have to remember to do that later" at a time when you are perfectly capable of performing the task in question, yet you do not because you are too lazy and choose to procrastinate, there is a 100% chance that you will forget to do it entirely. You will realize it too late, and spend the rest of the day berating your lazy ass inside your own head.

If you go outside your sphere of people you've grown accustomed to and really watch the 'new' people around you, you will get the distinct impression that your average person is at least a little bit insane.

Perhaps the most annoying type of person is one who is poorly-informed in a particular subject, yet completely convinced they have it all figured out. In fact, they are so sure that they correct you, even though it is clear that you know more about it than they do. Double the irritation if it is your job to know the things the person is correcting you about. There is a disease running rampant, and it is 'know-it-all-dumbass syndrome'.

I love my laptop, but I hate that I have grown so accustomed to its keyboard that my right hand is naturally offsetting itself on 'normal' size and layout keyboards.

I currently own three more video games than I have time to play. Yet, I am bored a lot of the time. Someone explain that temporal shift to me.

I have made a shift. Until recently, if I was given a choice of reading a book with a fabulous plot and a so-so writing style, I'd take that over a well-written book with a so-so plot. I've made a complete 180 there.

I'm sure I learned other stuff, but I was probably lazy and forgot to commit it to memory.

Wouldn't it suck to be Madam Hooch?

(Click the image to take the test yourself. Presented by Pirate Monkey, a name I am strangely enamoured with.) A couple of you have seen this already, but for the record, I thought it would be appropriate to establish the fact that I am a bookish, quick to anger, nerd.

The cool thing about this quiz is that I couldn't tell as easily as you can with most of those vanity quizzes which character I would end up getting. The last time I took the quiz, I retook it and tried to skew my answers to a particular character, but I kept missing and getting someone else. I suppose that's because it seems to be based on Myers-Briggs, which I've had varying opinions on for most of my life because I seem to get a different personality diagnosis every time I take it.

I peeked at the page where you can see all the results. I think all of the outcomes would be fun to get, except for Madam Hooch, who is in the books for a sum total of about a page and a half. That's like saying, "Hey, in the big 'ol novel of life, you're a minor bit character created so Harry could learn how to ride a broom. Congrats!"

(I just took an LotR quiz too, courtesy of a link from Jason, and discovered I am Aragorn. As that is clearly wrong, I declined to post the results from that test. I was tied as five different characters: Aragorn, Gandalf, Pippin, Sam, and Eowyn. I think if I can tie as five different characters coming out of that quiz, you didn't ask me enough differentiating questions. To take that quiz and perhaps tie for five characters yourself, swing by the Den of Evil, link to the right.)

Congratulations are in order...

So, I know someone whose name starts with E who got some really good news today. We're all happy here about it too.

Um, and just to keep it all about me, I AA'ed Afronova standard and I'm three songs away from getting all A's or above on Standard in DDR Max 2. Making progress with Heavy, too.

What sucks is that I was talked into this expensive "natural ingredients only" shampoo and conditioner at the hair salon last Saturday, and whenever I sweat (you know, biking or DDRing) it actually tingles. Like there's menthol in it or something. It's not altogether pleasant. Why don't I have the moxie to take it back?

What the #$&*$#*

So, yesterday, I walked to work in a short sleeved t-shirt. I am not a tough person where weather is concerned. It was 70 degrees yesterday at the high.

Today, it snowed. Big flakes. Windy. Miserable.

I realize there are places (Jason) where the weather is probably suckier than this (Jason) and the people there are tougher than me and don't whine about the teensiest bit of snow.

However. It sucks to get teased one day and then have it pulled away.

Is this what it's like to be a high school boy and have a girlfriend who won't put out?

Michelle

Okay, so who wasn't waiting for Michelle to figure back into 24?

I confess, I thought that whole, "I turned drunk and Michelle eventually got pissed off and left me" storyline had something to do with, perhaps, the girl who plays her having another job or something. So I'm not saying I saw it coming. I just really, really wanted it to happen.

By the way, all last season, I was plagued with "what else has she been in" disease, until I realized the truth and spent about two hours rolling my eyes at myself. You see, I spent a brief period in college watching two soap operas. One of them was (gack) One Life to Live, and she was on that show when I watched it.

I think she eventually died tragically, although I cannot, for the life of me, remember why or how. I can only assume that she had amnesia at some point, or perhaps discovered an evil twin or two.

I just Googled it, and apparently, I should be happy that I appear to have prioritized my brain to block out any fact from watching that horrid show. I just read a little synopsis of what happened to her character, and none of it sounds all that familiar. She didn't even get a tragic death, it appears. Just a "slink out of town because you're embarassed".

How much does that suck? I mean, half the fun of being on a soap opera would be getting to do the dramatic death scene, followed by the inevitable return from the grave. Then some wild sex, a wedding that's interrupted by your long lost love who you marry instead. Then you have a kid who goes off to military school at the age of four and returns two years later as a petulant 16 year old looking for trouble.

But I'm rambling.

Save Wesley

All right, I know the character was kind of annoying, but Wil Wheaton is pretty cool. If you want to give the poor guy a break, take a second and go to the TV Guide Star Trek quiz and vote for anyone but Wesley for the "most annoying character".

I mean, hasn't the guy taken enough abuse? If you don't believe, just go ask him for yourself.

Lite Brite Lamp!

lite_brite
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

Can you believe this? This wouldn't even "go" in my house, but I want one so badly I'm sitting here trying to think of some way to make one.

It can't be that hard, can it? I bet you if I bought a commercial Lite Brite I could take the thing apart and turn it into a groovy lamp like this. I'm not big on the red/orange/pink color combo side, but I could do a whole lamp in something like the green/blue side.

Do they even still make the Lite Brite? I had one as a kid, but I can't see how it would possibly entertain today's youth. I think mine even had templates, so you could recreate designs that actually looked like things. Maybe that's why I can't draw—I used the templates instead of actually being creative.

New DDR Developments

Here's what I got this morning that I hadn't done before:

B4U Heavy: AA*
Tsugaru Heavy: A (had a B on it before)
Ladies Night Heavy AA* (kept eluding me, I would blackflag one step near the end and ruin it)

And one almost:
Nearly made it through V Challenge. Got about halfway through and my head went all blooey on me. Did pretty well after the bar was gone, although I was knackered and nearly did myself a mischief there. I think if I worked on it this week, I could at least get a C on it.

I was helping Cheryl through her first few songs last night. Brought back a lot of memories of swearing by myself in my living room that I would never catch on. She's got a lot more guts than me. I didn't even let Tom watch me until I could pass 4's.

New Dance Video Game!

Hey! DDR freaks! Both of you!

Read this!

If it's half as good as their top of the line soft dance pad, I am so there. \/\/()()7!

(You all know that's ironic 1337, right? Gosh, I hope so. I am so the opposite of 1337 r0x0ring.)

Creative symmetry

So, I'm at Chuck's. There are four of us, now that everyone else in the old Friday Night Gaming Night group seems to be gone. Chuck and I are on the far sides of the room, and our respective spouses are in between.

Chuck and I both have our laptops on (gasp!) our laps, of all places, talking about the blogosphere and adding doodads to our sites, and my mister and his missus are rolling their eyes at us and giving each other quizzical looks.

Given my last post, I'm sure it's clear exactly what level of geekdom I reside on. Now that I've re-read that post, in fact, I realize most humans can't really make sense out of any more than the last two paragraphs of it. Believe me, I know now exactly what a poindexter I am.

I mean, this is on par with IMing with someone you're in the same room with, really. I added a creative commons license and made Chuck reload the page (across the room from me, mind you) so he could see it. We also both re-generated our counter codes until we each came up with a moderately less objectionable advertisement along the bottom of the button, again, all while in the same room with each other.

I'm sure there's some sort of social commentary that can be made here, but I think I'm not the best one to do it. Possibly some luddite could articulate how strange it is to "connect" with someone via the internet when you are sitting in the same room as them, but ironically, such a person would never have occasion to stumble onto my blog.

Oh, the irony.

This just in: I can prove what a humongous nerd I am. I swear I answered all these questions honestly.

RSS Feeds

Did you know that, by default, Blogger creates an XML file of your blog every time you republish it that allows people to subscribe to your blog via an RSS feed?

You can subscribe to any RSS feed if you have a feed reader, or if you use My Yahoo!. I just created a new My Yahoo! page with subscriptions to all the Blogger whatsits that I know about. You need to know the URL of the XML file that houses the RSS feed, but if it's a Blogger blog, you can guess it, unless the author of the blog has changed the location of the file somehow.

For example, this is the URL of my feed:
http://lostonpurpose.blogspot.com/atom.xml

You can replace the first part of the URL with the URL of the blog you wish to get the feed for to see if there is an XML file being published for it.

In My Yahoo!, all you do is go to Add Content on a new or existing page, then click Add RSS by URL link. You paste in the link, and blammo! It creates a module that will show you the last few posts of that blog. This would allow you to create a page where you can see quickly if any of your pals have gotten off their duffs and written anything new.

Any of you LJ denizens, can you poke around in your settings and see if LJ also auto-publishes an XML file with an RSS feed of your blogs?

Update:

I have found the feeds for LJ journals. They follow this naming convention:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss

(Of course, replace exampleusername with the username of the journal you want the feed for.)

Does anyone give a rat's about this geeky shit other than me?

Assumed Intimacy

There's this guy who helps out with the race team who I've been working with a little for the past couple of days. He gave me a nickname, which I hate (both the nickname, and the fact that I hate when people give me a nickname I never wanted in the first place) and I couldn't figure out why it bothered me so much.

I finally sussed it out, earlier today, while I was driving home from an excellent lunch.

I detest assumed intimacy. You know when someone you really hardly know makes a joke with you, and you think, "You know, if one of my friends said that, I'd probably laugh, but for some reason, my skin is crawling because this guy just said it." It's not that it's creepy, exactly, but it feels like a minor violation of some kind.

Maybe it's just me, but I really think there's a moment in every relationship when the line is crossed—when it's okay to say some things, to make that joke, to tease someone a little. It's a very definite line for me, perhaps more real than most people's.

That's why the nickname rankles. That guy doesn't know me well enough to give me a teasing sort of nickname. Every time he says it, I just bristle inside. But you know, I'm in customer service part of my day, so I pretty much have to smile and be nice to him anyway.

Being an adult. It sucks.

Pimping Veronica

Ah, just when I was starting to think that the only interesting links I ever find are on Fark, where everyone else I know sees them as well, I remembered my friend's website, Popgurls. Here is a taste, a great article with Kristen Bell, TV's Veronica Mars.

I'm sure there are several other 20 Questions articles there that many of you will like. Enjoy!

Fruits of someone else's labor

floor4
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

Here it is! Two checks and about a week after we decided to do it, the floor is in. Installation, according to the mister, went pretty well. They did attempt to freeze him out of the house, but he seems to have come through it okay.

I almost don't want to put all the furniture back in. We only had the rug down and the dining room table back when I took the pics, but I have about half the furniture back in there now.

The only thing I have to do now is finish putting the little felt doohickeys on the legs of the chairs and then move the approximately 1,535,543,234,221 books that we have back in there and re-organized on the bookshelves.

So, you know. I'll be done in about four and a half months.

Feeling guilty

We're having a floor installed today. Two rooms of Pergo, because the carpet in one of the rooms was stained beyond repair (and not all due to the cats, actually, now that I see the rooms without any furniture in them).

The guy I assume owns the small flooring store I chose to use instead of one of the big box home improvement stores told me on Friday that they would start pretty early. I seem to remember times like 7:00 or 7:30 a.m. being thrown around.

Well, we arranged for my husband to stay home and oversee them. I woke him up at 7:00 a.m. It's now 8:30 a.m., and they're still not here. I avoided getting up to DDR (figuring I could do that or throw the bike on the trainer for some exercise after work tonight) because I didn't want to be DDRing when a bunch of burly flooring installers show up. It's starting to look like I should have plugged in the pad.

I guess all that Googling I did about an hour ago, trying to figure out if I'm supposed to tip them, was all for naught. If they're going to show up late without even calling to let us know what's going on, I'm not sure how tip-inclined I'm feeling. (grumble)