My comment? Figures. China is proving that a dictatorship can thrive on capitalism. We don't need the example, thanks, but our leaders seem to be taking notes.
And our athletes are silenced on the things they truly believe.
I continue my quiet protest of not watching the Olympics this year, nor reading articles about them.
Oh thank heavens! I just heard that K will be coming back to work in a couple days! This has made my week! I was starting to think that putting the stapler to my head might be a good way to put me out of my misery, but knowing that it won't be just me and NG makes it so much better! Plus I scheduled PTO for September. I couldn't get the whole week off (geez . . . NG takes a whole freakin' week and a half/two weeks off from work, but I could only get only 4 days off because no one will be covering my monday. Sheesh!) But I have to go back and schedule one more day off (or try to since it is again on my monday), but mom's going in for surgery so I need to be there. I should have enough PTO left over to take one extra day off that week, just in case mom needs anything.
Wednesday almost over Long and draggy but no really bad problems this time. Wayne's surgery went without incident, I guess, so it's a matter of waiting to see if it actually helps. He had a heart attack last winter and they tried stents but it wasn't enough so they ended up doing triple bypass surgery. (He's younger than either of us, eeek.) This time they gave him an electronic implanted defibrillator if I understand it correctly. I hope he's got good insurance.
So Gary's mom is here for the night. He went and brought her to the hospital from Chicago, and will take her back tomorrow. No problem with that, we get along fine.
Several boxes of new books arrived at work, so I had plenty to do. About half of it is leftover for tomorrow and probably Friday since tomorrow is only a half day for me.
Oh, and the lace scarf from the colored poonies is now started. Soon there will be enough to photograph.
Typing with a cat on my lap, which isn't easy because she won't sit still. She was asleep on my chair and I made her move so I could sit down, but it didn't work. She just got right back up here.
Getting closer... Damon's plane should be touching down in the UK in less than 30 hours; the excitement is building. :3
Friday is gonna be busy for us, what with us moving in on that day too and also with a trip into Leeds city centre (including a meal at Nandos) for some essentials.
The really interesting (from my perspective) thing is that this will be the first place that I'm actually renting, as I've been living with friends and family prior to this.
As mentioned before we probably wont have Internet access for a couple of weeks due to the usual crappy timescales that broadband connections take in the UK.
In work news we've been moved up in the world, literally. Yes our team has been moved to the third floor instead of the first. Whilst this makes absolutely no difference to the job we do it does mean that we have had a say in how we would like our desks set up. I feel a lot more comfortable here, especially as I have an actual desk as opposed to a carosel.
Today im sitting here wondering to myself why am i attracted to certain people? I cant make any sense why im drawn towards certain people? There is no underlying theme, no common element to any of them. Latest case, one that has really alarmed me: My professor! O.0 eep! Ok..i come in to Campus today because I need to fill out some internship/graduation stuff before i go down to D.C. When Professor Weizer shows up, hes not wearing his normal boring buisness suit, hes in a tight light blue t-shirt, umbro shorts, sneakers and has like 3 gold chains around his neck and is completly shaved...He looks like young healthy man who today looks nothing like the professor I used to curse about weekly for giving me a hard time in one of his classes. Once sitting down in his office I comment "uhm...you look very casual today" He replies "well its the summer and im only here to do this for you today then im going running with my dog, hes waiting in the car" So we sit down in his office and he begins tapping away on his laptop "Would you like a coke Alex?" he chirps, rather pleased, opening his fridge hidden behind his desk, I take one. We fill out paperwork and chat for a few before I go I notice a DVD hidden in his book shelf, "Sex and Justice"...! Sex and Justice! o.0. Of course my immature mind thinks its a hot porno about a dominant female judge whipping a male court officer on the courtroom floor in leather gear. (Its Weizer, you woudnt get it if you diddnt know him).
I leave the office and scamper quickly to my car..." DID I JUST LOOK AT PROFESSOR WEIZER LIKE THAT!" ME!...AT HIM! O.0 ...yea...I kinda did, he looked cute today, even to me :P
Last Resort at AWA? Could It be True? I just received an email about an available table in the Artist's Alley Marketplace (i.e. the pack of tables that are in the same general room as the Dealers' Stuff)
Unfortunately, it took until AFTER I'd already gone and coughed up the cash for it (and my credit card number) for my paranoia to kick in, mostly because I have yet to receive a confirmation email. Then again, it'd be awfully weird for someone to try phishing the Artists' Alley folk...
I'm probably just being overly paranoid, but I wanted to ask if anyone else had received emails asking for table registration this late and/or if this is normal. If nothing else, I can't very well start telling people on the Blog of Last Resort that I'll be at AWA until I have something a little more concrete...
This is the consequence of reactionary thought. 9/11 my ass, we've set criminals over us to keep us safe. Yeah, I feel so much safer with fake police taking peoples' belongings and holding people without reason. "Some of our officers aren't respected"? Try respecting the people you deal with!
To quote ginmar, herself military: When my company came back from Iraq---in uniform----we got stopped by TSA assholes at the gate back to the plane who stopped us and demanded we take off our boots, our belts, and and our overblouses. We'd just spent thirteen months of our lives fighting 'the war on terror' and here were a bunch of polyester-clad, 1/5th criminal by percentage, and useless buttwipes telling us that they had to search us becuz, you know, a US soldier is extremely likely to become an Al Qaeda agent within minutes of setting foot back on US soil. Oh, yeah, and they pulled aside our sole black interrogator, a twenty-year US citizen with an Arab name, and announced they wanted to ask him 'some questions.' My CO, a kind man but no one's fool, asked if he could take pictures of this process, as the guy they wanted to interrogate had matched wits with Saddam himself and won. When it got to be my turn to go through the metal detector, I looked at the TSA dude, who was trying to look macho, and said, "In the war on terror, we're the professionals, you're the amateurs."
Why don't you just go read Bruce Schneier's blog? He's an expert on actual security, as opposed to the appearance of it.
I'll close with four quotes from Benjamin Franklin, inventor, patriot, fellow founder of my nation:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
Cell phone rawrs (advice?) So I just got off the phone with PC Mobile, and the only way to get the phone to work in the United States is to turn on Roaming... which means paying 1.80$ a minute for local calls and 2.80$ a minute for long distance calls. True, I rarely use the cell and I will have a land line, so really I'd only be paying enough to keep minutes on my phone (which expire.. -_-) and the 10$ for free texting. But still.. fustrating.
I don't know if it would be worth anything to go with something else or not... because even with free talking I wouldn't use the phone much, because.. well I have the land line(Although to call from the land line I need a calling card... hmmmm).
Chicken fantastic I been doing a bit of expirimenting with spices in the kitchen trying to find out what is good to use for what and I discovered that it seems for flavor infusion a good spice to use in small doses mixed with your spice mix is ground tumeric. The spice seems to have the ability to really soak in as I learned when it turned the measuring spoon yellow. I think I will play a bit more with this spice to confirm to myself whether it is helping other spices with permiating the membrane at all.
I want to write it down in my journal for future use as I think it was a fairly good mix I used to season the chicken last night
I used
3 Tablespoons of Lawrys seasoning salt 1 teaspoon ground tumeric 1/2 Tablespoon crushed Rosemary 1/2 Tablespoon crushed Thyme 1 teaspoon ground black pepper sprinkled paprika at end
I made an incision along the edge of chicken along one side and cut tendons about the chicken so there was a pocket then I folded that over and smeared into the chicken with the back end of a spoon the mixture. I then resealed the skin (next time likely with a toothpick) and proceeded to prick with a knife many holes throughout the remained of the skin of the bird. I then rubbed nicely the skin till the entire bird was a nice orangeish color, Then with what seasoning I had remaining I placed in a circle alongside the bottom of the pan so that when the bird wept they would join with the juices and soak the bottomside of the bird.
The bird was cooked in an oven at 400F in a covered broil pan. The bird was allowed to soak in its own juices and not removed till its internal temp was 160F. This is 10F less than the recomendation. The oven was turned down to 300F for another 10min or so as the side dishes were prepped. The bird was then removed and placed on a plate. I was very satisfied with the taste.
It is possible that the Lawrys seasoning alone created the taste but I tend to hope that those other ingredients helped some too.
For the morbidly curious, that pic was used on a paper tray liner at a Burger King at an airport. The original blog post about it can be found over here.
And yes, *what* is Burger King thinking? Pickles do NOT perform body cavity searches on onions!
Puppy training gone wild.... Aaerro's training's gone well so far. We did have an icident yesterday at the gast station where a 2 year old (or younger) WHAPPED my poor girl across the nose with their water gun. Pisses me off that **I** was the one disiplining the kid and not the guy who walked in with the brat.
**Sigh**
We're slowly coming along :-) Sure, she's still got budgie brains, but that adult dog is slowly peeking its way into that empty space between Aaerro's ears! Budgie brains make for a smart budgie but a dumb dog, and puppies are...well... puppies XD! She's got a habit of raiding my recycling bag for boxes to chew. A few days ago I caught her with a sugar twin over her nose. I called out to her and in mid chew, just as she was going to paw the thing off her nose, she looked up. There she was with her nose hilted up to the eyeballs with this bright yellow box. I don't think I've laughed that hard in a long long time.
Soo... Training.
Aaerro's doing excellent with:
1) Sit 2) Stand 3) Drop it
Doing okay with:
1) Store manners 2) Leave it 3) Detecting Changes in Blood Sugars 4) Coming when called (almost impecable, but needs off leash work)
Needs work on:
1) Not jumping up on peeps in stores 2) Heel 3) NO PULLING!!!! (a walking thing) 4) Down
Serious work needed with:
1) Pulling. By all things holy...NO PULLING! 2) Overall general public access politeness (need private trainer)
Stuff planned for the future:
1) Pushing disabled button that opens doors 2) Agility teamwork 3) Possible retrieving (getting meds?) 4) ????
...yet another belated post... You know, I don't mean to not post to LiveJournal for long periods of time... :)
Let's see...the big project we were working on to go live on 8/1 went off without too much trouble; I need to finish up some monthly reporting, but otherwise it's been a lot of little maintenance things. So, work has calmed down a touch. We have another couple of big projects coming up, though, so I don't see things completely dying down until later in the year.
I'm dealing with a case of tennis elbow in my right arm at the moment...it was really painful around this time last week, when it first flared up. It's gone from really painful to somewhat achy now, and I don't have full motion back in the elbow; I'm also getting some aches in my hand and wrist. Tennis elbows basically require rest and the occasional ibuprofen, so I just have to be careful for a while.
I've been wearing my hair down because of the injury, and I've noticed more silver in my hair lately. Not overly surprising, considering family and work stresses... :) Still, it doesn't look too bad.
I'm working at home today, due to Fay heading back our way for a visit. It looks like the center of the storm is currently forecast to go south of Clay County, so it may be mainly a rain event for us. We'll have to keep a close eye on it, though...this has been on screwy storm, as far as how it's been tracking (and it didn't lose any steam over land, either...yeesh...).
All right, time to finish lunch and get back to it. More later (and sooner, I hope...).
Reason #13263 why Stargate rocks It's the new season of Stargate: Atlantis. One of the characters is stuck on a world somewhere and has discovered that the big bad is on his way in a ship. Cue dramatic music? Of course. And cue THE ABSOLUTE MOST OVERBLOWN CAMERA ZOOM IN SURELY THE ENTIRETY OF TELEVISION.
The camera zooms out, upward, to show him looking up into the sky, with that horror-crawling-string-music effect. It zooms out until you can see the land for miles around.
It zooms up into the clouds.
It zooms out of the atmosphere until you can see the planet.
It zooms out past the planet's moon and away until the planet shrinks to a dot. The star of the system is visible now.
It zooms out past another planet and moon. This is a LONG zoom.
It zooms out through the rings of an outer gas giant. The horror-string is still ascending by the way.
It zooms out through what I can only guess is an Oort cloud.
It zooms out of a nebula which the system is in.
It zooms into HYPERSPACE. This is still one long continuous sequence.
The music shifts here because the camera does also; it's now panning across hyperspace.
It zooms IN through hyperspace.
It zooms in on a star.
It zooms in past some more planets.
It zooms in on a planet.
It zooms into orbit.
It zooms in on the bad guy's ship and stops.
(yes I know that technically it's not called a zoom and probably has some better name, but eh).
When I saw this I was going WTF?! after about 10 seconds... because there is absolutely NOT THE SLIGHTEST REASON for this light-years long shot. The planet isn't important. The distance to it isn't really important. The systems they're in are not important. They could have just cut directly to the bad guy's ship and no one would even have noticed. They took an entire 58 seconds out of the show to do it, for no reason except TO SHOW HOW COOL THEY ARE.
(I apologise for the repeated USE OF EMPHASIS. It comes from reading tv tropes.)
But anyway, enough fansquee. You can see it in the following clip at 4:13.
Stupidity abounds And it begins. I haven't even officially started my shift yet, and the stupid is almost thick enough to cut with a knife. J has no idea that he is being picked on, or if he does, he tries to one up it by showing how he is in the right. But it digs his grave deeper. He's pissing me off, pissing off I, and I'm willing to bet pissing off Julie too. this is getting ridiculous.
Those of you that know me, know I let a lot slide before I do anything drastic, but the argument that I and J got into a few minutes ago... I almost wanted to turn around and just tell them to shut the hell up and behave.
Grrrrrrrr.
Oh, Queenie, get in touch with me with regards to where and when I need to be on Saturday.
(Damn I need more icons for my posts. I need something angry.
So much for relaxing... Right now...MFM stuff is spread from one end of my house to the other as I finish getting stuff together for the convention next week. About the only thing I have left is to print badges and get the bags and other packets together...then of course make everything fit. After that, I thought I would get to relax and chill out...hardly.
August 28 - September 1st: MFM, Memphis, TN Week of September 8th: Denver to help with the installation of some network stuff I don't fully understand, but I have to be there to make sure the websites don't go off line Week of September 15th: Santa Clara, CA for ZendCon2008, a PHP convention. This will be the first professional convention I will have attended. Probably will be a little different than MFM ;)
What sucks is that I won't be able to make softball in Chicago for September now because I will have to leave for Santa Clara on Sunday. Still, it'll be fun and I hope to learn something from it. For as many conventions that the operations side goes to, I'm glad they are giving the programmers a shot to go somewhere.
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