Dear People Who Post Instructional Videos to YouTube

Dear People Who Post Instructional Videos to YouTube,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to try to share your knowledge. That's totally awesome. Now, on to the gripe.

Some of us have, like, no attention spans to listen to people talk, so if you could follow the journalistic creed of not burying your lead, or better yet, making condensed versions that just show us the meat, we'd be grateful. (If I want to learn a fairly straightforward, simple knitting stitch or method and the youtube video loads and says it's 5+ minutes long, I decide to find a written description instead, because that means someone is probably going to be fidgeting with their yarn while making some long-winded introduction for the first 3 minutes or so, and my mind will have totally wandered by the time they actually show the thing I want to learn, and I'll miss it, and I'll just have to go look it up anyway. By reading an explanation, even if there's a long-winded introduction, I can skim it, which is, yes, superior to trying to fast-forward a video, because my brain doesn't need a clumsy slider bar! (Ask me how well I managed the inscrutable expense reporting system at my last job, which was not only completely non-intuitive, but had no written manual, and used instructional videos for everything. A 7-minute video to tell me how to re-route a report that had been sent back to me? Seriously?))

Signed,
me

Other: Possessed Baked Goods!

We ate lunch near Porto's today, so afterward we walked over and got some baked goods. Porto's is a very popular LA-area bakery with a couple locations. Little did we know (and maybe it's just a Halloween promotion!), their baked goods are possessed...

Timeline of events:

• Approximately 1:30PM: My boss raves about the potato balls.
• Approximately 3PM: My boss says the potato balls had kicked his ass.
• 5:13PM: I announce on our IRC channel that the mango empanada on my desk is calling my name.
• 5:14PM: My boss tells me empanadas can't talk
• 5:14PM: I reply, "but potato balls can kick your ass? huh?"
• 5:14PM: He replies, yes.
• 5:30PM: We ask Samir if he ate his cupcake. He said he had tried to save it, but he ate it hours ago because "it was staring at me."

Possessed, I tell you...

Other: South Bay Plunder

At some point, the bulk of the Japanese expatriate population in Los Angeles moved from Little Tokyo in the downtown Civic Center area to Torrance, which is down in the South Bay area (roughly between LAX and Long Beach). It's a crap drive from where I live (every place that involves dealing with LA drivers is a crap drive from where I live) even though it's only about 30 miles, and is about a 2-hour trip by public transportation, but I recently heard that Daiso had opened their first Southern California location there, so I finally got off my ass last week and drove down.

The Daiso is a good size. I've only been to two others, the one in Seattle, which is not very large, and the one in Mountain View, which is cavernous. This one was sized in between, but packed with the same variety of 100-yen store awesomeness. I'm hoping it does well so that perhaps they'll open up more locations around LA County, including ones north of the 10.

Some of the crafty stuff I got at Torrance Daiso:


I also discovered that a store I'd heard of a couple years ago, but never made it to before, was only a block away from Daiso. The Store of Unbearable Cuteness, aka Tamaya, is a licensed distributor of San-X goodies, including Rilakkuma merch, so I finally made a trip, and could not, of course, leave empty-handed:



I also drove to Mitsuwa Marketplace, which is a couple miles away. The Sanseido bookstore only had a few knitting books this time, none appealing, but I got some treats from the grocery area.

Other: Buh-bye, Shared Items

Since Google now wants you to share stories via Google+ instead of the "shared items" system I'd been using in Google Reader, I can't add new stuff to my shared Reader list anymore. So, I'm retiring the widget on the side of the blog. Here's the link to stuff I had "shared" before the change.

Other: Date of My Last Tetanus Shot

Sept. 21, 2011

So, Monday morning I was walking to the bus stop and this ninja tree root just came out of nowhere and tripped me and I went flying.  I was in the dirt when my bus went by. But after taking inventory, I realized my right knee was butt-ugly, my left elbow was a little scraped, my left palm had taken some impact, but other all parts seemed to be attached and I managed to get to my feet and walk the block home moderately normally.  I washed everything out with soap and water, liberally applied Bactine, and logged back into work.

Yesterday my right knee was stiff and bruised but didn't look like it was about to fall off.  This morning, though, it didn't look any better, and since I was also pretty sure I hadn't had a tetanus booster in this millennium, I made an appointment with the urgent care center and went this afternoon.

The bad news:

• Yup, it's infected.  The doc gave me a prescription for antibiotics, both oral and topical, in addition to a tetanus booster.

The good news:

• I didn't faint after the tetanus booster, or even come close, even though the other nurse was scrubbing my tender knee at the same time.  (My last few episodes with medical needles had not ended so well.)
• I was out of there in an hour.  That's pretty efficient.
• I took the bus to the pharmacy that's about a mile from home, got my prescriptions, and walked home, stopping at Zankou for a tarna wrap...
• Where they were having a falafel special.  Mmmm, their falafels are yummy.

Other: Fun With Phonetics

I was driving out to the PetSmart after work because (a) by the time I got my butt motivated to leave this morning, the buses became annoyingly sparse, which mean that (b) I needed to justify driving to work and buying 30 pounds of cat litter will do it and (c) I got totally fed up with the local Petco because I never seemed to spend less than 15 minutes in line, so I refuse to go there anymore. The closest PetSmart is in Tujunga, and even though I'd been there before, I can never remember how to get there. I was using the Google voice navigation on my phone, and among other "quirks," it came up with some interesting pronunciations of street names.

Tujunga Canyon Rd. Ok, although there are many, many streets here with Spanish names, they never get pronounced correctly; they've been, um, anglified. "Tujunga" is an exception or at least close to one, as the 'j' is pronounced like an 'h'. Except the Google lady was using a hard 'j'. "Tuh-jun-ga Canyon Rd." Ok, so eventually I turn onto Foothill. That's a real English word, right? "Fooh-thill." Double fail. Well, I did get there, but still.

Other: More Minecraft Madness

• Minecraft is now a music box.
  
• 
  
• The Creeper Halloween costume.
• A completely ingenuous piece proclaiming that Minecraft is Christian propaganda.

Other: Minecraft Playlist

Certain songs come to mind when I play the game, so I decided to put together a Minecraft playlist of sorts. (Granted, some of the songs in the list didn't "come to mind" spontaneously, but seemed appropriate, since I needed filler.) Divided into three sections, here's the list.

General ambiance:

1. Kristin Hersh - "Coals." Coal is useful, you can burn it. And when you fall off a cliff, trust me, you're gonna crash.
2. Rasputina - "Diamond Mind." Diamonds are the holy grail, of sorts, in the game. They're pretty rare, you have to dig deep, the ore is a pretty blue (although, once mined, they look more like crystal easter eggs), but most importantly, they make the most durable tools and armor. One guy even wrote a song about diamonds:
   
3. Johnny Cash - "Ring of Fire." You can make a kind of ring of fire using perma-flaming tree stumps. Good for keeping the monsters away, but ouch, that hurts!
4. Devo - "Explosions." You can make TNT. Those are generally good explosions, as long as you reach minimum safe distance. Of course, creepers also explode, and they're not as big on minimum safe distance.
5. The Breeders - "Divine Hammer." There aren't actually hammers in the game, but there are axes and shovels and pickaxes which you use to pound on stuff. Close enough. A divine pickaxe is made of diamonds, of course.
6. Meat Puppets - "Lake of Fire." There are plenty of lava lakes (ok, underground they should really be called magma lakes). Just, uh, don't fall in. Because that hurts. Watch out for sparks, too, because they tend to pop out and set you on fire at inopportune moments.
7. Helium - "Skeleton." Yup, there are skeletons and boy, do they want to kill you. And they even make a sound very close to the song's fade-in.
8. Bettie Serveert - "Geek." Because you probably are one if you're playing the game. And those creepers will try to turn you inside out.

Playing the game:

9. Scrawl - "Hunting Me Down." Those monsters are coming for you.
10. Robert Johnson - "Hell Hound On My Trail." Seriously, they're after you.
11. Blondie - "Just Go Away." That means you, creeper.
12. Memphis Minnie - "Call the Fire Wagon." Oops, fell into a lava lake, did you? Well, like Minnie says, there's no fire wagon in this town!
13. The Carter Family - "The Little Black Train." Yeah, you can make your own little black train (ok, it's an iron mine cart, although with a custom texture pack, you could make it look like a train), but I'm thinking more about the one that's coming for you when a creeper turns you inside out.
14. Garbage - "Kick My Ass." They want to.

Reaction shots (aka stages of grief):

15. Boss Hogg - "What the Fuck." Where the hell did that zombie come from? The one that just shoved me into the lake of fire, thank you very much?
16. Nirvana - "Dumb." Nice one, Karen. You just shoved your own ass in the lake of fire.
17. Johnny Cash - "Cry Cry Cry." What you do when you die in the middle of nowhere while carrying a buttload of diamonds. Then kiss them goodbye.
18. Throwing Muses - "Mercury." After you're done crying, you get really pissed off, close the laptop, and vow never to play again.
19. Helium - "Walk Away." But you'll be back.

Other: A Creeping Death

The last two months, I've been spending an exorbitant amount of time playing Minecraft. I'm not even going to try to explain the game here, because I'd just make my addiction sound more pathetic. But I will show some pictures of my lovely glass domicile, featuring a jacuzzi/fishing pond on the first floor and an expansive greenhouse on the second:




I heard about the game from one of the kernel developers at work. The dude is lucky that he's a couple hundred miles away and that I still haven't figured out how to subcontract ninjas. But for anyone who was expecting a bigger Xmas present from me than they end up getting, well, you will know whom to blame.

P.S. While I may be addicted, I'm nowhere as bad off as the guys who put this together on a multiplayer server: (Yes, I am doing the "Well, I may not have a life, but they have even less of a non-life... or more of a non-life... or however that logic works" thing.)

Other: New Word of the Day

I coined a new word today.

• shitany (n): a litany of shit.
  Example: A permanent entry in my shitany is the fact that Support Group X tends to provide as much support to our group as a 10-year-old bra with shot elastic.

ETA: I even managed to find a real-world use today.

I was having an unscheduled sync-up with my manager today, and after I went through a shitany of blocking issues (where issues == people) keeping me from getting stuff done, she asked if I had anything positive to mention.

"Um..."

Other: Mini Constitution Tutorial!

There seems to be some confusion over what the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights covers.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Freedom of speech does not mean that

• any news outlets are required to carry your message
• any website is required to allow you to say it on their bandwidth
• anyone is required to listen
• anyone gives a shit

If, say, you post hate speech on your website and your web hosting provider takes it down, or your network cancels your show, they are not violating your first amendment rights. They’re just being sensible, because they're either run by decent people and/or they know it would be bad business to be seen condoning that point of view. If, say, I decide not to tell a co-worker that they have the butt-ugliest kids on the planet, I'm not violating my own first amendment rights. I'm just being sensible, because co-workers who hate you can make your life hell.

The flipside of your freedom of speech is our freedom of not having to listen to the bullshit that oozes past your lips.

Got it, intolerant “reverend?” Got it, “Dr” Laura?

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I can fucking read.

Other: A Couple Headscratchers

• Driving to work Tuesday, I saw a tractor-trailer braking excessively given the relatively light traffic. A car had gotten in front of it with maybe 2 car lengths between them. The car's bumper sported "Student Driver." Yeah, no shit. What moron teacher would get their student to merge in front that close to the truck without speeding up to increase the distance, and, here's the thing, not even exit at the next exit (or even the next two exits!) I didn't get the driving school's name, but, uh, I wouldn't recommend them.
• Why I drove to work Tuesday: I was cleaning out the litterboxes in the morning and, since it's not exactly either a mentally-stimulating or a terribly enjoyable task, my mind had wandered off. Then I spilled a bunch of used litter on the carpet. Ew. So I get the vacuum out of the closet, which, of course, sent Spoon straight for the bed. I plug it in, the ready light comes on, I push the switch, and... nothing. Ready light goes off. I cleaned up as much as I could with the hand vac, went on-line, and found a repair shop between home and work, and stuck the upright vac in the trunk. I got there after work right before they closed. The guy fixed it right on site, too, just a busted power switch, fortunately. Still, what a way to start the day. I bet Spoon threw a party when he saw me take it out the door. I'd suspect sabotage, but really, the not-too-bright thing is not an act.
• I have learned that our backup system at work has a black hole at the center. Maybe I should let Stephen Hawking know about it, because it would put the information paradox to rest. "Uh, that data you wanted restored, yeah, apparently it passed the event horizon..." That stuff is gone!
• We're trying to figure out if another tape drive would help data escape The Black Hole's event horizon. We could try to fill out requisition forms and get the money that way, but I'm thinking a bake sale would be easier. (My brain was a little mushy from the heat of waiting at bus stops this morning.)

Other: New Phone Update

• I used Google's voice navigation to go to Torrance and back (almost 30 miles each way) yesterday and while it worked, it did scare the bejeezus out of me every time it said something. Just like I knew it would. (I went to the Japanese market in Mitsuwa and got a couple Japanese knitting books. Then I had dinner with friends at this Japanese fusion place called Musha, which SteveZ recommended. Yummy. Ate too much.)
• I managed to enter the 60+ character WPA-PSK string for my home wireless access point correctly, the first time through, on the dinky software keyboard. I totally rule. And it only took me about 5 minutes to do it.
• The Chinese vampire on the lock screen seems to be working. No one has messed with my phone yet!
• While so far I like almost everything about this phone, the battery life is not the greatest. I recommend keeping it plugged in as much as possible.

Other: My New Phone

My new phone, with special lock guard!

I have a new phone. It's an HTC Hero, and, well, it made me really popular at work. For about 5 minutes. I'd been putting on the decision to get a new phone, because (a) I'm cheap, (b) I'm lazy, and (c) cheapness + laziness actually make me relatively environmentally friendly, at least as far as not acquiring and disposing of more electronics. (My only TV set still has a cathode ray tube. But, hey, the thing works.) But in the case of my (now old) phone, there's a (d). My father got me that phone the last Christmas I spent with him, 3½ years ago.

He had been asking me what he could get me that year, but I had nothing I needed or wanted. Then the $&%^^$%(* shuttle service came thisclose to making me miss my flight to Florida on Christmas Eve Day, and when I slammed the phone I had at the time shut after making no headway with their customer disservice, I broke the hinge. Arriving at the airport in Florida: "Dad, I know what you can get me..."

Here's how not-bleeding-edge I am. The phone I ended up picking out at the store was the same one my parents both already had (Motorola Razr). Then when the clerk went to transfer the contacts stored in my old phone into the new one, he pointed out that there were, like, 10. Which caused my father to mock me, since he had dozens and dozens in his.

So, even though I know it's silly, that Razr has memories. But it started getting confused over how much charge the battery did or did not have, and I started missing work calls. My father would have thought it was silly to keep it as long as I did, but I think he would still have been secretly pleased that it mattered. But he also would have thought my new phone was pretty cool. If he hadn't already gotten one for himself first.

Other: Facebook's New Privacy Controls

I don't care what it says, this is what it boils down to:

Other: This'n'That

• I've gotten so used to the automatic sinks at work that I keep putting my hands under my faucet at home and waving them around, wondering why the sensor hasn't picked it up... oh.
• Yesterday my co-workers were talking about an application that needed to "BP" itself. "Um, what's BP?" "Boot straP." "Um, wouldn't 'BS' be a more obvious acronym for that? Oh, wait. Um, nevermind." Of course, at this point, "BS" probably would be the more politically-correct acronym over "BP."
• The other day Dipity was on the computer desk when a bird flew past the window. She ran straight for the storage bins under the window... forgetting that there's about an 18" gap between the desk and the bins. She was so intent on those birds, though, that as soon as she hit the ground, she was jumping up on the bins. Still, not the brightest cat.
• I still really hate Macs.

Other: Bitching and Moaning

I'm tired. I haven't been sleeping well lately. And it's making me cranky. Here are some of those things that are just working that last good nerve.

• There are two things about dealing with Unix that I have always considered voodoo: NFS and printing. We have had NFS issues at work which are a nightmare, and at home I have more or less retired my old WinXP box which had my printer hanging off it. Thus, I've had to move the printer to my FreeBSD box. First it kept failing because it didn't have permission to write to the device file. CUPS, you're running as root. Either fix it yourself or tell me that's the problem and prompt me to fix it. Dumbass. It spews so much garbage to its error log file that it took me forever to figure out what it was complaining about.
• Thunderbird. All of a sudden it starts prompting me constantly for my Kerberos credentials. Dude, if the server isn't asking for Kerberos credentials (and it's not), why are you? Piece of crap. It still gets my mail from the server, but the Kerberos window will "hide" and then prevent Thunderbird from exiting without telling me. I got home tonight and it turns out my laptop had been sleeping on the bus because when I thought it was shutting down before I left work, it wasn't.
• That crappy Marmaduke movie. I only learned about it today when there was a commercial for it. While I'm sure the whole script was written by a committee in about 10 minutes, why does the CGI have to look unbelievably crappy? I mean, offensively, rubbing-my-last-good-nerve crappy?
• The major record labels. I'm having trouble finding good music I like. Anything I do find is pretty much on a dinky label. These bigwigs produce lowest-common-denominator music where talent takes a backseat to looks, and then they wonder why people don't want to shell out money to buy the crap. They blame that on illegal downloads, but they'd either have to be idiots or beyond disingenuous actually to believe that themselves. 99.9% of what they put out isn't even worth stealing.
• And why the hell are there practically no self-striping yarns which (a) do not contain wool and/or acrylic and (b) come in something lighter than worsted weight?
• Not having a dishwasher (or a place to hook one up, even). I'm starting to remember some of why my previous forays into cooking died out. Cooking generates a lot of dirty dishes to wash.
• Whatever bug bit me on the shin and made it itch like crazy. Ugh.
• Nickel bra hooks. I have an itch between my shoulder blades now, too.
• Excessively cute cats that just make me want to hug them and squeeze them and love them and call them George, except they really get upset with the squeezing thing, so that just spoils my fun.

Other: Adventures in Cooking

When pouring hot polenta, try not to cover one of the handles!

As I mentioned previously, I've recently started cooking stuff from scratch. Here are some things I've learned thus far:

• When making rice pudding, make sure you actually have enough milk before cooking the rice, because you probably don't know how much 3 cups is supposed to weigh when you pick up the carton. Otherwise you end up with rice clumps, which, while edible, just aren't as satisfying.
• If you're going to try flipping your frittata onto a plate and inverting back into the frying pan, make sure your plate is bigger than the pan first.
• If you accidentally spill some of your unset frittata eggs on the burner when flipping because your plate is smaller than your frying pan, make sure you clean it up before the next time you cook with that burner or you'll wonder why your cooking polenta smells like burning eggs.
• Polenta takes a lot of stirring and is not for the lazy. Alternate hands for even muscle workout.
• Make sure Dipity doesn't make one of her excursions on the kitchen counter when you've left a bunch of chopped tomatoes on the cutting board up there.

At least I can say that I haven't set fire to anything, burned anything (except for some toast I was using to try to make bread crumbs that didn't get toasted enough the first go-round), or made anything totally inedible.

Other: Ditching Detourage

Of course, last week I bitched about what a piece of crap Microsoft Entourage is. Today I actually found something which might make it possible for me to get the full Exchange calendar functionality, including checking invitee availability, while still using Mac Mail and Ical. It is this absurdly-klugey-to-set-up app called DavMail, but after a couple hours tinkering with it, I think it actually works. At least part of the time anyway.

Now I just need to re-do all my rules in Mail, which actually kind of sucks since it doesn't look like its logic is any better than Entourage's. But at least it has real threading. Sort of. I just get far, far too much mail at work to deal with a half-assed mail client. Let alone a one-sixteenth-assed mail client like Entourage.

Other: Why Microsoft Entourage Sucks Major Ass

I have to use Microsoft Entourage at work for my email. Well, strictly speaking, I don't have to. But while Mac's Mail and Mozilla's Thunderbird are options, neither can talk to the Exchange server to get calendar data for my co-workers so I can see their schedules when trying to fit stuff in. (I'd love it if someone told me I was wrong.) And it's not worth having Entourage open for calendar stuff but reading all my emails in another app. So, here's my list of why Entourage is crap:

• Threading. It says it has threading, but bunching messages together by Subject is NOT threading! True threading would be to read the In-Reply-To: message header to find parent-child relationships. That's what the header is there for and why it's in the 28-whopping-year-old RFC 822. Then again, Microsoft has proven again and again that they're just too special (and I mean rides-the-short-bus special) to adhere to Internet standards. Dumbasses.
• Rules. Don't get me started on Rules. Ok, yes, I need these two conditions always to be true, but in addition, I only need one of these two conditions here to be true. Nope, can't group that way for logic. That would require to much programming on their end. And I would really like to flag all messages with a calendar invite. That seems like a logical condition for a client meant to be used with Microsoft Exchange. Nope. The best I could come up with was to search for the Content-class header and see if it had a calendaritem. I'm not even sure that's bullet-proof.
• The spam filter is moronic. Um, Microsoft, you do realize that it's really easy for spammers to plagiarize the From address? (I won't even bother asking if they can check the Received: header for the "from" host.) Look, I don't know what the hell they use to check for spam, but since they don't seem to be querying spam blacklists from the Internet, it's just useless. I spent forever marking spam in my good folders and unmarking legitimate messages in the Spam folder.

Ok, those are the main three, the ones that just scream "stupid, lame, and lazy." But they're also annoying and time-wasting, and other mail clients have gotten it right, or at least significantly better, so Microsoft has no excuse.