Category: Angst

June 21, 2006 /

We’ve officially been in Louisville long enough to hit a residency landmark: The Favorite Restaurant That Always Seems Packed But Now It’s Closing. That’s right. The Mayan Gypsy is going away in a little over two weeks, and the world will be poorer.

To get in while we can, Maria and I are telling you to come eat with us there at 6 pm EST this Sunday, June 25th. Update: Not Sunday, they’re not open on Sunday. Monday? Call, email or comment if you want in on our reservation. We’ll get corn cakes and chocolate. I envision a pitcher of sangria and an 18% gratuity. Walls will tumble. Men will die.

June 21, 2006 /

After almost exactly three years here, it finally happened: my work internets have locked everybody out of LJ, Blogspot, and every message board I even tried to keep up with. Curiously enough, Facebook and Myspace remain unaffected. The same disparity means that Flickr is banned, for being “remote network storage,” but GMail is untouched. Wait, did I say “curious?” I meant “blind and stupid.”

Anyway, the man remains unable to hold me down, and I’m learning Lynx. The guys in IT, by contrast, are learning nothing.

June 14, 2006 /

We got new evacuation instructions for our building today. Before, we had to alternate in the east and west stairwells by floor, which was a pain to remember. Now, the instructions are to go to the east stairwell if you’re on the east side, and the west stairwell if you’re on the west side. You got to whichever stairwell is closest. It’s that simple!

In the last ten minutes, I’ve heard two people come up and ask the Lady in the Next Cube whether we’re on the east or west side.

HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA

June 12, 2006 /

At work, we have this client we pay for data. The client likes to know that only humans are seeing this data, presumably because they are stupid and bill by the hour rather than the byte (and maybe because of HIPAA, whatever). My employer likes to have computers get the data for the humans, so we can stop paying the humans to do extremely tedious copying work. This is why I have spent a significant amount of my time over the last year creating and maintaining a kludgy application that gets the data by pretending to be human. It can trick another computer, but you would probably not be fooled.

As of this weekend, the client in question deployed a whole new method of connectivity: a tiny embedded custom applet that works okay for humans, but doesn’t have the features necessary for our kludgy impersonator. They disabled the old connection, of course.

This is why my boss and I spent two hours, this morning, trying to hack in to a system we are paying to access.

I need a new job.

June 6, 2006 /

The Baxter is dropping Brick this week already! WHAT A SURPRISE. If you are one of the remaining few people I know in Louisville who didn’t get dragged to see it last Friday, let me know and we can go together. I will be seeing it again either tomorrow or Thursday.

Hey Mom, let me know if you want this post to be #1 in the Google results for their names

May 23, 2006 /

There are certain words I never expected to see my mother use in print, and “pimped” is one of them. Just one reason why I’m happy to see her blogging again.

If you read Mo-Jo, you’re already aware that after years of mounting mismanagement, condescension and outright lies from the diocesan administration, my mother’s willingness to stand up for her school and her students finally got her fired. She has another job now, but (no offense to any booksellers present) she deserves a better one; if you happen to be aware of teaching or library-related jobs in central Kentucky for someone with an MAEd (but not an MLS), please let me know and I’ll pass the news to her.

April 24, 2006 /

I kind of wish we’d had Facebook lo, those many years ago when I was referring to coeds by pseudonyms (note that I’d already learned to fear Google).

I read Dr. Weston’s post above and was a little startled to note that people are using a pretty new website to provide that kind of (subjectively) important social function. Then I’m like, what were class rings? What were letter jackets? They weren’t totems, magically created out of pure student ardor; they were business items co-opted by people seeking to fill exactly the same gap.

March 7, 2006 /

Ad seen on answers.com:

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Yes! Fight back against high gas prices by buying more of it!

March 6, 2006 /

Since I arrived here, our IT department has used XStop software to filter the naughty bits out of our workday. The only way it really bothered me was that it blocked the Onion (but left the AV Club unfiltered). I got used to it.

This morning we got an email informing us that they’d switched to WebSense, which has already proven to block nearly all my favorite webcomics, the Onion and the AV Club, IMDB and basically anything they categorize as “Entertainment.”

Awesome!

I assume the guys who installed this software (at the behest of the legal department–liability, you know) have passwords that will let them read Megatokyo; I’m sure they also know that getting around this kind of thing is startlingly easy when one has one’s own website. Then again, xorph.com is still listed as a webcomic in plenty of places. I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep tunneling out?

Update 1317 hrs: Oh, “Entertainment” has been unblocked. Cancel jihad, cancel jihad.