This can’t be real. If I saw this sign somewhere, I would have absolutely no idea what it meant. In the instinct of self-preservation, I’m pretty sure I would not deliberately drive off the edge of the road and into the water. Does this mean I should, or shouldn’t? 🙂

P.S. In the event that I get lazy in future, the GUI that allows editing fstab is PySDM. It’s in the repos, and once installed: System > Administration > Storage Device Manager.

Brake. Brake. Brake-fucking-brake. Brake!

Unless it’s one of the old junkers I drove twenty years ago, a car does not have breaks; it has brakes. Unless you’re a remarkably bad driver, and in remarkably poor physical condition, you do not break at an intersection, you brake. Jesus Christ, what is wrong with people…doesn’t anyone read anymore? They sound the same. English is infamous for its homophones. Deal with it. Pick up a book, you illiterate slobs. You make me sick.

Problem: If I turn on the overhead light in the bedroom, it smells like an electrical fire is about to start.

Solution: power down everything in the room, then turn things back on one at a time and monitor the results in an effort to see what, exactly might be overloading the wiring. Turns out it’s the light itself, not the “electrician’s nightmare” under my desk. Whew–didn’t really want to move the nightmare that is the desk anyway.

Project: Replace light fixture, hope that was the problem and we don’t need to get someone to re-wire the whole fucking house.

Actual solution: Remove bulb in preparation for replacing fixture. Discover scorched base with scary-looking burnt spot that still smells like…ozone. Kick self in arse for not remembering that self-ballasted CF bulbs have…ballasts. Ballasts that can fail, especially in old bulbs. Replace bulb with new one. No flicker, no ozone…end of project.

Problem: Indoor cat likes outdoor air and won’t STFU unless Deh-day is home to pet him. Deh-day works 35 miles away five days a week. It is November, and 3rd St. doesn’t need to be heated, at least not at my expense. I am being driven insane by the cat.

Solution: Give cat a “kitteh observation post” in his favourite window.

Project: Build kitteh observation post. Properly insulated and with a built-in cat flap, the cat can come and go as he pleases, and will…STFU.

Actual solution: PetSafe Cat Veranda. Slightly more expensive than building one (properly), but much less work. Have to order it, but can live with cat until it arrives.

Problem: P can play HL2 only between BSODs. Not getting a new computer until tax time in spring.

Solution: Fix the old one. Duh!

Project: First of all, dust it because if those fans are moving any amount of air, I’ll eat the goddamned dust bunnies with Tabasco sauce. Holy Christ, it’s scary in there. If you smoke around computers, you absolutely, positively cannot leave them un-cleaned for more than a short time. “Over a year” is not a short time. Ever heard the saying about the shoemaker’s children? Yeah…that.

Actual solution: Clean it, of course, but tell the wife it’s something you can “do together” (she knows what you really mean, but she’ll pretend she doesn’t), then say, “You do three things and I’ll do the rest, okay?” Wife gets a bottle of anhydrous alcohol, a box of Q-tips, an old toothbrush, one of those little round disposable “denture cleaning brushes”, a heatsink that has more tar-encrusted dusty hair than the cat, and a couple of fans that are so gunked with black-brown “mystery stuff” that they barely even move. Go downstairs, fire up the compressor, then stand there and wait until the pressure is up enough that you can blow out the dust. Return in five minutes, your part of the job done. Stand there and watch the wife cleaning the most disgusting gunk imaginable out of the heatsink and fans. When she’s finished and the brown stuff won’t wash off her hands even with dish detergent, offer her automotive hand cleaner. Ask wife for thermal paste, put heatsink and fans back in place. Ask wife to put screws in because light is poor and you’re half-drunk, so you can’t see the holes. Play HL2, crash-free. 🙂

Neither a problem nor a solution, and not a project, either, but….WTF? It’s called “Squirt” (technically Diet Squirt…guess Diet Bukkake was taken), which is quasi-obscene in itself, but it’s also…white? Um…heh. Tastes okay, though…citrus-y.

I kept L. up waaaaay too late again…like ten till three his time. He always says he has “free will”, and he’s right–he’s a grown man and could leave at any time with nothing more than a click of the mouse–but at the same time, he does like me, and I do know that, and I don’t exactly try too hard to get him off to bed when he should be going. That one’s a treasure, he is.

Such a shame that stupid, frightened and probably inbred white dudes can’t grasp the irony of, in an attempt to beat up an illegal immigrant, instead, beating up a boy who has more right to be on this continent, and indeed, in this country that their white European-descended arses.

(“Liberated” from CNN) — A jury awarded $2.5 million in damages on Friday to a Kentucky teenager who was severely beaten by members of a Ku Klux Klan group because they mistakenly thought he was an illegal Latino immigrant, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

The jury found that the Imperial Klans of America and its founder wrongfully targeted 16-year-old Jordan Gruver, an American citizen of Panamanian and Native-American descent.

The verdict included $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages against “Imperial Wizard” Ron Edwards.

The law center said before the verdict that a large damage award could break the Klan group, allowing the teen and the law center to seize the group’s assets, including its headquarters, a 15-acre compound in Dawson Springs, Kentucky.

“We look forward to collecting every dime that we can for our client and to putting the Imperial Klans of America out of business,” said SPLC founder and chief trial attorney Morris Dees, who tried the case.

Gruver, backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed the personal injury lawsuit last year seeking up to $6 million in damages from the Imperial Klans of America and two of its leaders — Edwards and “Grant Titan” Jarred R. Hensley.

An all-white jury of seven men and seven women deliberated for five hours after three days of testimony. The suit alleged that Edwards, Hensley, and the Imperial Klans of America as a whole incited its members to use violence against minorities.

“The people of Meade County, Kentucky, have spoken loudly and clearly. And what they’ve said is that ethnic violence has no place in our society, that those who promote hate and violence will be held accountable and made to pay a steep price,” Dees said.

According to testimony, three members of the Klan group confronted Gruver in July 2006 during a recruiting mission at the Meade County Fair in Brandenberg, Kentucky. They taunted him with ethnic slurs — inaccurate ones — spat on him and doused him with alcohol .Two of the men, including Hensley, knocked Gruver to the ground and repeatedly struck and kicked him.

“All I could see was a bunch of feet,” Gruver, now 19, told the jury. “As they were kicking me, I prayed to myself. I said, ‘God, just please let me go. Please let me make it home.’ ”

When the blows stopped, Gruver had a broken jaw, broken left forearm, two cracked ribs and cuts and bruises.

He testified that he has suffered permanent nerve damage and psychological trauma. He doesn’t leave his house and rarely sleeps more than two hours at a time because he has nightmares, CNN affiliate WLKY reported.

Among the evidence the jury saw was a pair of red-laced, steel-toed boots. A police witness testified that Hensley wore the boots the night he and another Klansman attacked Gruver.

Edwards acknowledged from the witness stand that the boots were the “weapon of choice” for skinheads and that the red laces carried special significance — that “someone should shed blood for their race.”

*Snipped* because I don’t care about the rest of the article.

I didn’t, however, care much for this bit…

On its Web site, the Imperial Klans of America refers to itself as a Christian organization exercising its rights of free speech and assembly under the U.S. Constitution.

The site carries this proviso: “If you are not of the White race, this Web site is not for the likes of YOU!” It then goes on to name the races and ethnicities it “hates,” adding, “This is our God-given right.”

The Web site disavows violence or any kind of criminal activity.

Edwards lives in a trailer on the Klan group’s heavily guarded, gated compound in rural Dawson Springs. The compound is the site of the Klan’s annual white power rally and music festival, know as “Nordic Fest,” according to the suit.

I’m okay with the “Christian organisation” shit because I don’t have a great deal of respect for any religion, so I don’t care. As for exercising their right to free speech, absolutely. Even delusional dumbasses have the right to say anything they want, and I defend their right to say it just as I’d defend my own to call them delusional dumbasses. Nordic Fest, though? I skimmed the article, and I see surnames like Edwards, Kelly and Butler. I see a Gunter, and I’ll give him Nordic, but the rest of them are about as “Nordic” as I am, and knowing/having known probably twenty-five people who genuinely qualify as Nordic (doesn’t get any more Nordic than Sweden, Denmark and Norway) it’s a horrendous insult. I don’t particularly want illegals here any more than these fucking losers do–I did it legally, and goddamnit, they should, too–but the whole “white power” thing is nothing more than fear gone mad, an inability to take responsibility for one’s own failures, and a desperate, pathetic attempt to belong somewhere. There exists no Aryan Nation except as a prison gang, there is no “pure” white race. I have as much (and perhaps more) a problem with immigrants who refuse to assimilate and instead, try to turn their new country into their old one, but when, oh when will this stupid Klan crap just go away?

P.S. Ran into L. late last night/early his morning; he’d crashed during an attempt to watch a film, and I was still up because P. was in Fred Flintstone mode. We had a lovely little chat, and I actually remember what I said (yay), plus he also told me that he not only doesn’t mind my drunk-mail, but actually enjoys reading them. P. was playing Half Life 2 last night (in between BSODs…hehe), and although I should have been catching up on Flickr, I wasn’t in the mood to be “on for the public”. Still, I almost had to sit on my hands to keep from writing a Wall O’ Drunken Text to L. because I don’t have to be in public-mode for him, and…he said he was rather disappointed I hadn’t. Bless his heart. I think what I do wrong with him is try too hard to separate. I’m reasonably good at empathy, as is he, but really have to keep reminding myself, “Other people are not you. They may or may not have the same reaction to something that you would have,” but he and I are enough alike that I don’t think I need to do that so much. It’s habit because I’ve done it so long, but I think I need to back it off for him. I’d also been mistaken about something he said a long time ago–that hanging with friends IRL is vastly superior to anything the virtual world can offer. I took that to mean that because I’m not next door, I am and would be always a sort of “second class citizen”, but that wasn’t what he meant. He didn’t mean the people, he meant the method of communication, since text-only does not offer what are perhaps the most important bits of effective communication…facial expression, body language, tone of voice. He’s right, of course, but I’d taken it as an insult when that was not the way he’d intended it. He said I was just being hypersensitive, but I disagree; no one wants to be told, “You will always have a second-class status, no matter what you say or do,” and certainly not when there is nothing that can be done about it. It isn’t what he meant, but it is what I’d mistakenly understood, and I don’t think that really qualifies as “hypersensitive”. Oh, well…he may have season tickets to my frontal cortex, and it may sometimes seem like I’m talking to the masculine side of my own personality, but that doesn’t mean we’ll always agree, and that’s okay. 🙂

If you’re bright enough to know the word, then for the love of all things holy (i.e. science, logic, good spelling and grammar), learn to spell it!

Throws (propels rapidly through the air): The Grammar Nazi throws a large brick at your stupid, illiterate head.

Throes (violent pains of suffering): If you continue to misuse the English language, you will soon witness the Grammar Nazi in the throes of death, and it will be your fault. You will make baby Jesus cry.

This is me, not drunk-mailing L. tonight. He’d be so proud. 😉

One way to make YouTube comments more bearable, and one way to make it more useable for multiple tabs. 🙂

Comment Snob add on makes the arseholes almost disappear (user-configurable, and the name makes me grin).

TubeStop disables auto-play so I don’t have two videos playing at once just because I got curious and opened another tab.

I’d accidentally scratched myself; felt a hair tickling me under my shirt, and my goddamned nails are like razors, so I’d broken the skin. The scratch was bleeding, so I stuck a 3M Nexcare “tattoo” band-aid on it. Disney princesses or something; I didn’t look when I put it on and don’t know who it’s supposed to be. Anyway, it’s just a little bit of thin, transparent plastic with a design printed on it, and adhesive/small gauze pad on the back. They’re for kids, of course, but I think they’re cute. If you’re going to slice yourself open with your own fingernails, might as well make the result look pretty!

It’s laundry day, so I’d put on an old T-shirt that happens to have a V-neck, which left the band-aid visible. Nobody sees me anyway, so it didn’t matter. It took B. seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds to ask, “What’s that on your right breast?” I’d forgot about it, but knew what he meant, and explained. He didn’t seem fully convinced at first, but finally asked whether there was any ink-transfer to my skin involved, and I assured him there was not; not even temporarily. Then he says, “Puhhhh! Nice to hear. I was kind of worried.” It was absolutely everything I could do to keep from bursting into gales of laughter. Not because he didn’t understand what a “tattoo band-aid” was–if they exist there, I doubt he’d ever have seen them–but because I knew exactly what he’d been thinking. He knows very well that I think L.’s tattoos are awesome (I never mentioned the thing about the markers, though), and he knows I’ve had one (albeit largely ignored) for many, many years, so he was thinking, “She’s got one already, and she likes his…she’s getting more of her own. My god–she’ll end up looking just like him!” He’s never made a secret of thinking L. has too many tats, and apparently didn’t want me roaming about as a female version thereof. Still, I had to laugh at his almost wary reaction–I guess I have one more “mum” than I thought I did! He didn’t tell me not to get any more tattoos, and he did say it wasn’t any of his business how many tats L. has, or I have, but he did say, “I hope you won’t.” I probably won’t–mostly because I can’t be arsed–but it’s a good thing he didn’t go into bossy-mode and tell me “don’t”, or that’s exactly what I would have done, just to remind him that if I want to get “FUCK YOU” in 2″ Gothic letters across my forehead, that’s none of his business. As it was, though, it just made me laugh, and it didn’t make me angry at all because he meant well. I didn’t have the heart to say, “Oh, don’t worry, mum–I have no plans for more ink,” because that would have hurt his feelings, but I for damn-sure thought it! 😛

Headline from some paper in Oz:

Slapped Iraqi soldier shoots dead two US troops

Jesus, I hate that. The word “troop” is technically defined as soldiers or armed forces, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely interchangeable with “soldiers” or “armed forces personnel”. You can have “a soldier” or “a member of the US Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines”, but you cannot have “a troop” to mean one person. Two members of some branch of the armed forces…still neither a troop, nor troops. Three or more, okay, I’ll give you that, I suppose, but that is the bare minimum. “50 000 US troops,” fine. Three US troops…pushing it, and there’s surely a better way to say it, like “Three members of the US armed forces” or “Three US Marines.” It isn’t just this one publication from Oz, either; they all do it now.

Fuck off with using “troop” because you obviously don’t know how to spell “soldier” or can’t be arsed to type “members of the (insert branch here)”. It sounds illiterate and it pisses me off.

Heil Grammar Check! 😀

After the Great Holy Fuck Why Do I Smell Ozone Scare of last night, I’ve kept Nerd Command Central powered off and everything unplugged, and the overhead light off. As of half an hour ago, I powered on NCC and so far, it seems okay, but I’m still leaving the overhead light off because that’s my number one suspect. I might try the light later, or maybe not until the fixture can be replaced. It’s old, but then again, so are the wires. Dunno. Hopefully, it’ll be all right, but I’m posting a shot of my pretty NCC desktop, just in case (FSM forbid!) something goes horribly wrong and I never see it again. 🙁

Please, somebody just fucking KILL ME. After my bitch-blog went down, I thought about calling “tech support” (HAH!) but there were so many people ahead of me that the fucking phone would have grown into the side of my head, so I thought I’d give their live chat a shot. For some reason, I always get a Russian guy. P. gets Dave or Mike or whatever (or Pradeep, claiming to be Mike), but I get Vladimir and Sergey, and Kirill. Frankly, if they fix my problem, I don’t give a flying fuck what planet they’re from, let alone what country, but they never, ever do. First guy tells me the site is working fine (I know that, dumbass–what part of “DATABASE error” did you miss?) and then just abandoned me after I’d spent half an hour waiting for…no help at all. Second guy shuffled me off to the third guy, who, after 20+ minutes of my sitting there, waiting for him to answer me, told me…drum roll, please….to submit a trouble ticket. Well, Jesus Christ astride a flaming fucking unicorn. Thank you for your assistance, gentlemen, but I was kind of hoping for something a little faster than glorified “Help by email.”

Having no other choice, I submitted a trouble ticket, stating “database script error” as my problem, even though it really wasn’t, but I had to choose something or I couldn’t move on to the next step, and that was the closest to my actual problem (there was no “my host sucks” option). My blog was back up last night, and again this morning, so I thought, “Oh, great–I’ll just go close that ticket and write a nice little thank you.” Not after what I just read, I’m not, and especially since it went down again for a while, though it’s obviously back up now. This time, I get some woman called “Lucy”, who, in classic IX fashion, tries to put the blame on me. She found an old (May ’08) .htaccess file that she referred to as “a redirect”, and told me she’d fixed the problem by renaming it to .htaccessold. If that had been the problem, I would have said “thank you!” but, of course, it wasn’t. That file was created in May, and if there’s a script kiddie willing to wait six months to wreak havoc, I’ve never heard of it. Besides, I created the fucking thing MYSELF, when I was playing around, doing an experiment. It wasn’t hurting anything.

Worst of all, this idiot says I should update my virus signatures, and install anti-spyware (conveniently providing links for me), and then tells me I should be more careful with my account login details. FUUUUUUCK ME! It’s a good goddamned thing she’s god-knows-where because THAT pissed me off. One, what the fuck good is Windows anti-whatever going to do for me? I do have Windows, which I use for PS and sometimes for MSN, and FF, and that’s it. I don’t upload anything to my blog, or even have an FTP client installed. Hell, I don’t even log into my blog from Windows; if I’m using XP, it’s because I have to, and I want to GTFO as fast as I can. Yes, I checked both Linux machines for rootkits, just like I always do, even though I don’t run about, installing software from just any old place. Two, you presumptuous bitch, the fact that most people save passwords if they can, and write them on Post-It notes and stick them on the monitor or under the keyboard if they aren’t allowed to save them doesn’t mean I do. I don’t, and I don’t use passwords like “12345” or “password”, or “jetsfan08”. My passwords are stored in my head, and they are all at least nine characters long, and all contain numbers, upper-case and lower-case letters, and (if it’s allowed) special characters. They do not form words; they form…nonsense that makes sense to no one but me. I absolutely HATE it when people assume that because the vast majority of users are Windows lusers who don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground and shouldn’t be given more than a limited account with zero admin privileges, I must be the same. I hate people who make assumptions about me of any kind, and that one…oh, that’s the number one assumption that I hate. Bitch? Yeah. Incompetent computer illiterate? No. Stop wasting my time with stupid assumptions, and FIX YOUR GODDAMNED MySQL!

I told P tonight that I want to switch to another host, hopefully one that actually deals with tech problems instead of just doing their damnedest to blame the customer, but it’s on his credit card, and he doesn’t want to deal with it. Honestly, that man will put up with the shittiest excuse for service, just as long as he doesn’t have to actually do anything, or call anyone. For three months, two of the channels he liked to watch didn’t even work, but he said nothing, not even to me, because it would mean a Charter tech would have to come here. Once I found out, I called and they sent someone, but he just couldn’t be arsed. Not me…if I’m getting it for free, then I don’t expect much, but by Jesus, if I’m paying for it, then I want what I paid for. Not more, and I do understand that sometimes, shit does happen, but I do want what I paid for.

Now, let’s see whether this is actually going to post, or whether my Windows spyware has stolen my password again and I get the DB error. Goddamn, I hate getting pissed off so late in the evening; between that and the flickering bedroom light/essence de ozone, I may never get to sleep!

I just had a thought…men named Sergey always disappoint me. That’s about the sexiest Russian-nerd name (okay, Alexey, too), and yet every guy I’ve ever known named Sergey has been anything but hawt, and not an über-nerd among them. Well, Sergey Brin, but he’s only sort of cute, not “want”. Oh well…better than John. Guys named John are almost magnetically attracted to me, or I am to them. My first “boyfriend” in Grade Six…John. First time I sneaked out of the house when Dad said I wasn’t allowed to go…John. First time I broke a military fraternisation rule…Jean (French dude, not a girl). First husband…John. First “friend that should’ve been more”…John. First….uh…heh. If he’s John, he’s always, always bad for me. Sometimes, they’re a nice kind of trouble, but oooooh, they’re trouble! 🙂