IF YOU TYPE EVERYTHING IN CAPS SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SCREAMING AT ME, I’M ACTUALLY LESS LIKELY TO READ YOUR POST AND HELP YOU WITH YOUR SICK FISH. I’M NOT BLIND, AND IT’S HARD TO READ WHEN YOU TYPE LIKE THAT. IF YOU WANT HELP, TONE IT THE FUCK DOWN.

Oh, and illiterate people make me want to poke forks in my eyes so I don’t have to read what they write. WTF kind of sentence is, “well you was right aout the plants because he/she constantly ripped the plants out the gravel.” I know I was right, dumbass–that’s why I said it. Of course you “was” not paying attention. Maybe you “was” busy looking for the Shift key so you could begin your sentences with capital letters?

What I was supposed to be doing: getting dressed, feeding the starving masses, starting the laundry, cleaning the catastrofuck…I mean…the house.

What I was actually doing: giving a photo of J.’s beloved childhood dollhouse (now passed on to her daughter), a bit of a “facelift”. Grandma looked okay in her rocker, but I thought she needed a few accessories…

I didn’t spend much time on it and can’t show anyone because I may have sort of “liberated” the original (I admit nothing), and I don’t know J., so I don’t know whether she’d be amused or pissed, but I just had to do it anyway. Now, I’m really late, and I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. That’s all right–I’ll think of a way it’s someone else’s fault as I’m working. 😀

Okay, no I don’t, exactly, but why the hell they had to give display options to people who oughtn’t have them, I don’t know. The default is three small photos across the page, and sets/groups/whatever (I forget) to one side of the page. I turned off the sets/groups/whatever because I don’t like the clutter, but left it at three small images. Why? Well, because even with a resolution of 2720×1024, the small images are large enough for me to see whether the shot is interesting enough that I want to click and go to the photo page, and most people will be using a slightly lower resolution. There is, however, another option; you can have one medium-sized image across the page (with or without sets/groups/whatever on the right), and I abso-fucking-lutely hate that! My page has 3×6, so without too much scrolling, and no clicking at all, viewers can see 18 photos and decide whether they want to investigate further. A few of my contacts, though, have chosen the “medium image” option. That means that I can see only five photos on the front page, and if I want to look at more, I have to scroll to the bottom and click through to the second page. I hate that, and especially in the case of a couple of them who take 66453973 photos of the cat (how many times can I be expected to look at the same goddamned cat!?), or flowers in the garden. Yes, the cat is pretty (for a cat) and yes, the flowers are pretty, but Jesus Christ, give me some options! S., for instance. He’s a nice guy, but as of this moment, there are five photos on his front page. Four of them are the cat. Yes, the same cat as always. The other one is orange leaves on a maple tree (wow, like I’ve never seen a photo of that before…yawn, stretch), and if I want to see the interesting (and nicely composed) shot of a path at Kullaberg, I have to click through another page. If he wasn’t a nice guy, I wouldn’t fucking bother because it annoys me.

Something else that annoys me and has nothing to do with Flickr’s options is when people say, “Please view large” or “View large on black”. Fuck…off. If I want to view it large, I will, and nothing you say is going to change my mind, so STFU and let me choose. You know…leave the choice up to one of the viewers for whom you put the goddamned photos up in the first place. “View large on black” annoys me, too; why the hell would I bother to make another click? If you think it looks better on black, well, that’s just grand. I’m happy for you. I might even agree with you, but your “helpful suggestion” has ensured that I wouldn’t look at it on black if someone held a fucking gun to my head. I use Flickr Shades in the first place because the white background hurts my eyes, and I could even change the background colour for all pages to black…but I won’t. I won’t because I want it grey, and also because you don’t tell me what I should see. I’ll look at what I want, when I want, how I want. View on black. Heh. You’re lucky I haven’t changed the default page colour to screaming-jesus pink.

Okay, I’m sufficiently annoyed to begin my Monday. Oh yeah…and so I won’t forget, V.’s birthday is tomorrow.

Okay, so it’s my own fault. I already know that films and TV shows fuck up anything computer-related, but I find the whole topic of “virtual humans” and androids utterly fascinating, and live for the day when I can have my very own Data. (Is it weird to have a half-crush on an android?) Plus, Rachel Roberts is beautiful (and Canadian), and it’s Friday, and I had nothing better to do for a couple of hours, so I thought I’d watch S1m0ne. I knew it hadn’t got great reviews, but that’s all right–wouldn’t be the first time I’d watched a movie that never should have been made (Norbit, anyone?), and I really was curious to see how badly they’d fuck up the computer stuff.

I was doing okay when the crazy, dirty hacker-type with inoperable brain cancer (microwaves from the monitor?) and only one eye explained that he’d spent eight years working on making CGI seem real. Then, the HDD with S1m0ne’s program data on it was delivered to Viktor (Al Pacino, whom I actually like). Obviously, the actual director didn’t think that the average viewer would have any idea what a HDD looks like, because when he opens the package, the head and platter are clearly visible. I guess we’re supposed to think, “Ooooh, that must be some kind of important computer-thingie!” I decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed that, but again had to cringe when he…put it into some sort of “drawer” that resembled a CD/DVD tray, and the computer seemed fine with that. Christ. I’ve owned a few computers and worked on many more, and I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen anything like that. Oooo-kay, I guess I don’t expect most people to know that the HDD goes inside the case; you don’t just dump it into a drive like a DVD. I let it go, and kept watching. We are never told exactly how Viktor knows how to operate this complicated program that creates a virtual human being, or where the hell he got the custom keyboard with commands like “loop” and “live” right on the keys when all that was delivered to him was the HDD, but…okay, I’ll let that go, too. Maybe he’s just a digital prodigy–who knows?

I actually thought the movie was okay. Not great, and I damn-sure wouldn’t have paid to see it in a theatre, but for the bandwidth it cost me, it was all right. Near the end, after Viktor has decided to “kill off” S1m0ne, they say a tearful goodbye, and he inserts the disk bearing the virus that will kill her. The disk. This movie was released in 2002. This disk…I haven’t seen a 5.25″ floppy since the 80s. Early 90s at the outside, and then only on old machines. By 2002, even 3.5″ floppies were becoming scarce, but nope. I guess Hank must have been working on S1m0ne for a helluva lot longer than eight years if “PLAGUE Ver. 8.1” was on one of these babies!

Sadly, even if the disk is ancient, and no self-respecting computer in 2002 had a 5.25″ drive, S1m0ne is still destroyed. I have never actually had a virus on my own computer, but I have fixed one or two (heh) that did, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that destroyed data like it was going through a goddamned paper shredder.

Now, we say goodbye to S1m0ne as her data is dumped into a travel trunk (why, why, why is it always a travel trunk!?). We see CDs and/or DVDs, 3.5″ floppies, and the infamous HDD with platter and head exposed. See me cringe again.

One thing I did have to admire was Hank Aleno’s headstone. If I intended to have a burial plot and headstone (I don’t–I’m an organ and body donor), I’d like to be “Remembered Virtually Forever”, too! 😆

It was near the end that I finally became unable to suspend reality. Of course Viktor’s 16-year-old daughter is computer literate (I was with the movie that far), and just by poking around a little on what obviously has to be highly customised hardware (I checked twice and I do not have a “Loop” key!), she stumbles across the Eject command, ejects the 20-year-old floppy disc, immediately understands that it contains the virus that “killed” S1m0ne, and somehow, knows how to recover S1m0ne in her entirety…from the virus disk. Jesus…wept. Of course, we re-create S1m0ne by….exactly the opposite visual representation of her destruction. Jesus…wept.

By the end of the movie, I was thinking, “Well, thank Christ I didn’t pay to see it or buy it.” Hollywood, this is the 21st century, and although the average moviegoer might be an idiot, we aren’t all idiots, and you might try a little harder to get at least enough right that you don’t drop computer-literate people out of their enjoyment by deeply insulting their intelligence and knowledge.

I was late finishing the ironing and laundry tonight, but for once, it wasn’t L.’s fault; I was talking to B., and he’d said he was there for just a few minutes, so I thought, “That’s fine…I have stuff to do anyway.” I was getting fidgety because it takes him forever to type, and I can’t type whilst he does because he forgets to look up and doesn’t see what I’ve written, so I clicked the “draw” tab in MSN and grabbed the stylus. I wrote my name and drew some little faces, and a flower, and although I meant to erase it all, I instinctively hit Enter when I’d looked up to read his message. He’s about as interested in computers as I am in NASCAR, so I thought he’d just laugh and forget about it, but I was wrong. He said, “How did you do this?” and when I told him where to find the tab, and what to do, I thought he’d just say “Datanörd stuff!” like he usually does, and ignore it. Nope…I spent the rest of the evening being entertained by little drawings and written words in between typed responses. I’m not convinced he was paying too much attention to what I was saying, but that’s all right–it’s always fun to see someone when they discover a computer can do something they want to do. He’s pretty damned good at writing with a mouse, too; I suck badly even with a Wacom tablet, but he did just fine. He can’t read my handwriting at the best of times, though, so I stuck to drawing a few little pictures. He’s a funny man…never know what’s going to catch his attention next, and when something does, he’s like a six-year-old turned loose in Toys R Us (where is the goddamned full Character Palette in openSUSE’s fucked-up menu? I want a backwards R!)

I even got to do something helpful for L. today. Bless his heart, he never asks me to do anything; once in a while he’ll spell a word two ways and ask which is right, but that’s nothing, and he’s always got one of them correct. This morning, though, I’d just got out of bed, turned on the coffeemaker and booted the computer. I was typing a half-asleep response to P., who’d sent me *mjah* from his phone (he likes MSN now that he has it on the phone), when another window popped up and L. said, “Payback time!” I thought, “Christ, what does he think I did?” but he wasn’t pissed or anything. He’s test-driving Ubuntu on a machine at work and couldn’t get sound to work in aMSN. I’d run into that myself, and it’s just a matter of changing “play $sound” to “aplay $sound”, but it did take me some time to find that answer when I encountered the problem. I thought it was a PulseAudio issue, but now that I think about it, I didn’t have to change it on openSUSE, so it’s either not PA, or it’s some issue with Ubuntu’s implementation thereof. Anyway, I was rather pleased that I could finally do something helpful for him. Under the big, scary tattooed thug exterior, he’s an absolute living doll. He made the sweetest page for H.; she showed it to me last Monday, and all I could think was, “AWWWWW!” She’s got a real treasure in that one; he absolutely adores her, and I hope she knows that men like that don’t come along every day of the week. Yeah, he’s stubborn, and yeah, he’s given more to brooding when he’s pissed off than to saying anything about it, but he thinks the sun rises and sets because she exists on the earth. Goddamned fine man.

Sure, I like it when a photo makes Flickr’s Explore, but I’m not rabid about it, and I don’t check Scout every time I upload new stuff to see whether anything made it. It’s an interesting curiosity, that’s all. There are people who seem to think it’s some sort of “badge of honour” or that it means their photo is particularly good. Not so. Not so at all. If that were the case, this would not have made it, and yet, it did.

1. It’s obviously a snapshot taken indoors with whatever flash was on the camera.
2. Date stamp. Come on…who doesn’t know how to turn off the goddamned date stamp?
3. Points awarded for composition…zero, because it’s terrible. Looks like she’s sitting on the old chesterfield in somebody’s basement rec room.
4. The model. Christ, that poor pig-snouted fattie-beast hit every branch on the fugly tree when she fell out. Her eyes are shut, she has moles that would have me making an appointment with a dermatologist, and when your face is that round, “flat” is not a good hairstyle. The giant blobs of fat that pass for her boobs are (sort of) held in place by the sprung elastic of that old bra.

That, “my friends” (hey, it works for McInsane!) is why Explore doesn’t matter, and why people should pay no attention whatsoever to whether or not their photos make it in. Besides, it’s easy to game with a little careful group-whoring, but B. found out the hard way that when you group whore, you’d best be prepared to keep putting the time and effort into group-whoring because if you don’t, your views and comments will drop significantly when your “fair-weather Flickr friends” don’t return to see your new stuff. 😉

For reasons known only to the program, Audacious didn’t feel like opening FLAC files this morning. I suppose it might have been the Icelandic file names, or some setting I forgot to change because I never use Audacious, but…whatever. I don’t care because CLI can batch process, which is faster. When I forget…I need lame and flac installed, and this command will not overwrite the original FLAC files. Default bitrate is 128, and I left it there, but it can be changed with flags.

for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd “$file” | lame -h – “${file%.flac}.mp3”); done

Hahahaha! Aaaahahaha! *gasp* Hahahaha! 😆

I love you, Tina Fey!

Yeah, again. I sort of dimly recall having heard good things about “Dust”, a new theme that is (or at least was) in the running to be the default for Intrepid. Intrepid’s out in beta now, and will be released on the 30th of the month, but I hadn’t really paid too much attention. Hardy works fine for me, and although I’ll probably install Intrepid very shortly after its official release (just because I can), it doesn’t really matter too much to me until release time. Anyway, I got bored with my black and gold theme, so I went back to my customised Ubuntu Studio for a day, and then got bored again. I went looking for more dark themes, but nothing really caught my fancy. Then, I came across a mention of Dust, and finally decided I’d go see what the fuss was about. The plain, default Dust theme is very nice, but I got a pack with some variations as well; there’s Dust, of course, and Dust Sand, Dust Burnt and Dust Aurora. I love “Aurora”! Most of my wallpapers tend toward grey-blue-black, so I had to do a bit of searching before I found one that I liked with the new theme. Most people use reddish or “wood” wallpapers with it, but I don’t like those; I wanted something abstract and a little different. At first, I wasn’t sure I liked this, but the more I looked at it the better I did like it. I hope they do choose Dust as the default Intrepid theme, or at least make it available. I did change the icons because I don’t like the orange-ish folder icons that come with it, and of course I changed the pointer to my beloved “neutral”, but the rest is very nice. Oh yeah…the Dust FF theme is separate (that’s for when I forget and don’t know why FF didn’t take the Dust theme the way I remember. Hehe).

I set up MSN on P’s new phone, too, which means that I can send him quick messages if they’re not important enough to make him answer his phone when he’s on the road or in a store (we both hate it when self-important idiots are shouting into their cell phones in the store, as if, “Have you left Wal-Mart yet?” is somehow critical information). He also said that he wants me to get a phone, too. I haven’t had a cell phone since….oh, I think it was 1999 or so, and didn’t really want one until I got to play with P’s new one. He has all the bells and whistles because NREC pays for his, but I don’t need all of that. I don’t spend enough time on the phone to need unlimited minutes, so as long as I have a reasonable number that I can roll over if I don’t need them, and can send text messages, that’ll do. MSN would be a bonus, but if that’ll put me on a more expensive plan, it’s not really worth it. I looked at phones last night and found a pink Sony “Walkman” phone that I like; it’s got a 2mpx camera with 4x zoom, music player with Memory Stick (mini) slot to expand storage, and although it has more features than I’ll need with the limited plan I’ll get, it’s fine because NREC pays up to $150 for the phone, and there’s a rebate, so it’ll end up costing us nothing at all for the phone itself. Besides, it’s pretty, and it’s pink. The discount NREC offers for the plan (to family members of employees) is only 8%, but considering they don’t have to offer anything at all, I’ll take it. 🙂

Another potential consideration is the Samsung Blackjack II in pink, because it’s got a full QWERTY keyboard, but it’s really got a lot I won’t use, doesn’t have expandable storage, and I didn’t have any trouble typing on P’s phone when I was playing with it this morning, so…meh, I dunno. I haven’t decided yet.

I found this comment on a CBS video clip during which Katie Couric asked Biden and Palin about Roe v. Wade, and whether or not there were other SCOTUS decisions with which they disagreed. Biden did well, and answered the second question with the fact that he believes (and indeed put it before SCOTUS) that abused women should have the right to sue their abusers in Federal court if they can prove the abuse. He thought they should, SCOTUS said not. I don’t know enough about it to agree or disagree with his position, but then the Palinator came on and babbled a bunch of nonsense that clearly showed she hasn’t got a fucking clue. She did okay on Roe v. Wade, because she’d been prepped for that one, but she could not even name one other SCOTUS decision, let alone one with which she disagreed. As usual, when confronted with a question she can’t answer (which is the vast majority of them, and means “any question to which she has not already been coached for an answer”), she went into babbling generalities, talking for several minutes without saying anything at all. All politicians do that to some extent, but most are not so bad at it that it is an insult to the intelligence of someone with an IQ hovering around room temperature. She is that bad…and worse. Well, at least she hasn’t got poor old Putin “rearing his head” this time and isn’t claiming to have read every newspaper and magazine ever published in her lifetime. Jesus wept. Anyway, someone left a comment below the video that nicely summed up Hockey Mom Barbie; it’s spot-on and I wish I’d written it myself. Christ…how does Couric manage to interview that blithering fucking idiot with a straight face?!

“I recently interviewed Sarah Palin. Here’s how it went.

Me: What day is it today?

Sarah Palin: There are 7 days in a week. There are many days. We could choose from many different days.

Me: Yes, but what day is today?

Sarah Palin: Today could be one of 7 days. And I have a great appreciation for how beautifully the week is set up. I mean, our question might even be rephrased to ask if we haven’t lost sight of the bigger picture, where the day is just a small part of what constitutes a week, which would be yet another part of what is known as the month.

Me: I just want to know what day it is, specifically.

Sarah Palin: Any and all of them that have come and gone. I have always been comfortable with any and all of them. My point, however, is that it all comes back to the year. I am someone who believes that the voiceless can count on me to represent the calendar in an unbiased way, from within one of the highest offices of government. After all, I have always made myself clear, and I am not apologetic about who I am. There are 30 days in a month and 52 weeks in a year. I was born in the 20th century, and this might already be the 21st , who knows? Here, our sense of the space-time continuum has come to be challenged by those who insist they must know what day of the week we are presently at. And I think it needs to be addressed in concrete terms for the good of the American people. Thank you.”

EDIT: Best Palin-name, ever: Caribou Barbie 😆