If you select multiple files in Windows and accidentally open them instead of copying them, Windows will dutifully open each one. So will Linux. The difference is that if you decide you’d rather not click the close button 102 times, Windows will make you bring up the Task Manager, find the application and try to stop it. Then, it will hang while it attempts (and generally fails) to stop 102 instances of it. If you’re fortunate enough to have made the fuckup in Linux, you open a terminal and type “killall gthumb”. Hit enter, and the process immediately stops dead in its tracks and closes any gThumb windows that are currently open. Penguin power! 🙂

Why can’t identifying insects be my full-time job? Aside from going out to chase them around with a camera, there’s not much I like more than solving insectile and arachnid mysteries. Occasionally, I can get a plant, but the insects are by far the most fun. I leave the group page up and come back to smack F5, just to see whether anyone’s put up something easy, like a giant leopard moth or a cabbage white, or a tiger beetle. Real work sucks balls.

I’m caught up with housework, paid work, my own computer maintenance and water changes (well, when I finish today’s, but there are only four). I’m caught up with replies and PMs on AQM, on Flickr–including comments on my contacts’ photos–and caught up on email to almost everyone, except for L., and he’ll understand. I wrote a long message to M. this AM because he’s at home, recovering from surgery, and not feeling very well, bless his heart. For reasons I will never understand because I suspect it takes him a lot of time and not inconsiderable effort to read them, he actually likes to get my book-length messages in English. Very proud of myself for that one, considering he wrote just yesterday and it usually takes me a week or more to reply. I still need to clean off my desk and get my Pwrincess Shoes (P’s term, not mine) out of the washer so they’ll dry, and find out how the hell those chafer beetles got inside the basement last night, but dammit, I’m on a roll here. I even installed a new, better frontend for Tracker this morning. Actually, I didn’t just install it, I built a package from the source and installed it from my package, just because I could! I am Geek Girl, and I’m an efficient, organised maniac!

Don’t want to change the goddamned fish tanks, either. Perfect time for a little critique of Flickr Explore! 🙂 Yeah, I “liberated” all of these images, but nobody who gives a shit will ever see my bitch blog anyway.

WTF any of these are doing in “interestingness”, I will never know.

#1
What the hell is this? A cull from a Sears catalogue shoot? About the outfit itself I’m mostly indifferent, but why do people love themselves so much that they have to photograph and post every goddamn thing they drag out of the closet and put on? Bad enough when attractive people do it, but…. Where is she going with that gigantic ugly purse? Shoplifting? The “All you can eat for $7.99” Chinese buffet? Anyway, bleh, and no, not interesting.

#2
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. BS, MS and PhD. The 80s made a comeback…but nobody cared.

#3
I think this young man has somehow managed to confuse the words “interesting” and “advertising”. Your music is probably shit, and no one is interested in your scrobble, much less in your performance as a human Last.fm billboard. The iPod is okay, but you paid for it…why is it displaying ads? P.S. Turning the camera so the shot is crooked does not make it “artistic.”.

#4
What the hell is this supposed to be? It looks like someone was trying to make amateur porn with a webcam. Girlie, swipe some of that lip gloss off, get rid of your double chin, and get a real camera before you try for “erotic.” This is just ugly; like the top-listed “don’t” in a photography book.

In the interest of fairness and to prove that I’m not just picking on images of things that I don’t like, I deliberately found four pictures I liked that had made “interestingness”, but were of subjects that I do not like.

#1
I can’t stand kids and frankly, sunset pictures are so boring that my eyes immediately glaze over, but I have to admit this is a good shot.

#2
Ditto pictures of buildings. They’re generally rectangular and people generally live or work inside them. Snore. Still, I have to give this shot of cottages in the Cotswolds credit.

#3
Don’t like sepias or “toned down” colour images, and don’t like portraits. Still, this has character.

#4
I abso-fucking-lutely hate primates of all varieties, but even I must admit that this is a damned good picture.

Apparently, the concept of “interestingness” has been lost upon me. 😉

P.S. Fuckin’ WP. No matter what I do, it won’t let me put the Last.fm picture in the post! EDIT: Hm….all I had to do was change the file name, and it didn’t even have any special characters. Hm.

I wasn’t in bad shape for the first round yesterday, but by 1800h during the second round, I was seriously beginning to wonder. Thankfully, we had Ben on our card for the second round, and he’s so damned funny that you have to laugh even when you’re hot (94F and not a breeze to be found), sweaty (morning clothes were soaked before 1100h, post-shower clothes soaked by 1400h), exhausted (3.5 mile walk for each round), itchy from insects and pollens, scratched by thorns and your left shoulder feels as if it’s been pulled out of its socket a bit by the harness of the heavy bag (discs, water, first aid kit, other misc. junk) you’ve been carrying all day. I’m at least getting a Gateway tie-dye T-shirt out of this goddamned tournament. Well, assuming I survive the two rounds we have to play today…

If I was three, I’d be lying on the floor, kicking and screaming, “Nooooooo! Doan-wanna-go!” 😆

Perfectly normal banner advert (didn’t block it because it was hosted on-site and not a site I usually visit):

I did, however, turn off the goddamned flashing, but not before I noticed this:

So, roughly translated, Reactine and Benadryl sponsor….Engrish.

Stupid quiz that gives you the thing that annoying people keep putting in their Flickr profiles. Here’s my “aura”. 😆

Uh…right. I’d make a fantastic life coach, but only if the job came with the “coach whip”. I’m actually not entirely sure what a life coach is. They’ve got one thing right, though; whatever charisma I may possess is not always immediately obvious!

I am so grateful that I have just one sibling.

When the phone rang, I ignored it a first, thinking that anyone calling that late probably wasn’t someone I wanted to talk to anyway, but then I looked at the clock and realised that it was even later than I’d thought–2225h. Curious, I checked the caller ID and recognised the NS area code, and didn’t have to look past the next three digits before I knew who was calling. There are exactly two reasons that my brother would call me after midnight, his time, when I happen to know that he has to get up early in the morning, and he happens to know that I don’t stay up late at night. One reason involves the hospital, and the other involves his computer. He’d left a message, but I didn’t bother listening, I just called him right back.

He answered the phone sounding very, very tired and decidedly unamused. He said, “I’ve got trouble. Biiiiiig trouble. The computer is fucked beyond fucked, and B. needs it because she’s got to take some important test online tomorrow. She’s been studying and took the whole day off work to do this test, but the computer won’t start.” Earlier this evening, he’d asked about updating some DVD burning software, and I’d sent him explicit instructions on how to do it. For some reason–even though I’ve known him since he was born–I didn’t call and walk him through it every step of the way. He saw the instructions, but for reasons known only to him, the word “readme” didn’t carry any weight and…he didn’t “read me”.

I asked him to describe exactly what it was doing, and tell me what, if anything, he had tried up to that point. He said it was crapping out and doing an automatic restart (default behaviour for XP when something goes very wrong) just before he’d expect the desktop to start to load, and that he had already tried a system restore. Fabulous. Crapping out at that time after having updated DVD burning software was most likely a driver or a copy protection system error, and without even being able to see the computer, given information by someone who’s not computer illiterate, but a long, long way from a geek…oh, boy. He couldn’t get it to start in Safe Mode before he’d called, but maybe knowing that I was on the phone scared it or something because we finally did get it into safe, though without networking. Tried another restore point, but no joy. By this time, he’s so tired that he’s barely coherent, I’m yawning, too, but trying to bolster his spirits even though I don’t have a fucking clue how I can help when I’m something like 1500 miles away and he’s got no Internet access, and the goddamned computer still won’t start. B. will castrate him with a grapefruit knife if she doesn’t have a computer to take that test, and they don’t have a backup or a laptop.

I’m as non-religious as they get, so I asked V. to pretend he was, and start praying while we tried an even earlier restore point. It took a fucking dog’s age to restore, and he kept asking whether he should reset it (yikes), but a slow system restore is a good thing because system restore is always slow when it’s working the way it should. At 2325h my time, 2h later his time, the restore seemed successful, so we crossed everything (V. said, “If it sticks out, I’ve got it crossed!” 😆 ) and restarted. He was giving me a play-by-play as it was booting, and when he said, “This doesn’t look good,” I thought, “Christ. I don’t even know what else to try because I have no fucking idea what he did to fuck it up in the first place.” This time, though, there was joy, and there was Internet. B. will be able to take her test tomorrow, and V. will be damned tired at work tomorrow, but at least won’t be singing soprano in the boys’ choir to make money for his alimony payments!

I don’t know why it didn’t work the first time, and I don’t care. It works now, he didn’t lose anything important, and I’m very glad that I have just the one brother. Tech support over the phone is a bitch at the very best of times, and this was not the best of times.

I have died and gone to linguistic heaven–I stumbled across the IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive) site! I’ve often said that I would like a “collection” of accents, and here I have found exactly that! Many are reading the same boring text, but….accents from all over the world. Not boring. I listened to “Nigeria” three times, and “Haiti” twice. I could listen to the Central and Eastern European ones for hours, and I am giving consideration to asking, “Male, actor, Moscow, English poor” to marry me (“…fadder wass pro-FEH-sor econo-MEH-trrik, meth-eh-MEH-tih-ken”). 🙂

According to the quiz I took yesterday on another site, my own accent is “Mid-Atlantic, also known as the ‘Philadelphia accent’.” I listened to the Nova Scotia accents on IDEA, and they’re exactly right, but I know I don’t sound like that, so perhaps I did end up with a “Philadelphia accent” after all. Americans make fun of Canadians for saying “aboot”, but I’ve never known one who did; they say it like “a boat”, and I made a conscious effort to not say it that way because I thought it sounded silly before I ever heard an American chuckle at “aboot”. Sometimes I’ll lapse back into my Annapolis Valley accent, but only when I’m tired or pissed off and only if I’m talking to someone who does talk that way. Anyway, whatever I sound like, at least it’s not that gawdawful flat, nasal twang from Buttfuck, Illinois! 😉

P.S. Also on my list of potential marriage proposals is the guy from Georgia (EU, not US). English that sounds like that can be as “halting” as it wants; I’ll listen to it anyway.

P.P.S. After mapping it, the quiz isn’t actually all that far off. Wrong country, of course, but only 1350km away.

Top Ten Reasons to not diet below healthy weight range, not get boob implants, and to (especially) avoid prolonged sun exposure:

Reason #1 – Someday, you won’t be twenty anymore.

Reason #2
Uh….never mind–that one’s more than enough.

Jesus tapdancing Christ, that is one scaaaaary old bag!

Somehow, I managed another (long-overdue) DB backup and WP upgrade without fucking anything up! It’s amazing how much I can accomplish when I’m trying to avoid doing something I don’t want to do….