Well, that left me feeling a bit flat. There was a kernel update available in the repos this AM, and since the kernel is the very core of the OS, as it downloaded, I mentally went over the list to make sure I had everything that I needed. Backup of xorg.conf, copy of the Nvidia driver, know the command to stop gdm. Yup, all set! Dutiful little penguinista that I am, when the kernel update was complete and the cute little “Restart required to use updated software” icon appeared on my panel, I pointy-clickied (it’s a word) and told it to go ahead and restart. I was ready for X to choke on the restart, and…it didn’t. Nope, it was fine, and I didn’t get to show off my uber-geek skills (to my coffee cup and the junk on my desk, since no one else is here). I’m almost bummed; I didn’t get to be Geek Girl and save the digital day. You know you need a life when…. 😆

Just when you think your grammarant could not possibly get any longer, you read this:

This is exactly why you go to school, learn a trade, or bust your ass to accel in something.

Yes, that is “accel” as in the first two syllables of “accelerate”. I’m going to guess that he meant “excel”. I hope this guy has learned a trade or busts his arse because he sure as hell wasted whatever time he spent in school!

For the last fucking time…

It’s would’ve or would have. It is NOT “would of.” Regardless (NOT “irregardless”, which is not even a word) of what you think you’re hearing, “would of” does not even make sense! How can you not see that? Well, aside from the fact that you’re (that would be the contracted form of “you are”, NOT the possessive form, “your”) an illiterate idiot.

“Wreckless” means that a hapless ship did not go down on the briny ocean toss’d. If I must, I will concede that Americans do insist upon calling automobile accidents “wrecks” in spite of the fact that their insurance companies sell accident coverage, not wreck coverage, but I won’t give you “wreckless” for that, either. If I did, “with wreckless abandon” would be the way you drive when you’re late for work and you don’t rear-end the car in front of you. For the love of all things holy and unholy, and all things in between, it’s RECKLESS. Reckless as in not taking the time to reckon the potential outcome of your actions. RECKLESS!

“For all intensive purposes.” I beg your pardon? How can you actually type this and not realise you’ve made a mistake? Jesus wept. “FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES”!

If I see, “you’ve got another thing coming” one more time and it does not mean that Amazon had to ship my order in two parts, I’m going to fucking puke. This phrase is the tail-end of a longer one (comes from an old joke, I believe) that goes, “If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming.” Although the first part is rarely said aloud (NOT “allowed”), it is implied, and it stands as it is, with “think.”

Advice, advice, ADVICE! You cannot give me “advise” because ADVISE IS A FUCKING VERB!

“I watched with baited breath…” I hope you were watching fish!

Mac – short for “Macintosh”, an Apple computer product name. MAC – Media Access Control. The thing that says “OSX” is a Mac. It may have a MAC, but it is a Mac.

“Wait! I want to go, to!” You want to go to…the store? To…a movie? Perhaps you should go to…an English class!

There is no such thing as a poisonous rattlesnake, viper or adder! A cane toad is poisonous. A poison dart frog is poisonous (if it’s been eating the right insects to create the toxins). A snake, scorpion, stonefish, lionfish, stingray, cone snail, wasp, bee or spider is VENOMOUS. Poison is ingested; venom is injected (or do you not know the difference between those two, either?)

“A hard road to hoe.” I can scarcely believe this phrase exists, and yet…it does. Idiot, how many times have you seen someone hoeing a fucking road? Okay, now how about….a row? You know, like a row of vegetables that one might weed with…oh, I don’t know…how about a….hoe?

“Give credit where credit is do.” “Do to his poor command of the English language, he appeared to be an illiterate fool.” Christ in a sidecar. Look at your phone bill. Now look at your utility bill. Okay, now the library books (assuming you have ever in your life actually read a book). What do you see? You see the word “due”, which, in the first sentence–means “owed or payable”, and (though somewhat less correctly) in the second, “because of”. The word “do” is a verb that means (among others) “to perform, to engage in” or even “to make” (I suppose) and has nothing to do with either credit or reasons. If you spoke actual English, you wouldn’t make this mistake because THE GODDAMNED WORDS AREN’T EVEN PRONOUNCED THE SAME WAY! “Due” sounds like “dew” (hope that won’t confuse you) and “do” sounds like the doo in “doo-doo” (you’re familiar with that one, aren’t you?)

*pant* *pant* Okay…that’s better. Note to self…never read comments on any website, ever.

P.S. If you’re going to correct someone else’s “grammer”, for the love of $deity, spell the word correctly. In spite of the fact that “grammer” is not even a word, if it were a word, it would be what a three-year-old calls his mother’s mum.

For Christ’s sake, somebody turn on the heat! My beloved Canon returned home last Wednesday. According to the paperwork, they attributed the weird noise to its having “sustained some kind of shock”, which is patently false unless their definition of “some kind of shock” could be fulfilled by having it tap lightly against my sternum if I walk without holding it. That kind of hurts after a while (ever had anyone poke you lightly but repeatedly in a bony spot?), so I don’t even let it do that often. Anyway, it’s back, it’s fixed with a new optical assembly, and the repairs were at no charge to me, so whatever makes them happy in their notes is fine. Now if only the goddamned temperature would get above….oh, let’s say….FUCKING FREEZING! It barely crept above that yesterday, but it was so windy that it felt like it was down in the teens, so we didn’t go to the park. If I don’t get out there today or tomorrow (P’s taking a vacation day), I’m going to miss the lilacs, and that is entirely unacceptable. Yes, lilacs matter. So do cherry blossoms, violets, phlox, Virginia bluebells, and anything else that blooms and looks pretty. Bugs matter, too.

Today’s desktop, because it’s fun to put an adorable widdle cartoon Tux on a very Vista-y wallpaper on a system that doesn’t even run Windows, let alone the bloated, DRM-riddled hog that is Vista. I like Xfce a lot better when it looks mostly like Gnome and still uses fewer resources.

I love FF. Even with Charter’s stupid web search, I can still use the keyword function (for any sites I visit regularly) without having to change anything. All I have to do is bookmark the page and assign a keyword to the bookmark. I love the easy way out. 🙂

Rant sent to L. this AM…oughta make his day. 😆
Now, for some industrial-strength bitching (heh):

Our ISP is Charter Communications, a huge corporation that serves all of the midwest, and several areas over the whole country. We’ve had Charter since 2001, and that’s basically because it’s the only broadband option except for crappy 1.5 DSL, provided by what used to be SBC, but then became SBC Yahoo!, and now (I believe) is ATT Yahoo! (who the fuck knows what it’s called anymore–welcome back, Ma Bell…or should that be T-1000?) Overall, I’ve been satisfied with Charter’s service; I suppose I’d give them an 8/10, which is pretty good for a huge corporation where they can’t even find you information unless you give your phone number, including area code (your name or street address won’t do it, not even the account number off the bill will help them find you).

Even when I was still a Windows user, I did not use Internet Explorer. I never used it; back in the 90s, I used Netscape, then I switched to Opera for a while, and have used Firefox since 0.8 was released around 2000 (was called Phoenix back then, until Phoenix BIOS complained). I like FF because not only is it more secure than IE, and allows me to easily block adverts (couldn’t bear the web otherwise), it’s much more customisable. The toolbar looks the way I want it to look with the buttons I want it to have, and the browser behaves the way I want it to behave. I install the extensions that I want to use, and don’t install the ones I won’t use, and about:config is always there if I want to make something work differently. The web….my way (mostly). Anyway, one feature of FF that I really like is the Keyword URL. If I’m too lazy (which is usually the case) to type in “www.ebay.com” (or whatever), then I just type “ebay” into the address bar and smack Enter. FF is set to search Google for whatever I’ve typed, and automatically open Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” result. In all probability, that’s where I wanted to go; “google” didn’t get into the dictionary to mean “to search, esp. with Google.com” for no reason. If I didn’t want FF to do that, I could just change the setting, but I’d always left it because I like that feature. Why take the time to type www.(whatever).com if I can just type the keyword, right?

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to go to some page (forgot where), so I just typed the keyword into the address bar. Instead of going directly to the page, I got a page titled “Charter Web Search – powered by Yahoo! Search”, complete with an entire fscking page of “Sponsored results” (i.e. advertisers paid for top ranking). I thought, “WTF?” and checked my FF settings just to make sure I hadn’t messed with something and forgot I’d done it. Nope, configuration still set so that it should give me Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” result. I tried a few more searches, and each time, got the stupid Charter search page. Then it dawned on me that FUCKING CHARTER HAS SOLD ITS CUSTOMERS OUT TO THAT HEAP OF STEAMING AD-RIDDLED DOGSHIT, YAHOO!. Fucking bastards! I don’t like Yahoo!, I have never liked Yahoo! and I will never like Yahoo!. I use Flickr because Yahoo! (so far) hasn’t managed to fuck it up too much since they bought it, but I do not now and have not ever used Yahoo! services because….I don’t fucking like Yahoo!. I hate their cluttered portal page, I hate their search with its billion links to advertising results before any potentially useful results, I hate their mail, I hate their abso-fucking-lutely everything. I am PISSED. I’m paying that goddamned Charter a not insubstantial amount of money every fucking month (they’re one of the most expensive ISPs in the country) to give me high speed Internet. I am not paying them to override the preferences I have set in my browser, and I’m for fucking sure not paying them to serve me up a page of advertiser-sponsored results when I’m looking for something. If I want to buy something, I can certainly find Froogle on my own. Google does offer sponsored results with it’s normal search (i.e. not “I’m feeling lucky”), but Google gives a few of them, and more if you want (I block the sponsored results anyway). Yahoo! gives an en-fucking-tire page whether you want them or not; if you want the potentially useful stuff, you scroll down, and on top of that, Charter’s stuck a big fscking banner at the top so I have to scroll even farther down for anything that might be a useful result. Yahoo! does not offer anything like “I’m feeling lucky”. Goddamn it, my computer is mine. My screen real estate is mine. My browser preferences are mine. My internet connection is paid for by me, and is mine unless I do anything that violates the TOS, which I do not. My search results should be mine as well, NOT be sold off to the highest bidding advertiser. Charter Pipeline is an ISP. Internet…Service…Provider. Not Advertising Services Provider; if I wanted this bullshit, I’d use AO-fucking-L! Grrrrr! I emailed Charter support (too pissed off to call or live chat) to tell them how much I disliked the new arrangement, and ask whether there’s any way to work around it, but I’m certain that there is not. If anyone looks up my account, I might get a reply (I’ve got *ahem* “notes” on the account that I suspect may contain the words “difficult customer” and possibly even “ill-tempered bitch” LOL), but otherwise, I’m probably stuck with it…unless I switch to ATT Yahoo! DSL, which I will do at the approximate time that King George converts to Buddhism.

I’m so fucking SICK of being bombarded by advertising every time I turn around. A half-hour TV show is twenty minutes, so even though I’m paying a substantial amount of money for my cable channels, one third of what I’m (ostensibly) paying for is advertising, and worse, the volume is at least one-third louder than the show itself. The adverts I don’t want and still have to pay for are shouting at me! Easily half of my snail mail is flyers, credit card offers and junk mail trying to sell me something. I bought a TeleZapper phone four years ago, and I’ve been on the Do Not Call list since the very day it became available, but still, telemarketers find enough loopholes in the laws that I may get as many as ten calls a day (average is about four or five). I can’t listen to the local radio station at all (not that I would–it’s owned by ClearChannel) because they play three songs, then three or four minutes of adverts. Billboards all over the damned town and along the highways, and the ones that don’t have actual adverts have the phone number you can call to get your advert placed on it! Magazines that used to be good are now nothing more than full page ad catalogues. Can’t go to a movie (assuming one were worth seeing) without 20 minutes of ads/trailers before the show starts. Product placement in movies–I couldn’t even finish watching I, Robot because I was so distracted (I liked the story and wanted to see how badly they’d screwed it for the movie). Targeted ads in games–a popular title goes for fifty or sixty bucks at release time, and still they want more? Were it not for FF, Adblock Plus/Filterset.G, NoScript and a hefty hosts file, I couldn’t stand to be on the Internet at all because there’s so much advertising! I don’t give my real email address out on any website, ever (I have “spamcatcher” Gmail accounts for that), and yet I still get spam and “special offers”. It’s got bad enough over the years that if you’re not on my whitelist, you’re probably not getting mail through to me unless I know ahead of time that you’re sending it and can intercept it. Goddamn it, if I want to buy something, I know how to go shopping, and if I don’t know what I want, I know how to compare product features and price, and how to find customer reviews. If I don’t want to buy it, then shoving it in my face is for goddamned sure not going to help your cause. There’s no escape, though; it’s everywhere, all of the time. So far, the park is safe, but the disc golf club was thinking about having local businesses sponsor the cost of concrete tee pads (so you don’t slip on wet grass or mud when you tee off), in exchange for…putting plastic plaques with the business name on the poles. Jesus Christ on a flying moped, juggling flaming batons! I just want the advertising to STOP! Enough!

Okay… *pant* *pant* Whew….I’m tired now.

EDIT: Okay, I found half a solution. At the bottom of the worthless search page, there is a tiny “About this page” link that takes you to a settings page that offers other search engine options, or a regular DNS error page (at least until I clear cookies the next time…*sigh*). I can (and did) set Google as my search, but still can’t use the keyword:URL function of FF. Fuckers!

Going to try a spawn. Jesus H. Christ, you can’t even keep an adult alive. Every one of your baby cories keeled over and died, and now you’re going to torture a bunch of baby bettas to death. Please, just GET ANOTHER FUCKING HOBBY! FISHKEEPING IS NOT FOR YOU!

I love Linux. If you don’t like what comes with your distro, you’ve got actual options. I don’t like KDE and Xfce doesn’t quite do it for me. I’m a Gnome gal, so I use Ubuntu rather than Kubuntu or Xubuntu. That said, I’m not all that happy with Nautilus. It’s better since they ditched the default “spatial” behaviour, but if your /home is as full of junk as my /home (or /Music, or /Photographs) and you’re as “NOW!” as I am, then Nautilus is not your friend because it takes too fucking long to open the folder even if you prefer list view to file view. I’d tried Gnome Commander, and it was okay, but I’d have to get used to the dual-pane interface, and couldn’t be bothered. Heh. I could use Konquerer if I installed the KDE libs, but I never liked Konqueror that much, either (too web browser-ish). All I wanted was a fast file browser; I don’t need disc-burning capabilities (that’s what GnomeBaker is for), I don’t need it to sort or display thumbnails of my pictures (that’s why I installed Picasa), I don’t need it to do anything except show me the specified directory in a big goddamned hurry. Today, I discovered Pcmanfm (PC Man’s File Manager), an application that some guy in Taiwan wrote for use on slower machines. My machine isn’t slow, but I’m very impatient, so I thought if it ran well on a slow machine, it should fly on mine…and I was right. Same basic interface as Nautilus, but where Nautilus takes five seconds to load my enormous directories, Pcmanfm loads the same ones in under two. All I had to do to make my custom shortcuts work was change “nautilus” to “pcmanfm”; the paths are otherwise the same. I can even switch back and forth between Location view and Tree view, and (unlike Nautilus), if I enable hidden files, I don’t have to restart the program to get them to show. For some reason, Nautilus will hide hidden files without a restart, but won’t show them. Bug…I dunno, but it’s a pain when you usually hide them, but occasionally have to un-hide to access a particular app’s settings. It would be good if Pcmanfm could be set to open on single click because that’s the system-wide setting that I use, but I suppose I can learn to double-click; Christ knows I did it for enough years when I still used Windows. Anyway, I love Linux because I’m quite particular about the way my system looks and works, and I love choice.

Why? Why do you even bother remaining a member? The only times you log in are to say you’ve got a new fish, you have a sick fish and ask for help after you’ve already administered at least two incorrect medications and the poor thing is half-dead, or to tell us that one of your fish died. Guess what, arsehole? We don’t care. Our board is not your personal fucking blog, it’s a community of people who like fish trying to help and advise other people who like fish. Community…people working together, not people reading your sporadic updates. Just spare us your blog entries and don’t post at all–no one will notice you’re gone, believe me.

Muahahaha! Geek Girl rides again! I had a file that I wanted to be an MP3, but it was in that stupid (and entirely unnecessary, since there is no advantage to it) Monkey’s Audio APE format. Linux has no problem exporting a sane (and standard) format like FLAC to MP3, but does not support APE without some work. I went looking for a way to at least convert it to FLAC, and discovered that it involved not inconsiderable use of the CLI, including installing some things from source. CLI doesn’t bother me, but installing from source has never been in my top ten favourite pastimes. At that point in time, I could have just given the file to P and had him hunt down some little Windows freeware app to re-encode it to something useful, but I thought, “No, goddammit, the harder they’re going to make it, the more determined I am to do it.” First, I enabled APE plugin support for both Beep and XMMS (just because I could and it’s cool to watch software compile), then I hunted down a script to convert to FLAC. Some of my paths were different, so I had to edit the script, and I had to give it executable permission, but it wasn’t too long before I had my FLAC file. A quick run through Audacity and I had my hard-won MP3. The file itself wasn’t so important; the important bit was that Geek Girl does not fear the CLI and can compile with the best of ’em…especially if the task at in question is something that Windows users get handed to them on a silver platter.