I did not just explain to an ADULT the concept of decimals as they pertain to the measurement of parts per million. I can’t possibly have done that because any adult should understand what 0.25 and 0.5 mean in relation to 1 ppm. If he doesn’t get this, I’m going to have to explain the decimal system to him. I can–I’ve explained it to grade school kids and they understood–but if I must….yeesh.

EDIT: Well, thank Christ. I’m not convinced he understands decimals, but he did get the part where I told him to just bring it to 4.0, so I’m not going to push the issue. 😆

I’d called L. on Friday (?) because I had some little snippet of words in my head that I couldn’t quite remember and I thought he might. He didn’t return my call until yesterday, then we played phone tag until he finally won and I actually recognised the number. It’s been probably eight years since the last time I talked to him, but I’d no more than heard his voice before it may as well have been yesterday. He’s still his same old self; quirky and opinionated, but fiercely intelligent and very good-natured. Now that I think of it, we’ve known each other since we were twelve or thirteen years old, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say anything more than “sort of bad” about anyone. Oh, and apparently, Chris C. isn’t gay at all. Someone outed him (over something that had happened at a party, but I wasn’t there) in our senior year, and I didn’t think about it beyond, “Oh, he’s gay, is he? ‘Kay.” All these years, I’d assumed he was, but L. says not. I guess it’s a good thing that I’ve never run into C. at any time over the years because I’m sure I would’ve been embarrassed if I’d asked him about his boyfriend. Eek. Anyway, I kept L. on the phone long after he should have been in bed and I should have, too, but I’m still going to call him tomorrow (’cause I don’t pay for long distance). This time, I may actually let him get a word in edgewise. Heh.

P.S. He still remembers, “A vision in leather”. Jeezus. I remembered, but stuff like that always stays in my head. I didn’t mind his having said it at all–perfectly all right–but I’d fervently hoped no one else heard it. 😆

“Why am I attracted to sick fish?”

Because you want drama and sympathy, dumbass. Right or wrong, I buy sick fish sometimes, too. I bring them home, treat whatever disease they have and hope I caught it in time that they can recover. I don’t create frantic posts to ask for diagnostic help, and update them frequently with questions about switching medications because I think your first diagnosis was wrong. The first time, you bought fish with velvet because you didn’t know any better, and we didn’t mind helping one bit. Perhaps we shouldn’t have, since you obviously got the response that you wanted. This time, you knew better and you still bought a sick fish, and not only that, you’re wasting time that we could better spend teaching someone who DOESN’T know. You know the life cycle of the parasite because I’ve explained it to you and given you links to further reading. You know how the treatment goes because you’ve done it before. You’ve got the aquatic equivalent of Munchausen by proxy, but since sick fish are so easy to come by, you don’t have to make them sick yourself, you can just buy them that way.

P.S. If you’re going to use a shitty free host that takes forever and a fucking day to send your data, please post only thumbnails, not enormous images. Irfanview is free for Windows, Mac comes with an image editor, and GIMP is free for Linux. Your huge pictures make my page load too slowly EVERY FUCKING TIME I HAVE TO REPLY IN YOUR THREAD, and it’s not like your blurry shots are of any diagnostic use to me anyway. When I say “clear picture”, that’s what I mean.

I’m just going to step out for a moment so I can throw up on my fucking shoes.

“OMG! I got an SUV for Christmas! My other car was so old and I just love myself so much that I decided to celebrate the Season of Conspicuous Consumption by buying myself a new one. I absolutely HAD to have an SUV, too, because every patriotic American knows that if you can’t afford to fill an SUV gas tank, you’re a communist..or is that a terr-ist? Well, whatever–it’s one of those”

Christ on a crutch. Yeah, you need that SUV to get through the eight-foot snow drifts down there in the freezing cold of MS, don’t you? DIAF, and while you’re at it, STFU. Nobody cares.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, my retinas. No.

Christ, no!

In all fairness, the photographer(s) who took the last shots were working with a catastrofuck of epic proportions to begin with and were not professionals like the first two, but they just made it worse by shooting in the dark instead of at twilight. I hope the ones I take of the display in the park (this weekend, perhaps) will be something closer to the first two than the last two. I’ve not seen the display lit up yet (only during the day), but it appears that there should be some nice reflections off the pond if the water is nice and still and I use a tripod. We’ll see! 🙂

WTF is going on with Flickr? Where are all of the GOOD pictures? If I see one more “wardrobe remix” of whatever some stupid broad decided to wear today or a picture of the contents of anyone’s purse in the “Interesting, last 7 days” lot, I’m going to fucking vomit. I don’t care what you wear or what’s in your purse and although the purse might have been an interesting concept THE FIRST TIME IT WAS DONE, it’s not anymore. Ditto the gawdawful B&W image of some dumbass’s pregnancy-ravaged body–thankfully, I wasn’t eating. Photo hint: Shooting in B&W doesn’t make it “art”, and your sagging, baggy, stretch-marked body is NOT in the least attractive. You gave birth. Whoop-de-fucking-doo…you and HOW many teenage welfare hos?

No other way to say it. Just fucking cool.

Those are some seriously expensive batteries! (Looks like someone entered the model number where the price was supposed to go! :))

Score another one for the Geek Girl! I resisted the urge to force XGL/Compiz down Dapper’s throat because from what I’d read, it was mostly a bunch of hacks. After I upgraded to Edgy, I still avoided Beryl (and Compiz) because at first, you had to hack to get it to work with the current Nvidia driver. Then, Nvidia released a new driver, but I still held off Beryl because the driver was beta. I’ll happily use Adobe’s Flash beta because if that doesn’t work, it doesn’t really matter, but if my graphics driver doesn’t work, that does matter. Now, however, the driver has been officially released and I am typing this from my pretty spinning desktop cube with its wobbly windows, fancy fading and cool animation effects.

I was going to wait for the long weekend to install Beryl, just in case I fucked something up and had to muddle my way around to fix it, but I got inspired this morning and decided, “Ah, what the hell!” I started a bit after noon, knowing full well that I had water changes to do before we left for the DG course at one, so of course, I fucked it up. First because I wanted to see whether Beryl would work at all with my existing driver. It didn’t–locked X up tight and I had to kick myself out. I left Beryl (and Emerald) installed, but logged back into plain Gnome to go get the updated driver from Nvidia. I installed the new driver (after I finally remembered how to drop back into runlevel 3–only done that once before and forgot the key combination, which, for future reference, is Ctrl+Alt+F1), but that broke X because in my excitement, I’d forgot to uninstall the old driver, and that did not go well. Even after I made sure the old version of the nvidia kernel was unloaded, it still refused to start the X server. Anyway, I had to leave X broken to go to the DG course, but while P, Bob and Larry were playing (they were there when we got there, so P played with them), I was thinking about what I needed to do to get myself a desktop again without having to be root (dunno what happened there, but it would start fine if I was root).

After we got home, I did a dpkg-reconfigure and told Xorg to use Vesa, just so I could get to a GUI and see WTF was going on in there. I cheated and used Synaptic to remove the old nvidia driver, and checked to make sure it was showing removed in Automatix (more cheating–heh), which it was not. Removed it from there, then dropped to runlevel 3 and tried the latest driver install again. I had an error, something about needing the X.org SDK/development package, but I said, “Fuck it–we’ll see what happens without it”. Glx info said that direct rendering was enabled, so I guessed I was good to go. I rebooted rather than just restarting GDM, just to make sure nothing I didn’t want loaded was going to fuck me up again.

Once I got back to my desktop (mine, not root’s), I changed the screen resolution (for some reason, it gave me 1024×768), edited xorg.conf to reflect the change, then started beryl-manager. Woo-hoo! Spinning cube desktops, all the pretty animation effects….but beryl’s output complained about “no something or other at depth 32” (mine is set at 24), I had no window borders, no wobbly windows, and although I could see all of the themes in the Emerald theme manager, I couldn’t select any of them. Damn. I knew I must’ve forgot something, and eventually, I figured out that I hadn’t told the Nvidia driver to enable GLX visuals. Oh….oops. A quick copy and paste into xorg.conf and I was good to go. Now I’m bordered, selected, animated, wobbly, fading and spinning….and my desktop looks pretty damned cool, too! 🙂 Yay for the triumph of Geek Girl’s dislike for R-ing T whole FM even when she hasn’t half a fucking clue what she’s doing. I don’t have Beryl configured to start on boot because I don’t know whether it’ll get in my way when I’m doing something, but it’s simple enough to start it any time I want it with two little words. If I decide I like it enough, I’ll create the startup script and the session file for Xorg. Even if I don’t like it and find I never use it, I’m keeping it installed ’cause it’s an accomplishment.