Author Archives: ZealotOnAStick

There’s This Nifty Thing, it’s Called a Turn Signal

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I hadn’t planned on going anywhere for lunch today.  However, due to my not reading the cooking directions Tuesday when I bought the pre-cooked, frozen, nuke’n’heat lemon-pepper chicken breasts, I lacked freaking plastic wrap.  Ok, so I’ll take the back road, run to Walmart real fast (hah!) and grab some plastic wrap . . . and maybe some pepperoni for home . . . oh, and a bigger tub of whipped cream for home . . . 

Anyway . . . leaving the megalith of wage-slavery, I was behind this guy in a big black truck.  I signal and start changing over to the leftmost lane (we both turned out into the center lane) of our side of the 7-lane road.  Big Black Truck Twerp also begins to change lanes – no turn signal – and sees me, swerves crazily (covering about 2 lanes of total width taken from all 3 lanes) and straightens out, slows down, and then changes lanes behind me, this time using his turn signal.  For the first lane change, anyway – not for the change into the turn lane, or his left turn into the Town and Country.  Oy, frigging idiots.

Random and Various Updates: Windy Dusty Edition

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So, yeah, life and stuff.  Things have been going ‘OK’ for me.  Not great.  But, overall, not crappy.  This post may be a little disjointed, I’m pretty much more or less randomly spewing thought onto the keyboard.

Work is going well.  I like this job. It’s kept me really pretty busy the last couple of weeks solid.  I’ve not really had that much time to take for myself (also known as: goofing off), and when I have had some time for that, I’ve mostly spent it trying to amuse, inform, or educate myself online (Reddit is my friend here.  I barely even LOOK at Digg anymore).  Thus, I’ve not dedicated much time lately to trying to sit down and write anything.  Hell, I wanted to just sit down and fire off a quick post this morning to vent and feel better about almost getting killed (as well as having my time wasted) this morning on the way to work.  Then I did something silly and tried to “upgrade” WordPress, and it trashed things, and wasted half an hour of my time, and about 2o minutes of James’ time, fixing it.  Hell, I should really honestly know better, backups before upgrades are, ya know, a good idea for a reason.

I’m making an actual, conscious effort to try to use tags on this post.  That’s probably why there are so many.  I’ve been really bad, sucking, really, about using tags.  It’s a Web 2.0 thing that I’ve just so very rarely found useful; in counterpoint, though, the few places I’ve found them useful they were VERY useful.

I started on a low-carb diet yesterday.  Not quite exactly Atkins, though very heavily influenced by Atkins.  It got hard for a bit last night, but I got past it.  I expect to have a few more days where I’ll have periods of intense carb-craving.  I’m determined to stay strong and will my way through it.  There’s a lot of things I want to do, and pretty much everything in my life I think will be easier if I can get down closer to my ideal weight.  The whole feeling better about my body and self-image thing will certainly be nice (and should give me more confidence, of course), but having less weight on my body to lug around will make things like trying to do pull-ups on the Iron Gym I bought and haven’t gotten anywhere near my $30 worth out of yet.  Less weight to power around trying to walk/run/jog should make it easier for me to do those things too.  I’ve basically just bitten the bullet on the expense thing . . . it’s going to cost more, period, but my health and attitude are worth more to me than maybe another two week delay before I move into my own apartment.

Moving into a place of my own again is certainly something I very much want to do.  Just the feelings of independence, of not having my cat relegated to a small travel trailer, where she only gets attention from me one visit a day, where she can run and play and be happier (of course, needing to pay freaking $450 or so for pet fees/deposit is ludicrous), where I don’t have to drive anywhere near as far everyday, where I could, if I so desired/needed, bring a woman home . . . all good and needed things.  But I’m trying to be smarter about things, listen to my dad, save up extra money, Just In Case, before I jump into a lease and a large chunk of monthly expenses that will leave me with very little discretionary income.  Being able to game again on my own schedule, with regularity, have a constant cable modem connection, etc., all very appealing.  But, my dad and I are getting along ‘OK’ right now, though I still handle a lot of things as if walking on eggshells so as not to piss him off and upset that.  

I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately.  Been trying a couple of different clients for it, TweetDeck and blu, and neither does quite just what I want, but if I they could be combined, with another little feature or two added, they’d rock as the ultimate Windows Twitter client.  Corey suggested I write it myself.  Hah!  That’s not quite what I’m going to tackle as my first project getting back into programming.  I like TweetDeck more, but it crashes all the damn time.  blu is stable, but lacking.  I’ll be adding some kind of WordPress Twitter plugin to the site here when I find one I like well enough.

Well, that’s probably enough time wasted for now.  I need to get back to work, wrestling with Advanced Installer’s inadequate documentation and the limitations of .msi files until I can get them to submit to my will.

Stuff of the Day, Tired Headachy Monday Version

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Spam of the Day: “Love yourself” (Ok.)

Pic of the Day: The Spinmallow

Link of the Day: Blogs aren’t money-makers.  Gosh.  Really now?

Quote of the Day: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein

(Note: I started this Monday morning, when I had a horrible throbbing headache.  It was so bad, I didn’t get back to it until today.)

Site Layout hosed, temporarily

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So, after I made my last post, and then tweeted it, I foolishly upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 automatically.  Now, it’s hosed my layout.  Will get it fixed, sometime.

Edit: Wow.  25 minutes to get the idiocy fixed.  @hate WP 2.7.1 upgrade.  I really need to get with James sometime and rip this theme to bits and get things changed so that I can get it to work with the 3 column layout I want with dynamic width.

Midland Drivers are Idiots

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The title of this post is something I’ve said all too many times.  I’ve said it (or paraphrased it, anyway) in other cities I’ve lived in, mostly as a comparison, “Yeah, ok, but they’re not as bad as Midland drivers.”  I thought that Fort Wayne drivers were bad; I thought that Huntsville drivers were bad.  Returning to Midland, however, and driving here after driving in several other cities and states, has reinforced for me, just how terrible and stupid Midland drivers can be.

I don’t know, maybe Midland drivers have gotten worse over the last several years.  Maybe there are just MORE bad drivers in Midland.  Maybe I’ve just gotten spoiled by a better class of idiot drivers from other cities.  But it’s definitely worse here than I remember before.  I continually see more and more amazing displays of vehicular stupidity the longer I’m here.  The day and a half of icy roads a couple of weeks ago, I thought, were going to be some of the worst displays I could expect.  Alas, I was so wrong.  Give Midland a little dust storm – a weather phenomenon anyone who’s lived here more than 6 months should be familiar with – and people amaze me even more with how fucking stupid they can be.

I came up with an idea several years back, which I’m even more in favor of now: All Midland drivers should be forced to spend like 3 months or so driving a regular work commute schedule in a big car-oriented city, like DFW, Phoenix, Indianapolis, or so forth.  Someplace that HAS more than lip service to public transportation, but where individually owned cars are still the primary mode of getting where you need to be.  Then, maybe, the ones who don’t get themselves killed might come back to Midland as slightly less of a fucking idiot behind the wheel.