When the robots take over the world, it might be helpful to have a sixth sense regarding electromagnetic fields. These people are, in a sense, low-budget cyborgs, which is just fiendishly cool.
Me, I’m waiting for the day I can turn my finger into a laser pointer. Or, you know … a laser.
You get your just deserts. Invent a device and call it the “Mosquito Teen Repeller”, and teens will turn around and find a way to use it against you. In this case, they turned the high-pitched noise into an mp3 and set it as their ringtone, one that they can hear and most adults can’t. Build a wall to stop teens from doing something, they’ll build a ladder, a bridge, some dynamite, and then turn the wall into a skatepark. It’s too bad we aren’t better able to harness all of that inventive energy. Still, I don’t see it becoming too predominant, because if you CAN hear the ringtone, it’s a really annoying sound. (see if you can hear it)
At least I know I’m not old. Yet.
(via NPR)
One of my favorite topics of discussion with just about anybody (and almost everyone has an opinion about this) is gaming as an educational tool. Do people learn from gaming? Does it develop critical thinking skills? I’ll admit a bias towards always answering yes, but really I think it depends on the games. Saying that games are educational is like saying that food is good for you. It all depends on what you’re consuming.
I had the pleasure to be one of the first generations to grow up with consumer video games. I started playing games on an old Apple off of 5-1/4? diskettes. Seeing that I really enjoyed using the computer, my dad spent money to buy a lot of educational games. One game involved math equations that had to be answered by jumping over the appropriate square on a pogostick. As you progressed, the equations got more difficult and you moved faster across the screen. Critical thinking on the fly with hand-eye coordination thrown in, not to mention math superpowers.
Another game worth mention was Zork, which certainly required reading comprehension and non-linear problem solving. Myst came along a little later and required the same sort of problem solving but required more visual literacy (a term I’ve seen come up frequently of late in library discussion). Moving off the computer and onto the console, games became less obviously educational, but still required some of the same sorts of skills. Critical thinking and problem solving are what games are all about, one way or another. Even in games like Grand Theft Auto (the black sheep of gaming, at the moment), players often have to come up with clever solutions to multi-faceted problems.
I’ve recently started noticing an increase in a certain kind of game that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago, and is perhaps the most research-oriented non-linear type of game yet. Via the Wikipedia description:
An alternate reality game (ARG) is a cross media game that deliberately blurs the line between in-game experiences and the real world. While these games may primarily be centered around online resources, events which happen as part of the game may be communicated to the players in a number of forms.
This new kind of game is mind-boggling. Crossing nearly every platform from hidden real-world clues to decoding online cryptographics to collectible trading cards to scheduled events run like massive treasure hunts, ARGs, when done well, are a new evolution in gaming.
ABC television recently announced an ARG-like game for fans of its show “Lost”, which allows players to uncover clues that piece together the history and backstory of characters and locations.
I Love Bees was another ARG marketing game that cleverly blurred the line between reality and the Halo universe. Players, on their own, discovered hidden messages in images, linked them to audio messages which, when run in order, played out character stories which wove together, and uncovered GPS coordinates across the world which tied into phone booth locations.
In the end, it was just clever marketing, but does that matter if people are enjoying themselves solving an incredibly complex mystery with other people all over the world?
Recently, Perplex City caught my eye. Offering a real $200,000 reward, the game involves solving puzzles, following stories, uncovering hidden information, and competing against and with other players across the world. The story is some of the best written sci-fi you might come across and all the more poignant for that it’s interactive. As for the puzzles, some are relatively easy to solve, given time and thought. You can sign up and answer a couple example puzzle cards here. Other cards have puzzles that are so difficult that the company has admitted that it doesn’t expect them to be solved.
One requires that the Riemann Hypothesis be proven true or false. I don’t even begin to understand the problem (my pogostick math game never got quite that far). Another puzzle requires a massive decryption effort that hundreds of users have joined together to try and solve via brute force processing. This is crowdsourcing at its most sociable. What if, via a game mechanism, the Riemann Hypothesis were solved? It’s been a mathematical conundrum for over a century now, and if it were solved by gamers working together (not likely, but possible), I’d be ecstatic.
To get back on a simpler note, Flash games bring us back to our Apple roots, with clever puzzle games that have an apparent educational value. Lore over at Table of Malcontents consistently links to games that are downright enjoyable and make my brain feel like it’s getting some exercise. Some of my recent favorites include 3-D Logic, which involves mapping colors around a cube; ClickDragType, in which solving the puzzles largely requires figuring out what the rules are, which is very enjoyable in itself; and Gwigle, which challenges you and teaches you how to utilize advancing googling technique all at the same time.
There are a ton of games out there. Perhaps not all of them are of educational value, but hey, sometimes it’s okay to have a little fun as well. I think it’s most important that if you’re going to have an opinion on educational gaming, you see some of what’s available that isn’t released by Rockstar and doesn’t involve shooting things. Because the fact is that kids are into video games. We’ve tried to bring the kids to the education with limited success. Maybe it’s time we try harder to bring education to the kids.
Office warfare? Need to lay siege to the marketing department? Does someone keep stealing your soda from the staff fridge? Get revenge with your very own trebuchet. Fashioned from common office supplies, it’s a formidable weapon at ranges of up to four feet. Use a can of soda as bait to lure them closer.
While you’re there, be sure to poke around further on the Instructables site. It’s well worth it. If you want to bring your arsenal into the 21st century, be sure to check out these USB air darts. To think we grew up in an age where all we had to fire at each other were rubber bands.
Bonus educational reading: Wikipedia article on trebuchets.
There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Calendar since it’s recent release, and for good reason. It integrates with Gmail, boasts robust nlp (natural language processing), and will make you happier and file your taxes for you (all Google products will, right!?). I’m a Googlehead as much as the next guy, and probably a whole lot more.
Still, I came across Spongecell today, and I have to admit that it seems pretty slick. It’s draggable, textable, nlp-powerful free software. I don’t know if it’ll do your taxes for you, but they have a live demo version up, so you can always go see for yourself.
I’m a PC-user, and I will remain so until the day that I die, no matter how they try to subvert me. In my last post I cited Eric’s snark regarding running City of Villains on his Macbook Pro. Evidently the dual-core intel processor coupled with the innate powers of Mac video-processing made the game practically purr with a sparkly ebullience. A fair amount of people mention that the new Mac desktop may run two (2!) dual-core processors. And of course, EVERYONE in the Mac corner mentions how gosh-darn pretty they are. Despite all this, I don’t see Mac taking over the computer-gaming arena, and I even have a few decent reasons:
Macs are expensive. With the iMac starting at $1299, the PowerBook G4 at $1499, and then MacBook Pro at $1999, you’re automatically spending a lot of money on that fine gaming machine. Oh right, and don’t forget that to run those games you’ll need to spend at least another $100 to buy Windows XP. For $1299 I can put together a nice PC with all the parts I would reasonably need to run any current game without a hitch. I mean, I should know because I just put one together for my friend Theo, and it’s gorgeous. For $1999, I could build a gaming god. And I wouldn’t have to dual-boot the damn thing. But the biggest cost issue is that Mac’s are difficult to upgrade. When your Mac gets old, you buy a new Mac. If your PC gets old, you can seperately buy the parts that are getting dated, and maintain your machine’s performance even on a meager budget.
No matter how easy Apple makes it to run Windows, dual-booting is a pain that won’t be worthwhile to a majority of people. Sure, you can run a Windows “window” in OS X, but if we’re talking about gamers (and I am, currently), they’re not going to get the performance the machine is capable of, and gamers are interested in nothing if not performance. In a way, the Apple Matters post I linked to previously has a point that if people are consistently running Windows on their Macs, simply because it allows them to play the games and run the apps that OS X doesn’t support, eventually they may get used to Windows, and wonder why they need OS X at all. Which is not at all to say that Windows is better than OS X, but it’s compatability is a juggernaut that may be hard to overcome, and a great many of us “PC users” not only use it, but enjoy it. There must be something to that, right?
If you buy a Mac, you’re pretty much buying whatever specifications that Apple happens to be offering. In the case of the MacBook Pro, you have a mind-blowing two options. I can’t even begin to think of how many options there are for building a PC between $2000 and $2500, but my god there are a lot, and by PC I mean laptops as well. Do-it-yourself laptops are possible, for the hardware afficianado, and the process for building one was even outlined very clearly in a recent edition of Maximum PC. But even if you don’t want to build it yourself, there are a thousand websites out there, at least, that give you a ton of options on everything from screen size to memory to video cards to processors. Bear in mind that Macs don’t hold the patent for dual-core intel processors. Heck, they just switched to a processor-type that PC-users have been enjoying for years. And PC-users have something Mac doesn’t have, which is AMD. Right now AMD has dual-core 64-bit processors for the PC, and they’ve announced the release of the same for laptops in the near future. Also, and contrary to the Mac “we’re so pretty ideology”, you can customize the look of your PC. A pretty case? There are a ton of them out there.
So my question, then, is this: Why buy a Mac as a gaming rig running Windows when the PC offers so much more in the way of cost and customization, with less hassle? The answer is that you won’t; not unless you’re already a Mac enthusiast, and hey, there are plenty of you out there and that’s great. But for the rest of us, PCs make a whole lot more sense in a lot of ways. Apple’s “Boot Camp” may pull a few people to the dark side who were previously on the fence, but the people that have chosen their sides likely won’t be swayed.
As for me, the next computer I buy will likely be a laptop and a PC, and will probably come in pieces. They’ll be small, complicated, fragile pieces that will need to be carefully nurtured and placed into the appropriate places at the appropriate times with an extreme amount of care. I’ll nurture them, place them, build a machine out of hopes, dreams and expensive parts from very particular namebrand retailers, and I’ll be damned if I won’t enjoy it. I’m a PC-user, hear me roar.
Follow up to my previous Boot Camp post.
Eric over at Websnark dual-booted windows on his MacBook Pro and loaded up City of Villains. Evidently the result was even more impressive than he had anticipated.
I ran at full native resolution with all the bells and whistles. It was beautiful. Effects I’d never been able to see before showed up perfectly. In the middle of a gigantic fight with a giant monster (the Ghost of Scrapyard, for those playing along at home) I and two other Masterminds, along with a pile of corruptors and brutes, were all in a pack alongside about sixty minions, the giant monster, special effects of everyones’ attacks, at least twenty Henchmen and a giant blue glowing thing… oh, and explosions everywhere… at absolutely no choppiness nor loss of framerate.
This poses a quandary for PC-manufacturers, who have until now at the least dominated the gaming market through sheer windows-compatability brute force. And the gaming market makes up a very significant chunk of change in the computer hardware world. If Macs can, all of a sudden, do everything and play everything, and do it as well as Eric’s post describes, the PC is gonna be in a heap of trouble.
But of course, the real winner here is Microsoft. But then, that’s nothing new. In fact, according to Chris over at Apple Matters, this could be a bad move by Apple in general (though I agree with Eric that once the cat was out of the bag, Apple was beholden to make a move).
Why is Boot Camp the Apple equivalent of the New Coke fiasco? Well, because Apple is trading a little short-term gain for a long-term negative. At this moment in time, OS X does have a big lead over Windows XP but Vista is around the corner and it promises to address a lot of the problems found in Windows. So, for the next few months, people might buy a Mac with the idea of using it as a dual boot machine and get slowly but steadily sucked in by OS X’s superiority, but once Vista comes out that will likely change.
In fact, Apple has tried this before. In an effort to stave off dwindling sales Apple once offered Macs with PC cards in them. These were the equivalent of dual boot machines. The theory went that people would buy the machine for their Windows needs, but use the Mac OS more and more as time went by. Finally, unable to resist the allure of Mac OS you’d have a full blown Apple zealot on your hands. The reality was that Mac users bought the machines (they were brisk sellers) and got converted to Windows users. This was when the cutting edge Windows was 3.0, it is hard to imagine that Boot Camp won’t make at least as many Windows converts out of Mac users than the other way around.
Having Macs and PCs out there, appealing to different users with different needs, was much like having two distinct political parties. You were either a Mac user, or a PC user, and the line rarely blurred between the two. With Boot Camp, that line is officially blurred. Is it only a matter of time before we have essentially the same computers trying to sell themselves under completely different names?
Additional reading:
More additional reading (added 4/7/06):
RSSPECT is a new offering from Ryan North, allowing anybody on any site to serve up warm, savory feeds for their devoted readers. Its tagline is “Syndication made simple.” and it certainly seems to offer up the goods. Ryan, who previously released Oh No Robot, a free search engine service for webcomics, focuses his attention mainly on projects for the webcomics community. Even so, the products themselves are solid, and RSSPECT particularly is useful for any site that would like to offer RSS services.
With RSSPECT, all you have to do is add some markup tags to your website, and you can be syndicating your content instantly. There’s no fees, no programming, and no hassle. You don’t have to install any software, and you can create as many feeds as you want. We take the sucky parts out of RSS.
We’ll check your website automatically, and when there’s new content, it’ll be added to your RSS feed. You control what gets added to the feed and what doesn’t. And you can always log in to add, update, or delete posts by hand, if you want. You have complete control.
It doesn’t stop there. We give you the tools to publicize your feed automatically, and the code that allows your readers add your feed to their Google homepages, to their MSN accounts, to AOL, to Yahoo – the list goes on. We’ve done the hard work so you won’t have to.
Apple has announced the Boot Camp Public Beta. Set to be included in the next OS X release: Leopard, Boot Camp allows Mac users to run Microsoft Windows on their Mac. Essentially, they’re offering Mac drivers for the Windows platform. Even so, they have to get in their anti-Windows quips:
EFI and BIOS
Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.
Device warns you if you’re boring or irritating.
The “emotional social intelligence prosthetic” device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate.
I’m curious what you’re supposed to do AFTER the device has told you that you’re boring your listener to death. Start juggling? Make weird noises? Sadistically continue, ignoring the vibrating device, eager to find out just how tolerant some people can be? Obviously this is not a tool that should fall into my hands, but seriously, they should consider programming some social cues into the hardware to offer alternatives to a conversation about “How I organized my sock drawer this morning by color, and how tomorrow I will do it by style”.
Perhaps I’ll watch that show. After the city has turned its lights off and the pre-midnight rainbow has become a sea of flashing yellow down State street, I’ll huddle quietly and try to dissolve the mystery surrounding musical and television pop culture. Reality TV? Maybe, but you know it can only be real when people don’t know they’re being filmed, and some of these people are really, very obviously, aware of the cameras. I’ll watch it though not on TV and I won’t vote, but part of me is curious about this pervasive pop phenomenon. It’s interesting, but I can’t get past a skeptical detachment (nor do I want to). Some people spend more time communicating with this show, about this show, than they do with their children, their spouses, their books or their dreams.
Once, when we were all in black and white, television seemed so wholesome. It was a reasonable extension from the family sitting around the radio, listening to the Little Orphan Annie show, news radio, or dramatic productions of great (by “great” I mean pulp) mystery stories. Then we had Bewitched, Leave it to Beaver, I Dream of Jeanie, etc etc. The shows were limited and wholesome, the time spent in front of the television set was balanced by time reading, talking about the news, playing chess, checkers, cribbage, bridge, being a family.
[long rant deleted]
Now, huddled in the blackness as my screen flashes lightning and laugh tracks guide me, sometimes I shiver quietly, and wonder how television could have been so subtle in devouring my integrity.
Question of the day:
Is it on Technorati because it’s popular? Or is it popular because it’s on Technorati?
Discuss.
Google has released, in beta, their IM software. It’s called “Google Talk”, and it rocks my little world. I don’t know where you can download it from, except that I can send you an invite if you like. You NEED Gmail to use Google Talk, so if you need that, let me know and I’ll send you an invite for that as well.
Cool points for Google Talk:
I won’t claim it doesn’t have some room for improvement (can you say “integrated google search function”?), but it rocks the hell out of everything else available, on day 1. But that’s just one man’s humble opinion. Comment me an email address, and I’ll send you an invite. Let me know if you need Gmail as well.
When you think of the instant message, generally your thoughts only go back a few years. If you’re positively archaic, like me, that may even mean ICQ. For most, it means AOL and MSN Messenger. In reality, the IM was born as long ago as 1960 with the creation of PLATO, which was funded by a shared Army-Navy-Air Force pool and housed at the University of Illinois. By 1967, it would also be funded by the NSF.
PLATO began as an education tool, designed in a drill-based fashion that would allow students to bypass lessons they already understood. Though the first application only supported one user, and PLATO II only allowed two, by PLATO III (1966), it could support twenty. PLATO IV, in 1972, was the first to support “Term Talk”, which allowed user to share information via electronic chat. By 1975, PLATO IV served almost 150 different locations.
A man named William Norris, CEO of CDC, became very interested in PLATO as it evolved. He thought that it would be a learning platform that could level out educational inequalities by offering higher education to people who would not otherwise be able to afford university. In 1976, CDC purchased the commercial rights to PLATO, and through aggressive advertising hoped to sell it as a universal teaching tool, more effective than a human teacher and never susceptible to sick days or strikes. Reviews in the ’80s tended to agree that while PLATO was perhaps as effective as a human teacher, it was not more effective, and at $50 per student per hour, it tended to less cost effective than a traditional classroom.
In 1986, Norris stepped down as CEO, and the PLATO service was slowly killed off. Though designed for computer education, PLATO’s real legacy is in its online communication features. PLATO Notes was introduced in 1973 and was among the world’s first online message boards and was the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online communication, including Personal Notes (email), Talkomatic (chat rooms), and Term-Talk (instant messaging and remote screen sharing).
PLATO’s architecture also made it an ideal platform for online gaming. Many extremely popular games were developed on PLATO during the 1970s and 1980s, such as Empire (a massively multiplayer game based on Star Trek), Airfight (a precursor to Microsoft Flight Simulator), the original Freecell, and several “dungeons and dragons” games that presaged MUDs and MOOs as well as popular shoot-em-up games like Doom and Quake.
Though PLATO had a loyal fan-base, the first general instant messenger introduced to the internet was ICQ, in 1996. ICQ, a play on “I Seek You” was created by Mirabilis, an Israeli start-up company based in Tel Aviv. ICQ was known for its simple UI, ease of use, file transfer capabilities, and for the “ICQ Number”. The ICQ Number is, in my opinion, the easiest way to add someone to your IM list. People would list their number on the internet, and with a simple cut&paste, you had added them to your ICQ friends list. Easy as pie. In 1998, Mirabilis and ICQ were purchased by AOL, and not too surprisingly the program quickly went to shit.
Despite buying ICQ, AOL has its own IM program, called AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), which came out in 1997. Though this program was usable for a brief period of time, it too fell prey to the AOL curse, which is highly regarded by people who only know enough about their computers to be able to turn them on (maybe) and surf the web, but only if a searchbar is automatically included in their home page. Everyone else, with reason, hates AOL with a fiery passion. Not that I’m biased or anything. AOL may just be on to something, though, as they prepare to replace AIM with Triton. Triton highlights tabbed chatting, and is being completely rebuilt from the ground up to support VoIP technology. It is currently in beta.
Microsoft, the big boo daddy of the computing world, hopped on board the IM wagon with MSN Messenger in 1999. When it first came out, MSN Messenger could be used on both its own network as well as the AIM network, making it a handy little chat-tool indeed. AOL, after trying for a long period of time, finally blocked MSN Messenger from using their network, isolating it to its own .NET messenger service. In their attempt to take over the world, Microsoft created a browser-based version of the Messenger client, which could be used on any computer with internet access, without having to download the program. Of course, this became a big security hole, and a big pain in the ass, and sucked in general. They also created MSN Mobile, which allowed users to send IMs via their cell phones. Welcome to the Microsoft Galaxy.
Yahoo! also has its own IM service, which supports VoIP already, and alerts you when you have new Yahoo! email. But I don’t really care, and I’m not going to tell you about it.
User Info:
AIM – Active: unknown; total registered: 195 mil (Jan ’03)
ICQ – Active: 6 mil; total registered: 140 mil (June ’03)
MSN – Active: 100 mil; total registered: 155 mil (April ’05)
You can see a big table comparing these services here.
I apologize if this post was horribly boring. If you’d like to complain, IM me. I use MSN Messenger through my Hotmail account, dragon_bebop (at) hotmail (dot) com. And really, you should IM me anyway, because it would be fun to chat with some of you. Just don’t expect me to join AIM. I won’t give in to the dark side!
I know I mentioned it when I got a cell phone, via Sprint. I’m not sure if I ever mentioned that I ditched Sprint within my trial period, and switched to Cingular. Cingular is better. So I sent the two phones I got from Sprint back to them, via their return kits, and went on with my life waiting for them to bill me all of $8 or so for the days I used their service.
A few days ago I get the bill from them, for a merry $165! Evidently, they claim to have never recieved one of the phones I sent them. So I finally had a chance to call them last night. The first lady I talked to needed the tracking # for the phones I sent back, which I couldn’t find immediately, so she asked me to call back. Once I had the tracking #s I called back, only to get transferred to the billing department. The billing department, after verifying my identity (for about the 8th time that night), immediately told me I owed them $165 and asked me how I would like to pay that amount. Once I explained my problem, they transferred me back to the customer service department (or rather to a main menu), from which I pushed the wrong button and couldn’t go back, so I had to call again. Around the fifth time I called last night I talked to a lady who noted my account, placed a priority status on it, and yet still told me I’d have to call back in the morning so they could check the warehouse (which was closed by that point) and verify the phone had been returned. They didn’t seem to care that I could go to UPS.com, put in the tracking number, and see that Sprint had signed for the phone at their warehouse on April 9th at 8 am. Evidently, that didn’t mean much to them.
So I called back this morning, talked to customer service, who stumbled around for a # to the warehouse, and after five minutes said, “All I can find is the orders support number.” Rather than transferring me, she gave me their number, and I hung up and called them. The lady in orders was pretty helpful, really. She checked the notes on my account, checked the tracking # through the warehouse, and finally admitted to me that yes, I had in fact returned that phone. She put a note, asked me to hold as she transferred me to someone who could remove the charges for me. I was still naively optimistic at this point (somehow), thanked her, and waited patiently. Ten minutes later, as I started to get antsy, I realized I was no longer on hold. Instead, my call had been dropped. This seems to happen a lot when you call Sprint.
Figuring my account had been noted by the appropriate people in the orders department, I called the main customer service line again, pushed a few buttons, and they transferred me to billing. People who work for Sprint who can speak clearly, with a minimal accent, and sound nice, get put in customer service and orders. They’re the salespeople, and it makes good sense that they sound friendly and approachable. Sprint’s billing staff, on the other hand, is the meanest, fastest-talking, and heaviest-accented group you’ve ever seem outside of an LA taxi company. The point being, I assume, that they would like to confuse you into accidently paying them the money that you were calling to dispute in the first place. Example:
Billing: “Thankyouforverifyingyourinformation. Youowe$165, wouldyouliketograymen hitherberjakoil mongooselimabeanfoxmonkey alphabitsjubjub hydroliccancanjuice?”
Customer: “Huh? What, ummm …okay?”
Billing: “Thankyou, yourcreditcardhasbeencharged$3000 foralifelong subscriptionto Sprint. Haveaniceday. (click)”
Customer: “Noooooo!!!”
So, I’m talking to this lady in billing, who verifys my information (I feel like my identity has been abused it’s been verified so much at this point), and then tells me I owe Sprint $165 and asks me, “Wouldyouliketopaythatusingcreditdebitorcheck?” I sighed, and explained that there were surely 20 notes on my account at this point, one of which would explain to her that I’d spoken to someone in the warehouse, who had verified that I had in fact returned the phone for which Sprint was trying to charge me, and that I would like the fee removed. I didn’t mention my suspicion that one of the notes on my account read, “Help this man and Satan himself will reach up out of hell and swallow your soul.” She took a moment to read the note, asked me to wait while she accessed my account, and put me on hold. Just as I was feeling like the end was in sight, she got back on the line to tell me that she couldn’t access my bill “at this time”. She waited, as if I would reply, “Oh, that’s fine, I was just calling for the fun of it, not because I expected any resolution or level of competence. Tata!” Instead, I grunted something like, “Umm, you can’t access my bill?” and thought something like What the hell is the point of a billing department if they can’t access your bill? She repeated, “Yes, I can’t access your bill right now.” She paused again. I outwaited her. “If you could call back in thirty minutes, we should be able to access your bill then.”
I was baffled. Was there a time-lock on my bill? Was it time for this lady’s lunch and she just didn’t want to be bothered by me anymore? Had she, in trying to help me, inadvertently been possessed by Satan, who wanted to mock and torment my misery? I doubted the last one, if only because I think she was never that interested in helping me. I thanked her (I’m infernally polite), though a bit curtly, and hung up. Of course, I couldn’t call back in thirty minutes because I had to be at work, which is where I am now, wondering why the devil has it in for me.
Moral: Sprint sucks.
“I put yo’ bitch of a profile down, yo.
All your desktop are belong to us.”
The main IT guy out here takes a look at it,
has a bit of a confused look, says “Derrrr …”,
and then, “I have to go to a meeting now.”
And so everytime I go to a webpage, I get a error message popping up to say that the computer couldn’t find my desktop. Strangely enough, my IE favorites are still all there. Oh what a tangled wired world we weave, when first we practice to network shit. I could care less about my desktop, but the error messages are annoying, and in general I just like it when computers work properly.
—
This weekend I went up to PT for a little relaxation and fun. We walked around, hit the Antique Mall, went swing dancing(!), and all in all had a good time. It was nice to get away from O-town for a bit, and chill. And we didn’t get on each other’s nerves once! At least, I didn’t think so. It’s a measure of a strong relationship, I think, if you get along fine even when pulled out of your comfortable, or regular, environment. Relationships that get by on habit don’t work so well when you’re on the road.
I smoked too many cigarettes yesterday, and today I feel like shit. I’m going to quit smoking for indefinately. I like my lungs. I also drank too much yesterday (hazards of having the entire day off that your roommate also has off). I need to remove myself from this decadent lifestyle. I did, however, buy a bottle of Stroh 80, which I feel proud simply to have. It may take me years to drink it.
This girl is WAY too excited about her Stroh.
So I found out this morning that
swing dancing is on Tuesday nights.
Now I have to wait a week, but at least
it doesn’t conflict with the poetry readings anymore.
The reading last night went swimmingly;
about 10 people read, including myself,
and every reader was worth listening to.
It’s good to remember that there are
other people out there, writing poetry; doing this thing.
Sometimes I forget.
I got a G-mail account today, which makes me happy
because stupid AOL bought Mailblocks, and
I figure it’s only a matter of time before they ruin it.
What with Google owning both Blogger and G-mail,
I’m now completely dependant on them
for my two biggest internet addictions.
Go go gadget Google.
To Emily: I’m sorry about mixed messages
and vapid arguments. I’d really like us to
interact positively. I’ll wait to hear from you.
–
In the employment world, a temporary position
opened here at St Martin’s in the Advancement Office
(I don’t know what that is, but okay), doing data
verification 20 hours a week. It’s a job that lasts
4-6 weeks and they’ve pretty much already hired me
(just need to work out the schedule).
That should help the old pocket-book for a pinch.
