On Errantry

Career Fair

2006-03-09T16:08:00.000-05:00

Went out and tried the scattershot method of job searching today at the career fair -- eight resumes distributed, maybe four that I have some hope of actually getting. Oh woe, to be a freshman mechanical engineer.

Tags:

engineering

we make money not art: Sacrified teddy bears

2005-09-26T07:45:00.000-04:00

Sacrificed teddy bears: "If you give her your old forgotten teddy bear, she'll cover it with clay and put it in the oven. The original teddy gets burned and vanishes but you're left with its fragile white shell."

Another creative way in which to scar a small child for life.

CNN.com - Backpack generates power from walking - Sep 9, 2005

2005-09-21T10:35:00.000-04:00

CNN.com - Backpack generates power from walking - Sep 9, 2005: "A backpack that converts a plodding gait into electricity could soon be charging up mobile phones, navigation devices and even portable disc players, U.S.-based researchers said on Thursday."

Coming soon to a SAREX near you:

"Jump up and down, cadet -- I need to make a phone call and my battery's dead."

Netvibes is my friend

2005-09-20T09:52:00.000-04:00

I think I'm in love. I've been looking for an RSS aggregator that will play nice with Firefox for the past few months, and Netvibes pretty much fits the bill. It's sort of a MyGoogle clone with considerably more flexibility (and much prettier). If they released a nice little API it would probably take off like a park duck chased by a toddler.

Few things I think would probably go over well:

Auto-refreshing feeds with some sort of new article indicator in the title bar. I keep most of my boxes collapsed (or else they run off the screen and I have to scroll), and it would make it loads easier on me if I didn't have to pop each one open to see if something new came in to distract me from my chem work.

Ability to add new search engines. I have a ton of engines integrated into quicksearch in firefox, and I'd like to be able to transfer them over.

Better weather box. For a quick overview of what the day's going to be like, it's fine, but it would be nice if I could click on the giganto weather icon and pop up the 10-day or hourly in a new tab. (NEW TAB NOT NEW WINDOW!)

Background and title formatting. No reason not to make it pretty, if I so desire, even though the simplicity thing rocks my socks.

Better GMail previews.

Blogger plugin, for those times when I just have to share.

I'm also having some trouble opening certain feeds, like dooce and mefi. I don't think it's a problem on my end, but I could be wrong.

Now my new homepage. Information junkie heaven!

Yep - Nope - Yep - Nope...

2005-09-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

Well, the past few day have been eventful, to say the least. I finally qualified as GTM-3 (entry-level ground search and rescue; see also, grunt and groundpounder) on Saturday - hanging out with the Carroll guys again; they've all become volunteer firefighters when I wasn't looking - and Monday morning bright and early I get an e-mail from my SC asking whether I want to be on the alert list for deployment to the Gulf.

I'm sorry, did you just ask me whether I want my first real operation to be The Big One?

My first instinct was to bellow out "Hooah!" and scrape my gear together, but needless to say my mother was not pleased with the idea of me taking off for a week in the beginning of my first semester. I, of course, was fired up as anything at just the chance and spent most of the day not eating because I was too excited and sounding out my professors about the idea.

Me: "I'm on a search and rescue team [not strictly true; I'm all alone because nobody else in the squadron has current qualifications] and there's a chance I might be deployed within the next few weeks. Is there anything I can do to prepare?"

Professor Whoever: ::blink blink blink:: "Er...yes. If you know far enough ahead of time, I can give you your assignments, but if you miss a test you'll have to take it on the make-up date. So...er...good luck."

So I spent the entire day agonizing over whether I'd be willing to sacrifice my GPA for a chance to deploy and help people out, finally deciding about midafternoon hey, what am I going to remember five or ten years from now - another week spent stuffing my soggy gray matter with chem and calc, or my epic trip to a disaster area?

Yeah, I'm a touch stupid.

By this time I had spent about an hour straight arguing with my mother - school vs. SAR - and had sent off an email to the SC saying I was good to go, which I almost immediately retracted.

Not that it matters - Tuesday morning I woke up to another e-mail that said CAP was closing down ground ops in Mississippi (we'd been working out of MS wing headquarters in Jackson), hence, no need to deploy, and I'm an idiot.

Jay Jay the Jet Plane

2005-09-13T18:14:00.000-04:00

The College Park Aviation Museum is looking for student volunteers to help this weekend on either Saturday, September 17, or Sunday, September 18, from 11-4 for its Jay Jay the Jet Plane Weekend. We are looking for anyone interested in working with kids of all ages, arts and crafts, and/or aviation. We are also looking for anyone interested in being the center of attention and dressing up as Jay Jay.

Do you have any idea how much fun this would be? If I weren't going to the SAREX, I'd be zipping myself into the suit in about three seconds. I mean, what self-respecting college student doesn't have dreams of dressing up as an anthropomorphized plane?

EDIT: Jay Jay himself, for anybody not familiar with his children's show on PBS:

Acronym champion

2005-09-13T10:24:00.000-04:00

"Our wonderful MER Chief of Staff and MER CC have found a way to cover the cost of the books and required materials from ICISF out of the MER budget for the CISM course during SAR College!"

I think that's close to the most acronyms I've ever seen in one sentence. Bonus, sir.

Things I must not do

2005-08-26T13:41:00.000-04:00

Things I must not do so I don't scare my new roommate/make her think I'm a complete psycho.

Immediately unpack ground team stuff, starting with tac vest. EDIT: Did it, but not until a few weeks later.

Bring underwear washed at Fred's house (nice yellow tinge -- buh-bye, Fruit of the Loom).

Slaver over high speed connection. EDIT: Computer done broke for a few days as soon as I brought it there. It was horrible.

Stick upper body out window to get better fix on GPS coordinates.

Begin construction of Pringle antenna.

Talk too much (not so much of a problem).

Talk too little (BIG problem).

Refuse to come out except for meals and classes. EDIT: Did it, but not my fault.

Bring more gadgets than clothes.

Bring an extensive toolkit.

Show too much familiarity with knives when opening boxes.

Polish boots.

A Field Guide To Encampment

2005-08-13T19:51:00.000-04:00

For those that aren't a big a dork as I am, encampment is a part of the Civil Air Patrol cadet program where we pretend that we're actually military instead of a bunch of weekend warriors, useful as we may be on occasion -- an attempt at BootCamp!Lite with twelve-year-olds.

CAP lies. We lie a lot. We say, for example, that we will teach you to fly, or at least help you along the way (hint: it's a bad sign when the recruiting officer can't keep a straight face when he says this). We also say that encampment is a goddamn walk in the park -- and maybe it is, if you're twelve and regularly daydream about crawling through mud and barbed wire under a hail of lethal gunfire. If you don't precisely fit the model of somebody who will enjoy the hell out of boot camp, however, you might have a few problems dragging your sorry ass through a week under the dominion of people whose sole purpose is to make you life as difficult as is permitted.

A few things I learned on my little foray:

GROUPTHINK EXISTS, and no matter how cynical, tough, or smart you think you are, given enough time IT WILL WORK ON YOU. My first few days at encampment sucked (mostly because of my own failings), but by the end, I liked encampment. I liked my flight, embarassment to the contrary (needless to say I'm a little leery of meeting them again given my asshole behavior in the middle, but still). I was grateful to my lieutenant and thought maybe we could put the whole thing behind us and maybe gain a little mutual respect. I was proud as a fucking peacock when my flight or I got the smallest of honors -- honor flight not so much, but drill competition champs? Hell, yeah! I was ready to rush right off and enlist just to get more of this positive reinforcement shit. It's addictive once you get a taste.

It works especially well on competitive or overachieving people -- they (all right, we) can't stand to fail. Part of what broke me down is that I'm unused to failure or, more correctly, being unable to achieve-- the spirit was willing but the flesh didn't know how to do a proper hospital corner -- and it kicked the legs out from under me when it actually happened. Room inspections in particular -- there was never enough fucking time, the templates were never available, and no matter what I did something ALWAYS catastrophically wrong. It seemed entirely pointless to even try -- and down I went.

It was an excellent lesson for me, though -- I had to realize not always going to be on top, and I simply won't be able to do everything period, much less at the level of success I was used to. It teaches good mental resiliency, which is something you really can use. Bouncing back and trying the fuck again until you get it right is one of the foremost weapons of the human race in tackling almost any problem. Of course, in bouncing back from a total breakdown (break 'em down, build 'em up) you bounce right the hell into the staff's pocket because it feels so damn good to do stuff right. You just can't help but become a useful tool, ready to do what they ask with a smile on your face (when they aren't looking, of course) like a goddamn collie pup.

MENTAL SHIT MATTERS. Don't tell yourself it doesn't -- you can survive pretty much anything physically if you've got your mind fixed on the objective, but if you ignore your mental state and let yourself get into that rut your ass is dead. I came into encampment thinking the whole "positive mental attitude" lecture was so much bovine feces, but lo and behold, I talked myself into almost wimping out because I just kept on mentally repeating that this shit was pointless, why the hell am I doing this to myself, I could be home playing with my dog or sleeping right now...just an endless stream of negative karma that I would have kicked my own ass had I said it out loud because it's whining, plain and simple. You must, MUST, MUST keep a durable mental attitude -- you've handled shit like this before, so you sure as shit can handle what they're tossing at you now. Encampment will give you this prior shit-handling experience -- most of the time they call it self-confidence.

TEAMWORK IS NOT BULLSHIT, but it's definitely not what they tell you. You are a unit, correct, but not in the same sense that a boot camp class is a unit -- this is only for a week. Instead, you are helping them limp through this week, thereby indirectly helping you get through the week. Other people's problems are an excellent distraction from all the shit raining down on your head. It's also an emergent property situation -- magically, if you all help each other out while doing the bare minimum you can for yourself, you end up with considerably more than the sum of your labors. Don't ask me how, but it's true.

ENCAMPMENT IS NOT FUN. It's not meant to be, nor should it be. In the words of my dearly beloved first sergeant, "This ain't boy scout camp, sweethearts." This is an old-fashioned wheat-from-the-chaff shakedown experience meant to test you as well as they can in the brief time the staff can get their claws on your soft pink body. Luckily, however, they make it as hard as possible to wash out so as to avoid considerable bitterness on the part of people who almost made it but were allowed to puss out before completion. If you must, talk to your roommate or the Tac, but I really don't recommend talking to the staff. No matter how much sensitivity training they get, they'll still hold you in contempt if you start bawling -- they made it, after all, so why can't you?

This also has the effect of keeping some cadets -- who really shouldn't be at encampment -- at encampment AND dragging their unit down for far too long. From my considerable experience in watching cable television, in boot camp or any other military training program showing weakness just calls to your instructors to crunch you even heavier in hopes that those that wouldn't cut it in the field won't make it through. In CAP, not so much. Two-edged sword, I suppose.

THEY AREN'T REALLY YELLING AT YOU. Okay, literally they are, but really they're just playing a part -- or doing their job. If you can be worn down by a little too much volume or some necessarily uncomplimentary one-way conversation (as I was), you really shouldn't be there. Just keep that necessary mental focus -- you are earning your bullshit and no fucking fifteen-year-old punk tech sergeant is going to keep you from getting it, hooah?

KEEP YOUR PERSPECTIVE. Encampment is not the entire world. A failed room inspection is also not the end of the world, no matter what hysterics your flight sergeant pulls when he/she sees it. Everything is just a little bitty part of you life that will soon pass, leaving you an embittered and scarred person -- I mean, better for the experience.

THE NEAT SHIT IS AFTER THEY SCREAM AT YOU. Some of the coolest shit I've ever done was during encampment -- after I had gotten over that hump. If they spaced the neat shit out amongst the bullshit it would give cadets more of an incentive to gut out the first few days, but then they wouldn't get their opportunity to shake off some of the real shits who you wouldn't want to be in a flight with anyway. Stealing blatantly from Starship Troopers, you value higher what you pay for rather than what is simply given to you -- all the more so when it's not money, but merely a little grit and fortitude.

THE POLISH FADES FAST. What's true for boots is equally true for encampment. When you first get out, you feel like the shit -- hell, you're even starting to look at those poor dumb civilians with a little contempt. You feel like you've really accomplished something that most people never even dream of. And then you go back to squadron with your shiny new encampment ribbon and your cute little completion certificate and soon realize that maybe it didn't really matter as much as you thought it would, except for the respect you may or may not get from those who have gone before. And then you might start hearing the stories -- how the officers you caught yourself being afraid of are actually a bit (or a lot) wankish in their home squadrons, how all that yelling was just for show, how nobody's really as highspeed as they seemed at the time. Some (maybe most) really are just playing at being Gunnery Sergeant Hartman for a week or so and go right back to being sleazebags. Maybe you are the genuine article -- primed and ready to terrorize poor unsuspecting Basics in your turn -- but for me the damn-I'm-good feeling faded inside of a week.

You will, however, have lots of dumb stories sufficient for years of squadron meeting lulls.

Gmail goes up to 2GB

2005-04-01T12:25:00.000-05:00

Infinity+1

As part of their April 1 festivites, Gmail introduced their "Infinity+1" plan for all users.

Or not. They doubled the storage space, though, and are starting to introduce rich text formatting (pretty colors) -- damn, I love those people.

The Real Deal

Also a "what now, bitch?" to Yahoo, methinks.

Boing Boing: Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens

2005-03-31T10:19:00.000-05:00

Boing Boing: Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens

Cory Doctorow comments on an anthology of science fiction intended for teens that he has just read, and also how the Great Age of Geek appears to be on the decline, since Kids These Days just don't want to pick up a gawddamn book. Okay, maybe he didn't say that, but still.

Speaking as a seventeen-year-old closet scifi geek (I've got a tape of last Friday's Scifi channel finales sitting in Dad's VCR that I'm dying to go get), I think the problem is cover art. Frankly, I'm unwilling to indulge my geekish tendencies in public if I run the risk of being caught with an overdrawn picture of fire-breathing dragons or scantily clad damsels-in-distress in plain view (I am not a twelve-year-old boy to whom that stuff is so freakin' cool, man. They have no shame). Yes, I know that there are *hrmph* "adult" aimed covers for stuff like Harry Potter (I seriously haven't read that yet. Put it on the to-read list...), but the bad-cover-art phenomena appears to be near universal in scifi paperbacks, which is why I tend to favor jacketed hardbacks -- you can strip 'em down, and barring someone peering at the spine, nobody will ever know you're reading something horribly horribly embarassing.

Tor Fantasy, I'm talking to you.

CAPblog: CAP to Adopt New Membership ID Card

2005-03-30T16:24:00.000-05:00

CAPblog: CAP to Adopt New Membership ID Card

Sweetness. The current CAP membership card looks like something you have to spend five boxtops for -- kind of makes it difficult to look like you know what you're doing (assuming, of course, that you do) when you have to flash that sucker at the gate. Of course, the new ones are intended for senior members only, so cadets should get theirs...oh...never. Ish.

Who's willing to bet money that the SM's will be shelling out their own cash for it, though?

EDIT: Upon closer inspection of the pic, it appears it's got some funky smart-card-like stuff on it, such as the shiny ICC to the right of the bar code. It'd be kind of handy to have that info around in the event of an emergency, but it strikes me as kind of cost intensive, given that we don't currently have a system to collect that type of stuff. Probably just a prototypical thing (or in imitation of the Common Access card on the right), but interesting all the same.

Heh. "Auxiliarist." Is that even a word?

FURTHER EDIT: While we're batting around improbable ideas for the new ID card, how about an embedded RFID tag? They're currently navel-gazing about whether to embed RFID in new passports (just for the record, I'm not in favor -- if I want a target painted on my back, I'll do it myself in an aesthetically pleasing way, dammit) and Homeland Security already has 'em, so why not us?

TANGENT: The government's defense in the Wired article is that it's not RFID, it's a "contactless chip." Well, hell, why didn't you say so? Doublespeak makes it all soo much better. I shall go and stand in the subcutaneous tagging line like a good girl now.

The difference, they say, between contactless chips and the much-maligned RFID tag is that the reader has to be within a few inches to detect the signal. Great. So the kidnappers have to sneak up on me now to tell whether I'm an American (besides the zinc oxide on the nose and the "Let's Roll!" t-shirt, I mean). Another victory for American ingenuity.

EDIT EDIT: The Air Force nuked this proposal without comment. I was right about the SM's shelling out, though, so nyah.

Back in business

2005-03-30T13:20:00.000-05:00

Bear with me -- I'm tweaking the template a bit, so the formatting might go a bit weird.

After a nice long hiatus (since what, October? Jeebus), I've decided to resurrect my blogspot account. Not that I have a whole lot to say, but at least now I have somewhere to go and say it.

Document Updates

2004-09-11T18:18:00.000-04:00

An experienced typist found here (scroll down to the comment by marbux) makes the following observations:

A characteristic of older typewriters (like the IBM Executive) is that they used an individual arm for each lower character and its corresponding capital letter (for a few printing characters that weren't letters or didn't have capitals they would have symbols in the shift position instead). When a shifted character (a capital letter for example) was required, the typist's press on the "caps" key would physically raise the carriage containing the platen roller on which the paper was wound so the "shifted" character would impact the paper through the ribbon instead of the "unshifted" character.

As the typewriter was used, the shifting mechanism rather quickly would become worn so there was a bit of wobble introduced, resulting in characters not aligning with the baseline. Also, because the Executive used proportional type requiring tight spacing, the arms that struck the ribbon/platen roller were very prone to sticking together if the typist didn't maintain a proper interval between keystrokes. When two keys would approach the printing position together, usually one would be slightly ahead of the other and would print, but would be forced slightly out of position sideways by the force exerted by the other arm. So Executive-written letters can be spotted by looking for misalignment of characters along the baseline, and by characters that are slightly to the left or right of where they should appear.

Finally, yet another form of vertical misalignment can occur when the typist is a little bit off when using the caps key. I.e., the typist lets go of the shift key just an instant before a character prints, and the carriage has already started to drop when the character hits the ribbon/platen roller. Or, going another way, the typist is slightly late in hitting the shift key, and the character prints before the carriage has completed raising the ribbon/platen roller. However you get there, typewriters that have been in use for awhile will have characters that don't align. Modern word processors don't produce anything like that.

He goes on to point out the specific examples of this in one of the documents. I'm hamstrung by my birthdate again, but this sounds legit.

Can I Get A "Hrmm..."?!

2004-09-11T16:27:00.000-04:00

Apparently, there's now some discussion amongst the blogosphere that the documents which surfaced this week referencing Bush's alleged special treatment in the National Guard are el-fako as they can be reproduced in Word to about 99.9% accuracy. These documents also do not have some of the hallmarks of early-70's typing (such as using something that looks similar to Times Roman and proportional typing- meaning, according to Accordian Guy, skinny letters like "i" get less space than big ones like "w"- most typewriters use a monospace like OCRB or Courier). Some people find the super-scripted "th" after 178 (I boxed it in the picture below) to be especially suspicious.

This is a graphic submitted to FilePile which compares a Word-generated document to the one produced by the Bushies on 60 Minutes (incidentally, 'CYA' means 'cover your ass').

Boing-boing is reporting that while the typing style is unusual it is possible for a 70's-era typewriter to produce this work through proportional Times Roman font wheels or balls (whatever the hell that means- I think I've used a typewriter all of twice).

They also reference two threads on Fark in which typography experts weighed in (allegedly, but I'll assume they're the real deal) and said that the documents do have some difficult-to-produce symptoms of typewriter generation (the "8" in "178" rides high on the line, "th" is in different place, as seen in below static overlay).

The Farkers also say that proportional type, superscript, and/or a "th" superscripted character was indeed available in the 70's (quote: "Superscript was well and truly available, even on mid-quality manual typewriters. I was born in the sixties, not the dark ages.").

I'm not sure of the actual mechanics of inserting a superscripted "th" from a font wheel or ball or whatever, but it seems to me this document is supposed to be an off-the-cuff memo (author abbreviates "group" "Grp")- why would he hunt up the "th" when he can just type the sucker "T-H"? I know the only reason my "st"s and "th"s are properly superscripted is because Word does it for me, lazy bastard that I am. Maybe I'll go hunt up a typewriter somewhere (a 70's Selectric, I guess) and see if it's really all that easy to do, eh?

Also in other documents it references the 178th as 178[space]th in a possible attempt to avoid the superscript function of Word...but if they caught it then, wouldn't they go back and fix this one? I mean, assuming these are forgeries for a second, it's not all that hard to fix it, print out another copy, and run it through a copier with the quality turned down about ten times. It's entirely possible to turn the automatic superscript off, too...

So really, then, I guess we're back to the proportional font thing and the who-gives-a-crap thing...ve shall see, then, von't ve?

Flash heaven

2004-09-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

Just rediscovered albinoblacksheep while trying to concentrate on finding literary criticism for English. My current favorite is here, called "Life As Seen By Cynical" (I think he might mean cynic, but oh well). There's an odd quote about weed in the first couple of frames and some typos, but it's beautiful otherwise (I love the space pics). Made me realize that us humans kind of suck.

Also heard Lazyboy's Underwear Goes Inside The Pants on the radio, liked it, and downloaded it. My favorite lines:

Masterminds are another word that comes up all the time.
You keep hearing about these terrorists masterminds that get killed in the middle east.
Terrorists masterminds.
Mastermind is sort of a lofty way to describe what these guys do, don’t you think?
They’re not masterminds.
“OK, you take bomb, right? And you put in your backpack. And you get on bus and you blow yourself up. Alright?”
“Why do I have to blow myself up? Why can’t I just…”
“Who’s the fucking mastermind here? Me or you?”

Man combines jet engine, wheelchair

2004-09-06T19:44:00.000-04:00

But the missus says put it on something unusual and so I put it on the mother-in-law's wheelchair," said Mr Cannella, who is from Luton in Bedfordshire.

God save the British.

Sharks with frikkin' laser beams attached to their heads!

2004-09-06T19:37:00.000-04:00

Yes, the gatorade is glowing. Yes, the cat looks extremely freaked. No, I'm not going to tell you what it's about.

2004-09-04T21:02:00.000-04:00

Screwed, screwed, screwed, screwed, screeeeewwwwwwed...

Oh, and screwed.

2004-09-04T20:36:00.000-04:00

In case anyone hasn't heard, the islamofascist assholes led by al-Sadr executed 12 Nepalis in Iraq recently.

NOT SMART.

I've never really thought of Nepal as a very warlike country, but apparently they field some ass-kickers on a caliber with just about anybody in the world- and they're royally pissed, as evidenced by letters to mypetjawa found here. These guys are some of the best in the world, and frankly I'm inclined to join the consensus in raising money for airline tickets to Iraq.

Can somebody explain to me what the hell is going on with al-Sadr? I don't understand. Killing innocent civilians won't make us withdraw our troops sooner- if anything, it only demonstrates our need to stay in so that the entire country doesn't rip itself apart into little factions ruled by warlords (then again, maybe that's what they want).

Sane people exist!

2004-09-04T15:01:00.000-04:00

This man is my HERO.

This has been a test of the emergency angst system...

2004-09-04T10:28:00.000-04:00

Yeah, well, sorry about post below. World is amusing again mostly because I have had my caffiene quota for the day.

I forgot where I read this (I will find it- eventually) but this was just too funny to pass up.

There's a free Re-elect Bush screensaver on download.com that's one of the more popular things on there despite the fact that it's loaded with spyware and warns you about it on the download page:

Editor's note: This download includes adware bundled with the software's installer file. Adware may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings. Pay close attention to the end user license agreement and installation options. For more information on adware and spyware, please visit our Spyware Center.

The funniest thing about it, however, is the reviews. Some of the best are below.

Not user friendly for international users
I have problems with the installation process. When asked to “Select Country” I was given only eight options, Australia, Azerbaijan, Palau, Mongolia, Uganda, United States, United Kingdom, Against us. The when I can to select my language settings I was given the options English (British), English (American), English (Bush), Other. Selecting other just opened up a Learning the English language webpage.

Excellent and Strong!
The other reviewers are shrill, embittered liberals who are attempting to smear a True American with their lies. In fact I'd expect Cnet to check all of the other reviews and find that they were all perpetrated by Michael "Documentary" Moore or the campaign of John "Swiftboat Veteran" Kerry. George W. Bush is what this country needs in time of feeble morality and gays getting married. Anyone who says otherwise is a traitor and probably a Commnist or Palestinian. Strong leadership! Vote Bush!

Flashy, but terrible performance
When I downloaded this software I was kind of divided about whether or not I wanted to install it. As soon as I downloaded it, though, it installed itself even though I was leaning towards deleting it. As soon as it was installed, it started installing all these secondary programs it called "faith-based" and using up all my system resources. Soon after that it invaded another system on my network claiming it was looking for destructive programs (even though all my malware scanners on the other PC were coming up clean). After destroying all the basic operating files of the other PC it flashed a big message that said, " MISSION ACCOMPLISHED." I called tech support who claimed, "No, that wasn't our message, it must have been a different program." I uninstalled it from the other PC and the software claimed that it had withdrawn but it's still there and every day it uses up more and more hard drive space & resources and deletes more and more of my programs. Now it's telling me that there's malware all over my network even though it's clean and that the only way to get rid of it is to install it again for another four years! SOMEBODY HELP ME REMOVE THIS PROGRAM!

Distracting
Every time I surfed to news about issues, the screen saver pops up. It didn't matter whether it was the jobless economy, the unwinnable war, civil liberty abuses, a faith-based federal science policy, school policy that hates teachers, millions of children in poverty and going to bed hungry, health care that distrusts doctors, energy policy written by oil cartels. Every time, a cheerful message takes over the screen. When I surf to the JohnKerry.com site, I'm now redirected to dead fetuses. When I try to read news sites I'm sent to Fox. When I tried to uninstall it, it called me names. And then the pulsing, spinning wheel turned on and I started to feel much better, thank you. Much more connected with Jesus. Much happier with a fearless America shoving McDonalds down the throats of heathens. Thanks! I can't wait for release 2.0!

Worst. Screensaver. Ever.
I had selected a different screensaver to download but this one went ahead and installed itself anyway. Then it deleted all files related to healthcare, blocked me from entering my overtime hours, lied about the dangers imposed by viruses of mass destruction to install VMD software that doesn’t have an uninstall option, and accessed my PayPal account and sent all my money to Halliburton. The only good news is that this program is scheduled to be uninstalled on November 2.

Since installing I've lost my job and all my private files were stolen
This is the worst software ever. Since installing I lost my job to India, my child owes $24,000 plus interest to pay off the national debt and my buddy who got injured in Iraq came home to no job and no benefits. I tried to call tech support and was told I was an enemy combatant for calling to complaign.

Caffieeeeennnneee....

2004-09-02T06:36:00.000-04:00

Ugh. I have to drag my scraggly ass off to school soon, so I just wanted to say hello before I went to hunt up some caffiene. Everybody I know can tell you I'm not much for the poetry thing (or the singing thing, or the dancing thing, or the social thing), but zen poetry (especially haiku) gets my blood pressure down so I'm not so irritable. So while I'm gone, here is some lovely zen poetry to think about (my sutta on the Metta Sutta will have to wait until I can link-and-link).

Barn's burnt down-
now
I can see the moon.

-Masahide

Empty-handed I entered the world
barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going-
two simple happenings
that got entangled.

-Kozan Ichikyo

Good and evil have no self nature;
Holy and unholy are empty names;
In front of the door is the land of stillness and quiet;
Spring comes, grass grows by itself.

-Master Seung Sahn

Feeling better already, aren't you? Here, take a cookie...I promise, by the time you're done
eating it, you'll feel right as rain...

Bear with me. I'm still getting over the fact that quoting the Matrix is now cliche.

Unpaid Labor Is GOOD FOR YOU!

2004-09-01T11:23:00.000-04:00

Nobody's replied to the e-mail is sent last night yet. I was trying to round up some girls to volunteer at the Book Thing this afternoon but I'll probably end up going alone. Oh, well. Maybe it'll catch on when school starts and I can harrass them for eight hours at a time (yay for captive audiences during community homeroom).

Also from the Thankless Task department (well, not really, this one's kind of fun) the MTA is due for a protest in which aforementioned blond-haired teenage girl from the 'burbs (preferably a large group of teenage girls from the 'burbs, but I doubt the school will let me advertise this one) joins her disabled brethren in civil disobedience (UPDATE: GRAH! Missed the protest. Took place on August 26). Apparently, a blind couple got on the Light Rail without purchasing a ticket (because the machines don't have a voice option as they are required to have per the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990) and some asshat of a transit cop kicked them off the train, detained them for an hour, and then abandoned them in an unfamiliar area after giving them a ticket they could not read. Not a brilliant idea, especially when the National Federation of the Blind is headquartered in Baltimore (it gets better. One of the victims was Director of Governmental Affairs for the NFB).

Asses will fry for that one, I assure you, and I intend to be the one holding the zippo.

Also have to drum up money for CAP so we can get an L-PER for this winter's fun and games since apparently all the SAR equipment has gone somewhere, just not to my squadron. Preferably one of the digital ones so I don't have to explain to my munchkins how to swing that gigantic antenna around ("OW! MY EYE!").

Heehee. Apparently Florida's short on equipment, too

I don't know if I'm brave enough to wear my field gear in public, though- I invested in a tac vest (like the one in the first picture, except black) from Sunny's Surplus in June before I realized just how odd it looks for a blond-haired teenage girl from the 'burbs to be peeling out of the neighborhood at midnight wearing an outfit that looks like it came straight out of Full Metal Jacket (camos, combat boots, orange reflective vest [under the tac vest, as if that made any sense], boonie hat [now part of our squadron's official SAR uniform], black nylon tac vest, and a bright red Camelbak). All I need is some facepaint and a ghillie suit and they can drop my butt into enemy territory. I scare small children.

The Importance Of Being Stupid

2004-09-01T09:38:00.000-04:00

This tab thing in SlimBrowser indulges my ADD tendencies a bit too much. It used to be I had to at least consider a moment before opening a new IE window (I HATE that grouping thing it does when you open about 4 windows) but now I click at will. Goddammit.

This blog is intended to give my opinionated and frankly stupid opinions I have written on my wiki a bit of release (given that 75% of my comments on current events begin or end with "GRAH!") so to keep my head from poppiing like a balloon, here's one of the rants that currently lives in my wiki. It was inspired by this asshat publication, just to give you some background.

A pro-life advocate says Planned Parenthood will stop at nothing to promote sex to children -- because in the end, it means they will able to sell more contraceptives and perform more abortions.

Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization, meaning they can't and don't make money off of abortions or the sale of contraceptives. They have no vested interest in people's sexual habits one way or the other, they merely inform people as to their choices and make resources available for those who do make certain choices. Hell, my mother went to a PP clinic for her gyno work when she was a penniless college student and it didn't break up her family unit.

Besides, aren't the two mutually exclusive? If they hand out contraceptives to people who really need them, it kind of cuts down on the unwanted-pregnancy thing, which reduces the abortion thing, which in turn gives the pro-lifers less to scream about. Hey...good idea, no? I wonder why nobody's doing that- oh, wait, they are. My mistake.

On a completely unrelated side note, I read that Durex donated 130,000 condoms for the Olympic games (10,000 athletes in the prime of their life- kind of figures, doesn't it?). Par-ty!

Maybe they should have sent them to Africa, though, along with some of the books mentioned in here.

Planned Parenthood recently conducted a "Nobody's Fool 2004" conference in Waco, Texas.

Sponsored by the Girl Scouts I might add, which amuses me to no end.

The American Life League's (ALL) Jim Sedlak says the conference was a thinly sveiled attack on parental rights and the health and well-being of children. Sedlak says the conference was for children ages 10 to 14, and parents were not allowed to attend.

What would that have accomplished? Do you have any idea what the difference is between the way kids act when their parents are around and when they're not?

Without Parents

"Now, if anyone know anybody with a substance abuse problem that might like some information on treatment clinics, the pamphlets are going around the room now. Feel free to take as many as you like."

*Little Timmy takes five*

Without Parents

"Now, if anyone knows anybody with a substance abuse problem-"

"Uh- no. What's substance abuse?"

*Little Timmy looks over his shoulder at Disapproving Parent, who is glowering at nosy Guidance Counselor*

He says PP passed out free copies of a book called It's Perfectly Normal.

Well...it is. Guess how babies are conceived?

That book is "essentially kiddy porn," he says.

Well, that's what he says, but where's the book? (Note: need to find pics of the book so I can see if it's on a level with goatse)

"It is a book that has illustrations of all kinds of sexual activity."

Which, believe it or not, is a normal human behavior, hence the title.

And the conference, he says, is another way PP is "sexualizing" the nation's young people. "[W]e believe this whole conference was an effort by Planned Parenthood to get kids interested in sex, to tell them how to do it."

Or maybe- here's a thought- inform them so they can make better choices. Woo-freakin'-hoo. Hey, nine out of ten kids that are sexually active don't know how to use a condom and eight out of ten have no idea what STDs are (note: find actual figures. I remember them being frightening, but have to find). Let's continue the cycle of ignorance because AIDS is a good thing!

Have fundie Christians invested in stupidity futures or something?

The ALL spokesman says Planned Parenthood's actions are irresponsible at best and child abuse at worst.

Did these kids have permission slips? Did their parents know what was going to happen and OK it? If so, what's the problem? (Note: need to find out if there were permission slips, etc.)

This is the kind of stupidity which makes me want to run around screaming "People are naked under their clothes! NAKED!" and/or graffitti lines from 1984 everywhere.

"Ignorance is knowledge! Weakness is strength! No, no, you idiots, it's supposed to be ironic! GAH!"

When I was doing a little fact checking I ran across this pro-life blog and was pleasantly surprised. It's actually pretty clever, although I don't agree with it (::point rant::). A much needed breath-freshener for the abortion debate.

So It Begins...::dramatic music::

2004-09-01T09:22:00.000-04:00

Decided spur of the moment to make a blog. I reached my first hurdle in about two seconds.

"How do you spell 'popsicle'? P-O-P-S-I-C...K? Fuck."

Now that was a weird fucking movie. The quote's going on my senior page if Ms. Midura doesn't veto it for having dirty connotations.

I'll only be putting select bits of my wiki on here because the world has enough details of teenage drama queens' lives that they really don't need my contribution. Especially when it's so fucking boring.

So it'll be shit, but the best of the shit. Distilled shit, even. Ew.

Somebody took all the good blogspot names- meatpopsicle was taken, as was dammitjim. Meatpopsicle didn't even have anything written. Bastards.

Have to dive into the depths of my StrayThoughts page to find an acceptable title, finally came up with reference to A Knight's Tale (metacritic score: 55) which had me giggling (yes, giggling, dammit) for a full week.

Duuuude. Blogger has a WYSIWYG editor now. Took me about five minutes to realize it ("...the fu- Why are my a href tags going insane?"). Does anybody else pronounce a href to themselves as they're typing it? "Ay...huh-ref..."