Less Angry, Mostly Annoyed
a twenty-four year old's ramblings and delusions of grandeurWhy Do I Need to Give My SSN to Watch Television?
I decided to finally relent and order cable television, despite the fact that I am perplexed as to why I have to pay to watch something that was always free in my childhood. (Though, to be fair, Nip/Tuck is about to start its next season, and I just couldn’t resist.)
So I sign up online, and the last step is this live chat process. After getting a dozen timeout errors, I am finally connected, and am 5th in line to chat with a representative. 10 minutes later, I’m chatting with “Chris” and things are going relatively well (in spite of the fact that I have to repeatedly emphasize that there is NO building manager).
That is, until he asks me for my social security number. I don’t have the exact line, but it mentioned something about FCC regulations.
In my head, I instantly think BULLSHIT. Why would the FCC require that some cable company have my social security number? Why should I give out something that was never intended to be an identification number to be able to watch television? Oh, but it’s not just to watch television. It’s to sign up for a 1 year contract for otherwise overpriced service…so yes, I can watch advertisements and wait 15 minutes on hold if and when I have a problem.
I am polite, though, and I tactfully say, “I prefer not to disclose that information.” (I was very tempted to claim to be an illegal immigrant.)
Chris promptly tells me that I can call 1-800-COMCAST to order television service and hangs up the chat with me.
No discussion, no reasoning, no alternative.
Just hangs up on me after I’ve spent a good half hour trying to order service, so I can spend another half hour wrangling on the phone.
It’s not even a basic utility. It’s fucking optional television. The boob tube. Where they give airtime to spoiled 16 year olds who later become tragically tan trophy wives. Where Glenn Beck is freely allowed and encouraged to blubber on about rubbish. Lowest common denominator.
And they want my social security number? Their live chat can’t even seem to handle more than six concurrent connections, given that after I got through the timeout, I was 5th in line.
You know, if Comcast is that concerned over non-payment, just fucking charge me in advance of the month of service and ask for a credit card for auto-payment. Even if my card is cancelled, those charges still go through. I just love that they use the FCC as their excuse. (Not as good as the Patriot Act a few years ago though.)
They’re fucking idiots, as far as I’m concerned, and I guess this means I go back to Hulu, Netflix, and illegal downloads.
Woo bit torrent!
Everywhere You Look…
I have a strange love of one of the cheesiest television shows that ever was: Full House. I grew up on this show, desperately hoping that my own family would be like the Tanner family, and resolve all arguments with loving hugs and gentle discipline, rather than screaming and flying dishes. My husband even pointed out that there’s a good chance I owe my entire present life to the show, as I picked Stanford because it’s near San Francisco, and that’s how I ended up working as a web developer.
I recently saw one episode that was just so perfect in how it could mirror an Asian family…perversely, of course. The episode involves Stephanie wanting to take more dance classes at the urging of her instructor, who believes she can actually succeed in such a cutthroat industry. So Stephanie begs Danny to allow her to take more classes and be more involved; Danny agrees and is very proud of her efforts and hard work. But then, poor Stephanie realizes that she doesn’t have any time to see her friends or family, so she wants to quit. Of course, being the good person that she is, she feels bad about quitting because Danny seemed so happy with her talent. This is all revealed at the end of the show, with the usual hugs and “Awww,” and Danny reassures Stephanie that she could never let him down, and that it’s perfectly fine to quit.
And I couldn’t help but think of the 101 OTHER ways this episode would have turned out, had it been an Asian family.
1. Danny would have never allowed Stephanie to take additional classes due to the expense. The current classes she takes are either very cheap or free because it’s part of an after school program.
2. After much crying and hubbub, Danny would agree to these classes if and only if Stephanie gives up something near and dear to her: Mr. Bear, the privilege of watching television, talking on the phone, eating dessert, her allowance, etc. Not that Mr. Bear would’ve actually yielded anything for Danny, but he just really wants to make sure she means it. So Mr. Bear becomes the dog’s chew toy or something.
3. When Stephanie gets her first blood blister and can’t walk to school for a day or two, Danny makes her walk anyway because “Professional dancers get injuries all the time, and you have to toughen up.” No Band-Aids either because those are expensive and only for company use. (Hence, they’ve had the same box of Band-Aids since 1984.)
4. When Stephanie wants to quit, she doesn’t even dare think of bringing it up.
5. After more crying and hubbub (and possibly collapsing from exhaustion), Danny allows Stephanie to quit, but she cannot take ANY dance classes EVER again. In fact, no more extracurricular activities that cost Danny a single penny. EVER.
6. 20 years down the road, Danny reminds Stephanie of all the money he wasted on her 2 months of additional dance classes, and how he’s a great parent because he was so “giving” that way.
Yeah. That was my childhood.
Self Help Seminars
“You’re a great wife!” says my husband enthusiastically. “You should give one of those seminars on how to be a great wife! Women would eat it up!”
I look at him incredulously. “You think I am a good wife?”
“Well yeah!
“You give me everything I want…
“You aren’t ugly…
“You make lots of money…
“And you don’t nag me to have kids or anything,” he so charmingly proclaims.
Collapse
On Tuesday, we found 3 ants on our coffee table, presumably foraging for sweets. We assumed they were from outside, somehow, and smushed them without a second thought.
On Wednesday, we found 1 ant downstairs on our desk, 2 near the sink, and about 6 near the coffee table.
I looked under the sofa, and there was a small line of them coming from a crack in the wall. Perhaps our neighbor had ants? Or maybe they had made their way inside, looking for food? So I did what I normally do with ants – dump a whole bunch of baby powder around their perceived route, and as a barrier. It doesn’t kill them immediately, but it does cause them to get confused and eventually suffocate, which is a better death than crushing them and releasing all of their “Come retrieve my body so that you can cannibalize it” pheromones. I then resolved to patch up the little crack so that they could not come in again.
A few hours later, I notice them in some other part of the living room. Not far from the wall, mind you, but I didn’t think they were going to escape that deluge of baby powder. But it turns out, they were not from the wall or the crack in the wall. I lifted a plant pot that we’ve kept forever (with a live plant inside!) and found a whole nest of ants!
I can only imagine that the ants must have come in the soil that I repotted with or with the pot itself, but that was many months ago. It had to have taken them some time to build up their little colony, and presumably the soil/plant/pot had enough food to last to this point. But they must have run out of food or space, or both. Because Tuesday was the first we had seen of them, and Wednesday was when we discovered them. They had been thriving – without any suspicion on our side – until now.
But the lack of resources caused them to venture out, and it caused their discovery. It caused the subsequent collapse of their little civilization as we threw out the pot (I salvaged the plant) and killed the rest of their wandering kin. Its rise and prosperity in 8 months; its destruction in 1 day. Funny…
1 Euthanasia: $120
I lost Chili on May 12.
He was perpetually sick. His illness(es) finally got to the better of him – he stopped eating – and I decided to have him put to sleep.
My own schedule did not work out, so I didn’t get a chance to see him before he was gone.
I did see him after, and he was still warm. His eyes were still open because they never stay closed like they do in movies and they were cloudy. I thought about maybe putting coins on his eyelids, but he doesn’t need to pay the ferry – horses can swim.
I took a little bit of his mane. This morning, his body was taken away to be “rendered” – whatever that means. I wanted to get him cremated, but it was too costly, and in the end, I would only get a box of ashes. I told myself that ashes are not Chili.
I never imagined that it could be so painful.
I tell myself that he had a long life and that his final years were mostly happy…that he is “only” a horse. He doesn’t understand grief or loss, and that he was only concerned about the now and driven by instinct. I tell myself that he went peacefully and while he was relatively content.
But I feel like I failed. I feel guilt. I wish last Tuesday didn’t happen. I feel no relief. I just want him back.
I realize now that he was more like a child than a pet or companion because he required so much more work, investment, and understanding.
Now, I can only wish for the next few weeks to go by quickly. Because there is no other consolation or resolution. Just erosion.
The little mare he was pastured with was visibly upset, too. She kept calling for him, but he never came back.
Strange IE8 Text Wrapping Bug
I seldom blog about anything related to my job, since most of the interesting quirks and bugs have already been discovered and written about at length. This, however, is something new.
So the lovely IE8 has come out and it doesn’t support the <wbr/> tag. A quick search turns up the following solution, which involves using an empty span to insert a zero-width space character with the :after pseudo class.
longtextthatdoesnotwrap<wbr/><span class=”wbr”></span>andcontinueshere
.wbr:after {
content:”\200B”;
}
Only IE8 recognizes pseudo classes, so IE6 and IE7 are unaffected. And one can easily add another snippet of CSS to set content to be empty for FF and Safari. So I tried this on a piece of text that looked like this:
moretextthatdoes<wbr/><span class=”wbr”></span>/notwrap
…but it didn’t work. At all. It was inserting the zero-width space, but for whatever reason, the text would not wrap. It would just stupidly overflow. After creating a new furrow in my brow, I figured out the reason.
IE8 does not wrap text if the break is followed by a slash. In other words, something like this will not wrap:
moretextthatdoes[some break here]/notwrap
So, it turns out I had to put the empty .wbr span after the slash:
moretextthatdoes<wbr/>/<span class=”wbr”></span>notwrap
And then it wrapped.
Yeah…weird and crappy. Thanks Microsoft!
Like a Claritin Commercial
My last week has been wonderful. Just truly, truly blessed. In fact, my biggest problem is setting up a little Nabaztag bunny because we use WEP security, not WPA. (I told Saxon that the bunny could read him NPR, and he was excited. Unfortunately, he is also a tad stringent about security – BAH, I say – and the bunny is inactive right now.)
I was encouraged to take some time off between jobs, and on Monday, I start at a new company. The past two or three months had been extraordinarily difficult for me, and yet, I couldn’t let go and slide because, well, even when it’s difficult, I’m still drinking Dom Perignon (1999 was NOT a good year, by the way).
One particular evening, I was in Palo Alto, having just done poorly on a job interview. The company had brought in an individual from Google to interview me, and it’s a funny thing with me…in my first programming classes in high school, I knew what recursion was and could use it before I actually knew the definition of recursion. So I struggle with terminology and whenever I append “-ing” to something (like ssh’ing), I feel like a dummy, and I felt like a dummy in this interview, with my lack of jargon. But it was around 8pm, quite chilly, and I had just missed the train by 10 minutes so that I’d have to wait another hour for the next one. Meaning I wasn’t going to get home until around 10:30pm. I called up Saxon and said, jokingly, “Sigh. I know why women become baby machines. So much easier to eat ice cream and pickles all day long, and the biggest complaint is that your feet are swollen. Are you sure you don’t want a baby?”
At another place I interviewed, I thought I did fantastic. I even completed a small little JS drag and drop assignment at their request, but when push came to shove, they said wanted someone who could work very late and on weekends. All fine and good except that I had not said (or even dropped the hint) that I wouldn’t be willing to work late/on weekends. I can only assume it’s because of the wedding ring on my hand. One of my former coworkers who is an attorney mentioned that she’d take off her wedding band if going to a job interview. I was particularly bitter about this one because, well, I had invested a considerable amount of time and energy (as with any interview), and they reject me based on an assumption of my gender and home life?
Whatever. Needless to say, it was hard. I felt like the Hollow Men, only they were blissfully hollow. I still had to smile and make dinner and pet my cat.
My birthday and the holidays rolled around, and as you can see from a couple of earlier posts, I wasn’t terribly happy. Hey, I’m 24, and that 40 year old esthetician at the spa looks younger than I do. I was in a funk. I felt addicted to my petty bourgeois bickerings.
But this week off is like a Claritin commercial, frolicking in the fields. I have been able to clean my house, and fix food, and shimmy up and down my dancing pole. I have been able to paint my nails my favorite color (Chanel’s Vamp), and I have been able to at least TRY to get my shoes repaired (the cobbler is mysteriously closed EVERY time I go). I have purchased beautiful yarn and ribbons to knit new things (a shawl to be used as a tagelmust, beautiful silks and alpacas for opera gloves, and hand-dyed silk ribbons as accoutrements).
Yesterday, at the Westfield Shopping Center, buying chocolate covered cherries for Saxon at Godiva, I even came to an epiphany about the nature of our relationship, which led me to understand Saxon all the more. And I also remembered that when I was 12 and visited San Francisco, I wanted to be one of those urbane, city-dwelling sophisticates that use “lunch” as a verb and had appointments to make and were oh-so-gloriously busy and involved. It made me smile as I was walking briskly to Ozumo, where my friends treated me to a delicious lunch and then facials on Maiden Lane.
Of course, I am still a cynic at heart and must describe it as a pharmaceutical commercial. But that’s better than brooding and steeping in misery.
Waste & Gardening
When I was a child, my mom would always lament the disposability of flowers and plants. Poinsettias get cast away with the deadened, dried spruces and firs that were once so decorated and worshiped. Easter lilies are left to die and rot as if the resurrection of Jesus legitimizes their maltreatment. Annuals are replaced, well, annually, as if harvesting the seeds or keeping the original plant alive is just too much work. So she’d pick them up from other people’s trash, from churches that would otherwise toss them, and from the boxes of slightly damaged flowers that would never get put out for sale.
A couple months after I moved into this condominium, I was taking out the trash when I noticed a crumpled but very green dendrobidium orchid laying in the trash. The roots were cut, the flower stalks wilted, the leaves smushed. It was obviously thrown out because it was done blooming, and of course, the only value that any plant offers is in its flowers, so it was perfectly fine to just kill it. It was a pretty hot day as well, and the heat emanating from the decaying garbage and the brightness of the sun was ensuring a quick death. So I grabbed it, if furtively, and took it back inside. I repotted it with some bark mix and spagnum moss and promised it that I would never throw it away if it lived. I knew all the crushed leaves would eventually wither away and turn brown (and they did), but the orchid sent out new roots and tender new stalks and leaves. It it still quite small compared to what it had once been, but the point is that it is alive.
It will be at least a year, if not two, before it blooms again, but I think I have a soft spot in my heart for plants that bloom so infrequently. It reminds me of unrequited love, of pursuing and chasing someone until they finally relent and give in, and it flowers gloriously. Of course, I feel like this is a very male perspective, and being a heterosexual female (and married), I can only pretend to live vicariously through these difficult plants.
Today, I went out to the dumpster again, and at the bottom were four vigorous narcissus plants. I knew I wanted to rescue them like I did the dendrobidium, but the trash was empty this time, and the dumpster was deep. So I cast away all the childhood embarrassment I felt when my mother rescued potted plants – only she never actually went as far as to rummage through the trash – and got a bucket to stand on to reach in and grab them. I only managed to get three of the four, but that’s three more plants that I have now, and three more plants that will hopefully be given a second chance.
Pole Dancing, Part Trois (?)
As another part of the “feeling pretty” happifier, I decided to resume taking pole dancing classes. Not with S Factor, as they’re really too cult-ish and expensive for my tastes, but with Slinky Productions, taught by people who are/were actual exotic dancers.
At any rate, seeing as how our place has massively tall ceilings, I figured this would be the perfect space to put up a pole. I settled on the X-Pole, as it has been described as the Maserati of dancing poles, and seeing as how I love the word Maserati, it pretty much sold me. I’d also considered Platinum Stages for quite a while, but I had read that there have been incidences of breakage with their poles. I’m not sure about the veracity of these claims, especially with it being the internet and all, but I don’t want a pole to break while I’m clutching it at 10 feet. Lil’ Mynx poles ended up being too short, as they have a 10 feet maximum height restriction.
So I order the X-Pole, as well as a 500mm extension for it, as according to the UK version of their site, that’s the extension I need to reach a 127″ ceiling. It arrives astonishingly quick – in a matter of two days, actually, and I have it on Christmas Eve (not a creature was stirring, except a mouse who was eager to set up her new pole).
Unfortunately, the thing turns out to be about 1″-2″ too short to reach my 127″ ceiling. I’m absolutely befuddled. The website and the included installation instructions all specify that I have the correct extensions and that it should, in theory, reach the ceiling. But it doesn’t. I measure all the pieces individually, compare them to the manual, draw myself a little diagram, and it turns out, there is no conceivable way that the X-Pole set with the 500mm extension can reach my height ceiling. Their recommendations are wrong, or there’s some space/time warping between the floor and ceiling of my place. I measured everything two, three times in both metric and US units and tried to piece them together in every which way.
It just doesn’t add up. Too short!
So now I must order the 1000mm (long story short, there are a couple of extensions included in the set, so I was using 125mm, 250mm, and 500mm for 875mm of total extension length, so with the 1000mm, I can use that alone or add in the 125mm if necessary)…and I must wait.
In the meantime, I’ve got some thick, exposed metal beams that are a mere 96″ high. I suppose that will have to do for now.
Stupid Grandfather Clocks
So I got asked this math question recently:
Say you have a grandfather clock that chimes every hour. If the clock chimes 6 times at six o’clock and takes 30 seconds to chime, how long will the clock take at twelve o’clock?
Of course, I answered 60 seconds. But apparently, that is incorrect, as this is the type of question intended to figure out just how clever you are. The “correct” answer is that it will take 66 seconds. Why? Well, with 6 chimes, there are 5 intervals. Each of those intervals takes 6 seconds to complete, if the “total” time is 30 seconds. At 12 chimes, there are 11 intervals. Hence, 6 x 11 = 66 seconds.
I kept thinking about this because it REALLY bothered me. Here’s why I believe the answer is not 66 seconds, and actually is 60 seconds. When the clock chimes 6 times, there are actually 6 intervals from the first strike to the cessation of sound from the last chime. Each chime consists of the strike to create the vibration AND the continuation of that vibration, which is what our ears interpret as sound. So, closer to 5 seconds per chime. (Note: I realize that in reality, the last chime is longer than the first chimes, simply because the chime is allowed to continue onwards. But then it probably becomes some difficult partial differential equation and not possible to solve in casual conversation. For most people, anyway.)
Thus, with 12 chimes, there are 12 intervals. Again, from the first strike to the cessation of sound from the last chime. 12 x 5 = 60 seconds.
QED.
AH!!! I feel so stupid.
