{ 2008 07 08 }
Long Live the New Flesh
- I’m watching Food Network Challenge: “Princess Cakes”, in which five teams each create a fantastic cake based on a different Disney princess. One of the judges is a little girl name Alyssa who had kidney cancer. Being very small and very ill, she received her Make-a-Wish wish, which was to be a princess for a day. Says Alyssa, matter-of-factly: “Princesses make me feel better when I have cancer.” It’s heartbreaking, and I just can’t stop laughing. Really, this tiny little girl is so touching she leaves a fingerprint on my soul…and yet, the absurdity (”I’m looking for experience and realism” is a ballsy assertion when you’re barely tall enough to ride the tea cups.) is gut-busting. Is it kosher to give a kindergartener medical marijuana?
- When words like confit and foie gras begin working their way into American English faster than a Panzer crossing the Maginot Line, one starts to think the French may be plotting to end this country’s cultural domination of the Western world by inducing myocardial infarctions en masse.
- Quoth Slate, on the topic of Al Franken’s run for U.S. Senate: “If the people of Minnesota would rather be represented by a hack like Norm Coleman than laugh off a few jokes that didn’t work, then they should stop complaining about being stuck with professional politicians. And the real joke will be on them.”
- Complaint: Last Monday, my laptop went daft, but I managed to order a new one in the hours while before it became uselessly slow. Benefits include sextupling my RAM and more than quadrupling my HD space, as well as obtaining a battery which functions for more than 30 minutes at a time. Unfortunately, I also had to adjust to Windows Vista.
Thus, I spent much of the holiday weekend alternately installing requisite applications and cursing Vista for being obstinate, being incompatible with my old software (Acrobat Pro 6), or having an infuriatingly opaque control panel. (Why can’t I change my background by right-clicking on it anymore?) By the way, if you want to install Office 2003, you need to uninstall the trial version of Office 2007, restart your system, open the Office 2003 CD, set the properties on the Setup file to run in XP Service Pack 2 compatibility mode, right-click, and select “Run as Administrator” - even if you’re already logged in with administrator privileges. That’s about as user-friendly as a bear trap.
Anyway, everything seemed to be fine by Monday morning. I’d even completed the arduous task of paring my iTunes playlist down to the necessary 7.3 gigs for proper syncing with my nano. Then, I tried to connect with GA Tech’s wireless network, a tremendously convenient feature of that school’s campus. Having made no headway after half an hour, I went down to the Office of Information Technology (OIT) service center in the basement of the library seeking answers. I run no funky networking software. I host no sites on this box. It should have been a straightforward query, right? My confidence with the OIT staff progressively diminished over the course of the half-hour they spent ineffectually mucking with my settings and re-installing the driver for my internal wireless card. When I got home, where the wireless network runs like a gazelle on the plains of the Serengeti, I discovered an email from OIT notifying me that my problem had been resolved. “Unable to determine problem in customer’s allotted time frame.” Yes, that’s right: they resolved my problem by sheer force of incompetence. Silly me for assuming the OIT people would know more about how to connect one of the world’s dominant operating systems to the network they run than I do.
- Here you can see the ad Republican Senator Gordon Davis is running in Oregon to publicize his agreement with Barack Obama. Now who’s got a crush on Obama?
justinb013 | 08-Jul-08 at 9:56 am | Permalink
First off, big kudos for getting the hell off of myspace. Now I can again read the musings of the NAWK while at work and cancel my myspace account…
Second, your forced adjustment to Vistar was likely not entirely necessary, but so it goes… and yes, Vista blows massive chunks. Remember Windows ME? I like to call Vistar Windows ME 2.0. Do the OIT “geeks” even get paid? I’d call them actual geeks, but if they can’t figure out a fucking wireless connection in half an hour, calling them geeks would be an insult to us actual geeks.
Oh, and if you are bored one day, type French military victories into Google and click the “I’m feeling lucky” button… good times.