November 12-13, 2014

I don’t intend to keep doing these double entries, and then fall back to triple entries, and then just give up entirely. But I have interesting days & thoughts, and less-interesting days & thoughts.

To wit: Wednesday the 12th I went to the dentist. I love my dentist, and will recommend her heartily to anyone who is looking for a dentist. Her name is Amy Gadol and she’s just absurdly enthusiastic about teeth.

But that’s not really something that I need to journal about at length.

Likewise the multiple hours I wasted on the phone Wednesday afternoon with AT&T trying, idiot that I am, to order a new phone. They have this program wherein you pay about half the price of a new phone in monthly installments spread out over a year, and then you can get a new phone every year. It’s a complete ripoff unless you’re an unbearable dork who wants to play with new toys every year.

Which apparently I am. AND I’m that unbearable dork who is still on the grandfathered “unlimited data” plan & thus it’s necessary to speak to a human at AT&T – and not just any human, but specifically one of the select subsets of humans who have access to the magic override codes.

All this despite the fact that I have never used more than 3GB of data in a month, and I could actually pay less if I just agreed to give up my unlimited plan & go with the 3GB plan. But I am a stubborn idiot.

See, none of this is worth writing a diary entry about. LIFE this week isn’t worth writing about.

Other things not worth writing a diary entry about:

  • Finally deciding to revert back to Linux for most of the backoffice machines at WXDU, and putting together an order for some sweet Lenovo small-biz servers. I’m a little sad I won’t get to play with one of the new black trashcan Mac Pros, but those things are absurdly expensive & are outfitted entirely to be graphics workstations (Two GPUs standard, when I’d be using exactly zero of them). I’ve disliked many things about using OSX as a server OS, so I’m moderately happy, even though I’ll have to rewrite a bunch of custom scripts and all the documentation.
  • Going back to the dentist Thursday morning to have impressions made of my teeth so that I can get one of those custom night guards that all the cool overstressed middle-aged people use.
  • Health coverage renewal time!

I’d write about how obnoxious that dude from the ESA is, with his stupid hideous lingerie-model shirt, but that’s been covered amply on Twitter & elsewhere already, and I have nothing much to add, other than to say “thanks for undercutting my excitement at your legit scientific achievement, douchebag.”

I’d write about TIME magazine putting “feminist” on a reader’s poll of words to ban, but I’m already stressed out & angry about stuff and it’s just them trying to emulate Buzzfeed or whatever anyway. They’ll be dead by the end of the decade, so enjoy the downward spiral while it lasts, dudes.

Other things not changing lately:

  • No grand jury outcome in Ferguson yet. 1000 cops being armed & trained to crack some protester skulls when the time comes.
  • Women on the internet being threatened, belittled & abused for speaking up about how difficult it can be to be a woman on the internet.

I tweet & RT about that stuff on the regular, so I feel like it’s not as necessary to recap it here. Follow me there if you want the daily blow-by-blow.

November 12-13, 2014

October 28, 2014

Spent an hour or so this morning writing a short essay about why I believe cumulative GPA matters to companies who hire students & recent graduates. It’s here on tumblr, a couple of notes up in my timeline, if you haven’t already read it & wish to.

After lunch we got this video:

I haven’t even looked at the YouTube comments, because the peripheral junk from dudes on Facebook & etc was more than enough for me. Dear dudes who are all innocent-feigning, like “why can’t a guy say hello to a woman on the street?”: DIE IN A FUCKING FIRE.

I say this as someone who is himself on a personal mission to say hi to, or otherwise acknowledge the presence of, more strangers whom I see on the street. I’ll usually say “hey, how ya doing?” to men, but with women I typically just smile, without even really going out of my way to make eye contact. Sometimes they smile & nod back, sometimes they don’t. Either way I can’t imagine acting like some of the egregious assholes in that video.

But as bad as those jerks in the video are, I think the asshole on Facebook who managed to be racist, classist *and* sexist in one obnoxious mansplainy comment is probably worse. I’d link or excerpt his comment, except I was so aggravated by it that I blocked him.

I have friends who like to engage with ass-backward assholes on the regular, but I’m sorry, life is hard enough as it is.

October 28, 2014