BunkBlog

30 years ago, you knew how to type if you were a secretary or clerk.
15 years ago, you knew how to type if you were a geek.
Today, you know how to type, of course.
current_music: UB40 – If It Happens Again
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So, I had a few minutes to kill (ok, more like hours) and I hit the Random LJ button. Here’s the pithy post I perused in my perambulations:

so yesterdai i wuz doin mai spanish project thingamahoosit n part of it wuz to write an obituary. i wuz gunna write dat one of mai frendz died, lyke mebbe joe or sumthin [lol no offense] buh den winnie IMs me n she tellz me dat shez killing justin timberlake. so den i decide to kill sum1 famous.

Does that make anyone else’s head hurt? Why would you purposely type like that (or even lyke dat)? Ugh.
current_music: Cracker – Sweet Magdalena
current_mood: annoyed

I seem to have lost some fonts. When I open a publication I made 4 years ago, it claims I used some fonts in it that I can’t find on my system or in my archives anymore. Does anyone have the fonts “Tennessee SF” or “Gill Sans” that I could snag from you? I thought all my fonts came from public sources or the Corel Gallery CD, but those two I can’t find. Very frustrating to have hundreds of fonts but not the ones you’re looking for. 🙂
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Finals are over. Whatever I earned on those two tests, it’s out of my hands now. Thank goodness.

UMUC’s Distance Education program sure turned out to be a mixed bag. Good English class, albeit with some real stupid classmates; horrible Economics class, with even dumber classmates and an apathetic instructor. Hopefully these classes don’t drag my GPA down too much. It’s only 6 credits of 50, so I’m confident. 🙂
current_music: Cracker – Guarded By Monkeys
current_mood: relieved

OK, OK. We get it. In browsers that are rather lenient with color names, they’ll parse any string of characters as a color. That’s wonderful.

For those of us using Opera or Lynx, it’s a non-issue. Lynx is not a very colorful browser, being text-only. Opera doesn’t allow non-standard colors, so all your funny-colored words are plain, normal paragraph colored. Sorry, it’s a bug not a feature.
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THE CHANGING NATURE OF CYBERCAFÉS
In southern California, the place of origin for so many American trends, there has been a widespread transformation of cybercafés from places where you go for a latte and a look at your stocks and e-mail, to a place where you rub shoulders with teenagers playing violent video games. In the small city of Garden Grove (population 169,000), the number of cybercafés has grown in just two years from 3 to 21, and a few of these have turned into crime scenes, some of them gang-related. The appeal of the new cybercafés is action and speed. One 13-year-old patron of a Garden Grove cybercafé says: “When you play these games at home, the action lags. These computers here are much faster. This is a great place to hang out.” In reaction to all the violence, city officials have now passed new laws restricting the hours for teenage “hanging out” at these places. (USA Today 7 Feb 2002)

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2002/02/07/cybercafe.htm

Um, Garden Grove may be a “small city” but it’s embedded in the megalopolis of Los Angeles Metro. I know my Angeleno friends keep saying it’s not one city, but look at it from the air sometime and tell me where the breaks between cities are. Most locals refer to the town as “Garbage Grove,” which should tell you something about the caliber of folks that show up for their cybercafes. 🙂
current_music: Five For Fighting – America Town
current_mood: tired

Hehe

Maybe this will get more hits than the T-Shirt Countdown. Hehe

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Although it was originally on a public website, and I only archived it because LJ didn’t support threading and the page was enormous in December of 2000, the Naked XXXMas Archive has outlived its usefulness. Rather than being an entertaining glimpse of a single goofy day in LiveJournal history, it’s become a point of contention. It is one of the most viewed things on my website, which saddens me since it has nothing to do with my website other than I hosted it here. There are increasing numbers of people who would prefer that they be removed. I’ve respected a few requests for such removals in the past 13 months, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s any point to keeping the archive.

The mood on much of LJ has turned more introverted and frightened. The open, fun feeling that prompted the whole thing is gone. Hell, I haven’t even been one of ‘s “friends” in at least 6 months, for reasons never stated to me. Some of the big players in the exhibition-fest are now offline or friends-only (I miss , who also doesn’t consider me a friend), others have changed LJ user IDs so often they appear schizophrenic. There are people that think they’re being stalked online (how that is even possible defies the imagination), and other folks who are having LJ feuds that encompass half my friends page.

So, without further ado, farewell to Lianna’s Nekkid XXXmas.
current_music: Prince – Cream (NPG Mix)
current_mood: sad

I think there is little chance of the emailed gift certificate ever actually arriving for my mom’s birthday last month. The problem, of course, is all due to my entire family being computer-stupid. Not just computer-illiterate, but stupid. It’s like they don’t even consider learning anything I tell them. Why does my sister insist on using Hotmail when she has a perfectly good email address that belongs to the ISP she pays for? Why is the concept of email redirection (aliasing) so completely alien that neither my mom nor sister can wrap their minds around it?

Hotmail, for those who don’t know, is evil. They have this wonderful feature, enabled by default, called “Junk Mail Folder” which is intended to hijack spam and keep it out of your inbox. Considering that Microsoft seems to sell your Hotmail address to everyone on the planet, this seems like a peculiar thing to do. Kind of like taxing farm subsidies. Anyway, if your Hotmail address isn’t in the “To” or “CC” lines of an email, Hotmail assumes it is junk mail and throws it into the Junk Mail folder. Since I’ve grown tired of figuring out what my siblings’ email addresses are as they change more often than my home address, I’ve set up aliases for them. When I email mom@andysocial.com, for instance, it gets redirected to (get this) my sister’s email box. Why? Because my mom doesn’t have her own email, even though sis uses Hotmail and all of her kids have at least one email address each. Someone in that house can set Grandma up an email account, but nobody ever does.

Now, since the gift certificate from Amazon was sent to “mom” and not my sister’s Hotmail address, it got thrown in the Junk Mail. This is all my theory. Trying to get any kind of coherent conversation about computers from my family is like talking to a chipmunk. It may be amusing, but not very informative. So, I email my sister directly, with a CC to “mom” and tell her what to do if she does not see two copies of this email in her inbox. Does she do it? No. I have no confidence that my mom will ever get this gift certificate. I really should stick with paper when dealing with these twits.
current_music: Whodini – Freaks Come Out At Night
current_mood: annoyed

If the extra effort required to hit the shift key is too much for you, if the extra keystrokes necessary to spell out words instead of abbreviating them in random ways and using numerals in place of words is too tough, perhaps you shouldn’t be using a medium of discourse that requires typing and a reasonable ability to express oneself in English?

Just a thought before I crash.
current_music: Prince – Computer Blue
current_mood: cranky

Do it like she like it
So your baby don’t wanna sleep around
Give her what she want when she want

U’re such a hunk so full of spunk, I’ll give U
Head ‘til U’re burnin’ up
Head ‘til U get enough
Head ‘til U’re love is red
Head – love U ‘til U’re dead
U know U’re good, girl
I think U like 2 go down
current_music: Prince – Face Down
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Although many people have remarked in the past on my predilection for rather unusual watches, generally including lots of buttons or more modes than anyone needs, this watch takes the cake.

This thing tells time in either the standard way, or in binary notation. Imagine trying to tell someone that it is already half past 110011! This is even weirder than “Swatch beats” that attempted to become a new time standard a couple years ago.
current_music: Prince – Sleep Around
current_mood: amused