The Beat and the Timing

ZOMG!!  I'm l33t and I can prove it!

I really need to get a photo of it, but in the meantime, you can see a (very) small selection of what books I own over here at LibraryThing.com.  It's free to join, but you can only list ~200 books in your library.  If you want to have more, you have to pay for a membership, but it's only $25 if I remember correctly.   I heard about it over on F13 a while back and started listing my books, but haven't had the time to continue.  I really should just sit down and start entering titles.  If nothing else, it might give me an idea of just how many books I actually own.

Only reason I started entering books again is because I finished reading Twilight Watch last night.  Last of a trilogy by Sergei Lukyanenko (or maybe not, a few reviews say it's a tetralogy now.. interesting!), along with Night Watch and Day Watch, all three books are really excellent and enjoyable.  I like how he carried the interlinked stories along and the translation (from Russian) was great.  As in, I didn't notice any problems or thought anything sounded weird when I read the book.

One of the best things I like about the fanficrants community are the rants about sex in fanfiction.  Especially the terminology used in some of these stories.  Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind reading about sex or sexual situations at all.  Heck, I've even come across yaoi/slash fics that I thought were well done and that genre isn't one I'm into at all (I must be a rare female that doesn't care for yaoi...).   I think I've found out part of the reason why some of these horrible terms which are so ranted about are also so common in fics though - spam adverts.  Honestly, have you ever read the subject titles some of these wonders of spaminosity provide?  I present to you a small selection of gems gleaned from my spam folder tonight while I was cleaning:

This is an article I meant to write years ago, back when Grimwell Online was just getting started.  It was going to be an ongoing debate about the merits of “good” versus “evil” in online PvP gaming.  Obviously I never wrote the article, but as MMOs came and went, I never stopped thinking about player conflict and how it was driven.


Sorry if this seems a bit disjointed.  I started it a while back and finally sat down to finish it tonight.  Not sure it's entirely coherent or if I made my point clearly enough.

That's me.  I seem to have turned into a human barometer over the past few months, and I have no idea why. 

Like today, I had to lay down with a cloth over my eyes because my headache was so bad I felt nauseous if I moved too quickly.  I'm talking sinus pain, eye pain, base of the skull pain... just pain.  And I'm not someone that gets ill easily or suffers from headaches or migraines either.  But today was horrible.  Until the weather front passed.  And I knew one was coming from listening to the news. 

I managed until about 12:30 or so, then I just had to lay down for a bit (luckily it's a slow day at work and working at home gives me this option).  Set the alarm on my cell phone and by 2:30, the front had moved over us and my headache was pretty much gone.  Lingering a bit but by now, completely well and not a problem.  I'd say it's just a headache (and I did take some Tylenol), except that it's happened far too many times now for it to be complete coincidence.  And I knew about the front coming through before having it confirmed by the husband who watched the news.

I think I'd prefer an achy knee when it's going to rain to this though.  *sigh*

I've just spent (am spending still) the past few hours loading CDs into my iTunes account.  I tend to do this in batches or as the random stacks of CD cases sitting around start to bug me.  Tonights session was precipitated by a cleaning frenzy at the work desk.  I'd straightened up my filing cabinet and organized the files finally, and that lead me to going through all the random stacks (I like random stacks of things apparently) of paper and filing them away properly.  From there I migrated over to the drawing table which is occupied by an obnoxious number of random stacks of things (see, there're those random things again) all over it, along with a HUGE color laserjet printer that doesn't work right.  I need to get rid of it somehow so that I can finally reclaim my drawing table.  Right now about half the junk has been taken care of (WTF?!  I had some newpaper from 2004 on there, and a Glamour magazine from 2005 - I don't even read Glamour!) but there is still some lingering around.

One (or three) of those stacks were CD jewel cases, travel cases and a bunch of uncased CDs gathering dust.  So I decided to start matching CDs to cases and that turned into "have I loaded this one yet?" which became load the ones I haven't, find cases for the ones I have and why not try straightening up the CD rounder stand we have downstairs that mostly functions as a plant stand.  So I headed downstairs to grab a bunch more CDs and discovered a gold mine.  I never realized we had some of these CDs , or if I ever knew, I'd forgotten.  I refuse to claim the Debbie Gibson, those all belong to the husband and he'll admit it, too. 

But oh my gawds! 

We've got Pink Floyd's The Wall!  Rush's Chronicles and the 2112 album!  I complete forgot I'd bought the Best of Simon and Garfunkle at some point in time.  Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Volumes I & II!  And I found all the cases for the Celtic series of discs as well.  Somehow we've managed to acquire two copies of Dave Matthews Band's Before These Crowded Streets (I discovered this because both discs were in one case) along with the rest of my DMB CDs.  The remainder of my Midnight Oil CDs (the husband bought me their entire catalog for Christmas one year when we were still dating).  My Joe Satriani discs and my third Counting Crows CD.  I found the discs for a Hawaiian artist named Lono that we discovered through listening to the Steve Dahl show here in the Chicago area.  The Charlie Daniels Band - A Decade of Hits and a Queensryche CD I didn't even know I owned!

It's like hitting the musical jackpot here.  If you don't hear for me for a while, I'll be off in musical heaven, enjoying myself.

So here in the Chicago area lately, bottled water is getting a bad rap.  Actually, I guess it's becoming a countrywide phenomenon, but I'm only concerned with this area right now.  Public water sources (PWS) are safer than the bottled water sources, and in fact, may be the same thing, according to different news stories.  My response is - so what?

I'm not saying there aren't any valid points in the claims that bottled water isn't necessarily better than tap water.  And the amount of unrecycled bottles clogging up landfills is a disgrace as well.  But to say that you shouldn't drink bottled water, or that you should refill with tap water, ignores a lot of different factors.  Here in Chicagoland (which isn't as homogeneous as one might think), not every municipality gets their water from Lake Michigan.  I know my village certainly doesn't.  I'm made aware of that fact every time we have an extended period without rain, because the water tables in the area get low and the water starts to smell and taste bad. 

When we first moved here over six years ago, spring and fall were marked by white foam and leftover white scum when boiling something, or in the dishwasher.  The water would taste bad for a while and then the water tables finished turning over and it was gone for a while.  That fact alone is responsible for my husband and I choosing to sign up for bottled water service.  Every month (today in fact), we put out our empty bottles (the blue 5 gallon ones) on the porch and we get filled ones in return from Hinkley Springs.  Works like a charm.  We keep bottles in the house, fill them up and keep in the fridge so they're extra cold when we want them.  After a while, the bottles start to get a bit funky and they are given to the dog for a few moments of play before getting thrown in the recycle bin.  When we're running around we occasionally buy a bottle of water, but then that bottle ends up being reused in the house.  Works like a charm.

I guess my biggest bitch about the whole bottled water brouhaha is that it's not necessarily better to drink tap.  These news people make it seem as if living in a larger urban area automatically means your municipal water supply is fine and dandy when that's not always the case.  I'm not about to give up my bottled water service just because someone says the water in my village should be fine.  It's not, judging by the smell it gives off more often than not lately.  So until I'm forced otherwise, I'm sticking to bottled water.

Blah.

Yep.  Blah.

That just about sums it all up.

Boring part of the month (even though reporting is due at work) and just a bunch of little things I have on my plate that I just do not want to deal with.

So blah it is.

Nothing like having your guild forum randomly go down without warning to cause withdrawal to set in.  Happened yesterday and today.  Turned out our webmaster upgraded his server to PHP5 but completely forgot that our forums only ran on PHP4, which means they broke, badly.  He ended up having to do several older upgrades to get the forum software up to a version that worked on PHP5, but now everything is back up and running.  The old skin needs to be put back (or new one made) but everything is readable once again.

So my withdrawal pains have gone away and now I just need to figure out how I fell to #3 on the post count.  /sadf

So I feel like ranting about something, and I found the perfect thing when I ran out for lunch today - drive-thrus.

Since we're leaving for vacation in a few days, it's not worth doing a full grocery shopping trip to get some food.  So I've been being a slug (since eating soup or oatmeal for lunch when it's hot and humid outside isn't my idea of fun) and getting fast food.  Today it started raining when I was out and by the time I got to the drive-thru it was POURING down.  Most fast food places have at least some semblance of a canopy over their pick-up windows, but none of them (except maybe White Castle, I think) have anything covering the speaker where you place your order.

Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't this be common sense?  The driver's side of my car (and me by extension) got soaked while trying to place my order.  And then to add insult to injury, the pick-up window at the Arby's I went to had some lousy excuse for a canopy over their window.  As in, it sticks out just far enough for the big drops of water to splat right into your open window.  Nice.

It sometimes doesn't pay to be a fat, happy consumer whore.