Oh dear

So after a complicated couple of hours tossing and turning in my head about whether or not to pay the $5.00 to join the Big Huge Labs website for seven days.  The motivation behind this was oddly enough their ability to create motivational posters.  They do that for free, but if you want it in high definition like the picture you supplied with the ability to print out at 24”X36” or whatever large size you might enjoy, you have to pay.  You don’t have to pay for each one, in fact you are allowed to get as many you like over the course of time you paid for.  I’ve never joined a website and paid for a certain amount of time.  It was weird.  I was unhappy.  What they produced made me happy.  What I obtained from them made me happy.  I will probably even be sad when my seven days are up.

 

The most bizarre part is the web app they have that I am the most attracted to.  Writer.bighugelabs.com  They are calling it the internet typewriter.  It’s a black screen with green writing and probably old news as far as the rest of the internet is concerned but it’s new to me so you’re going to hear about it.  It saves automatically and has a lot of other functions that are a major part of programs that allow you to write with them.  The best part was where it differs from a typewriter; spell check.  I could be showing my n00b here.  When I say spell check I mean that nifty red underline that appears when you mess up a word that allows you to right click on it for an alternative spelling.  It seems like to me that it’s available some places and not others but maybe it has to do with my browser.  I really don’t care where it comes from but I wish it were everywhere.

 

More excitement that previsouly planned upon

            My commute today was interrupted.  I was coming into work after a long session of logic thinking the night before that brought me to the conclusion that instead of keeping office hours and sitting around the last few hours of the day with nothing to do; I would leave after the warehouse left.  When the receiving department leaves there is no longer anything to receive into the system.  My work load ends when they leave.  So I should probably come in when they come in so that I can leave when they leave.  It made sense to me.  The interruption came from my passenger side rear tire that had come to the logical conclusion that it was tired of carrying my ass to work every day and was no longer going to retain thirty five pounds of air pressure.  Zero was about the amount of pounds it was looking to hold and with some serious vibrations that took my mind away from a new CD I burned this morning and was grooving out to, it succeeded to hold no air.

            I wasn’t aware of exactly what had happened until I was on the side of the road looking at the problem.  Walking from my side of the car to the side the vibrations came from I could smell burnt rubber.  I assumed something horrible had happened.  It hadn’t really occurred to me that my tire might be flat.  The car didn’t react as violently as I had thought it might at 70mph with only three tires doing their jobs.  It was almost a relief when I saw it.  Not thinking of the financial implications of it I opened my trunk and retrieved the spare, the jack and the tire iron.  I even had a blanket back there that I laid down on the ground so I didn’t get wet. 

I normally wear my dressier pants to work four days out of the week reserving jeans for the generous “casual Friday.”   With almost as much thought and consideration as I had put into changing my hours I also had decided that if everyone in the office was wearing jeans, shorts or even sweat pants; I should be allowed to do it too.  No one had ever spoken to me about dress code the whole time I’ve worked here, not even when I took a position in the office.  I had roughly assumed that there was a Casual Friday and the other four days of the week we were to wear business casual.  I don’t know if there was a sudden implementation of Casual Tuesdays or the warmer weather or lighter workloads of a slow season had somehow entitled us to a relaxed dressing environment but at any rate I wasn’t copied on that memo.

Even if I didn’t have the blanket to lay out I was wearing jeans that made it much more comfortable to change a tire.  The rain was an extra added bonus that only really started to factor in when the nuts were loose enough to hand un-tighten but the hub cap wasn’t very accommodating for my big fingers.  It was a long process of finger tip loosening the lug nuts.  When they were all off and the hub cap was in the grass I found out that the wheel was kind of fused to the lugs.  I can only imagine how I looked on the side of the road kicking the rim, trying to break it free.  I’m sure it appeared as though a disgruntled motorist was showing his displeasure with the defunct vehicle by kicking the living shit out of it.  A much funnier scene than what was actually happening.  I took the tire iron which was made for my car (or at least shipped with it) that had a perfectly sized socket at one end and a chisel point at the other.  I crammed it into the holes in the rim and leveraged it against the brake drum.  It eventually came off.

There really isn’t anything as pathetic as the donut tire.  Even on a tiny car like mine it doesn’t seem like something significant enough to drive on.  The weight of my car and the value of my life don’t seem like the type of things I could feel comfortable gambling against the unfortunate size and limited abilities of a donut tire.  In situations like this however there are no other choices.

Getting my world in shape

I use twitter.com to micro-blog.  Several times a day I will use 140 characters or less to explain what is going on in my life.  It’s a good place to vent, briefly.  I’m able to twitter anywhere because it accepts text messages when you are unable to log online and use the web page itself.  It keeps track of all my posts and posts them publicly the moment it receives them.  Of course it’s also doing the same for everyone else who uses twitter, so seeing my own tweet (which what we hiply refer to our posts as) on the public feed is not a likely thing to occur.  The public feed doesn’t show that many at once and as it receives new it bumps off the old.  On my personal page it saves all of them and on separate page it also shows tweets from the people I follow.

 

Following is like having friends on a social network site, except anyone can follow you without your permission.  That really shouldn’t matter because by using this site you agree to publicly post this information.  It really doesn’t affect you, unless you begin to follow them.  At that point you will see their tweets on your person page.  If you enable sms notices you will also receive them on your texting device.  I enjoy reading the things that most of the people I follow say, but I had to make a few decisions on which ones I wanted to come to my phone.  The more people I followed the tweets I would get and my phone would always be playing catch up because it only holds fifty messages at one time.  Now I get tweets I deem more important than the rest, directly to my phone and the rest I catch up online when I have some free time.

 

When I’m away from my computer and I’m in a position where I am unable to text message to twitter I use Jott.com to translate my voice message into text and then send it to twitter.  Jott can send messages to any one who can receive text messages but you have set up an address book online.  You dial a 1-800, tell it who to send the message to and then what the message is.  Jott also allows you to set up groups so you can broadcast a message to several people instead of resending it to each one.  Like I’m sure is the hindrance of all voice recognition software back ground noise, accents and the pronunciation and emphasis we put on words all confuse the crap out of it.  The best results I got out of it were all while I was talking like a robot.  It also helps if you spell some words instead of writing them out.  It normally gets that a little better. 

 

Jott partners with other web2.0 stuff like twitter and iwantsandy.com which is a personal assistant I am trying to work with to get my life under control.  She can take a message from Jott or any email containing the correct phrase of “Remind” followed by what and when to send you a text message or an email reminding you of things you need to do in the future, closer to when that event is actually due.  So far this is just for me to pretend.  I can call Jott ask for Sandy and say “remind me that I need to take Keely out to dinner on 06/23/08 it’s our anniversary.” (I changed the date so I could get a response today that is not our anniversary) Sandy will then send me an email…

 

Sandy also provided me with a link to enter into my Google Calendar so that everything I tell her to remind me of also shows up there visually so if I happen to look ahead in my calendar I’d see it, even if I didn’t have time to put it in myself.

 

If you want to record your voice because of the funny or musical way you want to say something and have it saved to the internet use utterz.com.  It’s like a twitter and a pod cast all in one.  It stores your posts on a personal page and people can listen to the things that you have said.  You can add pictures and tags to your utterz (which are what they call your posts) so they can be better searched.  Its usefulness is a little questionable for me at the moment.

 

 

I'll sleep when I'm dead

I’ve been going to bed between 9-10:30pm.  My alarm is set for 4:30am.  I woke up thinking it was time for me get up.  I went out to the living room where max wanted to play and I turned on the television.  There is an info bar that pops up at the top of the screen on my dish.  I’m glad there is.  I was feeling like crap.  I couldn’t believe I was alive.  I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed.  Luckily the clock on the info bar said 1:30am.  Which meant crawling back into bed was exactly what I was going to do.  Relieved and shocked I moaned and grumbled all the way back to my bed.  I fell down into it and almost immediately began fiddling with my clock radio.  I don’t know why I was doing it and if I could just get it to stop making noise I could back to sleep.  That realization was occurred at the same moment I noticed what time it was displaying.  It read 4:30am.  It was time to get up.  I didn’t feel the greatest but despite being kicked around through time I had to get up.  Once vertical everything was fine.  I drank some water, had some breakfast, got cleaned and dressed then went to work.  I was functioning.

Fifteen minutes into my commute and I’m just as tired as I was at 1:30am.  I can’t keep my eyes open.  My head feels thick like all that can help it is to lay it softly on my pillow or just immediately on any convenient surface; just do it now!  I made it to work and woke up a little more.  Sitting down at my desk the sleepy crept back in.  My eyes are tired and my body is weary.  I want to lay down.  I’d bet the fifteen percent of blogs that aren’t talking about technology are talking about being tired or just bitching in general about how things aren’t going in the authors direction.    

I don’t think I stay up to late or get up to early, but maybe I do. 

 

Vending Machine Coffee

If it were the job of Critics to simply bitch about everything in a condescending way, I don’t really want to be one. I’d like to be more open minded about things and simply report on how they are. So if things are good they would get good reviews and if they were bad they would get bad reviews, all in some sort of fair system of truth.

Coffee while referred to by those who do not par take of it, as burnt water, actually has as many tones as origins. The urgent need to make it more available and convenient has terribly damaged the final product of what could be a very enjoyable beverage. The coffee vending machine is such a speed bump in the progression of coffee.

The worst part being it’s sneak attack. To the unknown, unexperienced coffee enthusiast who may only have mixed ideas of what coffee should be. This is all not taking into account the high varying levels of personal taste. A machine that takes whole beans stored at room temperature in a container that is not air tight, grinds them according to the designated settings put forth by the vendor not the buyer and then forces boiling liquid through them into a non-insulated shot glass is probably going to compromise your experience regardless of tastes.