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A little something to brighten your day (sorry Leviski, but this is just too funny). This had me laughing for almost a minute and a half. Given the broken grammar and spelling I can see why it might be hard to google that. But even so, it's hard to misinterpret what he meant.

[18:20] <%Nasrudin>  Leviski: Ich bin keine Deutscher XD
[18:20] <%Nasrudin>  (I am not a German)
[18:20] <Leviski> ich habe hunger!!!!
[18:21] <Leviski> Du is dein komph?
[18:21] <Leviski> who here sprechen de duestch?
[18:21] <%retor>   Not me!
[18:21] <%Nasrudin>  I used to speak quite a bit of German, I lost most of it though
[18:22] <%Nasrudin>  these days it's mostly limited to understand it, sadly
[18:22] <Leviski> ok retor tell me if you understand this next sentence
[18:22] <Leviski> Ich Sheisa eine hosen NEIN >.<
[18:22] <%retor>   I don't speak German >.>
[18:22] <Iya> nasy that's mute worthy right?
[18:22] <%Nasrudin>  Leviski: no bad language please
[18:22] <%Nasrudin>  even in another language
[18:22] <Leviski> that wasnt bad?
[18:22] <Leviski> :O
[18:23] <Leviski> I said I changed my pants no?
[18:23] <Iya> I don't think so o.O
[18:23] <%Nasrudin>  no...you said something completely different
[18:23] <Leviski> hold on I'm lookin it up I'm pretty shure thats what I said
[18:23] <Iya> it says WHY you changed your pants, sure
[18:23] <%Nasrudin>  Iya: XD
[18:23] * %Nasrudin hugs Iya tightly
[18:24] <Leviski> oooo I was lied to I have been saying that sentence in school for years n I didnt know wut it mean :O
[18:24] <Iya> lol the teacher never said anything?
[18:24] <Leviski> no
[18:24] <Leviski> I don't think she actualy knows how to speak german

I'm glad I'm not the only one who instantly thought of menstrual products when I heard the name iPad. What a silly name for a product. I'm sure that eventually the giggles will wear off and nobody will think of it anymore (like the Wii), but for now, I'm going to mock Apple for using that name.

Future Ebay ad:

Selling iPad, like new. Unwrapped and not in box but used for less than a day. Great gift.

Josh linked me to this awhile ago and I started using it approximately 5 minutes later. Aya likes.

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

It's not useful to anyone who has a tingle tuner as their only desktop icon (*cough*), but it's great for me! At any given time I have about 12 different documents on my desktop, and that's just the ones not in folders, and it can be a bit of a struggle to find the right one. It makes organizing so much easier. I really like that you can move an entire fence and all the icons in it in one go. And you can resize them to display everything or just a few and you have to scroll to see the rest. Then I could really pile in the icons!

The world has gone completely mad. Or at least, Raleigh has. You know that post I made before about how the newspaper put Clay Aiken's mostly retarded political comments on the front page? Well now the GOP* is challenging the legitimacy of Clay Aiken's vote and will hold a hearing. afdlkhjdnx is what I have to say to that.

Are they seriously going to waste time on that? Are they going to waste MONEY on that? Christ, these are Republicans! They balk at spending public money to help people too poor to afford FOOD. Now they're going to hold a hearing which could possibly go into a court and up to the district attorney, because an old American Idol contestant got his negative comments published in the paper. That shit costs money.

I feel like I should give some background here. The school board election was very heated this time because the Republicans promised to end the busing policies which have been in place since the early 1970s, which sent some kids that go to public schools to a school that wasn't necessarily the closest one. The goal was to create racial and economic diversity so we didn't end up with the "rich" vs "poor" schools with an uneven distribution of resources. It actually worked pretty well, the county school system had great diversity. But was a pain in the ass for parents whose kids got transferred. But the GOP won by a landslide (the proliferation of the term "forced busing" definitely helped their cause). Clay Aiken's eligibility does not make a difference.

But because it was so heated it made everyone hyper-sensitive. The inquiry isn't totally without grounds, either. He lives in a different county(Chatham) than he voted in, because his voting address is with his mother, who does live in Wake county.  I'm not a legal expert, but it seems like that should be completely legal. As long as it's a legitimate address and you don't ever vote in any Chatham county elections, why should it be a problem? He's stated before that he wants his kids to go to school in Wake county, so it's not just some irrelevant point to him. He probably isn't the first or last person to do that!

This is a huge waste of time.

*for non-Americans: The GOP is the Republican party, who won the school board election. Party of George Bush and other conservatives. They advocate as little government spending as possible, low taxes, and Rush Limbaugh.

(19:48:19) Cruisecar : russell have u considered being gay? maybe theres some men out there for you.
(19:48:26) Donkeyy : hahaha
(19:48:27) Russell368v4 : CC, NO MAN
(19:48:30) Russell368v4 : THAT WRONG
(19:48:41) Donkeyy : yeah russ, its suppost to be nice
(19:48:59) Russell368v4 : NO GAY FOR ME THANKS!
(19:49:06) Russell368v4 : STRIGHT ALL THE WAY
(19:49:14) Russell368v4 : WITHER I GET ACTION OR NOT! lol

In the front page of the local paper there was an article that declared Clay Aiken had called the new school board members idiots on his blog. Why is this news? What does Clay Aiken have to do with school board elections, or any politics at all (ever)?

Is there really NOTHING else going on in the world? Unless Clay Aiken explodes on a bus, there isn't any good reason why he should be on the front page of the newspaper. What about some update on Honduras, the latest "he said she said" Sarah Palin drama, something else about that kidnapped 5 year old and all the charges, or that some guy from NASA assumes we don't know how much a gallon is and need a visual representation?  Put Clay Aiken in the entertainment section where he belongs.*

It's not even that I think Clay Aiken is incapable of educated political opinions. I don't know the guy. But this supposedly scathing blog post of his doesn't seem to be expressing any political opinion at all. He's just calling the new school board members idiots. Seriously. And to make it worse, he apparently types in netspeak. How can anyone take him seriously roflcopter.

To make it even worse, the article goes on to give the chairman's response. It makes him sound like some bitchy girl. Why is this man letting Clay Aiken's netspeak get the better of him?

New school board member John Tedesco said it's "repugnant" for Aiken to call him an idiot when he doesn't know him personally. He said it's ironic that a guy who finished second is writing about people who finished first.

"It's irrelevant," Tedesco said of Aiken's comment. "His words are invisible, like the name of the last song he wrote."

Bah, now I'm talking too much about Clay Aiken! Getitawaygetitaway!

 

Also, I bought a new skirt yesterday. It's so cute, and it only cost me $7.45! I love those pleats. And it's short too, which is good! Linky to the skirt!

 

*On the paper's website, the Clay Aiken article is in the entertainment section. Just not in the printed version. Still, on the website it's big and prominent like this is their only story of note. 

There was major progress today with Angie (my dog). She finally allowed herself to use the tennis ball launcher properly! I've been working on it with her for quite some times, but there was always something holding her back. It's simple to use, the dog puts the tennis ball in the bucket, it rolls down and hits the sensor, makes a whirring noise, then fires. The trajectory can't be controlled but the firing can. It can go off with a remote, or a set amount of seconds after it hits the sensor (7 or 14). Yes, it's lame and lazy of us as dog owners. But it's funny to see her use it, and she really enjoyed it tonight. The added bonus is that I don't have to touch a tennis ball that is so drool-soaked that it's permanently squishy.

 

I'm not quite sure what the problem was with the machine. She's known how to put things in "buckets" for a long time, and often will put her toys in a trash can, laundry basket, or any other container nearby and wait for us to throw it. So that's couldn't have been the problem. She's known how to bring objects we point to for a long time, and that easily merged with putting things in buckets. I tried for a long time to get her to put it in the launcher, rewarding her with toy throws and treats, but she, for some reason, didn't want to put this particular toy in this particular bucket. She had no problem putting other toys or objects in the tennis ball launcher, but of course they didn't make it fire. :P  

I would still reward her and/or throw the toy again if she did that, to try and communicate it's good. I could have been wrong there and confused her. She was afraid of the noise when we first got the tennis ball launcher (at least a year ago), but that didn't last long. And she's always been wary of the thing. Before I had left it in the middle of house so she couldn't avoid it to get her used to it, put treats in it (which she wouldn't touch if they were too close), knocked it over so it was shorter, etc...but she didn't like getting close to it. She'd only drop the toy a few feet away

Anyway, tonight I started with the usual routine. We played with a different toy for awhile, then I put it away and had her bring me stuff from around the room. After this I usually would bring over a container she was used to (a small trashcan) and tell her to put stuff in there, but tonight I skipped right to bringing over the unplugged launcher. She was certainly wary of it, but I had the advantage! She didn't get as much activity today as usual, and was pretty wired. So she wanted the game to continue despite the presence of the evil green machine. Eventually I got her to consistently put an old shoe inside the launcher! Success!

Then I got out the toy. I had to be careful not to hold it so she wouldn't get caught up staring at it. The launcher was still unplugged, so the whirring noise wouldn't be a factor. When it rolled to the bottom I just threw it myself. We played that particular version of the game for a long time, maybe 30-45 minutes. I plugged it in and she was hesitant again, but since nobody else was throwing the ball she put it in! My parents were very happy to see that and gave her a lot of praise. After maybe 30 more minutes she was putting it in there everytime, it was great!

 

 

This song is amazing, I'm so addicted to it right now. Also, happy birthday Dricey! You'll be able to read this soon too ;)

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. I DIDN'T FIND OUT UNTIL THERE WAS ONLY 30 MINUTES LEFT. IF THIS GAINS A FOLLOWING IN THE COMING YEARS (LIKE TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY) IT WILL BE EPIC.

I don't have a lot of experience being a skinny person. Now I don't really have a lot of experience being a fat person either, I was only fat for about 6 months back in 2007, and after that I decided to lose weight and get to and maintain 110 lbs. I spent most of the time as an "average American" size, which (if I remember correctly) was the upper end of a "Normal" BMI. I was 112 for a long time during the weight loss time, but I'm choosing not to count that because I was still in a "not skinny" mindset.  I've been maintaining 110 lbs (109 currently) for maybe 6-8 months now, and I'm just about fed up with my bones.

In the past I've been able to ignore them, and go about living as if they weren't really there. But now they're all sticking up and making themselves known, which has got me rather unhappy with them. When I lay down my hips stick up, my collarbone is more visible, and when I scratch near my ribs I can feel each rib individually, in a kind of detail that I'd rather not dwell on. I don't like it. Of course I do on some level because I'm quite happy to be at this weight. But this bone thing is really disturbing me. I don't like feeling my fingers go over each rib, I don't like hips popping up to say hello, and I think my collarbone should stay where it belongs. I miss being able to know that any pointy bits on my bones were safely protected from being felt by a layer of fat.

There has to be some way to cope with this, it's driving me insane!

On an entirely separate note, I am seriously considering/almost decided to change my non-gaming/real-life references to Aya (from Iya). Aya is prettier and is actually a girls' name. Google images turns up a bunch of different Asian girls instead of one particular Asian girl, some astronomy stuff, and a place in Japan. I won't be changing any in-game usernames. Drice and I are already trying it out, but we've only been trying for 2 days. It's still in that awkward stage I get when using a name for the first time. I need to find some people to introduce myself to as Aya. It will be pronounced the same way that I currently pronounce Iya (like eye-ah). In reality I think the proper pronunciation of Iya is more like ee-yah, so this is actually a change to the more correct form!

Another major benefit is that I won't necessarily have to use Sadie anymore. I do rather like it and have grown attached to it, and in the future I might use it more. But it's starting to feel like it wasn't really me. Plus I made it up when I started at Hollins, and now that I've graduated perhaps it's time for a change. The reason I was using it was because it sounded and looked like a real name. But using Aya makes me Feel like it's a real name, so that's ok!

Today I had to format my drive and reinstall Windows over what really should have been a minor problem. I am not happy about it, but fortunately I had the brains (rare, I know) to backup the things I really cared about.* The copying seemed to have some...issues part of the way through, I should have checked it before I started doing anything. It only copied my pictures A-B and none of the folders, so I lost all of the icon work I was doing for NEaB. Pictures and a little pixel-art-in-progress are not that big of a deal, but I would feel better if I had them anyway. It would just feel like less of a loss.

Ranty time about my computer problems? Yes! 

The problem started back before I switched to Avast Antivirus. My computer started freezing often, and I had to reboot to fix it. I checked for hardware and driver problems/updates, but no luck. Naturally I was then thinking some virus, malware, etc. But nothing I had would pick it up, and frankly I was quite fed up with AVG virus scans. Why bother putting a pause and stop button if neither work? And why do the scans take 9 hours? So I switched to Avast, and like I said in a previous post, it worked brilliantly (when not doing a boot scan). And while it did detect a virus that AVG hadn't, that didn't fix the freezing problem. Then the providers (which are the protection things running all the time) began stopping themselves for no reason. When that happened there was nothing I could do to open the screen where you could change the options for running providers, it only gave errors. It wouldn't close, it wouldn't open, it wouldn't update, and it wouldn't run. It was basically just an icon sitting in my taskbar whose purpose was to cause headaches. Reboot fixed that, but then it happened more often, which is a pretty big issue when evidence points to you having something pretty nasty on the computer. Google told me that I'm the only person on earth that has had Avast providers stop themselves for no particular reason and the program give that error. Why bother to make an error code if you don't provide help on it?

So I uninstalled Avast and downloaded Avira. It picked up a sneaky little trojan TR/Dropper.Gen, but the freezing persisted. I am still quite annoyed the whole thing wasn't just a driver problem. It really seemed that way, you know? And that would have been easy to fix. In retrospect I could have examined them more closely, but at this point it doesn't matter. Anyway, I thought the next best course of action would be a system restore back to before everything was freezing. That did nothing except leave me with a broken Avast, which this time was really broken. Now it was not only impossible to open, close, edit, or run, but now it wouldn't uninstall. And the providers were never running, no matter how many times I rebooted. Same error as before. So I did the system restore even further back to before I installed Avast. System restores aren't perfect, but as nothing else was working it was worth a shot.

Unfortunately that was when everything went to hell! At some point during the system restore something went horribly wrong. I had watched it before it rebooted and everything looked fine, then I walked away. I'm really not sure what went wrong. But when I came back to the computer it was claiming that although Vista was on my computer, it couldn't start because too many important files had become corrupted.

I probably could have fixed it, probably could have recovered my files, but I was sick of the whole thing. I had all the important files backed up, after all. And these computer problems were really getting to be too much for me to deal with, it was all too frustrating. Sometimes a clean slate is nice, too. I'm glad I did it really, I feel much better.

*Like my illegal copy of Photoshop. 

I invented a new game to play with my fish. Not as weird as what Croesy's grandfather did (I still find the story hard to believe, how did he catch the fish so easily?), but it's probably up there. I try to race them to their food. When I drop the food in I try to poke it so it floats to the bottom before they can dash to the surface and take it. But sometimes there's a tie and I end up poking their face. It's pretty amusing.

I've been meaning to name my fish, but haven't gotten around to it. I love naming things, even I find it hard to believe that I haven't named them in the 3 and a half months I've had them! But...I'm not exactly attached to my fish. I guess it takes time because they aren't exactly intelligent beings. As we speak one of them is sitting under the water filter eating air bubbles as they float down. But that's part of the reason I like them, because they're so dumb. :P   The other part is that they're pretty, of course.

Oh, and I went to the library today. I haven't gone to the city library or had a library card since I was really young. I just didn't feel like buying books. To my surprise, the library was really crowded. Not to a breaking point, but there were way more people than I thought would regularly visit the library.

When I run it normally it goes, well, a normal speed. Watched or not. But this time I'm doing a boot-time scan and it's taking fucking forever. At first I thought it'd be done pretty quickly, so I was pretty surprised when it took 30 minutes to get to 5%. I went up to put some dishes in the sink and when I got back, it was at 12%. Just chance of course, it had been at those low percents for quite some time. I also don't know how it calculates the percents, so whatever. I sat around fiddling with some hunts on FFXII, but seriously I am so tired of the Necrohol of Nabudis. Most of the hunts I have left are there or in the Nabreus Deadlands because I've been avoiding them. Why can't there be more happy, pretty forests like the Salikawood? 

Anyway, the scanner was still at 12% so I decided to watch a movie, and sat there watching the scan in hopes of seeing it get to 100% in a reasonable amount of time so I could keep working. APPARENTLY IT HAD OTHER PLANS. That movie was, at the very least, 2 hours long. In that time it got to 26%. So I got up to sign into MSN on the slow computer my mom uses (she thinks it's normal to wait 30 seconds just to change windows--I am not even exaggerating), and got back a few minutes later. Fucking scan was at 45%. Should I even bother to go back in the other room? By the time I'm done posting this will it be at 75%?

 

Edit: I just went to check on the scan, it's only been about 10-15 minutes since I posted this. I was a little off with the estimation of 75% -- it's at 97%. Fuck you, virus scanner.

16:24 to GraBug > do you think some should be "serious" o.O
16:24 from GraBug > Maybe? How so?
16:24 to GraBug > more normal monsters and less silliness
16:25 to GraBug > less Zombie Bathroom Attendant and more Zombie Carpenter
16:25 from GraBug > Well, I like to think all monsters are "less silly" than people think. I made all my monsters in all seriousness :P
16:26 from GraBug > If it's higher level you can be more lenient on how silly it is, but at lower levels you need some plausibility.
16:26 to GraBug > yeah the high levels are used to our silliness
16:27 from GraBug > Because otherwise it gives players a skewed idea of the game when they go from fighting Magma Golems and Bandits to fighting Scantily Clad Zombie She-Warrior.

My mom has always been interested in buying noise canceling headphones for her own reasons, but was never willing to pay the $300+ for the Bose ones! Recently she went to Tuesday Morning, a store that has a lot off-brand and cheap...junk (most of the time). They had a competing brand pair for only $99. I wasn't particularly keen on them, it seemed like a pretty big waste of money. After all, everyone says you get what you pay for. Maybe that's true, but this pair is just fantastic. Definitely check these out if you've considered buying a pair.

Able Planet Sound Clarity Noise Canceling Headphones

I've never one of those super expensive Bose pairs (or any other brand :P) so I can't draw any comparisons. But I am really, really impressed with these. They're very comfortable to wear and squishy in the best way possible. The noise canceling part doesn't block everything out, but I never expected noise canceling headphones to do that in the first place. When you turn it on with someone right next to you talking, it sounds like they suddenly took a huge step backwards into the other room, but are still talking at the same volume. My brother described the experience in almost the exact same words! What I'm saying is that you can still hear the people around you if they're less than 7 feet away or talking loudly, but they just sound very quiet and distant. They work like normal headphones of course, and still continue to do that even with the noise canceling feature turned on, which I love.

My only complaint about them is the way they push on the side of my glasses when I wear them, which makes my glasses tighter and less comfortable if I plan to wear the headphones a long time. But this just because of the size of the ear part, any pair of headphones meant to cover your whole ear will have that problem. My dad has bad hearing so he turns up the TV extremely loud to hear dialogue, so I was using them to tone down the TV. Usually I just put earplugs in, and can still hear the TV just fine. This time I used the headphones, and hen I turned on the noise canceling feature, it was lot more disorienting than I expected. There are speakers all around one half of the room, and it really seemed like the source of the sound had switched to the other side--the one with no speakers. I can't really explain it, my best guess is it's something to do with the "stepping back" experience you get. It wasn't bad, by the way, just unexpected.

In short, if you're looking for a pair of good noise canceling headphones but the big brand price tag makes you flinch, these are the ones to get.