Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Oh, Holy Crap, I Am Sick

I have a cold. And it’s a Summer Cold and anyone with a half a brain or who was raised in the South will tell you that The Summer Cold, while not an uncommon occurrence, is possibly the deadliest type of cold there is. More people are maimed for life because of rogue a Summer Cold than are smacked on the noggin with coconuts every year. “Why,” you may be asking yourself, “is The Summer Cold so much worse than a cold you might get any other time of year?”

Let me tell you why, dear friends.

Because it’s Summer and it’s Warm outside, and you have a Cold, get it?

Wait, what?

Maybe that’s just all the anti-histamines talking. That doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, does it? Summer, warm, cold… Wha? Yeah, I just re-read that, and not only was it neither clever nor insightful as to the Ways of The Summer Cold, but it doesn’t even make any sense.

Have I told you about all the anti-histamines I’ve taken today? I think someone backed a dump truck up to my face and deposited an entire dump trick load of Benedryl Cold down my throat. Which, though it has the effect of making me SUPER loopy (can you tell?), having that much cold medicine dropped down into your tummy isn’t as pleasant an experience as you might think. For one thing the guy in the truck doing the dumping wasn’t careful at all and he ran over the begonia bush and for another, do you have any idea the size of the hose you need to jam into your mouth in order to swallow a dump truck full of cold medicine? Though it also begs the question, “Who carries a metric ton of Benedryl Cold pills in the back of a dump truck, anyway?” Isn’t that somehow unsanitary or something? AND! I have a sore throat, too and it hurts to swallow. But most of all you should know that I’m all strung out on cold meds and cough syrup. Yeah, you might have been able to guess that, you are SO sharp! Seriously, this is all stream of consciousness, I’m not coming back and editing one character of this, though there is a small part of my brain, screaming right now, telling me that I’ll live to regret ever having given “voice” to this inner monologue of mine, sans mental filters and so-called reason. And judicious editing. Screw that! Let’s see what happens!

So I have this cold which makes me miserable. I went to work yesterday, sat down and thought, “this is not going to work out well at all today,” so I came home, napped, yelled at the youngsters to “pipe down for Zoraster’s sake hanging out on a park bench” and woke up in the afternoon, feeling even more miserable than I did in the morning, if you can believe that. And I almost cut my finger off the other day. Remember I told you about that? (I know, not one of my better posts, but I was in PAIN! And you know, we pros play through the PAIN) Well, now it HURTS. EVEN worse-r. Actually, it’s not so much that it hurts a lot, it’s that my pinky finger feels like it wants to throb itself right off my hand. And how is it to type, you may ask? (My aren’t you full of questions today?) Well, I’m not going to lie to you, it hurts a lot. But, again, I play through the pain, my delicious friends, I play through the pain.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I sound totally pathetic and I should just get over it, it’s just a cold after all. It could be much worse, I could be Rush Limbaugh, after all. I mean, I’m going to get over this cold eventually, but odds are, he’s going to be the way he is for a LONG time. There’s no cure for whatever horrible mental affliction he’s got going on over there, after all.

Hold on just a sec.

I just realized that I said “worse-r” up there earlier and technically that isn’t a real word, it’s just a word I made up one day when Reha and I were having a fight way back in the Dark Ages when we were engaged. I had done something stupid and had hurt her feelings. Or something. I can’t remember exactly, what with the passage of time and all the cold meds coursing through my veins right now, but I’m pretty sure whatever we were fighting about was entirely my fault. You could even say that whole “being all my fault” thing became a somewhat re-occuring theme in our relationship. But I bet if you asked her, she’d be able to remember the dumb thing I said/did/thought.

What was I talking about?

Oh. Yeah. The thing about that word. “Worse-r”

So we are in her bedroom in her apartment and I’m sitting on her bed and she’s over there by the closet. Try and picture it. It’s a bit crowded in there. Me (I had hair back then and I had been told by reputable witnesses that I had a modicum of cuteness about me), Re (she looks essentially the same. Radiant and lovely and shimmering in the distance, much like a faery queen, only taller and not a faery at all, much more brunette and without little wings sprouting from her back like faeries have, though it would have been totally bitchin’ if she had wings, you know, but get that image out of your head, it’s just Re, over there by the closet, peeved as all get out at me), a desk (standard desk, nothing special about the desk at all, not even sure why I brought it up), the stupid thing I did which was kind of psychically hanging around in the air beginning to suffocate us as it permeated every molecule in the room, a bed (twin size) and various knick-knacks which don’t have any real bearing on the story other than I like the sound the words “knick-knacks” makes inside my head right now. Anyway. I can barely breath in the room, it’s so cramped in there! She says something, though I have no idea what she said, but I do have perfect clarity about what I said in response to her:

“What do you want me to do? Feel worser?”

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, sixteen or so years of education and I can’t even conjugate verbs properly. That noise you just heard was every English teacher or Professor I ever had falling over and stabbing themselves in the ears to try and block out the sound of my horrible grammar. Say it again, out loud, to get the full effect, “worse-r.” Seriously, I’m dead lucky she even married me after that. The stupid thing I did was nothing compared to how dorky and imbecilic I sounded with “worser” on my lips.

Anyway…

So yeah, I’ve had a few too many cold pills. I’m just going to hit “publish” and see where the chips fall.

Mmmm! Chips! I need to go to the store for some of those “Hint of Lime” tortilla chips. Is the store still open? Can someone drive me to the store, please? I can’t seem to make the keys fit into the little ignition hole doo-dad to start the car.

Monday, July 30, 2007

This Probably Explains A Lot

Sunday afternoon while doing the dishes I sliced open my right hand pinky finger. Deep and nasty. I dropped a glass and was trying to catch it, but since my hands were wet, it slipped right through my hands and the glass shattered. My hand was still in motion and it got caught in the gaping, roaring maw of glass the kitchen sink had become. Ouch. Though the cut is quite deep and I ended up needing five stitches in my poor little pinky finger, fret not gentle reader, I can still type.

We live in a neighborhood chock full of really smart people and one of our neighbors who is a doctor dropped by and said, “yep, you need stitches, come over to my house in an hour and I’ll fix you up nice.” I did and he and his nurse practitioner wife did a nice sewing job, there at their kitchen bar. Hospital E.R.? We don’t need no stinkin’ hospital, man. Reha, ever the attorney, asked, “So does your malpractice insurance cover you for pro bono work you preform in your kitchen?” Nice one, babe. And it turns out that yes, his malpractice insurance does indeed cover kitchen bar medicine.

Anyway, Reha and I got to talking about how I’ve done quite a few dumb things to myself. And I noted that this was the first time in a long time that I got stitches and was able to see the doc do the stitches. Which, I have to say, it’s pretty weird and icky to watch a needle and thread pierce your flesh, but you don’t feel a thing. And, docs are really just glorified seamstresses when it comes down to doing that sort of thing. It’s all about the fancy knots apparently. Anyway, usually I’m getting stitches in my the neighborhood of my skull.

Let’s enumerate, shall we?

Incident #1: I was five or six and I ran down the hall and ran smack dab into the doorknob of the hallway closet that jutted into the hallway. Knocked me out for a sec, too. I didn’t realize I was bleeding rather profusely until the blood started running down my cheek. That’s when my mom screamed and off to the E.R. we scooted. Score: three stitches.

Incident #2: Fourth or fifth grade. I was running back from recess and I was running right behind this kid named Todd Johnson. He turned around to yell something at someone and I ran into his face. Specifically, I ran into his open mouth, his upper teeth in particular. I have a “half moon” shaped scar on my head from that little encounter. I also remember that though I was bleeding all over everything in the hallway, Todd was the one screaming his head off. Score: three stitches.

Incident #3: Fast forward to me as a seventeen year old snot. I t-boned a large pickup truck going about 60 M.P.H., not wearing a seltbelt and klonked into the windshield. Yeah, I’m a bright guy all right, though in my defense, the guys in the truck we totally drunk and had pulled out right in front of me, there was no way I could have missed them. It was a BIG truck and it was suddenly RIGHT THERE. Score: zero stitches, but I carried a few shards of windshield in my forehead for years, before they all worked their way out.

Incident #4: College at my girlfriend’s house. I was running from one room to another for who knows why and I jumped over something and through the doorway. Smacked my noggin on the top of the doorway. Knocked myself out for a little bit, too. Real smooth. Score: four stitches. And the doc who sewed me up asked about the half moon shaped scar, “Where’d you get that, son?” “Todd Johnson’s mouth, sir.”

Incident #5: Not really my fault, but I had a small cyst removed from the very back apex of my head. Score: three stitches

Incident #6: Car door bit me. I had parked on a slight incline and the car door of the Jetta decided it needed to close THAT VERY INSTANT and it shut with my head still in the car. Very ouch-y. And it hit me very close to my left eye. Six more inches and I ‘d be blind in that eye! Score: four stitches.

Incident #7: Another one of those cyst things. Though it’s possible that my brain is just rejecting the alien mind probes and they manifest themselves as weird little cyst things. Score: three stitches.

There are about six or seventeen other times I have thwacked my head, bled for a while, but decided not to run off the E.R. Like last week when I bumped mightily straight into a lamp fixture while stringing up some cat 6 wiring at work. Head wounds bleed a lot, you know, even the ones that don’t need actual medical attention.

So blunt force trauma to the head over multiple sessions might go a long way toward explaining certain aspects of my personality, that’s all I’m saying.

Friday, July 27, 2007

So, This is Weird (aka, TextMate doesn’t want to play nice with the other kids)

Warning… Geek stuff ahead. Nothing funny here. Regular goofiness will return Monday, unless I think of something funny this afternoon, in which case, I’ll shovel it right out to the IntarWebs. (Update! Figured out the problem, see below.)

Anyone else who uses the normally delightful TextMate, ever have this problem?

Copy and Paste into or out of TextMate, just stops working.

See the pics below.

In this one I’ve copied some text to the clipboard:

Now we go to Mail.app (or any other app for that matter)

Copy some different text:

Go back to TextMate. Paste. Should be the copy I snagged from within Mail, right? No, not so much. Same text I had earlier in TextMate:

But what happens if we copy some text from TextMate and try to pull it into Mail? (You’ll just have to trust me that I re-copied my snippet of “Hello there!” text.

Couple of caveats:

I use iClip, which kind of mucks around with the normal clipboard process, allowing you to have multiple clipboards. BUT! It wasn’t running when I took the screen grabs. And, I’ve used iClip without too much fuss before. And! It’s like everything works grandly for a while, but then things stop working. A machine restart fixes everything, but that’s annoying and a rather inelegant solution. And! I also use TextExpander, which seems to do some copy/past wizardry to do it’s “auto-complete and then put the cursor in a different spot” mojo. But again, after a restart, everything works perfectly, and at some point in the day, copy and paste in TextMate stops working. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And I know TM does its own copy/paste “stuff” with its “Paste from History” geekery. Maybe all three of those things get together in a room and start fighting and TM decides it doesn’t want to play anymore. But it still doesn’t explain why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

And here is my System Info:

Anyone have any ideas? It’s driving me a little batty. TextMate is one of favorite tools and I’m all sad inside when I can’t use it.


UPDATE:
Seems it’s a bug in the system’s pasteboard server. Details here and here.

Basically, quit everything except the Terminal. Then fire off the following commands in the Terminal:

killall pbs

followed by

nohup /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs &

The first command nukes the pasteboard server process and the second one re-starts it. I recommend quitting the Terminal and also re-launching the Finder. You do that by bringing up the “Force Quit” applications box (Cmd + Option + Escape), highlighting the “Finder” and them smacking the “Relaunch” button. See below:

Whew! Now I can get on with my life.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Hesitate and You Shall Feel My Wrath

I waited three minutes too long to head out to the grocery store and this is the result. The Drama Queen emerges from her secret lair to spread destruction (fuss at me) and wave her hands around. I should have known better than to hesitate even one second longer than necessary. That whole taking a moment to make a list and think? That was wrong of me. Obviously.

Direct link thing-y to the QuickTime file (plain old glorious MPEG-4, should play in Windows Media player, etc.) to the video in case the picture link-thing-y above doesn't work.

Specifically, it seems that Firefox on any platform is wonky, so FF users, please use the MPEG-4 link, until I can figure out what the deal is. Thanks! The vid is about 10 MB.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

No Admittance Without Prior Written Authorization

The Department of Homeland Security should contact my youngest son on how to secure America’s borders and preserve the freedoms we so richly deserve and enjoy.

Because he has quite the talent for building fortresses. Granted they are only made out of blankets, couch cushions and the occasional bit of Lego™ for scaffolding and flying buttresses, but I think once he got the hang of using steel and concrete he could come up with some decent. I’m sure they will be calling him to consult Real Soon Now™.

Observe:

Ellis didn’t really have anything to do with construction, in fact she got yelled at more often than not for, “knocking down my support beams!” but she insisted on being in as many photos as possible.

“Hurry up and take the picture, Dad, I think my face has frozen like this.”

What you can’t see in the photos is the heliport area just behind him. The boy is always thinking, knowing that someday he’ll be running his own vast international crime ring and will need the ability to get place in a hurry.

The design features two levels and has three “rooms.” Here Jonah is demonstrating his innovative “door” creation. “It’s not a flap, Dad. You have to knock on the side.” (knocker not shown, because it kept falling off and I wouldn’t let him near the couch with industrial glue, like his plans called for.)

Proximus

 

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

• Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago
• Dear Gratuitously Naked Conversationalist at the Gym:
• A Peek Inside the Writer’s Guild and Producers’ Negotiations
• We Regret the Error
• What I Did There
• Hermaphrodite Administrative Assistants and Receptionists Need Not Apply
• Giving Me an IM Account Was Obviously a Huge Mistake
• Official Ransom Note Typography Vista vs. Mac OS X Shootout
• I Need a Real Hobby
• Beat Down
• Big Fat Lies
• True Love
• Now MY Ovaries Hurt
• Don’t Get Her Started
• Disturbing Trend
• Had to do it
• Mooshy stuff
• Ransom Note Typography End User License Agreement “EULA”
• Diva-licious!
• Just so we’re clear
• PETA may have a point

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

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