Hi, friends! We made it to Friday!
I might have wanted to reach through my monitor and cut 2 coworkers today, but good news! That’s not something I am capable of doing! So no one got cut today.
What are you doing or watching tonight? I’m eating leftovers and catching up on WandaVision.
I won’t bore you, my day was similar, we really need to be able to remotely blow up the screens of random coworkers. Just to keep everyone on their toes.
I just finished shoveling. It’s still snowing but I wanted to get as much of it out of the way as I could so I’m not staring down a foot of it in the morning.
I probably looked really strange to my neighbors yesterday since I was clearing off snow from the grass along one side of my house. It’s just that my basement leaks and the sump pump does a great job EXCEPT for along that one side of the basement. I’m hoping that shoveling like 6 inches of snow off the side of the small hill there instead of letting it melt right next to my foundation will help. I felt like couldn’t hurt to try.
…I spent most of my day fighting windows on behalf of someone else for something like the third day in the last couple of weeks…& about 2-3hrs of what was left walking between places
…so I get the instinct to reach out & throttle someone
…but on the other hand I managed to fix some stuff that seemed inexplicable…& definitely beyond the ability of the person having the problem to explain…much less fix for themselves…despite the support team for that particular bit of software not being able to figure it out…so I guess that feels moderately satisfying
…but I had to leave before windows in its infinite wisdom had got through serially updating the OS side of things & would rest easier knowing if that fixed the only glitch (out of a considerable laundry list) that hadn’t been banished by my efforts…because not being able to type anything in the search box on the start menu would drive me nuts if windows was what my principal machine ran on
…still, I guess that kept me on the effectively humble side of smug given the amount of stuff that I did manage to get working…which is probably a good thing?
Yeah I had one of those days where I had to explain to a higher up that ummm the QA team IMing me at 10pm the night before a code launch to make config changes is bad. Because I don’t work nights. And they were like “good thing you were online to get the message” and I had to be like “noooooo that was the problem. I changed the config this morning for them… guess they didn’t complete testing last night….”
“ohhh, well ahh ohhh.”
I had a day full of minor annoyances.
I feel like a litany of stupid minor annoyances sometimes is worse than a few big ones.
It was one thing after another all damn day long. I’m hoping I used up next weeks ration of bullshit and have a few blissful days, lol.
I’m playing Arkham Horror the card game for the first time tonight with beers of course. I’m hoping it coaxes me into flexing some grey matter.
I believe in you! And your gray matter!
I just want to say I love everyone and I’m not even high.
I love you all, too. And I’m completely sober.
I’m not high either, dammit.
I started watching WandaVision and was a bit confused, so I went back to watch Age of Ultron where they first appeared and…. that movie is not good.
Age of Ultron is good for setting up future plots, but agreed not a good movie.
I do appreciated mostly naked wet Thor though. Age of Ultron lucked out in that many of the cast have good charisma with each other, like when Hawkeye and Black Widow are discussing home renovations during the final battle.
This is why I’ve never watched any of the comic book shows/movies. It’s all one big Easter egg/spider web/rabbit hole. Miss one and you’re screwed, and now I have a 20 year backlog. Pfft.
Eh, yes and no. Plots have to be reductive because viewers only have so much of an attention span.
I only watched the not-main-storyline ones at first. Like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, then Thor Ragnarok, then Black Panther and then Captain Marvel.
Then I watched Avengers Infinity Wars and then Endgame.
Occasionally I caught like 20-40 mins of a random one at the gym (I swear to fucking god the gym showed Dr. Strange like every other week and always saw the same stupid part of it. I also caught the same 30 minutes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier like 6 times.).
It wasn’t until I got Disney+ last summer that I started watching some of the other ones. I still haven’t seen a single Iron Man movie and I don’t fucking care.
I finally got around to watching the other Thor movies last fall and damn the second Thor movie SUCKS.
Tony Stark is such a fucking douche.
But, it was Iron Man that pretty much kicked off the MCU, and I think they did a really good job – I think most of the movies were accessible to people who weren’t comic book nerds, but they still had little eastereggs and callouts and such for the nerds. Avengers: End Game was kinda amazing – just that they had SO MANY big-name stars in it, and it had some great action sequences, and a ton of callouts for the previous movies. It’s not high art or anything, but as a comic-book movie, it was a pretty amazing accomplishment.
I rather liked Age of Ultron, I think I saw it in the theaters twice? But, yeah, there are a lot of problems with it. I think I mostly liked it because it was all of them working as an established team, as opposed to just being thrown together in the first Avengers movie.
After the Avengers movies, I think I like the Captain America ones, they are sorta like mini-ensemble movies. But Thor… ugh, I only watched those because they were part of the MCU. It probably didn’t help that I never really liked the comic book character, or the mythological figure. I kinda like Gaiman’s take on him in Sandman. But Ragnarok was great, Taika Waititi did a great job of making him a more likeable character, and Hela… just fucking hell, Hela was amazing. 🙂
Yeah Ragnarok was the only one I actually liked. I mean the first Thor isn’t horrible, but it’s also waaay too self-important.
I’ll watch if there is nothing else on but they don’t make any sense to me, seriously, who would fall in love with natalie portman when kat dennings is literally standing right there????
I’ve had a long day helping a friend do a remodel. Put in a floor in one big room that was an indoor deck, ripped out a kitchen of cabinets, tile & 5 layers of linoleum on top of each other in varying layers of bad tastes from the 50s thu 80s but great glue from the 50s & 60s. We also found a hidden steel water heater from the 60s hidden in a cabinet like structure that was so fun to remove & weighs at least 300 lbs. I’m exhausted & having a glass of wine before I pass out. Another similar day tomorrow & if I don’t finish my wife’s greenhouse soon & I may get murdered in my sleep!
I have a century old coal furnace in the basement you can take out when you’re done if you want.
Thanks but no! Fun fact though, in Texas they put water heaters in the attic so when they break (or freeze) it can flood your house! Fucking morons!
@Loveshaq Doesn’t 50’s linoleum have asbestos in it? Please be careful!
Well, my replacement HDMI cables for work arrived at a reasonable hour, so I was able to hook them up and salvage at least a few hours of work. (And between that and using the PTO that I’d accumulated thus far this year, I ended up losing just nine hours over the past week and a half.) It felt good to be back again because things were starting to get quite slow and dire on this end.
Also, did you see that there’s a House bill within our lovely state legislate to create a fucking “Rush Limbaugh Day”?!? And not just as a one-time memorial thing but year about fucking year?!?
Ewwww fucking gross. It’ll pass with massive approval.
Well, I guess I’ll have to do something appropriate like donate to GLAAD and Planned Parenthood and the NAACP on that day.
And the Trevor Project. Really, there are lots of organizations to choose from.
what a fucking asshole. It’s like someone just scraped some logical fallacies and malice together, and then animated them into an asshole golem.
This is a PC issue I feel tempted to assist you with.
I’ve got scrum master experience if you want to go full on Agile. And project coordinator experience if your preference is Waterfall.
Project management is an essential asset. How else could our wonderful class of reprobates manage to stick together?
I’m tired. I think it’s this full bike commute thing. I’m not achy or anything, but I think it’s enough energy expenditure that by the end of the week I’m pretty worn out. I’m kinda liking it though. Just seeing a bunch of weirdo shorebirds on my way in is kinda amusing. And the Canada Geese have been getting really honky lately. I think they may be pairing up for mating or something, but I’m not much of a bird person, and I’m too lazy to look it up right now. But I’ll frequently see just two of them on some bump in the marsh, no other geese nearby, and they are just sitting there, honking away.
Just got my fenders tonight, so I’m going to try and install them this weekend. Not terribly difficult, it’s actually the same brand/model (different size) that I put on my old clunky hybrid, so that bit of prior experience should help, plus I now have a bike stand, which will should be a little more convenient than putting it upside down.
Last week or so, I had the idea to get a pair of those clip-on earphones, so I could wear them under hearing protection, and listen to music while I’m doing noisy things at work. Found my old ipod shuffle (1st gen!) that I got to hook up to a motorcycle helmet, and it still works, and has music on it from around ~2010, which is the last time I used a mac (and itunes), so I’ve been listening to that old playlist, because it has some stuff I don’t have in my collection anymore, so I’m not quite ready to wipe it and put in a new playlist.
I’m thinking I should maybe consider looking into podcasts, especially since with the bike commute, I’m getting more activity, but loosing a lot of my reading time that I got while on/waiting on public transit.
sorry, that got kinda long…
Is it safe to wear earbuds while biking? Like would the volume be high enough to keep you from hearing ambient noise like vehicles that you need to hear?
Sorry I don’t know enough about these sorts of things.
I really don’t want to compromise my hearing while on a bicycle, even though most of my commute is on fairly safe mixed-use/non-car paths.
But, a while back, I did get a bone-conduction headset, and tried it once, and didn’t quite like it, because reasons. But, I didn’t really think of trying to use it for while I’m bicycling, so I’ve been meaning to try and figure out if/how I can wear it with my helmet, and if that works out, try and figure out how to use my phone with it (bluetooth only bone-conduction headphones, so I need to figure out how to play audio files on my phone over bluetooth, and I’m old and cranky…)
I wasn’t really concerned with hearing on a motorcycle, because, well, motorcycle… Like, between windnoise and engine noise and such, I didn’t find my sense of hearing to be all that useful while on a motorcycle, but at least it was nice to be able to listen to music, especially on longer rides. I remember having a coworker who learned about my helmet-headphones, and they were VERY CONCERNED about both the legalities and safeties of it, and frequently informed me of their concerns… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatevs, until someone starts taking people blasting car stereos loud enough to hear four-blocks-away seriously, I really do not care about your concerns over me using headphones in my helmet. Also, a person on a motorcycle is not likely to kill someone, and on the contrary, they are very likely to be killed by someone in an SUV, or even a car, playing on their smartphone, fumbling with their heated seat controls, or just plain ole spacing out.
sorry, went full rant there…
And I really need to wash my helmet liners, so hopefully I can get a load of laundry in tomorrow, and then sort that stuff out. Also, why do they have helmets with removable liners, but no clear way to buy extra sets of liners? Like, if they were readily available, I’d totally buy 5+ extra liners, just so I could put in a clean one every workday, without worrying about laundry conditions on any given day…
…I’m not sure what they’re really like since I’ve never used them but I’m pretty sure sony made a set of earbuds that literally had a hole through the middle to theoretically let you listen to stuff without blocking all ambient noise (don’t know if they’re still available) & some of the noise-cancelling sets can use the mics that let them invert the ambient sound for noise cancelling purposes can be flipped to pass through that sound…but again, I’ve not used them
…wish I could remember what they called the weird ones with the hole through the middle though because that sounds like something I’m just making up
…I don’t know if they’re still available or if they’d be worth the money if they are…but at least I’ve proved to myself I wasn’t imagining that there ever was such a thing
https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/sony-xperia-ear-duo-review
thanks for the link.
Those look a little fancy (and expensive) for my tastes, plus I’m concerned they will fall out with the way they go under the ear.
…they seemed like an interesting idea (& I think they loop over the top of the ear so I expect they’d stay in all right) but it’s hard to tell if they’d be comfortable or if the balance of ambient sound to the stuff coming out of the earphones would be “right”
…plus as you say they seemed expensive for something sort of experimental…& the battery life didn’t sound all that great even if they seemed to charge fast
…I have some bluetooth earbuds & quite often use just one rather than both but that’s an imperfect solution in a different way & only one of them can work independently so I don’t have a choice about which ear isn’t full of earbud if I do that…haven’t tried bone-conduction headphones but do know some people who like those…possibly because they tend to listen to less music & more podcast discussion type stuff?
…be interested to know if you do hit on a solution you like, though
I use headphones a lot in my apartment, both to prevent causing noise issues with neighbors, and out of privacy. Even in my apartment, I don’t like being shut off from ambient sound, so I sit there with my headset crooked so it only covers one ear.
I thought the bone-conduction headset would be a solution, but there is really no privacy, it’s quite audible to anyone nearby. But, I don’t think that would be much of a concern on a bike, since I am rarely within hearing range of someone for more than a few seconds or so. Maybe I’ll fiddle with it tonight or tomorrow…
I had someone give me the finger on the drive home. Why? What horrible thing did I do?
Said finger offerer wasn’t fucking paying attention when cars were moving when the lights changed leaving me a big gap to jump into so I changed lanes and did. Not my problem if the finger giver is both slow and fucking stupid.
Instead of blowing a headgasket, I just laughed. Not the reaction she was looking for.
Wait, this was in Toronto? When the Better Half and I went on our leisurely, unintentional excursion through rural Ontario, as discussed in my FYCE “Beef Rissollés” post, all was calm. Nobody flipping each other off. In Montréal they drive—aggressively, let’s say, but the city is so quiet because no one honks. Even the Métro is just this quiet whooshing of efficient trains, not the cranking, shrieking tumult of subway cars you find in NYC.
Toronto can be pretty aggressive. I know…
Outside of the GTA is pretty okay. Relaxed even.
i was mostly just watching music videos last night…
this morning i was watching the little kid ahead of me in the shops
i think i broke her little brain
woke up to find there was no coffee again…this situation needed rectifying immediately
as in it was a higher priority than sorting out my bed hair first….so yeah…i had a pretty major floof going (hell..if the shop was a little closer i would have turned up in my bathing robe and slippers)
coffee and croissants first…then i’ll consider getting functional and presentable
I had a good week at work because on Wednesday at a Dept meeting 2 people started in on TX, windmills! poors! one of the attorneys immediately jumped in and lectured on the real causes of the outages, it was beautiful, shut them right up, and I rode that high for the rest of the week.
ahahahahahaha florida….they must put something in the water there
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-56138699
whoops wrong thread