I began teaching Peggy the Unicorn Dance this weekend, I don't think she understood what an honor it was. For those who remember Calvin & Hobbes, it's similar to the tiger song Calvin has to sing to get admitted to the treehouse. :)

Unicorns are swift and fleet,
Unicorns are really neat!

Unicorns are sometimes hairy,
but Unicorns are never scary.

Unicorns fear Pegasi,
they just don't trust equines that fly.

Unicorns are always funny,
but what's worse they're sometimes punny.

Unicorns are sometimes silly,
when they're chasing a cute filly.

There are several million more lines to the song, of course. :)

How to penalize people for being more secure than you expect them to be.

1) Never warn them during an online transaction that you're forwarding them to a website that they haven't enabled javascript/cookies for.
2) Arrange things so that the webpage they end up on fucks up completely when they notice what's happened and try to turn on javascript.

I was trying to make a purchase from a company in asia, who foisted me on on the Royal Bank of Scotland, who dumped me into VerfiedByVisa. At no time did I ever click a button that said I wanted to sign up for VbV, but when I enabled javascript to see what the hell was going on, it took that as a yes. It also was referencing hidden websites which I hadn't authorized, so I got into a subscribe loop, and in the middle of all this my bank called me to ask if I knew a transaction to asia had just been declined.

Oh yeah, I knew it, and I was pissed at hell at everybody involved.

Take a note Visa, some people know better than to use IE and to browse with javascript blindly enabled. That includes your site and all the various domains you use, we haven't enabled you by default, and you damn well should deal with it better than you currently do. Stop us at the subscribe page, and either provide a page that doesn't need scripting (which is more secure) or recover from it gracefully and warn us about all the domains we'll need to authorize to keep you from fucking up our evening royally.

Idiots!

Ok, so I'm not the sanest member of my species, and someplace in my dim past there must have been a parent who crossbreed with a packrat. With me, one of the ways this has manifested is in my relationship with Peggy. I have, for no reason I can possibly explain, kept every ticket receipt I could, of every movie/play/symphony/vacation/etc that we've attended during the last 11 years. It's a box that has overflowed all over the desk in my office.

What I want to do is put all those things in a scrapbook, in chronological order, a book of memories of our lives together.

The problem is that I've never done anything like this, so I'm not sure how to start.

I'd love it if it was a single big album, something you could add pages to in the future, and if it's a bit fancy/silly, that's not a problem. :)

Anybody got any suggestions how to go about doing this?

It was 52 years ago today that the female donor of half my genetic makeup screamed in relief at being able to hand me off to my grandmother, who would actually raise me for most of my childhood. I managed to recover a copy of some 8MM movies my male donor took when I was a hatchling, though all that remains of them these days is a fading VHS copy (The asshole who decided to throw the original movies away after making the VHS copy will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes).

Earliest picture of me I know of.

I'm the short one


My grandparents came to visit us in German while my
father was stationed there, I still have my hat!


Earliest/Only picture of my father I have. 

*shuffle*on*stage*

Briiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaannnnnsssss ....

*shuffle*off*stage*

P.S. Happy Birthday pelzig , you old fart! :)

I visit Schlotzsky's often enough that I signed up for their club, and get the occasional coupon for discounted sandwiches from them.  I also get a coupon for a free sandwich each birthday, and one showed up in my email this morning.

Hint: when you're trying to entice people into visiting your restaurant, pissing them off is probably counter productive.

They've started using something called "View-Once", IE you get exactly one chance to click on the link, view the coupon and print it.  If anything goes wrong, goodbye coupon, and of course I accidentally closed that tab after it opened in FireFox.  Try to click it again and you get a message about having already viewed that coupon once.

What the hell are these people thinking?

Peggy broke the right tail light in her Civic a few months back, and the dealer quoted $$$ to fix it, so we kind of let it slide for awhile.  This last week I finally snapped a couple of pictures of it and tracked down a generic replacement via the web, and Sunday was the big install day.

The engineers who designed the Civic should be taken out and shot!

The taillight is held in place by four bolts that extend out the back of the assembly.  Ok, I opened the trunk of her Civic and popped the plastic access door to get at the taillight.  The door was designed to allow you minimal access to change the bulbs, only one of the four bolts was even visible through the access door.  After finding the right metric wrench, I did manage to feel around inside the opening and loosen three of the nuts, and then remove them without dropping them inside the body cavity, but that fourth bolt was a bitch to even touch, much less get a wrench over.

At that point I looked to see if it was possible to remove the plastic panels around the area to get better access, no such luck.  The panel for the taillight area extended from the passenger side door, all the way to the back of the car, and then bent around and folded under another panel across the back of the car.  To remove it, I'd have to remove the rear seat, locate all the bolts and fasteners for both panels and then pry them out without breaking them.  Yeah, right.

I tried with a wrench for another 30 minutes or so before I finally just cussed under my breath and pulled on the loose side of the taillight until the plastic around the last bolt broke, dropping the old taillight into my hands.  Of course it was then trivial to remove the final bolt once I could reach though the wire channel from the outside.  A few minutes of work and the new assembly was bolted into place, though I dropped one of the nuts down inside the body cavity trying to thread it on the bolt from that damn tiny access hatch.

All they needed to do was make that access hatch about an inch bigger in each direction and it would be trivial to change one of those taillights.  Because they were idiots though, it's major surgery and probably requires some $$$ wrench they sell to the dealers only.

Ok, so we went to see Michele Moore's latest effort tonight, and as we walked up to our theater, I spotted this in the display area.  whitiger , why didn't you tell us you'd signed with DreamWorks to write a script for them!  Is it a comedy?  Documentary?  Cough up the details!

It's been three hours now since the VPN from work back to home went down, QWest is not giving estimates on when my DSL will be restored.  I checked the modem, I've got DSL connectivity, but no connection to my ISP.

*sob*

Update: 21 hours and counting, all QWest will tell me is that "the techs are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it".  The last call I made a few minutes ago, I asked the guy if he had the local number for Comcast when he asked if there was anything else he could help me with.  He didn't have it.

Update: 24 hours and now they claim there's been a power failure in my area and that it's taking the tech awhile to reach the equipment.  WTF?  I'm not in the backwoods, I'm 10 minutes from downtown Spokane, and why have they been telling me for the last 24 hours that they were working on it and it would be back up shortly if the power was off the whole time?  And why do I have a green DSL service light if the power is off?

Update: 36 hours and I've seen the DSL light go off occasionally, so maybe they're working on it.  I'm on emergency dialup through my ISP, which gets my email limping along.  Trying to browse the web proves once and for all though that dialup ceased being viable for the web in the late nighties.  Everything is so graphic/flash intensive these days that broadband is a requirement.  It takes several minutes just to load the LJ posting page.

Update: 49 hours and while they claimed they'd contact me with an update within 4 hours earlier this morning, I had to contact them just now, only to find out that not only was the 4 hour estimate bogus, they're not sure that their efforts to replace the DSLAM/etc will even get my service back up and running today.  The business office is going to be getting a call from me about how much of a credit they're going to be giving my account over this mess.

Update: 50 hours and the webcams shown on my desktop at work finally refreshed, it looks like they've finally restored my DSL service.  About Damn Time!

This last week, Murphy seems to have had a predilection for water based problems.

It started out with the freezing temps and the fact the sprinkler system hadn't been blown out yet.  The underground pipes aren't buried all that deep, and the zone for the garden is actually above ground because it's used for the drip heads that go to each plant.  The local landscape companies were caught off guard by the early freeze, my guy won't be around to blow the system out until this week.  I guess we'll find out next Spring if anything failed in the cold.

The other thing the could brought was a return to running the furnace, and the humidifier I had added to it.  This year I decided to get one of the refurb kits for the humidifier instead of just replacing the filter media, the rest of the parts were showing serious mineral buildup that I couldn't completely get rid of.  One of the replacement parts was the small plastic hose from the water valve to the filter, the replacement came with no instructions.  In one end of it was a small plastic insert with a tiny hole, I didn't realize that was the pressure reducer, that it wasn't build into the valve.  I also didn't notice that a similar piece fell out of the hose I removed.  When I buttoned things up and turned the water back on, all hell broke loose inside the air return plenum as the water came shooting out of the humidifier at full pressure.  I spent an hour trying to figure out what I'd done wrong before I happened to notice the old pressure reducer on the floor where it had rolled under the furnace, then it dawned on me what it was for and I managed to get the system working correctly.

The last part of getting things ready for winter was washing the inserts for my electronic air cleaner, I emptied the dishwasher and gave them their standard wash (without soap).  When I went to take them out, I found a small puddle of water in front of the dishwasher.  The next two hours were a mixture of cussing and screaming as I figured out how to disassemble the kick plate on the dishwasher and tried to track down where the water was dripping from.  As best I can tell now, it's a slow leak from the water float assembly, so I've put something under it to catch the drips and I'll be shopping for a new dishwasher this week.  The old one is a contractor grade Amana, about 15 years old, and it's been showing its age for awhile now.  I'm not sure I could even find parts for it, I'm more sure I really don't want to put money into it when it already has other problems besides a slow leak.

It's always something, Murphy just can't pass up a chance to make my life "interesting".

Edit:

Hit the appliance store near where I work at lunch today, hoping for a Columbus Day Special.  Found what looks to be a decent Whirlpool Dishwasher, middle of their line model, with an extra $100 off because it had some very minor dings in the finish.  Hell, in my case, that'll just make it match the rest of my collection better. :)  The tech sure has changed a bit since my old Amana was built, this has spray bars top, middle and bottom instead of one central sprayer that pops up.  Hopefully it will do a much better job so I don't have to mostly handwash the dishes before loading it.