It is cold here today, but it seems to be cold everywhere today- at least according to my friends’ status updates on Facebook from around the country. Here the wind chill was about -14 this morning, so I totally parked on the street in front of my office. I have a habit of doing that, but then the city doesn’t seem to ticket on cold or rainy or slick or snowy days. The opposite of the post office! But it’s fine with me because it’s too cold to get a ton of business downtown, so why not just let me park near my office? Thank you!
My real problem is that the City of Columbia parking tickets are only $5 each, no matter how many you rack up. I’m truly terrible about parking on the street and then forgetting that I parked on the street, and then getting a little yellow envelope under my windshield wiper. And, since it’s a cheap ticket, I’m not deterred from getting tickets because sometimes $5 seems like a reasonable price in comparison to trying to locate enough quarters to see me through the day (and also then remembering to get up every two hours to feed the meter). I guess I think the City of Columbia could probably increase revenue in these tough economic times by raising those parking fines. $5 for the first, $25 after that. Or something. I mean, that would deter me.
Speaking of tough economic times, the travel budget for my office has been slashed and I don’t have to go to Denver next weekend. I’m a little bit sad that we’ll miss the Chicago trip in July, but I was not looking forward to either the Denver trip nor the Charlottesville trip in April. My boss wanted us to take the American Airlines regional jet from St. Louis to Dulles. That is the trip I took with Tracy a few years ago, when we flew in that tiny little tin can around a giant thunderhead, and it scared the hell out of me. I stopped flying American after that, and I am still scarred from that trip. The memory has not faded. So I am fine with skipping that flight in April, and I am fine with not going to Denver in January. Woo-hoo, budget cuts!
On the other hand, our office might be moving again, and that is insanely frustrating. Other than really really liking the location of our current place, it will also take thousands of dollars in my work hours to get the address changed on the paperwork that I handle regularly. This is something of a normalcy with this office, too… I have not been with the office for three years but our third location in that time, and at least the fifth or sixth location since the office was set up in the late 1990s. A new location hasn’t been selected yet. It’s my usual method to just envision the worst possible location and then hope for something marginally better than that.
I got my fancy new laptop on Monday, and I have spent most of the week nursing it to life. We had a troublesome first twelve hours together, when I tried to install something and it snapped at me and then started to do a regular BSOD for me, good fun. I eventually just reformatted and restored the factory defaults and started all over again after that, and so far it’s been a very pleasant computer. It does have Vista on it. Some of the less powerful machines had the availability of an XP-downgrade, which means it shipped with XP and you got a license for Vista, so you could upgrade when you wanted. But I bought a 64-bit machine, and I don’t know if XP handles that too well… so I am stuck with Vista. So far I don’t hate it, but Microsoft’s need to completely rearrange things when they redecorate is a little frustrating. It’s so not intuitive that you end up just wading around for minutes looking for something that used to be front and center. See Office 2007 for more evidence of this.
However, after all that futzing I did on the Dell website to spec out a very useful machine, I ended up with one thing that I did not want: a high gloss screen. I was pretty mad about that. They said the 15″ model came with the high gloss screen, but they said the 13″ came with a standard screen. I therefore assumed that the standard screen was not high gloss. Clear mistake on my part- I should have called them to verify that, I guess. I get the laptop and I can see my face reflected in it. I don’t understand why this is a useful feature. I even googled it to see what the supposed benefits are, and they said ‘reduced glare’. Anyone who believes that is a fucking moron, because a high gloss or reflective surface will only reduce the glare IF YOU ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE REFLECTION. Otherwise it just amplifies the glare!
I have been stewing about this issue since Monday, and I have not called to bitch about it. I don’t want to send it back, for one, and I don’t think there’s anything they can do about it if I did send it back, except give me a refund and then I would spec out an entirely different laptop, since this particular model obviously comes with a high gloss screen regardless of the size. And since I bought this laptop primarily to sit on my desk in my home office, and since it isn’t even the primary screen in that room, I guess I have to admit that it doesn’t make much of a difference. There are a few times where I will need it out and about (which is why I got a new laptop and didn’t just upgrade the desktop machine), and I will grumble silently at those times about it, and then I will look forward to the time in the future when we will look back and laugh at what fools we were, in the late 2000′s, with our shiny, shiny laptop screens. Shiny shiny.
I’ve finally been checking out Twitter for the past few weeks. Other than the ridiculous name, I really don’t have much need for the site in terms of requiring yet another outlet for expressing my inane tirades on the subject of stupid technology, but there are a couple of people that I wanted to follow… mostly journalists and bloggers and maybe a couple of celebrities (mostly alternative comedians, not like Britney Spears or something- thank you). I didn’t realize that from the start people would want to ‘follow’ me. I have gotten several random strangers out there who started following me almost immediately. I think that’s bizarre. I mean, I have maybe put two things out there in total. I am definitely not worth following. So it’s probably just something where they want me to follow them, and that seems a little desparate. This skepticism/cynicism will probably protect me from hardcore Twitter-er-dom.
I can’t believe it’s already Thursday. I thought it was going to be gone next weekend, which would give this weekend an air of needing-to-get-things-done, but since I’m not going anywhere, woo! Freedom!
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