anagram of brat

Contrary to the icon used this post has nothing to do with porn, except tangentially by way of making it easier to obtain it. Theoretically, anyway.

I have this tendency to order shit online for myself and then clean forget I did so. This is only bad if I fail to budget for said purchase, but if all's well on the money front (in this case the purchase in question only cost me $5 in shipping) having the UPS guy knock on the door is a total shock followed by the "ooh, what did I order again?" excitement. Which sometimes is compounded by the box contents being orders of magnitude smaller than the box.

Anyway, Squee's new 2GB RAM chip showed up today (size of box: 11"x8"x4.5". size of item shipped: 3"x1.75"x0.25". *facepalm*), and after probably the fastest chip swap I have ever done in my life (seriously, that was it? it took all of a minute and a half!) Squee seems to be doing much better with double the RAM. Not ludicrous speed by any means, but at least he can now play youtube vids without hiccuping (testing this by drooling at the men in red heels again - that vid never gets old).

So. Epeen's happy, Squee is happy, The Preciousssss's retirement is in sight so its happy, and provided the cat doesn't kill my iPad trying to dig virtual mice out of it (yes, we found an app or three designed for cats last night and ridiculous cute and hilarity ensued), I would say that barring major disaster I'm pretty all set on the tech front for a while.

ETA: oh yeah - have a dumb cat video. I have a feeling with the iPad my youtube channel is going to very quickly fill up with Lily being a doof and Lil'beast arguing with people.

Halloween = new eggs. Or rather, a chance to get last year's Halloween eggs. So I got two of em. :)



Honestly I think they're the most visually pleasing eggs ever. They look like fine quality butterscotch.


Thanks to rhipowered's comment on my last post, I'm on my way towards breaking my personal rule against e-books. I installed Stanza onto my iPod so I can read Cryoburn. Yes, my need for Miles is so potent that I will willingly defile myself and my reading experience with a filthy e-reader app. [barrowman] VORKOSIGAN! *shakes fist* [/barrowman] :| I don't think this is in any way a permanent change though - my disdain level for anything but ink and paper books remains very high.


This morning I was attempting to explain to htl_1126 the force of nature that is omgwtfaninja, which of course led to me linking over to a certain youtube involving a mailbox and Optimus Prime. (A picture, after all, is worth 1000 words, and at 30 frames per second it says plenty.) This led me to doing some fun fooling around via Imageready and GIFSoup, and now I have an animated gif that rather perfectly expresses "YAY SEXYTIME." Or something.

( YAR YAR HUMP HUMP (nsfw/l) )

Yeah, try getting that image out of your head now. :)

Fellow iThing users - any of you know of a nice simple iPhone/iPod Touch app that'll just let you enter your own recipes as opposed to dump a bunch on you? Basically, an iRecipefile? Been looking for one for about a week, and all the ones I'm finding in among the All The Indian Food Recipes! Ever! have TERRIBLE reviews. Normally I'd just download a bunch of things and try them, but so far I haven't found a Lite or free thing that does what I want. I'm about ready to go old school and buy index cards and a holder at this rate. The only reason why I haven't is that my handwriting is awful.

Finished up the second ep of Sons of Anarchy. As if my ladyboner for Katey Sagal wasn't pulsating and horselike enough. Also getting through season two of Arrested Development, which somehow managed to take the absurdity of season one, step to the side, and take off running with it. Also midway through season 4 of Doctor Who; while Martha is my favorite companion so far, Donna's slowly edging out Amy for second place. I appreciate red-haired and feisty.

I discovered this morning that I've been lied to my entire life and that a successful, fluffy omelet requires high heat, not medium low. Christ, no wonder Mom's were terrible. Not to speak ill of the dead or nothing, but as I get older I realize more and more that if it didn't come in a box/wasn't oatmeal, Mom pretty much failed at breakfast. Anyway, I made a reasonably perfect omelet this morning, and am just agog at its gastronomic beauty.

"Black coat black shoes black hat Cadillac...." now hopefully it's stuck in someone else's head too. I've been hearing it for two days straight.

Back to ye olde to-do list...

I've actually had this meme done in advance for a while, I was just copypasta-ing each days entry. Kinda tired of doing that, and kinda annoyed by having my journal hijacked by it for a whole month, so here's the whole thing, with links back to the days I already did and the new stuff behind LJ cuts. So yeah, maybe I can yammer about some other kind of inanity for a change.

( Days 1-19 )

Day 20. A song that you listen to when you’re angry ( Das Ich, 'Destillat (VNV Nation Remix)' / Ladytron, 'Ghosts' )
Day 21. A song that you listen to when you’re happy ( Chairlift, 'Bruises' / Basshunter, 'DotA' )
Day 22. A song that you listen to when you’re sad ( Johnny Cash, 'Hurt' )
Day 23. A song that you want to play at your wedding ( Muse, 'Hysteria' )
Day 24. A song that you want to play at your funeral ( Oingo Boingo, 'Dead Man's Party' / Boyz II Men 'So Hard to Say Goodbye (to Yesterday)' )
Day 25. A song that makes you laugh ( Günther & the Sunshine Girls, 'The Ding Dong Song' / Flight of the Conchords, 'If You're Into It' )
Day 26. A song that you can play on an instrument ( Antonio Vivaldi, 'Winter (Largo)' )
Day 27. A song that you wish you could play ( Johann Sebastian Bach, 'Little Fugue in G Minor' )
Day 28. A song that makes you feel guilty ( Fiona Apple, 'Criminal' )
Day 29. A song from your childhood ( Grandmaster Flash, 'The Message' / Culture Club,'Karma Chameleon'  )
Day 30. Your favorite song at this time last year ( Rasputina, 'Rock and Roll' )


BONUS ROUND: have a questionnaire.

( raaaaaaandom useless questions )

Day 18. A song that you wish you heard on the radio

I suppose the only argument for satellite radio are things like genre specific radio stations, things more specialized than the normal Top 40, Country, Urban/Hip-hop, Techno (or as a station manager once famously told my mother "the kind of music that makes you want to slit your wrists), etc. Seeing as I carry around a 32 GB iPod that to my credit is actually running out of space (I forget where I read that most iphones and iPods only use like half of their storage ever) I tend to barely listen to the radio as it is, and when I get a hankering for something new and different I tend to fire up Pandora.

Someday when I have disposable cash (ha) I do plan on splurging on the only car upgrade I feel is worth having, which is an iThing dockable radio. Mostly for a vanity reason (holy crap, you get awful sound through a tape adapter, especially one that's been going nonstop for eight months) but also because I tend to noodle through playlists while I'm driving, and killing the extra steps of actually picking up The Preciousssss, turning it on and poking the fast forward "button" would probably be a little safer, even if I've got the process down to the point where I can do it without looking. It'll also look a lot less like I'm texting while driving, and the less reasons I have to get pulled over, the better.

I digress though... Like I said, I don't tend to listen to the radio much, except in the car when I'm utterly sick of every song I possess... While 99.3 here comes pretty close, I guess I long for Z100 circa 1992-1996, when the radio was one of my lifeline to the outside world and my god, it was full of grunge alternative. I'd wake up to Pearl Jam and drift off to sleep after Dr. Judy and Jagger to Collective Soul, Soundgarden and Nirvana.

Though I'll tell you a story - there was a clear summer night once upon a time long ago now, where I was working at Smith over the summer, my usual crowd of friends weren't around. It was way later than I should have been awake, I was having a bad night of it - it was hot, I was fractious and anxious and overcaffeinated and lonely and could not sleep, and out of sheer boredom I started fiddling with my clock radio looking for anything to cover up the silence. Having exhausted my options in the FM frequencies, I switch to the AM and for the first and only time, loud and clear, I got a signal from a distant land and a familiar voice telling me to give his station 22 minutes and they'll give me the world. I went to sleep that night with the comfortingly fuzzy sound of New York news radio playing, and the next morning the signal was gone, never to be picked up again.

It's funny, I just went to their web site to pick up the link, and for poops and ha has clicked the button to stream the station... It doesn't sound right. It's too clear, if that makes sense - I realize some folk would probably squawk at the notion, but it seems a little wrong to me to stream an AM radio station over the internet at a much higher quality than most of its market hears it. Even the narrowband option isn't fuzzy enough, in my opinion. Probably the only time I'd ever call for something to be encoded at 11kHz/56kbps Mono.

Anyway, enough blather, I have a day to get on with.

things I jotted down in an iPod note yesterday (with cleanup and expansion):

• There isn't an app for letterboxing?? THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Especially since when I do surrender and join the cult of iPhone that's pretty much ALL I will be using the damn thing for. Aside for the making calls and the permanently jacked into the internet thing.
  
  
• Driving down to work was gorgeous. Like traveling through the Snow Queens palace grounds. I was so taken with it I very nearly missed my exit on the pike, which I've never done before... and a good thing too, there's 30 miles with no turnaround between my exit and the next one down so that would have landed me at work an hour late at least.
  
  
• Still can't do The Moody Blues. Too soon. Especially not "Your Wildest Dreams." Ouch.
  
  
• Had an amazingly get-shit-done kind of day at work today. The key really is keeping music on. I also sang all the way home.
  
  
• I think I'm learning a little bit about my own singing from Lady Gaga, weird and horrible as that sounds. At least the bit about being fearless about it, no matter how bad i think I sound. There is no way whatsoever to sing "Bad Romance" timidly.
  
  
• Ever wonder what DeLoreans would look like if DMC had stayed in business? And consider what cars are like 30 years later, what speed do you have to get to to go back to the future? Because if it is still 88mph before you see some serious shit, then there are a couple of spots on I90 out near Syracuse where had I been in possession of a flux capacitor, I might have briefly driven through 1950s Upstate New York and failed to notice. Considering how loud I crank the stereo when I'm on the highway, I'm sure they noticed ME. 'Course, an insane black woman speeding down the highway in a green Corrolla with a skull and crossbones on the bumper roaring along to an obscenely loud radio ain't exactly inconspicuous in any era. (somewhat inspired by this post in metaquotes yesterday.)

Also of note was a conversation via text message with zadnyl that made me laugh and tear up all at once. I don't talk about it too much given the circumstances but one of the hardest things about the past two years has been missing/potentially losing the ex-in-laws and despite constant reassurances from their end, being completely unsure how to keep them in my life and how much, something made both harder and easier by having them all at least a four hour drive away. Moments like yesterday make me happy I chose not to shut them out. And since I've been invited down to this farm I've been hearing no end about for a decade and a half, there's another road trip for the roster. 'Course I ain't going anywhere until I frikkin get Hanzo fixed. *sigh*

Ended the night on an excellent note. Damn, but I'd forgotten what a happy thing it is to snuggle into a warm squashy bed with someone you love and a book for both of you. Dear fates, it's lovely to be dating someone who READS again.

Today... isn't much special. I had kind of an amazing rah rah get things done get things done sort of day yesterday, and this one isn't so much, though the day is much improved by the swiping of the studio monitor headphones someone left in my office for the past month. There is nothing in this world that makes me the kind of aurally happy than a set of squashy headphones bigger than my head. That's pretty much it, other than the usual scheming dreaming and fiending. :)

Goose out.