algeh

When I was a little kid, Skipper's once gave out a bicycle reflector as their kid's meal toy. I did not happen to go to Skipper's that week, so I did not get one. (I don't remember how I learned about the promotion - it's possible that a friend of mine had one.)

For the next several years, every time I went to Skipper's I would ask if the toy was a bicycle reflector (it never was) and fill out a comment card telling them to have bicycle reflectors as their kid's meal toy. I suspect this made the job of reading and tallying customer comments a little more surreal for someone. However, it was totally ineffective as a method of getting a bicycle reflector.

Anyway, I bring this up because I'm starting to feel similarly about job applications.

(Side note: I've been spending less time online and more time walking outside, so I have no idea what y'all are up to these months. Sorry! Feel free to let me know in the comments.)

I've been really terrible about posting online this year and so my year has stayed pretty much undocumented. I've decided to solve this problem by sending out Christmas cards and including what would be a typical Christmas letter if I had normal, grown-up accomplishments but will, instead, contain at least some of the following things I never got around to writing about online this year:

• con reports for the three conventions I went to (ConFlikt, SpoCon, and OryCon)
  
• trip reports for the two trips I took to see extended family in Idaho
  
• a trip report for time several generations of my family went to Sunriver and my mom decided to take both the dog and the turtle along
  
• injury reports for the two times I sprained my goddamn ankle (only one of which was on a family trip to Idaho)
  
• a picture of Annabelle the Basset Hound in a different funny outfit than last year
  

If any of you internet-people would like a card, please fill out the following poll:



If you can't fill out the poll for some reason, leave a comment letting me know and I'll work out some other way to get your address. LiveJournal people without Dreamwidth accounts should be able to vote in the poll on Dreamwidth by logging into Dreamwidth with their LiveJournal OpenID.

I don't mind sending out cards to people I don't know well, but if you're not someone I follow on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, or Twitter I'd appreciate a heads-up on how you found me and why I might know you so I can keep some sort of context going in my head. Reciprocal cards are not required, but are welcome.

Speaking of LiveJournal and Twitter, I've been kind of terrible at keeping up with them lately. Don't assume I've seen anything you've posted at either place in November or December. I might have, but it's not a sure thing. I've been keeping up with Dreamwidth, because it's less overwhelming and also Dreamwidth pages don't make my ancient computer slow down horribly the way LJ's new comment pages do. (I know, I know, custom comment pages like all the cool kids use, but I'm still using an S1 style over there and never got around to figuring out how to port it to S2 and blargh. I also know about their new friends page plans and am not happy because I hate change and my computer hates fancy, so it's a double blargh. I may go to keeping up with LJ through RSS feeds and a desktop RSS reader. I can't even think of a good way to make Twitter less overwhelming; it's just a really unpredictable timesuck because so much of it is links to articles that I may or may not care about and casual conversations between people I semi-know, so checking it can take anywhere from a half an hour to eight hours, and I avoid checking it because I don't have the eight hours right now.)

So it's been several weeks and the LJ changes are still, in fact, really annoying to me (and breaking all kinds of things, to the point that I'm still finding new broken things on a regular basis, such as current mood disappearing from my friends page), and LJ hasn't shown any signs of undoing them (ideally accompanied by profuse apologies and process changes to make them not happen again), so I'm trying to find more to do on Dreamwidth in an effort to slowly shift the bulk of my reading over by the process of not finding more things on LJ to read whenever I have more time, but instead finding more things to read on Dreamwidth.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I've been following lots of links and adding people and communities on Dreamwidth that sound vaguely interesting but I have no real pre-existing connection to. I plan to keep doing so whenever I've Bored On The Internet for at least the next week or two. If you're finding my journal as a result of that, this post is mostly my way of saying hi and letting you know that I'm adding people based on them saying something interesting somewhere and not based on, say, going to school with you in the 8th grade (although if any of you happened to go to my tiny hippy school in Portland that'd be a pretty awesome coincidence).

Also, between the possible new visitors and a curiosity about how many people are still reading actively in such a way that they might have questions, I'm throwing this post open to questions from the peanut gallery. I don't see any easy way to disable IP logging for just this entry so I'm keeping that on, and thus be aware that your anon comments may not be quite as anon as they could be. Aside from that, feel free to ask questions either anon or logged in (you can use OpenId to comment with your LJ account here if you prefer). I may or may not actually answer them, but I'll try. Some questions may be answered with "that's not something I discuss in unlocked posts" - I use a bunch of filters for different things rather than post vanilla locked posts so there's no clean way to do a locked question post without people getting a bunch of copies in a row.

So, as I do most years, I went up to Seattle for Sean's birthday party on New Year's Eve. I meant to do an actual post about this, but then I got All Caught Up On The Internet instead of writing a post and I want to go to bed eventually, so you're getting more of an outline.

( a few thoughts, in bullet point form, behind the cut )

Anyway, that was New Year's. I'm going to try to actually be active on Dreamwidth this year and see if I can recapture the spirit of online journaling, but I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'll stick with it. I just don't find what I have to say about my day as interesting as I did when I was younger, and I don't think I'll ever get back to the long, rambling, oversharing, whiny entries I used to write on my first webjournal (which is probably for the best).

This is going to be stupidly long and rambly post about how my week has been going. Since I know not everyone has time (or interest) to read such a thing, I'll summarize the important parts above the cut:

1) I am now home from the hospital.
2) I am basically fine.
3) I have health insurance, so hopefully this won't spiral into a giant, credit-destroying financial disaster and I'm not asking for donations from people or anything of that sort.

( Adventures in head injury )

On Tuesday, I took Annabelle the Basset Hound to a local park in an effort to get Christmas card photos to send out to my pet-sitting clients. It was pretty much a fiasco, and I've concluded that if I do this again I'll have to bribe someone else to go along to either camera-wrangle or dog-wrangle.

If you'd like a card mailed to you, please comment to this post (on either Dreamwidth or LiveJournal) with your mailing address. Comments will be screened, although I'll unscreen comments that don't include an address.

I'm sharing three of the outtakes here. At least I didn't have to pay money to have these developed.

( Annabelle doesn't really understand about photographs )

So anyway, while the card I'm sending out will not be a beautifully posed masterpiece, it will be much, much better than any of those.

I went to OryCon 33 over the weekend. I'm always so tired and out of social interaction points by the time I get done with a con that I never get con reports typed up. I'm making myself get one written up this time because I do enjoy reading everyone else's.

As per usual, I mostly spent time hanging out in the filk room with some excursions to other tracks during breaks in the filk programming or when something looked particularly interesting. This is also a commuter con for me, which makes it harder for me to get to morning stuff because I sleep in and eat a big meal at home before I go to the con each day.

( Friday (includes stats on the Friday bardic circle) )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

( Personal observations/what worked and didn't work about how I managed the con )

So anyway, that was OryCon. As with every year, I have moments when I wonder why I keep doing this to myself and other moments when I remember why I keep coming back. I've already bought my membership for next year, and this year I also offered to volunteer before, but not during, the con (with my anxiety I don't want to commit in advance to doing anything in particular during the con so I can adjust my con schedule as needed if I'm having a day when I can't handle much). We'll see if they take me up on that.

Next up: possible December housefilk at my dad's place in Aloha (I'm not sure that there's enough interest, so I need to put out a few more feelers before committing) and then Conflikt in January.

Argh. All I ever post here any more is whiny complaints about how the world doesn't work the way I want it to. This is pretty much the state of my life the past few years, so I guess that's not that surprising. So anyway, me whining. Again. Dammit.

I'm trying to set up a new, professional domain for my math tutoring and petsitting businesses (which I should probably post about here at some point). I figure that a nice feature for the pet business would be if I kept a daily, password-protected blog for each overnight client so they could check on their pets while on vacation. Because I want to get this set up soon and don't want to spend a lot of time learning about various blog/CMS choices I was going to do this with Moodle, which is kind of like killing a spider with a 30-volume encyclopedia set. (Plus, I could then set up practice quizzes and such for my tutoring clients, and easily re-purpose the whole thing if I got a teaching job, as Moodle is a great platform for things like online math homework assignments.) However, the host that's my current first-choice (for reasons mostly having to do with a good customer service track record) will only support up through Moodle 1.9 on their cheap hosting, and the more expensive hosting needed to run Moodle 2.x is a big enough cost differential that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to spend that much more when what I actually need right now is, in fact, less than 100 password-protected blogs rather than a full-fledged learning management system. (Moodle 1.9 will lose even security-fix support next summer, so I'm not going go with that.) Of course, I don't know anything about the various blog-hosting systems. Wordpress is what everyone seems to use for blogging, but doesn't seem to offer much in the way of intrinsic privacy levels, so it looks like I'd have to spend a lot of time messing around with plugins. There are a lot of other blogging/CMS systems out there, but I have no idea where to even start researching which don't suck.

Am now tempted just to make html pages in emacs rather than use a blogging platform and assign each client their own password-protected folder on my domain. I already know how to do that, and it just sounds way easier. I'm pretty sure that's the Wrong Way To Do It, though. I keep wanting the 90s back, which is not the way to make websites not suck.

I wish I were wealthy enough to just hire someone to deal with all of this crap for me, but if I had that kind of money I wouldn't be petsitting in the first place. Computer stuff just changes too fast for me to ever understand what the hell is going on anymore, and I'm just so tired of trying to even find the right way to frame my questions.

Dear Kohls,

Thank you for actually carrying, in stock, the bra I wanted. This puts you one up on JC Penney, who wasted a bunch of my time only to ultimately try to hand-hold me through ordering it online via the roundabout process of talking out loud to a salesclerk (pretty much the worst of both worlds as far as my shopping preferences go).

However, I would like to clue you in to something about the bra-buying public: many of us have a pre-existing opinion about either the bra size we wear or the bra style we like. Some of us even have opinions about both! Thus, sticking all of the bagged bras of a certain brand into a two-sided display with a total of sixteen shelves to explore and doing so, as near as I can tell, with no organizing principle whatsoever, is pretty much not awesome. Many stores choose to organize their similar displays by style, then band size, then cup size, which makes it fairly easy to trial-and-error your way to a bra that fits within any given style by grabbing the one you think you need and several adjacent ones before going in the fitting room. I could also see an argument that organizing first by band size, then cup size, then style might encourage women to explore a variety of styles in the size that they already know fits them and that this might be more convenient for them. Organizing by some other principle, such as color or cup size first would be odd but at least let me know the shape of my search space and let me skip searching some sections of the display.

I came in knowing my cup size, band size, and the exact model number I wanted. To put this into perspective, if I could buy bras at Napa Auto Parts (and I'd probably buy them nowhere else if I could), I could have walked right up to the counter with this amount of information and been out of there in five minutes with either my bra or an explanation of which store it was at and how long it would take them to get it in from there on the truck.

Back in reality (and at Kohls), after poking at several shelves, I found a bra in the style I wanted but a size very different from my own, which gave me the incentive to go on. Eventually, after searching all 16 shelves, I found two bras in the size and style I wanted and an empty package that indicated it once contained a third (I found this first, on about the 5th shelf I searched, and it gave me motivation to keep going). Neither were anywhere near each other. One was on the top shelf on one side of the display, and one was as far away as possible on the bottom shelf of the diagonally opposite unit. Neither were surrounded by other items that were of similar size or style (aside from all being bagged bras of this particular brand, since that was true of the entire display). For all I know, my inattention to detail means that I missed the Holy Grail of bras, the One That Isn't White, Yet Is My Size and Style, in the process of trying to examine each package individually to see if it was the one I was looking for.

I might note that at no point during the time I am shelf-reading this entire display do I see a sales associate of any kind, a level of being left alone I'd previously associated only with used book stores. (This is fitting, because the level of disorganization was also something I'd only seen previously in used book stores, and not often there.)

I was going to share all of this with you in the survey that my receipt kindly invited me to take, but there were no long-form comment opportunities provided, only a bunch of vague questions with Likert-scale-type answers and a few yes/nos. It is times like these that I miss paper forms, for they had margins in which I could provide commentary.

Thank you for providing a minimally adequate shopping experience.

Sincerely,

Me

It's been 10 years of using LiveJournal, which is pretty much the most recent site I've joined that I use regularly (if you don't count cross-posting to Dreamwidth, in which case I guess LiveJournal is the second most recent). I don't even want to think about how long that means I've been on the internet now.

All of you Web 2.0 kids need to get off my e-lawn.

(I was going to do a meaningful post on how my life, LiveJournal, and the larger internet have changed in the time I've been using LiveJournal, how that's been reflected in my changing posting habits, and blar blar blar introspection, but I seem to have stopped being introspective in public. Also the Blazers are down TWO GODDAMN GAMES in the playoffs and that's all I actually want to talk about, but I doubt any of my readers are interested in sports blogging.)