Action at a Distance

Jen's PODS unit arrived yesterday, filled with most of her stuff, including 47 boxes of books, five bookshelves, a king-sized mattress and a loom. The job of unloading the unit fell on me, Jen and Jen's parents. To make matters worse, there's no adequate parking by our apartment building, so the pod was parked waay over at the other end of the complex, so moving in her stuff was a two step process: move it from the pod to Jen's car and her parents' minivan, then unload the cars and bring the stuff up to our third-floor apartment.

Jen's father and I, being the two manly men of the party, were tasked with the moving of the large furniture; I can't decide which was harder, the mattress or the loom, but pictures of the former will probably be posted to our Facebook in the coming days.

We started unloading at around noon and weren't finished until 9pm. But we got it all done, and that's pretty phenomenal.

Can't say it was fun, but it was all worth it to be able to sleep on a REAL BED and be able to permanently put away our air mattresses, and while my legs were killing me last night, I woke up this morning feeling strangely fine. No aching muscles, no weariness... Hey, I'm not complaining.

 

So here's the deal: Jen and I decided to go with Verizon DSL instead of Comcast, the premise being that we were gonna cut down on the evil factor. So we purchased it two weeks ago Thursday, they said it'd be activated in 1-7 days, which meant there was a decent chance it would be online by the time I moved in the following Sunday.

I get there, and there's a UPS slip that said we missed delivery of the router. Fine, okay. My parents have to take me to the UPS shipping depot in Laurel to pick it up (since there's no guarantee I would have been home for the second or third attempts). So on Tuesday I get the router, set it up... and discover my service hasn't been activated yet, and, in fact, it WON'T be activated until... Thursday.

Fine, okay. So I got unlucky with the whole 1-7 days thing. Thursday rolls around, it's STILL not activated. I call Verizon, they say there's some sort of problem with my service, and they'll get back to me. Friday rolls around, I call them back (they never actually got back to me), and they said, "Oh, nonono. It should all be good." I insist that it's NOT, they tell me they'll get back to me and might have to send out a repair tech on Monday (to-day). I'm grumpy, but what can I do?

I call them back later in the day on Friday to check in. They say the problem isn't on their end, and they'll need to send out a tech after all. I ask them on what time Monday should I be expecting the tech, and they tell me that, oh no, the tech won't be arriving 'till TUESDAY (to-morrow)!

This is absolutely WONDERFUL, considering JEN IS MOVING IN TO-MORROW!! So in addition to all the stress of moving her stuff in, we're ALSO gonna have to worry about a Verizon guy who will be coming "some time before 7pm."

But the bottom line is, it's been a WEEK since I moved in, and whenever I'm in my apartment, I don't have internet. Luckily, my University of Maryland network account is up-and-running, so I can use internet while at the office, but, considering my "work" right now is teaching myself all about Lyapunov Exponents, if I had INTERNET, I could be DOING IT FROM HOME!!! Plus, it's been a bunch of lonely nights, what without the comfort of Google LiveJournal and Washingtonpost.com (on the plus side, I have managed to get Wikipedia Offline)

For years, my pseudonym / screen name / etc. has been Antar (as in, the name of this blog).

After doing a Wikipedia search on the name, I feel I should make it abundantly clear:

The name comes from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Symphony No. 2 "Antar", which melodically chronicles the tale of the great 6th century Arabic Warrior-Poet Antarah ibn Shaddad.

It IN NO WAY references the home planet of the main characters from the 1999-2002 teen drama Roswell and associated young adult novels.

I think I need to go take a shower....

Wow, this is gonna be weird: I'm done traveling for the forseeable future.

No more flights to Austin or back and forth to Gambier.

My home, my work, my school and my fiancee* are now all in the same place.

That is kind of crazy.

*Technically, fiancee arrives in a week-and-a-half...

http://wonkette.com/408962/fox-news-asks-commenters-to-write-funny-questions-they-would-ask-obama

although, to me, this isn't NEARLY as bad as:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052200793.html

Say what you will about liberals--they don't make racist comments and ban conservative organizations.

( Caution: Potential Spoilers )

Oh, and by the way, I GOT ENGAGED!!!!!

My warranty on Scheherazade, my Dell laptop and primary computer, expires next month. It's one hell of a warranty, covering not just normal wear & tear, but "accidents" up to--but not including--fire & flood.

I just had her serviced a few weeks ago to fix a crack in her screen casing. About a week after the servicing, when I tried to replace her hard drive (for upgrade purposes--not because the HD was failing, as far as I could tell), the plastic cover that makes it so the HD case is flush with the rest of the laptop broke clean off. Since I was graduating, I couldn't get a Dell tech to come out before I left Gambier, so he's showing up to-day in MD.

But YESTERDAY, all of a sudden, my CD drive has stopped working.

So everything on my poor baby laptop seems to be breaking down at the same time...

...but it's RIGHT BEFORE the warranty expires, not RIGHT AFTER, which is what USUALLY happens with me and my electronics items.


Dell offers a one-year warranty extension, and if it's reasonably priced, I'll probably take it. I've pretty much decided that Scheherazade will be my last "desktop replacement" laptop and that she'll be replaced by a Linux workstation or Mac Pro (read: really powerful tower) and a Dell Mini 9 "laptot" (a.k.a. "netbook"), but I won't be able to afford to buy those new computers for quite some time. So until then, I'll still be pretty reliant on Scheherazade, and, if it makes any fiscal sense, I should keep her under warranty.

I had no idea that blip.fm was posting all my blips not just as Twitters, but as LJs. THAT is annoying. Now that I think about it, though, what the Hell was I *expecting* them to do with the account I added?!?

Then again, I kind of have a thing for melodically beautiful but lyrically nonsensical tunes.

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that this song makes absolutely ZERO sense, lyrically, but I like it anyway.

Ha! Okay, this service officially rocks if they have THIS of all songs.

And this would be the first.

Just playing around at this point; this song would be the 2nd song I've heard on a commercial that made me buy the whole album from (shudder) MySpace.

The best quantum physics joke I've ever heard came from... Seth Macfarlane?

"Heisenberg's wife was unsatisfied because when he had the time he didn't have the energy, and when he had the position, he didn't have the momentum."

Closed out my People's Bank of Gambier account to-day.

Guess I'll never get to hear that Scottish ATM voice again...

Submitted via the Subway website...

 To whom it may concern: I have just returned from purchasing a 12" turkey & pepperoni sub from one of your Mt. Vernon, OH locations (the one OUTSIDE the Wal-Mart, rather than inside). I am composing this message since the establishment did not have a comment card box.

The turkey-pepperoni 12" had long been a staple of my diet, back in my young and heady high school days. But these days, as a college senior in rural Ohio, I vastly prefer to spend my money at local establishments than to schlep over to the neighboring town to get mere "fast food."

For four years, I can't say I missed it; my college town has a local deli and many other fine dining establishments, and nothing--certainly not the TV ads featuring dancing/singing idiots--made me even once think I was missing anything.

But then, two weeks ago, I found myself watching Chuck, one of my favorite currently-airing shows. In that episode, one character attempts to butter up another--a rather large fellow by the name of Big Mike--with a footlong chicken teriyaki sub. In the scene, the delicious sandwich is shown in all its glistening, meaty glory as Big Mike devours his favorite food. Now, I've never had a subway chicken teriyaki sub. But watching that scene made me remember MY favorite subway sandwich, made me remember my minimum-wage high school job (working for a dry cleaner's), made me remember how I HATED that job, made me remember how the ONLY THING that motivated me to go to work each day was that I would get myself one of those mouth-watering turkey & pepperoni sandwiches (eating half right away, and saving half for my mid-shift break). I remembered how the turkey and pepperoni complemented each other so perfectly, how the olives--bathed in honey mustard--added just the right variation, how the freshly-baked, never frozen Italian Herbs & Cheese bread would crunch. I remembered dripping honey mustard on myself and staining oh, so many pairs of pants. In that short scene, all those memories came flooding back, and I thought to myself, God, I want some Subway.

I'm graduating this year and moving back to a more civilized region, one where chain restaurants aren't a 15-minute car ride away. I'm heading off to become a poor grad student, and $5 will be approximately my daily lunch budget. Now that I've tasted that juicy goodness once again, I know where that $5-a-day is going. And it won't be to McDonald's.

The purpose of my writing this, Subway corporation, is to try to convince you of the good that Chuck has done for your business. I am sure my story is far from unique. And while I'm not going to say that that one scene is somehow saving your corporation (I don't imagine you're doing particularly poorly), I am saying that it was THE most effective Subway advertisement I've ever seen, and it reawakened a long-dormant craving in someone who used to be one of your most regular customers. You should implore NBC to renew Chuck, if at the very least, for the promise of more such ads to come.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a sandwich to finish.

 Oh, shiny, shiny interface. Oh, Omnibox. On "Speed Dial" home screen. How I missed you.

I've switched back to Google Chrome, and this time, I think it's for good.

As I described so long ago, the main reason I switched away in the first place was lack of Flashblock. In addition, I was worried about trivial things like "security" and "speed."

Regarding security, I realize the master password is kind of silly for Chrome's user experience. And if I consistently lock my screen when I go away from my computer, it's not something I have to worry about. In terms of vulnerability to attacks, I think the results of pwn2own speak for themselves.

Regarding speed, those weird slow-downs I'd experienced seem to no longer be a problem, at least in Chrome 2.0 beta. Part of that might be that this version of Chrome has somehow been made EVEN FASTER in terms of Javascript execution, but I think the real answer lies below:

Chrome 2.0 has support for add-ons. And while everything's still very much in beta, some wonderful, wonderful souls (scroll to the bottom, to the "answer" by ChromeFreak) have taken to making a version of Flashblock. The interface is a bit clunky (Shift-F to whitelist a site; hunt down a cookie to remove it from the whitelist), but by-God, it works (for instructions on installing an extension in Chrome 2.0, click here).

So I'm rejoicing in the glory that is un-dockable tabs, Google Docs integration and sandboxed processes (ooh! Looks like they've added custom dictionary support!)

P.S. I swear, I *am* working on my Honors. I just implemented three chapters worth of corrections. So I'm taking a teeny break.

Jeez... it's grown a lot since the days when I just read Goats and Overcompensating...

(Arranged roughly in order of when I started reading them regularly)

Goats
Overcompensating
Wigu
xkcd
Questionable Content
Dominic Deegan
Dr. McNinja
Perry Bible Fellowship
Non Sequitur
Pearls Before Swine
Tom Toles
Dresden Codak
Action at a Distance (if only we were actually UPDATING it...)
Pictures for Sad Children
A Softer World
Piled High and Deeper
Schlock Mercenary
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Kate Beaton
Darths and Droids
Abstruse Goose

And yet, I STILL don't feel like I have enough webcomicky goodness in the morning.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/tomtoles/?name=Toles&date=04092009&type=c

Couldn't have drawn it better myself.

Nice job, Iowa and Vermont.

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=423

The alt-text makes this for me.