Posts
Happy 2009! May your 2009 not be completely awful, and, hopefully, absolutely wonderful. :)
Some random numbers for me for activity that occured during 2008:
- 1216 IM conversations
- 10635074 bytes in 65755 IMs
- 320025 total words exchanged over IM (thanks wordle!)
- 684490 lines of chat typed into IRC in the one IRC channel I mostly hang out in
- (wow, that's a lot.)
- 849 phone calls on a cell phone (not counting my work blackberry)
- 494 of those calls were made on my iphone after I got it in July to replace my Treo 700w
- 972 total minutes used (my cell phone sadly is nothing more then a tool to facilitate "hey, where are you?")
- 93 text messages sent (70 of them from my iphone)
- 164 text messages received (116 of them on my iphone)
- 180 personal emails sent
- 6575 personal emails received (that went into the "general" folder and weren't filtered or deleted by a rule)
- virtually 0 spam (yay greylisting!)
- 7205 emails received from "Youtube Service"
- of which, 5241 emails were notifications of a comment being posted on one of my videos
- (oh, and approximately 1.7 million youtube video views in 2008)
- 2153 emails sent at work
- 28374 emails recieved at work (that went into the "general" folder and weren't filtered or deleted by a rule)
- 56821 total emails recieved at work (most of the difference are automatically generated reports, etc.)
- I bought at least 269 books
- and probably read 70% of them
- (most of my non-manga books aren't cataloged though, but, there aren't that many of those. a few dozen tops)
- 74 video games bought (probably not all too accurate, as I only recently started to catalog video games, and i'm sure my stack on the shelf is missing stuff that's been lent out, etc.)
- 26 Wii games, 18 DS games, 19 Xbox 360 games, 3 PS3 games, 8 PS2 games
I sorta have this fetish for charts. here's a link to the big version of the chart. (also, linecount and wordcount)
badly organized bulletpoints, because i'm too fucking exhausted to form paragraphs right now
- i hate fucking emergency rooms; i hate fucking waiting in them for things that never seen to happen in any sort of timely fashion
- the people in shitty hospital emergency rooms are fucking crazies. list:
- crazy guy who was allergic to sesame who apparently tried to commit suicide via sesame seeds
- crazy old paranoid-schizophrenic who was complaining that someone stole his money and was searching the entire goddamn ER for his money (it's not under your fucking bed you crazy old fuck no matter how many times you search since the meth-head on the next bed over stole it from you)
- crazy meth-head guy who was stealing money from the crazy old paranoid-schizophrenic (who i guess isn't really all that schizo if someone really was stealing his money)
- crazy random fat chick who gave a cigarette to the crazy meth-head (and they both tried to smoke in the ER. seriously, WHAT THE FUCK)
- crazy homeless chick who just wanted a bed for the night (and to talk to a social worker, i guess) who thought crying (and cursing) at the security guard would stop him from kicking her out
- crazy guy who looked like a veteran who apparently wanted to be admitted because he was having delusions and wanted to kill people (look, i'm glad he's getting help, but don't fucking place him next to my uncle)
- although, I figure he's probably faking it for the meds (either that, or he did serve in say vietnam, and he's flashing back to killing random asians back in the war, and placing him next to my uncle is a really really great idea *sarcasm*)
- oh, and there were four or five cops there too, ostensibly because there was some kind of crazy fucking criminal in the ER. they cleared out the ER of visitors when they showed up
- also the crazies in the waiting room, who aren't too bad:
- crazy schizo lady who kept flashing back to some sort of attack on her. (felt sorry for her, at least)
- crazy big tall dude who had a huge giant bag full of magazines which apparently he goes from ER to ER to steal. that's my best guess there at least.
[18:15] <yeoz> i just had a funny idea for a website
[18:15] <sei> being
[18:16] <yeoz> nethack played via group vote. there nethack being displayed (and various panes of information for stats), and people vote on what move to take next. after every hundred votes or so, the move gets picked (either randomly from the votes, or majority) and the move is made in the game.
[18:17] <McDohl> Heh.
[18:17] <McDohl> EVERYONE PLAYS NETHACK
[18:18] <Zaratustra> that would be the slowest thing ever
[18:18] <yeoz> a hundred is probably too much
[18:18] <yeoz> maybe randomly selected from the last ten moves
[18:18] <yeoz> every minute
[18:18] <MetalSlime> Dwarf Fortress would work better
[18:19] <yeoz> dwarf fortress by committee?
[18:19] <OHakubi> Rule the fort by commitDAMN IT YEOZ
[10:34:05] <yeoz> on the way to work today
[10:34:11] <yeoz> i saw a caterpillar floating in midair
[10:34:24] <Squizzle> Do you work in space?
[10:34:27] <yeoz> obviously suspended from a web of some kind, but the tree above us was twenty feet up
[10:34:39] <Squizzle> :D
[10:34:42] <yeoz> and i stood there for five minutes watching it trying to climb up
[10:34:58] <yeoz> and failing horribly because of gravity (or exhaustion) i guess
[10:35:13] <yeoz> and i felt so bad for the little green guy.
[10:35:49] <Squizzle> :(
[10:36:20] <Squizzle> The lesson here is "think before you excrete silk".
Apparently, with Chase's business credit cards, your first purchase with a new credit card is declined automatically no matter where it happens, whatever it's for, or what the actual transaction cost is. That's absolutely retarded. Sure all it takes is a ten minute phone call to a customer service drone in Bangladesh/India/wherever to prove that I am actually who I say I am (which is absolutely ridiculous to begin with); But, imagine if you're a new entrepreneur who just got his first business line of credit, and your first business expense on your shiny new business credit card is a lunch or dinner with a client, and your card is declined... Well, that's an awfully embarrassing situation.
Not that that's what happened to me (Heh. It's fun to exaggerate! I spoke with HP over the phone and explained it to them, and they said they would run the card again.), but, there's absolutely no reason why this kind of thing should happen to anyone using a business credit account at all. I can sorta understand them pulling that kind of crap for personal credit accounts, but, a business account? Get real. Having to explain yourself to a rude customer service rep who doesn't actually speak anything that resembles English isn't my idea of customer service at all. Isn't this kind of thing supposed to be done during activation anyway? Grugh. Screw Chase. I can take my business elsewhere.
Anyway, this is all supposing that business spend is actually relevant at all to Chase's business model.
Which I suppose might not actually be the case. Bah.
Haven't posted in a while.
Life as an IT person is typically nothing but running from one emergency to the next, with some sleep mixed in every so often. Especially when IT, as it typically is, is horribly understaffed. And, it doesn't help when the newly installed management decides to slash jobs, and, the prospect of outsourcing _everyone_ looms over your head.
Two months ago, the company announced a new EVP of IT. Probably a golf buddy (when they worked together at GE) of our current CEO, who himself is less than a year into his job. The EVP in question, was previously a CIO at Citigroup, where he was known for outsourcing/offshoring/cutting entire IT groups (including outsourcing the entire desktop support group to Dell), and, also previously at GE Captial EMS where some random blog comment says "he did away with 70% of the IT jobs". Anyway, that's just what Google says about him, which might or might not be entirely irrelevant. (You'll have to google to figure out his name, as I won't write it here. Would you believe that the network guys at work were asked to add content filtering and logging to prevent people from Googling his name? Unbelievable.)
What is relevant though, is that, he recently announced that he had a 1.4 billion dollar IT budget, and, that, he intended to slash that by 10% at the very least. 71% of that budget was employee/salary/related costs. You can probably guess where the bulk of that cost cutting will go (actually, if you listen to the rumors, anywhere from 10% to 25% of IT jobs will be cut...). I've heard of a couple of engineers down in our florida office who resigned immediately upon hearing this news.
Anyway, the initial cuts happened a week or two ago (I was spared, but, we lost four from my local sysadmin group.), and, a new org chart was released the previous Wednesday. It's quite horrific to see other teams that I interacted with that formerly had dozens of people being shrunk to ten or so.
What is your favorite kind of bagel and what do you put on it?
Submitted by Nacwolin.
Living in the Lower East Side has it's perks. One of them is that Kossar's Bialys which is just a few minutes away. Why have a bagel when you can have a bialy? Bialys are crustier, chewier, and tastier then bagels. I've been eating bialys since high school, after a teacher bought us on a mini-field-trip to Kossar's. A lot of delis in NYC have 'em too, and I often get my breakfast sandwiches made with them, typically being: fried egg, tomato and swiss on a bialy. Yum!
About a month ago, I became addicted to a small little Internet diversion called gpokr.
I had introduced a coworker of mine, who was a big friend of Dice Wars, to a silly Internet diversion called kdice. Dice Wars, if you haven't played it, is sorta like the board game 'Risk', but, with dice representing abstract combat units, instead of infantry or soldiers or what not. Dice Wars was a fun little game, but, being single player versus computer opponents, it was limited by the (weak?) AI that it had, and, would thus get fairly repetitive and tiresome quickly. So, when I told my coworker about, kdice, a online multi-player clone of dice wars, he jumped at the opportunity to play against other people. We played a couple games of kdice together, (with me jumping through hoops just to play, using a web proxy to get past kdice's IP blocking, since, we were both playing from behind the same IP at work). Of course, he was much better (or much luckier) then I was, and he would often still be in the game long after I was taken out.
So, during the downtime, after getting horribly crushed in kdice, I started playing another game that was also hosted on the same site that kdice was running on. It was an online texas hold'em poker game called gpokr. I didn't have much luck at first, but, it was fun, and the thing that kept me going back was the friendly idle banter during hands, the kind I hadn't experienced in any game since gameneverending. gpokr even had it's own little miss cult of personality too. Anyway, in the last week of December, with a little hard work, and a lot of luck, I managed to get myself into the top 100, and earned myself a shiny little trophy. And, that's when it all went downhill.
At the end of each month, a trophy is given out to everyone in the top 100, and everyone is reset back to 0. So, at the beginning of the month of January, after the reset, I spent a few hours a day chasing a spot in the leader board. But, for me, the month was up and down, (mostly down), and I kept spending more and more time playing. I had made it a couple times to just barely past 100, but, would regularly lose it all shortly after. Near the end the month, I would spend practically every waking moment on gpokr, including this entire previous weekend (even skipping out on a friend's surprise birthday party) playing gpokr. Although, this weekend, I did manage to get myself into the top 50. I was pretty happy with myself. Of course, today, like clockwork, I lost everything, in a couple of hours of really bad betting, while on tilt. An entire weekend of work down the drawn. G-ddamnit.
Anyway, K., et al., that's why I've been behind on so many things. I don't know if I'll be able to stop entirely, but, I'll at least start limiting the amount of time I spend on there. Although, I still don't consider it wasted time, since, I met a couple of people on gpokr, that I now consider to be friends, (including notably, f.).
Bonus: I learned about most of the above games via MeFi. Links follow in chronological order:
