From Fark…

Attention Ladies: When selecting your attire while at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, please view this slide show using mannequins to demonstrate what is and is not immodest.

I’m laughing at what I posted yesterday.  The idea of getting offended by a snarky record store employee — it’s like taking umbrage at the rising of the sun.  Maybe I don’t belong in that High Fidelity world anyway; I don’t have the proper anti-customer attitude, and all I care about is old vinyl.  I’d probably get along better with computer geeks, wouldn’t I?  Just wish I could leverage my computer skills with my knowledge of music somehow.

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I walked over to a certain record store to drop off my resume, on the off chance that they’d hang on to it for the next time they’re hiring.  It is my dream job and all.  The one guy I kinda know wasn’t working, there was this new girl who I haven’t met.  I asked her if I could leave the resume, and she says… "You know what? Could you come back when we’re HIRING?  Because they’re ONLY going to THROW IT AWAY. But I can take it if you WANT." I sez… "Yeah, I think I’ll leave it and you can throw it away after I leave, okay?" "Oh, I won’t do THAT…"

I mean… you’d think my friendly local independent record store would be the one place that might give me a smile, if nothing else.  For pity’s sake?  Boy… I feel about this big right now.  –> . <– Sorry for whining (again).  Just seemed unnecessarily harsh, you know?

Here’s the first draft.  I haven’t beautified it in HTML yet, I just pasted the plaintext.  Haven’t done up a resume in years so I imagine it’s gonna look a little funny to any actual employer!  But if y’all have any suggestions to improve it, I’m all ears of course.

I took out my address and phone number and munged my e-mail… hope that’ll stave off the junk from spammers and pranksters, for the time being.

(Update: I took it down for further beautification. Please comment or e-mail me if you’re hiring and need a copy.)

I’m getting my resume together, finally.  It’s ironic that it’s taken me this long to break down and do it… I spent a couple of years after college typing resumes for a living!  I could do it in my sleep, but the idea of doing it for mySELF is a bit loathsome.  I’m going to be posting it here as an HTML file when I’m done.  Not just to give you guys a good laugh, but so I can have a URL to give to prospective employers who haven’t requested it as an attachment.

I’m getting more used to the idea of going back to the 9-5.  It sure would be great to have health insurance again, after what?  Almost ten years of living without. And a steady paycheck, that would be nice.  A routine to follow, new responsibilities and new people to dazzle.  I’m looking forward to all that, it’s just the begging-for-work and the daily rejection that really gets me down.  But I guess that’s a pretty universal feeling now, what with our current crappy job market.

I’m going through my server logs; I’ve been getting a lot of random b.s. comments lately.  They seem to be coming from AOLers… they’ll try to post a couple of words, meaningless phrases that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. They don’t leave a name, e-mail or URL, just a couple of weird words.  WTF?  I just delete them.  I’m having no luck tracking those people down to any particular IP number in my logs; it’s just random AOL dialup nitwits.  But I did notice something else.  I’m getting slammed by script kiddies trying to hack into FormMail, which doesn’t even exist on my server.  The IP number 65.33.10.192 (some jerkwad on RoadRunner) has been doing it every few days, all month long. Almost all the formmail abusers have a common user-agent, "Mozilla/4.06 (Win95; I)" … I’ve just completely banned that UA from my site since the ONLY thing it’s ever asked for is some version of FormMail.  Hundreds of times.  GRRRRRRR!!!!

I talked to Daddy today; he has a pin and a metal brace in his hip now.  He sounded alright, or as alright as you can sound laying in a hospital bed.

I asked around about jobs a lot today.  So humiliating!  Laurie’s say nope.  Tail between my legs.  Very embarrassed, I have to get over myself.

John and I are playing Yahtzee!  He says… "no we’re not, YOU’RE BLOGGING…!!!" Gotta roll.  :-)

I’m still waiting for news on my dad.  They had to move him yesterday from the hospital where the ambulance took him, back to the hospital where he usually goes.  (It sucks that I can even use the term "usually", meaning "more than two or three times"…)

Lucie told me a story that really warmed my heart, it cheered me up just thinking about it.  You know my 5-year-old nephew Marshall, the youngest webmaster around, who runs the Great Movie Ride website?  Well, the whole family just got back from another trip to Disneyworld.  They had alerted the GMR castmembers in advance, and when they got there, guess what?  They treated him like the superstar he is.  He got to meet all the castmembers, they showered him with praise, gave him some souvenirs and gave him a special tour so they could point out all the hidden Mickeys on the ride.  See, that’s what Disney’s supposed to be about, making a little kid’s dreams come true.  Isn’t that just neat-o?

I just found out my dad fell and broke his hip late last night, at home in San Antonio.  He’s gone through so much physical pain and suffering over the past few years, this was the very last thing he needed.  I feel so bad for him, now he needs surgery for the umpteenth time.  All of you please throw a few mental words of positivity his way, if you can!  ::sniff::  I just want my dad to be happy and healthy.  I keep hoping that’ll come true for him, but every time I think he’s getting closer to that goal, something happens to throw a wrench in the process.  I’m just bawling now, there’s nothing I can do.  :-(

So guess who gets top billing if you google the words "SpamCop" and "Cyveillance" together?  Google’s so weird… the SC-List should come first, obviously.

And how am I feeling about this issue now?  Nothing’s changed.  They’re still bitching about it on the newsgroups.  Those of us who remain suspicious can either uncheck the option to report spams to Cyveillance, or we can lump it.  The idea that SC would ever associate with that company still bewilders me, despite everything Julian’s said.  They abuse net resources and I don’t trust them.  July 24th is my deadline to renew my paid-mail service with SC.  At this point I really don’t think I’m going to renew.  Maybe I’m being too idealistic but I just can’t go along with the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  I feel pretty strongly about this, and I want to put my money where my mouth is.

I just uploaded a new config file for MT, I hope I didn’t break anything.  I’d been using the same mt.cfg file since the beginning, but the most recent one has a new switch that I wanted to implement.  It isn’t included in the update-only bundle I normally install, so I had to go grab the full-install version for comparison.  The switch I’m talking about is ‘GenerateTrackBackRSS’… you see, whenever I get a trackback ping (which has only happened three times… I’m not exactly Miss Popularity in the blogging world!) a little .xml file gets stored in the root of my archive directory.  It’s supposed to be used to generate an RSS feed of trackbacks, should you wish to do so.  But with only three trackbacks in the whole damn blog, why would I ever create a feed for it?  The .xml files were just cluttering my pretty archive folder so I turned off the feature altogether.  You can still send TB pings exactly as before; the only difference is that these useless (to me) little files won’t be generated.

I hope somebody pings me soon so I can make sure it worked, but I’m not holding my breath.  ;-)

Remember my ‘No More Blogrolling’ phase when I swore off reading a bunch of blogs that were getting on my tit, including the growlings of a certain Mr. Grumpybear?  Well he’s whining again and I can’t escape it because the whole freakin’ blogiverse is talking about it.  In my best Nancy Kerrigan voice I ask… WHYYYYYY?

Apparently Grumpopotamus feels that Movable Type produces "funky" RSS.  Are my feeds funkified?  According to the Funkidator they’re funky as can be, funky like James Brown.  Well, I give my feeds a bath at least once every two weeks whether they need it or not, and I haven’t had any complaints so far on their personal hygiene or lack thereof.  I hope if anybody really does discover some stank in there, they’ll let me know so I can fix it.

This week’s mystery song is ready and waiting.  Can’t believe it took me so long to get around to this particular mystery artist.  Last week’s song was a piece of work called "Chloe" by Leona Anderson, ripped especially for you from her album Music To Suffer By.  I hope y’all can appreciate the true majesty of that voice.  :-)

The software developers have been busy this weekend.  NoteBook has a new update out — they’re modestly labeling it as v1.1, but the ‘What’s New’ page is about a mile long.  Cute little XShelf is now at 1.1.1, and URL Manager Pro has a minor update as well, to 3.0.6.  And — as if I care! — there’s a new security upgrade for IE.  How long did that take ‘em?  Call me cynical, but the only reason I ever open IE anymore is for ego reasons, to make sure it’s not mangling my own website.  Pfffft.

I’m getting better with my CSS; I feel freer now to make up my own div-tags for certain styles I need to apply to my posts. The newest one is <div class="quotation">… you can see it in action on the previous post, and in the press categories like this one. My album reviews were especially messed up… sometimes my own comments would be italicized, and the quotation would be in plaintext, and sometimes it’d be the other way around, or maybe I’d use blockquotes instead. Well I cleaned ‘em all up so now you always see a gray bar to the left of quoted text, and only album titles and things that need emphasis are italicized. I know… who cares, but I think it looks nicer and it’s a lot easier to see who said what.