She’s ba-aaaack

It’s been about a year since my last post here. A lot’s happened-I got a promotion at work, and designed a couple of sites that are actually live and functioning. I’ve learned so much in such a short span of time that my brain is doing the “overflowing drinking glass” thing. You know what I’m talking about: Today I learned that ctrl+shift+I inverts your selection and OH CRAP I CAN’T REMEMBER MY FACEBOOK PASSWORD NOW.

A couple of days ago I thought to myself, “Hey, self, maybe you should start a blog for some of this stuff…track your professional goals, log your favorite tips, that sort of thing.” And then I remembered that I already had a blog for that, and that I hadn’t updated it in the internet equivalent of forever and a day, and here I am.

So I have a hard time just letting things die, okay? At least this thing’s still got some google juice.

Humility

Me: All I uploaded to Linux samples was the index and the CSS, but it’s finding the images and I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S GETTING THEM FROM.
Andrew: What?
Me: Here, let me show you. **Pulls up one of the samples URLs**
Andrew: Okay, so this is on the Windows samples server…
Me: **facepalm**
Andrew: Should I just walk away now?
Me: Yeah, that’d probably be best.

Whoops

I forgot to tun scrobbling off during my kids’ last session of “Let’s play all our stuff on Mommy’s computer”, and now my Last.FM profile has Disney as the top artist with 202 plays.

Now I wish I had paid attention when they pointed out the feature where you can remove songs and artists from your stats. D’oh.

I’ve found my place in this world…

…and lo, it is a humble cubicle. Not only that, but a cubicle missing half a desk. BUT IT IS MINE.

This week I have one monitor. Next week(hopefully) I’ll have two. The words “dual monitors” are quite possibly the sweetest in the english language.

If I could just get rid of this nasty head cold, I don’t think I’d have anything to complain about for the time being.

What fun would that be, though? Without dissatisfaction we wouldn’t have anything to blog about.

Ka-BOOM

Oh my effing G.

Am no longer phone monkey. Am now, instead, design assistant(code monkey) for web marketing firm. As of this morning. Phone interview Monday, in-house interview yesterday, job offer today.

How did I manage to come by this opportunity, you may ask? (Or not, but I’m telling you anyway, so deal with it.) I was talking to this guy on MySpace (which is how all my stories seem to start, these days) and he asked what I was into, and I said web design, and he said “Really? I work for a web design company and a position just opened up. Would you be interested?”

Anyone who has known me for more than five seconds knows my answer to that question. So I sent in my resume, totally not even thinking anything would come of it, and now I’ve had my dream job practically dropped into my lap. Well, maybe not my DREAM job, but certainly a job that is a solid step towards my dream job.

I start Thursday.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

There goes the neighborhood

Wow. Ahem. I have this nasty habit of starting blogs and then getting bored with updating them, and this one was no exception, it seems.

In my defense, there really wasn’t much going on in my life worth talking about here. I went through a lot of stress at work, split up with my husband, and came down with a case of mono in the last several months, and I’m just now getting back on my feet. I’ve been in hiding for quite some time, and when I was posting anywhere it was usually on LiveJournal or MySpace or someplace similar where whiny emo blogs are just par for the course.

Now? I have a job as retail sales support for a well known cell phone carrier(translation: phone monkey who activates plans for Wal-Mart shoppers), so I’m going to be working with phones and computers, and suddenly I have technology to babble and rant and rave about again.

y hello thar, intarwebs. Good to see you again.

GAH

Dear AIM,

I hate your goddamn ads with sound. They’re new enough that when they start playing, I look through my desktop frantically going “WTF did I just start up?!” before realizing it’s coming from MY BUDDY LIST. Is nothing sacred?!

Ads with sound are the telemarketers of the internet. They’re unwelcome, annoying, and even though everyone hates them THEY CONTINUE TO FLOURISH.

Miscommunication

Nothing is as fun as trying to ring up a customer who is gabbing away on her cell phone. Because it’s not like I wanted to make sure you were actually purchasing what you thought you were, or anything. Some products have similar packaging, and the bubble bath you picked up because you thought it was on sale might not be because you read the sign wrong.

And then you come back to me and bitch about how you didn’t want it if it was full price. Sorry, I must have missed the mind-reading part of my associate training.

On the other hand, if you insist on talking through the whole transaction, you are SO not getting a coupon. Ha.

Fandom go boom

I’ve spent most of the week following the story of a Harry Potter fan who was just revealed to be a Very Big Liar. (Warning: This is not a SHORT story. It’s longer than a novella and stranger than fiction, so don’t blame me if you end up spending your whole Saturday trying to figure the whole mess out.) What followed was nothing short of chaos, of the “…OMFG. If she lied, maybe I don’t really hate you!” sort.

Oh, fandom. You’re totally not like high school at all, except when you are. I can’t even imagine what it must look like to people on the outside.

I’m just sayin’

I’d probably be more willing to write fiction in longhand on actual paper if college-ruled notebooks had a copy-and-paste function, and not the kind involving scissors and a glue stick.

Until then, MS Word, it’s me and you and your stupid grammar-check. And your insistance on switching me back to Times New Roman 12pt whenever the hell you feel like it.

EEK

WHY AM I NOT DOING ANYTHING WITH THE DOMAINS I OWN.

Every so often I miss my sites from back in the day, when I had a B2 blog in an iframe and hosted other people’s sites for popularity free. Staying up till all hours of the night using the tagboard on pick-me.net as a chatroom, and sharing the latest dramarama. Back in the day, man.

Then I remember how I made myself sick over keeping things working smoothly for people who weren’t paying me anything for it, and I don’t miss it as much.

BrightlyColored.net is still coming back someday if it kills me, though. The layout I have up right now uses an image map and a javascript rainbow link hover. Someone call the web standards police, I’M OUT OF CONTROL!

Ooh, uploadable header image for Connections. This weekend I am all over that like white on rice.

Crickets?

Not much going on here, obviously-the laptop keyboard is broken again, and that’s the computer I have regular access to.

I do have caramel swirl ice cream, though, which makes everything a little bit better. Mmmmmmcaramel.

Let’s see, life as of late? I have four new fish, all platinum whites, and they’re SO PRETTY. I’m trying to refrain from bringing any more petshop fish home with me, simply because I only live about two minutes from a Petsmart and my family might just toss me and my fish out in the street if I come home from “grocery shopping” with another betta.

Dave and I went to go see X3, and I enjoyed it immensly. It was action-packed, at least. Thumbs up: Storm’s sudden development of a personality, shirtless Wolverine looking all angsty, Pyro with a bleach job. Thumbs down: Jean and Rogue’s disappearing personalities, Rogue’s disappearance PERIOD, and a certain event that occurs early in the movie that left me screaming “NOOO! WHYYYYYY?!” (I’m trying to stay spoiler-free.)

Let’s be frank here, people: I’m not going to an X-Men movie that has lots of hot actors in it for the intellectual stimulation. I’m going because I want to see things blow up and cool fight scenes and some tight physiques and James Marsden in sunglasses. Quality dialogue is just a perk for me.

Bedtime! I’ll update again soon, I promise.

Adventures in search strings

In a weird way, it makes me kind of happy that someone is finding this blog by searching for “wacky sluts”. One might think that being wacky and being a slut would be mutually exclusive, but they would be oh so wrong.

It also makes me wonder what they’re actually trying to find. Comedic porn, maybe?

Craving simplicity

Back when I hosted my own blog, I wanted every feature under the sun and I wanted it YESTERDAY. Movable Type plugins were the best thing since sliced bread. Custom field for moods? Lay it on me! Hack to incorporate clickable smilies? I’ll do it! I was particularly impressed with myself when I managed to correctly follow a tutorial that involved altering some SQL tables in order to get a hit count per post.

Now I don’t even use the mood field on my LiveJournal, and it’s a custom moodset I made for myself of Starfire from Teen Titans. And when I come across tutorials that require more than copying and pasting code, I go “meh” and surf on.

It’s kind of funny, how I’ve come full circle-I taught myself HTML because I couldn’t stand any of the page builders or WYSIWYG editors, and now that I know how to code my own pages I love the AJAX sidebar widgets in WP.com because it means I don’t have to code things myself.

MySpace is still the devil, though. Embedding music in a page is the fastest way for anyone to lose my respect.

Oops

I’m doing that thing again where I throw myself completely into a particular aspect of my life and pretty much neglect all the others.

This time it’s work and…fish.

My infatuation with bettas has grown. So much, in fact, that I’m now the proud owner of ten of the little finned darlings, including five veiltails, two crowntails and three cute little girl bettas.

Since bettas can’t be kept together (except the females, who don’t have a sorority tank yet), this equals a pretty large number of bowls and tanks, all of which have to be cleaned every few days or so. That’s what I do after my kids go to bed.

My job has also taken up a lot of my energy, since I am pretty much acting as the lead teacher. (I’m actually an assistant teacher, since I lack a diploma.) Not that I’m complaining, because I love my job and I love the kids I work with. It doesn’t leave me with the motivation to do much in the evenings, though.

So less time on the computer = less techie stuff to blog about = less posts here, even though really I post about anything that is even vaguely tech-like.

(Note to self: Stop blogging about how I’m not blogging.)

Anyway, that’s the last couple of weeks in a nutshell. I have new fish pics in the Flickr sidebar, and I’m working on an entire betta related blog so I can talk there about my new obsession.

If you’re still reading this entry, I apologize for the last five minutes of your life that I just wasted. Forgive me?