July 2005 Archives

The Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofit that provides management training and technical assistance to Congressional offices, has released the first of four reports on its study of electronic communication between constituents and their members of Congress.

What caught my eye (I'm mostly lifting from their text here):

• Half of congressional staff surveyed believe identical form communications are not sent with constituents’ knowledge or consent. [Note: As far as I could tell from the report, this seems to have spread from incidents in a few offices and turned into a general suspicion.]
• Nearly all staff surveyed (96%) reported that if their Member of Congress had not arrived at a firm decision, individualized postal letters would have at least some influence on the Member's decision, and 94% believed individualized e-mail messages would have at least some influence. 65% indicated that form postal letters have at least some influence; the analogous figure was 63% for form e-mail messages.
• Some Senate staff reported that their offices "do not count or respond to" some form communications – in essence, ignoring the messages altogether.

The Yahoo logo isn't just for websites. They also put it on buildings. WTF?

Heather Armstrong is a real, breathing, moving person with a great smile.

Heather Gold is funny and wicked sexy. Her website sells an apron that says "hot lesbian baking action." I wish I'd bought her CD at the Blogher Dinner, but I was too disoriented and overwhelmed from being in a room with so many people.

The trees out here don't all match. There are feathery ones with stripey bark, tall triangle-y ones, and purple ones. And they don't seem to care if they all stay together. They just mix them up! Cats and dogs, living together! And they plant them on the embankments that slope up to the elevated freeways, so you don't have to look at all the ugly concrete! YOU MANIACS! And what's with all the flowers everywhere? It's like you want thing to be pretty and colorful.

The crosswalk lights on Great Avenue Parkway ALL depend on user input, so if I arrive at a crosswalk and punch the button too late in the cycle, I can stand there all day long and never get a walk signal. Great Avenue Parkway? Grand America Parkway? I have no clue. All I know is they really, really don't expect pedestrians to be using the sidewalks at 8 in the evening. Or they don't care whether we get an extra special sprinkler bath. Thanks, Netgear.

In non-California news, C-Man has started saying "walkies" for taking The Dog on a walk, as in "The Dog has had her walkies and pill and food." It must be connected to the Wallace and Gromit we watched while I was busy having a broken neck.

I would very much like to post right now and say "Ahhhhh! Someone get [this song] out of my head!" But I don't want to accidentally put the song in your head. So I won't.

Instead, I will describe the bizarre menu options in my work voice mail. The recorded voice in the system is one I've heard before, but I can't remember whether it was at a previous job or at Macalester (undergrad college #1, for those of you just tuning in). No matter. Ever since Macalester, every recorded voice mail system woman is named Janice.

So I dial the extension for the voice mail system, and Janice answers. She asks me to enter my password, followed by the pound sign. So far so good.

When I am logged in, Janice tells me I have new messages. But my first choice is to record messages (for sending to other people) by pressing 1. To get messages, I press 2. OK, I can live with that, even though I don't know many people who log into their voice mail on a regular basis to record messages.

Then Janice tells me some information about the first message - who it's from, what time it was recorded, and its length. Then, again, I have choices. I like that part. But my choices here are in this order:

1. To listen to the message, press 0.
2. To delete the message, press *D.
3. To skip the message, press #.

I'm sorry, quoi?

Then, once I've listened to the message, I have these options:

1. To respond or forward, press 1.
2. To delete the message, press *D.
3. To skip the message, press #.

AHA! I think I have discovered part of the reason for this madness. Janice is attempting to maintain a context-independent menu, so that *D means the same thing wherever you are.

However, repeat after me: Elegance of design is not the same thing as ease of use! This system puts the choices in an order like no other voice mail system I've ever used! And why do I have to press two keys to delete, which is what happens to most voice mail messages!?

Enough said. Onward to the next miscreant. Good thing the universe has me around to criticize these errors in judgment, or we might be in serious trouble.

Check out the No Nonsense in November website. Forms are available for volunteers, donations, pledges to vote against the amendment, and e-mail alerts. Each page seems to have a button for e-mailing it to a friend. There are also downloadable materials for doing grassroots outreach.

1. Staying up late waiting for C-Man to get home from teaching.
2. Getting up and leaving the house an hour early so I can accompany C-Man on part of his bus ride to the Bar Exam.

My other observation on the universe this morning: if you were going to make yoghurt-covered raisins, you would likely choose seedless grapes to make the raisins, unless you were the people who sell yoghurt-covered raisins to Wheatsville, in which case you would apparently not.

I am so tired...

The setup: Don is divorced, and is charged with kidnapping because he took his child on a fishing trip after being told not to take the child anywhere.

What type of plea will be entered if Don refuses to plead, citing Texas's unlawful annexation by the United States?

If you need to be cheered up, check out Defective Yeti's description of Karl Rove's latest activities. No, really. You'll thank me.

Via feministe, a perfect demostration of why I quit reading most mainsteam magazines several years back: The Art of Retouching.

Not only am I bombarded solely with images of women who are considered culturally the most attractive - excluding all the other women in the world - but those images are fake. No wonder my confidence in my looks would plummet after paging through one of those magazines.

Last Tuesday afternoon I was feeling quite ick. Tired, grumpy, headachy, and looking forward to collapsing once I got home. This often works well, because C-Man is usually more than willing to make dinner, listen to my pitiful whining, take The Dog out after listening to her pitiful whining, help me find my pajamas, etc. I figured he would also put away the groceries I had lugged home from Wheatsville on the bus so I could maintain my "woe is me, I'm so helpless" identity. He's an enabler.

When I arrived home, though, I saw two packages on my porch. What is this madness? Why are there packages? Why didn't C-Man take the packages in?

Oh, damn. I forgot. C-Man is teaching until 5:30.

I entered my abode in despair. The Dog grabbed her tennis ball and gurgled/mooed/growled at me happily. (Note: I have no idea how to accurately describe that noise. All I know is I have to reassure strangers that she isn't fixin' to take a chunk out of anyone.) I shoved the groceries wherever they fit in the fridge, taking no care for organization. After all, if I'm too tired to organize my own fridge, then I must be in trouble and someone should show up and take care of me, right?

I was about to throw my backpack on the floor and collapse on the chair when I finally got annoyed with myself.

"Dagnabit," I said to myself, except I probably didn't, but I don't think I use that word enough, "You lived by yourself for a year and a half before you even met this guy, and somehow during all that time you never missed dinner or ended up sleeping on the couch because you couldn't get to bed and find your own damn pajamas. Get a grip! Clean up the apartment a little and make some dinner! It won't even take an hour!"

So I did. C-Man got home feeling lousy, but I already had dinner in progress and had cleaned up enough to feel sane, so I could take care of him for a change.

Then I made my fatal mistake.

I made a very similar speech to the one above OUT LOUD. And I added this: "I can actually do things for myself, dammit!"

At first, it seemed fine. We ate dinner and went to bed. The next morning, the alarm went off. I shushed it and stretched.

The stretching caused a stabbing, icepick-like pain in my neck, and it didn't stop. IT WAS THE WORST PAIN I CAN EVER REMEMBER FEELING! EVEN DRINKING WATER CAUSED INTENSE PAIN! AND C-MAN HAD TO DO ALMOST EVERYTHING FOR ME FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS.* I couldn't even brush my hair! And I tell you, I was willing to take it on faith from people who have grown dreadlocks that your head stops itching if you don't wash your hair for long enough. I didn't need to find out directly!

And that, my friends, demonstrates very clearly the value of knowing when to shut the hell up.

* Except for the car ride to the doctor (when I finally admitted the Aleve wasn't going to do it), because he doesn't have a car. So my saintable friend C. drove, on what must have been her favorite road trip EVER due to my crying and shrieking in the passenger seat every time she started, stopped, accelerated, or turned the vehicle. It's not that I objected to the driving. It's just that every time I moved my head even slightly, the pain in my neck exploded so badly that I couldn't think, breathe, or want to live any further than that second. The Bene Gesserit would never have let me be the Kwisatz Haderach.

I say "OK! I'll knock that right off."

Shouldn't be too difficult, really.

The Princess: I never wore lip gloss in high school, I don't think.

C-Man: Why not?

The Princess: Because I was a hippie girl or a metal chick, and it didn't go with either.

C-Man: I think hippie girls are allowed to wear lip gloss. If it's made of quinoa.

My wonderful friends Grace and Mark have just lost their dog Chance. Since I don't know what to say to them that could be of any help, I just wanted to acknowledge publicly that Chance was a great dog, and this is a sad day. I would say half of Chance's greatness was his innate personality, and half was the hard work that Grace and Mark did to make sure that Chance could be a happy participant in our society with friends and toys and fun. They saw his potential and did everything they could to bring it out. I wish more dogs were as lucky as Chance for adoptive parents, and I wish he could have stayed longer to enjoy it all.

This is my souvenir from NYC, where C-Man is currently vacationing. Have I mentioned how much I love this man?

Editor's Note: For those of you who are mystified by the image, go here. Or ignore it. Totally up to you, no hard feelings either way.

• Figuring out that when you have an Excel spreadsheet that's too big for PowerPoint to deal with, such that it cuts off the rightmost columns no matter how small you make the pasted-in sheet, you can instead paste the sheet in as a picture and then you can do anything you want to it.
• Holding the result of said PowerPoint bitch-slap up against the boss's window to signal victory. (The window is inside. So I guess it's actually a glass wall. It's not like I'm Spider Man and I crawled out the window to show her the slide.)
• Slicing colby jack cheese with the biggest knife I own.

I have paid off $30,000 (plus interest) of my student loans since I began in early 1999.

I have $12,293.44 left (plus under $600 in interest if it takes me another year).

I can't believe I am coming to the end of this. It's been part of my life for almost as long as The Dog. But the loans are less cute. And less afraid of fireworks and the vacccuum cleaner.

After a three day weekend all by myself with virtually no plans, I am still tired.

Last week, people got here by searching for...

• gojira
• covered in bees
• white rainbow sonali kulkarni
• pronouncing tsutsui
• can vegans eat marshmallows
• comeback lines for women
• whining noise when ac is turned on
• i have stupid vision
• vin diesel's workout schedule
• the purpose of the government
• eharmony is bullshit
• eharmony scientologist
• alchoholic cider cancer
• demon buffy friendly lizard
• photos of vin diesel's bare feet
• geeky seat cushion

Actually, as far as I can tell, there's just one. It's in Tennessee. Perhaps you should use Google before sending me email!

[Update, around lunchtime: When people see this in RSS, can they see that this post is in the category Spambot Love? Otherwise, it might not make sense.]

[Update, around snack time: Updated the subject line to more clearly communicate.]