Recently in Miscellany Category

Dear people who work at jobs,

I'm not sure how to break this to you, if you haven't already figured it out, but... your work email account? Totally not private.

You know that gal who works in your IT department, the one who always wears black and drinks out of a Star Wars mug and has an eyebrow piercing? Actually she would probably be a friend of mine and she's good people, you don't have to worry about her. But those other two people who work with her? They could totally log in and read your email any time they want - either at your manager's request, or just for fun.

At my previous job, my colleague's daughter got very sick suddenly. He went on leave while she spent a few months in the PICU. He was obviously not checking his email during that time. So various team members logged into his mailbox every day and forwarded work emails to the appropriate places for handling. Are you comfortable with everyone you work with having access to everything in your inbox? Friends writing to you about marital issues? Your own emails about your financial situation or your health? Lots and lots of emails that show you've been working on your blog or updating Facebook continuously during the work day?

Here in Austin, I knew someone who showed up to work one day and there was a padlock on the door of the building. Seems the business had gone bankrupt, but the owners didn't let any of the staff know. All computer accounts were now inaccessible. If your personal contacts are in the habit of emailing your work account, how easy would it be to get all of them to update their address books? How much mail would you lose in the meantime?

Some people use their work accounts for personal email because their job blocks the major providers for personal email - Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and so on. If you're in this situation, I'm so sorry. But is it worth sabotaging yourself at work to send email?

Just think about it, okay? Segregating your personal and work email doesn't completely stop your employer from checking up on your internet use, but it's just good sense.

Best,
The Princess

If there are 2 zucchini in 2 loaves of zucchini bread, and each zucchini is 2 servings, then if I eat half a loaf of the bread, I can count that as 1 serving of vegetables, right?

Lately, all I do is work, parent, clean, and get enough sleep. (When I wasn't doing that last bit, the first and second bits were not going so well.) This weekend, Boy Detective's grandmother and aunt were kind enough to kidnap him for a little over 48 hours. I worked only about 5 of those hours, and didn't sleep enough, which left plenty of hours for me to do... just about nothing. I read all of DC's 52, went to Tribe Comics and Games twice, and cleared out my feed reader in my pajamas while eating eating peanut butter toast and watching C-Man paint Warmachine miniatures.

We lead such a fascinating life.

My life has always been boring like this, which is usually okay with me. But before this weekend, my last brief break from the onslaught of work was a recent 2 hour deviation from my normal one track life, on a Saturday morning, while C-Man took Boy Detective to the library and Whole Foods. That didn't go so well, but I was blissfully unaware of it at the time because I was busy taking a class on how to use my camera.

Do I have a new camera? No. I have an old point and shoot camera whose picture quality is now matched by my phone as long as I'm outdoors. But you see, cameras have these things called settings. The book that came with the camera made my eyes glaze over. I couldn't decipher it. I did find the button for "flower." I used it to get a better shot of Boy Detective's Captain America action figure once when he was climbing the dresser.

Then a Groupon offer showed up for Chimpsy Photo Field Trips. I figured that I could either just give up on the camera and use the phone, or learn how to use the camera. It also seemed like two hours spending something totally different might be a nice change of pace.

The class format was perfect for me. We got a few small, useful tips rather than 75 of them all at once, and then we walked around outside and did stuff so we could see what it meant.

Of the photos I took that day, these are the ones I kept. Angelina asked if I might be able to share them by October when my life will hopefully be less busy, but what the hell, Boy Detective is asleep now and it's not quite bedtime yet. So here you go. You should be able to click on each one for a slightly larger version if you want. Putting my name on them makes them look less cool, but other original photos I have posted to this blog have been ganked by internetizens, so what can you do.

(Reader users, you may need to click through, apologies. I need to fix that someday, but see aforementioned lack of time.)

Too dark, oh well:

Not too dark:

It's hard to take a bad photo of a flower, as long as it's focused. I was mostly glad the damn bee finally sat still, though I wish I'd gotten closer:

I find this one quite cheerful. It doesn't embiggen, I'm still working on my Picasa process here.

Oh look, someone's getting ambitious:

And this last one cracks me up. What the heck am I doing with my fingers? I even have one pinky up like I'm drinking tea.

Don't take the self-deprecating comments for more than me entertaining myself. I was quite happy with that I managed to do that day. I also feel like I may take better photos of what I normally take photos of, which is not strings of light bulbs and holes in fences.

"I don't understand why anyone should be upset that I criticize Lady Gaga's performance during which she gives birth to glitter while being attended by a gaggle of leather-clad caressing dancers."

From the keyboard of the lovely Angelina, who writes at Better Than Bullets and Stitch and Boots. (I can't tell you how lucky I am to work with this woman. She keeps me together on a lot of days when I would otherwise fall apart, and she's damn funny, too.)

If you've ever wanted to hear my honey talkin' the geek talk, you're in luck. He's the one on the left lookin' all scruffy.

A heartwarming thought as we bring the year 2010 to a close:

"Tentacles make everything cool. I learned that from the ballet."

See y'all in 2011.

The Princess here. Doing my part to uphold the principles of free speech upon which this country was founded (or something), I am pleased to provide airtime today to C-Man. In my post How is this not cheating? I basically called him a cheater, so it seems only fair that he should be allowed to respond publicly to these accusations.

Now onto his defense.

So the princess deigned to give me the opportunity to defend my "cheating" ways in a guest post.

I'm a programmer by trade.

Copying someone else's code without their permission. . . that's cheating.

Reading the API documentation, even if the manufacturer didn't see fit to provide the documentation and left it up to enthusiasts to write it themselves . . . not cheating.

This pretty clearly falls into the latter category:

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES Fusion Database

It's all about what the rules of the game are, not how to exploit them. Coming up with your own exploits, in this case deciding what persona to create to counter a given boss, is the fun part. Pressing X and O 65,280 times in order to write down every possible combination of personae, not so much fun.

(great game by the way, highly recommend Persona 3 to anyone who likes RPGs)

The Princess again: I feel it's only fair to include that while he was writing this out, I said "I clearly remember a time when you were playing Final Fantasy XII and you went over the the computer to find out exactly how to get out of this clearing because you couldn't figure it out, how does that fit in? That's more what I was thinking about when I was writing the post." and he was like "Oh yeah that."

You know how there are people who play video games? Like, oh, my husband? And they play some of the game, then they look some stuff up online to figure out how to beat the demon who keeps kicking their ass or unlock the puzzle or save the prince or whatever?

How is that not cheating?

Is it not cheating because everyone does it? Do the game designers figure that everyone's going to and build the games accordingly? And if the system is set up that way and everyone does it, does that mean that the user-generated content outside of the game is basically part of the game, which the game designers essentially outsourced for no payment to the players?

This is not the weightiest topic ever discussed here in the Flooded Lizard Kingdom, but I am continually bemused by C-Man's insistence that it isn't cheating to look up how to solve a problem in the game he's playing instead of just playing the game until he figures it out.

Someone please explain. C-Man is a member of the Texas bar in good standing, if that helps.

1. Learning how to use Photoshop well.
2. Caring that I don't know how to use Photoshop well.

Shut down by Flickr user Florin Hatmanu, reproduced here under a Creative Commons license