Ok, so as much as I am terrified of skydiving, this looks pretty cool and fun and peaceful.

It's a bunch of skydivers in formation- looking like a huge kite.

(the video is really boring, after it breaks apart the first time you might as well just turn it off.)

crap. never mind.

Paul- how do I add a video if it's not on youtube or google? It's a .wmv file on my desktop.

Ok instead you get a random picture of my "irish" dog. :/



Ok and some more random crap from today's email.
A very simple but addictive helicopter-flying game (my kind of game- one button and that's it)-


Ok, and this one is disturbing. First of all, the picture is graphic and horrifying [be warned]. I can't tell if the guy is dead, but if he's not, I bet he was shortly thereafter.

But even worse- when I clicked the pic to try to copy it to post it, it turned out the picture was a link, that took me to 'cumfiesta.com'.

Now, if you had a porn site called cumfiesta.com- is THAT how you would attract people?!

I forgot!
I made a new mix.
Link over there --->
or here


Here's the song list:

The Chills - Peter, Bjorn and John
Between the moon and the ocean - the bon savants
nobody knows me at all - the weepies
fidelity - regina spektor
true affection - the blow
barely listening - pilot speed
dashboard - modest mouse
parade of punk rock t-shirts - maritime [my user song]
stacked crooked - the new pornographers
walking with a ghost - tegan and sara
southwest planes - the western states motel
love song no. 7 - CYHSY
old catherine's box - katamine
black flowers - yo la tengo
keep the car running - arcade fire
lightbulb - mezzanine owls
lady luck - can joann
shoulders and arms - tokyo police club
searching for the ghost - heartless bastards
they - jem
girl sailor - the shins

Enjoy!
Hope you all had a good weekend. :)

I hate chippewa.
Blah.

But I had a fun weekend. :)
Except for missing the ratatat show (yes (e:enknot) I blame you entirely and am not forgiving you anytime soon).
But the PMT party was fun, as always.

Then I spent most of saturday being lazy around the house... then at like 7 got a call saying I was lame for not being drunk yet. I hadn't been planning on going out that early, but, twist my arm... So I went to a little party at a guy from work's house- it was awesome! First of all, he's an awesome guy. And he has a sweet apartment, and he is just the ultimate host and had all this great food and drinks and stuff.
But then I made the ultimate mistake. People talked me into going to Soho. i said 'but i hate chippewa' and they said "no no, soho is different, it's not like chippewa'. So against my better judgment I left the party where I was having a good time, and I even abandoned my friends there, who were only there for me and didn't know anyone else (but they didn't want to go to soho and said they'd stay behind) and I went to soho- and god it sucked. I never want to go to chippewa again. Aside from the fact that all the little hookers there make me feel old and fat, it was just not fun. it was too crowded, the music sucked, and there was broken glass all over the place. And one guy kept asking to feel me up, and when I reminded him that his WIFE was at home, PREGNANT, he was annoyed that I had to bring that up. Sorry dude. I'm not going there.

So I had totally planned on meeting everyone out today for the parade. But then I slept til noon, and was hungover, and decided I'd stay in. And then again, since I have no willpower, I let myself get dragged out to a party, by the promise of "lots of cute single lawyers" [even though I kind of hate lawyers]. And sure enough, as soon as I walked in the door, I was introduced to a super cute guy who seemed nice and fun. But he left right after that. I'll have to see if I can work that at all. Then we went to Mother's, which was yummy. The downside was the gold-digging girls, which I guess is inevitable with a crowd like that, but is so not my scene.

But all in all, a very fun weekend- thanks to everyone! I so don't want to go back to work tomorrow!

I hope you all had a great time too. Sorry I didn't meet up with the estrip crowd for the parade. :( It was a case of social circles colliding. BUT thanks for the message from (I think) Terry. It was very funny and I will save it for a long time. :)

Sorry for the random post- I think I'm a little buzzed.

Later peeps. Have a good week!

-J

Or: anyone have a copy of diskwarrior 4 that I can 'borrow'?

So I got my new computer on friday. That's right, like 4 days ago. It's so new I can't have even crapped it up yet. (more importantly, it's so new I haven't even backed it up yet). Haven't installed any 3rd party software. But, instead of doing a nice slow clean install, like I knew I should, I used the 'migration assistant'. Plugged old compy into new compy via firewire, said
"go", and went to bed. In the morning- voila. New compy just the way I like it. I know I know, those transfer things are never a good idea... but it was so easy! otherwise it would take me a week to get things the way i like them...

So, everything was working fine. Then today Mail started acting weird. totally freezes if i click on a message with an attachment (i.e. if I click yet another fucking online pharmacy spam message with embedded .jpg to delete it).

So, I did my good little mac troubleshooting stuff and repaired permissions. nothing big there. Then booted from the OS install CD and ran disk utility. Chose "repair startup disk".

Well alas and alack, my startup disk DOES have a problem ("invalid node structure"), but Disk Utility can NOT repair it.

No problem, i think, I have Disk Warrior! So I dig out disk warrior. Well I have 3.0, but need 4.0.

4.0 is available new, for download, for $100. Or for upgrade for $50. But upgrade is NOT available via download, and they ask for "three to six WEEKS" for delivery. So I can wait WEEKS, or I can shell out the extra $50 for a downloadable copy.

WTF.

I thought it would take more than a week to totally corrupt a brand new HD. And like I said, I haven't even gotten backups going yet. I'm really not looking forward to having to reformat/reinstall ev-er-y-thing.

Guess it's back to old compy for now (which seems painfully slow compared to the new one...)

Damn migration assistant...

any of you computer whiz peeps have any thoughts?

thanks
-J

P.s. for your viewing pleasure, here's one good thing that has come out of new compy. [I can't believe how entertaining photobooth is.]

So my parents are out of town and my brother is home alone. He called me at 1am but I didn't answer b/c it was 1am and I figured he was just bored. But finally I decided to listen to the message, and he was in tears. My first thought was that my parents' plane crashed or something, but I figured he wouldn't have just left a message and given up if that was the case.

But my dog Alice died tonight. He let her out before bed, and when she didn't come back in he went looking for her, and found her dead by the side of the porch. No idea what happened. He said she was right under the edge- maybe she fell off and broke her neck? It's only like a foot high. But he said she was only out for 20 min or so- how do you just DIE? Too bad there are no doggie autopsies. So then he went and got her favorite bed and buried her in it, at 1am, all by himself, in the frozen ground.

It kind of hasn't hit me that she's really dead. I loved her. She was 11. She was (sort of) named after me. She was a surprise present for my Dad's 50th birthday. My mom threw a big surprise party, and I came home from school for the weekend, and so the surprise was 1: that I came walking into the party- 2: carrying the cutest little baby bulldog you've ever seen.

She's been getting old and sick over the last year or so... sort of limpy, and I think she was blind, and just slow all around. And I was always so mad at my parents b/c whenever I came home my mom was just complaining about her being in the way, etc. I took her to the vet and got her eyedrops and stuff and she seemed better.... but after I left they got lazy and stopped giving them, and I was so mad. And my mom kept making jokes about her dying, about this being her last christmas, about how when I say goodbye this time to go back to buffalo I should know it might be the last time i see her, and I know she was just kidding, but it would always piss me off.

And my brother said that as he drove my parents to the airport this morning, they were going over all these things "if there's a leak, call the plumber. If you get locked out call the neighbors" etc. And they said "and if Alice dies..." and all laughed.
haha, very funny.
I hope mom feels like a jerk now.

:(

Poor baby.
I'll miss her.
And what is poor Gus going to do without his big sister?

Weird...

So I still talk to my ex (the one that was making me miserable when I first joined the site). We chat, and have coffee once in a while, etc- but totally platonic and harmless and fine. And after a while we were ok enough that he could tell me about his new girlfriend- and that he moved in with her. (damn... I could barely get him to spend the night... this chick must be something special. But I digress.) Anyway, point is it sounds like he's in a pretty serious relationship.

A few weeks ago I got a random message from him, and I was confused and responded, and he said he meant to send it to someone else.

So then this morning I got a random "how are you" msg... wondered if it was for the wrong person. He said he dreamt about me, I said funny, I thought of you the other day too. (I did- I drove down his new street and wondered which house was his.) Then somehow it got flirty, and all of the sudden he saying things like "I always wanted to do xyz with you, we should have done that" and "remember abc- that was hot" etc. It almost started to seem like he wanted to hook up... so I asked about the GF and they're still going strong.

Weird.

Though I must say, as wrong as it is to talk dirty with my ex... It did manage to make my afternoon a little less boring. ;)

Now if only there was a real live person in the picture to pick up where things left off. Sigh...

So I have this weekend off. Fanfare please. Whenever I have a weekend off, I am so afraid of 'wasting' it that I feel like I need to have plans every second. But, last night I ended up with no plans, so I watched tv and fell asleep on the couch. Which I must admit, is one of my favorite ways to spend an evening. So since I did not stay out all night misbehaving, I woke up nice and early this morning, and figured maybe for the first time in my life I'd be productive on a saturday. I always have a bunch of little things to do on the weekend (clean my apt, do laundry, groceries, etc.) But I always leave them for sunday. Then sunday I waste the whole day, and then it gets late, and so I never do them. So I decided this week I'd be good and get them done before sunday.

So I went to clean my fish tank. By "clean" i mean change about 1/4 of the water. I try to do this every week, but I skipped last week. So I get my stuff together and I go to the tank... I can only see one of my pink fish. Granted, I don't do a fish tank roll call every morning, so I have no idea when the last time I saw him was. So I look all over... he's not floating on the top. He's not a skeleton on the bottom. And he's not hiding in the plants as far as I can tell. So I start looking for all the others. After a little hunting, I found the frog. He's a good hider, but I found him. And I have this big algae eater guy. Not the sucker kind, but one that reminds me of a little shark. he's pretty big, maybe 3.5" long. Biggest fish in the tank, for sure. Also a very good hider. I can NEVER find him, and then all of the sudden he'll swim out of nowhere. All the others were there. (your orange guys are doing well, Lib, btw.)

So I siphoned out some of the water. Took out the filter. Took out all the plants and decorations to rinse them off. And then looked again- the two fish are still missing!

Where did they go?? I think if they'd died I'd find their little bodies SOMEwhere. If not floating, then half-eaten on the bottom. But they're just totally gone. What happened? Did the other ones eat them? Very weird.


Oh- I lied. I did do one good thing last night. I answered my home phone, which I never do unless I recognize the caller ID. This one said anonymous, but I picked up anyway, prepared to say "take me off your call list." Well, good thing I answered, b/c it was actually an invitation to interview in detroit next week. Yay.

Now just to get ready for an interview... I guess I need to go buy a stupid suit.

But a question for the frequent-flyer peeps: any recs on how to get to Detroit? Southwest goes to Buffalo, and to Detroit, but somehow does not go from Buffalo TO Detroit. Orbitz brought up a few 3-connection >$500 flights. I can't believe it's really that difficult. Might have to bite the bullet and drive. Hate to spend 10hr of a 24hr trip in the car, but if I have to, I will.

Enjoy your weekend, peeps!

-J

But first a mini-rant: Fox news is retarded. I saw a few minutes of it this morning, and they spent half the time talking to Geraldo about his blackberry, and then they did a segment on email addiction, and how there is a new 12-step program for it. So they asked the woman, jokingly, "so, is the first step to say "Hi I'm so-and-so; I'm an email addict?" And the woman had no sense of humor and got all defensive and went on and on about how it's society's fault and not hers for being an 'email addict'.

Seriously. Astronauts in diapers, Anna Nicole Smith ad nauseam, and email addiction- no wonder the rest of the world thinks we are fat idiots.

But the reason I'm writing- I just got this email. I don't know squat about economics. But I kind of like this. Am curious what you guys think.

"Beer and Taxes"

CLEAR EXPLANATION OF TAX CUTS.........................
Sometimes politicians, journalists and others exclaim; "It's just a tax cut for the rich!" and it is just accepted to be fact, without questioning it But what does that really mean?

Just in case you are not completely clear on this issue, the following might help. Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What about the other six men, those paying the tab? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!" "That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!" "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, PhD
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia

So going out for "a drink" yesterday at 4 turned into staying out til midnight (and then up for a while after that wink wink). We went to Essex. That place is so cheap. And David even made an appearance- yay! Made friends with some random drunk guys at the bar, and the flower guy kept giving me so many flowers in the end I had a big bouquet. Which I forgot on the bar. Oops. And I burned myself on the radiator in the bathroom at least three times. It's like 1/2" from the toilet seat. You'd think I'd learn. But no.

But I was a little bit retarded all day today, and snippets of the stupid crap that was coming out of my mouth keep coming back to me. Oops. Note to self. Monday night is not the same as saturday night and can not be treated as such.

Ok. But now a serious dilemma.

Right now I have a two year old 20" G5 iMac. I like it. It still works just fine, though once in a while it feels a little sluggish. I also still have my old computer- a 5? year old G4 iBook that is really so slow now that it's practically unusable. And as much as I don't like windows, there are a couple programs I use that are windows-only, and for that reason it would be nice to have an intel mac.

The desktop is my 'main' computer, and I use it all the time. Love the nice big monitor. I rarely use the laptop, unless I take it on vacation or something.

So... I really don't 'need' a new computer. But, because of a stupid mistake on my part, I now have a (big) credit with Apple.

So here's my dilemma: do I upgrade the computer that is the oldest and slowest and most deserves to be replaced (but that I rarely use), or the computer that doesn't really need upgrading, but is the one I use all the time?

I've changed my mind about 50 times. I'll think I should upgrade the desktop, since it makes sense for my 'main' computer to be the most current. Then I'll change my mind and think that I should do the laptop, since the laptop is just SO old...

Basically I'm looking at the 20" intel imac (don't need 24") or the black macbook. Upgrading RAM, HD etc brings them both to about the same price. Though I could probably sell the iMac and get at least some money for it. I doubt the iBook is worth much...

I just can't decide.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Oh- and roswell peeps: I should be around for lunch tomorrow, so let's eat!

And happy Mardi Gras everyone!! This is the time of year that I miss New Orleans. But after last night, I really should stay in and be responsible/productive tonight. Not to mention I'm on call and thus can't drink. At least the crappy weather makes me feel a little less lame for staying in while I know people are out partying. Can't wait til this weekend. I hate that it's only tuesday. Boo!

So I went to Dr. S's wake this weekend, and then the funeral today.
I know it's supposed to be a celebration of life and all, and people told really nice, funny stories- but it's still just so sad. And I am SUCH a crybaby. The second the organ started and they started wheeling* the coffin down the aisle I was weeping. And I barely even KNEW the guy. Then amazing grace got me choked up. Then I was ok for a while, til the family gave eulogies... And I figured I'd be ok as long as no one speaking started crying. Fortunately his wife/kids didn't talk. It made me think that there is NO WAY I will be able to speak at either of my parents' funerals. In fact if I could have my way I wouldn't even go. I am not going to deal well with my dad dying.

• aren't you supposed to carry the coffin?

But anyway, so I was pretty good (relatively speaking), only cried a little, and was pretty much dried up til the end. Until the brought the casket back out, now covered with a flag, and the pall bearers were crying, and I saw his widow, with her sons holding her hands and supporting her... then I was crying all over again. Fortunately another girl from work was sitting behind me and crying too, so I wasn't the only big baby there.

Man I hate funerals.

But I must say, and I mean no disrespect, but- it was the most rockin' funeral I've ever been to. I kept expecting a gospel chorus to pop out out of the wings. It was crazy! I'm not very good at church, and I'm not catholic. So all the kneeling and crossing yourself is foreign to me. But I'm used to services with a big organ, and that's the only instrument. Well I think this church maybe didn't have an organ (or something) b/c it seemed like there were piping in synthesizer music. Seriously. Like when getting ready for a hymn, all of the sudden a BEAT came blasting through... I finally asked "I know I'm not catholic, but is this typical?" And I was assured it wasn't. Don't get me wrong, it was still nice and touching and sad... but at times I almost found myself laughing b/c I felt like I was in a broadway musical. A little surreal.

Then afterwards M wanted to make it an "Irish Funeral" (even though we were all on call) so we went to her apt and she cooked us French toast, which was delish.

Now I'm home, and a little spent, and I think I could use a drink.

-J

P.s. Happy almost mardi gras peeps!