Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Ocean's 13 - booyah!

There aren't too many movies made these days that I want to see. On the rare chance we have time and space to go to the movies, we have a hard time figuring out what to see because there isn't always something available that we're interested in.

Exceptions to this are anything by M. Night Shyamalan (I don't love everything he does (see: Lady in the Water) but I love enough to want to see 'em all) and Ocean's 11, Ocean's 12 and - coming June 8th - Ocean's 13. Oh yeah!

The Twilight Zone

Andy has a collection of DVDs containing original episodes of The Twilight Zone and last night he watched "The Odyssey of Flight 33" in which a commercial jet flies into a jet stream causing them to break the sound barrier and be transported back in time.

Andy: They broke the sound barrier. That's not fast enough for time travel.
Dianne: *blink*
Andy: Theoretically.

Evolution of Laundry

Early marriage:
"Honey, where are you?"
"I'm getting dressed."
"Where??"
"By the clothes dryer, where my clothes are."

Later marriage:
"Could you fold the laundry, please?"
"Yes, if it's a load of towels instead of socks."

Preparing for baby:
"Aww, these clothes are so small they don't even fill the washer. How uncontrollably cute!"

After baby:
"Could you fold the laundry, please?"
"Yes, if it's a load of socks instead of baby clothes."

Growing child:
"Child, put your clothes in the hamper. You don't need my help with that."

Older child:
"Child, let me put those in the hamper for you so I can pre-treat the stains and empty the playground mulch and matchbox cars out of your pockets before they go through the washer."

Vindication

Gmail is off the hook (as in not guilty of anything rather than being the bomb - although that is also true) for putting a message we needed into my spam folder. I am off the hook for deleting that message.

We received a forwarded message of it on Monday morning and when I looked at the original part, it was sent when they said, but our email address was typed wrong so we never got it. I guess the person who sent it found the returned message on Monday morning and re-sent it after we'd already gotten it from other people on Friday afternoon.

Phew!

And the interview went well. Andy doubts he'll accept the job but they haven't officially offered it yet, so we'll see.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Can we push the date of that interview back a few days?

Andy has a job interview on Monday. He wasn't looking for a job but a friend forwarded Andy's resume when he saw a job opening at the company where he works.

The recruiting specialist that Andy spoke with said that Andy needs to fill in an online application this weekend before his interview. She said who would be emailing it and to let her know if he didn't get it.

Here's where I step into the story as a key player. I rarely look at my spam messages before deleting them (Gmail's spam filter is amazing) but yesterday as I hit the delete button, my eyes scanned to a message that mentioned a job. That isn't strange as plenty of spam messages mention job opportunities but this one fired more than the usual number of neurons in my brain but it was too late to get the message back when I realized that may have been the message Andy was waiting for.

When Andy got home I told him so he emailed the recruiter to get another copy of the message. He opened the crazy long application page and read through it, filling in the easy stuff before dinner - addresses, etc. - and reading through what else he'd have to do (a couple of extra conflict of interest forms on top of the crazy long application.)

After dinner I was checking email and surfing around when I accidentally hit "Back" while on Andy's application page. I thought I should be concerned about that until I saw the message that came up - "This page is no longer available for security reasons. If you need access to this page, please contact the person who provided you with the address." Then I KNEW I should be concerned. My heart raced, my eyes widened and my skin got prickly. I searched my fairly internet-programming-savvy brain for a solution to cover my tracks. No results were found.

It turned out that we could still access the link from the email message and he didn't have to contact anyone for yet another correction for his space-case wife's mistake (that's what they would've thought I was at that point, I'm sure.) Unfortunately, all of the data Andy already entered was gone.

When Kevin and I returned from running errands this morning, Andy was at the computer. He said he was going to let me type in the information I deleted yesterday but he was filling in some new stuff. Later when he got up from the computer, I asked how far he'd gotten. He said he'd moved on to writing his answers down on paper after accidentally closing the window that he'd typed his answers into.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

If you're ever going to comment, do it now for my sanity

Please, can someone (or someones) please remind me what the federal government is doing for me besides annoying my socks off?

Between umpteen tax forms that were so confusing I lost sleep over them (not because I'm afraid of owing taxes or being audited, I just couldn't figure out what to do on some of the forms that kept telling me to go fill out more worksheets that asked for data from the ones that sent me which just put me in a circle of not having any information and can you tell how aggravating that must've been??) and being denied a simple change at the social security office with the appropriate paperwork except for something that we were not given in the format that they say they need it in even though I have plenty of other proof that was issued by their same federal government who writes their laws and signs their paychecks and to which they owe their existence.... I'm really ticked off.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

If you're not a programmer, this will not be any fun

The website Worse Than Failure (used to be known as "The Daily WTF") provides sneer-inducing material for programmers. Although it's easy to look down one's nose at the code examples, I know that we've all written code that could be featured on that site.

I enjoyed this quote from the introduction of a recent article:


Now there are different levels of evil. Ruby is normally elegant but resource intensive. PHP was designed as an example of how not to name functions. Perl has its own special circle, ancient and full of strange characters. If you want real evil, though, you have to find a web application written in C.


Good stuff.

First Date?

Andy: Who invited you to their house?
Kevin: Reem
Andy: What did she invite you over for?
Kevin: To watch a Princess movie
Andy: Who was hugging you when I came to pick you up today?
Kevin: Reem
Andy: Were you hugging her back?
Kevin: Yes
Dianne: Who was knocking on the front window when we got there this morning to wave to you?
Kevin: Reem
Dianne: Who was waving at you from the door of the room when we walked in?
Kevin: Reem
Andy: Reem was also waving from the door as we walked down the hall to leave, looking doe-eyed.
Dianne: (looking in Kevin's lunchbag) Oh, good, Grave Digger came home today
Andy: Who wanted to play with that this afternoon?
Kevin: Reem

Fortunately nobody has introduced the term "girlfriend" into Kevin's vocabulary yet and the boys often want to hug him goodbye also.