Kaitlyn's Blog

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:07:20 GMT

I'm pretty deer-in-headlights about our upcoming trip. I've started being really productive at other things to avoid finishing Christmas things. And I planned a date for tomorrow which was probably really stupid because of everything I have to do.

At least I have awesome sugar cookies to make everything better.

If I had a roommate like me, I'd evict her. Seriously. I couldn't live with me. Today I needed mozzarella cheese, old cheddar cheese, and a frozen lasagna.

I almost accidentally bought light cheese - in both varieties. The only reason I didn't was because I screwed it up last time. Then I did bring home completely the wrong lasagna. And not a single serving - an 8-serving lasagna. And I didn't notice until the noodles were different. After it was cooked.

I buy lasagna all the time! My package? Red. This one? Blue. What the hell? Does my brain turn off after work? I'm fairly clever at work.

I seem to become more and more clueless about daily things as I have to perform harder at work (this week, reverse-engineering html forms, javascript, and a slip of asp). Maybe I'm just using up brain power. That must be it.

Obviously this doesn't sound dire. But imagine if you trust someone to get you food which you need to cook tonight in order for it to be available over the next 4 tumultuous days, and they bring home the wrong thing when you know they know better. It just makes me want to shake them. If it were someone else, it would make me want to do it myself from now on since they're so useless.

It's just getting to the point where I can't stand me. That's not a good place to be, when you're in any kind of relationship, because you get confused/irritated when someone likes you. Cause, like, WHY do you like me? What the hell? How do you put up with all this crap?

But I have cookies. Maybe they'll make everything better.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:43:40 GMT

Heading home after a last minute, awesome evening. Got to remember spontenaity can be awesome.

ASL quandry

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:41:53 GMT

I enjoy dabbling in languages. 8 months of each of Spanish, German, and Italian, and I bought some books to review my 9 years of French immersion, although that has to wait in case we're going to Italy, in which case I have to shun French until after the trip because it crowds out everything else.

Recently, I keep seeing ASL on TV - Joey Lucas on The West Wing, the episode of House with the deaf patient, and an episode of Law and Order CI, wherein Joey's interpreter Kenny made an appearance as a interpreter.

I want to dabble! The linguist in me is facinated! And now Andrew is learning a few signs, so I want to teach him Christmas (it's pretty easy - a cross between 'tree' and 'c') and Auntie Kaitlyn (since Aunt is an 'a' twisted next to the cheek, I thought a twisted 'a' followed by a twisted 'k', which will probably just be a hand twisted twice by his head with the "baby accent")

The thing about ASL is that it's not easily separated from deaf culture, which I do not have an "in" into.

My best chance is the community college which offers introductory asl, starting from scratch, but the classes are quite pricey ($500 a term?) and aren't related to my career so won't be eligible for help from work like my computer classes were.

But that's a lot of money for dabbling. But I know that the worst thing I can do is try to learn out of a book. But that might happen if I don't find a class! Bah!

DropBox!

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:05:05 GMT

Now that I know about shares, I wanted to share out the external hard drive that's usually hooked up to the tower. Then, if the tower is busy, I could access it from any of the laptops via \\tower\externalshare. If it wasn't taken, i could just sit and use it as F:. Eventually, we would use that as our store from all the computers in the house. Like a network drive! And one drive to grab in a fire!

There seems to be a kink since the working accounts on all the computers don't have administrative rights. In theory, I just set the external drive's ntfs permissions to "everyone has full control" and set the share permissions the same. But it doesn't seem to work. :-(

Then Dad showed my DropBox which is like... well it's like duplication across all the computers you want, plus into a cloud accessible via web address. Well, I put the drop box folder on the external hdd. I can put it on all the other computers here. I could put it on my work computer too. It's way better than using google docs as a store, since there are local copies!

https://www.dropbox.com

On the one hand, awesome! On the other hand, damn simple solution! That means I'll never puzzle out the shares thing!

Oh and I have invites and it's mutually beneficial to give them out. You can post an email address and I'll send you one. I'll screen all comments and unscreen the one's without addys.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:59:36 GMT

I just tried to 'fix' my computer's time because it was 'wrongly' December. Oh sigh.
#cell

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:02:04 GMT

$ClassmateA once bragged that there was nothing her father couldn't buy. $ClassmateB cooly wondered if perhaps he could buy a few aitches*.

British snap. Oh no she didn't!

* It's very unusual in North America to spell out the names of letters. Here I am using the plural of the noun better known as 'H'. **

** Oh crap, now I'm reading about letters on wikipedia. Aitch vs Haitch as a pronunciation is a shibboleth in Ireland. Fascinating.

it's from one of the Enid Blyton boarding school series I read.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:56:33 GMT

We rushed home from the company christmas party so that I could be sick some more. Great. Like I didn't earn a nice christmas party. I guess I didn't work hard enough this year.

The worst part is going to be taking it easy enough that I don't get sick again so I can get back to work next week. How easy is easy enough? I have stuff to do!

Coverage of tomorrow starts today. Lino had no knowledge of what tomorrow is. I didn't get it until I was older. It's still an interesting Rorschach test. Do you just hate Marc Lepine? Do you hate his father? His mother? Do you hate the men that let themselves be separated from the women?

I have to find reasons to visit Rome. Italy has nuances to eating in cafes. When you need to take an Italian class just to be trained how to eat in a cafe, it's not a good sign for a hapless tourist. When you have to watch out for the taxi drivers so that they don't charge you triple the going rate, that doesn't sound like a vacation to me anymore.

Time to hit up 914.5632 on the Dewey decimal system. There's a ... for dummies book that looks promising.

I just need a reason and an itinerary. I can't show up and wing it. "The coliseum" is not reason enough to fly to Europe. I'm not sure I could justify going to any just-one-place. There are so many places I do want to visit that I want to do an n-for-one trip and get many places done and visited. And Rome isn't one of them.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:02:04 GMT

Stubbornness can pay off.

When I decide I don't want to be miserable, many things can happen.

All doorhandles etc: disinfected
Bathroom: Shining clean
All bedding, guest and ours: washed (that's 8 loads in laundromat washers)
Floors: given a lick and a promise
Dishes: contained in the kitchen
Other laundry: contained in baskets

House: reclaimed after illness. Usually this takes several days. That's the funny thing about 36 hour bugs. They come on quick and leave quick.

Couldn't have done it without Lino's help <3

A plague on our house - again!

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:21:36 GMT

Now THAT is a contagious bug - Karl was staying with us, and I think I hugged him twice on Sunday, and Monday morning he was sick, and Tuesday at midnight Lino was sick, and by 4am I was sick.

It must have been off doorhandles and such. Ugh. My house feels so dirty!

It was a GI thing of the worst kind. Let us not speak of it anymore.

Looks like I will be back at work by tomorrow. Lino and I can go to my Christmas party but we canceled the fancy king sized bed hotel room (thinking we weren't going to make it, and having to cancel by 4 today) which now makes me want to cry because instead of getting all dressed up at the hotel beforehand and then our romantic evening I get to come home to my infected, filthy house. Oh god. Maybe we will try to rebook. Oh goddy god.

At least I can get back to work where at least one important and time sensitive thing awaits.

That's just great. My life blows so hard that I'm looking forward to work. Even when work is good, it's not supposed to be that good. EVER.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:59:36 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmjLqddPqZQ
This makes me want to eat vegetables.

I'm conditioned to listen to Muppets. I cried when I saw the censored Muppets a few weeks ago.

Also, my brain did a HUGE double take because as soon as I heard the song I got the feeling like I had seen it before. But by the title, I thought I hadn't.

If you haven't seen the Bohemian Rhapsody cover do it as soon as possible. I thought they were just singing it, and since it's such a sad song I was going to skip it altogether. But Lino made me and I'm better for it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY

This was one of the awesomest things ever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGohKgNOXnU

Thank god for sesame street.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 01:22:12 GMT

Because of tablet capabilities I was basically forced to swap which computer had Vista on it, choosing the far less powerful one (boy does the tower ever race with XP!!)

As a result, we only ever hibernate it as to make startup bearable.

Of course, that leads to trouble when I forget that it's been up for two weeks. Because I forget to try a reboot when, say, the keyboard seems to be dying. I just assume the keyboard's dying. Luckily, once the keyboard ALL dead, there's only one thing you can do - ~~go through its pockets for spare change~~ reboot! Tada! Keyboard's fine.

I just spent something like 7 of the last 9 hours coding (well scripting). Sweet deal. Last night as a random example of a .NET object you can manipulate with powershell, the prof used the WebClient object, which among other things, allows you to download a file via its web address. Well, that solves a problem at work, but it took all 7 hours to get it all perfect and also format the input for it (it's not like the guy has a handy list of URLs at his disposal perfectly sorted into a text file. YET. Now he can with another script).

Now is the perfect time to go shop for needlework and baking supplies.

I think I balanced traditional gender roles for the day. Mmmmmmm maybe I'll make some biscuits when I get home. Then I can haz traditional gender rolls too. Hahahaha.... coding makes me somewhat CRAZY.

Class

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:36:55 GMT

Nothing in the entire world compares to sibling rivalry. You just don't get it unless you had it.

I've really got to get to a dentist. No cleaning in at least 2 years, and pain now. Oh dear.

Unfortunately, to go to the dentist, I need to figure out if it's covered. To figure out if it's covered, I need to learn how to be a grownup and handle my health insurance. And once I do that, it'll be a higher priority to get my claims in for this year.

I really have to get off my butt - there's major opportunity costs this year, with all my massages at $45 a pop.

One more reason to cheer multiculturalism - forms with a "legal first name" field and a "name you prefer to be addressed as" field (or similar). Sweet! Much clearer than cramming in Grace Kaitlyn in one field.

When a spa advertises a price for waxing "full leg" (to distinguish from "half leg") - and they all use "leg" in the singular - ..... do they mean that's per leg? Is confused. No know girl stuff. Wanted to try something new but is intimidated.

I'd better not get around to the spa before I get around to the dentist. That would be a reflection of poor self-control and non-laziness

"Everybody stand back.
I just learned regular expressions."

More importantly, I already have a tool that lets me implement them. They're not handy at the command line in Windows like Unix (? so I hear), but PowerShell has them.

New Icon!

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:36:06 GMT

Oops. Instead of sending it to myself, I sent a note about a cheap spa nearby to the email addy that automatically forwards here and posts a post. Hopefully I disabled posting from that address fast enough. If there's a lonely url to a spa that's why :/

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:58:42 GMT

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1242

Class Musings

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:22:16 GMT

I wonder what planet you have to be from that you would fill out a scantron card in pen. Really?

Bonuses: Prof reminded, and golf pencils were offered.

Negative-bonus: it was just the course evals, not a test or anything.

I put in 4 hours of my home tech services as an item for work's United Way silent auction. It sold for $175. Sweet deal. Next year, I'm putting up two such sessions up for grabs. This is part of my plan to volunteer my time since I'm not making cash donations a high enough priority. Aside from the money I'm already giving to SOS Children's Villages. I have guilt lately. And time to spend.

Also, I'm volunteering for FreeGeek but I can't go as much as I'd like because their only hours I'm available are 11-6 Saturdays, which tends to clash with weekend plans. Annoyingly, the only time before the new year when I can fulfill my United Way responsibility... is next Saturday. Blast!

Wednesday's XKCD prompted my prof to say it reminded him of me (see here). In fact, the business thing pretty much happened.

My cubicle neighbour needed something in a batch script but someone had told him it was impossible to do in a batch. At first I thought I needed to call a VB helper script from his batch file to handle date compares but I ended up solving it in a handful of cmd lines

That's right -- I did the impossible! And all I got was "Hey great!"

He needed to isolate the name of the file that was created today and pass it to something else. Since there was only ever one of these in the directory, my script just:

Formats today's date to match what the dir /tc command outputs
Loop through the files in the directory performing a "find" for today's date on each file's dir /tc output
When the find exits with 0, we're on the right file - set it in the variable

Done!

Then, it turns out it's really only two lines because apparently the file is named \\PATH\BigStringNamedate.log every day. Forget creation times to find the right file - let's just build the name. One line to set up the date, one to string together the path, prepend string, date, and ".log"

Impossible? Bah.

Not thinking ahead, the guys who built PowerShell encoded a couple of important things with the version number - an important subdirectory in the windows directory is called "v1.0", and the scripts themselves are of type .ps1. These did not change with version 2. LOL.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:28:09 GMT

I like to think that even were I stranded like today's Toronto subway riders
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/727602
I wouldn't think there was a flaw in the system.

First of all, it's a third party who screwed things up. Breaking through the roof of a subway tunnel deserves careful repairs and scrutiny by TTC engineers. It's not like sheer force of will or really good business plans can protect from some idiot breaking through your tunnel.

But also, from my layman's point of view, I don't see how you have have a plan b that compares to a subway. The article says that buses hold 60, trains 1600. Trains don't mix with the regular traffic. I just don't see a lack of planning being to blame when I can't imagine WHAT your plan b would be. I suppose if it comes out that they had extra drivers/buses standing around, that'd be bad. But even mobilizing all drivers and every single spare bus wouldn't compare to the trains.

I try not to grumble too much about other people complaining, mostly due to the irony. But they quoted far too many people saying they don't want to pay more for crappy service. Bah!

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:16:13 GMT

Two shirts for me: $4
Two shirts for a friend: $6.50
One awesome book at "full" price: $5

VV's half-off sale: Priceless

It was so sad! I found an awesome sweater. Then, a) I forgot to put it in my basket, b) it fell out of my over-flowing basket, or c) someone poached it from my basket!! But I felt like it was already mine! My beautiful brown zip-up hoodie that was reversable! :'(

(Jenn: sorry I forgot, again, to give you a heads up.)

(Also, Getting Rid of Matthew is a hysterical schadenfreude about a mistress whose lover suddenly leaves his wife for her... and then she realizes she can't stand living with him. And now it's mine.)

"We'll toss the dice however they fall,
and snuggle the girls be they short or tall,
then follow young Mat whenever he calls,
to dance with Jak o' the Shadows."

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:17:04 GMT

blerg. I made it into work yesterday with just a scratchy voice. Now I have a bad cold!

It's a completely different set of symptoms which includes all my higher-brain-function-responsible cells being replaced with wool between my ears. I was at FreeGeek (where I volunteer) for 10 minutes before I sent myself home realizing they were overstaffed at every station I knew, and I was unable to learn anything new.

Ugh........

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:15:23 GMT

Made it to class, and should be back to work tomorrow.

Clickers are, in theory, awesome - it's anonymous feedback of how well the class is grasping the concepts (otherwise you can interpret a silent classroom as bored or lost, and gee I hope you're not wrong).

Classes after mine whined a lot about it, but they had to buy or pay a deposit on the hardware, and there were marks associated with using your clicker. But then friends took their friends clickers to class to get them counted.

But in my class this term, we're in a lab and everyone is expected to be logged in and tinkering with an open command window, so the prof has a software version of clickers and we just click on the answer here and it tallies them anonymously on his computer. He does show us the frequency of each answer and then decides how much depth to go into with his explanation of the right answer. No fuss, and 100% positive. Yay!

I like racing to see if I'm the first to get my answer in, since the tally of sent-answers counts up on the projected screen :P

I am in awe of the patience required of an instructor in an open class like this that should have strict prerequisites. And I'm in tech support (and good at the patience thing).

*shakes fist at whomever it was that said the Ontario ban on distractions included the built-in radio and climate controls* Doesn't seem to be true.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:23:54 GMT

My fever is up a little again and my voice is up and down so tomorrow is off again. Hopefully I can get to class tomorrow night but I shoud leave early to get home and get a good night's sleep.

I hate being sick if only for not being able to get anything done. I would rather even put off my books for a bit until I catch up rereading pages I bookmarked throughout the series on the last pass. There are so many named characters and so much prophesy it's nearly impossible to follow all the subplots without taking notes. But taking notes isn't taking it as easy as I would like.

Note to self: as little of the ASL alphabet I remember, Lino knows less. STOP SIGN-SPELLING TO HIM.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:24:04 GMT

To all the mathies/scientists in the audience: want some shadenfreude? If you have time to brush up on the definition of cardinality, read this post, and then watch Vorlath mewl about how he's right and Cantor was wrong. If this guy was asking it be explained to him and posting his instincts as "sorry but what about" then it would be understandable inability to grasp a pure math concept, which I don't have a problem with. But the guy thinks he can disprove Cantor, without understanding that he can't redefine cardinality based on his argument.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/10/the_hallmarks_of_crackpottery.php
Thanks to Ben for the original nod, and the reminder that I forgot to include a link :P

If you can't understand the progression from definition (a statement) to theor[y,em] (requiring proof) you don't get to phrase your non-understanding as "I can prove Cantor wrong".

... I'm feeling better. Today is a stat in BC so I don't have to feel like I need to go to work as soon as I feel this good. Let's see if it lasts.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:04:23 GMT

Wow - I ran what felt like all over town to get to school because my bus might not have come on time and managed to be only 4 minutes late. And that was leaving work just on time. Phew.

It rains here. You'd think people would be used to it. I guess it's the same as never learning to drive in snow in Ontario. No, they have to have an accident and virtually stop the bus I needed.

Not much to report this week! The house is very clean as we find more things that Lino can help with and I keep to my schedule.

Oh yeah, one danger of enumerating most of the chores is I'm worried I won't do the random, few-times-a-year chores, like cleaning out the couch between the cushions, because it's not on the list. I guess I'll just have to keep adding things?

The time difference seems more significant than it did before - by the time I'm done eating dinner it seems to late to call. I hope that's not just an excuse.

Please, dear god, do not let me turn into Chris, asking mutual friends to pass along my best wishes and my missing them instead of CALLING THEM or SEEING THEM myself!

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:24:45 GMT

Soccer in November. Culture shock!
#cell

Pictures finally.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:05:34 GMT

Science World!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2271706&id=122606392&l=675718f5e2

Hallowe'en!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2271700&id=122606392&l=2929489955

The cool thing about Hallowe'en was reusing my wedding dress. I very loosely stitched on the sleeves, and the other pieces just tied on on top. The wig totally makes it. (Come on, you HAVE to click the link now.)

I'm wired and feel like the time change was in the other direction and that's why I can't get to sleep. Backwards.

kait_the_great@livejournal.com — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:46:41 GMT

Susected geek on bus, so I pull out my book, and he pulls out path of daggers. Convo ensues :)