another entry into the "this should surprise no one" file

lo and behold, after a month of harassing people and getting no response via email or phone, it was finally discovered that the company i was told to use for a service that we absolutely require can not, in fact, perform said service.

as opposed to the extremely helpful and punctual company specializing in this area which i was forced to tell we will not require their services.

next week's project, of course, is me going to the original place and set up installation dates and changeover to their service now that i have proven, once again, if i do a couple weeks research on something this is a more accurate method than "boss picks company name out of a fucking hat".

a conversation from the apartment of infinite horrors

n: "so, having just one beer is like getting a handjob from your sister. yeah, you can do it, but if you're getting anything out of it, there are serious fucking problems there."

a: "mgd 64 is like getting a handjob from your brother."

n: "because it's fucking awful?"

a: "because if someone gives you one, you gotta finish it yourself."

n: "and you're not going to respect yourself for that."

blurb of the day

courtesy of mr. destructo:
"My favorite part of the Sin of Onan — besides, basically, its being free, low-impact and awesome — is knowing I just Early Aborted something like 20 million people. Fuck, I didn't even give those poor sonsabitches a chance. Think about it: every time I jerk off, that's an overachieving decade of Stalinism served on tissue paper. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm getting kind of hard. If this keeps up, today's premature death rate is seriously going to be maoing my zedong, if you know what I mean."

sentence of the day

re: samuel l. jackson as mace windu.
"Mace Windu is a boring old man with no personality who does not even so much as raise his voice during the whole trilogy, let alone call someone a motherfucker."

teachers

semi-ripping off a topic from lj's question of the day: what teacher(s) did you have that inspired you and why?

i have three.
1) mrs. willing, my 7th grade science / homeroom teacher. she realized early on that i had no business being there, so she let me fuck around for the entire class period, and read / do whatever i wanted so long as i wasn't disrupting the rest of the class. i am sure that the fact that i'd read and learned most of the text by the end of the first week of class had something to do with this. i didn't find out until a couple years later when my mom got drunk and let it slip, but she was also the teacher that told my parents it would be a good idea for me to skip 5th and 6th grade. (small grade school, all teachers knew almost all the students.) she let me read this book instead of doing my math homework for a couple weeks, sleep in class, got me into the nerd science & math olympiads, etc. basically, she let me go at my own pace, and introduced me to a lot of much more interesting stuff when the rest of the class was spending a week learning why whales are mammals.

2) mr. z, highschool english / writing teacher.
z was the opposite of mrs. willing and spent most of the semesters i had with him undoing my incredibly shitty schoolwork habits. z knew how well i could do if i decided to put some effort into it, and didn't let me coast or half-ass my way through anything. if i put in enough effort to get a c, even if that would have been an 'a' paper for anyone else, i got a fucking c. he raked me over the coals in grading, taunted me in class, and made me work harder than any other teacher i'd ever had. when i took my placement tests for college, i tested out of english. spent the next couple years taking 400 and 500 level college language and english courses that looked interesting as filler. thanks z.

3) dr. susan haller. computer science professor in college.
spent 4 years telling me to drop out of the major and basically go fuck myself. was completely correct to do so. turned me into the fucking dr. doom of writing code. laugh at me will they? i will DESTROY THEM ALL.
for what it's worth, i'm still not great as a programmer, but i will be damned if i'm going to stop working on something until i get it right.

i somehow missed this by a couple weeks.
yes, this makes me feel old.
still, bonus points for rolling out on the town with a copy of erich fromm instead of 'shoes quarterly', and for the smoke tucked behind the ear.

it is finished

finished bonus features for new site widget. i am a better programmer than i remember. javascript and php can still blow me.
been doing a lot of stuff for random games lately, both larp and tabletop. i feel dirty.
ideally will be caught up with errands and bullshit by tonight. just the idea of that is pleasing to me.