Below please find the LJ of Jenny Rowland, who fears no Google.

Dateline early-mid-April '08:

Free userpics here. Credit anyone who I note the art as belonging to.

Four Panels is still on hiatus. I know, you are all so sad and such. Meh.

I am close to finishing my very last semester of college before finally graduamating, and assuming I pass everything then I will possess my very own BS in Informatics come May. Then we will be moving to Madison, Wisconsin so I can work for Epic Systems Corporation. This is a good thing.

I still don't have my computer up from when it died last July. Any emails to me, sent to anything with "xidus.net" in it, will just sit unread until I have my own copy of Thunderbird again. If you really need to get in touch with me, commenting to my most recent post is a fairly good method. I also regularly check my yahoo address if you know that.

If anyone wants to give me lots of money so I can fix my computer, I will not complain.

This entire entry is almost completely unchanged from when I last edited it in December, but I figured an update of "more of the same" couldn't hurt.

Fnord.

I should start a new blog dedicated solely to pictures that ask the question of "why?" Why does this exist, why did I have to experience this... et cetera.

In the Darkwing Duck episode "Smarter Than A Speeding Bullet", there is a barely-functionally-retarded alien superhero named Comet Guy, whose one weakness is that whenever he hears a bell, he "can't stop dancing".

Which does not explain THIS.



Screenshot is unedited except to add the inset.

Why is there a naked man-woman's crotch, mommy?

...why does this exist?

CafePress: for all your incest-wear needs.

Comcast is stalking us!

Yesterday someone came to the door and knocked, and I peeked through the spyhole, and the someone appeared to be a salesman. Not wearing the shirts the maintenance or pest-control guys wear; holding a clipboard and wearing one of those taller-than-it-is-long, probably-photo-though-I-didn't-see nametag things. This is very clearly marked as a No Soliciting Apartment Complex, Thank You Very Much, so I didn't bother opening the door. Guy knocked again, then eventually went away. I never heard him knock on any of the other doors in the building, but the fact did not really impress itself on me at the time.

Today, someone carrying a clipboard and wearing a nametag came and knocked on the door again. Mecha describes him as "skeezy-looking," which isn't terribly descriptive, but I'm quite willing to believe that it was the same guy as yesterday.

Mystery guy also stalked around to the back of the apartment and tried to look in our windows.

And it turns out that yesterday he left ( this little love note on our door. )

(We don't use the front door much when I'm not in school.)

According to the love note, it is apparently "too late to pay office to avoid disconnect"; I guess that means we should hand over our money to the random guy who shows up at our door! And then they can claim that we never paid the office, which means that we still owe them. If Comcast says you owe, then you owe, credit card statements, receipts, and REALITY notwithstanding.

Also, DUH it's too late to pay office to avoid disconnect. It's too late to pay anyone to avoid disconnect, because the disconnect happened APRIL SECOND.

"Dear Valued Comcast Customer". PFAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA

"Blah blah bloobity blah OH NOES $39.99 RECONNECTION FEE AREN'T YOU SO SCARED THAT YOU WILL IMMEDIATELY PAY WITHOUT FURTHER QUESTIONS"

"Since you weren't home when I arrived to 'write' this obviously pre-printed message, I didn't disconnect your cable service outside your home today." That would've been a neat trick, since it hasn't been connected in over a month.

"Blah blah blah I'll come back again tomorrow" A threat, I assume. Perhaps he'll peek in our windows again.

Finally we have the notice that he would be there Sunday, i.e. today, at 8 AM. Which apparently he was, to judge from mecha's account.

Minimum balance: sixty-five bucks. Total balance: THE COST OF THAT FUCKING CABLE BOX THAT WE ALREADY RETURNED AND PAID FOR.


Mechamom emailed that Frank guy over at comcast, and thus far this has been the sum total of replies.

Comcast surely does care.

Tune in next time for more adventures of the Let's Scam And Defraud Our Customers variety!


P.S. I corrected a few errors in this entry, so now it should accurately reflect the history of this sordid little affair.

Suck it, cold, uncaring universe! I'm-a gradjumatin' with distinction!

Although why I got the lowest A- in capstone class, I have no clue. I did every single assignment that wasn't the actual project, and I did the majority of design/coding work on the project, and I never missed a single meeting ever except the one when the bus literally stopped running to my apartment complex for half a day without bothering to let anyone know. I wonder what it took to get a solid A. Doing the entire group project all by yourself? And presumably creating the world's first true, Turing-passing, honest-to-Cthulhu really sentient AI would get you an A+.

But eh. You! Universe! In yo' face!

So Andwoo and I got to talking about Salvador Dali, especially his one painting of an apartment that is also Mae West's face. Somehow the conversation turned around to becoming trapped in said painting. Then it got weird.

[23:50] Teh Jenny: Like poor ol' Charlie on the MTA.
[23:50] emsworth: YES
[23:50] emsworth: HE WILL RESIDE FOREVER IN MAE WEST'S FACE APARTMENT
[23:51] emsworth: HIS WIFE CAN'T EVEN HAND HIM A SANDWICH THROUGH THE EYE WINDOWS
[23:51] Teh Jenny: But did he ever return, no, he'll never return, and his fate is still unlearned (poor ol' Dali)
[23:51] Teh Jenny: And yeahg, the eyes keep blinking shut every time she tries.
[23:51] Teh Jenny: In retrospect, eye-windows? Not a good idea.
[23:52] emsworth: Not really, no
[23:52] emsworth: But Dali was never an architect, and thank God for that
[23:52] Teh Jenny: Heh heh.
[23:52] emsworth: Somewhere, there's an alternate universe in which Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador ali traded careers
[23:52] emsworth: "Dali"
[23:53] Teh Jenny: OH man, totally.
[23:53] emsworth: It's the same universe in which Edgar Allan Poe was the beloved author of "Ronnie the Raven and Other Romps Through The Sprightly Meadows"
[23:54] Teh Jenny: This is indeed a strange and terrifying universe.
[23:54] emsworth: While Beatrix Potter wrote terrifying novels about eldritch soul-destroying bunnies and froggies
[23:55] Teh Jenny: Oh, whoops, it was "disturbing", not "strange and terrifying".
[23:55] Teh Jenny: also YES
[23:55] emsworth: "The Tale of Peh'ptyr Rah-Bit"
[23:55] Teh Jenny: The Lurker In The Burrow?
[23:56] Teh Jenny: And somewhere in there is a joke about Mopsy, Flopsy, and Cthtntl.
[23:56] emsworth: Of course
[23:57] emsworth: When one of them tore their trousers and lost a shoe, the very fabric of existence would wuaver
[23:57] Teh Jenny: THey'd gather legions of cultists to come hide their shoes when the stars were right.
[23:58] emsworth: "Mrs. Tiggy-winkle's Model"
[23:59] emsworth: "Jemimah Puddleduck, Reanimator"


Dear SWEET Tsathoggua but nothing beats Lovecraftian humor.

Every Saturday night, we go to Atomic Age Cinema, which is, quite frankly, the best possible way to spend that or any night, whether it be in the fabled city of Bloomington, or anywhere else in the world.

My delightful little Creative Zen Vision:M has a microphone on him, and so at some point I started recording every Atomic Age, just in case there was something funny we wanted to remember during the week. So now I've got months and months of two- and three-hour-long recordings, mostly-audible, that to be honest I've hardly ever bothered to refer back to, but at least they're there.

Last night, Doctor Calimari tried to describe the movie we had just gotten done seeing. The results were predictably tragic, and I thought I'd share those results so you could get a tiny sample of what Atomic Age Cinema is like.

The movie in question was an old 3-D number called The Mask, about a museum-piece Indian mask that drives people crazy. Two-cent description: guy is driven crazy by mask, possibly rapes but definitely kills some random woman, mails the mask to his shrink and offs himself. Shrink gets mask, finds that when you put it on you go into a weird-ass world that requires the audience to put on their 3-D glasses to view properly, goes nuts, also wants to rape and/or kill. Good times for all involved.

The doctor takes rather longer than that to explain it, of course.

Care to listen? (4 minutes, 1.6 megs, contains naughty words)

Incidentally, at several points, things happened that don't entirely come across audio-only. They are as follows:

At about 1:07, when Dr. Calimari talks about things being flung, he is throwing a piece of child's plastic play-fruit at mecha. We bring a basket of those every week, and they are thrown at the hosts whenever they make a bad joke. Unfortunately, the hosts have started throwing back.

At about 2:20, the cucumber in question is a plastic one that the doctor's female companion threw at him from her seat in the front row.

At about 3:40, she whanged him in the gentacles (tentacles that are genitals) with more plastic food.


Ahh, Atomic Age. How I will miss you when I go, and can only make the all-day trip down to Bloomington every few Saturdays instead of having my ass in that seat every single goddamn week.

I was listening to Dethklok on the bus home, and as I walked across the parking lot and entered the apartment, "Go Forth And Die" happened to be the song playing.

Oddly apt, seeing as it's about graduating from college, and I am done, motherfuckers, DONE

It's a really weird feeling. I'll be 27 later this month. I graduated from high school last millennium. And finally, another happy little piece of paper.

Damned weird.

So say you had a horrible bitch of a neighbor who played her music way too loud, and responded to wall-bangings by screaming something incoherent at the top of her lungs and banging back. And say you were moving out in two or three months. You're thinking ahead to that last week or two before you leave, and considering that you really don't give a shit at this point, seein' as how the neighbor is, as previously noted, a heinous unrepentant bitch, and apartment management has spent two years swearing that they'll fix the problem and then doing nothing. Along with doing nothing about any of the growing number of other noisy residents, of course.

Say you figure that that last week or two, every time bitch neighbor starts playing her music loud, you'll stick a portable stereo up against the wall and start playing the most annoying song you can think of. On repeat.

What song would you use?

Hypothetically speaking.

I at first read the last suggestion without the T, which made it hilarious.

"Aaaaugh" indeed.

I just cracked a book to start studying for my (non-cumulative) environmental health class final on Monday. They start every chapter with a quote, and this is the one for the chapter on noise pollution:


Noise, n. A stench in the ear. . . . The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.
-- Devil's Dictionary (1911)


When I read this, I said, out loud, "Oh, Ambrose Bierce. You witty bastard."

Now I should probably actually do that studying.

Edit 5/11/08: I talked to mechamom, and it turns out that a little bit of my chronology below is wrong. I've corrected it by crossing out the wrong stuff, and adding her corrections in [brackets]. Just keepin' my hat white on this -- I can and do forget details, but I'm not going to lie about any of this when the truth is already sickening enough.

Some years ago now -- some of you might remember, because I was stuck basically-offline then, too, although only for about a month and a half -- mecha and I forgot to pass the monthly cable bill on to mechamom, who thusly did not pay it, which means we got our Interwub and TV service cancelled. We realized our mistake, paid up the bill, et cetera, and I believe that that was what started the chain of events that has continued on until this very day. Can't quite keep the chronology straight in my head anymore, and Google indicates that I never actually LJposted about Event Two of the history, but it does seem logical that that would've started this whole thing. So I'm assuming that that's what leads into the part I DO remember. It would explain why we of all people keep getting singled out for all this madness. So call forgetting-to-pay-the-bill Event One.

Event Two, which I am assuming happened after Event One:
[Event Two, which happened immediately after we paid up our late bill from Event One:]
Our contract with Comcast back around '05 stated that we would pay a certain amount for our cable TV service -- something like thirty, forty bucks a month. Reasonable. We paid this amount[, until the one time we forgot and were late]. Then, one month [right after we paid up that late bill], suddenly, it was over two hundred bucks a month. For no apparent reason. They had decided that the "free" premium channels we got were no longer free, I think, but whatever the reason, they assured us that our contract meant nothing and that from now on we would have to pay $200 a month for our TV.

So naturally we cancelled.

They told us we had to drop off the cable box at such-and-such a place, and we did. Mechamom even got a little receipt saying that we had given them back their cable box. [She also asked the nice lady at the place if this would square us, if we would really, truly not owe anything more, or if it was too late into the billing cycle and we'd still owe the month's payment. Comcast lady swore up and down that all we needed to do was return the box and we would never hear from them again.]

Then they said that since we had never given back the cable box, we owed them about $150 to pay for it.

"Uh, hold on," mechamom said, or something like it. "See, I have this receipt that SAYS that I gave you back your cable box."

"Nope, you owe us for it," Comcast responded. "Also, you owe us $200 for the month of cable service that came after you cancelled. Pay up now."

After a very large amount of back-and-forth, mechamom gave in and paid them for the cable box that she had already returned, and for the month of cable that came after we had cancelled.

So they took mecha, whose name was on the bills, to collections for the cost of the cable box and the month of cable.

[There was a very large amount of back-and-forth, with mechamom waving her receipt and Comcast putting their fingers in their ears and going "LA LA LA". She refused to pay. They refused to let it go. Finally they took mecha, whose name was on the bills, to collections; and at THAT point, mechamom finally gave in and paid the collections agency, because she didn't want mecha's credit ruined.]

All that was Event Two.

Event Three:
We came back here to Bloomington in the tail end of 2006. At the time, Insight Communications was the only choice for cable TV, which was fine with us, as at least it wasn't Comcast. We didn't want to ever give those assholes money again.

Then Comcast bought out Insight, and took over at the start of this year.

Our billing date with Insight was... I think the 25th of each month. Mechamom did the actual bill-paying, so I didn't have to know the date, but I know it was the last week of the month. Then, this month, April, Comcast moved the bill date up to the 2nd. They didn't actually tell us, naturally. They just moved billing up by three weeks, presumably because they figured that way they could get a full month's pay for one week of actual service.

Then, since we had no idea it was time to pay again, they turned off our service for nonpayment the morning of April 2nd.

Mechamom called them, found out the problem, and paid the bill. And the cable didn't come back. And didn't come back. Repeated calls garnered only repeated promises that service would come back any day now, that it was ABSOLUTELY working. For three weeks.

A few days ago, of course, the truth came out. There is suddenly a charge on our account for about $150. They won't tell us what it's for. They "can't" tell us what it's for. They "don't know." But we absolutely have to pay it, or the cable will not come back on.

Funny how the Mystery Charge is about the price of that long-ago cable box, idn't it? Funny indeed.

So basically, at this point, fuck Comcast. They already have their cable box, AND the COST of the cable box, AND the cost of a month of cable service THAT WE NEVER RECEIVED. And, by this point, the cost of ANOTHER month of cable service, lo this merry month of April '08. And now this "we can't tell you what this charge is for, but we know you have to pay it" bullshit, which you just KNOW is SO TOTALLY not something that they would ever abuse in order to repeatedly charge you for things that you could never prove you didn't owe them for, since you would never be told what the charge was, you know, actually FOR.

I wonder if they'll take us to collections for things we already paid [don't actually owe them] for again!

Seen on the bus ride to campus this morning: girl wearing "She Blinded Me With Library Science" shirt.

Reminds me yet again that I've been meaning to get the Math Is Delicious shirt since Jeph first offered it... like... four years ago.

Also, I have been doing so goddamn much PHP coding that I keep noticing the quote marks that I typed earlier in this entry and thinking "argh! must escape or else will error on compile!" I need help.

So I have a final project due Monday, and capstone more-or-less due Tuesday since that's when we go back to the client to show them how we've done everything they wanted us to do. (Mostly.)

And so I'm workin' hard in the basement of the Informatics building.

And some people in the next room over are either having band practice, or lighting fireworks in a trashcan. Or possibly both.

It's... very odd.

I just spent over an hour trying to force MS Access to let me update the text value of a label, before realizing that apparently you can't dynamically update label text -- just textboxes.

Because that makes sense thank you Microsoft.

Having a database application project in Access at the same time I'm doing one with mysql/php really makes me appreciate how much easier, better-documented, and more intuitive the mysql/php route is. Hooray for official Microsoft help docs that are factually incorrect!

So the School of Informatics wants us to fill out a graduation survey, saying whether we got a job, how many job offers we got, &c.

The last section of the form -- a required section -- is for post-grad contact information.

In order to submit this form, which I need to do before the semester is over in order to get credit for it, I have to fill out where I will be living post-graduation.

Because, you know, I CAN TELL THE FUTURE.

Or I could just fill it out with all "n/a"s. Which I will. And if they don't like it, they can feel free to build me a time machine so I can find out what my street address in Madison will be.


Also: something appears to have gone horribly wrong with the capstone project database. I am going to blame David! He is the group member that it is fun to blame. Plus he was working on the "edit checkout" page, and that's a fair culprit for the whole "okay who set every single checkout to be due at the exact same instant" thing.

So I was going through the item table in the capstone database and cleaning it up, removing all the silly stuff preparatory to showing what we have to the client on Tuesday.

And right after I reloaded the page to replace the silly values with the serious ones, I realized that I probably should've taken a screenshot first.

Lost in the wave of stupidity were such gems as:

Item: "A big ol' chicken wing", manufacturer: "KFC", location: "Me", comment: "It was delicious";

Item: "Wooden teeth", manufacturer: "Washington Inc", location: "Outer Space", comment: "Splinters in gums";

Item: "Blender", location: "explosion", comment: "keep hands out";

Item: "Battle axe", comment: "Great for home defense";

Item: "Giant Turnip";

Item: "Some Cheese", manufacturer: "France", comment: "Delicious cheese.";

and undoubtedly others. It was fun putting together checkouts composed of a camera, a giant turnip, and Some Cheese, and declaring that it was to make an avante-garde film.

Item #666 used to be "Mr. Satan", though ol' Scratch is probably surprised to find himself suddenly turned into "Misc Cables".

Fine test values all, sadly fallen victim to the need to not get in trouble for weirding out our client. Sigh. Professionalism is a harsh taskmaster.

Now to sweep through the user table like grim death... I've changed Redshirt's last name to Test, but I'll be damned if his first name or Major Major Major's full names go...

Screenshot from my capstone project, which is four of us making a checkout database/application. This is part of the contents of one of the tables.



Can you tell I've been doing a lot of the populating?

(I keep wondering whether the last one there is a reference to something, but so far I haven't bothered to ask the guy what put it there.)

Hey, mecha, don't suppose we can get me new headphones tonight? If not tonight then v. v. soon, please.

I will never, ever, ever understand why repeatedly and noisily sucking snot back into your head, then having to wipe said snot all over your hands because it won't actually go back in there very well, is considered better than just blowing your fucking nose and having it DONE with. It can't be that they don't want to deal with the germy tissue -- they're already wiping directly onto their hands!

Blerg.

When I put Eustace in my backpack at 3:30, he was working just fine.

When I turned him back on at 5, his left channel had gone half-dead.

This means that, while sitting in a classroom for an hour and a half, I suffered spontaneous breakage of either my $70 headphones, which are less than six months old, or my $300 mp3 player, who is edging towards one year.

Either way, fuck.

Hopefully it's only the headphones, which means I essentially set seventy dollars on fire, and can go back to the ten-buck Sonys I was using, which hurt but at least should still work.

Fuck.