Body Fail

Today is made of body fail. I went to bed with a headache brewing last night. Took some ibuprofen before bed, but it didn't kill it. It didn't feel like a sinus headache at the time, so I didn't take any Sudafed. Bad choice. Today all the tell-tale signs of a sinus headache are present - burning eyes, desire to put pressure on various parts of my face, and huge desire to floss my teeth because clearly something is wedged where it doesn't belong. Taking Sudafed now. Harumph.

Meanwhile, I went to donate blood at lunchtime. The Blood Center was not keeping up today and seemed terribly understaffed. Though Erik and I had appointments, we sat waiting in the lobby after our appointment time, then had to wait for a chair to become open after initial processing, then had to wait to get someone to clean and prep, then had to wait to get stabbed. The whole thing took way longer than normal. I warned the tech of my vein's tendency to leap out of the way at the last second. She got it, but I noticed almost immediately that it seemed to be not flowing as normal. Sure enough, it mostly filled the mini-bag, and when she transferred the now non-existent flow to the main bag, nothing came out. Then comes my least favorite part ever - where they wiggle the needle around a bunch trying to get it restarted. Back and forth in in a bit more and out a bit. Argh and ouch! Now with sweaty feet and palms, we give up. I go sit and wait for Erik to finish up, annoyed and defeated. And I have a headache, which I've now realized is definitely a sinus headache since all I want to do when I get back to the office is to floss my teeth. Sheesh.

Out of 11 donations, that's twice they've utterly failed. One more chance and then I think I'll keep my blood to myself for a while.

St. Patrick's Day!

Every year I take St. Patrick's Day off. It's the one time of year when other people care about Irish dancing, so we gather and dance our legs off.

This year, we're planning to hit Oakland City Center at noon for dancing with Driving with Fergus. We always follow that with lunch at Le Cheval. Then Joreth has kindly invited us back to Nona's for corned beef and ceili. This should be yummy.

I can't wait!

Cleaning

Last week I was in Target and looking for some Bon Ami, which they didn't seem to have with the rest of the cleaners. Okay, so looking for some toilet cleaner. Maybe something different. I had some hard water stains that had built up and browned over time, and the usual Comet with bleach wasn't tackling it properly. So I took a close look at the options. There was a Lysol Power Toilet Cleaner on sale. There was an off-brand next to it called The Works. They had the same active ingredient, but The Works had it in a much higher concentration, and cost 4 cents more, and well less than the regular price of the Lysol. Let's try that, methinks.

I sprayed it under the toilet rim and brushed a bit and the stains just melted away. One flush and poof, it was all gone. Blink. Blink. Blink. Wow.

I mumble that this stuff is probably pretty toxic, but it sure does work. Erik, ever the chemist, says, "Oh it's probably not that bad." Then he reads the bottle. It's actually pretty darned strong acid. But man does it get things CLEAN! But seriously, wearing rubber gloves is required. One splatter on my hand stung almost immediately.

So I'm reading Gimundo and there's an article about using ionized water for cleaning. I suspect that might be a tad less harsh. I'm afraid my mother trained me too well to prefer a clean bathroom, clean kitchen, and generally clean house. When cleaning, her frequent refrain was, "Don't do a half-assed job of it!" So I learned to clean well. It's good, but I do find that my standards of clean are higher than most other folks ('cept maybe Alexandria whose mother I suspect had standards similar to mine). Still, clean isn't a bad thing. Research shows that people in a clean environment tend to behave better.

Taking Offense

There's a weird psuedo-Thai cafe on campus that sells cheap food, but you order off the menu, no substitutions, and you'd better darned well know what you want when you get to the front of the queue, even though you can't really see the menu until you're right there. I went once or twice, but frankly, it was insufficiently good food/price to deal with the pressure of the situation. It always felt like a stressful way to get lunch out, and if I'm leaving my desk, I'm seeking a relaxing experience.

It has been closed for a while. I'm not sure why. Someone posted to the Staffers list (an opt-in mailing list on campus intended for university staff):

Anyone know if the Thai Nazi is open? It was closed during the fall semester to re-open in a different location....please help?

Thanks!

The almost immediate reply was:

As a Thai who works here at Stanford, I am very offended by your “Thai Nazi” comment. While I understand why you call the people who run the café with those terms, I have two problems with your remarks. One – they are not Thai. Two – calling anyone a Nazi is highly derogatory.

I am surprised to receive this from someone in our community and especially that someone who works closely with our students.

Holy cow! So I write back, thinking yikes, big misunderstanding, saying:

Please don't take too much offense. I believe Shannon meant it as a humorous pop culture reference to the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, not as a direct referent to the Nazi party of Germany. She's referring to the food, not the nation or its people and the brusque attitude of the staff.

So here's the thing - assuming you know the Soup Nazi reference, why is it that you can willfully ignore the intended reference of the person and take offense for something that is clearly not their intention? It's a tricky thing, because there are plenty of backhanded ways to do things, but in this case, it's hardly the first time that I'd heard this referred to as the Thai Nazi. (Poor Shannon likely had no idea of the flame war she was about to start when she randomly repeated something that was common parlance around her office.) But to play the devil's advocate, I still hear schoolkids refer to things they don't like by saying, "That's so gay!" They don't actually really mean it as a slur against the homosexual community, but it does promote homophobia as a norm, and LGBT kids still struggle with harassment and violence in school. But is using something like "Soup Nazi" equivalent (or it's derivative "Thai Nazi")? Should Seinfeld have not been allowed to make that joke? Is referencing that joke the equivalent of calling someone a Nazi, and what does that mean exactly? And is it a reasonable expectation to assume that any use of the word Nazi is like using nigger or kike? And if so, must it be equally expunged from language the way those terms have been? And finally, what is the value of being offended? Just because someone takes offense at what you're doing or saying, does it make it wrong? I'm quite certain I offend lots of people worldwide with my uncovered hair and form-fitting clothing choices, but by the standards around me, I dress quite conservatively, so does it matter that I do offend some people? Is there a difference between controlling speech and controlling fashion?

Meaty stuff for a Monday morning...

Interesting Quiz

The Five Love Languages

My primary love language is probably
Acts of Service
with a secondary love language being
Quality Time.

Complete set of results

Acts of Service:		11
Quality Time:		7
Physical Touch:		4
Receiving Gifts:		4
Words of Affirmation:		4

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don't understand our partner's requirements, or even our own. We all have a "love tank" that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz


EDITED TO ADD:
I took it again this morning to see how consistent my results were. After a decent night's sleep (a little too decent actually), I got a slightly different set:

The Five Love Languages

My primary love language is probably
Acts of Service
with a secondary love language being
Quality Time.

Complete set of results

Acts of Service:		10
Quality Time:		8
Physical Touch:		6
Words of Affirmation:		4
Receiving Gifts:		2

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don't understand our partner's requirements, or even our own. We all have a "love tank" that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz

Hypocricy and the Religious Right

Why does this story happen again and again? Why do those who are loudest fighting for family values end up getting busted doing the very thing they rail so hard against? Why are they so very interested in controlling everyone else's behavior when they can't even control themselves?

And seriously, drunk driving nowadays? Really? How have you avoided the MADD lobbyists? Ugh. If you're going to do something you'd be embarrassed to be caught doing (like taking a guy home from the gay club), at least take a taxi. Or are you cheap, in addition to being a hypocritical asshole?

I Love Trader Joe's: Reason #427

Crispy Crunchy Apple Clusters.

The ingredients are: dried apples, apple juice, potato starch, sucrose, citric acid, and sulfur dioxide. They are formed into little balls of extremely crunchy splendor. Crunching into them is deeply satisfying. There's no fat, and one bag is 2.5 servings with 160 calories and 7 grams of fiber per serving. I shall have to get more. In fact, I think others must know about the happy crunchy goodness, so I'll bring some to Tank tonight.

Getting Back On Track

So the grand experiment to skip ceili and get to bed at a reasonable hour to get to work on Tuesdays on time is a failure. I didn't end up going to bed much earlier on Mondays, and I did manage to gain nearly five pounds in six weeks. Harumph. So, back to ceili I go. It was a hoot and I danced my legs off this week. Between Friday Night Waltz on Friday, Gaskell on Saturday, and ceili on Monday, I felt well exercised. I've also gotten back on the morning crunch routine.

But knowing that I really need more exercise, and especially something for my flabtastic arms, and being moderately inspired by the article Mackenzie posted about the perilous creep of desk-butt, I tried something new this week. I've got little three-pound hand weights at work. I've had them for a couple of years now, and I use them intermittently. But I've made a new deal with myself. While reading the morning posts (LJ, Facebook, etc.), I'll be exercising one arm at a time. I get one arm to drive the mouse, and one arm to exercise. When that arm gets tired, switch to the other. I can only read my morning fluff as long as I'm exercising. So far, it's working really well. Turns out I waste a good chunk of time in the morning reading this stuff, so it required switching back and forth several times until both arms are now a bit fatigued and better yet, I'm warm. This is a good thing. I spend most mornings freezing at the office. If I warm up my muscles, they'll be happier in the long run, and I'll be happier in the short term. This looks like an epic win. The only downside is my roommate wondering what the heck I'm doing and random passer-bys wondering if I'm waving my arms at them. I've explained to my roommate and she's all for it. The random passer-bys, well, they'll just have to deal.

Anyhow, suffice to say, I'd like to pry those five pounds off my butt post-haste, and follow them with the other ten that crept on last year. No more ice cream or pie for the near term. If it's not protein or veggies, I'm probably going to try to give it a miss for the moment, with little exceptions here and there so that I don't go completely daffy.

Also, playing Wii is far more vigorous than watching Lost. We played Toy Story Madness for the first time last night and I was amazed at the amount of flapping about that was required. A Wii Fit may be in my future. I am now curious.

Ross-Fu

It's that time of year again when Ross gets in it's spring dress collection and I go treasure hunting. I filled a basket full of dresses and tried on four batches. With the buffer of my recent tax return, I came home with a half dozen dresses. Sure, I only spent about a hundred bucks, but oh so very worth it. I got a cute dress that just screams "I fell off the set of Pushing Daisies!" so I must wear it with big sunglasses and a fabulous hat or scarf. I narrowly passed on a silk Evan Picone dress that was fabulously fifties, but was just a tad long in the waist. I got a great dancing dress and a couple of little jumpers that will work well on their own or with a shirt underneath. All in all, I was thoroughly pleased with an afternoon well spent.

So if anyone else has that itch - the I need a cute little sundress itch - now is the moment to go forth to Ross and fill your closet.

The Voicemail Lady

This weekend we replaced our voicemail system here at Stanford for all Medical Center phones. I just got a call from a doctor in the Med School who was having a bit of trouble accessing saved messages on the new system. He wasn't actually certain what a web browser was, so that the change was tripping him up wasn't a really big surprise.

We worked through his basic problem with some saved messages, and then he admitted to having another complaint. The new voicemail lady just wasn't as nice as the old voicemail lady. She seemed more abrupt and pushy.

This isn't the first time we've heard this complaint. I said that we'd heard the same thing from other folks, but that unless we wanted to rerecord every system prompt using someone here at Stanford, then we were limited to using the voice the company gave us, and that we'd already approached the powers that be about such a thing (and what it would cost) when they made the same complaint. The dollars just couldn't be justified, so we keep the voicemail lady we've got. This actually seemed to make him feel a lot better about it.

It's just interesting to me because though I agree with him, I couldn't put my finger on why it's true. It's such a tiny, subtle difference between the voices, but it's enough to make lots of people think kindly of the old system. Is this a unique expression of the usual change management problem - they hate the old right up until the moment they're forced onto the new system - or is it something totally different. Is the new voicemail lady just slightly bitchier, enough that people perceive her as brusque rather than neutral? And what does that imply about how subtle perceptions are about our own words and tone?

I Love My Cute Boy

So there's a restaurant in Davis that makes a dish I love. We're not often in Davis anymore though, and rarely contemplating dinner out when we are. So the Cute Boy decided to look up a recipe for my favorite dish. Then he spent the next two days preparing the meal. This involved grocery shopping and marinating meat and picking an ungodly number of cilantro leaves from their stems. Meanwhile, he also fixed my drippy shower AND got us a compost bin.

So I head home last night and come home to the entire house smelling like kitchen-heaven. The dish is a Firecracker Pork Fusilli, so it's pork and pasta and there's a brown glaze made from a reduction of the marinade, plus a habanero-cilantro pesto, plus a dollop of sour cream. It turned out really well. Also, he made manly sized portions, so I took some to work for lunch today, keeping the pesto and sour cream separate. I heated it up and then added the pesto and sour cream. Add to that a slice of leftover pie and I'm eating like a princess today.

Oh, and he got a teaching gig for the spring at Foothill College, continuing his unnatural streak of job interview = job offer. I'm so keeping him.

Beautiful Day

I went over to the command center for the voicemail rollout earlier and couldn't believe what a beautiful day it is. So, I came back to my desk, grabbed my soda cup, and headed for the Clark Center. Up and down and up and down and up and down later, I grabbed a soda. It is just gorgeous outside, totally belying the tragedy a couple of miles away and the power outage that will stretch into the evening. Nope - from here it's just a beautiful early spring day, 65 degrees and sunny with trees just starting to bud and bloom.

Why?

Why do environmental activism organizations send me the most paper? I got calendars from 3 different orgs this year (with the usual pleas for money) and I have to say, any org that's shipping out that much paper isn't an org I'm going to send money to. Next they'll be sending my "I support hypocrisy!" bumper sticker. Sheesh.

Living the Happy Life

There's an odd poll published by Gallup about the areas that are happiest and have the best sense of well-being. Where I live tops the list for big metropolitan areas. I'd tend to agree. Most folks here work hard and play hard. We apparently rate especially high in both "Healthy Behavior" and "Physical Health." Well imagine that - our veggie-eating, exercise-loving, no smoking in public places lifestyle makes us healthier than average? Nah! Anyhow, can't say whether the impression maps to actual reality (survey responses vs. actual health stats), so that would be interesting, but this is a weird window on our self-perception.

Healthy Eating

I made a lovely dinner last night for girls night. First we had veggie samosas and spinach salad with blueberries, cherries, walnuts and dried edamame. Then we had Erin's fresh baked bread and veggie stew. The stew is:
- 1 bag of frozen black-eyed peas
- 1 bag of frozen corn
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 jar of Classico Organic Tomato Herbs & Spices Pasta Sauce
I boil the peas first in a bit of salted water, then sautee the onions a bit, then throw it all together in a pot and let it simmer for a half hour or so. A little cracked pepper and parmesan cheese on top and it's tasty.For dessert I baked a blueberry-blackberry-raspberry pie. Sure, we had butter on our bread and a dollop of whipped cream on our pie, but no one can argue we didn't get our full servings of very colorful fruits and vegetables yesterday!

Vampires, Demons, Zombies, and Classic English Literature

It all started innocently enough. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was perfectly amusing. It was a rollicking way to tromp through the old pages once more, with a special twist.

But now there's a prequel: Pride and Prejudice - Dawn of the Dreadfuls. And there's a sequel (of sorts) from the same publisher: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. And another publisher has gotten into the act and now there's Mansfield Park and Mummies.

But then it gets even wackier. The original author of P&P&Z has moved on to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Someone else has penned Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter. Perhaps they'll team up to hunt down Mr. Darcy, Vampyre or the undead Jane Austen of Jane Bites Back.

Meanwhile, Quirk Classics, the publisher who started it all, is not content to leave their doings to 19th century England. Attention turns to Russian lit with Android Karenina.

I am at once bemused and aghast. I see a fascinating new genre growing into form and I suspect I'll actually get to be selective about which ones of these I opt to read because they won't be strictly novelty, but will have varying degrees of quality from which to choose. That's kind of cool. Literature, history, and fiction mixing it up and creating new from old? Yeah, I'm down with that.

Warmth, Competence, Respect, and Geeks

Every day, we judge everyone around us based on their warmth and competence. Reading this article reminded me that while an impression of competence is easy enough to maintain via actions, I can tune how warm I appear to others, and should definitely be aware of that in meetings with new colleagues and clients. My life will be far easier in the long run if I'm perceived as both competent AND warm.

That dovetails nicely with this ComputerWorld article about managing geeks. If you get the geeks to respect you, anything is possible, but without a manager that exudes competence and warmth (and especially competence), you can't get respect, and then things fall apart.

Movie Meme

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen films you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall -- they don't have to be the best films of all time.

1. Mary Poppins
2. Pump Up the Volume
3. Clue
4. Dead Poets Society
5. The Princess Bride
6. Heathers
7. Star Wars
8. Gattaca
9. Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrman)
10. Moulin Rouge
11. Princess Mononoke
12. Rocky Horror Picture Show
13. Serenity
14. Singing in the Rain
15. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Other contenders for that last slot:
Ghostbusters
Toy Story
Some Like it Hot

AT&T Addendum

Kevin rightly points out that my cell phone is still via AT&T, but thankfully, due to their unbelievably poor integration, I haven't had problems with Cingular AT&T Mobility. In fact, through all of this, I still get that bill via eBills on Wells Fargo as that bill is completely separate from my residential phone service and DSL bill. I actually really like their rate structure. The rollover minutes concept saves me a lot of hassle.

Still, come the end of my AT&T iPhone contract, I will be looking into the Nexus One offerings at other providers.

AT&T Infinite Fail + 1

Remember back in October when AT&T randomly started billing me for "Enhanced Billing Services" without my consent? Well, since then, I've gotten to spend hours on the phone with AT&T at least once a month. They have:

- allowed this other company to bill me without my consent
- said they'd fix it
- didn't fix it
- told me I needed to fix it by contacting the other company
- billed me again, even after I'd called and fixed it with the other company
- randomly stopped sending my bill to Wells Fargo eBills (Wells Fargo says "Discontinued by Biller")
- this caused my bill to go unpaid for a month, leading to a late fee
- the late fee was waived by a nice human I talked to when I called again (fourth time now!)
- after re-enabling e-billing on Wells Fargo's site, AT&T sent email demanding a verification, and sent me to a website my account type (not U-Verse!) cannot access to verify
- I tried calling during my time off, but was told that the AT&T offices were closed, though it was late-afternoon on a Saturday
- got another call from AT&T saying they needed me to verify my request or it would be canceled

That's where things were when I started dealing with this a bit before five o'clock on January 7th. Then I:

- tried to remember again what mysterious email address AT&T has assigned to me, because they won't let me define the email address I should use to log in, but instead picked a random email account they created and I have never ever once logged in to review
- jumped through hoops at that web site answering a bizarre list of "security" questions (my choices being either "Who is your favorite actor?" or "Who was your childhood hero?")
- got to a page that said I'm in the wrong place
- tried calling to fix this
- got hung up on while being transferred around
- got hung up again while waiting on hold after 17 minutes
- called back to wait on hold again for another 25 mintues
- got passed around to tech support and after waiting on hold for another 22 minutes was told that I needed to talk to billing or that maybe I should try live chat
- started live chat and had him transfer me to billing
- did live chat while waiting on hold and found that Unica, my chat support rep, could not help
- Unica recommended calling the tech support department
- talked to billing, who said they couldn't help with web site problems, and couldn't enter a verification over the phone because they couldn't access that
- got passed back (without my consent) to technical support
- at this point I requested he send me to service cancellation instead
- the cancellation department is apparently encouraged to transfer you anywhere else, so they transferred me back to tech support, again without my consent or acknowledgment
- waited another 20 minutes and learned a deep hatred for AT&T's hold music
- I talked to tech support again, now exhausted, and the chap went and got his supervisor (I'm pretty sure I'd talked to the same tech support dude an hour earlier, so he knew what was coming)
- Supervisor apologized, but said there was nothing he could do, but recommended sending an email via the web site since the department I really needed didn't actually have phone support, so that was the best way
- I submitted an email form, which went to a blank white screen rather than any submission confirmation

Over two hours later, I still couldn't verify that I wanted to get eBills via Wells Fargo, and my blood pressure was through the roof.

I've so had it with this big old dinosaur that doesn't seem to be able to tell it's tail from it's feet. The biggest problem here seems to be that none of the departments have effective cross-communication and that different service offerings (like U-Verse vs. AT&T/Yahoo DSL vs. regular old phone service) seem to be incredibly poorly integrated. I think the email I got was for a web page only U-Verse users could access, but I don't have U-Verse, so it was rejecting me, and there was no way to report or resolve the problem once it started. Not merely a dinosaur; a dinosaur with acromegaly.

So then I logged onto the Comcast site. I could order internet there, but just to check in I decided to call to take care of some other business like changing my phone number to something other than my land line, which now it seemed unlikely I'd be keeping.

I talked to a nice young man who said he could set that up, wondered if I wanted the cable guy to come out for installation for $25 or if I wanted to get a self-install kit for free. I said I was thinking of picking up a cable modem at Fry's on my way home. He asked what variety. I gave him a model number for one I had checked on their list on their easy-to-use and informative web site that I had found on the Fry's web site for in-store pickup. He cross-checked it on their list and said that would be fine, so he could have the technician turn it on now, and I'd just need to call and give them the MAC address when I got home and plugged in the modem. I said, "... Now?" He said, "Yes, it's all set." I said, "I love you!"

I then hung up and changed all of my contact numbers for PG&E, credit cards, Wells Fargo... everything! Now everything is calling Google Voice to reach me.

Since then I've set up a cable modem, reset the wireless router to manage that connection, ended DSL service less than a week later, and kept the land line just long enough for The Woodbury to deal with some EDD issues without burning through every minute on his cell phone. Last night, I called to disconnect the land line a couple minutes before 6 p.m. After wandering through 10 minutes of phone tree interactions (including being placed on hold), I was told by a recording that this department was closed and that I needed to call back during normal business hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Riiiiiiiight. Interesting how I can't disconnect service via the web or via email or anything else, and I can only do it during hours that most everyone is at work. (Oh, and just for giggles, I tried filing an email form on the web last night, but it again goes to a blank white screen because their web site is so very broken.) So, this morning I called back and disconnected it.

Farewell Pacific Bell SBC AT&T! After too many years being a thorn in my side, I can only say, "Good riddance!"