My much abused MP3/CD player is dying a slow, lingering death, and I'm considering replacements. Like, oh, I don't know, a set of tapes for learning Japanese. Know where I can get those cheap?

Of all places, I heard this song on the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre website... went to find it, found it, need to memorize these lyrics...

SONG TO THE SIREN
On the floating, shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
'Til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving into your eyes.
And you sang "Sail to me, sail to me;
Let me enfold you."
Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you.
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?
Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken lovelorn on your rocks.
For you sang, "Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow."
Oh my heart, oh my heart shies from the sorrow.
I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.
I'm as riddled as the tide.
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or shall I lie with death my bride?
Hear me sing: "Swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you."
"Here I am. Here I am, waiting to hold you."

Finally, Quizilla is running again!


You're Most Like The Season Winter ...

You're often depicted as the cold, distant season.
But you're incredibly intelligent, mature and
Independant. You have an air of power around
you - and that can sometimes scare people off.
You're complex, and get hurt easily - so you
rarely let people in if you can help it. You
can be somewhat of a loner, but just as easily
you could be the leader of many. You Tend to be
negative, and hard to relate to, but you give
off a relaxed image despite being insecure -
and secretly many people long to be like you,
not knowing how deep the Winter season really
is.

Well done... You're the most inspirational of
seasons :)


?? Which Season Are You ??
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The football-loving Goddess (aka me) is smiling down upon her two teams... both the Redskins and the Panthers played wonderful, fun football and stomped mudholes into their opponents. At least the Patriots put up a fight... the Falcons just let Doug Johnson (who is handsome in a Billy Kidman kinda way) take sack after sack after blitz rush. Who'd'a' thought Dan Reeves would be couching such a one-trick pony team?

Had a bunch of fun doing mostly nothing yesterday... never got dressed, never took my hair out of it's nightly braid, just aimlessly wandered between Aardwolf and Pools of Radiance and the football games. Felt good. Slept good. Ready to face another week.

So they've released a bunch of data about testing and how the schools in South Carolina are doing. Basically, they suck, but we all knew that already. Inez Tennenbaum, the current Superintendent of Education, is already bailing out and concentrating on her Senate run because she knows there's exactly nothing she can do about it.

So, out of morbid curiosity, I went looking for the middle school I went to. Heyward Gibbes Middle School was where some of us Seminary kids went to "learn", where I got beat up, where I was 1 of 5 white girls in the 8th grade, where I picked up my love of rap and R&B.

Total enrollment: 470 students. 7 White, 3 Hispanic, 460 Black.

When they tell you desegregation worked, just laugh.

Continuing adcentures in work:

So we're given a list of all the users (400 or so) on our network. "Ping them all to see if they're in DNS," the network gurus tell us. So we split the list in half and work our way through it.

Then we get new instructions: "Send me the users who aren't in DNS." OK.

More new instructions: "Send me just the ones in Columbia, you call the ones in all the outlying offices and have them refresh and renew their IP." Out of 30, how many have I gotten in touch with? 2.

Even more new instructions: "We think we've fixed some of them, ping everyone again to check."

*pops Advil*

Adventures in work:

Things still are working right... DHCP is still half-hosed, the printer servers won't run half the time, etc. Do the two network "gurus" inform the rest of us what's going on? No. Do they make announcements that we're having some problems but we're working on it and it will be back up soon? No. All we get is silence.

Must be a dick-size thing.

When I worked at DHEC, when the severs went down, all 5 or 6 of us would gather in the room to work on it, so that we all knew what was going on and what to tell users. These two guys won't let us know what's going on, so we on the help desk are the ones who have to tell the users we have no fucking idea what's going on. Which is what they don't want to hear.

I swear, one of these days when things go down, I'm'a forward the help desk line to the computer room. Let them tell the users what's going on.

Adventures in co-workers...

The main woman here on my team who thinks I'm unprofessional, no good, etc., suddenly announces she's taking the rest of the week off. "Oh?" I ask. Another co-worker: "She sent a message about it."

Not to me. Amazing, ain't it?

Adventures in work...

Today the DHCP service decided to die. Repeatedly. Completely. As in too many people (including me!) couldn't do a damn thing over the wire. My boss wouldn't give me straight answers as to what happened... until right before he left for the day.

We're apparently moving and upgrading a server (what is labeled 486 because of what the original machine was) to something that more resembles our name and location. The two network guys, who apparently skipped all the classes in "Real World Application", decided to move some things over to the new server WHILE THEY WERE IN USE. Including the DHCP database. Which, of course, got completely corrupted.

Hello? You move things on weekends when no-one's in them.

Of course, this network is so poorly put together that crashes are expected. Someone would do us a huge favor by taking a grenade or some other low-level explosive and permanently damaging all the servers so things had to be rebuilt from scratch. But then, since the same guys who have been moving the stuff which causes the crashes would re-build it, it probably wouldn't get much better...

A poem after talking to him this morning...


He's going to make me say it
Isn't he?
He won't take the hint
Refuses to take the bait
Puts the ball back in my court

He's going to make me say it
Despite my fears
He'll make me force the words past locked lips
Past frozen fingers
Past a shielded heart
And a guarded soul

He's going to make me say it
I don't know if I should hate him for it

He's going to make me say it
Whether I like it or not.

Killing your parents is bad, I know... but when your dad is acting like a fucking 6-year-old because the cable had to be turned off, and your mother is being a tee-total bitch because of the catheter still in her, it's damn tempting.

It leaves me with no appetite, a headache, and a seriously foul mood.

Better be some damn good wrestling tonight in Cornelia, or someone's not gonna last the night.

I think my little sister has found some religion. Her last couple of emails were full of "Praise the Lord!", and her signature says, "Devoted wife of..." Devoted wife to a user, pot abuser, etc. Bah. As long as she and her husband don't start in on me, they'll be OK.

According to CNN.com, about 3 1/2 MILLION people are without power because of Isabel.

That is pathetic.

If that doesn't prove our energy infrastructure needs a serious overhaul, I don't know what will.

Your Bush is the VILLAGE IDIOT!

For you, all of Bush's antics have one simple
explanation: He's dumber than a bag of hammers.
The lights are on but there's no one home,
and he's got nothing but toys in the
attic. He got almost-elected on the strength of
his face and his last name, and all the hell of
the past 3 years is just what happens when a
man with the intellectual capacity of a
hormone-mad goat is at the helm of the most
powerful nation in the world.


That's Your Bush!
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Boy, can I vibe with this one...

Yes, I'm avoiding writing about other stuff right now. Bite me.

You're a PANTSER! A pantser writes without
forethought to where the plot is going--sort of
by the seat of her pants method. Youre a free
spirited, creative person. You write with
passion about what inspires you at the moment,
and you probably have a strong voice. Dont
worry about writers block--youve a different
story. Youve got more story seeds than a hive
has bees. When you write, its in disjointed
segments. You may write sequentially or in
flashes of inspiration, where you connect all
your flashes later. People might say you
ramble a bit in your work. Your revision
process might take several passes, because you
really have to whip that first draft into a
more marketable shape. Youre novels either hit
it big or miss. Theres no in between. Readers
either love you, or hate you. Learn to channel
that creative energy into a masterpiece and
well be seeing your name on the NYT Lists!


Find Your Writing Personality!!
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"Sweet Child o' Mine," a beautiful song
about love and nostalgia.


What Guns n Roses song are you?
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I'm thinking it's pretty cold in Hell right now... not only are BOTH the Redskins and the Panthers 2 - 0, but the Panthers BEAT THE MOTHER FUCKING TAMPA BAY BUCS!!!!

Things may FINALLY be starting to turn around for my two teams. :-)

There was a poll on CNN.com asking if you planned to do anything special for 9/11. I answered no. I fully expect the Office of Homeland Security to be at my door when I go home this evening. ;-p

As of 11:45am, I am 28 years old. Go me! :-)

Adventures in Dell customer service...

I went to Dell's webpage, logged in with my Dell Preferred account, and went to order 2 256MB RAM sticks for this XP Pro memory hog of a machine. They come to my house. I install them. The BIOS tells me it's the wrong type of memory for my computer.

I then spend ONE HOUR on the phone with Dell, at least half of it on hold. First to technical support, who then transfers me to the wrong customer care center, who then transfers me to the correct customer care center, who speaks so mush-mouthed I have to get her to repeat nearly everything she says. This is why you should never out-source your customer support...

When the survey comes in about my online buying experience, Dell is gonna get reamed a new one. So is the customer care support people, since she kept having to put me on hold for minutes at a time just to get a reference number. She said, "We're having a network slowdown." I'm thinking the problem is mostly in-between the chair and keyboard.

So now I get to mail the memory back. Normally, Dell sends someone to pick it up at my house, and I had a hard time convincing the woman that if they couldn't be there between 8am and 9am they wouldn't find anyone home. Supposedly I will be refunded for the postage. I'm just hoping they refund me for the price of the memory.

Will I buy more memory? Eventually... maybe... might not be from Dell...

I wish I had more self-confidence, or wasn't so scared of speaking out sometimes... I'd give a lung sometimes to be able to tell people (him, my mother, my sister, etc.) what I really felt.

You are the Figher Femme


Which Ultimate Beautiful Woman are You?
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My inner child is six years old!

Look what I can do! I can walk, I can run, I can
read! I like to do stuff, and there's a whole
big world out there to do it in. Just so long
as I can take my blankie and my Mommy and my
three best friends with me, of course.


How Old is Your Inner Child?
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Well, I've done it... linked to this thing from my personal homepage. We'll see if that adds one or two more people. ;-)

Dawn, Anastacia ROCKS THE FUCKING HOUSE!!! Oh my God, I need her album like right now. If I get any money or gift cards for Best Buy, that's what I'll grab.

For him...

"Hear my cry
In my hungering search for you
Taste my breath on the wind
See the sky
As it mirrors my colors
Hints and whispers begin

"I am living to nourish you, cherish you
I am pulsing the blood in your veins
Feel the magic and power of surrender to life

"Every finger is touching and searching
Until you secrets emerge
In the dance as it endlessly circles
I linger close to your mouth"

Riverdance

Trying not to drool on my keyboard... about a week ago I was wandering through Ebay looking for "Pirates" stuff when I came across this picture of Orlando Bloom. This amazingly sexy, full-on WOW black-and-white picture of Orly. I'll have to upload it somewhere so I can share.

Adventures at work...

Lawyer calls from our Charlotte office. "What's my user name and password?"

I wish I was joking.

*staring at a blank piece of paper*

Bah... it's in my head fine, what's wrong with my hand?

Adventures at work...

Lawyer calls from home, can't get into our Citrix system. Normally she uses RoadRunner, but it's down, so she's trying to get an ancient laptop to dial in to the server. The modem is there, there is a phone line into it, but when she double-clicks to run Citrix, nothing happens.

I email the hardware guy to have him walk her through some diagnostic stuff, since hardware problems are technically not my problem. He emails me back: Oh, the Citrix server was down this morning, have her dial in again.

Um, hello? Can you be any more obvious that you didn't bother to read the email I sent you?

I send him one back: "When she double-clicks on them, nothing happens. No dialog box, no phone line noise, no attempts to dial, nothing."

NOW he reads the email. "I'll try her." Well, good, thank you for taking time out of your obsessive Bible studying to do some work.

Geez...

CONGRATS you got MOON GODDESS! You can control the
moons light and when is rises and falls. Very
lovely sight and a lovely goddess to be.


Which eternal goddess, above earth controling the elements, are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


Wish I could see the other potential answers

Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.


What threat to the Bush administration are you?
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*snickering*

(this will be short, Aldor's literally howling to be fed)

Every year about this time, the sky turning from the white haze of summer to the startling blue of fall. Cold fronts start to make their way in, dropping the temperature and humidity from the mid to upper 90's for both into 80's and even lower. There's mist in the mornings.

Happy birthday, Dawn!

Happy birthday to the one who doesn't read this, who I'll never have the guts to let read this. He thinks I'm crazy enough as it is.