$disanpoter

location irritations

following up on the dorky data-based posts, i've spent a sizable chunk of the day researching options for a static resource that can be referenced dynamically to provide location information, because really, how many local, independently established copies of city-state-country data does the world need. it's a waste of effort and resources for every sales, product, mailing system to have it's own in-house set of tables for this information when they all must comply with rules and conventions established by national organizations. it's ridiculous and i resent the fact that i live in a world that hasn't come up with a better more widely adopted solution for this. oh...incidentally, this is a rant.

argh

so i wrote this long ass post about the summer to catch up and my session timed out and it was all lost. kinda like the summer itself, actually. that's all.

what an ending

well today's a shitty day. it's been a good week all in all - busy, but busy with positive things like socializing with new friends and old friends and a ho, work leads, collaborative projects, pretty night walks in the slope. all good things. and now it's pouring outside and i'm feeling supremely not-understood by certain people in my life. it makes me want to stop trying. trying to relate, trying to help, trying to improve my own bad habits. i'm tired of people deciding in their heads i should make the next move and then expecting me to play along with the version of reality they buy into. I have my own version of reality, too, and while i may jokingly claim to expect others to play along, when it comes down to the meetings of those realities, i do try to understand both sides. and i'm damn tired of people who just expect me to see it there way and don't even take a milli-second to try to understand how their actions have effected me or what i'm feeling or even what my understanding of the situation is.

i'm tired of people with the gall to assume they know my intentions better than i do, people who tell me what i'm feeling or thinking. i'm tired of people cherry-picking my own words to throw back in my face, like saying that I "decide [I] have no use for people with an alarming regularity" because i've acknowledged it's an impulse i'm working on not acting on, when

1. there's only one person i decided to stop speaking to in the past that i'm still not speaking to
2. i've actually been reaching out to people i've fallen out of contact with recently
3. i've been meeting new people and trying not to assume they're not interested in being friends when they aren't immediately available

it's just not true. and to throw that in my face but show no understanding for the flip side of that just sucks coming from people i'd come to consider friends. you all know - or should know - that i just don't reveal trembly emotions in my voice. i talk about how i feel; i don't talk with feeling. i get stressed; i get tense; my voice gets flatter and lower and harsher - but it's not going to go all trembly with hurt/remorse/desperation/fear/what-have-you. my face is not going to crumple. no tears will start streaming down in front of people. i'm not that person. i'm not capable of being that person right now. maybe once, maybe someday. not now. that's not a f*ing carte blanche to callously assume i'm not affected by things.

i don't expect everyone in the world to give me the benefit of the doubt or to remember this when they are upset with me over something. i just expect my friends to...and today, i'm realizing that there are a number of people i counted loosely as friends, who never will extend that understanding to me.

it really kinda sucks and i don't know how that factors into things. i think i just need to pay attention to how i let relationships develop.

premium pain

first, i'd like to ask myself when "trend" failed to be a category on this here blog. what on earth was i thinking - not thinking, rather.

i went to the yahoo mail help pages this morning to get an example for this manual i'm helping out with of how to find information on setting up POP3 accounts. i feel like that sentence requires translation it's got so many slightly out of place prepositions...helping with manual. writing email section. explaining POP3 account set up. need sample from free service.

yahoo no longer qualifies. they've cut off POP service to non-premium members. now not only are there ads at the bottom of the email you send out to people, but you yourself have to look at the ads on yahoo's web interface. i may like yahoo pipes (here), and i might even pay for that service, but i still pity the people who suddenly find themselves forced to look at the "dashboard" again after contentedly using Eudora, Thunderbird, or even (gasp) Outlook [yup. that's me. user of the evil outlook] for all this time. I knew there was a reason I never went in for a yahoo account.

rah rah gmail.

friggin network

it's true - i have a history of pushing my computers too far. i'm just an uder-the-hood kind of girl. i like to see what happens if. so, that's not just a computers thing. i get myself in trouble: what happens if i don't put the cover on the blender? what happens if i jump (really carefully) onto that slime covered stone? i get myself dirty and bruised, and at times considerably in the whole in terms of dollars or time - all in the name of first-hand experience. it's not that i can envision what could happen, it's that i can. and i want to know if i'm right or not.

if however one is going to tinker with what was is able to tinker with on a network computer, one should be careful not to forget at home the added drives one has programed into the core user profile. to do so makes for a very long stall until the people with administrator privileges but not quite so much curiosity come to the rescue. and, of course, block your view from the password they type in and guarentee one's need for a rescue down the road as well...

and another thing -

you know what really bugs me? using 'tk' as a shorthand for 'to come' wtf

[the MC] no i will not!

this morning involved no calls, but i did receive a sweet short note assuring me we'll find something fun to do on the fourth. that's how it works.

***

this morning's call included the choice phrase "you're taking a week's vacation time to see your father!?"

- I love you, but... it's my vacation time! It's not yours; you don't get to decide how i spend it.

you would think this crucial bit of reality would be obvious. how many years do you have to hold down a job to understand out that the person who puts in the hours and gets the paycheque gets the vaction time too? and why do I have to end up feeling shitty anytime i visit anyone? i don't deserve it. I deserve to be able to enjoy time with my freakin' family without feeling like I've slighted someone else. and I deserve to have an actual vacation once every few years...clearly that's not going to happen this year (or at least this season)...

zero sum gain

well this sucks. bistra just told me my email account wasn't working. it certainly seemed to be working properly...all it had to do was forward everything (everything >0.0 KB that is) to my gmail account. I wonder how many other emails just disappeared en route?

ah well. i missed my old account interface anyway. gmail just doesn't have that great a filtering system. fast, but simplistic. i'll just have to set up some rules that everything gets archived to gmail...

grr...

I'm annoyed.

i keep getting thrown crappy little projects to fix that more time explaining to users why it actually does what they're asking for already than doing my job. I'm beginning to think it might be a tactic to keep me from developing the new projects i want to be working on. grr...

and plus, i'm just tired of it. i didn't create these messy, poorly mapped out utilities and i resent being stuck managing them.

i just don't think it's so outrageous to want friends and lovers who actually care when i'm having a bad day, or feeling sick, or frustrated about something. who treat me with the same concern and affection i treat them with, and who respect me.

i feel so carved down today. last week was the week of fully looking at how i respond to distance in other people. why is it that i can push so hard to defend an idea, while over the same weeks and months i slowly allow my life to fall out of the conversation simply by resigning myself to whether or not the other person thinks to ask. i guess this week is the week of absorbing the fact that i permit this, that i continue to allow myself to invest in the lives and concerns of people who have stopped noticing me on a very fundamental if deep and subtle level.