New Yorkers have far too many important things to do.

From some distribution list I'm on (no idea why) at work. Emails have gone to everyone on the list, and this is only a select few of the emails I have received in the last hour.

I had my every three year evaluation by the Dean last night. He was supposed to talk to the kids for 20 min, then observe, but he took over an hour with them. I guess he figured since it's a three hour class, I could lose a third of it no big deal. Ugh, there goes the easy night I had planned for tomorrow. . . .

They didn't like him very much, "He was a dick" was my favorite quote after he left.

Routine sexual activity? Guess I'm living in the past.

Maybe he was the man mentioned in the lawsuit?

a power outage at 4:40am, which set of the smoke alarms, woke up the baby, then stayed off just long enough to mess up the clocks. i had to keep waking myself up so i wouldn't oversleep for work today.

Speaking of lawsuits, I am going to the courthouse ASAP and filing a new restraining order on Bob's X, who just chased me around my own car in the parking lot five times, trying to take Logan out of my arms. After thanking me for the beautiful job I am doing with Logan, she congratulated me on being such a deeply disturbed person. And shortly after uttering the words, "I will always respect you in front of this boy," commenced chasing me around the car, clawing at me and Logan.

All I did was beg and beg for her to leave me alone. She wouldn't.

My heart is still pounding an hour later.

EDITED for clarification.

Oh Tana, sounds like 'way more than an annoyance. I hope you are okay.

Fly

I sent a concert flyer I made to our chorus director for her comments. She then made changes, saying "I hope you're OK with this", and without waiting for me to respond proceeded to e-mail it to everyone in the chorus. Of course, there were errors.

With the royals in the bay area, a lot of people are talking about protocol. I think since he's going to be the head of state one day, you can sort of get away with treating him like you'd treat a visiting prime minister or president, but what's with all this bowing and curtseying crap? He's not my king, let alone my prince (that would be George Clooney)!

I say all we owe him is a firm handshake and a direct look in the eyes while doing it. As a host, I'd grant him every favor possible but not because he's a prince, but a guest. He is my equal except in cash.

And if he doesn't like it, he shouldn't come here!

But Gordo (playing devil's advocate here) - if say a Japanese dignitary came, would you bow? It's a cultural thing that you might do for an honored visitor, right? So what's different about this?

The Prince of Wales is an idiot and should be treated like one.

Yvonne, how do you treat idiots, generally speaking?

I thought that was foreigners.

he's one of those, too.

Ah yes, German-Greek as I recall.

I'm with Gordo. Any opportunity to curtsey is a good thing.

Children. Waiters. Servants in general.

Okay, got it.

AND THIS IS HOW YOU TALK TO THEM ONLINE

USPS tracking number which doesn't show up in the USPS system. How effing helpful.

Edit: Ah, apparently some trivial technical problem like me failing to address the envelope.

I went to exercise my franchise in the great proposition showdown today. My polling place had been relocated from a very accessible church with lots of parking to a residence on a hard to find chopped up hillside street with virtually no parking at all. The polling place itself was a room about 10' x 10' with three polling volunteers, 4 mini-booths, a ballot box and no place to stand while waiting to vote. But I voted. Ah, democracy. Shucks, I forgot to get the dye on my index finger.

Apparently, if you want to write in a candidate whilst using NYC's ancient voting booths, you have you make that preference known before you go into the booth. Once you move the lever over to the right, fuhgettaboudit.

what a waste of a fucking day, or why mouthfuls should be so grateful to have orik:

another subcontinent's hosting provider, dreamhost, excellent for more than a year, recently seems to have begun to have mysterious problems with the servers their mysql databases reside on. different databases on different servers, powering different software, have been crashing simultaneously for some time now, recently going down for hours at a time. and no one there seems to know what is happening or how to fix it. finally, we decided it was time to find someone new. i spent some time researching shared hosting providers and found a company called hostgator.com -- rated very highly by many online sites. called them yesterday and signed up. here follows my tale of woe:

first, as a test i, exported my mysql database and uploaded the dump to my account on hostgator (couldn't import directly via phpmy admin because the file was much larger than the max allowed). after uploading (a 30 minute process) dropped email to tech support to ask them to restore the database i'd created from this dump.

received email some hours later from tech support saying that my dump was incompatible with the version of mysql they run. "you should have checked first, you idiot," is what you are doubtless thinking. well, luckily for me this is not an insurmountable problem--all i had to do was re-export with a compatability box checked and re-upload. did so, and a few hours later (early this morning) i was informed that they had successfully restored from this dump.

feeling happy, i then decided to see if i could reconfigure invision's config files on my own. whaddaya know, it was a piece of cake. i said to my compadres, on friday night we will take the forums offline, back up the database again and do this whole process again. when most of our members wake this will be done and very few will even notice the downtime since i will redirect them to the i.p address of the new site till the dns transfer propogates.

so far so good. then dreamhost went down again this morning. keeping in mind that they had gone down for 4 hours yesterday i decided that we could probably get the switchover done (with the hard redirect) in less than that time anyway, so better to get it done now than risk 3 more days of dreamhost crapping out unpredictably.

big mistake.

i backed up the database, took it offline at dreamhost and uploaded it again to hostgator, expecting that they would once again hit me with the quick restore, 12 hours later hostgator's tech folks had not yet restored from the upload. they stopped answering my emails. so i started calling them (unlike dreamhost they have phone support). i called 4 times, each time to be told that someone was going to do it "right away". finally called at 9.30 pm, and spoke to an incredibly blase young thing who said essentially that "someone will get to it at some point". said i, not un-sarcastically, "is this the kind of quick response i can expect if i have a major outage later, assuming, of course, that you get me back online to begin with?"; she said, with no trace of rancour or irony, "well, hopefully when that happens your files won't be so difficult to work with". said i, "point me to where i go to cancel my account and get my refund". "oh, you can find it on the site", said she. not wanting to prolong this interview with the queen of customer service i decided to go to said site, and of course this cancel link was not readily apparent. i used the live customer support thingy and was given a link by perhaps the same blase young thing. this procured a 404 error. when i reported this she said the fault was my browser's. "interesting", said i, "that i can reach all other pages of your site and every other link on the internet but not your "cancel" page"; "oh", she typed, and a few minutes later gave me a different link--this worked and now i await the joy of making sure i get my refund.

and to add insult to injury, dreamhost came back online not too long after the crash in the morning and didn't go down again.

The delicious bowl of gingery ramen I had for lunch has made me extremely sleepy. This would be a reson to be cheerful had I not so very much to do this afternoon and evening.

catered lunches everyday with very bad sandwiches and very, very good cookies.

My dog won't stop eating carpet . . . and then puking it up afterward.

tell your dog to hurry up and fucking pee!

Who knew that obtaining a restraining order required so much fucking paperwork?

Signed,
Carpal Tunnel on the Central Coast