It's not dumbing down, merely correcting your aim.

A response to the Twitter "Trending Topic"#myweakness that I just had to share, and then promptly mock without regard for mercy or common human decency:

a MaN Wit a PlaN---->I Dnt LiKe them "Wing it" Ni66aSz<---Cant BuilD NthN WitOut a BluePriNt

Okay. That was incredibly painful for my brain to try and interpret. I understand that Twitter only gives you limited characters to work with, and that sometimes you have to get a little creative in order to say what it is you are trying to say in those circumstances. But it seems like only the truly creative actually manage this with any level of success. Everyone else comes off as lazy and illiterate. I also understand some...*ahem*...younger people's obsession with ridiculous 733t speak, to an extent - I am, after all, a lolspeak afficianado, myself - but that abomination up there? THAT is some of the most unconscionable mangling of written language I've ever seen from someone outside of grade-school. Does it really take that much effort to use vowels? I've made some spelling errors in my day, but Jesus Tapdancing Cristobel, I'd be damned if I'd ever intentionally use the number six to substitute for the letter "g". Speaking of crimes against literacy, the mainstreaming of the number 4 as an analog for the word "for" fills me with an indescribable sorrow. I saw that shit on a billboard for a local BMW dealership the other day and just about wept. Then I was overcome with an intense desire to set fire to it, but overcame that compulsion - mainly because I have a sneaking suspicion that "grammar-rage" isn't an acceptable defense against charges of felony arson.

Of course, having just given you an example of everything that's wrong with applications and platforms like Twitter, now it is time to regale you with the high points to to explain why I kind of think that Twitter, despite all of its many failings (I got Fail Whale three times today, their servers must be freaking vintage), is the best part of what Web 2.0* has to offer...

Because, you can get updates and notifications in real time on things you may want to know about, and you can creepily but awesomely stal..I mean follow some awesome people - mostly celebrities, because, lets face it, we're culturally conditioned to be fascinated by fame and infamy alike, no matter how dubiously achieved or undeserved it may be(IrefusetotalkaboutOprah...IrefusetotalkaboutOprah...):

Hugh Jackman - @TheRealHughJackman

I think it's actually him. The posts have mostly been about press junkets and PR for the X-Men: Mangling Logan's Origin Canon and Killing a Franchise movie, but there have been a couple of candid comments about spending down time with his family, so it might be legit.

Crispin Glover - @crispinglover

He's promoting a movie he made. The posts are brief, but completely sane, so it is not clear if it's him or a staffer. I don't "follow", but the potential for the possibility for it to dissolve into the random, unhinged ramblings of a complete loon keep me coming back from time to time.

Kevin Spacey - @KevinSpacey

May be him, since the profile seems to be used for promoting projects and talking about theatre (i.e., the art of the stage you uncultured pleebs!).

Tom Felton - @TomFelton

AKA, Draco Malfoy. Tom seems to be one of the few young Harry Potter cast members who does not have a locked profile or a bunch of fake profiles - if this is actually him. Also there's...

Matthew Lewis - @mattdavelewis

AKA, Neville Longbottom. He talks about football a lot (the European variety, of course), and if you check out his photo, which gets updated from time to time, you'll see that he's really grown into his teeth quite nicely.

Oh, and as a Harry Potter bonus, I'll give you BOTH Phelps twins. Double your pleasure with James (@James_Phelps) and Oliver (@OliverPhelps).

In news that reminds me of an Alanis Morisette song, my mom managed to win tickets to see Pete Yorn and Coldplay in concert. There's just one small problem. The concert is in Pittsburgh, which is about 1,500 miles or so across the country from where we are. And the show is tomorrow!

(Haha - everyone's mom is now on Facebook)




*My husband hates the term "Web 2.0", so I use it with reckless abandon.

King Julian tested, science approved

There are people who are upset with Google for today's logo:

I think those people are too sensitive. You don't see me complaining about the constant comments about needing to bring "fundamental religious values" (meaning, basically, Christianity) "back to public schools" or other ridiculous religious WHARGARRBL, do you? Some people need to put down the propaganda texts and expand their understanding of science beyond visits to the "Holy Jehovah it's Jesus riding a Velicraptor into the Rapture" Creationist museum.

Also, this just in: some scientists now think that the "missing" evolutionary link between humans and the other primates was a lemur. Kind of...anticlimactic, isn't it?

I am obviously in the wrong line of work...

I came across this amazing employment opportunity today while browsing some job boards:

Shelf Management Specialist II forKraft Foods, Inc.

And, what, pray tell, does that entail, you might be wondering? Well, allow the posting itself to shed some light on that:

The Shelf Management Specialist II manages all activities relating to optimizing assortment and shelf management with retail customers. The Shelf Management Specialist II is a seasoned expert on all field sales space management technology and applications and is expected to meet or exceed the established shelving principles and standards for all Kraft Foods divisions. The Shelf Management Specialist II is the customer’s preferred expert in shelf management and contributes to volume growth of all Kraft categories. The position is actively involved with the assigned Customer Business Teams and contributes to and shares responsibility for meeting the team’s volume targets. * 3-5 years exp direct account selling & shelf management responsibilities* 3-5 years in the CPG industry* Strong knowledge of analytics and problem solving* 3 years exp in Syndicated Scanner Data

And, I'm sure your curiosity is now piqued about what level of education might be required to become a Kraft corporation expert in shelving principles and standards. Well, I must say, I was also more than a little inquisative. And according to Kraft, they want a Bachelors degree for this glorified retail sales position. But, in all seriousness, I have to wonder...
Where exactly does one attain an undergrad degree in Shelf Management? The University of Ikea?

"Abandon all work, ye who enter here"

Also, check your youthful enthusiasm at the door, sweethearts, 'cause it ain't gonna do you no good nohow.

What have I gotten accomplished today? Not a damn thing worth a damn. This frustrates me, because I had plans. I had a list. I had intentions. So much for that. I've spent the day trying (and failing) to find a free program that will allow me to map zip codes by radius, as part of the survey project I've been doing for weeks. Then I watched as two people called five times between them, to ask me which department I worked for. I knew why they were calling, and I let their under-worked butts go right to voicemail. Then, one of them crossed that tenuous line between downright annoying and outright "oh-hell-no" territory and called my husband to try and get the answer from him. Oh. Hell. No. I called one of them back and told them, that if determining what department I actually work for was of some grave concern to them that they need to call me multiple times a day (and so nice to know that they have time to make something that trivial a priority in their day), then to take it up with HR, and if further clarification was needed to address it with my bosses. Both of them. The HR receptionist then called the other fool, and told them to knock it off. What is wrong with people? Sure, my department info is all messed up, but that is my business, to be resolved between me and the two departments I support. I don't want people with hero-complexes and chips on their shoulders making a big issue out of this, simply because they're freaked because the minutes of their stupid staff meeting that nobody attends have the wrong department info from when I got the employee award. Obviously, they don't have anything better to do, but guess what - some of us do, and no one else cares about your meeting minutes. Especially me.

Going to my sister-in-law's birthday pizza-cake fiesta after work. Mmmm, pizza-cake.

The myth of the silver lining

I think this is the fourth day in a row that we've gotten rain? And it's supposed to be like this through most of the week. I had coffee this morning with no sugar (how is it possible to have a building rife with seven different kinds of candy, but not a grain of plain old table sugar to be found?). The weather is conspiring to make my hair a frazzled mess, and I broke my only decent hair clip somehow this morning, so now my hair is being secured with a very utilitarian rubber band.

I spent part of my morning trying to explain to someone how our online ledger report program is different than their Excel worksheet that they used to track their expenses, and why the information between them didn't match. Then I learned (as I had suspected all along) that this person I was trying to educate didn't even know the first thing about formatting formulas into Excel. That one little skill is pretty fundamental to even the most basic clerical position around here, and would probably explain why their math was wrong - reason number two why the ledger reports showed a different balance than their incredibly error-riddled hand-crafted worksheet. This took me a horrifying hour and a half of attempting to explain. I swear to you, a couple of times it felt like I was trying to communicate to a barnyard animal, for all the comprehension I saw in that person's eyes. This is accounting. Not rocket science!

Now I'm engaged in trying to find a decent, workable (FREE) online mapping tool. I want a radius grid, and I want it to be presentable. I'm not having a lot of luck, and I freaking refuse to pay for some crap program that some kid mishmashed together out of a Google hack.

I love how my coworker comes in late, goes to play handball in the gym for an undetermined amount of time, takes twenty minutes to change in her office, disappears for long periods where no one can find her, and often leaves a few minutes early. Because that is effectiveness in action. She'll have a promotion and pay raise within six months - you mark my words.

Oh, and by the tone of these questions I'm being faced with today, I work with some seriously stupid people. That's a given, though, right?

Wheeeze

Spent the afternoon and evening at my sister-in-law's house celebrating Mother's Day with my husband's family. She and her husband have three cats and two dogs, which all seem to be in the process of shedding. My nose is itchy, my throat is scratchy, and I am covered in cat hair and Jack Russell Terrier fur. I like pets as much as the next person (obviously - I have my own), but when all of the furniture has to be covered in sheets and and there's a layer of cat fur covering the top of the stove (because a nervous cat decided to crouch there to get out of the way of all of the activity in the kitchen), it's a bit much, even to me.

Speaking of cats, though, my husband and I recently realized that we hadn't seen the neighbor's pack of semi-strays for a while. One of the other neighbors had threatened to put down traps, and I guess she meant it. So no cats fighting on my porch and carousing and depositing kittens in my yard...

But the rabbit population on the block now seems to be booming.

The rule of three

I am a supersitious person. This comes as a surprise to some people, because of my sometimes mind-boggling insistance on a life defined by the word "practical". But I've believed in the Rule of Three since I was a kid - meaning that events in one's life often come in a series of three. For example, bad news. Over the last couple of weeks my husband and I have both received bad news relating to family (actually in my case, it's complicated because it's "former" family, really), so we've got two, and are waiting on the third. Hopefully, whatever rounds out the three is a minor thing. This is part of the reason that I'm not a big fan of odd numbers - as a child I was obsessed with symmetry and eveness, and anything not cleanly divisible into even parts or anything off center really bothered me. I could write endlessly about the bizarre workings of my mind when I was a little kid. I think things have normalized a little in adulthood, though. But I still see portents of doom practically everywhere...that much hasn't changed.

Of course, the rule also can be applied to positive things as well. I have been making plans to go to Disneyworld with M at the end of the month, and my husband and I will be taking our son to go bowling later this week with a young newlywed couple we've become friends with, plus I think my in-laws might be planning a get-together this weekend, so there's three for the month of May.

More ensuing panic evident

According to the local news, three schools in the neighboring county are closed due to "probable" - but as of yet unconfirmed - cases of H1N1. I don't want to rant over this, but I feel I must. As I told a coworker today, the influenza virus is biological force to be reckoned with. No matter what we do to combat it, all of our best efforts are for naught, since almost every regular flu season presents a slightly different strain of the virus. Of course, once most people catch the virus and recover from it, they have developed a level of immunity to that strain. Which is why our flu "vaccines" contain small amounts of the virus, in order to innocultate our immune system so that if we catch the flu at all, it will be less severe. And at this point, what are the signs that this new strain is more pathologically virulant or more deadly than your typical influenza that puportedly kills thousands every year? According to members of my family, my Great-Great Grandfather died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1818 -1819. At that time, for many, basic sanitation was a luxury and there were large numbers of people living clustered in poverty-driven unhygienic conditions - just like the majority of the cases of death from H1N1 in Mexico (the news doesn't seem to be in too much of a hurry to be very forthright with that little gem of info, does it?). All we can do is be preventative (some basic hygiene, people!), and if you're sick for God's sake stay home! Closing schools won't keep people from going to the grocery store or kids from going to the mall, where they could unknowingly pass it around.