Auto-snooker

We are in the midst of a classic example of our family's craziness. You might think that with only three people, things would be pretty calm and so on.....yeah, not so much. 


Yesterday the hilarity was kicked off with style as the following part of chat log shows. 


'Anyways got home [in Caddie, with grannie], had lunch and lay in the sun for a long time, then 'did my math' [snoozed in the sun some more].    Also I've been pretending to be either goth or emo for the last few days [with good reason] but it's not going too well, owing to the fact that 1) math is AWESOME  2) I have some really good music for which you are partly to blame  and 3) gran sent over a batch of what is arguably the best baked custard known to man'



I had to deal with some tech troubleshooting. My dad recently got the job of proprietor of the local FIRST robotics fundraising effort web site....actually a student did, but dad was on a conference call and screen-sharing with the original Overlord the other night. Well the screen sharing showed the username and password required to log in to the database. A screenshot of that didn't show the password well. At ALL. I tried to log in on the laptop but no go, was getting several error messages. I went back to the original password...sure enough there were two errors there, and one in the username. Now all I have to do is get some savvy in SQL...


OH. Schedule for next year is getting firmed up. AP Calc, tech support, advanced computers/Photoshop, and hopefully an Oracle/databases class at another local high school. 


Last night I and a few friends [you know who you are ;) ] had a nice little randomness-fest on Skype and three-way chat on Yahoo Messenger. At one point I was tooling around in YM, messing with the audio-alert settings, and found that you can play any audio file you like instead of the default beep/fwoosh/plink noises. Like personalizing a cell-phone ringtone. Well I got enthused, and set it up so that whenever anybody sent the first instant message YM would autostart this song from my iTunes library. It's a frantically inspiring and dramatic song in the Celtic tradition. Good for getting ENTHUSED to. 


Things were fine and dandy, until in the course of the evening's flitting from Skype to AIM to YM one of my contacts managed to send first IM and BAND! [inside joke] UP starts The Song. Transcript of chat log: 

bethie_forty_twoMEEP i set Yahoo to play The Song when contact sends first Instant message

bethie_forty_twoIT IS PLAYNG

lol

bethie_forty_twoack make it stop

bethie_forty_twomusic

bethie_forty_twoMY MUSIC

bethie_forty_twoack

bethie_forty_twoHELP

bethie_forty_twoit won't stop

bethie_forty_twopanic

bethie_forty_twoi can't change it back well i can but it's

bethie_forty_twostll playing

bethie_forty_twoI MUTE

bethie_forty_twohah

bethie_forty_twoTHWARTED

bethie_forty_twoACK

LOL

PANIC! THWARTED!

bethie_forty_twobut i wants to hear you chuckling 

bethie_forty_twoit's not playing with itunes....

bethie_forty_twoACK

bethie_forty_twoHELLLPPPPPP

I am actually crying I am laughing sooo hard, eeeheehee...

bethie_forty_twoWHERE THE HECK is it coming from

bethie_forty_twonoooooo

 Uh... Close Yahoo and switch to AIM?

bethie_forty_two5/14/10 9:44 PMit's not even the Song, it's Moondance

Anyways, I finally got it to shut off, I still can't figure out what is was playing through. I guess YM has some sort of audio output function that was calling The Song. It was truly hilarious....ANYWAYS....

The next attraction involved replacing the kitchen sink. [This is the selfsame sink that we had endless discussions over a few months back, THE TIME HAS COME.]   Dad and I took out the old one and shuffled it out to the porch. 

Come dawn we were still laboring under the dark cloud of Non_Sink. Not that anybody was actually up by dawn, but I think we all get the point, THERE IS NO BLASTED SINK IN THE KITCHEN.   I got up at 8 and it was off to farmers' market [did you notice my careful use of the Comma there?]  Market was even more of a circus than usual. We made half a dozen trips between the car and the market with produce. Then I remembered that my best friend is havin a grad party/ceremony tomorrow and I wanted to get flowers for her. We got a lovely lot of sweet peas, a few of which are scenting the whole [sink-less] kitchen as we speak. Made another few trips to the car. Then we saw my grandmother's car, and went off in search of her to ensure that she didn't get mowed down by an over-excited shopper intent on strawberries. 

After we and the produce were finally all in the car, we headed off to Rice N Spice to buy our weekly fix of hazelnut/chocolate spread. THEN dad remembered he needed a stand for his keyboard, for tonight's jam session with his band. We first hit one of the three [at least] music stores in town. 'Hitting the music store' involved first trying to find a place to park. Parking in our town on a Saturday is nextdoor to Impossible and involves a lot of slick moves on the steering wheel. We took a shortcut through a parking lot but encountered another car going the other way in the subsequent alleyway. Dad waved at her to go ahead [so we could slip off in the desired direction] but she wouldn't. We then had to back up behind the row of cars ['hiding' so to speak] until said car got out of the way. Off on a lengthy traversal of a back-alleyway. Found a parking spot but the music store was closed...on to the second store in town. Dad parked and went in the back door....this happened to be in the same alley in which we had just minutes before been forced to wait in hiding. I was left in the car, to quake in terror whenever a biggish car looked like it was trying to fit past.   

After a few minutes he came out and told me to open the trunk. When he came out much later with the music stand [a tiny affair] he said it was a RUSE....the open trunk was merely to make it look as though we were engaged in moving some big honking piece of musicality out to the car, and loading 'er up. 

Got out of there and went home after a bit more dithering.   

[NOTE]  Title, 'Auto-snooker', is related to the fact that we are pretty sure we managed to snooker OURSELVES at some point in the proceedings. 

When we got home the sink was still nonexistent. This should possibly not have been a surprise. However I became what we might term cranky as I was trying to unpack and wash vegetables and cook lunch.  Irritation vanished in amusement at how classic it all was...I've set up camp in the laundry room sink but there is not nearly enough room for massive vegetable-preparing. I feel like I just moved into a dorm or something, everything is in an uproar and  there's food sitting on the counter and dishes piling up and clothing on the floor and towels everywhere.....I put a box of strawberries by the laundry room sink so that they're handy to wash, and everybody who comes through there eats a couple. Then there was a cream-spill in our overstuffed refrigerator which had to be mopped up. 

Promptly upon getting home there was a lot of fervent discussion about plans for the day. We had people at all ends of town. I wound up getting to hang out with Eva for a bit after delivering the flowers to her, which was cool. [As a side note, if you have friends who live near you, please make sure you appreciate them. I live a good fifteen minutes away from Eva, and realized I don't have many close friends in town. Like, at all. Value your friends.] 

I offered a little tech support, which involved poking around in the dust back of their PC, tooling around in their antivirus program, and offering up my most glowing advertisement for Macintosh OS. Here is a link to a highly relevant comment about virii [read the mouse-over for the scoop on Macs]. NO VIRII. Life is good. 

Let's see. I downloaded an open source HTML-editing program, Smultron. Love these Cocoa applications, they all have the exact same look and feel. Smultron looks like Bean which looks like iTunes. Unlike programs for PCs which tend to be all over the place. Macs are shiny. Some people disparage them because 'they're JUST shiny'.  How bout a shiny computer and shiny user interface which GIVES SHINY RESULTS?     