Stupid Alienware. Stupid Paypal. Stupid Christmas. (Blog Post)

Several weeks ago, I ordered a new tower from Alienware as a big (huge) present for my son.  Alienware sent me, the next day, an offer to up the warranty for some huge amount of money.  I ignored that.  It turns out, before they even sent me that warranty offer, they reversed the charges on my tower back to paypal because my address wasn't verified.  Alienware did not notify me.  Paypal sent me a "because of recent activity, your account has been frozen" message indistinguishable from allt he stupid paypal spam I get every day.

 

Today I find out that my paypal account is frozen, has a ton of money in it, my big christmas present for my son has zero chance of arriving on time, and I'm annoyed as crap.

 

So anyway, what I wanted for christmas was a good present for my son, and I guess I don't get it, or at least not what I was wanting to give him.  I'm hating on Alienware and Paypal bigtime.  I can do without Alienware, but it's hard to do without paypal these days.

 

Grrrr.

 

 

Help a sifter choose the best pictures (Blog Post)

Woebane did these pictures.  He needs to choose two to use for Christmas purposes.  I helped him cut the 85 originals down to these.  Help us choose among the finalists (you can click on them to see even larger versions):

  1. image_0013908_05191_refined
  2. image_0015413_44625_refined
  3. image_0018924_27137_refined
  4. image_0016416_09131_refined
  5. image_0017000_09131_refined
  6. image_0019472_21125_refined
  7. image_0017715_14372_refined
  8. image_0018033_25835_refined
  9. image_0019289_35170_refined
  10. image_0014447_13593_refined
  11. image_0017476_23838_refined
  12. image_0016001_23838_refined

These pictures were computer generated based on seed images and then manipulated mathematically using random recombinations. Post the number of your favorite here, please.

Being beautiful given the local standards... (Blog Post)

This blog entry comes about because I wanted to say so much in the comments for http://www.videosift.com/video/ART-OF-SEDUCTION-Not-Pretty-Really, and the comments were veering way off topic.  So this isn't really completely germane--just started by that video.  I'm hoping some of the nice women will read and understand and murmur reassuringly.

Long ago, when I was 16, I went to a small scientific school that had only 20 women in the entering class of 220.  The percentage of females in the classes ahead of me was even lower.  I lived in a house (dorm) of about 70 people, of whom 6 were women.  By the local standards, I was very beautiful, but so were just about all the other females.  It was horrible.  Most men have trouble believing me when I say it was horrible, often making comments like some of those in the video with the link above.  I wish to try to explain some of the bad parts of it, only some of which have anything to do with that video.

* Some men were very, very bitter and thus unfriendly.  I could get laid; they could not, ergo, I was evil.  They assumed I was sexual power-mad and only believed anything else after a ton of evidence.

* The nice men knew the women were overloaded and tended to not hit on them or "bother" them much.  This means that for a single woman at a party to claw her way out of the clueless and find a nice person to talk to was very unlikely.

*A lot of men were just plain terrified of the women, or how they felt around them, or something, and as such either wouldn't talk to us at all, or if they did, would only look at their feet or their books, or do some other strange displacement behavior.  Convincing a man to calm down and just talk to you like you were a person was hard work.  This was even worse, of course, if you were single.  Not having a boyfriend was social suicide, and I always  begged mine to not tell anyone we had broken up until long after the fact.

* A lot of men really did assume that attractive women couldn't possibly be smart.  My freshman year, I heard several men starting a pool for how long it would take me to flunk out.  This was before I had taken a single miderm: that is, they had no possible data that I wasn't smart.  Actually, I was way too specific there, even the other women would sometimes act like attractive women couldn't possibly be smart.  I had another woman tell me, "I don't get it.  Why are you here?  I mean what is your game?  Who are you trying to marry?"

* To continue on with things related to the end of the last point, having female friends was somehow very tough, and I'm not quite sure why.  Part of it was that just having XX chromosomes isn't enough in common to build a friendship on.  Part of it was that it was a very intense environment scholastically, and social time seemed to be spent on intense stunts, away from campus entirely, or romantically.  Part of it was that somehow there was a strange undercurrent that it was part of the duty of the women to "socialize" the more clueless men.  Uncommitted social time was somehow to be spent teaching the some of the poor scared bunnies that they needn't drip sweat or flee at the prospect of speaking to a female.  I know this sounds like a lot of direction, and that the women must have been pretty wimpy to put up with it, but it was subtle and pervasive and we were young.

* Somewhat related to the previous point,  the local standards of good and evil said that any sort of "cock teasing" was the worst possible sin.  That is, any sort of sexy dress, sexy acting, or sexy aura was the act of a an evil whore and shunnable harridan.  Now realize, by local standards, failing to walk around with mud smeared on your face or perhaps showering more often than weekly were sexy, sexy acts.  I was young, and I hadn't dated much when I got there.  Any budding skill at flirting completely fled me, and I began to reflexively insert "I'm taken!  I'm not an option!" into every possible conversation and try very, very hard to be that stereotype: one of the guys.  Most of the women tried to be one of the guys.  This led to it being even harder to be friends with women (I'm sure the woman who asked "why are you here" was just being one of the guys).  It also led to some other stuff I remember with cringing: I wanted to be one of the guys so badly that I happily participated in ridiculing women in general or women in particular.  I wasn't really aware of sexism at the time, and I really had no clue what I was doing.

* It was impossible to ever be inconspicuous.  No matter how the big the class, the teacher would always know if I didn't show up, or I nodded off, or whatever.  Dealing with TAs was sometimes hell.  I once tried to get math help from a guy in his office while he had my head cut out and pasted to the naked body of a playboy centerfold on display within my sight.  He started to give me the help I wanted--at least considering the actual words that came out of his mouth--but believe me, anyone who could have stayed and listened to tutoring delivered with that look and smirk would have to be way tougher than I was.  I can easily imagine how much he enjoyed relating the joke to his friends later.  Every time I failed at something, it was somehow taken as evidence that women couldn't do that.  Every time I succeeded, I must have gotten help--possibly I slept with the teacher or the TA. 

*I spent a ton of time downplaying my looks.  I used to like clothes and makeup and such, but somehow using it was evil.  It never really occurred to me that intelligence was just as much of a Gaussian distribution as beauty, and there was really no good reason to be proud of one and ashamed of the other.  Yeah, I know I sound weak-willed.  I probably was.

I could say more.  I could go on way too long.  This has been a vent, I know. And it's ancient history.  But reading about how little sympathy is inspired by people complaining of their good fortune...it hit a nerve.

I'm currently in a pro-free -speech huff (Blog Post)

The story that has me riled is here.

The summary is that  a teacher posted anonymously on a conservative blog professing that teachers are underpaid hacks and that the columbine shooters were heroes.  It is laregly believed he was being ironic, but someone complained, and officials tracked him down and arrested him for "disorderly conduct and unlawful use of a computerized communication system."  They are considering whether to press charges... Given the attention of the ACLU, I am thinking they will be really entertaining if they do.

 What do I think should have happened?  Nothing.  The Site admins might have banned him if they were upset by it.  He was clearly trolling, and trolls can get banned.  As long as he didnt' threaten anyone in particular.  The teacher cum blogger wrote "They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time!" and some people are saying that was the threat.  It seems pretty oblique to me.

But as far as this affects VideoSift, it makes me think two things:

  1. Our tizzies are pretty mild.
  1. Even given the mildness I wonder if there are any posts that could get folks arrested in the wrong hands.
 

Videosift makes me a good aunt! (Blog Post)

My nephew called me on the phone and asked me to send him email about how I feel about global warming because that was his homework assignment (it had to be email).  So I emailed him a sift on global warming and told him that's how I felt about global warming.

 

He loved it.  He loves me.  His teacher loved it.

 <beam>

 

In further news, I have submitted a more personal than most sift: It was put on youtube by a grad student at my school, and it's of my school mascot being carved into a pumpkin.  It seems awfully self-referential, but I had nothing to do with posting it to youtube or making the video.  (Although it was one of my grad students who got us the cyber-mascot in the first place, a long time ago.)  I realize the video probably isn't quite as cool as I think it is, but it could be a fair bit less cool than I think it is and still be pretty cool.

Being a mom and playing video games (Blog Post)

I used to spend too much time playing video games.  I haven't played much lately (except for things like peggle and sudoku, which don't count), although I did recently run through Portal.  My son  (who is 15) was sometimes frustrated by my being uninterested in driving him somewhere because I had to make a raid or some such, but he was mostly pretty supportive.  He sometimes treated me like some sort of curiosity to show his friends: the mom who who was a WoW geek. ("My mom could kick your ass at PvP!")

 

Tonight he sent me this link:

http://animalcrossingtragedy.ytmnd.com/
 
I think I will take it as a positive gesture... 

 

Man, Videosift is so not iphone friendly (Blog Post)

I suspect I know why: I suspect it takes special software to detect iphones and do different things with them, but I spent the day surfing, and videosift is the only spot where I am frustrated.  I can't see videos (they work well at youtube), if I open comments, it only shows me some with no link to go to the rest no matter how I move about, and I tried to post a comment, got to the end of the laborious tapping and then was told "malformed comment submission".

 

If any of you experienced iphone users can tell me things I don't know that will make it better, I would really like that.  I spend a lot of time over the day sifting, and I was looking forward to being able to do it with freedom.  As it is, I don't even seem to be able to use videosift to get to youtube, where I can really watch the video. 

Stupid AT&T. Stupid iphone... (Blog Post)

<rant>

I shell out the $500 for an iphone with accessories (extra charger for work and car charger), and of course you can't activate it in the store: you have to activate it from home.  I go home, I follow directions, and after typing lots of info into itunes, I am eventually told that no iphones activations are working today.  I call the apple store and after waiting for 30 minutes, I am told they have no ETA on the fix, because it's AT&T's issue and AT&T is a cipher to them.   There is no way for me to know when the registration is up again short of trying over and over again, which of course includes my typing in all my info (including the fake social security number I made up for my Cingular account back in the dim reaches of time so that I wouldn't have to give them my ss# for a stupid purpose).

 

Gah. 

 </rant>

Oh, and this is my cat.  I've mentioned him in a couple of comments.  He's a savannah cat.  It's hard to see in this photo, but he's very, very long.

  My cat

You also get to see a tiny bit of my son's arm.  I'm sure he wouldn't approve of that, since all associations with parents are uncool, by definition.

 



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