One of my favorite people at work sang me a birthday greeting today:

I don't normally read something awful unless someone points me at it.  Someone pointed me at this: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/real-books-photoshop.php (something for everyone, with a gem on every page).

It's occurred to me that there is a name I used to see all the time who I do not see now, and I miss her.  Can anyone tell me any tales of Crittter?  Did she just fade away?  Is she around and I just havne't paid attention?  Was there an event?

This picture, for example, as the "translated" caption of:

Drat, thwarted so close to freedom’s sweet caress…  I dreamed for but a taste of the decadent west, and now my eulogy is sung by guard dogs and alarm bells.

Anyway, I find them hilarious: http://rolcats.com/

Really. 

Here is a sign from a Chinese hospital:

See also my most recent queued video, which I also found while preparing for my trip.  

For instance, this makes me laugh:

I keep looking at more and more of them at http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/, and I keep thinking I will tire of the joke, and I just keep laughing.

Another worthy "non-video" (and Jonathan Coulton likes it):

My house: one landline-connected desktop (my machine), one iphone, one wireless-connected desktop, which is brandnew, one laptop.  I can see videosift from all computers but the new one, and the new one won't go there with either IE or firefox.  I have it's firewall turned off, and it still won't go there.  I've also had some odd errors with respect to videosift that might or might not be networking related (comments not showing up--the contact us link not working for me--getting error 404 when trying to get to my blog), so I figured maybe I just had fewer of the same type of error that the new computer was getting.

 Tonight I called up and tortured a very nice man from linksys who walked me through tons of things with a tolerant eye towards it being the linksys router's problem.  He even offered to replace my router, but he says the fact that my other wireless devices can see videosift and the new computer can't means it can't be the router's issue.  Damn.  I forgot to ask him about the traceroute.  What could possibly cause ONE computer in my house to not get past that one place.  Well, anyway, he told me to call up alienware and give them hell and that it has to be alienware's fault.  Except, how am I going to explain that for some reason my son's computer get's stopped at castleaccess.com?  How can that be alienware's fault.

I'm so muddled.

Just venting.  I don't expect anyone to do anything.  I just feel like the powers that be are trying to keep me away from videosift. 

I've been playing this weekend, but I'm stuck now.  Enjoying it less now that I can't get past a stupid race.  Anyway, the game is fun, and very light weight.  Im not really very good at twitch aspects of such games, and racing through an obstacle course is not my idea of a good time.

My mom bought my son a new alienware computer. Very big.  Very nice (much nicer than mine, except he gets my old monitor and I revel in 24" glory).  It came with mcafee installed on it.  I am not familiar with mcafee.  I use symantec, and I've never had to think about it much past keeping it on and it very occasionally catches something.

My son's computer seems great, and I've made it homey by adding firefox and google desktop and various addons and open office and all that.  It surfs everywhere I want to go, except videosift.  At first I thought it might be the adblocker on firefox, but I can't get there on plain old internet explorer either.  So I figure it has to be mcafee, so I disabled the firewall (figuring I could figure out if it was mcafee and figure out what to do correctly later: I still can't get to videosift.  Even worse, after I try to get to videosift, it's like my network is frozen until I reboot my computer.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  I don't want him to be unable to go to videosift (I send him links to vids pretty much daily).  Any suggestions?

We had a big storm on the west coast of california this weekend, and I spent a day without power.  Here's why:

 (That picture was taken quite near my house, and I drove by that tree dragging the power lines earlier than this photo was taken.  A house on the same street, a few blocks away, burned down because of downed power lines.)

And my school turned off all the compute servers because of power fluctuations, and tha's where I get most of my important email.  I mean, sure, I can still send email out on any one of the 8 other accounts I have, but those places are not where anyone tries to contact me.  I feel so at sea with no email.  Yes, I know, my house didn't burn down, and I should count my blessings, but that sort of approach doesn't normally make me feel better.  I want my email back.

So anyway, if I'm being stupid with my queue and such right now, that's why.  No power, then no email.  I don't note when I have member comments, etc. 

Here is a shot of an iphone taken today:

Note that it says the day in New Delhi is July 12, 31.  I checked, and that's the day it says Dublin is having on my phone.  Bah.

This will have to do:

Oh, and I said I would show my new monitor (in the midst of my mess):

It's hard to see anything because it is so dark in my little den of siftitude, so I also give you the view from the tip of my front garden:

That gray patch in the distance is the Pacific Ocean.

Welcome to my home!

I had a nice Christmas.  My family and I did all the classics:

 Humiliate animals,

Humiliate our children:

Pose with local celebrities (I mean the iguana),

and give books to each other.  By the way, none of those pictures contain me (I'm always behind the lense).  From one of the books, I offer a cartoon that made me think of Swampgirl's plea to keep it clean in the kids channel:

(If you can't read the caption, it says, "are you going to dispense candy with that mouth?")

And one more to fit my post-Christmas, more cynical stance:

 ("Lately I've had uncontrollable cravings for venison.")

Cheers!

Just thought you might like to take a look.