If you are on the telephone with me
and you just start talking to someone else
I am going to hang-up.

Read that again: do not just start talking to someone else while I am in mid-sentence with you or you are with me. If you are responding to someone that is addressing you, it is not rude to make them wait. When I say something to my roommate and she is in the other room and she doesn't answer and I walk in to see that she is on the telephone, I am not surprised that she did not answer me. If anything, I am sheepish that I was talking to her without seeing if she was available to talk.

Option 2: If you say "just a sec, I need to speak to my roommate" and then just start talking to them, I will wait 5 seconds. In this amount of time you can tell your roommate that you are on the phone, then immediately return to the conversation we are having. If you would like, you can return to it to ask to then have a longer conversation with the other person, which is the next option:

If you do the second-most polite thing and ask me if I can hold on for a minute, I will say yes if it is convenient for me, and I will wait one minute. (Note that there is a difference between asking if the person on the phone can wait and just telling them they have to wait or not listening for an answer from them). After that minute I will hang-up. I am not trying to be an asshole by hanging up while you are not talking to me, or while you have me on hold, or while you are getting a call from the other line. I am just trying not to get angry and frustrated with you. I am hanging up the phone so that on my end I am free to do the things I am most interested in at that moment, just as you are doing by taking another call or talking to another person or what have you.

If you do the absolute most polite thing and choose to have just one conversation at once, I will be your friend.

To re-cap: when you are speaking to someone, it is rude to just stop mid-talking in order to speak to someone else.
This includes cell phones.

I will take this opportunity to remind you of this post from March:
http://kira-lynn.livejournal.com/495903.html

"Please do not check your cell phone while you are out with me.
If this seems unreasonable to you, that is okay. I will stay home.
I am completely serious."

I am not interested in hanging out with you while you are on your cell phone.
Please choose not to hang out with me while you are on your cell phone. I do not care what your reason is. I am not interested. It is not fun for me. It is rude, and cell phones turn just about everyone into assholes. I know you think you have a good reason just this one to twenty times, but that's what everyone else thinks too, and look at them - they look like jerks.
Thank you.

Just picked up my copy of the WOW official magazine in the mail. 140 pages of lovely. A bunch of interviews, amazing artwork/pictures.. I don't regret spending the money, especially if there's three more of these coming this year.

As for an in-game thing... when the hell did they add a flight path at the Bulwark? Just noticed o_o

(also! mutilate a good leveling spec for a rogue? http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Stormrage&n=Bohemien is the armory, with clearly not enough hierlooms >_> )

 

Thursday, January 7, 2010
Day 10 of 84

I did the usual morning yoga. I really need to change my program. I will check with CG on that.

Late this afternoon we went to the Y. L, my 3 yo, had her swim lesson. Knowing I had a finite window and considering CB’s advice on going hard and fast I hit my work-out hard. Doing my best to keep my rests in accordance to the guidelines. It was a hard work-out. I am still struggling with chin-ups which annoys me. 6 months ago I could do 9 now I struggle with 2 or 3. Pathetic. Well here is what I did.
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Tags: fitness, tc7, tt
Current Location: home

Did anyone else watch The Colbert Report on Monday and see him talking about the LOL-Cat in the interview? It was awesome!

Here's the video in case you missed it, he talks about the LOL-Cat about 1minute 10seconds into the clip:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Erick Erickson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

I can has EARNED cheezeburger!!!

Tags: not a macro

I've been an avid lurker on cat_macros for some time now. I hope these are lulz-worthy. u_u

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Current Mood: creative
Current Music: 02 Medley - 8bit Remix

Poor little Bug has been so droopy all day, lying on her back listlessly playing with toys, and catnapping in between.

I checked her temperature this afternoon--she seemed hot--and it was 38 degrees, still normal but high. We gave her Baby Advil and she feels so much better! She hasn't been eating or drinking much so I hope that gets better this evening.

She still believes that nose-wiping = corporal punishment, so lots of battles there as she is leaking like a tap.

Tags: bug, sick
Current Mood: tired

Poll #1508542 thank less
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

What is the most thankless task at your house?

Tags: poll

It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

Tags: 10th anniversary, account settings, best buy, blurb, find friends, holiday promotion, international voice posting, my guests, paid accounts, rich text editor, spam, stats, txtlj, userpics, volunteers

I was thinking about how it will be when Cataclysm hits.

Remember when Outland and Northrend each opened up? No one knew where the instances were and they had to hunt their way there. That won't be the case this time, people could practically sit in a capital city and level using dungeons. Good? Bad? I dunno, just interesting.

I hope Blizzard puts in a reason to visit the entrances of dungeons - it would be kind of sad to go through an entire expansion and never REALLY know where the entrance to [instance] is. Maybe if you'd have to go and touch the meeting stone to attune for the dungeon in the finder.

Any other thoughts on how this will affect things after an expansion launch, when everyone's leveling and not at level cap yet?

On my way home I stopped into a mall to use the bank machine. In the parking lot I encountered an elderly woman who had driven her car up and into a snowbank in the parking lot. She was very shaken and could not get her keys out of the car. This panicked her even more as her purse was in the trunk and she felt she needed the keys to get it out.

I managed to calm her down and see if she was hurt. She seemed just a little freaked out. I used the remote lever to open the trunk and free her purse. (she had forgotten she could do that) I then manged to drive her car back off the snowbank and get her keys out of the lock. On automatic cars you cannot get your key out unless it is in park, which it wasn't.

The front end was damaged, but the car was driveable so I told her to contact her insurance guy about the damage. She had obviously hit the gas instead of the brake, but at least her target was a snowbank and not another car or worse a pedestrian. In the end, she seemed more embarrassed than scared, so I guess that is a positive step up.

I am thankful that I am personable and non-threatening, so that she was willing to trust me. Older women tend to like me as I remind them of their daughters. It came in handy in calming her down and moving her car for her.

This is not something I am usually grateful for but, sometimes it pays to be a short, middle-aged woman!

Were I a summonable creature, what kind of ritual would you craft to summon me? (stole from j-v-lynch)

Gentle Readers,

Question stolen from Tithenai:

Were I a summonable creature, what kind of ritual would you craft to summon me?

Tags: questions

BJJ where I learn the naked choke ( Read more... )

I'm tired about all the cracks about the tank not needing Arcane Brilliance. Have you ever taken a moment to think about what goes into a good Taunt? Sure, you can insult someone in your own species without pausing to think--but can you make him so angry that he forgets the the pain of that fireball he just took? Can you do it in a different language? To a different species? To things that aren't even flesh, or alive? Go into a warrior's home and look for the shelf of thick books. Those are the texts from his Taunt class. They're continuously updated to keep up with new species and cultural trends affecting what insults sting the most.

It's mostly rote memorization, of course. The top lines for each race are kept current by representatives of each one's tanking classes. For nonsapient species there are research tanks who'll go into the wilderness and imitate the sounds that creatures make to each other until they find one that provokes an instant attack. Undead and demons are brought into special laboratories where calibrated chains measure which insults produce the strongest attempts to break out. Then the results are written down and young fighters chant phrases in unison until they get them right.

Slimes are the worst. Sure, it sounds like a burp to you, but we've spent weeks at a time practicing to get that enunciation just right. And no priest ever puts Pain Suppression on your vocal cords.

It's not just a phrasebook, though. Draconic is easy to pronounce and we've got dozens of different lines to throw at them. The hard part is using the right one. Dragonkin and whelps are part of a rigidly ranked society with true dragons at the top. You have to match the taunt to their social status to truly hit home. Tanks spend long hours watching their instructors pop up portraits of dragonkin until they can peg their rank from any angle. This gets easier as you go up the hierarchy. With Sartharion you only have to quote his adds back at him.

Anybody with a match can set things on fire. Making a demon forget about that tasty warlock he's about to bite into--that takes brains.

Current Mood: mischievous

Gentle Readers,

Today I'm back at work, but it's not going well. The sugar pendulum has not yet stopped swinging so my head is full of all kinds of irrational emotional turmoil and my stomach was feeling left out and so addded it's on tumtultous feelings to the mix. It's a tempest in a torso.

I also seem to be doing something to my wrist that is suspiciously like CTS so I'm spending brain power trying to figure out a better ergonomic situation.

Bleah.

On the plus side, Reyl has finished the first coat of the pumpkin's room and it is very pumpkin like. I think she'll love it. There's even a chance that he'll get started on his own room tonight.

I'm so looking forward to making the revised rooms habitable.

Tags: renovations, sugar

A month and a half after ordering, my Dell laptop finally has all its bits working and in the same place. The motherboard was replaced this morning which means that my computer will now talk to my battery and I don't have to run off the cable all the time.

Not a great Dell endorsement. Paul in particular has been mad enough to spit nails over the whole thing.

Bug and I are still sick. I have an interview tonight that I don't really want to be at but at least it's one more under my belt.

Paul is going to stay in  Montreal till the end of Jan like planned but we will take the car off the road after this weekend. Another possibility for the smashy is that a guy at the burger joint kept asking him if it was a cop car; he didn't recognize the Alberta plates or his stickers and clearly didn't believe that the car was simply out of province.

So if the burger joint lowlifes thought it was a cop car I could see them being disgruntled about that in view of all the illicit smoking and transactions that take place there.  

Anyway, immediate crisis is over and we are onto a new and hopefully improved page for the New Year! Bug's nose is still runny but she has (mostly) resigned herself to her fate of having her nose wiped. She is breathing better too. My nose is still runny and throat feels like hell but the wicked sinus headache is gone so I'm counting a win.

The more I deal with the R. community here the more I see nothing but smoke and mirrors. It will be interesting to see if I turn up anything more substantial before I leave. Either I'm a truly crappy fieldworker or there really isn't much substance behind the community. Not sure which, or maybe both. I've started networking with the Toronto community, and getting more smoke and mirrors. I would have come anyway... but I'm surprised at difference between appearance and expectation.

Tags: bug, car, fieldwork, montreal, sick
Current Mood: sick

BoingBoing posted a link to game-themed cupcake quiz.

WoW cake made me laugh.

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Brought on by this http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/12/10/small-ales-big-sales/ and my recent acquisition of a case of Panil Barriquée Sour.


Lets suppose for you are beer snob connoisseur. What are your options to find and consume beer?

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Until LCBO lets up on the brokers, such as letting the warehouse and ship their own consignments Ontario or allow licencing of retail beer sale. We will remain in a monopolistic environment pushing international mega swill on us.