web-goddess

You know what’s rude? The woman sitting next to me on the bus home tonight was eating sushi. She was eating sushi on the bus! And I know you pescaphiles (I just made that word up!) will argue that good sushi doesn’t have any smell, and you’re right. She wasn’t eating good sushi. She was eating nast, $2.00-take-away sushi and it stank. On such a muggy and oppressively gray day, it was all I could do not to barf from the smell. I actually got up and changed seats (which is, like, the height of confrontation for me). Ick.

What a rip-off. After much finagling and secret-method-employing and American-accomplice-utilizing, I managed to secure an iTunes Music Store account only to discover that the aforementioned thirteen free songs… are from a crappy sampler album that you can’t actually change. Bah, humbug.

Oh, and my computer’s officially not okay. The video started messing up again and “resetting the NVRAM” (as the support guy online showed me the other night) isn’t doing anything. Snookums thinks it’s a hardware problem. Looks like I’ll be doing a full reinstall and calling AppleCare tomorrow!

Equestrian Web-Goddess!
Oh yeah, we did it… The Snook and I tried something new today: horseback riding! We had a coupon for 50% off a park ride at Moore Park Stables so I decided to put my long-standing equinophobia aside for the afternoon. First we had to sign the inevitable indemnity waivers (basically saying that if a horse were to kick me in the head, Snookums would be screwed), and then pick out some nasty boots and smelly helmets so we looked the part. Snookums was given a gray mare by the name of “Christmas,” while I got an white gelding called “Tamiko.” (And when I say old, I mean old. Older than me. My horse was thirty-five.) Our guide was a cheerful teenage girl named “Pip” who displayed some pretty awesome patience in the face of my relentless stupid questions. Once we were all mounted up, we headed out and crossed Lang Road on our way into the park. Pip and Snookums kept up a decent pace, but Tamiko seemed to prefer plodding along a few meters behind. I didn’t mind. Man, riding a horse isn’t easy on the bum! I’m going to need some “gluteal treatment” tomorrow. We spent a nice, leisurely hour going ’round the park, admiring the Sydney skyline, taking in some amateur cricket, and waving at all the families hanging out. Eventually we made it back to the stable and I effected a particularly non-graceful dismount. Tamiko even consented to posing for a picture with me. Isn’t he cute?

   

Breakfast Around the World. For the record, I’ve never seen a single Australian person ever eat toast with tinned spaghetti on top. The Snook assures me, however, that bogans do this. It boggles the mind.

What Animal Would Your Daemon Settle As?
I haven’t done a silly quiz in a long time. Here’s my result:

My MONKEY DAEMON represents a nature that is admired, detail-oriented, and full of curiosity. Some people might call me self-absorbed. I like to plan ahead, and hone my various talents to perfection.

I’m not sure that describes me perfectly, but hey, monkeys are cute and funny! A monkey daemon would rock, as long as it wasn’t a scary evil monkey like Mrs. Coulter’s. (Link courtesy of Marci, who is a hare.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, “daemons” are from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books. Even if you haven’t read them, you’ll learn about them when the movie comes out in a couple years.

Hey, I made an appearance in Nora‘s Personal Internet History! She recounts the night sophomore year in college when I got puke-drunk for the first time ever and tried to teach her HTML. Good times.

I was just exceedingly happy to learn that the upcoming RENT movie will star nearly all the original Broadway cast. *sigh* Then when it comes out on DVD I’ll be able to watch Adam Pascal 24/7 from the comfort of my own home…

How cool. Karen Allen, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame, is teaching a knitting course in Massachusetts next month! I think the class name – “The Yoga of Knitting” – is pretty cheesy, but it sounds like a pretty fun workshop. (Link courtesy of Brigita, who should totally go and tell us all about it afterwards.)

Good grief. It’s going to be 90 degrees out today. The Snook’s gotta work… So dare I brave a trip to the beach on my own?

Damn. I was all happy this morning because AppleCentre Broadway was able to verify that my two-month-old iPod’s hard disk had indeed died, and they gave me a shiny brand new replacement. (Brand new! I was expecting a refurb.) So I just plugged it in to set it up and iTunes started accessing the Music Store. A splash screen informed me that, as a new iPod owner, I got 13 free songs! (That offer definitely wasn’t there two months ago.) The only catch? You have to have an account… and there’s no Australian music store. I’ve got no cards with a US address. My British cards now have Aussie addresses. I got nothin’. So I got a tantalizing offer of 13 free songs, only to have it jerked out from under me. That sucks!

Update: I must’ve been seriously tempting the gods there, claiming that my inability to download some free shit constituted serious suckage. Because guess what? The last two hours have seriously sucked.The new iPod started syncing but then froze after a few songs… just like the old one did. I cursed my bad luck at getting two bum iPods in a row. The Snook suggested I try it with the iBook just to see what happened, and lo and behold, it synced just fine! What’s more, hooking it up to the iMac using USB also worked perfectly! Which meant, of course, that the problem wasn’t in my measly $400 iPod, but in my new $3000 computer. Shite. Even weirder, DeskCam is also Firewire and it’s still working perfectly. So I tried booting from the “Techtool Deluxe” troubleshooting CD that came with my AppleCare. The computer wouldn’t boot from it. It just spun and spun. We did a hard reboot. The computer came up and then the video flashed all jaggedy and crap. I freaked out. I jumped on the iBook and started surfing the Apple Support site. I noticed that they have this new thing where you chat live with a technician. I fired it up and “Charlie” helped us reset the “NVRAM,” which fixed the whole video issue. (Apparently it was a result of all the hard reboots.) Unfortunately Charlie bailed on the chat before he could work out what was wrong with my Firewire. So I did some more digging. And guess what? I’m not the only one with this problem. It appears to be caused by the 10.3.7 update. Makes sense, and it jibes with the time that my iPod problem suddenly appeared. I’ve repaired permissions and deleted some of the preferences suggested by that discussion, but syncing via Firewire on the G5 still hangs. (I was able to get it to do one song at a time manually, but anything more dies after a couple.) So for now, I’m using USB and it’s flying along. I guess I’ll just wait, covet my brand new iPod, and see if this gets remedied in the next update, huh?

Oh, and now I’m wondering if I should tip off the AppleCentre guys that my old iPod, which they thought was dead (since their computer couldn’t recognize it), might actually be perfectly functional, and it’s just that Firewire + G5 + 10.3.7 = Sucks Ass.