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[sean]

so i just posted some flyers and i made a craigslist ad, so if there is somebody looking for it hopefully they will find it.

but really i would like to know who in their right mind ditches a bike in the middle of a parking lot.

[pwhodges]

Maybe joyriders who had already stolen it, and abandoned it for their next game.

[David_Dovey]

Dear Blog Thread,

some asshole hipster kid stole my bike, I'm gonna kill him when I find him

[Ladybug]

but really i would like to know who in their right mind ditches a bike in the middle of a parking lot.

I'm gonna guess that since it seems to be a pretty new and fancy bike, there is probably some other reason than "Meh, didn't want it anymore".

[sean]

i doubt that too! though, it doesn't look very new, it certainly has some wear and tear on it. its totally nice though.

i swear that parking lot is a bike graveyard though, this is hardly the first bike i've seen just ditched there.

[Christophe]

Oh man. Effective guilt bomb? On the internet? I have never seen one before.

Guys I just got back from Tracy. It is maybe 25 miles away from Livermore, but when we left town at 4:45am it was just the start of "idiots trying to merge" hour. And guess who was designated driver since everybody else was sleepy and whiny about it! Alas, I was the one stuck with morning freeway traffic on I580. Stop and go for half the damn distance we went. Literally just walked in the door maybe ten minutes before starting this post.

Hanging out in Tracy was fun though. My friend from work wanted to go hang out in Tracy to meet with a friend of his. It was pretty fun. We smoked in the bowl of a skatepark at 2am. Ate at Denny's at like 3:30. Some dude vomited in the parking lot, which made me have second thoughts about the meal we'd just subjected ourselves to, but I feel fine, and food poisoning would've hit by now. So I suppose I'm alright.

And now, bed. I don't plan on being conscious for the next several hours.

A. Since when do you have a driver's license?
2. You need to get down to where I am sometime soon. Or I need to visit you. Or whatevz.

[valley_parade]

So my grandma had a hip replacement this morning I guess.

I dunno. I haven't heard back from anyone yet about how it went. But from reading online, it seems like it's pretty straightforward, as far as replacing bits of your body with metal and plastic go.

[pwhodges]

My (younger) sister has an artificial knee and an elbow as well (she's had rheumatoid arthritis since she was 28 or so).  My (older) brother has a titanium ball in one shoulder, following a bad fall in snow.  Neither has given any complications other than what led up to their being necessary; so you should be optimistic.  Fingers crossed, anyway!

[Lines]

I think we should all just get Wolverine bones and then our problems will be solved!

[Edith]

Seriously though guys 30+ is where it's at.

You don't believe me but when you get here you'll see.

o/

[Ladybug]

I have two four-hour exams tomorrow, both counting 100% in their respective (completely unrelated) classes. That should be fun! One of them requires a ridiculous amount of work, because the lecturer, while good, is also one of those girls who have really freakin' high standards for both herself and others. And, I mean, that can be a good thing. But not when it results in waaay too much work on exams. On most of the previous exams, they were supposed to perform one or two risk analyses for software projects (in addition to answering some fact questions and cleaning up some code snippets). This stuff isn't supposed to be done well in four hours by one single person, damnit. And sure, she doesn't expect them to be complete, but they have to cover a lot of stuff to be considered good answers.

I seriously cannot wait until Christmas break starts on Thursday at 1PM.

[Patrick]

Guys I just got back from Tracy.

Did you see any cricket? When I was in Tracy, we drove by a cricket match!

It was 2am when we got there. And 6:30am or so by time we got home. Only thing I think we really saw was a douchebag hitting on his pipe at a light.

[Metope]

I am home in Norway! It's really cold! I seriously need to clean my room tomorrow, I vacuumed it before I left in early September, but since then my cat has taken over my room and it's now covered in dry leaves and dirt he's brought in, plus that thick layer of dust that somehow appears when no one's been in the room for a while. It feels weird being home, somehow it feels like I never left, but at the same time it feels like Glasgow is home now and I'm just here on a holiday. I'm on a holiday at home! Strange!


Also it's hard to speak Norwegian again, I keep searching for words and I only find English ones.

[JD]

My brother sent this email to my dad.

Dear: friends and family
merry christmas and happy holidays
watch polar express
Best wishes from Asher
I need a ipod touch

Subtle

[vegkitkat]

I had a great day today.  I was really busy all day. That being said,I actually got nothing productive done at school.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

My friend got a gift certificate for a restaurant, and took me out for dinner. Afterwards, we went to the mall and I got a xmas present for my best friend.

And then I came home to my secret santa present. FUCK YEAH!

[pwhodges]

Also it's hard to speak Norwegian again, I keep searching for words and I only find English ones.

That's because there are so few Norwegian words compared to English ones.

[Ladybug]

Yeah, I have that problem because pretty much all the textbooks I've had for the past four years have been in English, and there is just a whole lot of English going on. We wrote a report this fall that ended up being in Norwegian, and it felt awkward as hell. I've even handed in exams and assignments in English multiple times when I could choose between Norwegian and English, because it just feels more natural. It's not even just because of the technical jargon either (although that is important), we did the same thing on another project this spring about libraries. Couldn't pick between nynorsk and bokmål, and everyone felt awkward writing in Norwegian anyways, so hey, English it is. I can only imagine it would be even "worse" after having spoken English for months as well and not heard any Norwegian at all. My mom already laughs at me because I pretty frequently can't think of Norwegian words. An English - Norwegian dictionary has come in handy!

One of today's exams is dooone. It was pretty quick, but we'll see how it went. The next exam is four hours away, luckily, so I have time for some last-minute reading, after a break.

[Spluff]

that's weird, I still feel more comfortable writing in australian despite my many posts on this forum

[Patrick]

It's a thing to be proud of to have learned a non-native language so well. I wish I could say I knew 'my' other languages that much. I remember in Luxembourg, the education system had adapted to the absolute requirement that you speak more than one European tongue if you're going to be successful in business. In a nation where I think something like 80% of their GDP comes from banking (don't quote me on that number, I only know it was a huge percentage), it was even more critical. The fact that people are able to do that, and the fact that here in the U.S. we don't really even bother until high school, when your brain doesn't quite develop that way anymore... as a fan of the idea of language, it bothers me.

tl;dr hey guys get yr kids a dang ol' Muzzy audio cassette set on eBay or something, that shit's handy in this world and also really really rad

Guys I cannot believe I'm working until 1am, our holiday hours mean that we close at midnight. And it is kinda hitting hard. I'm actually going to pass out in about 30 seconds once I click 'post'.

[Spluff]

BLOODY OATH MATE TODAY WAS A CUNT OF A DAY

[snalin]

I haven't started delivering big assignments in English yet, and I think our uni is quite big on actually allowing the students to use Norwegian all the way. It's not ideal - our calculus book is in English, and the teachers use Norwegian, so every theorem has two names and it's quite hard to remember which is which. The squeeze theorem (best name) is one of the few which is directly translated; the mean value theorem has been translated to something that translated back would be "the secant sentence", and so forth, so if I get an assignment in Norwegian to apply a theorem, I need a damned dictionary to know what they are talking about half of the time. Our java programming is also an unholy mixup between English syntax and Norwegian variable names. I know that all the books on higher levels are in English, and I'm going to arrive totally unprepared, because I'll have to translate everything I know into a new language.

It's like when I had read three Wheel of Time books in Norwegian, and tried to start reading the fourth in English. Nothing made sense any more, and I had to start reading from the start again in the new language. I don't want to do that with a year of studies.

I've heard a lot of Americans that's impressed with the average European speaking two or three languages well, but to be honest, we have to know English to be able to get most average or better paid jobs, so it's not as much a big feat or a great school system than simply a necessity. And probably 70% + of the shows on TV are in English, many commercials, most slogans, store names etc. are also English. If you were surrounded by French every day, it would probably be easier to learn it. And people like us Norwegians on these boards are probably better than the average Norwegian because we write a lot of English every day, here and on meebo, and you've probably all noticed that I at times write kind of poor English (at times outright bad writing, but that's another issue entirely). Imagine how bad it is if you only use English about ten times a year, on a vacation or when a tourist asks you for directions. It's been a really long time since I've spoken English for a prolonged time, so my pronunciation is quite bad whenever someone foreign shows up at work.


Work-related; I've always wondered why the closing procedures at work only involved shutting down the electricity to all of the machines. Turns out it doesn't. Oooops! Almost got my ass fired, I think - me and the bosses had a half hour chat about proper closing procedures. For reference, I'm working in a science centre for kids - it's basically a museum where you touch everything. You've probably seen something like it. They could have spent one minutes saying "you are shutting down everything wrong and you're slacking off a bit much, but we like the acting you are doing in our science shows, so we'd like you to improve your routines and do more shows", but they spent half an hour skipping around the issue. On the plus side, if there's few customers I've started helping the IT guy, and I'm learning a lot. He's promised to see if any of the installations we have use java and if he has the source code or can get a hold of it, and that would be great.

I write too long blog posts, don't I?

[Inlander]

Yo blog,

Today was very good. I finished the first draft of an 80,000 word manuscript, and a whole day ahead of schedule! Now I just have to edit it but I don't think it should take more than two or three more drafts and that shouldn't take long. Then hopefully in the new year I can try to find a publisher for it! I'm pretty pleased with myself, I've been trying to be more serious about my writing this year and to treat it more like a job, with daily targets to meet. I wrote the 80,000 words in around two months, and a very large part of what would normally be leisure time since October has gone into writing so I feel good and chuffed about my productivity and also about the fact that I've managed to actually finish a story, because I've worked on two other manuscripts in the past 18 months or so and one I had to abandon because I realised that after a stupid number of drafts (like, more than twenty probably) it just wasn't working and more to the point I didn't really know why it wasn't working, then I started another one earlier this year and wrote quite a large amount of it before realising that my current circumstances just don't allow me the time or resources to do the kind of research I needed to do for that particular story.

But this one I've got now doesn't really require research, and it's got a good story with an actual end and a strong and clearly defined point and I think that's good. In simple terms it's about a man adopting a stray cat; in more complex terms, it's about compassion, and about making a conscious decision to be a good person instead of an arsehole, and about coping with disappointment and realising that life goes on, and about just figuring out how to deal with life day by day, year by year.

Oh and although it's all written in the third person a good half of the manuscript takes the perspective of the cat.

[allison]

I would buy that book.

[valley_parade]

My (younger) sister has an artificial knee and an elbow as well (she's had rheumatoid arthritis since she was 28 or so).  My (older) brother has a titanium ball in one shoulder, following a bad fall in snow.  Neither has given any complications other than what led up to their being necessary; so you should be optimistic.  Fingers crossed, anyway!

Update: She's fine. Hangin' out in the hospital. Will be home by the end of the week.

[sean]

harry if yr prose is anything like how you post i will totally buy yr book

[Ladybug]

I haven't started delivering big assignments in English yet, and I think our uni is quite big on actually allowing the students to use Norwegian all the way. It's not ideal - our calculus book is in English, and the teachers use Norwegian, so every theorem has two names and it's quite hard to remember which is which. The squeeze theorem (best name) is one of the few which is directly translated; the mean value theorem has been translated to something that translated back would be "the secant sentence", and so forth, so if I get an assignment in Norwegian to apply a theorem, I need a damned dictionary to know what they are talking about half of the time. Our java programming is also an unholy mixup between English syntax and Norwegian variable names. I know that all the books on higher levels are in English, and I'm going to arrive totally unprepared, because I'll have to translate everything I know into a new language.

Yeah, this is one of the big reasons I tend to lean towards using English in my assignments. I didn't back in the first years when we had maths and all that stuff, but it was frustrating as hell. In those lower-level classes (as in, in lower grades, not that they're easier) the lectures were in Norwegian, but in some upper-level classes, the lectures will be in English if there are non-Norwegian speaking students taking the course (and I think I've taken one upper-level class where there were no non-Norwegians). That's always fun when the professors are old, Norwegian men with poor English pronunciation or nasal Italians with a permanent stuffed nose. I'm pretty sure we're allowed to use Norwegian all the time, but very few do on big assignments/reports once almost everything is in English. I don't think I've seen a technical master's thesis in Norwegian. I still do deliver most of my exams in Norwegian – I think – but it depends a lot on whether or not the lecturer/professor spoke Norwegian and whether the assignments were given in English or Norwegian, I think. Today it ended up being in Norwegian, with lots and lots of English words thrown in.

Like snalin says, being fairly okay at writing and speaking English is sort of an inevitability. I took French for five years at school (although with a plethora of different teachers who all started at different levels), and know almost nothing now. If I had been surrounded by French as much as I am by English, I'm sure it would've felt as natural as English sometimes does. Which would be awesome, because I don't like that I wasted five years on a language I can now barely state my name, hometown and age, and ask how you are doing, in.

(Also, Norwegian variable names = suckity suck, suck. The intro classes at NTNU tend to do that as well, and gah, it's annoying.)

[benji]

Blogyness,

I have too many friends who's love lives are complicated and this is fine, only now it is affecting my life.

Basically two of my friends used to date, and remained close friends and occasional fuck buddies afterword’s. When she would visit from out of state, she would usually stay with him. Only the last time she visited they parted on weird terms, they haven't really spoken in 8 or 9 months, and now he lives with his current girlfriend. So instead she asked to stay with us, and we agreed, even though we're generally busy people and her travel plans are ill defined. She arrived on Saturday. On Sunday night, she realized he probably wasn’t going to respond to her face book message and called to say she was in town. It turns out the new girlfriend doesn't want to meet any of his exes, so he doesn't want to get together until Friday when his girlfriend has other plans. It's not entirely clear to any of the rest of us if he has even told his current girlfriend that his ex is in town and he plans to see her.

This means that a visit that was originally going to last a few days is now going to last an entire week, and while we love our friend dearly, we also have other things we need to do this week then just hang out with her. On Friday in particular, we're now expected to play chaperone for this little outing, completely trumping anything else we might want to do that night. Plus, I don't really want to be there for any kind of big emotional confrontation. Basically I think they all 3 (including the current girlfriend) need to grow up. He needs to communicate what he wants. Either his ex is still a friend of his, and he needs to tell his current girlfriend that, and she needs to get over this "never going to meet your exes" BS, or he doesn't really want to still be friends, in which case he needs to tell his ex that so she can stop needlessly extending trips to make time to see him.

[Jimor]

Just about to trudge off to help a friend shoot his short film. This was supposed to be a 5-week project back in APRIL. He just keeps adding scenes, changing the story and script, and I'm stuck with this whole thing because we're using my camera. It's going to suck, and he keeps asking for my creative input, but I haven't the slightest clue what the story even is at this point. He's a nice guy and all, but damn. I guess the only bright spot is that I've learned a thousand and one ways NOT to shoot a movie.

School's over for the semester at least. Time now to start getting my own projects off the ground.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

so my Gawker account info leaked, along with a shitload of other peoples'; you may have heard about it. I've been bouncing around the internet to my various hangouts and changing all my passwords, but it's really annoying. I have to use the same password for everything otherwise I'll never remember them all, but some places require symbols or numbers which makes it especially annoying.

It sucks though because in the back of my mind I could swear I've forgotten one, maybe even an important one, but I can't think of what it is.

stupid hackers and their rap music

[Tom]

Gnosis may have the knowledge but they certainly lack the wisdom. If anything, they proved that they are indeed in kiddie-hackers.

[Patrick]

stoned driving story

A. Since when do you have a driver's license?
2. You need to get down to where I am sometime soon. Or I need to visit you. Or whatevz.

I don't, I still have only my permit. My buddy let me drive. y33333333

(only just saw that)

Anyway, today I auditioned for my friend's band. I almost feel like I'd be selling out hardcore by joining, stylistically at least. It's very Maroon 5 meets Franz Ferdinand and I don't know if I dig it all that much. Still. Opportunity for a career playing music for a living.

I really don't know which way I should go on it, actually, and if anybody's got advice I'd be happy to take it.

[valley_parade]

Man all you ever talk to me about is your total mancrush on Maroon 5.

[Patrick]

The last time I even mentioned them was because I sell their guitarist's signature line with First Act. That was like 3 months ago when I started. Besides, you know I'm sucking huge Beatles dick right now.

And admit it, that line of electrics does look pretty fucking rad.

[valley_parade]

If I could afford a Delia LS I'd be on it.

Do what you gotta do. Honestly, if it were me, I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to be stuck playing stuff that I don't like/am not comfortable with.

But again, that's just me.

[Inlander]

harry if yr prose is anything like how you post i will totally buy yr book

Fewer jokes, more dead animals.

[JD]

The Hewlett Packard Corporation's sole reason for existence is to spite me. Can your shitty software be any slowerstupider?

[tania]

when i worked at staples selling technology to people, these HP reps would show up in the store every so often whose job was basically to do my job, but shitter, and get paid about twice as much. i spent months trying to work out how to get that job and never managed to figure it out.

[McTaggart]

harry if yr prose is anything like how you post i will totally buy yr book

Fewer jokes, more dead animals.

  Spoiler alert! 

[Rizzo]

The Hewlett Packard Corporation's sole reason for existence is to spite me. Can your shitty software be any slowerstupider?

At work our IT problem logging system is provided by HP and I swear it is the worst thing I have ever used in my entire life. Basically it's a repurposed shopping cart where you have to find the problem you're experiencing from the catagories aka store and "purchase" it. Completely fucking fails every single time so I always pick some arbitrary issue and put my problem in the comments field. I believe this what everyone does.
The previous system was a simple text form with a drop down for priority and how inconvenient the problem was, and it was 80,000,000,000x more effective.

[Barmymoo]

Here is an exciting thing: when flying with British Airways, you may have two pieces of hand baggage! Two! The smaller one can be the size of what I usually use as my sole hand luggage, and then you can have a bigger one that is the size of a small suitcase! My slight problem (namely, that I have so many Christmas presents that they pretty much fill my suitcase) is solved; I will just carry two bags!

I am very pleased about this, because I was worrying about how to get a present to a friend in London who I'm meeting straight after I fly home. Now I can just take it with me to Norway and bring it back, and not have to worry about it getting bashed up in the hold because it'll be with me all the time

Now to pack. Eeeee excited. And tonight, providing all the packing is done, I will be going to my old sixth form to see a Pantomime and surprise one of my favourite teachers.



ETA: Disappoint. All the tickets for the pantomime are sold out. I may just turn up anyway.

[JimmyJazz]

Taking my Irish History final in 20 minutes. It will be followed by glorious, glorious sleep and a weed/Arrested Development marathon with friends later this evening. Damn you Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair for keeping me away from Bob Loblaw's Law Blog!

[nekowafer]

Hey there bloggy thingy.

I was in the hospital recently. Man, that sucked. I was honestly terrified that I was going to die. I'm scared of doctors on the whole and never went to one unless I had to, before that. Now that I'm out of the hospital, I have to go to a million and one appointments. Last week it was my primary care doc, hematologist, and gynecologist. This week is the anti-coagulation clinic and a CT scan. Next week is the psychiatrist, and probably an appointment with my primary care doc to discuss the findings on the CT. I might have an enlarged spleen and/or lymphoma. Wee. Oh, and I almost broke my toe the other day, and it's purple and super painful. I feel like all sorts of crap, and yet, my boyfriend can't even muster a little understanding that walking home from work really fucking sucks for me right now (I don't drive). He's not even going to try to get out of work a little early to help me get to any of my appointments and this annoys me and I've told him this. His schedule is very flexible, but he's decided he just doesn't want to ask at all. So, thanks, boyfriend. Instead I will be spending $20 on cab fare at least once, maybe twice, and then taking the bus as much as possible.

On learning other languages; I hate that I had 4 years of French in high school and can now maybe say a sentence or two. I think I can count to 3. It would have been awesome to learn a new language when I was younger, I think I would have really enjoyed it, and it would have helped me out with my little speech issue in elementary school. Now I can speak English very well and bits and pieces of other languages.

[squawk]

I DID NOT FAIL CALC II
GPA 3.11
FUCK YEAH

[Lunchbox]

Today I am going to work for like, an hour, as I have a doctor's appointment this morning and we are having a farewell party at 12 t hat will last the rest of the day. Then tomorrow we are having a picnic day! EXCITED.
(I am wearing a dress to work today! It is SO HOT)

[Scandanavian War Machine]

it still blows my mind that you are living in tomorrow already


crazy ass blue space ball and it's weird nuclear heater   

[Allybee]

finallllsss. architecture crit was actually awesome except everyone had pulled an all nighter and my hand was shaking and I wore a short skirt so I may have flashed a jury of renowned architects when I bent over to put my building model into the site model, oooops. but really, their criticism was so great, they suggested all these things I hadn't thought of and called me out on some of my bullshit ("are there really no walls in this building?") while acknowledging all the hard work I'd done. when the lady from my favorite firm omg (the rural studio) called my building "complex" I almost fainted. hooray my 50+ hours of work were justified!!! maybe I can be an architect after all????

so now, laboring away on 2 twenty page papers due friday. and then break break break break I am so broken right now. eeeeeehhhhhhh

[Patrick]

Three day weekend. Gonna git fuuuuucked up with my homies before the real evil of Christmas retail work rears it's ugly head at us all.

Hopefully Lukas and I can finally record that shit that we WERE going to record last week save for the bit where he forgot to bring his shit

[Jace]

I have a tendon in my ankle that is overly tight. There is nothing I can do to fix this except stretch my foot and deal with the pain every morning or when I sit too long. Good job body, falling apart before I even get a discount on my car insurance.

[Johnny C]

finallllsss. architecture crit was actually awesome except everyone had pulled an all nighter and my hand was shaking and I wore a short skirt so I may have flashed a jury of renowned architects when I bent over to put my building model into the site model, oooops. but really, their criticism was so great, they suggested all these things I hadn't thought of and called me out on some of my bullshit ("are there really no walls in this building?") while acknowledging all the hard work I'd done. when the lady from my favorite firm omg (the rural studio) called my building "complex" I almost fainted. hooray my 50+ hours of work were justified!!! maybe I can be an architect after all????

so now, laboring away on 2 twenty page papers due friday. and then break break break break I am so broken right now. eeeeeehhhhhhh

i'm really glad you're feeling good about architecture as a field, ally!

[Jimor]

I finally got the summons for federal jury duty from the jury questionnaire I filled out last May. Feb 2nd is the first call-in day. That's during school, but I'm only taking one class and I know I can work around the schedule, so I'm just going to go with the flow during the selection process and not worry whether I get picked or not. A federal case might be interesting.