I sent the following e-mail to my wife shortly after I got home this afternoon.

Do you have any compressed air at work? Can you please bring it home?

I have the world’s most disgusting computer problem.

Remember the tiny ants I mentioned? Turns out they’re not in the bedroom.

They’re in MY COMPUTER.

I am NOT making this up. I have watched them coming out of the keyboard at least a dozen times now.

I think an ant crawled in through one of the vents, and did whatever ants do to reproduce, and now I have a computer full of ants.

This calls for a nap.

Today is what we call a clusterfuck of epic proportions. (Firefox’s spell checker has flagged clusterfuck, but I don’t care.) This weekend we were helping a friend move down from New York to DC. To live in our house, actually, until he finds a place of his own. Which I’m not happy about, but at least he’s going to find a place of his own, and damn soon if I have anything to say about it. Two boarders was too many already; fortunately we’re still living at the in-laws’ for the time being. Anyway, today was a giant mess.

This morning we started working at around 8:00 or 8:30; he guessed we’d be out of there by noon. Half an hour later, he was standing around doing nothing. I said “do you need something to do?” He said no, and continued standing around doing nothing. So a few minutes later, A asked him if he was waiting for something. He said yes, he was waiting for us to get off the rug so he could vacuum it. A pointed out that things did not have to be done in a particular order, and there was lots more he could do meanwhile. (See, he wasn’t actually ready to go. He had left a lot of things undone. We suspect he spent his time masturbating, smoking weed, and playing video games instead. Normally these are pursuits I would approve of, but not when there are things to be done.) He got all huffy and ordered us to get out and go home, he’d do it all himself. Needless to say this was ridiculous and pissed off A and I quite a lot. She locked herself in the bathroom to cool off, and I went back to packing up his computer. Damn, I wish we’d left when he said to.

He did most of the carrying to the U-Haul while she and I cleaned the place. A lot of the carrying (down two flights of stairs) was done on Saturday, when we had hired two guys to come and help us out with the furniture…but there was still a lot left to be carried. So A and I cleaned and scrubbed…the bathroom, the refrigerator, the stove, the fingerprints from all the light switches and doorknobs, etc. I was working on the very dirty inside of a kitchen cabinet and A was working next to me at the sink when he stopped behind us and commented, “you guys are such good little scrubbers!” I turned around and gave him The Look of Death. He said something to the effect of “I wouldn’t have done that if you guys hadn’t been here” and A turned around and said “So…this doesn’t need to be done?” He said: no, not really. We immediately dropped our sponges and got ready to leave - bags gathered, coats on - and he said “are you leaving TOWN now? There’s so much left to do!” I was about to smack him in the mouth, I swear.

I went and got our car, which we’d parked a couple of blocks away on Friday night. I came back and brought my book for Sex & Gender class and sat with the U-Haul for a couple of hours, because that way he wouldn’t have to keep pulling the back gate up and down and locking and unlocking the padlock. (That’s what I did on Saturday instead of carrying anything - I was the truck guard and A did stuff upstairs.) I sat out there freezing my ass off - it was about 40 degrees both days, with no sun because of all the buildings. Finally it was time to go. At 3:10pm, that is. More than three hours later than he’d predicted, and five hours from when I wish we’d left, when he told us to.

We realized at the last minute that we couldn’t take the regular route to the Holland Tunnel, we had to take the truck route. He was behind us, and I called him and said “did you see we have to follow the truck route?” He said “oh, no! I didn’t see that.” So we led him through it. I don’t know why, but we stuck with him the whole way back to our house. After the final toll on the New Jersey Turnpike, which we breezed through with E-Z Pass, we sat on the shoulder and waited for half an hour until he came through. Half an hour. Wait, I remember why we stuck with him: because he’s a moron who can’t handle himself. He called up after the toll in Delaware and said “uh…do you have any cash? I’m running out of cash.” Apparently he didn’t have enough for tolls - they were costing him more than normal because he’s driving a truck, but he didn’t think to have LOTS of extra cash on hand. So fine, we pulled over on the shoulder together and I ran back with $40 cash. At the Fort McHenry toll, we went through a regular lane because there’s nowhere to pull over and wait after that one. Of course he managed to be so far behind us that we didn’t see him, but we figured he’d catch up. Nope: he’s still a moron.

We were around Catonsville when he called and said this priceless gem: “I took 695 East. Was that wrong?” Instant *headdesk* on my part. I said “Yes.” He said “I gotta go, bye” and hung up. So we had absolutely no idea what happened, what he was doing, or where he would end up. We drove another 8 miles to a rest area just past Route 32, and called him up again. Turns out he was still on 695 because he figured he could just loop around, and he said to go home, he’d find his way somehow. A pointed out that 695 is the Baltimore Beltway. So we told him we were waiting at the rest stop past Route 32, because obviously he needed help getting home. Fortunately that rest area was part of Maryland’s free wi-fi rest stop program, so I got on the computer and started typing this entry. (I’m still typing it, duh - we’re about to cross the American Legion bridge into Virginia.) He finally caught up and we set off…still guiding him…because he’s a moron.

This probably doesn’t sound too bad to most of you, but the guy was already on my shit list to begin with for various other stupidities. A wanted to help him move, so of course I came too. And I didn’t mind it, until today, when he became a complete idiot. God damn, he pissed me off so bad.

Apparently when I got this computer I was temporarily stupid. For some reason I didn’t install ZoneAlarm, AVG, or Spybot-S&D. And they didn’t get transferred from my old computer either, probably because was still stupid. I noticed the ZA absence a couple of days ago and got a BSOD after installing it; just now I was doing nothing - I was talking to A with the computer idle on my lap - and I got another BSOD! Good grief. AND I apparenly forgot my blog password, I just had to change that. And I lost an entry I was writing in Notepad and hadn’t saved yet; fortunately I hadn’t written much when the BSOD randomly popped up. And my website design is messed up for no apparent reason…I didn’t change anything!!

Computers and I usually get along pretty well, but…yaaaaargh!

This is just another gripe about my in-laws being so noisy at night. My brother-in-law is really noisy by default, he grew up in a loud household and he doesn’t know how to close cabinets quietly, close doors quietly, etc. He also thinks it’s okay to talk to himself and sing to himself all the time, so he’ll blurt out all kinds of stuff to himself just walking around the house at night. He apparently never learned that doing the dishes makes noise, because he does them at 11pm sometimes. Bang clatter crash! And him and my sister-in-law have a habit of singing to each other…really loud…as if nobody else lived here. It just drives me crazy. They’re good kids, I like them fine, I think they’re great…but why do they hafta be so loud?!

I am working on my research project about accreditation. I think my thesis is going to be along the lines of “Despite the need for improvement in K-12 deaf education and despite the cultural differences between Gallaudet and other universities, we can retain our accreditation with MSCHE” etc. Something like that.

I have spent three hours trying to use Simpsonize Me. The one time it actually uploaded my photo, it cropped it the wrong way or something, and it was useless. So I’ve tried again, and again, and again. I either get the interminable spinning donut, or an error about my photo not working. Here are the photos I have tried: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It just hates me, that’s all there is to it.

I just want to vent about my feet.
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Today can probably only be described as a disaster. We made it to Seattle in the end, but there were catastrophes along the way. We were almost to BWI Airport when my mother realized she had left her retainers at home. Fortunately FedEx offers same day service - it was $275 but she now has her retainers. The flight from Baltimore was fine, we had a three hour layover in Denver that was fine, and the flight to Seattle was fine even though I was in the middle seat. When we touched down I turned on my phone…and I had voicemail from Travelocity saying our reservation had been screwed up and I should call the hotel. So I did, and we’d been moved to a somewhat nicer sister property down the road. I told her a FedEx package would be coming there, and she promised to call. I was saved a mile (RT) walk because the FedEx courier was willing to drive it over. Now I’m exhausted from a screwed up day and I’m going to sleep.

Oh good grief…they’re going to change where I sit at work, sort of. But instead of being a nice easy move from one cube to another, I am going to sit in my current space three days a week and the new space two days a week, so I don’t really have anywhere to call home.

See, two of my clients are in the area where I sit, and two are in another area several floors away. The two who are in my area can call on me anytime they need to chat with a co-worker; the other two have to schedule me in advance or send an e-mail and hope I’m at my desk to rush down and meet them. Now, it’s perfectly clear that the two downstairs deserve their own interpreter they can call on at any time. It’s also true that these people all work for the same department, and it would be nice if everybody could sit in the same area.

And they were going to put us all in the same area, but the people who would have had to move to make that possible…decided they don’t want to after all. The government can’t afford to hire a separate interpreter to sit with the two downstairs full-time, so they are going to have me split between upstairs and downstairs. They say I will at least get a cube downstairs, so at least I will have a place to sit that isn’t in an aisle or in somebody else’s cube. But who knows if I will have a computer or phone, so it will be difficult for the two upstairs guys to reach me if they need to last-minute, etc.

I agree that this is an appropriate solution since the government can’t hire another interpreter…but I think it’s going to be a big logistical hassle for many people, especially me. So I’m not looking forward to it.

My work has blocked MySpace for a long time. It’s no big deal, I don’t use MySpace much anyway. I set up my own copy of CGIProxy and it was serving me well. Today I noticed that apparently eBay and Photobucket have also been blocked, or are at least not coming up - but they do fine through my proxy. Ditto for CreamAid, which I just wanted to check out but couldn’t get to…huh. Anyway, it’s rather annoying that Photobucket is blocked, because this screws up my LiveJournal friends page…feh. I will have to re-host the images via Imageshack or something.

But even more annoying is that MySpace is apparently now channeling your login through a secure server…which CGIProxy doesn’t want to let me access. It should work, as far as I can tell…I have the requirements taken care of. I’m not running on a secure server, but this is for accessing MySpace, not processing payment information - I don’t care if it’s secure. But the error message I’m getting is basically “zomg somebody might EAVESDROP on you wtfbbqpolarbear!!!eleventy1one!!” Again…it’s MySpace. I don’t care. Please to be allowing me to talk to the secure server now.

If anybody has a secure server and wants to host a password-protected (.htpasswd is fine) copy of CGIProxy for me, that would be teh awes0me. Meanwhile I will wait to hear back from the script author.

Added: Oh, YouTube is blocked too.

Update: The script author clued me in to $OVERRIDE_SECURITY and all is well now. Except for Photobucket, because I can’t add pictures to the albums at all…sigh.

I used PayPal for a couple of years with no problems. Now I have had more problems in the past six months than ever before. For my own documentation purposes, here’s what I just sent via their Contact Us form.
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