I happened to be surfing the other evening and caught “The Wizard of Oz” on cable. I had to stop and watch it, mesmerized, the whole way through. Just as I had every year for years when I was a little girl. When I was little, it was an “event.” I would carefully plan my bath so as to be out in time to watch the show. Mother always let me have a snack when I was watching TV (which set the stage for my bad eating habits today, no dount!). I’d settle in on my pillow on the floor with my cup of hot cocoa or (if I was lucky) my “coffee milk” that mother would let me have so I could feel grownup.

Although this time, I have to admit, I felt I had more in common with Margaret Hamilton’s character, Miss Almira Gulch, who kept cats and who got a warrant from the Sheriff to take Toto away for chasing her cats around the yard. And less in common with Dorothy, who made excuses for the dog and said that he couldn’t help chasing her “nasty old cats.” Nasty old cats?! No one better ever call my cats nasty! And I catch a dog after them and … well, you can just imagine. So that part of it was ruined for me.

But still in all, I loved that show then and I love it now. And I was amazed at the clarity of the colors even today, the quality of the production … well, all except those flying monkies. You could see the strings on them…. Oh well. Nothing’s perfect.

But it can come pretty close.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, weathered the relatives, the outcome of the football games and everything else….

We just sat around and ate yesterday. Robert roasted a small turkey and we had a pretty traditional feast. We each withdrew to our respective “inner sanctums” — Robert to watch football and me to try to wrestle my latest computer project to the ground: GeekLog. I also decided to tear apart the “About Blogging” page I’d created, made a separate blog out of it so it could be indexed, sorted and commented on. Check it out here.

I’ll add most of my “geekstuff” there, along with any HTML or CSS tips and tricks I’ve learned and new software I find. In fact, one of the things left to do is go through this blog and take out all the geekstuff and put it over there.

I also have been trying to (very loose use of the word) move my Galleries around. There’s a lot of unused space at my second domain, jonimueller.com, so I’ve decided to move all the photo galleries there, except now I’m having some mod_rewrite issues with that server. Yeesh.

I’ll post my latest photo soon. The one showing all the HAIR missing from my head after I tear what’s left of it out this weekend….

I can tell this story, now that my mother is dead. About the day I played hookie in the seventh grade. The players were me, my friend Deborah, her friend Pat, Pat’s boyfriend, John, and John’s deaf mother. Got it?
Read more .. »

I stumbled onto this site by accident, while reading an old online review of an ancient word processor. It was in a poster’s list of favorite sites. And his/her tag line was priceless: “Out by the creek bluegrassin’. Might be home before dark, might not.”

Check out www.mulletjunky.com.

you’ve been….

ignored by, woken up by, sat on by, nibbled by or adopted by …

a cat. Like this one…

Sunny

or this one…

Simon

Simon does everything except bring out the top hat and tails to get my attention in the morning. When I finally get up and stagger down the hall, he runs ahead, tail held straight up like a flag! Then instead of turning right to go into the kitchen (where his food is), I turn left into the bathroom. The look of dejection on his face is priceless.

Sunny is fairly standoffish with me, except when he’s hungry and Robert is ignoring him (or not present). Then he pours on the feline charm thick as country gravy!

Today’s Sunday Drive is an exotic. And not a pretty one, IMHO. This car just lends credence to my assertion that all cars nowadays look like nothing more than used bars of soap. But if it’s good enough for James Bond, it ought to be good enough for me, right? In any event, here’s a peek at the 2002 Aston Martin DB7 Zagato Coupe.
Read more .. »

I was given yet another reason to despise Word 97 yesterday afternoon. Our law firm has chosen to abandon Corel WordPerfect 8 for Word 97 and beyond. It’s been three years in the making and it still isn’t all the way migrated over yet. There have been plenty of growing pains along the way.

When I first heard of the evil plot several years ago, I tried to fight it and so did some of the lawyers. But management turned a deaf ear (and a blind eye) and Word was silently shoved down our throats. (At least I hope that’s where they planned to put it.)

Yesterday afternoon, I was revising a brief that did not originate with my boss. Therefore, the thing (all 45 pages of it) was riddled with stylistic mistakes that a legal secretary should know not to make. For example (or e.g., if you are my boss and getting paid $350 an hour to say it), there should be a SPACE (and preferably a coded or hard one) between the paragraph symbol or the section symbol and any numeric text after it.

Easy enough to fix, I thought to myself. I’ll just search for the paragraph symbol and the section symbol and replace with the same AND a hard space. Not a problem. Oh, but then Word stepped in. Apparently this is one of the (many) things “you can’t do in Word.” This is the primary function of the Firm’s Help Desk staff nowadays. To utter that phrase, or a variation of it, whenever presented with a problem such as mine.

You can’t do that in Word.
Our developers are working on it.
No one else has called with that problem. (Which I interpret to really mean, “You are an idiot and you don’t know what you are doing; deal.”)

Almost makes you hanker for one of these….

IBM Displaywriter, circa 1983

This machine was a dedicated word processor built around the Intel 8086 chip, but used boot disks to load the programs. The boot disk went into one slot and your storage disk went into the other. The keyboard (which is 2? inches thick!) has some things in common with the keyboard of the Selectric typewriter, even having a shift lock that actually locks down.

The real interest of the machine, however, is the floppy drives, the huge cabinet to the right. These are 8-inch floppy drives and I don’t know of any other machine that used them. I always thought the drive cabinet resembled a toaster with its two levers. I’m not sure what the actual capacity of the floppy disks was, but I don’t believe it was much more than 256K.

Now that I think of it, I wonder what was “under the hood” of this machine. The CPU unit is huge but when you consider it is not housing a hard drive or floppy drives, you have to wonder just what IS under there….

I hopped over to A Touch of Hope from Brad Choate’s site. This website was set up so that children with devastating illnesses, like Thomas Pacheco and Carly Rafferty, have a place to tell their stories and so that we can reach out with words of support and encouragement.

And Thomas has his own website. Not only did Thomas contribute the artwork to his site, but he helped design the Touch of Hope site, founded by his father, Ron.

I wish I had half the fortitude these “half pints” have. If by some miracle, they manage to beat this thing, they’ll surely be outstanding young adults and a tribute to their parents’ love. And to all the world. I’m rooting for them. Go pay a visit now. But before you do that, give your own little one(s) a hug.

Well, today was my turn in the barrel, to paraphrase the punch line from a very very bad joke. The reassignment of my second “bossette” took place today and I had to move one cubicle (veal pen) to the right. Do you realize what an inconvenience this is to the attorneys? While we are being moved, our computers and other peripherals are unplugged. We are helpless. We have nothing to do except assist with the move, wander down the halls, get coffee, visit the ladies’ room, visit with our friends, etc., etc., etc.

Because of this unforeseen down time this morning, I didn’t get around to taking a break for lunch until after two o’clock. (For me, “taking lunch” usually means getting up long enough to run and grab something from the vending machines if I wasn’t smart enough to pack lunch or too lazy to walk over to the Park Shops — like a food court, but in our office building.)

While waiting for the elevator that would take me back up, I hopped in the first one that came along. You ignorant SLUT!!! It was going DOWN. I cursed at my own stupidity because now I was stuck. My office is on the 44th floor, the snack bar is on 40, and floors 39 and below aren’t accessible from the elevator I was riding. I had no choice but to go all the way down to the lobby and back up again.

Just about the time I was making peace with that fact, the elevator stopped and jerked abruptly, like it was hung up on something. This was the 8th floor. The display kept blinking 8 and “EX” (Express?) back and forth. It clearly was stuck. I hit the red button to summon the troops.

The alarm from Hell went off, the bastard bell of a thousand fire trucks. It was dreadful. It was actually, now that I look back, the most dreadful part of the entire experience.

Finally a security guard called to me and the first thing he wanted to know was if I was alone or not. I told him I was. I then asked him to call my boss, gave him her first name and phone number and told him to tell her where I was. He said he would. I waited a few more minutes; I could barely hear myself think over the noise of that damn bell. I finally decided to sit down. After all, I had a bag of Chee-tos and a 16-oz. bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper to keep me company. Didn’t look like I was going anywhere anytime soon.

I remember grousing earlier about not being able to even have a few minutes to myself to eat lunch. Looks like someone had been listening. I plopped down on the floor of the elevator, crossed my legs, Indian chief style, broke open the Chee-tos and soda and had a nice quiet (well, except for that yammering BELL) little snack.

After about 10 minutes, the noise from the alarm ceased and the disembodied voice of the security guard came back on to tell me the elevator would be moving shortly. I stood back up, brushed off the crumbs, and pressed “44.” He said when the elevator stops, jump out. (No, I’d much rather ride around in the elevator ruining my hearing with the bell that won’t shut up.)

When I got back to my desk, I thought sure I’d get at least SOME reaction from my boss. She was nonplused. After a few minutes at my desk, I went into her office and asked, “The building at least called you, didn’t they?”

“Call me for what?” she asked.

Ah, that explained it. “I was stuck in the elevator.” (I thought sure she thought I’d run off for good; turns out I wasn’t even missed.)

She expressed shock and dismay and asked me repeatedly if I was alright. Actually, I was. I never felt in any danger, once the car stopped. I knew they knew I was in there and I knew I’d probably get out pretty quickly.

After I returned to my desk, I got a call from our Librarian telling me that the building had just called to tell her that my boss was stuck in the elevator. They didn’t even get the message right. (How could they hear anything over that damn bell?! I wasn’t surprised.)

Maybe the reason I was freed so quickly was because they were under the mistaken impression a partner was stuck in the elevator? Hmmm.

If only the sentiment behind this article were applicable to other service industries besides the taxi industry (in Malaysia), there’d be a lot more dead people….

I think the tourism minister is being a little harsh, lumping rude taxi drivers in with other traitors. And if I had a nickle for every time a taxi driver (other than Robert, of course!), a sales clerk or other service person was rude to me, I could hire a taxi to drive me from here to Malaysia and back — at least five times over.

And it’s not just rudeness that gets my dander up. It’s laziness masquerading as stupidity. (They aren’t too stupid to do it, they’re just too lazy to do it….) A prime example of that was when I called Radio Shack to inquire if they had any data transfer serial cables available. Immediately the guy wanted to sell me a crossover cable (CAT5). Nope, I said. I need a data transfer cable to run on my serial ports. The salesman, apparently quite crestfallen that he was unable to sell me that high dollar ($29.95) crossover cable, said that they had no serial cables in stock. I asked him if he could order one. His response? “I’m not sure.” There was a pregnant pause while I waited for further response from him. Perhaps he needed to make up his mind whether he felt like placing an order for me. When the silence continued, I spoke up. “Um, when might you KNOW whether you can order the cable for me?” “Oh, I don’t know, I have a lot of customers here (uh, yeah, and did you count the one you have on the phone?) and it will take some time.” I hung up. Clearly I was not going to be able to dash over there on my lunch hour. I then called the location close to my house and sure enough, they had them. They had plenty of them, I was cheerfully informed.

So it wasn’t that the guy at the first Radio Shack was rude. He was worse. He didn’t even care enough to be rude…. Where’s my shotgun?

[Article reprinted in full below]
Read more .. »