Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

I love the British

Aren’t the British great? Look at this example, from a dictionary:

calico (KAL-i-co) noun, plural calicoes or calicos

1. A brightly printed coarse cotton cloth.

2. (Mainly British) A plain white cotton cloth.

3. An animal having a spotted coat, especially with red and black patches.

Look at that! The number one definition and the related animal definition are precisely the opposite of “plain white cotton cloth”. Woohoo! Man, I can’t wait to move to Britain! It’ll be like a fish who’d lived its entire life out of water finally finding itself in a much more comfortable setting! Or pudding!

Drawing class going downhill

Today in Drawing class I got some sketches done and improved a little on some ideas I had that Marc might like better than the one I’m probably going to do, but some other things happened, too. Marc was going around the class giving people feedback (he upset at least two other students as much as he upset me), and he got to my setup and asked if I wanted to talk about where I’d been going with the sketches, I simply told him I wasn’t going to talk to him. That I would turn in the portfolio, but I wasn’t going to talk to him again. He said that would be okay, but asked me why, so I told him I don’t like him.

Ooh, and that’s not all! At the end of the class, it was time for teacher evaluations! If he had given them to us a week or two ago, I might not have been as harsh in my “extra comments” section, though I would surely have been just as brutal in the fill-in-the-bubbles section. I have never used the word “jackass” in a teacher evaluation before today, or had to mention that the teacher told me outright that I would be better off mowing lawns than creating art. They say it’s anonymous, but if he gets to see my comments, he’ll probably know it was from me. The other students who don’t like him don’t seem as honest or open about it, and will probably just keep quiet.

Still, mathematically, if Marc gives me a ZERO on my final, I’ll still pass the class, and will likely still get a B, depending on how he decides to grade the other compnents of my second portfolio. Presumably for turning something in that meets the requirements of the assignment, I couldn’t get less than a C on the final, guaranteeing a B. If he’d not a total fucking moron and grades it fairly, I’ll get even better. I didn’t say I couldn’t draw, just that I don’t care to.

Problems with Timespace

Okay, so I was looking to print out a Year 1 calendar, and a Year 2 calendar, so I could look ahead and make some plans, and I found that my updated spreadsheets that were printable versions of whole years were part of the information that was unrecoverable from Realink in the layoff. Still, I had some older versions of the spreadsheet from Year -3, so I started to draw from it to make a printable one.

I noticed that 9/11/00 was the last day of year -3. I couldn’t remember if that was the 9/11, so I looked it up online and found out it was a year off. Because of the way my spreadsheet oh-so-cleverly calculates things, it was an easy matter for me to adjust it so that the last day of year -3 was 9/11/01. The change implied other things, shifting the entire calendar up 365 days. Some of the personal events that moved to dates that made more sense I will not detail, but for instance, with the new alignment, Year Zero would start on Cinco de Mayo next year, Year One would start on the first leap day on the new millenium, and based on my already established rules for interpreting annual holidays (whatever day they fall on in the first positively numbered year arbitrarily becomes the new day for them to continue on) Actually puts Christmas on the first day of the year, every year; The first day of year 2 would be 12/25/04. It also puts my birthday at nine days after Christmas.

Maybe I’ve been right, though. The way I’ve been calculating things before, Christmas always falls on the last day of the year, and the first leap day of the farmer’s millenium falls on a meaningless day in the second week of the third month of year 2, and the day ********** declares war on the US is a meaningless day in month ** of Year 1, instead of ****************** I guess I’m not saying….

Nevermind.

What am I still doing up? Shouldn’t I be sleeping and/or doing homework instead? I guess I’m trying to hurt my Drawing performance. Maybe I’m just crazy.

Cable TV Gone Bad

Wow, reading that title for this post makes me think I’m going to say something about the programming on Cable TV. Like, somehow something on Cable TV was morally objectionable. Except than I remember who I am, and realize that there isn’t much that offends me in the world (see earlier post about art teacher telling me my motivations are incorrect for an example).

Anyway, I was sitting here waiting for my cable box to reboot, reset, and let the servers know it had reset, and I thought I’d post, since my cable modem is on a split, filtered boosted, re-filtered, unboosted line and I have internet access whether or not I have cable TV now. What I wanted to post about was this thing I just figured out:

The Bartending Academy’s commercial is a corrupted digital file, and it likely contains a virus.

I noticed some time ago that The Bartending Academy’s ads don’t have sound anymore, and are often accompanied by digital visual corruption. It wasn’t until just a few moments ago that I noticed that it was the third or fourth time I’d seen my cable box become unstable during a Bartending Academy commercial and then crash as soon as I hit a button that affected the cable box. And by crash, I mean total crash. The little LED screen that normally shows the time or the channel actually manages to say “ER:oR” before it goes to static. And I don’t mean the TV screen goes to static; the LED briefly displays static, then shuts off. The TV goes black, after a moment the logo of the company that made the software that is hard-wired into the box, as it resets itself to factory presets, comes up and disappears.

Note: it is then up to fifteen minutes before the box has fully restored itself to factory presets, identified itself to the network, and is allowed to decode the signals of channels above 22.

I wonder who I should call at Cox to complain about a corrupt ad.