start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

Finally getting around to replacing the batteries in a clock that seems to have slipped from telling the correct time to still telling time several hours out. Surprised to find that it did seem to be continuing to run when I thought they normally just stopped and had the second hand ticking between two points.
But then finding out that the nail has gone into the wall which is presumably not much stronger than being plaster with nothing actually solid to it. NOt sure what you make a dividing wall out of but still hoping it would be a bit more solid.
So now got to work out how to get at the thing and get the nail out. It's a few feet up on the wall behind the kitchen sink so not the easiest to get at.
So loadsa fun

So yeah wondering why a clock manages to stop long enough to rest its time when its just been sitting on a wall. Though it did appear to have some kind of web stuff across the back of it when I took it down.
& why walls are soft enough to allow nails to sink in them up to the head while you're trying to maneuvre a clock onto them where the clock's hung since it was bought a couple of years back. Blooming useless innit?

reset it's time (to one about 4 1/2 hours out) while it's just sitting on a wall with nobody actually resetting it. But continue to run for at least a week afterwards.

I've noticed my watch will stop for several minutes to several hours when the battery is getting low. And then start up again as if it's OK.

Clocks with hands seem to struggle when the batterys low, well mine does anyway, I guess because on the 6-12 upswing of the second hand it hasnt enough power to move the mechanics against gravity? At least thats how my clock on a stand behaves when the battery is low.

Saw the trailer for the "Independence Day" sequel and there's some scene where Jeff Goldblum is looking at some huge offscreen thing and says, "It has its own gravity." EVERYTHING HAS ITS OWN GRAVITY, MOTHERFUCKER. I wanted to punch the TV screen and, having thus punched, have the writer say, "Ow!"

Mozilla Firefox giving me some nonsensical propagandistic BS about how great it goes with Windows 10 on the day I have continual trouble with it.
Can't get beyond a dialogue box asking if I want it to try to stop script. Doing nothing when pressed and then popping up again.
Should I go back to Windows 7?

Ipad app that wont work unless i update it, when there us no update available

people who give innocuous news stories the Snopes-like treatment whenever there's one minor discrepency

People who ask you to spell your name for them 4 times while you're holding out your ID card to them

People who misspell your name in an email reply despite the fact that your correctly-spelled name is clearly visible in the email they're replying to.

people, basically

fuckin slow driving idiots who don't actually merge but just drive very slowly all the way down the merge lane til it disappears and just assume that the traffic will magically part for them

As someone who's largely a non-motorist, I am with you on that 100%. They deserve to be shamed by car after unyielding car until they run out of gas and have to walk.

this is a small one, but people who suggest doing things outdoors, or like "maybe we could meet in the park" when it's 6 degrees outside, just because it happens to be sunny. like just give it a month and it'll actually be warm.

I'm kinda that way with people who always want to do things outdoors anytime it's nice out, too. Like, ugh, what am I, a pioneer? And I've seen the sun like a couple thousand times now, I'm not a baby who lacks object permanence and squeals with delight every time it peekaboos at me. Let's just be real: most of the good stuff is indoors anyway.

I exaggerate only slightly.

People hate me cos I always insist on the outdoor beer garden/back courtyard at the pub even in winter... but, I'm a smoker, so deal with it.

maybe you should deal with it

otoh yr winter isn't that xtreme, so whatever. thanks for coming inside that one time i met you!

I thnk back then we could still smoke inside anyway haha! :)

But yeah its not like its ever subzero.

go outside it's a nice day, thanks MUM

i love any chance to go outside if it's nice weather, because I work inside 8 hours a day in my apt.

but 6 degrees, fuck that.

professional newborn photos where the baby is pushed into a position it cannot get into itself such as putting its head in its hands with elbows on the ground

Take your kid to work day

Is this actually a thing? I dont think Ive ever worked places that do it... how would it work, having dozens of bored toddlers/tweens/etc in the way?

Thinking about it it seems to be an outmoded idea since the idea of a lifelong career is a thing of the past isn't it/ therefore trying to get the next generation interested early must be too.
& I would have thought that was one reason for its origins.

I've taken my kid to Take Your Kid To Work Day in the past. My employer would have big educational programs where the kids all go off and do fun science activities (I work for a scientific institution). Other times he would just want to shadow me at my desk, but YES the boredom set in for him within the hour. And I made sure to bring books, activities, toys, a tablet... So I'd take off from work early and we'd go run around DC together. After the first year, I would just treat it as a Personal Leave day and tell my colleagues in advance that I would be there but not to expect anything from me.

He doesn't want to go anymore now that he's a tween, but one of my friends brought her teenage grandson in this year. He seemed pretty bored too.

Lots of kids in my building in NYC yesterday. In the elevator on my way down for lunch there was a man who'd obviously grown up in the south having a conversation with someone. During a pause one of the kids in the elevator asked "Why do you have a country voice?"

Having been partially responsible for software updates and rollouts at my previous job and recalling the lengths to which we went in trying to make these kinds of transitions as smooth as possible for the end users, it is simply mindblowing the way my current company works. People are baffled this morning that the systems they use every day aren't working, and an IT dude is casually strolling down the aisles all like, oh yeah you can't do things that way anymore because we switched over to this whole other way of doing things. I'm not directly impacted in this instance but I'm infuriated nonetheless. It's sad that I, of all people, find myself frequently decrying unprofessional behavior, but here we are.

Odd thing today, some idiot refused to let me onto a lift up to a Job Club thing i was on today. He said I was scaring his daughter.
I only just twigged that he was just being a prick who thought i looked vaguely muslim thanks to dark skin and beard.

Funy since the guy himself was Eastern European from his accent.
But I think everybody who is darker than nordic blonde caucasian is probably getting that from some idiot these days.

At least I'm not an oriental I guess, or being called one.

I remember some idiot thinking i was bosnian before I stopped living in Dublin.
Find that pretty weird being half black with dreads and stuff.

damn that's fairly rational anger I'd say. fuck one xenophobia, esp of the 'mistaken identity' variety.

Found out I have spent about 80 hours working on something that has absolutely no value. I want to take the christmas champagne from the cupboard and walk out drinking it

Trying to work out if a dying CFL bulb dies slowly by turning off completely for several seconds then coming back to full brightness. Or if I have a wiring problem.
Problem also being that I have a new landlord that has made no contact so far. &I've been told old managing agency are no longer looking after the place.
Weird smell around the room last night too which might suggest it was a wirng problem. Light just switched off several times, was off for a couple of seconds then turned back on to normal brightness. Last time it happened it was off longer. Other electric stuff stayed on. & interval between it going off seemed random and hours long. I'm only place on my power supply so can't see how it's being effected.
Is that normal CFL expiring behaviour or should I be worried?

i had one in my bathroom that would come on, then dim suddenly, then get gradually brighter. it failed completely soon afterwards. i ended up buying a new LED lightbulb, 1/6th the energy usage for the same brightness, 25 year lifetime (about 4x more expensive than traditional bulb). vg, would buy again. i had trouble finding one as bright as the one it replaced though, ended up shuffling a few around until i was happy with what was where.

lights are typically on a different circuit to other electricity.

THanks, might just sort outif i can get up to the light fitting and change the bulb. ceiling is pretty high in this room. So getting at the actual wiring may not be taht easy. & the light fitting socket itself needs a ladder to get up to.
I don't remember when I've had to replace one of these things in this room, that one may have replaced a normal lightbulb or may have replaced another CFL.
Just surprised by this seeming to die, or like somebody had actually turned it off, then coming back on to normal, staying like that for an hour or 2 then doing something similar again. It stayed off abit longer the last time. Then came back on again.
I tried it this morning , thinking that it might just blow when the switch was turned on since normal lightbulbs tend to but it came on as normal.

So hoping a new one works ok. Especially since i have no idea who I need to get hold of about wiring if that was teh problem.
Previous landlord changeovers have been accompanied by letters announcing them and saying who one needs to get hold of etc. Now we've just seen a sign saying the Blocks been sold and another tenant said they tried to get onto the previous management agency to find something out to be told that the block was no longer under their supervision.

I've also had CFLs bulbs that start dim when I turn them on and then get brighter, so it's likely just the bulb is at the end of its life. The smell may be from the bulb, like a flourescent tube's ballast going bad (that burned paper smell).

The worst are those recessed lighting bulbs, they do that all the time and short out inside of 6 months, at least in my experience. Once, my flatmate went into the bathroom and the overhead recessed bulb full on exploded and showered him in tiny glass shards :/

people who go to parking garages where there are clearly two different lanes in which they can pick up a ticket, and everybody files into ONE lane. mostly cos at Pointe Orlando, when they do that it causes a bottleneck and then you often can't squeeze by to get into the empty lane, due to the way its designed.

Wondering if it is a constant any time you have a film made in any specific location you're familiar with to be wondering why the film's geographical logic doesn't follow the real one.
Sat and watched a show yesterday where a plot point hinged on a teen having to wait for a bus home to a location that was about 50 feet away from where he was standing.
So wondered if that was true with somebody any time there was external shooting in any film.

Or is it all supposed to be covered by suspension of disbbelief or artistic license or something.

teens r lazy

Yeah, I used to get amazed on the crowds of teens/young students waiting for the bus into the university which was about a 10 minute walk away, back when I lived on that side of town. But that is another point.

Thought it weird also that if the teen was standing where he was standing waiting for a bus on the actual service he was waiting on he'd get to the end stop in a 10 minute walk. But there you go

So wondered if that was true with somebody any time there was external shooting in any film.

This happened to me when watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, since the big Sam Jackson car chase sequence near the beginning makes no geographical sense whatsoever. In fact, it starts and ends at the same intersection in downtown Cleveland.

Wondering if it is a constant any time you have a film made in any specific location you're familiar with to be wondering why the film's geographical logic doesn't follow the real one.
Sat and watched a show yesterday where a plot point hinged on a teen having to wait for a bus home to a location that was about 50 feet away from where he was standing.
So wondered if that was true with somebody any time there was external shooting in any film.

There is a poetry slam movie set in DC where one of the slam scenes in a club is set in Fez, under the old Time Cafe in Manhattan. At one point the protagonist runs out of the club and across town to the...Lincoln Memorial.

This is why I could never watch the Blues Brothers with my stepdad from Chicago.

Blues Brothers is mostly accurate, iirc.

He saw the sign for the funeral home where they first get stopped and went nuts when they suddenly appeared inside the Dixie Square Shopping Center.

I get the same way during Smokey & The Bandit, so who am I to point fingers.

Ha, yeah, forgot about that. That would be like an hour-long chase.

A friend of mine lived near the Dixie Square in 1979-80, which was closed at the time. Suddenly one day it appeared open, lit up, and fully-stocked. Two days later, closed again. He thought he'd imagined its phantom reopening until he saw the Blues Brothers months later and realized it was done for the filming.

This shit is worse when you live in a country like Australia or Canada and your country gets used as a cheap stand-in for America; recognisible Melbourne or Sydney or Toronto landmarks are supposed to be somewhere in downtown Bumfuckville, USA

yeah there was that Jackie Chan one (Mr nice guy, I think?) where he'd run into Block Arcade in the CBD, and emerge from some random spot in Fitzroy or some crap.

I get cravings for candy at movies. But don't want a whole box of the shit. The Regals near me always have 50 cent candy machines. I always have singles and no change. There is always a change machine next to them

None of them ever. Fucking. Work.