Link soup:

Wherein a granny and a not-so-girly-girl mix it up in a store bathroom. Via metaquotes.

Babysitting a 6-year-old Harry Potter slasher. Via ataniell93.

One-liner from metaquotes: "I defy normal. I fly in the face of normal. I... I... fall in the pudding of normal. Often."

grifyn makes a practice of being disconcerting sometimes.

No Two Ovens Are Not On Fire. (Happy St. George's Day.)

After work, I stopped by the store, really to take advantage of the sale on area rugs (to save me precious deposit money later), but I got distracted by the pizza. So I brought home some frozen pizza. This will be great, I thought. I can stick the pizza in the oven, take a shower, eat my pizza and read LJ, then go straight to bed. So I came home, put away groceries, hauled the pizza stone out of the bottom drawer of the stove (it's the model that hasn't got a broiler below the oven, but a storage drawer instead), and that's where the presence of blue mold on the pizza stone should have clued me in as to how the rest of it was going to go. I should have given the whole thing up as a bad job and gone to bed. But no, I had to decide that I wanted pizza, dammit, and I wanted it now. I cleaned the pizza stone, preheated the oven, and carefully arranged the pizza on the stone while I waited for the oven to warm up...

My conversation with wibbble some half an hour later recounts the subsequent sequence of events fairly decently. (Edited for relevance & clarity.)

wibbble: I saw your post, and was considering if it would be wise to enquire further...
azurelunatic: Pizza, preheating oven. You can imagine what happened?
wibbble: Not so much with the 'pre' heating, as with the 'over' heating, leading to 'burning'?
azurelunatic: Worse/better. Note the "brand new" modifier.
wibbble: It needed to be broken in?
azurelunatic: ... What does one find inside brand-new, never-been-used, never-been-opened cookers?
wibbble: Bit of cardboard and plastic crap. Instruction manuals. If you're especially unfortunately, expanded polystyrene foam.
azurelunatic: I note in passing that it's deuced hard to RTFM when it's on fire.
azurelunatic: Read The Flaming Manual, perhaps.
wibbble: Read the Smouldering Remains of the Manual.
azurelunatic: No, the actual manual did not catch fire. It sounds funnier that way, though. It was actually just the little cardboard insert between the heating element and the floor of the oven. But that was bad enough. So when I opened it up to put the pizza in, I wound up doing the Unhappy Dance Of Juggling Pizza And Smouldering Paper Products.
azurelunatic: and the dance of OMFG It's On Fire.
azurelunatic: And the dance of OMFG It's 11:30PM And I Can't Let The Smoke Alarm Go Off.
azurelunatic: Which is directly related to the thing where I don't want my neighbors to kill me...
azurelunatic: So. Now that I've verified that I have an oven, and also verified that I really need to avoid putting the pizza stone away wet next time (good job I'm not allergic to penicillin), I can start cooking the pizza...

The pizza was, eventually, good. But probably not worth things catching on fire. D'oh.

To write up in more depth: attempted bribery.

Hey, amberfox, Cute Geek Super is now attempting to be a man-ho in exchange for craxx0r favors.

My lungs are mad at me for laughing so hard.

He wants to be sure that y'all know that this (the request for craxx0r help, the bribery) is all meant in good fun.

Huh?

*sigh*

Long day at work. Long, long, long day at work. Still
two and a half hours left for phone goons; at least
three and a half hours left for me.

System Down, Revisited.

So this morning I dragged my happy ass into work, and about fifteen minutes into the shift, the dialer went "Ploink!" due to ...

... geeze.

Who would have thought that the same *#@!$ automatic software update would kill the system AGAIN??

[Poll #480807]

Fortunately, now that the problem is a known issue, it only took a half-hour, fifteen minutes to get in touch with the IT guy on duty, and 15 for the system to come back up again.

Things from work today:

Picture this: a man wearing a Spiderman shirt, an eye patch, and a sticker of Spiderman leaping stuck on the eye patch. Superman Shirt Super has been re-named Comic Pirate Super. The eye patch is actually because of some minor surgery to remove something that would have been cancerous if it were allowed to stick around, but it adds to the effect. Since he has a hobby that keeps him in modest amounts of rum and parrots (a hobby having to do with DVDs, a burner, and the barter system, where "barter" is mostly limited to cash money or near equivalents), the nickname's appropriate. Now all he needs is the hat.

Cute Geek Super offered, yesterday, to take amberfox out to dinner if she would only crack the game for him (which offer of his had me in hysterics); he didn't want to mention the bit where "dinner" would be a cheesy fast food joint, and he was trying to downplay the whole "I know I have a girlfriend already, but this is business" angle. I hooted and hollered and pointed out that not only a) still not going to happen, but b) Texas. Cute Geek Super also tried the "A real hacker would do X just to prove s/he could if dared!" angle. I laughed harder.

Today's iteration of the cracking game involved Cute Geek Super cracking into Comic Pirate Super's hotmail account, through the good offices of the Hotmail lost password/reset function, as well as a lot of ham-handed social engineering. I did some Googling and came up with a description of the technique, then explained it to College Chick Shift Ops Super before Cute Geek Super had the account even half cracked.

Cute Geek Super has somewhat fewer general l33tness points than I first imagined; I'm going to have to introduce him to "All Your Base", as well as Strongbad. He's got fewer technical l33tness points as well.

The talk of cracking e-mail accounts turned into pranking e-mail accounts, which turned into subscriptions to gay porn. It's a heartily homophobic crowd there -- I need to liven things up some. I'm thinking a healthy introduction to goatse might be in order -- but alas, goatse.cx is no more as of this writing.

At 7:00pm, the discussion of whether or not Cute Geek Super had ever subscribed to gay porn was going strong, with the two major parties in the discussion being Cute Geek Super and Rev. Nice Super, both doing so at the top of their lungs. There was one problem with this: there was still one phone goon in the room and on the phone. Namely, Figment. After several abortive attempts to shush the combatants, I crept over there and apologized to my poor bondmate, who was almost through with the survey.

I think College Chick Shift Ops Super is catching on to the coincidence that the goofy grins on my face very often happen in association with something Figment-related. Heh. Ah well.