Administrative: displayed name change

Old: Azure/Pufferfish (the words that I can't say)
New: Azz (shot right through with a bolt of blue)

Too late, too early

Made fudge. Fudge did not work as well as it should have; it crystallized. Alas. Dad explained how you had to be very careful with that, but I did it wrong. I'll try again sometime.

When I was leaving, there was a skinny little cat on top of the car next to mine. It licked me and rubbed my hand. I don't know if it was stray or just out and friendly.

Tired. Stiff from too much floor internet. Moody and slightly sorrowful that there are things that many people have that I probably won't wind up having full-time. But I had what I had, and it was beautiful, and now it's time for me to see what else I can be.

And a nice shower has improved my mood. It'll do things like that, you know?

I've been in love. I've been a secondary parent for a while. I've been deeply depressed, and I still have to keep vigilant that I don't return there, because I never want to be there again. V said to me once that I've already had so many adventures that if I stopped right now, I'd still have enough to write about for the rest of my life. I know that. But I want to see what else there is. Cordelia listed off her litany of roles she had played in her life to Elena, and perhaps I'll take Elena's part.

I've had the brilliant happiness that some people will never, ever know in a relationship -- and I managed it without even quite the relationship. That's what I'm taking from this. It would be too easy to get annoyed and bitter and try to bury all traces of what once might have been, but I still have two solid things that came out of this: I have my memories of the sheer joy and brilliance that happens when I'm madly in love, and I have a best friend who's seen me through all kinds of crazy situations (and I've seen him through a few too). Those are both treasures, and they're freely mine to keep and cherish.

Qwest! Cellphone!

I am on hold with Qwest about the dead cellphone. Fortunately, I'm on hold with an *agent*, not waiting for one. Unfortunately, it's about a 30 second loop of hold music.

legomymalfoy sympathized with me at this point, due to her past experience with them.

Their IVR has improved. I lost my cellphone back in May, and the dude said that since the contract was about to run out anyway, there was no need for me to get back to them if I decided I did not want to re-green*. THIS WAS APPARENTLY WRONG. So I'm on hold seeing if they can take care of the month that I was billed for that I didn't have any intention of using and thought I didn't have, or if we have to dispute it with billing.

Oh, hooray! They were able to take care of it. The agent apologized for the long hold, but if it's a long hold resulting in the charges being credited back to me, I'm so not complaining. Though I did inform her that the hold music is about a 30 second loop of the same song, so it's great for very quick holds, but it is not great for a hold longer than about a minute, and if she could please pass that up the management chain.

I bought a more-minutes card for the prepaid cellphone last night, so once that gets in, I should be good to go. Don't know if it's eating pictures or not, though. I got a shot or two yesterday that I was trying to send out, but that did not end well.

---

* Re-green: literally, LiveJournal Support Volunteer slang for the act of a customer responding to an answered support request in a way that is not closing the request. This derives from the color coding on the Support message boards, where the color of a new (unanswered) Support request is green, the color of an answered request is a beige or yellow, and the color of a "still needs help" request is (once again) green. Given that it's slang and we're a very informal group at heart to start with, "re-green" has passed into the non-support-specific slang pool of the support and surrounding people to mean to re-open, renew, refill, make needing attention again, or return to near-original state after being what we thought was done, finished, completed, or all gone. And the definition is nearly longer than the actual entry!

(And speaking of re-green, there are some things that are good when re-greened, like those really tasty appetizers. There are some things that are not good when re-greened, like the swimming pool.)

(no subject)

2007.07.03 What if the Army had to have a bake sale?

12:55
I have guilt about not meeting my shared writing committments. I also have a tasty cupcake and some peanut butter fudge, with an appointment with some geek or other to reinstall crap on my machine. Oh, and database insanity. Before I even try to upload crap, I need to see if/how I can install support for non-paid break in all the stuff and things.

Oh, and then there's the thing I've been meaning to say whenever I see a couple specific new volunteers in channel. I Am Not A SupportHelp (or Op), but I observed that at least one new person came in with a nick of their name (or what they prefer to be addressed as), rather than their username, and (at different times) several different ops greeted them directly and wanted to know who they were. And I noticed that the person I was thinking of may have interpreted this as "I should have my nick be my username". But just looking around the channel, there are quite a few people whose nicks and usernames don't match up. I know that sometimes there's a level of paranoia in channel about unfamiliar names coming in, but once the new person is identified as Someone Who Has Business Hanging Out There (like a new volunteer or someone with an alternate nick or a friend-of who has reason to be there), doors open, ops and SHs smile, and all is good.

1:12 PM 7/3/2007
Meh.

1:13 PM 7/3/2007
Remote geek couldn't connect. Alas.

1:22 PM 7/3/2007
omg, microsoft infopath. I've never played with this before, but omg. forms creator.

1:41 PM 7/3/2007
I want Visio, but at the moment maybe Word will have to do. (shudder.)

1:52 PM 7/3/2007
One world's loss is another world's gain. When one asshat bricks up a door, someone punches out a window.

2:34 PM 7/3/2007
Gods but I dislike dealing with spammers.

2:41 PM 7/3/2007
http://brainofck.livejournal.com/208580.html -- I can't read this at work. It's a remix, and the original author calls the remix "scorching hot", and is flailing.

2:50 PM 7/3/2007
Really, any comm with multiple active maintainers doing their thing, where they need to coordinate in some fashion, probably needs a community solely for administrative coordination.

4:46 PM 7/3/2007
I'm happy with my documentation today. It makes me happy. I went through the list of my action queries and figured out a) what they did, and b) in what order they should be done. And that is a good thing, and I like that.
The bake sale looks like it was good. Management brought cupcakes baked in ice cream cones. Very cute, but also very bizarre. They would have been better in waffle cones, I think, because waffle cones are not only made out of waffle, they are also made out of win. You cannot argue with both waffles and win. Well, you can, but that would wind up being a holy war. We don't like holy wars around these parts so much.
Can has faith. After a month to adjust, and then Ro smacking me hard on the head in the right way, I have a solid core of faith in the situation again. I have a hard time describing it in words that aren't feelings. Picture a container of cookies & cream ice cream, the one with the Oreos and the vanilla ice cream. You know how occasionally you find a lump of the creamy filling in the ice cream, a lump without surrounding chocolate, and it's just so perfectly sweet and creamy and different from the surrounding material? That's how this faith feels, except with less in the way of lactose and scary amounts of sugar and ingredients that really do bad things to the health. I have a best friend, and he has me, and no matter what else happens in our lives, we'll have each other unless we choose to let go. I chose to hang on, and I chose that long ago.

5:12

User brings up a good point: the standard "use a client to edit tags faster" doesn't work all the time -- comms where they didn't make the post and the client's trying to edit the whole post.
The original Support request.

What I want to know -- I know I have a lot of assorted LJ/code geeks on the friends list. There's clearly a massive demand for a retagging client. A client with a standard editor has now been documented to not work on retagging comms. I never even thought of this. (I don't think this is standard knowledge in Support, either, because it's a fun intersection of tag/client/comm.) Does anyone feel like writing a client that will retag properly? It wouldn't have to be mass retagging at once (in fact, I bet the engineers would prefer not) but it would have to edit tags only, and work with comms, and should have a "retag and make no changes" feature paired with a quick back-forward. I can't speak for LJ as a whole, but I know that lots of people would LOVE YOU FOREVER, or at least until the next killer app came out.