Celebrity tweets, treated to dramatic reading. This one features Courtney Love, Tila Tequila, and Jessica Simpson.Verified accounts, all. Sounds like a party!
You just know those poor actors are going: for this, I went to COLLEGE!
Category Archives: geek
in the name of Cthulhu and for the love of all that is holy has anyone seen this laptop cord????
Technical difficulties; the story of my life. And bitching about them publicly seems to be the key to success in my life. They were supposed to have ended nearly a year ago, when I arranged to buy Eve, my fantastic new (lightly used, only driven on Sundays, albeit by a Vangroover singleton, not a little old lady) laptop, a Dell Inspiron. It has bells! It has whistles! It has the machine that goes PING!
It has a dead laptop cord.
And, of course, they are available for sale. For almost exactly half of what I paid for the computer in the first place.
I went to ReBoot, my favorite little DTES computer bits and bobs shop. They were very sweet and went through all their cords and turned up blank. I went to FreeGeek, which I dare not do by myself since they’ve probably read what I’ve said about them (repeatedly, over the last three years) and would off me if I walked in without escort, so I got an intimidatingly-tall escort and away we went to the retail shop of Freegeek, where we were told “You want a laptop cord? You’ll have to wait till So-and-So gets back. He’ll be back in a half an hour. Maybe.” No, here’s the box, you can look through it yourself. No you can leave the model here and we’ll see if we have it. Nada.
I believe the technical term for this is “par for the course.” I do believe they mean well. I do believe they have a wonderful mission. And I have never, not once, seen them deliver that mission to anyone on the Downtown Eastside, although I have frequently offered my ear to my friends who have to vent about their experiences therewith.
I support them, I really do, I just wish they didn’t routinely suck.
Anyhoodlewinklewhatever, we rooted around for far too long anyway and So-And-So never showed up and they didn’t have the cord in any of the boxes we could get our paws on, nor did they seem to have any index of anything they had. Or if they did, they weren’t telling.
Which brings us to YOU!
Knowing as many people in the tech scene as I do, I have reasonable faith that one or more of you has, in that inevitable pile of plastic-coated macrame under your desk, a cord exactly like this except for the fact that it, you know, works. It is, of course, unlike every other cord on the face of the planet (certainly different from all of mine, and who thought we’d ever see the day when I have an extensive collection of laptop cords, eh? and a fine lot of good it has done me).
And the netbook I’ve borrowed from my friend Cathy Browne is, of course, unable to upload the pictures of the laptop cord, so I’ve had to wait a week and a half until Roland had the brilliant idea to take the chip and upload the pix to Flickr from a computer that could do that, which is really something I should have thought of myself, except that experiencing the internet by essentially looking through a straw has a way of limiting one’s vision over time.
And now, to the sexiest centerfold you’ll ever see (assuming you’re a retro-tech perv who doesn’t get out much):
Back of the brick of the power cord
Super duper closeup action of laptop cord brick wooo, exciting!
and this is what it looks like supine. Did you know that word, supine?
and another aspect:
the pointy bit Tab A which goes into Hole B in the computer
Three the hard way, the bit that goes into the brick
And that’s all she wrote, except that there’s a reward for the first person to solve this problem for me. I dunno what, but it’ll be nice, I promise. And unusual, considering the source. I ain’t got nuthin usual. I’m all out of it.
Cthulhu Collects
You think you’ve got it bad NOW? Imagine being audited by the ravening, tentacled mass of malevolent, soul-killing protoplasm which is the Great Cthulhu.
You think he’ll allow those pub crawl receipts? Do ya, punk?
Cthulhu comes to collect
via Pete Quily
Too Soon
I know we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have oft (and justly, perhaps) been accused of tastelessness, particularly around the subject of profound loss. To that we plead guilty, but we are not entirely without hearts (not even counting the ones in the freezer). If you bleed us, are we not pricks?
We are bloggers.
But we have weaknesses, we have feelings, we have tender moments, and not just because of the sunburn. There are some things about which we do not joke.
Gin.
Operation Global Media Domination.
And Pluto.
Too soon, man. Just too soon.
Housekeeping
I’m doing a little housekeeping in my meatspace space, otherwise known as offline, otherwise known as Operation Global Media Domination HQ, otherwise known as my office.
Now, originally my office was in my apartment, which looks like this, only without the vintage Burgess Meredith:
Then, one glorious day, I got a slot at Workspace, which looked like this:
but now Workspace is no more. Indeed, there I was, sitting at my desk, typing away (or more accurately I was surfing Gawker and monitoring drunken spats among my Followees on Twitter) at one in the morning, when a cheery Asian fellow walked in and started unplugging the routers and pulling the art down off the walls.
Normally, this would not bother me, but I quite liked that art and besides, I was only there because I was acting as a fierce, even vicious replacement for a guard dog, keeping Workspace safe for all the bloggers of Gastown, and I thought I should at least try to earn my keep.
I raised an eyebrow.
Apparently, I do so in a very menacing fashion, for he immediately began apologizing.
Aha, he’s Canadian! I thought. I’m very used to intimidating Canadian men (ask any of them): the only ones I can’t seem to intimidate are Albanians, but I think that’s just because they are too thick to understand the danger.
I got some mumbled excuse about “doing a changeover.” Well, sure, I’ve only been here a few weeks, I thought. Maybe they DO bring in fresh art in the middle of the night on Tuesdays. How would I know?
And so, because I am Canadian and, thus, good at rationalizing when faced with a polite young man in techie-approved cargo shorts, I let it go.
Well, almost.
In fact, I hit up the only cop I know on Twitter, which has the benefit that you can use it while the perp is still in the room and he probably thinks you’re just reposting a lolcat or some damn thing. Alas, the cop was away on vacation (and why doesn’t 911 have text input? Eh? Wouldn’t that be darn handy? Sure as tootin’ it would be!) and so my tweets went into the void.
More than usual, I mean.
So I go out to the kitchen to make myself a coffee, to find yet another guy packing up the espresso machine.
This was getting serious. You Do! Not! Fuck! With my right to espresso.
So Yet Another Guy was, in fact, someone I’d already met, again in the middle of the night at Workspace, and when I did he seemed quite startled to find me there. He told me he was the owner, and then farted around here and there, not doing any work, but also not settling down and doing any thing at all, just sort of haunting the place and keeping an eye on me. I outlasted him that time, and left with the dawn.
So I have, at this point: one stranger dude and one “I’m the owner. No, really” dude, and I’m getting a “this isn’t the whole truth” vibe off both of them. So what do I do?
I give them the espresso test.
“Gee, I was kinda hoping to make myself a coffee,” I say, wistful-like, for if there’s one thing any Vancouverite can sympathize with, it’s caffeine withdrawl.
Quick as a flash and quite palpably sincerely, Yet Another Guy offered to fire up the big, professional espresso machine that only the daytime pros get to use and make me a latte.
He passed the espresso test.
I mean, in all likelihood 40% of burglars in Vancouver have at least some barista training, even if they flamed out in the first week. Let’s face it: in all likelihood 40% of Vancouverites overall have barista experience, and the only reason it isn’t more is all the old people and babies. But they very rarely show visible familiarity with the machines they are trying to disconnect and cart off.
So, espresso test passed, I leave the guys to get on with their de-Workspacecombobulation.
The next day, Hummingbird604 tells me Workspace is kaput. Well, technically, kaputting on Friday. Whereupon I hit up Twitter and Facebook and start screaming all over the internets, looking for another sweet deal of the same nature or, really, just a swivel chair in some drafty hallway.
Will Blog For Shelter.
Which brings me to my new home: The Network Hub. Which looks like this:
which is a great deal more “Silicon Alley loft” and a great deal less “stunning view over the water to the mountains and inside there are always models wandering around” but still unquestionably more than I deserve. Hoping to move Eve the laptop and sundry papers over in the next 24 hours, and quite probably a wall hanging or two. Ah, I remember my first day at an office job for Starbucks; they were taking the new corporate accountant and partner relations manager around and introducing them, and I was pinning up a batik so I didn’t have to stare at the grey tweed of a cubicle all damn day, and I didn’t even get off the desk to shake hands. I think they were impressed.[oh well, it was good while it lasted (3 days?)]
Dooced!
More later…that’s a threat!
raincoaster 