Entries from June 2010 ↓

One of my classes, a health and wellness class, just had me take a general wellness/health/esteem inventory.

I failed, and I’m sad now. I think the point of the test was to reinforce feeling good or to point out how I can feel better, but instead it just gave me sarcasm. “Are you really trying?”

To be fair, I’m not sure this is the best test. Mandatory religion, assuming I both have a job and it’s not one I picked out of desperation, and way too much focus on self-esteem. But I failed, and the self-esteem score is probably lower as a result of harsh external judgment.

“Guys always talk free at one eight hundred free love! (Messages cost between 99 cents and 1.99 depending on carrier Sprint and Nextel customers 19.99 a month subscription fee applies.)”

Yeah, a dollar a text sounds like free to me. Okay, I know, if you’re sad enough to go for sexy text messages from someone who doesn’t even have to try and sound attractive you’re probably not that concerned at paying a buck for 160 characters or less, but still. You’d think they’d hide the fees at least when two seconds ago they proclaimed how it’s free.

You’ve seen this, no doubt. Every time you load up say, Robot Unicorn Attack, you get an interstitial ad with the “Please wait, your game is loading” tag.

Bullshit.

My game isn’t loading. I know my game isn’t loading because it’s already cached. Or because when the ad ends, I get to a screen showing zero percent loaded. I could also talk about how convenient it is that the game never fails to load right as the ad ends, couldn’t I? But the truth of the matter is always that we’re being lied to for no reason. Why not a “This ad pays the bills. Wait 30 seconds and then you get your game.” Or “Your video is loaded, but bandwith costs money”? I’d support that for sure. Who wouldn’t? We’re…

Nevermind, this is the internet. Most of the adults act like 13 year olds on a good day, especially if a microphone is involved. Resume lying.

I’ve gone from E. Coli right into tremendous amounts of schoolwork, papers I would have had a week to do generally, but now have nearer…a day. One of them is talking about myself, the other is talking about my health.

You know, I’m pretty sure I could cut and paste from this website and cover the first, and…well, expand on my E. Coli week for the second. I probably shouldn’t, and probably won’t because I hate myself, but it’s good to know I could.

I’m weak, I’m battered, I’m beaten. I’m lethargic, energyless, unshaven, in desperate need of a shower, but I’m alive. Barely. Turns out no matter how many Ensures you drink, when you’re not digesting a damn thing for four days, you’re going to need a day or two to rebuilt.

Particularly when day one was the special kind of vomiting where I threw up at least seven times. Not just the “HURNK okay done” kind, either. The “HRNK. HRRRRRRRRRRNK. HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNK. Okay…okay I’m empty, I HRRRRRRRRRRRRNK oh god I can’t HHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRNK breathe HRRRRRRRRRRRRNK nothing… is even HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNK” kind.

At fever’s peak, I could clearly enough hallucinate a headstone saying “You have died of dysentery.” I can’t remember if it was before or after I tried to caulk the wagon and float across.

Turns out it’s a lot like chemo. A full day of horrid, violent vomiting, two days of bowel-emptying diarhea. If there’s ANYTHING left anywhere in my digestive tract that’s not mucus or Gatorade I’m amazed.

I’m also amazed I’ve typed this much, because I feel like I’m going to throw up for having sat up so long.

Despite the fact that in high school, college 1.0, or work at the airport I could eat anything put in front of me, I actually have to watch what I eat these days. I’m not sure it’s a lack of durability from my stomach, though. Rather, I suspect it’s because as that point I ate nothing but crap. My body knew how to handle crap, because hey, that’s what they served in the cafeteria. Clear-paper pizza with greasy fries, every day. That was the healthiest and least culinarily risky option at any given point, which is a sad thing.

At the airport, well, airport food. Any Burger King which has food so greasy it turns a whopper wrapper into a piece of saran wrap is not a good thing, but it was the option.

Now my eating habits have changed thanks to maturity and marijuana. I’ll eat a salad, most of my food is fresh, even the crap. I make my own pizzas on naan with a Foreman grill! And it turns out I will never, ever again eat Hamburger Helper, because I just spent so long on the toilet my legs went numb. Alas, another food marked off the list forever, with the vast majority of sodas, KFC, and McDonald’s.

Life has no time for studying, obviously. I certainly tried to make time today, for these two rather boring textbook chapters. Really, even by textbook standards.

Instead, I got a surprise phone call. “We’re moving and we need help. Immediately. Anything we don’t get out of the house by tonight has to stay.”

Planning ahead and moving, they don’t seem to work together often. At least I hate studying anyway, but I really should at least make sure I’ve got the answers to the in-book quiz answers down. If I’ve got those I’ve likely got the rest of it. And I can appreciate the irony that a textbook on communication has some of the most poorly communicated concepts I’ve read in years.

Microsoft seems to be dropping the ball on this one. The most recent Xbox update provided the ability for players to save their gamertags to a USB drive, a great idea for those who play on the go since tag recovery can take an hour easily. Unfortunately within a few days, people figured out how to hack the files to change their displayed names (often to something spectacularly racist), or even unlocking additional prestige levels in Call of Duty. Live had been reasonably free of hacking thanks to the closed nature of the system, but a good idea has gone horribly wrong quick.

Unlike hardware hacks, this isn’t such an easy detection, and I’ve seen no official comment on the problem. Here’s hoping Ryan Treit, aka Treit and True, addresses the problem or Mircrosoft expands the mod teams to deal with this. Most of the gamertag hackers, afterall, just can’t seem to resist flaunting it via colorful display names or ones using system symbols.