Ree’s musings

Today my local temperature should break 100°F. Thank God for central air conditioning. (Or maybe thank the guy "downstairs," if you're a Dogma fan.)

Finally got over a failed web design idea. That let me rearrange the same material into something that looks more balanced, resizes better, and is probably better suited to viewing on non-computer devices. Even my bad ideas lead to good stuff!

The other day, I transferred over 400 links from an online service (that lacked an export function) into my del.icio.us. Over four hundred. I am unhappy about this.

Shouldn't an export function for a link list be super easy to make? The entire information for one link is: URL and link title (and possibly, depending on the service, brief description and/or tags). It would be a tiny file -- so why can't the server generate that file and let me walk away with it? The file doesn't even have to be in an export format that can be imported into my browser or another online service (although that would be fabulous). All I'm after is a way to get information that I have collected online, and copy it from the server to my hard drive. Oi.

The thing is, I copied those 400+ bookmarks, one at a time, into del.icio.us and promptly backed up my del.icio.us account. After that, I realised I might have a few more stashed in another online service, so I checked. And discovered another dozen folders of bookmarks.

If all the links can by displayed in one page, along with all the metadata I assigned them (like the Tabulas links page works), I can just do File -> Save As to copy them. That's fine. But when I have to go through each category, like this particular service forces me to?

I get cranky.

I have discovered the craziest thing: a group on Facebook dedicated to the proposition that my last name is the best name ever. In it, I have found a discussion of the exact mispronunciations telemarketers use, and how that's a handy screening device. There is also at least one comment to date saying that women of this surname are the most attractive! It's quite a switch from the usual, "So... how do you say (or spell) that?"

Between that and Scrabulous, I am beginning to see what my similarly-surnamed cousins see in Facebook.

I'm so twitchy right now. No more caffeine for the rest of the day, to prevent more twitchiness, and it's not even eight o'clock WTF brain!

So. My autumn semester started Monday. I found out a little after midnight Sunday night that there was a problem with one of my classes. I had not been aware of any problem until then; I have a sneaking suspicion I should have known it, but nothing I've been sent about school has any indication of this totally annoying problem.

It is now Wednesday morning and I am finally contacting somebody to help me about this. Yes, that's from Sunday to Wednesday without doing anything. No, I'm not very happy with myself about it, either. No, it could not have been helped -- much; the situation was unavoidable but I did aggravate it when I should have been resolving it.

I think in my head, the yeses and nos above are addressed at my mother, who is going to be deeply disappointed in me when she finds out, and I mean deeply disappointed as only a mother can be. If you were ever a rotten kid/teenager who did something really stupid, and instead of being punished, had a parent tell you, "I'm not angry. I'm just sad" -- that is exactly what I'm dreading.

I'm still angry at myself for emailing instead of phoning, but I think I've been it off till now in part because my timing blows and in part because I really hate phoning strangers. Email is not phoning strangers, therefore I am more apt do it, and and some point this whole "getting over the phone thing" has been eclipsed by non-phone-thing urgency.

I notice that on some level, I am still explaining this to mom-in-my-head instead of to my general blog-reading public. How vexing for us all -- and I'm including my real mother in that "us."

At least the solution is in motion and my twitches have mostly faded. That won't stop me from compulsively checking my email every few minutes to look for a reply, but I'm still better off today than yesterday.