Looks like they changed the rules of the mailing list without telling me, and then deleted me from the approved senders list this morning! I unsubscribed and no more headache for me.

Come to think of it, I never did volunteer to be the “Vice-President of Communications” for the local MIT alumni club. I was asked to do it by a guy who was tired of it, and no wonder. At the same time I also was volunteered to keep track of a few cross-university alumni club mailing lists, and all I got was grief. I mean, Stanford University was already near the top of my list of west coast jackass factories when this Stanford alum told me, “arrogant functionary. we’ll meet some time. watch your back,” because I asked the list to see if a newcomer had the proper qualifications to join the list. I guess everybody in Portland is supposed to know who the Stanford grads are and just bow down before them.

Today I forwarded on an event to the MIT group mailing list and I was told, “This is spam. Do not use this list for forwarding these events.” I’m sorry, but whether or not it’s spam is MY call, or it will be for a while longer. It looks like they changed the passwords for the alumni club web site without telling me, so I may have my job taken away. I know that MIT alumni aren’t the most socially well-adjusted people, so it might just be better that I stay away from them.

I went over to help a friend’s dad with his computer. The main problem was getting the modem working. Of course, that took me all of about 5 minutes, and then we tried getting his sound card working. Two hours later, we gave up. He really just wanted the modem working so he could get online.

Later in the day, I was over at my sister’s, trying to get her wireless router working. I got it working in five minutes, then decided to change the password on the wireless. Of course, that only wasted a half hour of my time, so I decided to upgrade the firmware on the router. Another half hour. Well, now my brother-in-law can use his laptop upstairs, but yeesh, it’s supposed to be easier than that.

Oh, so friend 1 told me to try to meet chicas on Friendster. He has 18 friends there. Friend 2 who has 37 friends there told me that sure, you can meet chicks there, but you’re gonna meet chicks who really want to meet other chicks, if you know what I mean. This probably explains why I can find some of my gay friends there when I can’t find them anywhere else. (Except for the ones who are still hiding from me, and you know who you are Terry Pribble.)

So, I’m not much of a planner, so the fact that I had a couple of things lined up for Friday night was kind of a surprise. In fact, on Wednesday I knew I was supposed to meet with Dave the trainer and meet Il for dinner or something. Well, they both bailed on me. Dave is redoing his girlfriend’s deck and had to meet with a contractor, and Il claimed he wasn’t feeling so hot. So I headed to the gym.

Well, the gym wasn’t so bad, but nobody seemed to be as friendly (or so it seemed to me) and the high point of the night was that I finally got to watch an episode of “Numb3rs.” It wasn’t all that great.

Oh, and I was told at megacorp that what I’d been doing for the past couple of days was nonsensical and useless. I hope things seem better after I get some sleep.

OK, I’m limited on the “wit” part, but let me live with my fantasy, OK? Sorta like some of the women at the gym. Turns out the surly woman is back and I think her name is Megan. And I talked to someone who was watching the marathon at mile 12 and her name is Megan. And then there’s my friend whose dad I was supposed to call back and her name is Megan. Why am I listing Megans? I have no real idea.

What I was really going to mention is the fantasy woman at the gym, who I’ve never spoken to and who works out a LOT. She dresses like a hairdresser. Or, in other words, kinda stylish and kinda nutty. Well, I wanted to be a hairdresser when I was in high school, so there you have it. I still have no idea what point I was trying to make.

My trainer, Dave, went to a trainer’s conference in NYC and came back with all sorts of new ideas and silly looking exercises using the medicine ball and the Swiss ball. Not only do they look simple and silly, hey all involve a lot of balance and use of small stabilizing muscles that most people don’t use. This made these simple looking motions very hard. For example, pushups on the ball. You have to keep yourself balanced on this wobbly thing while you’re doing the regular exercise. I wonder if they didn’t just sit around and figure out how to make people look stupid and still get paid for it.

Well, I suppose anyone who knows any Japanese would know that “gocco” means “playing” used in the sense of “playing house,” or “playing doctor” or in the case of my sister’s obsession, “playing printer.” So just calling the Print Gocco a Gocco is calling it “playing,” which is just plain ignorant. I mean geez, look at the frigging box. It says “RISO” in big letters since that’s the company and then under that, “Print gocco B6,” B6 being the size of the paper that you print on. Honestly, my sister is such a ‘tard sometimes. Now that I read her blog, I see she’s not the only one.

Ah, well, the print gocco I gave her is like fifteen years old. Lessee, I can figure this out. I had it for three years before I finally made some New Years cards on it for the Year of the Sheep. If 2003 was also the Year of the Sheep, then I must have used it in 1991 and bought the thing in 1989. So not only is the ink probably completely solid, but I think I used all the screens and flash bulbs. If there are still batteries in it, they’ve leaked all over the inside, too.

Well, I suppose that’s good enough for her “moron gocco.”

Today at megacorp I found out that my laptop had no more idea of what a network was. Just like the old days when there was no intarweb. It just sat there and worked merrily away but no email, no surfing, etc. How did I do that? Well, however I did it doesn’t matter, but it sure isn’t going to look good on any review I get.

My decidedly crazy pal Reid told me that Friendster is the place to look for online dating so I got on there and realized that all my “friends” were on orkut.com. I went on a mad search for people to add, and I think I found a couple including people I haven’t talked to for a long time. Well, I want to hear any gossip they have so I suppose that wasn’t so bad.

I finally got some deadlines, etc, at megacorp and some longer-term tasks to work on. But I was so tired today I forgot that I asked the project lead for some more direction until I saw what I had typed in my message to him. When I got home I realized that I’d destroyed all networking in my laptop. Oh, boy. I’m in big trouble.

I guess I didn’t make it clear that my mom’s doing fine. The doc prescribed antibiotics during our 3-minute visit and off we went. My mom’s feeling better and I survived my volunteer stint at the marathon.

The number of walkers appeared to be up while the number of runners seemed down. I guess the Chicago marathon was on the same day. Chicago is a lot faster marathon, so I bet more runners who could pick and choose decided to go there this year and log a faster time.

I went shopping with my sister and all I can remember is that I also took a nap. More sleep would probably be good.

And I’m not even running the thing. Every year (for about five or six years) I’ve volunteered to do radio communications, and I’ve been at Milepost 12. Well, this year I’m doing the same thing and I was just about to go to bed early when my mom showed me her swollen arm that was reacting to the pneumovax shot she got when she got a ‘flu shot. I called the advice nurse and she told me that:

1. anyone over 60 years old with a temperature over 101 should go to the emergency room (and she had a fever of 100.7 earlier in the day), and
2. any reaction greater than 2″ in diameter means a trip to the emergency room (and the swelling was about 3″ in diameter).

Well, volunteering in an ER for three years told me that a trip to the Emergency Room meant, “Hurry up and wait.” I told my mom to grab a book and the timeline was:

 

10:27 arrive at the ER and check in

10:50 go through triage

00:00 get a room back in the ER proper

00:20 get a visit from admitting (paperwork for payment)

01:00-01:03 talk to the doctor

01:45 finally get to bed

06:00 get up for the marathon volunteer thing

Wish me luck (and all I’m doing is standing in one spot for 5 1/2 hours.)

I had my “welcome to the group” lunch at Megacorp and we went to P.F. Chang’s. It was as bad as I expected. The “spicy” food was bland and tasted nothing like any Chinese food I’ve ever had. I think it was a focus-group-created whitey fantasy of Chinese food. Well, at least it was warm.

Anyway, on my way back from the gym I saw that the special at Joe’s Cellar was prime rib for $11.75. You can imagine what prime rib for $11.75 was like. Pretty good, actually!

And what was up with the gym tonight? Friday nights is usually four guys working out. Today there were hotties arriving as I left! Is it bikini season now that it’s raining?

The phone rang in my office for the third time since I’d been there and I was about to pick it up and say, “What do you want?” since I figured it was my sister. Fortunately, I didn’t because it was someone who was trying to screw up the paperwork where they have me reporting to the wrong person in megacorp.

But that wasn’t the silliest thing that happened. I had my LCD monitor delivered to my megacorp cubicle yesterday. It’s part of the office ergonomics thing: I’m not supposed to be looking down at my monitor all day like I usually do anyway. This kid came to deliver it and the first thing he did was spill my coffee all over my desk. Then he started moving things around and threw my notepad directly into the coffee puddle. I cleaned it up and he hooked up my monitor which did NOT work. In fact, it took another twenty minutes of fooling around after he left to get it to work.

So there you have it. I was about to say my ass hurt, but that covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it? (It’s really all about the leg press thing and how it makes my glutes sore, but it’s funnier to say my ass hurts.)