Apps!

Ridiculous Fishing

Universal
Genre: Fishing with guns
Price: $2.99

Ridiculous Fishing is ridiculous and awesome and you should get it right now. It’s one of those “oh just quick game” apps which will turn into you missing your bus stop and being awake at 3am and not paying attention during meetings because you are too busy fishing. Yes, it’s more expensive than your usual fare at $2.99 but a) it is worth it, b) that is still pennies on the entertainment value, and c) there are absolutely no ads and d) no in-app purchases. So much fun. So ridiculous.

Rando

Universal
Genre: Random Pictures!
Price: Free

Rando is a social picture app, sort of. Unlike Instagram, you don’t share pictures to a feed or your account – rather, you send one picture randomly to someone somewhere in the world. For each picture you send, you will (eventually) get one in return. You don’t know who you’re sending to or what you’ll get in return or where it’ll come from, and that’s all the fun – my friends and I have spent hours sending pictures into the ether and comparing what we get back. Some of the pictures are boring, some are interesting, and all of them are completely random. It’s worth a look for free!

Also, dear app developers – please do not do this:

what the fuck is wrong with you

If they’re trying to be funny, they desperately missed the mark. If I had paid for the app, I’d be asking for a refund. Instead, I simply deleted it, shared the outrage on Twitter, and left a review:

don’t ask me, i’m just a girl

I have someone on the inside looking into this situation .. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it. In the meantime, please don’t support developers that pull shitty stunts like this. There are so many other developers that deserve your downloads and love .. these guys are not among them.

I feel like I haven’t eaten a meal made in my own kitchen in four months.

My American Chris was in town for the past four days, so we did a lot of delicious eating out. It was super fun (and super expensive), but I am really going to enjoy the next week or so of cooking and eating at home and also having things that are not poutine. I usually have poutine once or twice a year, and this past week I had it twice .. that’s enough for now. I plan to eat a lot of salad in the upcoming week. My arteries feel like gravy.

We did have lots of fun with Chris though, even given the awful weather. Naturally, things got beautiful the minute we had to drop him off at the train station and it’s kind of gorgeous outside today (lousy Smarch weather) – our timing sucks. Instead of doing fun outdoor things, we did fun indoor things instead like visit the Vancouver Aquarium with every grubby child in the Lower Mainland, but I got to splash in mud puddles, and take a lot of pictures, and here are some of them:

i love jellyfish like i love snails.

here is a turtle.

plz appreciate this photo because monkeys are damn hard to take pictures of what with the movement and constant poo flinging

penguin guard duty

tiny and poisonous, just like me

the rare and elusive american christophericus internetus

Man, I love the aquarium. The next After Dark event is on June 9th, and you should come with me to look at fishes and stuff. It is a Good Time.

Now I am off to launder.

WOOOOOOOOO YEAH PARTY TIME UP IN HERE!

(I ran out of words that start with predic-)

i am prepared for every occasion!

In my bag:

• Gum
• Bus Tickets
• A space rocket pouch that holds:
  • Bandaids (Hello Kitty)
  • A screwdriver for glasses
  • Moisturizer
  • Three iPhone camera lenses
  • Bokeh filters
  • A Delicious Juice Dot Com button
  • Tokidoki button
  • The World’s Dirtiest Smutton
  • A moustache pin for emergencies
  • Our Lady of Guadalupe pin for different emergencies
  • Peppermint Oil for headaches
  • Discontinued perfume oil from Kiehl’s
  • Urban Decay double-bladed eyeliner for goth emergencies
  • A smooth round pebble
  • Body Shop lip gloss
  • Aveda Nourish-Mint mineral lip colour in Sheer Roseleaf
  • Bite Lush Lip Tint in Black Currant
• MAC powder compact
• Hair clip for my newly out-of-control mane
• LEGO Darth Vader keychain
• Two fancy feathered bobby pins
• Minibator key with shield and one-legged robot
• Home keys with enormous fob, gate key, the one-legged robot’s able-bodied twin, another shield
• Yet another keychain; this one holding a bunch of London-themed items
• Two wrapped honey mints from Trader Joe’s
• Fossil wallet with “Insert photo of super hottie boyfriend here” card, some cash, ID, work access card, bank card, and emergency business card (I have a lot of emergencies)
• Two half-completed Pinkberry frequent buyer cards and two cards good for a free mini yogurt
• An elastic band
• Another elastic band; this one with a macro lens in it for my iPhone
• Cheese bag with glasses and sunglasses
• The world’s most awesome pill box, containing:
  • Extra Strength Advil
  • Tylenol
  • Advil Migraine
  • Extra Strength Reactine
  • Whatever those little green pills are
• Fluff “Suzy Sailor” coin purse containing:
  • iPhone 5 Lightning to USB cable
  • Powerocks Super Magicstick portable battery charger
• Optimus Prime on a skateboard

Unseen:

• iPad Big
• iPhone

Oddly enough, I’m carrying very little today.

Thanks to @_hudsonny for the inspiration!

In the last twenty minutes, I have become intensely, droopingly tired. While it’s true I didn’t get enough sleep last night – I was cold and hungry and there were wolves – it’s more an emotional tired than anything else.

The last week at work has been .. interesting. Mostly exhausting. There is upheaval afoot, and the Powers That Be want to make some significant changes. This is not always a terrible thing, but in this particular instance, it would mean my job would become boring. Part of the reshuffling of duties would mean that I am not nearly as involved with my projects as I currently am, and that makes me sad all over.

I do too much at work, in that I’ve taken on (or forced my way into) duties that are way outside my job description. I don’t actually mind this – in fact, I like it this way because even though it sometimes drives me mad, I get to play a big role in projects. I like knowing what’s going on, and I like figuring out what needs to be done – it’s basically process improvement on a bigger scale. The more I know about the project, the more I find myself trying to run or guide the team. I make (very educated) decisions that I probably shouldn’t be making – not because I’m wrong (I’m never wrong), but because it’s not my place to make them: I’m a tech writer, not a project manager. I should be writing tech, not managing projects. Bad Kimli.

Thing is, I’m kinda good at it. I LIKE knowing all the answers and trying to stay several steps ahead of the game. I LIKE being frazzled and challenged on a daily basis; I like getting everything in order, and .. okay, I like being bossy and telling people (nicely) what to do.

If the suggested changes come to pass, I won’t be allowed to do those things anymore. I wouldn’t even really be required to think – instead of having a hand in the planning, I’d be delegating to word monkey: taking someone else’s notes, and making uninformed edits to a document. That’s it. And that would make me cry.

I might be doing this backwards – instead of looking forward to reducing my workload, I dread it. There’s nothing more terrible (or dangerous) than boring, and if the fun “illicit” things I do at work are taken away from me, I would be so bored. Bored and over-qualified, because you could pay someone half my salary to simply transcribe notes and call it a day.

So what do I do?

Well, the way I see it, three things could happen:

1. The new terrible changes may quietly go away and things will remain the same
2. The new terrible changes manifest, and I stomp and kick my way to a new role – one that would give me too MUCH control, but at least I’d be able to retain the parts I like (and also have to do the parts that are terrifying)
3. The new terrible changes manifest and I’m not allowed to stomp and kick my way to a new role so instead I stomp and kick my way over to Sales and Marketing

Option 1 would clearly be the easiest, but now that I’ve had to think about it, options 2 and 3 would be a lot more interesting. I wonder if I could do it. I wonder if they’d let me do it. I guess I’m about to find out one way or another, because I talked to both HR and my boss today about these intriguing ideas and now I am totally wiped out. I’ve been worried and stressed for days, perched up on this fence about whether I should share these ambitious thoughts with anyone, and now that I have, I’m practically falling over. SO. TIRED. What have I signed myself up for? Hopefully, an opportunity to be awesome.

I like being awesome.

keekeekeeahahah

A long, long time ago, I once thought maybe I would do some freelance writing work while I tried to sort out my life. I even went so far as to sign up for a GST number so I could pay taxes and be all official and junk. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as I got – I soon got a regular job, and never freelanced my way in or out of anything.

Each year, the government would sent me forms and ask me to submit payments on the money I had earned during that period. Since I never earned squat, I never bothered to file anything – while it’s true I like to do things that don’t make any sense, filling out forms of nothing is not one of those things. Eventually, the forms stopped coming. I figured the government finally got the hint that they weren’t going to get any GST payments out of me, because I never did anything GST-chargeable (sex work? tax free, bitches).

For the last few years, I didn’t receive any GST forms and I soon forgot about it all together, what with my attention span of a goldfish. I figured I was off the hook, until this year – a form asking me to submit tax for earnings made in 2012. Well, shit. Once again, I ignored the forms – I made nothing, so you get nothing. Take that, The Man! You ain’t got nothing on me!

.. except they kind of did: my tax refund for 2012. We filed our taxes early like Super Keeners, and looked forward to the refund coming our way that would serve to both pay Visa and fund a road trip along the coast this summer. Is were dotted, Ts were crossed, and we waited.

And waited.

Then, more waiting: it was like the Ottoman Ultimatum all over again. Finally, I managed to hack* my way into the CRA website and read the bad news: The Man was holding my tax refund because my GST account was “non-compliant”. I owed GST payments on all my freelance earnings for the past 6 years. Well, my earnings equal 0, so I could just file those empty returns and be on my way, right? Oh, I was so naive.

I called the 1-800 number and learned that each return needed to be filed separately, and each return required a unique access code that had been mailed to me every year since 2008. All I had to do was find those papers I repeatedly threw out over the course of the last forever, and .. well, fuck. No worries, though: Government Darill would send me the forms and codes I needed, I could file my “non-compliant” returns, close my stupid GST account, and get my tax refund issued. Hooray!

While I THOUGHT Government Darill was helpful if a bit nerdtenious (a pretentious nerd), he was actually a fucking idiot. I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get what little help he could provide, and most of it came because I had been extremely lazy with the shredding: the 2012 form I ignored was still intact in the living room. I was able to provide my business number and from there, guess the answers they were looking for to sufficiently prove my business identity.

That was almost two weeks ago, and in the meantime I grew impatient waiting for the forms to show up. I made a call today to find out what the fuck, and I learned that a) Darill could have easily closed my account for me then and there, and b) there’s a fucking 1-800 number I could have called at any time to get my access codes right away. Annoyed but pleased (and sticky), I made the call, got my codes, and within 10 minutes had filed 6 years worth of empty GST returns. With any luck, my raging non-compliance will be cleared up within a week, and then I will get my tax refund. I closed my account too, so this shouldn’t be an issue going forward .. and if I ever think that maybe I want to law-abiding and legal with my business dealings in the future, please remind me what a fucking pain in the ass this all was and then I will merrily break rules to my heart’s content instead.

*: by “hack” I mean “remember my login information after several dozen attempts”

In other news, I’m Causing Trouble all over the place. I’m less panicky than I was on Monday morning, and there are several deeply interesting paths ahead of me. I will know more tomorrow, and will undoubtedly spill the beans when I can .. but I am intrigued (and sticky).

rawr?

I predict the following for The Following:

• The fact that Emma is turning out to be exactly like her mother by boning all the guys ever will be her downfall
• Roderick is getting pouty because now that Joe’s around, he isn’t the most important crazy man in the house
• Jacob will switch sides because Emma has betrayed him for the last time plus he’s still a killing virgin
• Killing your most talented hacker man because he was a bad puppy is really stupid, even if he asked for it
• Poor Gay Paul is dead
• His death causes Jacob to realize Paul was his true love and he wants revenge on Emma for toying with them both – he may decide she must be his first kill
• Mike and Ryan will open a ranch together when this is all done
• I will laugh when the icy blonde is taken out by a bookshelf or something
• Needs more MMF shower sex scenes

That is all.

Carl’s Jr. has been open for like, a week, and already the girl at the counter a) knows my order of “a large pop please!” on sight and b) is giving me shit for not coming in every day (“where’ve you been! you haven’t come by in days!”).

I am a creature of habit.

Delicious, fizzy habit.