Category Archives: nerd

take this job and restaff it

Posted in i'm an astronaut, nerd by

I keep offering our clients my job. For some weird reason, their stark terror shows up in their text as they try to politely decline and run away as fast as they can.

Last night was FUN! We went out for dinner in honour of Miranda’s birthday, and I got to introduce Josh and Shan to Miranda and Reilly (who I have a total crush on, but don’t tell) and also Tanya, Cynthia and Darren. I had forgotten how much fun it is to be Outside With People, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. We couldn’t join them for the post-dinner glow bowling though because Ed is deathly ill and I had promised him that I would return with life-saving Nyquil right after dinner, but I’m glad the three of us got to go out and have some fun that didn’t involve laundry or sushi because I am just not ready to go back for thirds.

Ed’s been hovering on the cusp of a cold for the last two weeks, and yesterday everything exploded in one giant snotty mess of germs. He’s been home from work the last two days, moaning as though the world were ending – and yet he’s still well enough to get many levels ahead of me in Zelda. I’d call foul, if he didn’t really look and sound awful. I think I’ll disinfect the Wiimotes before I start playing again.

I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror on my way to work and realized I look exactly like my Mii. It’s not a cartoon version of myself; that is actually how I look. I think it may have something to do with the blue eye shadow, but either way I’m a little creeped out by the resemblance to my pixilated doppelganger. Maybe it’s time for an extreme makeover?

Today I am so haircut I can actually hear the snipping.

there’s nothing sexy about ooze

Posted in nerd, vroom vroom by

Things the “HP” on my socks might stand for:

  • Hit Points
  • Hewlett-Packard
  • Harry Potter
  • Herpes Patrol
  • Have a Pabst

I scooted to work today! It was cold as hell and a little slow going thanks to the headwind while trying to drive up the hill on the Lions Gate Bridge, but whee! Scooting! So fun. I hope the sun sticks around for a while; it’d be nice to see some flowers blooming and also I enjoy having dry feet.

I do wish my eyes would stop leaking, though. My allergies seem to be getting worse each year – how long before I am nothing more than an oozing mass of salty sinus drips and other randomly thick mystery liquids?

I itch, too.

Happy Pi Day, nerds!

who’s up for eating some worms

Posted in angst, i'm an astronaut, nerd, vroom vroom by

It’s almost spring! How do I know this?

  • My allergies have kicked into overdrive
  • I got my first scooter parking ticket of the season

Even though I haven’t been able to ride Sally since October because of the weather, I already have a parking ticket to add to my Wall of Shame. This one is special, because it’s just a warning – and I received it IN FRONT OF MY APARTMENT.

I needed somewhere to store Sally during the winter, so I made an arrangement with our landlord to park Sally in front of our building, locked to the fence. Sally sat there for 5 months without any problems, until yesterday when someone took offence – and lo, a parking ticket. Hooray! It is totally awesome; not being able to park your scooter anywhere – not even on non-city-owned property with permission from the owner. I swear, I’m trying awfully hard to go green and be a completely convenient truth, but I’m getting foiled at every non-turn and I can’t even ride anywhere yet. This sucks.

Other things that suck: the weather, Samsung’s support department, blue screens of death, day 3 of my headache, and having a client complain about your department (ie: me) being “too young and tech-savvy” to do the job properly. When the job in question is training people to use our software, I would generally think that being “tech-savvy” is a good thing – and hey, when you’ve been trained four separate times and you still don’t get it, perhaps the problem isn’t with the young tech-savvy people training you but with your complete inability to use technology more advanced than a microwave oven. Just sayin’.

This is not a good Tuesday. In fact, my only happy is coming from MacBeth – iTunes insists on repeating “Family Reunion” by Blink182 many times during the day. The joy is in the lyrics; the only words of the song are “shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd and twat”, which excellently sums up how I feel about pretty much everything right now.

zest for the counterproductive

Posted in angst, nerd by

I forgot my cell phone at home today, so anyone trying to get a hold of me with have some difficulty in doing so (she says, like she ever gets any phone calls at all).

I’m having an issue with my beloved Q1B, and I am having a devil of a time getting support for it. This makes me very sad, because I have many things I want to do with it but I can’t because it needs a doctor. Compounding the issue is the non-availability of Q1Bs in Canada – I can’t even call up support for help, because they don’t have access to them. My calls have been rerouted down to the US twice, and each time I was disconnected. FIX MY TOY! I AM SAD AND LOST WITHOUT IT! I just sold my PDA too, so I don’t even have a backup available – this sucks. How can I have truly excellent wireless adventures when my toys need fixing? I can’t, that’s how. I hate living an analog life.

A half-asleep conversation with Ed over the weekend has made me remember the recurring nightmare I used to have as a child. In the dream I’d be standing on the corner by our old house, watching my mother return from being gone for a long long time – and she’d always be walking up the hill, carrying a bag from Woodward’s, and stumping along on her peg leg.

I can’t even begin to imagine what the deeper meaning behind that dream is – abandonment issues? Fear of both pirates and my mother? Nostalgia for a bankrupt department store? I keep going back to the peg leg – while it was terrifying at the time, it’s hilarious now. Hee. Stumpy mom.

Okay, back to working and also trying to find someone to fix my poor Q1B.

i really do hate wearing pants

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Today I am at home sick with various diseases. I spent much of the morning lying in bed weighed down by cats and moaning, until I got thirsty enough to haul myself up out of bed to Do Something About It. I then promptly went back to bed and read Wiki entries about death and mutilation interspersed with sending snarky emails to work about clients being rude to my team. My team may only have one other person on it and really isn’t my team at all, but damnit I am fierce and mean when people are rude to my minions. Plus, I’ve been reading violent things all morning. You best step off while you still can, horrible client. I am watching you and making vague passive-aggressive threats on the internet.

This afternoon I was struck hard by a bought of both the coughs and some creativity. I stumbled upon an online application for a site looking for writers with wit, passion, and a hatred for wearing pants. I am at least one of those three things, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I don’t really know why – I’ve applied for positions like this before only to be met with a raised eyebrow and an uncomfortable cough. The majority of my “talent” appears to be in my own head, which, while definitely large enough to house ALL my misguided self-love, is often stark and lonely with a wicked echo. Maybe it’s time to seek love and acceptance – or more likely, disdain and rejection – from another venue, I thought. So, I applied. They wanted a short bio and three sample posts of what I would write about. I provided blurbs, because I have an extreme tendency to ramble and didn’t think they’d want to read a 70000-word dissertation on why Counter-Strike sucks.

I don’t expect much to come from it, mostly because I suck at words. Hell, after pressing submit the website even says “don’t call us, we’ll call you”. I’m sure that’s not a personal dismissal of my writing “style”, but I also don’t intend to wait by the internet phone. It was just fun to try and stretch my word wings and see what I could come up with, is all.

I’m toying with the idea of putting my samples online for feedback. It’s already said and done what with the pressing submit and my words going away, but at least if I don’t hear anything from the applicant reviewers I can still get feedback from my Army of Seven. I need validation! Tell me you love me! Tell me I can write at least a little bit! Tell me I have a talent other than drinking Diet Coke and being really good at computer Scrabble! VALIDATE ME!

Okay, I’m kidding*. Still, sometimes it’s nice to get feedback.

*: technically not kidding

snarky space station support

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[Client] I’m trying to use your program on a Mac
[Kimli] I’m sorry, but our system is PC-based – our Mac-compatable tools are still in the alpha stage
[Client] Is there a program I can download that will make it work?
[Kimli] Yes .. Windows.

get yours today

Posted in everyday kimli, nerd by

I am selling off my worldly belongings so that I may pay for my newer, more advanced worldly belongings. If you happen to be in the market for a spanky new PDA or digital camera, feel free to check out my Craigslist postings. Say enough lovely things about me, and I might even throw in some extras.

Buy Kimli’s used stuff today! Quantities are limited! Be the first one on your block to own my crap!

HP1940 Pocket PC – $150 obo
HP R707 Digital Camera – $150 obo

urine trouble now

Posted in everyday kimli, nerd by

I park in an underground lot several blocks from the Space Station. It’s pretty secure, but it’s also quite possibly the smelliest place in the entire universe. Every day I have to go up and down a flight of stairs to buy my parking pass, then return to the car to place it on the dash (face up please, or it’s a $30 ticket for you .. not that I’d know anything about that). That in itself isn’t the issue, it’s the staircase: every night, a thousand hobos and a thousand hobo sons gather in this staircase to pee out their woe. The air in that staircase is thick with the smell of urine, almost as though people were purchasing jugs of wolf piss and going to town. I’ve been in outhouses that smelled more pleasant than the Staircase of Perpetual Human Waste – it is beyond foul. I’ve tried breathing through my mouth instead of my nose, but that just leads to situations I’m not mentally or physically prepared to deal with – smelling the urine of a thousand thousand hobos is bad; tasting it through mouth breathing is a horror I cannot face. The staircase is bad. Very, very bad.

It seems that someone actually took offence to the stench to the point of Doing Something About It, though – today as I prepared to hold my breath until I saw spots I noted a definite tang of bleach in the air. I cautiously took a small sniff and affirmed my nasal findings – bleach. The Staircase of Perpetual Human Waste had been hosed down with a pressure washer full of Ajax, and while it’ll never be somewhere I’d want to hold a romantic picnic, I can at least breathe a little easier every morning. Not too deeply, though. The last thing I need is to pass out and be subject to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by the (albeit very nice) morning parking lot guardian dude.

I slept very poorly last night – too much excitement before bed. We spent much of our evening down at Josh and Shan’s, checking out Wii Play and engaging in some XXXTreme Mario Kart 64 action. I won two races – never underestimate the quiet power of the Toadstool! It’s easy to take the lead when the boys are busy mauling each other. I’ve heard rumours that our very own Wii is within city limits, after only three months of searching. Josh sniped one online for us and offered up his credit card to secure it – just one more person to whom we owe money. The list is getting disturbingly long, but at least we’ll have a Wii. Wiis work in cardboard boxes, right?

pocket-sized sex appeal

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I honestly thought I knew what sexy was. I mean, I was so confident that I had an excellent grasp on what was and was not sexy that I frequently brought forth my own notions of sexy; ideas that were completely independent of what society and “The Man” force down our throats on a daily basis. I am an individual; a unique snowflake with thoughts and ideas and notions all of my own and not delivered to me monthly in glossy magazines crammed full of airbrushed lies.

Of course, I don’t know squat.

Yesterday I received a lesson in sexy delivered by, of all people, UPS – my very own Samsung Q1B Ultra Mobile Tablet PC thingie, featuring the VIA C7-M processor. I spent a large part of my day and night playing with it – setting it up (it runs Windows XP), trying out programs, playing with the screen (it ROTATES), and generally just being in awe of it. It is, hands down, the sexiest thing I own. It’s completely wireless, has two USB ports, a 40 GB hard drive, a touch screen, and a thousand other things I haven’t even begun to discover yet. It has an on-screen keyboard, but also accepts handwriting done with the stylus which it can then translate into text characters. I can quite literally go anywhere with this thing and write updates or check email or even draw dirty pictures of Ed in various delicate situations of extreme nudity. I can watch movies! I rarely do, but I’m totally tempted to start now! It has sound and video and weighs like 2 pounds and HOLY CRAP IT’S THE SEXIEST THING IN THE WHOLE WORLD AND I LOVE IT

I know I sound like a dork, but seriously you have no idea how much I love gadgetry and this is super cool and unique and brand new so I am ultra leet as well as ultra mobile. The only downside is having to keep my eye on it at all times so Josh doesn’t steal it from me. He’s already tried twice.

So. Fucking. Sexy.

YAY!

awash with technology

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I’ve been in a pretty wicked bad mood all week. The space station was bringing me down, things at home are a little tense for reason I’ve promised to not go into online, and I am in a general funk about my appearance. In short, it has not been a ball of fun to be me lately. I am cranky and petulant and more than a little fed up with the universe around me.

It’s amazing how quickly all that can change, however, when you have NEW! TOYS! to play with.

Slightly sheepish pictures and details to come.