Reign of Frogs

There’s a massive winter storm up in the Panhandle today. Huge stretches of I-40 and I-27 have been closed altogether due to ice and snow accumulation and blizzard conditions.

Blizzard conditions. In Texas. In April, almost.

Here in Austin, the morning was heavy and black with thunder and rain. This afternoon it’s bright, sunny, and 81 degrees.

What’s going on here?

Ever since starting at my new job (I say “new,” though my first anniversary was February 25th) I’ve been plagued by a low-performance computer. 504MB of RAM, I got. 504MB!! And ever since I started on I’ve wanted to get ArcGIS software installed, because come on, I work in travel – and it just so happens I know how to make maps. Travel. Maps. Hello?! We have a license, it wouldn’t cost anything. But I couldn’t have it, because Arc requires a minimum 1GB of RAM.

This morning I came in to find a sticky note on my computer from our IT guy. “E – I installed 3 more 512s to your RAM – G”

Naturally, this sprang instantly to mind.

And speaking of LOLZ, two years ago, the day after my now-painfully-estranged friend left our old division for his new job in the building where I also work now, I sent him an alarmed email. “You clearly play a larger role in holding the fabric of reality together than I had realized,” I told him, “because today, Bitching Bubbly Smoking Nonsmoker came over and made friendly chit-chat with me for half an hour.”

She’d never really spoken to me without snarling before.

She got fired the same week I started my new job, and I had no further contact with her. But then, two months ago, my poor little friend and I fell out and stopped speaking, and she turned up and friended me on Facebook...?

Coincidence??

Especially considering that Facebook was the final contributing factor in our falling-out?!?!?

I’m glad my computer is a lot faster now, and I’m glad the day is so pretty. But I wouldn’t mind if the universe would start being a little more normal again.

The Specialist

I can make charts in Excel. Ergo, I'm special.

Not to brag too much, but today, just because I churned out a couple of very simple line graphs using the wizard, I suddenly achieved expert status. And thereby helped out and impressed the Big Boss, hooray! She's no intellectual slouch, but she's at a place in her career where she has people to prepare documents, reports, presentations and the like for her, so she probably hasn't mucked about much in Excel since the Reagan administration.

Back then, you know, Excel had beads.

Remember Max Headroom? I used to love that show. I had such a crush on Matt Frewer! And I wanted to be like the British chick, what's-her-name, because she was so poised, oh-so hot, and she really knew how to work computers - an accomplishment that seemed well beyond the dreams of your average high-school wanna-be femme mentale. A couple of years later, my parents would get an Atari 800, I'd churn out high school English papers in LetterPerfect on a dot-matrix printer, I'd learn a little BASIC on an Apple IIe (boy, talk about the skills you WON'T use again after graduation), and my dad would send me off to college with a Heathkit H89, which confused and frightened me. I mean, the thing required a hugely elaborate string of commands just to turn it on, and if you got any line wrong it automatically administered severe electrical shocks. That thing was scary.

So it's gratifying to be regarded as a computer whiz, dammit, even if only by state employees. But I still can't seem to seize control of the elevators or the cooling system.

Macs = Better Than People

When it's time for your Mac to go to sleep, all you have to do is pull the menu down from the pretty blue apple in the top left corner and select "Sleep." And it does. It sleeps, silent and peaceful, its power button slowly pulsing with a gentle glow. It stays asleep until you come and wake it up again.

Or until your cat Bingo, some hitherto unknown species of nocturnal bug up his butt, scrambles sideways into the room at 2am, leaps onto the keyboard, clatters your mouse and some photos and several CDs to the floor, and washes your bedroom in sudden humming light.

I need somebody to Ctrl-Alt-Delete me now.