Enemy of Entropy

Stoopid School!

4 April 2008, 4:39 pm. Comments. Filed under College, Rant.
stoopid-school

I just found out that DeVry didn’t “package” my financial aid for this semester. Huh? I registered the day registration opened, or nearly so, as I recall. I wasn’t scheduled to graduate. I did everything I’m supposed to do, in fact. Somebody there just dropped the ball.

Why isn’t that sort of thing automated so that doesn’t happen? It isn’t as if the place specialized in, oh, technical degrees or anything like that, right?

Then they inform me that because of their mistake, my student loans are also screwed up, and I’m going to end up owing them over $4k for the semester! What?!

Yes, I’m fighting this. That school has screwed up something every single semester I’ve attended it! Unfortunately, so did SPSU. Is this just a given with colleges? They only hire the incompetent, or they don’t honor competence, or what? I know that schools usually pay less than other employers, so maybe they can’t compete and don’t care to try?

For your sakes, I will not upload a recording of the bellow of inarticulate rage this crap provoked. I think it would have broken my microphone, anyway.

Book Joy! And Stuff

29 March 2008, 10:32 pm. Comments. Filed under Art, Health, Reading.
book-joy-and-stuff

I’m so tickled! In the last two weeks, I’ve found not one, but two books that Sam and I have wanted for ages at good prices on eBay!

Seeing Red
First, I’ve been looking for
Seeing Red: The Rapture of Redheads by Howard Schatz for years and years. Seriously, it has to be at least five years since Sam first mentioned that he’d love to have it. Unfortunately, it’s out of print, and the only thing I found for the longest time were used copies for $150 or more. It’s a gorgeous book, but that’s far more than I could pay for it.

I had the book on my wish list at Half.com, which is part of eBay, but for some reason I also set up an eBay search a few months back, and finally got found a copy going for $35.1 I didn’t happen to see the email until a day later, and by then the seller had dropped the price further for some reason. It was more than I pay for most books, but after five years, it was more than worth it. We received it in the mail earlier this week, and it is just a beautiful as any new copy.

Your Guide to Metabolic Health
That gave me an idea, so I set up a search for another book I’ve wanted for a while, but couldn’t afford. John C. Lowe’s tome Your Guide to Metabolic Health came out in 2003, and I haven’t ever found it in stock anywhere. It must have gone out of stock quickly, because Amazon has only ever had used copies that I’ve seen. And again, they were always pricey—$180 was the price I’d seen most recently.2

Today, eBay came through again! The “buy it now” price was very reasonable, so Sam encouraged me to go ahead and get it instead of chancing the auction route.

Dr. Lowe has also written another book that’s specifically about the metabolic treatment of fibromyalgia, but it runs over $500. Apparently, that one is intended for physicians, rather than laypeople. I have an eBay search going, but I’m fairly certain the book I bought today has the information I need in it. From what I’ve heard, it’s mainly about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.3

Keep Working Girlfriend
I’m busily reading my ARC of Women, Work and Autoimmune Disease: Keep Working, Girlfriend! It’s good stuff.

1 For what it’s worth, Half.com still shows only the higher prices. Weird.

2 It’s available more cheaply now, but I still got a deal.

3 Aha—the publisher actually sells the latest version of that one for $99.95. Why would anybody pay the used price? Why do the used sellers think they can demand so much?

Boo, Motorola!

10 January 2008, 11:51 pm. Comments. Filed under Kvetching.

Maybe I’m just spoiled from years of Nokia phones, and being able to just download the Nokia Phone Suite free from their web site to sync my phone and PC, or put ringtones and photos on the phone. But honestly, I find it absolutely ridiculous that Motorola wants me to pay them $30 to $40 for the equivalent software to work with their phones!

It doesn’t, as far as I can see, do anything more than what the Nokia software does. They sell plenty of phones, and it cannot be that unusual for people to want to back up the data on them. So why are they gouging customers this way?

I can see charging some amount if the customer wants a CD with the software on it mailed out, but charging for the download is ridiculous.

And when I try to register for an account on their support site, I keep getting error messages saying that my email address is invalid. I tried a bunch of different addresses, even the ISP address that I never, ever use—no joy.

I can’t register the phone, either, because you have to pick your mobile provider, and mine isn’t listed, and there isn’t an “other” option.

Boo!

Further Prof of Insanity: Blog365

1 January 2008, 11:45 am. Comments. Filed under Blogging, Family, Fun, Geekery, Health, Holidays, Home, Homeschooling, Music, RPGs, Reading, Writing.

I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).
Blog365
The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:

Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.

We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

Tweets for 12-12-2007

12 December 2007, 10:01 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Tweets.

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