Enemy of Entropy

Stoopid School!

4 April 2008, 4:39 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under College, Rant.

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. 1 Comment. Filed under Art, Health, Reading.

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. 9 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. 1 Comment. 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.

Fol­low Cyn at Twit­ter
 
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