Random thing you loathe right now.

Bashful farts. "Here I come, no wait let me go back.. ok now I'm ready.. oops no I'm not. Gimme a few minutes to work up the courage. Wait I lied... no I didn't lol see you in a few minutes."

MaxShrek wrote:

Bashful farts. "Here I come, no wait let me go back.. ok now I'm ready.. oops no I'm not. Gimme a few minutes to work up the courage. Wait I lied... no I didn't lol see you in a few minutes."

Sorry, I lied, I'm not a fart, but I'm here anyways....

RawkGWJ wrote:

Our water heater broke Friday evening. The soonest we can get someone out is Tuesday.

Well you're pretty lucky though all things considered. Every time mine has broken over the years, it's been in the middle of the coldest part of winter.

Running errands and becoming acutely aware of my anxiety as I notice the number of "elect orange stain" signs in my neighborhood is increasing.

Nimcosi wrote:

Running errands and becoming acutely aware of my anxiety as I notice the number of "elect orange stain" signs in my neighborhood is increasing.

.. and bumper stickers, and those stupid flags, and electronic signs at businesses.

In the midst of an insomnia period, so it's probably just the brain chemicals acting up. Sitting here listening to Beethoven and crying while my family sleeps is fine. This is fine.

Rezzy wrote:

In the midst of an insomnia period, so it's probably just the brain chemicals acting up. Sitting here listening to Beethoven and crying while my family sleeps is fine. This is fine.

Have you tried gregorian chants or Bach instead? I find those more relaxing. They helped me earlier this year in a similar situation.

Cripes, YouTube has just gotten stupid with ads recently. They're so jarring too being stuck right in the middle of videos now.

bobbywatson wrote:
Rezzy wrote:

In the midst of an insomnia period, so it's probably just the brain chemicals acting up. Sitting here listening to Beethoven and crying while my family sleeps is fine. This is fine.

Have you tried gregorian chants or Bach instead? I find those more relaxing. They helped me earlier this year in a similar situation.

Just put Gymnopedie #1 by Eric Satie on repeat. Maybe throw Gnociene #3 into the mix.

Or if you are in a more modern mood, try "Thursday Afternoon" by Brian Eno - very calming.

davet010 wrote:

Or if you are in a more modern mood, try "Thursday Afternoon" by Brian Eno - very calming.

I struggle a lot with insomnia and can definitely vouch for Brian Eno.

I have YouTube Premium and a pair of sleep phones and I fall asleep to one of the below almost every night. Apologies for the “insomnia guy info dump”.

Brian Eno Ambient 1

Brian Eno Ambient 2

Moby: Long Ambients

This one may seem corny, but I promise it works for me.

Another guided audio that just rambles so long I eventually at least rest

One more thing I’ll say is that a big reason I like things like Moby’s Long Ambients or the guided meditations is that they all reflect an empathy for people struggling with insomnia. Even if you don’t sleep I find it comforting and distracting to listen to something like that.

I’m going to continue this discussion in the

insomnia thread.

Our cat Zoe has an abscess which has been causing her pain and affecting her appetite. We took her to the emergency vet last night at 12am and had to wait outside about 90 minutes while she was treated.

She's at home now and feeling a bit better with pain meds and antibiotics.

GLad to hear it's taken care of! hopefully her appetite will improve.

My children's schools both send out all announcements and flyers as PDF attachments. These PDFs are clearly just plainly-formatted Word documents that have been printed in PDF format. Both my children's schools have prominent Announcements sections on their websites that have not been updated since the summer. Why do they not use the website for announcements instead of sending out PDFs? If they have to send it by email, why don't they just put the text of the Word document into the body of the email? And why do they think that "Upcoming_Events_Announcement_in_Spanish.pdf" is an acceptable file name for the Spanish-language version?

Probably because the schools usually don't have a dedicated IT person for that purpose, just a teacher or admin who does it "in their spare time". Sigh.

I did win 10 training for a highschool as a contract. The department consisted of two and if you consider all the audio/visual responsibilities on top of day to day IT... SMH

ClockworkHouse wrote:

My children's schools both send out all announcements and flyers as PDF attachments. These PDFs are clearly just plainly-formatted Word documents that have been printed in PDF format. Both my children's schools have prominent Announcements sections on their websites that have not been updated since the summer. Why do they not use the website for announcements instead of sending out PDFs? If they have to send it by email, why don't they just put the text of the Word document into the body of the email? And why do they think that "Upcoming_Events_Announcement_in_Spanish.pdf" is an acceptable file name for the Spanish-language version?

Why? Why? WHY? I’m having similar frustrations with my kids schools.

My soon to be spouse is a high school teacher and as a tech support person/AV engineer for a college I can say that their IT support is a joke. For computers she has either a Core 2 Duo Dell desktop or a 2012 Macbook Pro. The Dell barely works and like half of the USB ports on it are dead and the Macbook was originally a student use machine and it was given to her without having the student use restrictions lifted so she can't do things like rearrange the Dock or use the webcam. Her district bought a bunch of new Macbooks and she was supposed to get one but she was at the end of a long list and they ran out. Over the summer she had them move her projection screen and her projector, but they failed to move the cables along with it so now she can't even use the projector. Also it sounds like one of the secretaries might be their Google Classroom Admin. She thinks they only have a couple of IT guys for a district with 20,000 students and 1,200 teachers.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

My children's schools both send out all announcements and flyers as PDF attachments.

Our district does this as well. They said it's because some people reported issues with their email client not displaying all the text of longer emails. I'm thinking these are people who may be accessing email from something like a library computer and/or an using a free parent email account provided to them by the district.
I'll admit it didn't occur to me that everyone doesn't have a gmail or microsoft or ISP-provided email account.

Gmail cuts off long emails.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Gmail cuts off long emails.

They scrape all the advertising data they need from the first 500 characters.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Gmail cuts off long emails.

They scrape all the advertising data they need from the first 500 characters.

That doesn't surprise me. My point was just responding to Phish's comment that in fact Gmail is a prime offender. If an email is more then 110kb in the body, Gmail cuts it off. All my Costco emails are affected by this, so I could see that being an issue if the school is sending long emails, especially ones containing embedded images.

I don't want to sound too arrogant, but do people not click "view entire message"? I understand that in UI design one wants to minimize steps, but this one seems pretty clear.

qaraq wrote:

I don't want to sound too arrogant, but do people not click "view entire message"? I understand that in UI design one wants to minimize steps, but this one seems pretty clear.

I guarantee not all of them do, no.

And you have to design for the least adept user. You can't assume that every parent of a schoolchild is Very Online like we are.

PaladinTom wrote:

Cripes, YouTube has just gotten stupid with ads recently. They're so jarring too being stuck right in the middle of videos now.

YouTube is completely unusable if you don't have an adblocker installed. I hadn't seen a single ad on YouTube in years, and then I was stuck using a browser without and it was literally ads every 10 minutes or less.

Amazon Delivery Services has my "ire" for today! So instead of the usual USPS or UPS, "Amazon Delivery" delivered a package to me this morning, and instead of putting the package on very large covered front porch, they decided to dump it on the wet sidewalk in front of the porch in an area where water runoff from the roof streams down onto that spot when it rains, which of course it was doing when I retrieved the package.

Fortunately, I was home and retrieved the package a few minutes after it was delivered and so it was only mostly soaked through instead of being a full cardboard puddle, and the contents were something that could not be damaged by water.

But seriously!!!

Every delivery driver in history has put packages on the covered porch (sometimes--well usually--annoying blocking the door, but at least out of the rain!) What could possibly possess this delivery driver to even remotely think that it was just fine to leave a package sitting out in the rain when a very obvious alternative was less than 2 steps away? (It's not even an enclosed porch, so there was no need to open a door or anything like that.)

Then my second "ire" happened when trying to figure out how to send an email to Amazon describing what happened. After the third attempt at searching online (their own web page was useless), I finally found an email address that didn't bounch back with a reprimand that the address doesn't receive direct messages. While I did respond to the "how did we do" survey, my only allowed response was "mishandled by delivery driver" and I didn't feel it was enough to describe the problem.

I loathe that anxious-stressful feeling like I'm missing something. I've had it all day today so far. Something that I can't quite put my finger on that my subconscious is telling me about that I can't understand. Am I forgetting something I'm supposed to be doing? Was there a bill I didn't pay? Did I miss an action item from work? Maybe something for the kids? Ugh! It's driving me nuts!

ThatGuy42 wrote:

I loathe that anxious-stressful feeling like I'm missing something. I've had it all day today so far. Something that I can't quite put my finger on that my subconscious is telling me about that I can't understand. Am I forgetting something I'm supposed to be doing? Was there a bill I didn't pay? Did I miss an action item from work? Maybe something for the kids? Ugh! It's driving me nuts!

You and me both, buddy. Woke up with a pit of anxiety in my stomach. Can't tell if it's work stress, the outside world looking like doomsday is coming, or just general *waves vaguely at everything*.

Thankfully, there's anxiety meds available.