Infuriating

In case I haven't said it enough yet: I hate Windows. Right now my phone and laptop refuse to communicate even though they're both plugged in and it was working five minutes ago. -_-

Shaving

There aren't many things that feel as good as putting on clean clothes after shaving everything you've got. :)

Nuts in the News

I heard about this story on the radio earlier, but seeing the video is just hilarious. Seriously, why can't Saturday Night Live come up with stuff that's this good? If you just want the laughs, fast forward to about 1:15. The video is embedded below.

New writing thing

It's (shockingly) not porn, so I thought it appropriate to cross-post here. I don't know why, but I was struck by inspiration from somewhere and pretty much had to write what I did. I only hope it conveys how I suddenly feel about writing: as if it's a gift to be shared, a way of creating an entire universe, using naught but language.

Anyway, enough dramatics. Have a link: http://pixelpaws.blogspot.com/2008/05/symphony-of-words-or-symphony-in.html

Exhaustion

You know you're tired when the simple act of getting naked before bed feels like work.

Home

Just getting to the terminal now. Hope I can at least get five good hours of sleep tonight.

RMFC Rundown

I typed up a nice, long post on the plane, but my computer decided to eat it, so here's the short version.

Thursday: Arrived late afternoon, helped set up the con, got dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, went to bed around 2AM.

Friday: Got registered, helped out during the morning, attended a reptile meet-and-greet in the afternoon. Went to Anthony's Pizza with a few people, then hung out with Kouga in the room until we both decided we were too tired to do anything other than sleep.

Saturday: Overslept (or thought I did) and missed the fursuit parade. I can't remember doing anything until a room party in the evening, which was quite fun. Two folks from that party stayed and spent the night in my room.

Sunday: Not much happened except for the Free Can Cook panel. Met a couple of nice folks, spent the rest of the evening hanging out with one.

Today: Slept in until 11AM, checked out at noon, and got a ride from Ivan and Kahuki to the airport. Flight out of DIA was on time; flight out of DFW to VPS looks to be 40 minutes late.

Tomorrow I get to be at the truck, ready to work, by 8AM. I'm just glad that I had enough time to sleep last night, though there was a party I'd have loved to be at. There weren't many artists at the con; I only commissioned one badge and one picture for after the convention. Even so, I had fun and plan on being back in Denver next year.

Thunderbird crash landing

I was just finishing a nice, long post about the convention when I hit the button combination for sleep (instead of the battery). Now, even though I have three draft copies of the message saved on the computer, it's saying that they're not available since it didn't download them from Gmail. Why the hell is it trying to download a message that it never uploaded in the first place?

Heading home

I'm in the airport now; boarding for the first of my two flights home should start within ten minutes. The con was (as a whole) very cool; I enjoyed myself at RMFC more than any con I've gone to within the last year. I'll write up a full post-con report later this week.

Two quick things.

1. I just went to Walgreen's to get a couple items I forgot and there was quite a line. Most interesting, however, was what happened when the guy working the photo center said he could help people in line that weren't buying tobacco. Every black person in line moved over there, including one person in front of me. Meanwhile, all the white people were standing in the front counter line. I don't fully understand the psychological reasoning behind it, but it seemed strangely reminiscent of what separate-but-equal might have looked like in the first half of the 20th century, assuming the races were even allowed to shop in the same stores.

2. Upon returning to the room, it looked like housekeeping had just come in here, as they were just starting on the rooms across the hall. However, I then realized I had a lot of items out on the bed I didn't sleep on, including two bottles of lube and a collar with its leash attached. I can only imagine what he might have been thinking upon seeing those items on the bed. :)

Con hotel

You know, for being such a fancy hotel, this place seems to love giving you the pleasure of paying extra for every little thing. The wired Internet here is $10/day; the wireless is a T-mobile hotspot (at roughly the same price). They offer bottled water... at $6 each. And the TV controls are locked down to the point that I can't actually plug in video games, though there are plenty of options to buy more things from the hotel. While the rooms are nice, I can't say I appreciate being given the pleasure of paying for things that many lower-end hotels offer for free, such as wi-fi and a TV that you can plug something into.

Anyway, registration should be open now, so I'll probably head down in a few moments to take care of that. I'm in room 1049, if anyone wants to visit at some point during the weekend.

American Airlines = OOS

I was at the gate, ready to get on the plane... then they made an announcement saying the plane had just gone out of service. They didn't say why and I didn't feel like asking, but this does mean that I'll not likely be out of here before 10:30; the plane they're going to put us has just landed. It's still going to be a two hour flight, so this puts me in Denver around 11:30 local time. I'll make another post once I land to let everyone know I've arrived. If you want to get a hold of me, please call me or e-mail; I may or may not be on IM services later.

McWin?

As a follow up to my complaint to McDonald's corporate, I just received a phone call from someone (presumably the store's district manager) telling me that he already had planned to go out to that store. My complaint was just one of several he intended on discussing with the employees and management. He made it sound like a few people were likely to be out of a job. I'm impressed that he took the time to call and explain what he was going to do about it. Hopefully, if I go through there again, I'll be able to get a burger in under half an hour.

Getting on a plane

I'm through security and now just waiting for boarding to start. Seeing as the flight leaves in 25 minutes, I can't imagine it will be much longer. It's then a two hour hop to Dallas, an hour layover, then two more hours to Denver. I have bus information for when I get there, phone numbers for several people in the area, and double-checked everything in my luggage to ensure that the toothbrush really was the only thing that I'd misplaced. I'm very much looking forward to this. :)

RMFC - leaving in the morning

At 6:30AM, I'll be leaving for Denver to enjoy the convention. I've packed just about everything; the only thing I've misplaced is my toothbrush, of all random items to lose. Hopefully we'll have time to stop by the store in the morning; it's already going to be a little tight getting to the airport. I'll have to take down the information on the bus routes to the hotel, but that's the only other thing that I need to do before bed. This means I might get a whopping six hours of sleep; a welcome reprieve after being awake for nearly 36 hours. @_@

On a billboard...

Formerly we suffered from crime. Today we suffer from laws.

McFail

Since I was in a hurry to get where I needed to go this evening, I decided to stop at a McDonald's in the Stroud, OK travel plaza. It seemed quiet enough when I walked inside, but after I went to the bathroom, it seemed like at least one full bus had pulled in, if not two. However, I would have figured that the staff would have been able to handle it, having been on the other side of the counter. Only... not. At first, there were three cashiers up front, but two of the three simply walked away from the registers without warning or explanation; they each simply left half a dozen customers standing in line when they abandoned the position. As such, it took me 35 minutes just to place an order. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but it was just before 8 o'clock when I got there and my receipt shows 8:32PM.

During this time, there was only one person up front. There were at least three people working the drive through even though it had fewer orders; none of these people came over to help. There were also plenty of people in the grill area making sandwiches; because they were working so quickly in the back, food was getting cold before the front counter customers received their orders. Heck, there were two people making french fries. But through all this, nobody came over to help out up front. The manager was nowhere to be seen, except for one instance where another customer demanded to speak to her; the manager simply gave a terse apology and went back to doing apparently nothing.

When I got to the counter, the cashier seemed clueless. I asked for a large #3 with mayonnaise to go; I wasn't in the mood to try and order anything more complicated and I no longer had the time to sit down and eat. This simple order, however, left the cashier unable to actually ring it up. I have no idea what the problem was, but she had to get help from another employee just to enter my order. Even once I ordered, however, it took another several minutes for me to get my food. There were ten orders on the front counter screen (eight displayed, plus two pending), which left it impossible for anyone behind the counter to figure out who needed what.

Even once I finally received my food, about five minutes later, things still weren't right. I found I'd been given a medium order of fries and a medium drink instead of the large I'd ordered. I told another employee about this and she simply snapped at me to tell me to wait a moment. When she returned about fifteen seconds later, I explained the problem; the employee told the still-confused cashier to fix it and walked off. Every person I dealt with in the store was exceptionally rude. I'd add names, but conveniently, nobody was wearing name tags. Behind the counter, the floor was a mess; fries, cups, and stray sandwich wrappers littered the ground. The order of fries I received was cold and unsalted, the drink was watered down, and my sandwich had condiments oozing off the side before I'd even opened the box.

In short, my experience at this location could have been a training video on how not to manage a McDonald's. Nearly everything that could have been done wrong was done wrong. Every person in the store on that shift needs to be retrained, particularly the front counter order taker and the manager on duty.

I'm going to pass this along to McDonald's corporate, in a slightly abridged form. I'm willing to bet that I won't even get a response, but it's at least worth a try.

You know...

There are few things that make me shiver like putting on clothing after I just finished shaving everything, from top to bottom. It took me perhaps an hour to shave it all, as I actually used my regular hand razor to do a better job, but now I've wonderfully smooth skin all over. Now I just need to maintain that until RMFC next weekend and I'll be good. *purrs*

I'm still alive

Just kinda have been hanging out with various people whenever I got the chance, so I haven't thought to update this a whole lot. Just last night, I was hanging out with Zordrak (Zakram on LJ) and we spent most of the evening playing various games on the Wii. I can't think of many other things to report on, aside from the fact I'm rather excited about RMFC next weekend. I'll probably write a longer post about that some other time.

On technology...

Don't you just "love" it when you're trying to do something simple with the computer and the computer fails to do it, citing a hardware problem with something you've attached? Specifically, I tried plugging my cell phone in to get online and the computer said it couldn't recognize it due to a malfunction. However, it couldn't use the wi-fi either and, frankly, Vista has the worst networking support I've ever had to tolerate, so I'm thinking that "malfunction" has more to do with Windows simply being user-unfriendly as usual...

RSS & You

I've mentioned a few times that you can subscribe to this blog (as well as my others) via RSS, but that assumes that you know what it is. So I thought I'd take a little bit of time to explain it a bit. First, allow me to post a video that sums it all up and I'll add a bit more information below.

So if you're using Firefox, there should be a big orange button in your address bar to subscribe. In any browser, you can click my "readers" graphic in the right column to be taken to FeedBurner, where you'll be presented with a list of subscription options. Though the above video shows off Google Reader (which I highly recommend), you can use similar steps for any other feed reader, whether online or offline. Thus, you can keep up with a whole bunch of websites - including this blog - without having to check them yourself. :)

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head

I woke up about ten minutes ago, started getting stuff together so I could get a shower here before I left... and then it promptly began raining. I don't have an umbrella (I really need to fix that) and I'm a good quarter-mile from the front door of the operating center. While I could probably go without a shower, if I had to, this thunderstorm isn't going to make it easy to get dinner either. And if I'm going inside for one, I may as well get both, assuming the cafeteria's still open.

By the way, does anyone near Knoxville, TN or Harrisburg, PA want to hang out? I'll likely be stopping in those cities tomorrow and Monday morning, respectively.

Mew...

Why is it that, the more you want to have someone to talk to about a bad night, the less likely you are to actually have any luck getting a hold of someone? :(

Any artists looking for money?

I know that several of you out there draw on a regular basis. Normally, Shirt.woot has a weekly contest with a $1,000 prize for the each of the top three, but they've actually gotten a sponsor for next week's contest that's bumped the prize to $2,000. Given how hard the economy sucks right now, I imagine that a lot of people could use an extra couple grand right now, to say nothing of the extra goodies bundled in.

Anyway, the details are on Woot's blog.