Housekeeping

So, some people I know convinced me to sign up for Twitter. I'm still getting used to it. I promised I would complain at some point that the 140-character limit is too short. So here you go: the 140-character limit is too short! For someone who likes complete sentences and still refuses to text-message, it's annoying. But what are you gonna do?

Because you just can't get enough housekeeping news

Apparently this is on the new blogger now. I hope I didn't fuck things up.

Mostly I just wanted to see what it would look like with the new labels.

Update: I'm not sure I care for the placement of the labels. I will probably have to some template modification at some point, but I don't have time now. Also, apparently the labels are arranged alphabetically, even if you didn't enter them in that order. That's annoying.

Housekeeping

Links are finally updated, in both the Friends and Strangers sections. Some dead or dormant ones are gone. Shiny new ones added. Oh, and if you didn't notice, I messed with the color scheme again, because that's what I do. Who needs substantive content when you can just yammer on about superficial things?

Also, I know I should write a Blog For Choice post, even though it's already a day late (and I say 'should' not because I feel some sense of obligation, but because it is actually important). But I have always had trouble doing things because the calendar says so (seriously, I hate all holidays; in other news, I'm tons of fun at parties), and, more importantly, I'm having trouble forming coherent thoughts on the subject. So it will have to wait.

Some thoughts

Have you ever noticed how common it is in movies and TV shows to have one character make another character dig their own grave, after which the grave-digger is murdered and buried in said grave? First of all, do you think that really happens much? I doubt it. But more importantly, if you were the person made to dig, why would you do it? You know you're going to get killed anyway, so why not just tell the murderer to fuck off? So they'll just kill you sooner. Big deal. And actually, probably preferable, if you ask me. Plus you've made more work for them. I mean, if someone's going to murder you, they might as well have to work for it, right?

*****

It's not a new idea to notice that Corey Dillon looks like Ludacris. But I don't think I've ever seen it pointed out that Rodney Harrison is almost a dead-ringer for LL Cool J. I think it's a fair bet to say the Patriots have cornered the market on rapper look-alikes.

*****

I was poking around some political websites yesterday, and somehow ended up at The Volokh Conspiracy. This is not a blog I have ever read before, so I was surprised to see that someone I went to high school with is one of the contributors there. (I won't name names, the better to keep anyone from finding this post, but it may or may not rhyme with Willya Bowman.) He was in a different grade, so I didn't really know him. But his locker was right next to mine, and despite that fact, I don't think I ever spoke more than two words to him in the (three?) years we overlapped. Because, seriously, dude was weird. The one thing I remember about him was that he used to spread his books and papers all over the floor in front of his (and thus, my) locker and do his homework right there on the floor.

Anyway, it's always strange to see someone you "knew" way back when become, well, I suppose "famous" isn't the right word, but at least marginally prominent, I suppose, if you can call being a law professor and posting at a big-name (it is, right?) blog prominent.

*****

Oh, and Landru's most recent post reminds me that I need to do a whole lot of linkage updating. But I don't feel like doing it now. I know you always appreciate it when I tell you what I didn't do. So, you're welcome.

Dammit

It's been more than two months since I updated, and look what's happened - now I'm missing a month from my archives. Fuck. I suppose I could backdate this post and force it create a December archive, but that wouldn't be right. I'm all about the honesty here. (Ha. Ha.)

Anyway, I promise I am in the process of writing a big honkin' new post, and it should be posted within the next day or two. Many topics will be covered, probably including, but not limited to: how my Dad is a radio star (except not really), how my Mom will probably burn the house down one of these days, how I could totally be a terrorist if I wanted to (yes I know this was promised two posts ago), why I should buy stock in Ann Taylor, and how my family has not been spared from the recent spate of cancer diagnoses. Yeah, that last part is sad and not funny, but hey, so is life sometimes.

Check back soon.

Because I am incapable of just letting things be

I'm like a fucking drug addict. I can't help it.

Which is to say, I'm messing around with the template again, so if things look wonky for a little while, that's why.

UPDATE: Okay, I think I'm done. I like it. Not that I necessarily hated it before, but I realized my problem is that I don't like using the default Blogger templates because I don't like having the exact same design as zillions of other blogs out there. I need something that's all my own.

And thus concludes the latest episode of Jolene Changes Her Template AGAIN And Tells You About It AGAIN Because It's Not Like You Don't Already Have Enough Reasons To Want To Kill Yourself Over The Monotony Of It All Because You Can't Tell If She's Ever Going To Write Anything Worth Reading Ever Again.

UPDATE UPDATE: I was just adding a few more links, and I noticed that I don't know the fucking alphabet. Like, I apparently thought G came before F. I have no idea what THAT was all about.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: I forgot to add, now that I'm done, that if the blog looks like shit, please tell me. I looked at it in three different browsers, but I'm sure someone will come along with some wacky alien browser and tell me something's amiss. And I would like to know if that happens. Thank you muchly.

I'm back, maybe

So I'm slowly recovering from last week's trauma. Maybe ready to resume blogging again.

Of course, right now I'm still hung up on housekeeping issues. I did indeed cut and paste in all my Haloscan comments, despite the best efforts of Blogger's spam controls. Apparently, there's some maximum number of comments you can post within a certain amount of time; if you exceed it, Blogger thinks it's spam and disables all commenting on the entire blog for several hours. This happened three times before I figured out that I could get around it by repeatedly disconnecting and reconnecting my internet connection, which changed the IP address and tricked Blogger into thinking I was a different person.

I also added and cleaned up some of the links, got rid of some of the little icons I didn't like, and changed some of the colors. Nothing too drastic, but I at least like it a little better than the defaults for this template.

Anyway, I should hopefully have something more interesting to say soon. Not that I'm sure you don't love hearing all about my comments or the color of the links, or that I learned how to make a favicon, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's probably not that interesting to you. I don't know. I could be wrong. But in any case, I think I'm done with the tinkering for now, and actual substantive posting should resume shortly.

Well, that's that

Looks like I successfully changed the template. I miss the old one already. *sniff*

I'm also sad that I've lost all the Haloscan comments. I'm switching back to the Blogger comments because they have the feature that emails you when you get them (Haloscan actually did have it, but you have to pay for it). The Blogger comments don't seem to have all the problems now that they had back when I started using Haloscan (really, it's that Blogger itself seems to be much more stable), and they work properly with the new template (with the old template, which was designed before they had comments, they wouldn't pop up from the main page).

Technically, I still have all the Haloscan comments stored in my account there, and in theory, I could cut and paste each one into the Blogger comments just so I could keep them attached to the posts. Obviously, now, I don't have time to do that, but I'm compulsive enough that I might just do it at some point.

Anyway, that's all for now. We now return this blog to hibernation.

Fucking Hell

So I made a few minor edits to my links today and managed to fuck something up. I have no idea how or why this happened, but the post font completely changed. None of the code appears to have changed, so I don't know what's going on, and thus, I have no idea how to fix it.

It is driving me nuts. I HATE the way it looks now. HATE. I am really senstive to aesthetics when I read, and if there's something that bugs me, I can't read it. And it doesn't work so well when you can't read your own blog.

It's just such a bummer, because I spent quite a bit of time and effort making the template look they way it does, and I liked it, and I really, really didn't want to change it. But I can't leave it they way it is now. I just can't.

I soooo don't have time to be spending futzing around with a new template, but I know that if I don't, I will be unable to function because I won't be able to stop thinking about it. I know the best thing is just to do it and get on with my life.

So if you happen to check the blog in the next few days, and things look wacky, it's just me screwing around with the new look, and it should look okay (I hope) shortly.

You know if I leave you now, it doesn't mean that I love you any less

Hey. Hi. How's it goin'?

You might have noticed a serious dearth of posts lately. I've noticed too. But here's the thing. I've always been busy. I've always been sleep-deprived. But now? Things have reached a whole new level. As a direct result, the motivation to expend mental energy on anything other than certain life obligations is rapidly waning. I predict that the circumstances precipitating this state will last, oh, about two months (just a hunch).

And yeah, I know, I should just cut and paste one of the fifty other posts where I've written almost exactly the same thing. Broken record and all that. Whatever. Don't judge me.

Anyway, what this all means for you, the reader, is that it's possible I may not post at all between now and August. But it's also possible I might. I don't know.

Because everyone else is doing it

I decided to play around with my links a bit. Separated the friends out from all the rest of the random blogs I link to. No real reason, except maybe it was starting to get a little cluttered, I guess.

Service Interruption

Things in life have suddenly become really, really stressful (even more so than usual, even though it didn't seem possible). And I'm probably not going to be posting here much in the near future. It's not so much that I don't have time, although that's part of it. It's more that the stress just kills any desire to write much of anything. (God, I feel like a broken record. I know I've written almost exactly the same thing at least once or twice before.) Of course, as is always the rule, as soon as you say something like this, within hours you suddenly think of something you want to write about anyway. Who knows. No guarantees. But if you don't see anything here for a while, you know why.

Edited to add: By "near future" I mean the next several weeks. So don't abandon me! I'll be back.

Housekeeping

So the comments were apparently having issues yesterday. Again. Some more. I finally got fed up and decided to go ahead and install Haloscan. The voice of the people will no longer be stifled by Blogger!

I didn't want to lose the comments I already had, so unfortunately, the old posts now have two comment links, and it looks really stupid, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it (though I guess I can turn off the comments on posts that don't have any). Oh well. You can't ask for everything.

I want my twenty-five dollars!

So I'm sitting here at my desk trying to decipher some very cryptic flow charts so I can summarize them in paragraph form, and my phone rings, and it's a woman asking me if I'll answer some questions for their market research about my industry, and if I say yes, I'll get $25.00. Since I am a whore, I said sure, why not. So she asks me some basic questions about the place where I work, as in, exactly what type of place it is, and how many people work there, and then says, sorry, we've already filled our quota of people who work at that type of place. Okay, then. And after I hang up the phone, it occurs to me that, given that they called me, shouldn't they have already known that information? They obviously got my number from somewhere, and determined that I was an appropriate person to target for their survey, so it just seems weird that they wouldn't already know where I work. And if they knew where I work, they could have figured out that they'd already filled their quota without ever calling me, since the information is all right there on our website. Just seems kind of weird, especially since they're a market research firm, and you'd think they'd have enough sense to, you know, do some research.

By the way, for the longest time, I've been trying to figure out how to post in other colors (mostly so I can set quotes off without resorting to italics or bold, since the blockquote function fucks up the formatting of all the text that comes after it), and I could not figure out how to do it. And then today I noticed that there's a whole other tab in the "compose post" window, and it has a convenient little color button. All this time, I've been trying to do it by HTML, except I don't actually know much HTML, and the button's been right there. God, I am clueless. Hey look, it worked!

Um

See, there's this project I've been working on at work the last few days, and it's sapping my will to live. So I haven't been able to think of anything to write about. Mostly, I just wanted to add another post so I could bump the last post down and not have it be the first thing you see when you open up the blog.

Trouble in Bloggerland

It has come to our attention that a certain someone's comments are getting lost in Blogger's cybernetherworld. Please be advised that we here at Major Disaster Co., Inc. are working tirelessly to resolve the problem, mostly consisting of posting a test comment. While this seems to have temporarily provided a fix, please bear with us, as we cannot guarantee that it is permanent.

This might be a good time to tell no one in particular that we ourselves are just slightly annoyed that the comments left here on this blog no longer get emailed to us, except for the comments left by Wheezy. We have no idea why this would be, except for maybe that Wheezy has magical powers or something.

Anyway, we will continue to provide status updates as the situation warrants.

Thank you for your patience,

The Management

I hope I don't regret this

I did it. I changed the title.

Like I said in the last post, I hated the old title. It was the title of a song, and I liked the song. It was a fun, kicky song. But it never really felt like me, whatever that means.

So I was thinking for a long time about what I would change it to. I am not a very creative person, so I didn't even bother trying to come up with something original. Mostly I tried sifting through my music collection to try to find something interesting and appropriate, as well as obscure enough that it wasn't immediately obvious where it came from, and not too long (yes, I know was obsessing and overthinking this - that's what I do). As you might imagine, that was a tall order.

I tentatively settled on something from another Cake song, because I thought it would at least go with my "name" Jolene (also from a Cake song). But I still wasn't crazy about it.

Then I got this wacky idea that I could reinstate the name of my old blog, the one I had before this one, which no longer exists. The name of that blog was actually the only thing about it that I wanted to keep when I deleted it. It not only fits my personality (sadly enough), but it has what I think is a pretty funny backstory, which I had completely forgotten about until just now. So it makes me laugh, which is always a good thing.

Anyway, if you have a link to my blog, the URL didn't change, so all you have to do is change the link text. Sorry for the inconvenience. I promise I won't do this again!

At least not for a little while...

When did I start writing a political blog?

I mean really, what the hell is happening here???

I promise, things will return to the usual irrelevant and meaningless content shortly.

Oh, and by the way, I have been mulling over changing the name of the blog. Basically, I kind of hate "Have Fun, Go Mad". Have for a long time, but was resistant to changing it. It's really starting to bug me, though, and I figure any day now, I'm going to hit the big time (don't laugh, it could happen), and then it will be too late. I haven't entirely decided what the new title will be (don't worry, the URL won't change), but when I do decide, I'll let you know. (I'll even entertain suggestions, serious or otherwise.)

Okay, I think I finally figured out the comments

And I think I managed not to break the blog in the process.

Unfortunately, it kind of looks like ass. For some reason the "Comments" link is much bigger than the other text on the same line, and I can't figure out how to make it smaller. Damn you, Blogger. Or damn me, for not knowing how to do HTML. Whatever.

Hello, Hellooooo.... Is this thing on?

Good lord, it's been so long since I posted on this thing that the entire Blogger interface has completely changed. And I'm missing several months' worth of archives because, well, there wasn't anything to archive. Kind of sad, really. I don't even know what prompted me to post right now, other than I am working on some exceptionally boring stuff at work (I mean, even more boring than usual), and suddenly decided that this was the distraction I needed.

In addition to being bored, I'm in a pissy mood because I have been suffering all day from various wardrobe malfunctions and bad hair.

First, the sweater. The dry cleaner decided that it would be cute to shrink it so that it is now too small (and yet I wore it anyway. I don't know). Normally, my first thought would be, upon finding my clothes too small, that I had just gotten too fat. But here's the thing - I own two of these sweaters. They're identical, except for the color. I brought them to the dry cleaner at the same time, and picked them up at the same time. And the other one didn't shrink. I don't know what they did to it, but they fucking shrunk a cashmere sweater, and that MAKES ME MAD. It's not the first time, either. I have a pair of lined wool pants where they shrunk the pants part but not the lining part, so now the lining sticks out a half-inch from the bottom. The hell? The simple solution would be, of course, to switch to a different dry cleaner, but this one is right near my house, and it's too inconvenient to go to another (I'd have to walk there). Or I just like complaining.

Anyway, moving on. The pants. I was sitting cross-legged in my chair at my desk, and happened to look down and notice that about an inch worth of seam in the crotch of my pants had decided to open itself up to the world. Thankfully I was wearing underwear. Thankfully also you could not really see it as long as I was standing or sitting normally. Seriously, Ann Taylor, whither the quality? I paid a lot of money for these pants, and I haven't worn them very many times. That shit should not happen.

And then the hair. I don't know if it's the weather today, or if the water quality suddenly changed, or what, but my hair is awful today. I can't remember when it's ever been this flat. I normally don't have big hair no matter what I do to it, but this is ridiculous. It's hard to describe if you don't know me, but it's bad, bad hair. Very bad.

In housekeeping news, I'm updating the links to take out some broken ones and add some new ones. I've finally admitted to myself that I do actually read the political blogs, so I'm breaking down and adding them. I still don't want to discuss politics, but now it's more because I'm just too depressed about things. All I'll say is that if the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and West Coast want to secede and form their own new country, or, say, join Canada, I would have an awful hard time being opposed to it.