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| Saturday, June 01, 2002_ Hey hey!! Read my cheater's blog at erinfinnegan.com/blogger.html !!!! You have to click on comments if it's blank. Wheee!!! Man... I messed up my last post here... yipes! Erin typed @ 1:12 PM :: Comments [] Thursday, May 30, 2002_ OK... try going to Erin typed @ 11:48 PM :: Comments [] _ Well, I am now horribly blocked from blogging at work. I have decided to become an internet free speech activist. Check out peacefire.com. They talk about the evil SmartFilter, which is what ISO uses to oppress me. It's one thing to live in a fascist state at work, but it bothers me much, much, more to know that SmartFilter is also used to oppress high school students. There's a name for this kind of thing, and that name is Censorware. Coming soon! My cheater's blog. I'll start posting in my own comments exclusively. You'll see. I won't let them get me!!! Erin typed @ 8:37 PM :: Comments [] _ Auuug!! Blogger ate yesterday's post! It still seems like I'm terribly depressed. Here's yesterday's post about feeling better: Erin typed @ 9:33 AM :: Comments [] Wednesday, May 29, 2002_ I feel much better today! It's amazing how much a full 7 hours of sleep can make a difference. I talked to Noah last night on the phone. His old boss, the corporate recruiter whose going bankrupt, is taking him in for a few days on some meager assignment. This will provide Noah with tiny bits of cash, but more importantly, keep him from going insane this week. Also, I convinced Noah that he should probably start applying to grad schools, without first figuring out how to pay for it. Most grad students are adults who work part-time anyway, and it puts Noah towards his becoming-a-professor-goal. It will take him about a year to get in, I figure, and I get to help pick the school, and wherever he goes, I'm going to go and live with him. It's not like I've such a terrific "career" going on in New York. Besides, moving would be moving to a college town, and college towns are usually OK by me. I other news, my dad got a job!!! At this point, my mom would tell me not to jinx it. It's exciting, since my dad has been out of work since at least September, which is one of his longest stretches of unemployment that I can remember. This is an excellent turn of events, since it will mean my mom can worry less about the gigantic debts I ran up, and my parents can afford to visit in the fall. Oh, and it is also worth mentioning that my roommate's cat is quite a bit better now. It is no longer blind, but still a little unsteady on it's feet. For example, yesterday it went to jump on my roommate's lap, and somehow failed, and ended up on the floor on it's back. I guess the cat rolled a one for the jump. Erin typed @ 11:05 AM :: Comments [] Tuesday, May 28, 2002_ So right now, Noah is probably having a nervous breakdown. Columbia finally told him he didn’t get the job, after dragging him through two interviews and two months of “waiting for HR to get back to us.” This seriously impairs Noah’s current life plan. Worse still, his worst-possible-scenario involves never accepting money from anyone to help pay the rent, and moving out onto the street in shame instead of asking his roommate to cover for him. Meanwhile, I’ve been getting depressed. You know, trouble sleeping, worrying about eating and my weight, moving because I thought my apartment was making me unhappy, crying for no reason, getting sick because I worry too much, and giving myself an ulcer because I hate my job. I guess I could get some kind of counseling for this, and indeed, my doctor has offered me a referral. But what’s the point? I can’t afford a psychologist with no health insurance, and what could a psychologist tell me that I don’t already know? So life is sucking. I am lucky to have a suck-job that I hate. None of my friends really have jobs, and those that do are part-time or close to minimum wage. My only ray of hope is the newly founded “Franco Club” which meets on Tuesday nights, and Maggie’s re-instatement of sci-fi club, held informally at her place on Thursdays. There’s also gaming. I guess. Email me, people, I can't read your comments while I'm at work. Erin typed @ 9:41 PM :: Comments [] _ Ooooh... burn. The firewall has, at long last, blocked erinatwork.blogspot.com. But not blogger.com, so in theory, I can still post from work. However, I can't see if the page turned out OK, or read comments, which blows. Other blogspot hosted webpages have been blocked, like my friend Steve's page, and my experimental "Fiction Makes Me Happy" thing... although I can read it in the posting area. Oh, and Kerry's blog is blocked, but it's not like he updates it or anything. I can still read (and comment on) everyone else's non-blogspot-hosted blogs. And I can read blogs when I get home, but where's the fun in that? Let's see if I can still post. In the meantime, email me if my page isn't working. Erin typed @ 10:33 AM :: Comments [] Friday, May 24, 2002_ Blogging about Blogs I happened across someone else's blog, following a promising link to "Spit on a Stranger." It was written by some girl in college, and her entry had to do with the Buffy season finale and some other TV show...and that was it. I was horrified. Who could possibly care about what TV shows this girl is watching tonight? That got me thinking about my blog, and the pointlessness of blogs in general. If I weren't an addict, "Spit on a Stranger" would have disgusted me enough to quit blogging right away. Sick I'm back at work today. I felt a lot better this morning, but the office building seems to have aided my congestion in a really gross way. In other sickness news, the cat is doing much better. My roommate returned and doesn't seem angry with me for anything yet, so that's good. We'll see how it goes in the coming weeks. Erin typed @ 3:19 PM :: Comments [] Thursday, May 23, 2002_ Experiments in Over the Counter Cold Medication So I was going to go to work today, but then I didn't sleep well. I woke up every hour on the hour. At 6:00am I pondered seriously whether or not to go to work, and, since my sinuses were dry and painful, and the lack of sleep had zombified me, I decided to stay home again today. I realize this will make a serious dent in my paycheck next week, but what am I gonna do? If I went to work, it would take longer to recover. By staying home I can lower the net misery I have to feel. Irritatingly enough, I caught this cold at work, from co-workers. Now I've given it to Noah, and hopefully that won't hamper his ability to find work. Fiction Makes Me Happy I have started a new, collective blog at erinesque.blogspot.com. It's like one of those games where one person starts telling a story, and then the next person continues is, and so forth. It might be really lame. We'll see how it goes. Bruno Meanwhile, the comic strip I am including on my site, "Bruno," is in one of it's typical patterns. The main character, Bruno Baldwin (the girl) has an unshakeable kind of existential angst. She's never happy staying in one place for very long, and constantly drops out of her life to travel in a kind of Bohemian way. I care about the characters, but sometimes their philosophical whining kind of gets on my nerves, as in today's strip. Erin typed @ 2:23 PM :: Comments [] Wednesday, May 22, 2002_ Sick I found out I was tired because I was getting sick. Now I am sick. I stayed home from work. This sucks. Erin typed @ 6:34 PM :: Comments [] Tuesday, May 21, 2002_ Why is it only Tuesday? Why am I so tired? I went running yesterday with Noah. Isn't exersize supposed to give you more energy? I think I should bring on the funny. I promised the funny, and I have not delivered. Jason, my co-worker, is in St. Louis for some ridiculous text-based RPG convention thing. He's so big into this game that he's one of the top 5 wealthiest players in the game. Just in the game, not in real life. His character has a ton of expensive, custom tattoos. Which is curious, because, since it's a text-based game, it means that J payed a lot of money for a couple of sentences describing his tattoos. Sometimes players of this game sell their game-gold-coins on ebay at a set exchange rate for real-life money. I think J should give me a lot of money, and I'd describe his imaginary tattoos for him. Erin typed @ 1:25 PM :: Comments [] Monday, May 20, 2002_ Name Generation I almost didn't bother finding my Wu Name, since one day when I was bored I went through almost all of Yahoo's name generators. But then I was bored again... so I did, and it was a different Wu Name generator than the one I'd seen before. So my Wu Name is: Optimistic Lyricist Or, with my middle name: Flailing Fanatical Killer Some days I feel like both. Noah's Wu Name is "Tha Prickly Comedian". My Ninja name is "Daisuke Fujiwara -san" or maybe "Tsuru Mifune -san" thanks to Ninjaburger.com My Star Wars name, for those of you dying of curiosity, is "Erifi Adjac, Nagford Tempo of Ortho Tricycline." Other My doctor has recommended that I see a nutritionist. I am not too thrilled about that. I know I eat crap. I don't need a nutritionist to tell me I weight as much as a baby elephant, that I eat crap, and that I need to exersize more. I can't even spell excersize. I get it so wrong no spell checker can help me. I'm finishing off a pack of SweetTarts as I type this. I guess I'm also daunted by the fact that in high school I'd run at least 20 miles a week and I was still technically over-weight by those fiendish height charts. I'm convinced that the solution is to grow 4 inches taller. That'd be easier than losing 30 pounds, I'm pretty sure. Fuck all. I'm just gonna buy bigger pants. Erin typed @ 4:09 PM :: Comments [] _ Another day, another blog. This weekend(ish) I went to two parties. One was a corporate party thrown by my former roommate's company. Hooray for free alcohol! I had an alright time there, but being among 30-somethings in a real NYC party reminded me that I work in Jersey City, in a job I don't care for, in an industry where I don't belong. The second party was at a house in some far-ish off place in Jersey. It was a barbeque held by Noah's (significantly older!) friends. There were many very hard-core geeks (cryptographers!) who were very smart, and happened to also have gourmet taste in alcohol. I was especially amused by 30-years-old-but-still-looks-16 gamer Adam, who is apparently a "binge worker" who will work extra hard at a job, make mad money, then quit for a long time. He was pretty funny to talk to. Also, some guy who I had met before, who I thought was a jerk, turned out to be not so bad after all. So over all I had a pretty good time, and a lot of good alcohol paced out at a reasonable pace. Then a new show premiered on Adult Swim! It was "Mission Hill," a nice new cartoon for adults about a geeky 17-year-old who moves to the city to live with his older, cooler brother while he finishes high school. There were some pretty good jokes, a solid plot, and an intriguing art style. I'd recommend it. It wasn't as excellent as "Eltingville" which they showed the premiere of again. Eltingville just has soooo many references packed into it. Thus went my weekend. Erin typed @ 2:44 PM :: Comments [] Friday, May 17, 2002_ Son of a bitch! The SmartFilter blocked IDZap.com. I have spent a lot of time just now trying to find some other way around the firewall, but most of the sites relating to that kind of thing have been blocked. How will I read Penny-Arcade? Whoever is reading this should email me today's Penny Arcade cartoon. Just download the gif and email it to me as an attachment. Please? Somebody... Meanwhile, I'm really, really, really tired. Star Wars made me tired. Then last night I went to big corporate party that had free food and alcohol, but more alcohol than food. Then I talked on the phone with Noah for a long time where he bitched and bitched and (as my dad would say) pissed and moaned about not having a job, and worse, not wanting any sort of job where he'd have to work with jerks and/or stupid people (thus, exluding 99.9% of all jobs) and this and that and other doom and gloom. I thought some kind of usefull conclusion was reached towards the end, though, and I was feeling better about the whole thing, but NO, he emails me this morning with more of the same. So I kind of emailed him back something mean. That probably wasn't the best idea. Erin typed @ 12:34 PM :: Comments [] Thursday, May 16, 2002_ Everyone is graduating and/or taking the day off from work, so blog traffic is low! Even the guy who does Bruno didn't do a comic today. I saw Attack of the Clones!! Wheeeeeeeee!!! Not a single clown in that whole movie, how disappointing! Without going into too much detail here, I will say that I liked about 40 to 50% of the movie quite a bit. The other 50 to 60% I hope I never have the misfortune of watching ever again. Eye-gouging and sappuko feelings ran high during the romantic scenes. I thought yoda fighting was super-cool, as did the audience I was with, although my friend Jen claims that it was horribly lame, and her audience laughed and laughed. I don't know what that's about. You know Yoda's gotta be a bad-ass with a light saber, and he does not disappoint. Just in case anyone who works for Lucasarts ever reads this, even by accident, I need to convey this message: NO MORE VIDEO GAME COMMERCIALS DURING THE MOVIE!!! Ugh! Like that scene in the droid factory or the pod race in episode one... Erin typed @ 12:45 PM :: Comments [] Wednesday, May 15, 2002_ I really hate Elvis Costello. I can't stand the way he sings. There are only two songs of his I can stomach; the one on the Big Lebowski soundtrack, and "Pump It Up." Erin typed @ 5:13 PM :: Comments [] _
 You are 40% evil! [?] You're more good than evil, but not by much. You've drank straight from the carton of milk in the refrigerator, and maybe kicked the neighbor's cat, but you're still good. Kinda. Erin typed @ 5:12 PM :: Comments [] _ Hanging out with your ex; always a bad idea. Why can't Ric learn this lesson? Yesterday I hung out with Shaun for an hour, on account of him graduating and leaving NYC forever and all that. I didn't tell Noah about it, because the whole "Shaun" issue makes him uncomfortable anyway. Shaun had high hopes, of course, but the whole hang-out was awkward and terrible. And he was acting creepy. Creepy! Why would I have ever dated such a creep? Maybe he wasn't a creep at the time, but the break-up made him weird. Erin typed @ 5:12 PM :: Comments [] _ Baby elephants weigh about 200 pounds at birth. I am like a somewhat under-weight baby elephant. Erin typed @ 1:50 PM :: Comments [] _ I can't decide if today's Bruno strip is funny, or just really annoying. Hmmm... IDZap is not all it is cracked up to be. It keeps going down. I found another site that's not blocked, snoopblocker.com, but it is incredibly slow. Plus it has ads and messed with my browser (or something) until the ISO (that's my workplace) proxy server asked me to log on a couple of times. I've seen it do that before, randomly, but it always kind of freaks me out. It also freaks me out how a lot of sites I would go to to research anonymous web proxies have been blocked. No freedom of information here... Hey Maggie! Where's that script for a quiz? I know you're reading this... Hehehe... There was this conversation the other the reasons writers write things, and someone said, "for revenge." Hilarity ensued. Noah quipped, "Dear Reader, I know you're reading this!" Speaking of Noah, I have mentioned before how he is against blogging and doesn't even read my blog. So now I'm going to start mentioning him more frequently here. I doubt he even remembers the URL. Erin typed @ 12:17 PM :: Comments [] Tuesday, May 14, 2002_ Huzzah! I have comments! Thanks to Sam!! Wheeeeee!! Today I went to the doctor's. I held things together really well, and was only particularly near tears when the doctor-in-question asked if I wanted a recommendation to a counselor or something, since I was so "emotional" last time. I really think she failed to understand my problem. Oh well, my stomach is doing a lot better. That's the only thing I was really concerned about. I'll stop being so anxious around doctors when I have health insurance and can find a doctor who actually cares. (Oh, for the days of pediatricians!!) My blood test came back from the last visit. Somehow, I have high cholesterol. That's really weird considering that A) I am 23 years old, and B) I hardly eat any cholesterol. Jason has suggested that maybe someone is sneaking into my apartment and giving me injections of pure fat at night. That would explain why I weigh so much. (Don't tell me I'm not fat. I'm not fishing for compliments. I know I don't look fat, but I weigh damned near 200 pounds. I think my feet are made of lead. Or strange matter. Maybe someday I will collapse into a singularity.) (Hooray for parentheticals!!) Last night I sent a copy of my script into the WGA. So now it’s copyrighted, in a way. Special thanks to Evonne for spotting all the ridiculous typos. Erin typed @ 3:42 PM :: Comments [] Monday, May 13, 2002_ So one bag of M&M's, three aspirin, and one anonymizing website later and I feel a LOT better. It make me chuckle to use software intended to block banner ads to see blocked websites. I had posted something earlier about living in a dark, Orwellian future (SmartFilter is used in some public schools! It blocks the Onion, America's Finest News Source) and software for the damned (damnedware) but blogger sort of ate it. So forget about it. Erin typed @ 4:56 PM :: Comments [] _ Oh!! The day I feared has come to pass! The firewall has blocked orangatango.com, so I can no longer use the service I paid ($7) for to check Penny Arcade or read Kari's journal (livejournal.com is also blocked)!! Oh whoa is me! Blogger will be blocked next!! I just know it. Erin typed @ 1:42 PM :: Comments [] _ Great, so I start posting Bruno on my site and the cartoonist immediately falls ill. I'm having a hard time working this morning. I guess it's just the usual Monday blues. There's got to be a less cheesy way to say that. Hmmm.... On Thursday I went to an optometrist for new glasses and contacts, resolving myself to the fact that I needed new, un-encrusted contacts, right now. It could not wait in hopes of obtaining health insurance. At the optometrist I had a kind of revelation: Every optometrist I have ever been to has been more or less a total jerk. If the doctor isn't a jerk, the staff are jerks, or creepy or something. The sales staff at this place kept touching my arm. I actually had to yank my arm away from the one guy, and he backed off after that. I have a (regular) doctor’s appointment Tuesday, and I am not looking forward it at all. Over the past 4 years or so I've developed a good, strong, phobia of doctors. I know exactly where these fears come from… In high school I ran cross country and track, and I was locked into this kind of competition where a few of my friends and I ran at least a mile a day every day. I ran for 700 consecutive days, and then I got injured. A doctor (not the kind pediatrician of my youth, but someone else) told me to take a week off. This was devastating to me, right in the middle of the season, my senior year. Worse yet, it didn't work. I was still injured at the end of the week. I got a recommendation and went to a specialist. At the orthopedic place, they built insoles for my shoes to correct my step and I could go running the same day. The week off had been for nothing. The doctor had had no idea what she was talking about, and didn't care at all about what was important to me. Over the course of my college career I occasionally got sick and went to campus medical facilities. These are, in general, horrid, because the physician you see will probably never see you again, and therefore, doesn't really care about you or your well-being. He or she has 50 other sick college kids to see that day, he doesn't have time to care. Somewhere along the line I started bursting into tears in doctors' offices. I almost never cry in my every day life, but this whole despair over how doctors don't really listen to me, or care, and just give some general diagnosis that they gave 50 other people that day really gets to me. It's a horrible kind of despair. And it builds on itself. I worry about breaking down in a doctor's office, and so because of the worry it happens. It's really disturbing. Plus it makes me look disturbed. I need that comment script… so people can write comments. Feel free to email me at work, people. Erin typed @ 11:20 AM :: Comments [] Friday, May 10, 2002_ Wheeeeeeeeee it's Friday!! I am trying something new - daily Bruno comics on my blog!! It is not the funniest web comic in the world, by any means, but it is very regularly daily and has been going strong for many years. I have not finished reading the archive yet. The strip is at it's best starting in about 2000. There's a lot of drama dealing with various political issues at first, and the drawing is not at it's best, but eventually it settles into a rhythem of beautiful art, and high sarcasm. My email at work is down!! Curses!! Erin typed @ 10:38 AM :: Comments [] Thursday, May 09, 2002_ I just made Jason laugh so hard at the local coffee shop that I was actually embarassed. He fell over sideways on the couch-thing laughing in weird hystarical giggles. His face turned red. Eventually I said, "That's it, I'm going back to work," and I got up and left. The cause of his merriment was this proposed scenario: What if one sweated blood? One's clothes would be bloodstained constantly, laundry would be a pain, one's hair would be matted and horrible (not just hair on one's head, but also one's arms), no one would one would want to use the stationary bike after you at the gym... and so forth. Erin typed @ 4:20 PM :: Comments [] _ Alright, that's better. Look, it's like some weird ANSI terminal. Which Noah would like, if he wasn't totally against blogs and refused to read them!! Thpppbbbttt!!! I was late to work today. Blah. I was in the middle of a dream when the alarm clock went off. I felt it was more important than anything else to get back to that dream and kind of finish it up. It had something to do with a school field trip, octopuses (octopi? octopocta?), and at least two celebrities. OH MY GOD there's no sci-fi club tonight. That throws off my entire schedule. That's way too much free time. I'm actually gettin my laudry done... and even the dishes, although one can hardly blame that on a lack of clubs. Obviously I'm avoiding something bigger, like editing my screenplay. My screenplay which no lousy film companies care about. The Tisch log line book got published, and two of my friends got contacted about their screenplays, but not me, because obviously I suck. Anyhow, I haven't been writing anything since I finished the screenplay, (except this blog), so I think this has a direct effect on my job getting more boring and frustrating in the past week. The solution is writing. If I don't write, I will go insane. Writing is life!! Erin typed @ 11:16 AM :: Comments [] _ Now I am messing with the colors. My links are gone. My cat's breath smells like cat food. I suck at archiving. Note to self: Re-think archivist career goal. Erin typed @ 10:36 AM :: Comments [] Wednesday, May 08, 2002_ I want my blog to have pretty colors. It does not. I could steal some outright... but nah. Any tips? Erin typed @ 3:38 PM :: Comments [] _ Paper-Wasters and Paste-Eaters Ugh! Between yesterday and today I'm sure I have wasted an entire ream of paper! Yesterday I was printing out things in blatant defiance of the failing toner cartridge, and today, well, today I kept printing a 40 page document incorrectly. Why not print a test page, you might ask, and my answer might be to tell you that I was trying to create a macro to print the things correctly, and it took me a couple of tries to get it right. Granted, my job does not include as much paper-wasting as it used to, but it's still rather a lot of paper-wasting. Times like these actually make me feel better about all my script printing and zine copying. At least that paper goes to some use. I would do less harm to trees if they set me loose with a blow torch among the Ponderosa pines. Graduation. Don't play that game. It's getting to be graduation time for a lot of my friends. I graduated last year, and looking back on it, graduation was the singular most stressful time of my entire life so far. In fact, even if you took away all the terrorism and the scary nationalism and warfare and economic slowdown of the past year, it would still be one of the worst years of my entire life. I have no useful advice for graduating seniors. Working sucks. Having no money sucks. Paying back student loans sucks. Having no health insurance sucks (NYU lets you keep using their services until August, I suggest stocking up on medication). Having no job is fun for an entire week, maybe two, then it sucks. There are very few upshots to graduating. Other people seem very supportive of college graduates, giving hearty "congratulations" and whatnot. College drop-outs are occasionally impressed you finished your degree in the allotted four years or less. Your parents are probably proud. It's nice not to have to write papers or take exams. But that's it. Other than that college is a giant scam. (I don't know how people without a degree manage to survive.) After graduation you're only qualified for the pithiest of low-level entry-level crap jobs. In my experience, no one cares about your internship(s) or scholarships or that kick-ass work study job or even that campus literary magazine you edited. Even entry level jobs in New York can be surprising. Don't be shocked when you hear, "Have you ever worked in a mailroom before?" or even, "Have you ever worked at a Starbucks before?" Here are my tips for job seekers: 1. Pad your resume. 2. In the interview, when they ask you what you want to do for a living, lie like a dog, and tell them that what you want to do is whatever this job leads to in 5 years. 3. Commence lying. 4. Revel in despair. 5. When you still don't get the job, go back to step 1. Erin typed @ 3:32 PM :: Comments [] _ The phrase "caffine free" is quite possibly the worst combination of any two words in the English language. Erin typed @ 10:09 AM :: Comments [] Tuesday, May 07, 2002_ Oh my god my job sucks!!! I just caught myself thinking, "I like North Dakota. Not to live there, but because they have a very simple commercial auto loss cost table." AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!! (more screaming follows). The other day I joked, "Can you imagine the loss cost for the Death Star?" one of my co-workers responded, "Whoa, that would be a manual like this!" He then spread his hands apart in a how-big-was-that-fish gesture. Then all of us groaned at the sheer awfullness and mind-warping boredom of our jobs. I wept openly. Well, no, just kidding. Worse yet I keep thinking about it. No one could have insured the second Death Star. There would be no worker's comp for them!! But then I guess if you're living under a (supposedly) totalitarian fascist regime, it's not like you have a choice of contracts to choose from, you know, if you're a contractor. Send me your thoughts on the matter and win a quick reply (9am to 5pm): efinnegan@iso.com I'd put a mailto: link on there, but what's the point? I've never worked on a machine that was properly configured to allow mailto: links to work right within the browser. Erin typed @ 2:42 PM :: Comments [] _ I think they should call him Johnny Deformed! The cat has made an amazing and miraculous recovery in the past 24 hours. It's walking around, doing whatever it is cats do (Red Dwarf fans might recognize this as "investigating" with "my investigating feet"). However, the cat seems to be blind in one eye. It has a real problem with depth perception and keeps running into things. Also, it seems to have lost all its memory. So now we have a cycloptic, amnesiac cat. Erin typed @ 9:52 AM :: Comments [] Monday, May 06, 2002_ Ooh, I forgot to mention that the cat is doing better. Sort of. We took her home from the hospital on Sunday. She seems very weak, and can't stand up for very long, and sleeps a lot. Her condition has not improved in the last two days or so. We'll see, I guess. Erin typed @ 4:36 PM :: Comments [] _ One of my hobbies at work is signing up for web-based email addresses and seeing how long it takes for them to be blocked by the firewall. I have found that if I sign up for an account while at work, the website will be blocked the next day. If I sign up for an account at home, and only check the my mailbox at work, it takes about 2 months for the site to be blocked. And you may ask yourself, "Why is Erin's workplace blocking webmail sites?" and apparently, the answer is something about hacking and viruses and being forced to use Outlook. So anyway, I have had a Finnish email address, I have been anonymous@fangirl.net and a few other things, but most recently I got a lasting account at sailormoon.com. Since I have nothing better to do I signed up for one of their list-servs, hoping to glean otaku knowledge from real hard-core fans. The reality was a bit different. It took all of 5 minutes for these idiots to start debating dubs vs. subs, and slightly longer before people started asking "What is a dub?" Then a Dragonball thread started, a few people asked "What is DBZ?" OH MY GOD!!! The stupidity! I thought, perhaps these people are 10-year-olds, maybe that would explain the poor spelling, the one-line emails, and the proliferation of emoticons. But no, that was quickly dispelled by a few people saying that they were 20, and "wanted to make friends". EGAD!! UNSUBSCRIBE!!! (The sound of many clicks on the unsubscribe button.) In other news, I saw the Spiderman movie. It was not a bad movie, nor was it a good movie. The first 40 minutes were enjoyable, but it got weird from there on out. There were some very good scenes, and some extremely bad scenes. One romantic-dialog scene obviously written by Stan Lee had me looking at my watch, covering my eyes, pretending to shoot myself in the head, and finally screaming "Cut! Cut!! For the love of god cut!" in that order. Although Spiderman was more entertaining than the X-men movie, it was not always entertaining for the right reasons. For example, one transition had schrapnel from an explotion morphing into graduation hats to take us into the next scene. That made me laugh, but not for the right reasons. The first Batman movie was infinitely better if only for its consistancy. I should end with a joke. Here, read this: http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/GavinMillarrrrrWrites. Erin typed @ 11:25 AM :: Comments [] Friday, May 03, 2002_ The cat is worse. She's twitching. She's probably not gonna make it. I have let a few of you in on the detail that my roommate went away on his vacation early in part because his grandmother was dying. She died before he got there to see her, which is sad. I have observed that maybe everything around my roommate is dying. Maybe I'm next!! Oh no!! Jason-of-work has provided me with the following humer-filled scenario: bad scenario: you come home to find all your stuff smashed on the road your roommate raving about how you killed his cat and he has a new roommate worse scenario: you come home to find all your stuff smashed on the road your roommate raving about how you killed his grandmother and his new roommate is a cop Yeah, thanks Jason. Meanwhile, I have been doing something I should have done a long time ago! ("You don't know, do you?" "No ma'am.") I am making a graph illustrating my episode-by-episode opinion of every Simpsons episode ever. Thanks to the SNPP I was able to create an Excel database, and I will soon have a precision chart for arguing purposes with Franco and Ric. Here are some links for your enjoyment. First, help save Futurama!! Aparently it's been cancelled. And second, here are some corrections to "Rock Bottom" which was a Hard Copy parody show on the Simpsons. I always liked this list, (which can only be read using slow-motion) from which we learn useful facts, like how Roy Rogers was not burried inside his horse. Tonight, against my better judgement, I am seeing Spiderman. Next week, against my better judgement, I will see Episode II. Erin typed @ 2:58 PM :: Comments [] Thursday, May 02, 2002_ OK, so "Frontier House" is the American spin-off of a British show called "1900 House." In these shows, one or more families lives in a historically authentic environment. "Frontier House" features three families living as 1800-something Montana homesteaders. It's not a competition, and there isn't a prize, although a couple of the families don't seem to know this. Overall the show is pretty entertaining, because it moves right along, and is kind of like the Real World if it were a PBS show. This is the PBS site. I am never ceased to be disgusted by Gordon Clune, an executive-type from California who has come to the frontier with his wife and his four preppy kids. "We miss Coke!!" they whine. Gordon is the most annoying person on the show. He starts off complaining that they are not being given real guns, but only kid's guns, and he goes on and on and on about how this simply was not how the West was one. Come on, it's PBS. They're lucky they got guns at all! A few months into the show, all the men have lost weight from hours of hard labor constructing log cabins and chicken coupes and the like. The powers that be are amazed that in three months, all of the men now weigh the average weight for men their age in 1883. Gordon, however, freaks out. He started the show overweight, not grotesquely so, but he was fat enough he had a fat face. Three months in he has lost 45 pounds and looks like a skinny little hippy. He starts panicking when he feels fatigued for several days, and his muscles freeze up. So his family cheats on the show, and trades with 21st century neighbors to get vegetables that would not have been available to them in 1883. The family feels totally justified cheating, and it's pretty disgusting to watch. A doctor visits later and talks with Gordon. It turns out he was displaying classic symptoms of dehydration!! Gordon complained and complained and drove his family to cheating, and went on endlessly that he was not getting enough protein, when, in the end, he just wasn't getting enough water. Too bad he wasn't really starving. The other families were having a hard time too, but they didn't complain or cheat. In fact, everyone else's complaining added together wouldn't equal Gordon's complaints. He volunteered for this thing! I guess when you rented a villa in Tuscany last summer, spending this summer losing 45 pounds in Montana is a little less glamorous! Anyway all this prompted me to yell at the television "Starve, fat-face, starve!!!" Erin typed @ 4:22 PM :: Comments [] _ It has occurred to me that Blogger is hosted in another time zone, possibly somewhere in California, thus the four-hour-lag on its clock.
My Mormon name is Erdine Fionnuala! And everyone's favorite:  Which Colossal Death Robot Are You? These "Which ____ are you?" quizzes are pretty popular now. I took one that was like, "Which NYU student are you?" and it correctly guessed Tisch. However, some of the other mulitple choices were very worrisome. Observe:  take the nyu type quiz. and then browse around mewing.net. because laura is cool. Auuug!! God! I just smashed my finger between my desk and the chair!! Goddamn!! Not much is going on today, as you can tell. Jason is not here. He found that with flex hours, if he works one hour later every day, he can take every other Friday off. That bastard. I guess I could probably do that too, but working an hour later every day is a pain in the ass, even though my commute is a lot shorter now. Speaking of commutes, I've decided commuting is for suckers. Why would anyone want to live 2 hours from their workplace? It's not worth it, people... also, please quiz squishing me on the PATH train, you people, and if I'm sitting on your coat tails, why don't you move them, for god's sake? Erin typed @ 11:43 AM :: Comments [] Thursday, April 25, 2002_ Today I have been reading my brother's website and his web log at http://personal.jackson.cc.mi.us/matt.finnegan/. He seems to be obsessed with dental hygenist, and thinks of most of his post while sitting on the toilet. It's somewhat amusing, to be sure, but I fear the SmartFilter (a component of the FunWall!) will block it soon, because Matt has put porno-names on his links. They are not links to porn. Now let me tell you about how the Newport area of Jersey City is like Nazi-era Berlin. In any good, fascist regime, you have to have travelling papers to go anywhere. People are not allowed to travel freely, you must have ID for everything in such an authoritarian state. The same goes for the office buildings in Newport. You cannot enter an office building where you are not an employee, and employees must have a phot ID at all times. Packages are subject to search, in some buildings. Vistors must be signed in and wear name tags. Food delivery people are not allowed in past the lobby. Plus, all of the office buildings around here have these turnstiles that don't turn until you wave your ID over a sensor. The sensor logs all your comings and goings into a database that managers, if need be, can access (Fred, you're fired, you left 5 minutes early every day this month, etc.). Everytime you scan, your photo comes up on a computer monitor where bored, under-paid security personel can read your name. Am I the only person who finds this EXTREMELY FRIGHTENING? These checkpoints are not enforced by any government, they are just inventions of large companies. The fascism is self-imposed. All the security check points leading to and from the mutual business cafeteria don't make me feel safe, instead, they really freak me out. Erin typed @ 12:24 PM :: Comments [] Wednesday, April 24, 2002_ Welcome to my blog for work-related post. I work at a large and super-fun company where the parties never stop! It's so fun here that a firewall, which I like to call, the "funwall" blocks all ftp services, streaming media (like RealAudio), webmail (such as hotmail.com) and any controversial websites like The Onion (blocked for the first time yesterday), or websites you might visite too often, like penny-arcade.com. Thusly, I have my own webpage www.erinfinnegan.com but happily, I cannot updated from work! But that's OK, because my work is so thrilling and busy that I don't have time for things like blogs! Let me tell you how fun my job is! Right now, I'm actually digging myself into a hole by doing work that will only create more work for myself later! Isn't that brilliant? The best part about this job is the fact that I'm a temp with no job security, but, like, a permanent temp so I have a really good, warm-fuzzy false sense job security. My temp agency offers health insurance that I can't afford! Isn't that awesome? I bet you wish you had my job! Erin typed @ 9:43 AM :: Comments [] |