Words for frankie_ecap. Terribly late, I know. I've got a couple of other wordlists, too, that I'm planning to get to.

( Christianity, Politics, Science, Fandom and Cats )

Leave a comment if you would like five words to write about, you know the drill.

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Dear Microsoft Update: No, I do not want to upgrade to IE8. I only have IE on the computer at all for testing purposes. If you keep nagging me I shall uninstall it altogether.

Further on the tech theme: what antivirus/firewall would you recommend that is effective but yet leaves you some processor and RAM to actually do stuff on the computer? Free is nice but not necessary.

Minor rant:

Why is it beyond most clothing shops to produce woman's business trousers that are 1) not polyester and 2) possess a) pockets and b) belt loops? Why is it so impossible to produce plain black, brown or grey trousers in a range of sizes, lengths and cuts? (Oh, cuts. I'm pretty straight through the hips and thin in the thighs, so for something cut for an "average woman" to button up at the waist, it has great flapping saddlebags with me hidden somewhere far beneath.)
And why polyester? It feels so cheap and nasty, and yet they charge enough for it...Pretty much the only place I've found that sells decent trousers is the Gap (cotton trousers, in three lengths, with skinny and curvy and my own long and lean cut, hurrah). What I'll do if they change lines or go out of business I can't think.

Anyone else out there female and suffering under the confines of business casual, where do you get your trousers, if you wear them? (Skirts have the skinny-leg problem again: if they're loose I look like something on a stick, and if they're too fitted they go out too much over the hips.)

Boys only think they've got it hard -- geekboys are notoriously allergic to business casual and will subvert it where possible. I was discussing work with one of the boys from my team and he remarked, "I hate having to wear trousers. [beat] I mean, trousers that aren't jeans."

Was waylaid by a disciple of L. Ron Hubbard on my way home. I was concentrating on extricating myself without saying So, really, the planet Zog?, but in perfect esprit d'escalier I thought of what I ought to have said before I reached the end of the road: So, I have to pay to belong to your religion? You know, mine is completely free. You don't have to pay a penny, and you don't have to become a good person first.

Why is it that I say stupid things without thinking, and can't think of non-stupid ones when I ought to?

So apparently there are sections of fandom out there that don't warn for content likely to be triggering.

....

Going back to play in my nice genfic sandbox now, kthanxbai.

Firefox users: Microsoft's .NET extension introduces a security hole.

Bah.

Not dead. To-do list long as my arm. Weather sweltering, am making the most of it when I can get outside the building.

The weather today was absolutely appalling. It started coming down in sheets at 1645 and looked set for the night. As we squelched our way past the cinema (the long way round by the Stiff Kitten, because there was a small river flowing out of the footpath across the square), one of them yelled that it was pretty much a monsoon only colder, and then pointed out that at least we weren't knee-deep in groundwater like an actual monsoon. Yet.

My trousers are a lost cause, and my trainers are upside down on a radiator. I don't think they'll be dry for walking in again tomorrow, because there was actually water sloshing around inside them at the worst point. I'll have to see what other shoes I have at home. My work shoes are, sadly, in work.

At least tomorrow looks marginally better than today.

I am so far behind with this tv thing....

( Spoilers )

I wanted to upload the 'I survived DW closed beta' icon that a few people have been using, but so far PayPal and I have not agreed. I am exercising patience.

Work has been good in a stretching kind of way. I had a code review this morning which turned into a 'let's refactor this out and then we'll need a new data access object, and $%"% the DAO layer in this app is a $£%*$£^ half-baked bodge job, but at least it's not as bad as that horrible ApplicationObject, or all that business logic in the front end.' (That would be our tech lead. The girl who sits next to me says we should get a team mascot--a parrot--and hang it up next to him. Its vocabulary would be half design patterns and half swearing. I did teach him something, though (when you're comparing local and CVS files in RAD, you can toggle an 'ignore whitespace' setting, very useful when you've done an autoformat by mistake).

It's the 100th episode of Numb3rs this weekend. I'm going to rewatch the first episode, because apparently there are going to be easter eggs for long-term fans.

Apparently the Internet is due to creak to a halt over the next three years.

As I'm currently a web app developer, that makes me a little worried. My online entertainment is still largely text-based, and I've been living on the web since the late 90s, so I'm sure I can adapt. I hope my employers can, though.

I'm not a hardware girl, but surely this problem should be to some degree self-correcting, or at least cyclical? If the internet slows down to dial-up-esque speeds, people are going to give up trying to watch on-demand video, thus freeing up bandwidth until video becomes feasible again, rinse and repeat.

British citizens: petition to the government to save Bletchley Park.

Testing crossposting, wheee!

Testing pingbacks with leia_naberrie.

Can someone who is a paid user with pingbacks enabled please make a test post to see if they're working for me?

I meant to do a lot of unspecified stuff today and ended up doing very little. Next time, I should make a list.

I've been feeling a little discontented today. Sometimes I feel like I'm out of step, in different ways, from everyone else in the world.

I happened to drive down the road where I grew up this evening. It's changed a lot in the year or two since I was last there. There were bits of it that I knew so well I could have drawn them, like the old ash stump beyond the gate into the field next to our old house, and yet there were parts I remembered with equal vividness that are now completely different, like the old farmyard with the chestnut tree at the corner that is now a new house with quite a large conifer hedge, or the stretch with the overhanging blackthorns where the DOE widened the road and put in a crash barrier. It reminded me of the bit in Job: He will not return to his house, nor shall his place know him any more, a little reminder that some day I'll be dead and the places I know will continue on without me holding a picture of them in my head.