monkey nonsense

thanks to nerdy friend jason for introducing me to… meebo.com!

this thing is pretty cool! it allows you to sign onto AIM/MSN/yahoo/some other chat clients from the web! all the IM windows are on the window of the browser so they’re all hidden under one internet browser window, instead of multiple windows (though if you use any IM client with tabbed windows- AOL finally added that?- then i guess it doesn’t matter). and when your friend IMs, it alternatingly flashes their screenname as the title of the window and the actual IM! (though this did not seem to work for jason, it worked for me!)

pretty neat! i wonder… for people whose companies actually block instant messaging places… can you log on through meebo? (unless of course they get smart and block you from getting to meebo’s webpage too)

it’s ghetto to program in notepad

one of my friends noticed that i don’t use commas in a list of three. for example… “my favorite animals are monkeys, dogs and cows.” not… “my favorite animals are monkeys, dogs, and cows.”

i remember learning specifically NOT to put commas after the “and.” but i also remember later on in high school and college, everyone had the commas after the “and” and i wondered if i should also.

from the Rules of Comma Usage webpage:

Use a comma to separate the elements in a series (three or more things), including the last two. “He hit the ball, dropped the bat, and ran to first base.” You may have learned that the comma before the “and” is unnecessary, which is fine if you’re in control of things. However, there are situations in which, if you don’t use this comma (especially when the list is complex or lengthy), these last two items in the list will try to glom together (like macaroni and cheese). Using a comma between all the items in a series, including the last two, avoids this problem. This last comma—the one between the word “and” and the preceding word—is often called the serial comma or the Oxford comma. In newspaper writing, incidentally, you will seldom find a serial comma, but that is not necessarily a sign that it should be omitted in academic prose.

do you put commas after the “and?”

so at work, i have to use linux/unix (what is the difference?!? … i’m such a failure of a CS major) quite a bit… so i had set up my own environment “settings in some file” that made it easier for me to use it… things like hitting the up button to repeat a command, hitting tab to complete the command, setting paths. suffice to say… nothing works. i had little to no idea how to set these things up so i was basically copying my predecessor’s settings, googling other things and so my settings file is pretty much a mishmash of crap… plus, my settings get overridden by the settings of our software product which has its own environment settings file that gets used… so yea…nothing with the command line really works.

normally, i dont care. all those features are nice and all, but i’m just too lazy to figure out how to get them to work properly. however, there is one feature i miss dearly… and that is the ability to delete. i’m not the best typist so i have plenty of typos… i just want to delete!! backspace, delete button, esc and then ctrl-x or ctrl-dd… i don’t care what it is, as long as it’s consistent, but it seems like with each different login i use (my own, the product’s login, a co-worker’s login), different platform and version (solaris or AIX and the different supported versions we have here)… the button to delete changes each time!!

this was me at work today:

ahhh!!! those weird characters are my attempt at using various buttons to delete my typo. and that’s not even the worst typing job i’ve had. there was one time it was so bad i started cracking up in my cube… my co-workers must have thought i was crazy… but i had been trying to type the SAME thing like 1875391859189 times!!

i hate computers