I’m grumpy when I have a headache. So pretend I’m providing you with sparkling observances on how stupid it is for a person with allergies to dust, mold, and pollen to live in a household filled with stuff, books and plants.
I’m going to go sit in a corner and moan now. It beats yelling at everyone for no reason. Wake me when it’s spring.
Cost accountants get no respect. Really. I mean, who cares that a box costs forty-three cents and that extra little bit of padding makes the package one-half ounce over 1 pound?
Well, come to think of it, I do. (Saw that coming, didn’t you?)
We’ve been selling some things online — Plagioclase does the pricing & listing, I do the shipping & bookkeeping. Normally this works out ok, until he prices an item “to get it out of the house” that actually sits in the basement until some cheap bastard buys it some indeterminate time later. At which point I have to pack it (it’s like the night before Christmas every day here) and take it to the post office.
That half-ounce of carefully taped padding, combined with the net loss on the sale after the venue’s fees were deducted and the cost of the box means I might just have well given the thing and another dollar to some kid on the street — and then I would have saved some gas. At the very least I could have donated it and maybe gotten a tax deduction.
So today I’m going to start revamping the sales thingy so I can track this shit. The accountant inside me wants to allocate costs and note every expenditure against a sale (including to the weight of the box!) so we don’t lose money, and the slacker in me just wants to get rid of the crap no matter what. The accountant wants to do physical inventory (again) and list all the items (again) to make sure what happened the other day doesn’t happen again. (I couldn’t find something that had sold. Nowhere. And it wasn’t in my inventory list, so I didn’t know where to begin to look. Very frustrating.) The slacker just wants to wait until tomorrow to start thinking about it, or maybe I should just develop the whole system first and make sure it’s perfect and does everything I could ever want it to do and don’t forget it should go online and get info as needed and should give consignors up-to-the-minute information………..
And then I’ll write a blog entry and procrastinate some more.
(p.s. My dear patient friend, I’m working on it, really!)
Not too long ago we got a cheapo-PC to run some specialized hardware (and of course, its associated software). The machine came with Windows XP Home (OEM edition). Every time I turn it on, something jumps up for attention: “Hey, there’s a new security thingy that Windows installed. Hope you don’t mind,” or “Are you sure you want to do that?”
I used to be fluent in Windows, and pretty well-spoken in MS-DOS, too. But then I quit working in a place with Windows PCs, and my skills pretty much lapsed. Now I find myself acting like one of those dolts novices people I used to work with — staring at the screen, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to click, frightened that I’m going to poke something and make it blow up. I think it has something to do with the WinXP design paradigm. Everything’s all rounded and primary colors* — makes me think of Fisher-Price toys, like I’m a child messing about with my parents’ stuff.
I tried looking for new themes, but they’re scary, too. I’ve read so much about security that I’m loath to download stuff, especially the coolest bits. The skinning crowd tend to over-design, anyway (just because there are 16 million colors, doesn’t mean you have to use *all* of them). So I futz with the colors and try to find an inoffensive wallpaper and ignore the ugly icons.
And when it’s too much, I go back to my Mac and breathe a sigh of relief. Not because the basic design paradigm is any better (remember the jelly-bean window buttons and the dalmatian-blue imac?), but because I know how to change it. Except for that row of indistinguishable blue icons in the dock. That I’ve given up trying to do.
I think I’ll go generate some starfish patterns now.
* Not like this blog. Nope. No primary colors nor jelly-beanness going on here. Just rounded corners. All the cool kids have ‘em.
Cosma is looking for advice on assigning a textbook. Since I have absolutely no clue what he’s talking about, I’ll just make jokes about one of his topics:
ergodic theory
What the hell is that? Some sort of concept of a Higher Power? Or perhaps a methodology of “therefore”?
Crap. I can’t even make a good joke about it. My computer’s dictionary says ergodic is an adjective
relating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points.
Well, that explains it then. It’s about that creepy drunk guy in the bar who hits on all the women.
Pesky Mac reveals her trinitarian nature:
My optimistic side thinks perhaps President Bush now realizes he has no political capital, will appoint someone who is a] qualified and b] will rule as a judge should—not by their religious beliefs, but by the Constitution. My pessimistic side laughs at my naivete and thinks President Bush will nominate some out and out scuzzbag arch-conservative fundie with no respect for the Constitution to please the Dobson set, who without doubt are the reason Harriet Miers withdrew in the first place. And my Inner Conspiracy Theorist thinks this was the plan all along, to throw Miers to the wolves as a way of seeming to appease Democrats with Bush’s idea of a moderate, but then having Miers pull out at a politically opportune moment and giving Bush the chance to appoint someone really sleazy, saying it’s the will of the people.
I think I’m gonna have to get the heavy-duty wrap, ’cause I’m thinking ICT is right.
