Category: Endured

Trials, marathons, or otherwise draining.

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Endured

Weapons of Mass Irritation

Last time I [posted about a mashup](https://vjarmy.com/archives/2005/11/wowzers.php), I wrote:

> Every now and then, there’s a mashup so goofy, so absurd, that you can only listen and try your damnedest not to die with laughter.

Today, I need to add a corollary:

Every now and then, there’s a mashup that is such a crime against humanity, that you can only listen in abject terror. It is the musical equivalent of a kick in the balls, and yet you will be unable to delete it.

If this isn’t enough warning, consider these quotes I’ve already gotten from people I’ve pawned it off on:

*”There is no god.”*

*”Seriously, who ever did this needs to be tracked down and beaten to death.”*

If that’s not enough warning, this is the last bit I can give before you go over the abyss: One of the source songs – nay, *the* source song – has been declared as “[a stunning assemblage of awful ideas](http://www.slate.com/id/2131640/)”, and “[so monumentally vacuous, slapped together and tossed-off that it truly tests the definition of ‘song’](http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/comments/12-15-05/)”, among other lofty awards this year.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold: Aber N. Stein’s [Turkey in My Humps](http://musicbuilder.net/music/bands/3164/). [as always, [via GYBO](http://www.gybo-v3.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=12511)]

Finally, something absolutely worse than the transit strike!

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Endured

Struck Out

It’s funny; the first day of the [NYC transit strike](http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/index.html) has been one of the most exhausting days I’ve been through in a long time, but not for the reasons I expected.

When I had caught wind of the strike, I thought to myself – “Hey, this’ll be okay; the walk is about four and a half miles, there’ll be some good photo ops, and I could use the exercise.” I almost looked forward to the possibility.

But unsurprisingly, something got in the way – ironically, my foot. Something in my right foot got messed up over the weekend; can’t recall anything in particular, but the pain started then and grew steadily, hindering me slightly on the way in on Monday and considerably on the way home. As such, there was no way I was going to be able to hobble over the 59th St bridge – so I worked from home as best I could.

But just keeping up with everything for the strike is excruciatingly draining. Coordinating who’s in when at the office, figuring out the car pool, trying to fill the car pool now that a couple people have found other options, having NY1 playing the same segments over and over again, hearing first-hand about the LIRR backlog, wondering how Katie is going to get home with Penn Station shuttered…
Jesus, I’m beat – and there’s little worse than exhaustion when you haven’t done anything physically exhaustive. Hell, walking the 9 miles roundtrip would’ve probably been pleasurable in comparison.

Here’s to hoping the MTA and the TWU reach a fair settlement soon.

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Endured

Direct IM Compatability

Just a quick note, as this happens a lot:

When it comes to IM, there seem to be two groups of people. One use official clients (iChat, AIM) – they’re convenient, they’re pretty, they’re well supported and sanctioned by the services involved. The other group tends towards third-party clients, either due to hatred for the official clients or, more frequently, because the official clients lack functionality they need.

I fall in the latter group, for a bit of both reasons. iChat, originally, was a huge RAM hog, was unbearably slow, and clutters up my display with a new window every time I get an IM, making conversation tracking a bit painful. I switched back to [Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/) because it solved all of these, and added some nice new features before iChat did, like a Jabber client. I can’t live without tabbed IM; the number of conversations I have to hold open with coworkers are countless, and I have [NADD](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html).

The downfall is, unfortunately, that as Adium is based in open source goodness like libGaim, it is not fully supported, and as such, falls short on a few features. File transfer was notably one that, for years, was particularly painful – it’s a little better now, but still not quite there. The feature that currently is painful, and the cause for this post, is Direct IM.

Direct IM is one of the AIM technologies that a lot of people don’t know they’re using, but can invoke without realizing it. Direct IM enables a tunnel from one client to another; previously, this was the only way to get “user is typing” notification before AOL added it to the proper AIM spec. These tunnels get invoked whenever you try and drag and drop an image onto an AIM conversation, especially in iChat.

I have a lot of iChat users that try and send me images. This is what happens:

– User drops image onto IM conversation.
– iChat demands a Direct IM conversation.
– Adium prompts me for it – there’s no auto-accept. This prompt is easily lost.
– iChat gets really baffled by the connection, as does Adium. As such:
– All the IMs I send to the other person are lost.
– All the IMs and pictures they send me are lost.
– The only way to recover is for both of us to disconnect from AIM and start chatting normally (and this is hard to coordinate when you can’t IM each other).

How to avoid this? I beseech you, iChat users – if you see me on IM, and you want to send me a photo, and you **do not see a microphone or a camera next to my name**, ask me to switch to iChat. Adium doesn’t do AV communications, and I always have a microphone or camera on every machine I sign onto AIM with. This is a clear sign about which client I’m using.

Thanks for your understanding.