Here’s a little known fact: Fantastik kitchen cleaner will remove silicone sealant from your hands. Aren’t you so glad you read this site?

Someone has been poking around in the old Blogatelle archives via the Wayback machine…which of course makes ME start poking around in them. It was such a different time then, wasn’t it? Trolls were non-existent…comment spammers didn’t yet have a clue…I was funnier.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go deal with escaping monkeys… Glad we didn’t buy that banana tree.

Update: Would someone please take away my internet access? I apparently had to order more seeds today…

From Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds:

• Lemon Cucumber
• Parisian Pickling Cucumber
• Strawflowers (colors I never knew existed!)
• Blue Monday Sage
• Yarrow
• Bright Jewels Cactus Flower Zinnias
• Polar Bear Zinnia
• Orange Master Pomegranate
• Red Marconi Pepper
• Thai Long Sweet Pepper
• Red Cheese Pepper

And from Landreth Seed Company:

• Marigold, Jolly Jester
• Amaranthus, Caudatus Red
• Marigold, Queen Sophia
• Poppy, Oriental Scarlet
• Sorrel
• Tabasco Peppers
• Tennis Ball Lettuce

Caitlin, need more seeds?? Halp!!

When I finally decided it was time to see what this internets thing was all about, I did it during downtime whilst working for Boeing. *whistles innocently* I used tutorials and reverse-engineered code to teach myself about site building and FTP and HTTP and all the crap required to, you know, have a website.

Push-button site publishing, and of course blogging, came along some years later and any fucking idiot with opposable thumbs thought it’d be shthuper cool to have a presence on the web. Well, I’m happy to report that ass-picking morons are still crawling out of the sludge and putting up hideous frontpage-built shit every day. And they still neither have nor want a clue about how to accomplish the most basic of tasks.

Huzzah.

And then there are those proprietors of high-traffic sites, who believe their stats relate directly to their penis size, and who rail and scream when the server (the exclusive use of which they are not paying for, by the way) inevitably buckles under the strain of their ape-like minions and their ever-so-eloquent flinging of poo.

You, sir, are not a special snowflake. Unless by “special” one means “requiring of transport via the diminutive bus,” or “goddammit, Timmy, put on your helmet before your brain falls out!”

Another day, another five layers of enamel ground off my molars.

*breathe*

Complete lack of babysitting T-minus 4 days and counting.

Hey, remember those radishes I planted last Sunday? They sprouted on Tuesday. Yah, two days later. And now they’re demanding a seat in Parliament.

We hit the local RenFaire Saturday, along with half of central Florida. Picked up a lovely bamboo windchime (the sound of which I’ve always loved), some trinkets for the kids, several cases of Faire-tummy and a still-painful sunburn. So, the usual.

The Girlchild tried her hand at jousting…

Naturally she aimed at the woman’s HEAD.

Yesterday bought EVEN MORE GROWING THINGS, thereby ensuring we’ll get a call from someone wanting us to move approximately 2,000 miles away. Inexplicably I bought a zucchini plant. Just one, but I hear that’s more than enough to ruin your life. Maybe we can take them to the skeet range…

Actually zucchini has made a place in my heart lately. Fry up some spicy Italian sausages, then saute a white onion, red bell pepper and a zuke, all roughly chopped, in some olive oil, butter, Holy Trinity, and copious quantities of thyme. Serve together with your favorite bread. Nom nom.

Bought two new planters that I adore more every time I look at them.

I just needed some flowers, ok? Shutup.

The bonsai maple is doing quite well after doing a remarkable impression of a stick for the past four months. It had a nice root bath yesterday in Bonsai Pro, which probably means we can put off root pruning for a bit longer. Huzzah.

See those peas down there?

See the dead carcass of the previous pea? The FAILED pea? The failed pea succumbed to a combination of curious cats and a few chillier than usual nights, we think. We’re leaving the carcass there as a reminder to the three new ones poking through the soil. We call this fascist gardening, and that’s how we roll.

So, how was your weekend?

Anyway.

Can I just tell you, I have the worst mouse hand this week. Fire in the heel of my hand, and a dull ache from fingertips to elbow. Ergo, I am looking for an alternate pointing device. Can you, my three loyal readers, suggest anything that has worked for you? This site has some interesting suggestions, including the head-movement = mouse-control widget, and this zero tension mouse that rather disturbingly resembles a sex toy. That’d be a conversation starter in the office, wouldn’t it?

Some people seem to think that using email relieves them of the requirement to be polite in their communications. The speed and ease of transmission of messages somehow translates to a courtesy exemption for some individuals…

Like the guy who emailed us claiming he’d never received a bit of spam until he’d moved his domain to our service. Clearly, according to him, we are selling his email address to spammers. How that makes any sense, since WE are the ones who would have to fight off the influx of spam to his account on OUR server, is a complete mystery.

Or the guy who emailed us claiming we were deliberately keeping his account resources low, and his charge for those resources high ($10 per month is high??), in order to take advantage of the “profit margin” between “drastically reduced storage costs” and “static pricing.” It is absolutely amazing how an end-user can have such insight into our business practices, non? (/sarcasm) Equally amazing is the preconception that, even though he purports to be a “long-time, satisfied client,” we’re deliberately cheating him. Well, amazing, and incredibly insulting.

It doesn’t take much effort to be polite. To ask questions instead of make assumptions. We’re like puppies…we’ll bend over backwards, wiggle our butts and everything, if you’re the least bit NICE to us. And we’ll bite when you’re not.

The fact that you prance around like a little ballerina who doesn’t want to get her tutu damp doesn’t make me any happier with you. If you’re going to run some damned app on your site, then you really, really need to know something about how to deal with it when your fuckstupid activities make it go tits up. The fix took about eleven seconds, and is so fucking far outside of our provided services as to be carpet cleaning that you’ve permanently made my List of Clients Who Couldn’t Extract Their Own Heads from Their Own Asses Even With the Jaws of Life Lending an Assist.

That’s not a good list to be on, people.

Oh, if anyone couldn’t comment over the past day or so, that’s now fixed. I am r00t!

Well, back to solving more people’s self-created problems. Growl.

“Would it help my site hits to have 4 nameservers instead of just two?”

No, the only thing that would help “hits” to your site is decent content. So, you’re basically screwed.

Stupid Statement:

“Just like I know how to reward good service with loyalty.”

Seeing as how with just two tickets to your name you’ve already established yourself as the Leading Asshole in the State, we could basically give a rat’s ass how “loyal” you consider yourself. You’ve already shown us exactly what you think of us, and trust me, the sentiment is returned in spades.

Just Plain Stupid:

You like to use whatever latest software the cool kids are using, yet you’re too stupid, or too lazy, to actually bother researching it/learning how to use it. So, we make the framework available to you on the server, and you utterly fail to make it work. News flash: Automatically assuming that we’ve either installed it incorrectly, or have something misconfigured, just emphasizes that you are a clueless tool. It seriously never occurs to you to ask questions instead of assuming you know everything, but after five years of the same old shit I suppose it is too much to ask that you will remove your cranium from your anal passage.

The Grand Prize Winnar of Stupid:

You let your domain expire. Three months ago. And didn’t notice it was expired. For three months.

For those of you who don’t know, when your domain expires, it is typically redirected to a registrar page that says, “Hey, stupid, your domain expired.” From expiration date, you have about 30 days to renew the domain, at the same price at which you registered it. After that time, the domain enters the redemption period, where you can renew it for an exorbitant fee, typically around $150. This fee is punitive, designed to permanently remind you to remember your frigging expiration dates. (The redemption period policy was put in place to save you all from the evil domain squatters, however, so it is a good thing overall.) After the redemption period (also about 30 days), the domain is deleted from the registrar and free for anyone to register.

So, not only did you let your domain expire, but it was a shitty, shitty domain name. Your first initial, your middle initial, PART of your last name, and then a descriptive bit. Seriously, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best domain EVAR, yours was a negative 743. It had zero mnemonic potential, and even if someone had it written down in front of them, it’d take five minutes to type it into the address bar. You might just as well have chosen dhlksndlkwhye.com for sheer user unfriendliness.

But being the nice people that we are, we offered to register the .net version for you. Or, a more sensical domain, yourname.com. We were going to do this for free, too, since you’re so very pathetic in your not understanding anything at all that we were telling you. Nine times. But you kept whinging, “I don’t understand, just get my domain back,” even after being told, NINE TIMES, that we could do nothing more than contact the current owner and make an offer….which, might I add, is so far out of our web host purview that it might just as well be salmon fishing. They’re not going to answer, dumbass, because they’re evil domain squatters.

We are tired of repeating ourselves. We’ve had every person in the company answer you now, each of us rephrasing and using smaller words each time. It’s time for you to face facts…you shouldn’t be in the Intarwebs. Evar. Not even Googling. The tubes might melt. We recommend carrier pigeons instead. Yes, we know they’re extinct. Have a nice day.

1. The more shrill you get in your insisting, the more less true whatever you’re insisting on becomes.
2. When we tell you the remote network is queueing the mail for delivery, that’s because it is. Insisting that something is wrong with the server makes you the jerk.

Repeating the same old whinge over and over makes us repeat our responses. Over and over.

Your lack of comprehension is not our problem. If you don’t understand something, ask.

1. Not understanding that you’re not getting email because you didn’t even set up the email address at which you expected to get email is just pitiful.
2. Asking for a refund for the time during which you did not receive email because you didn’t set up the email account in question is the very definition of an exercise in futility.

No, it is not our job to keep your crappy software updated. It is yours. If we do anything to help you in this regard, it is a courtesy, and you goddamned better well be courteous throughout the entire process.

Keep a copy of your signup documentation. It’s really kind of silly to forget where your website is hosted/domain is registered.

You know what they say about assuming… If you cannot email someone, let us know the specifics so we can check the mail logs. Do not rush off to dnsstuff.com and start querying things. We guarantee you won’t understand the results, and telling us our servers are misconfigured because of that is just going to get on our nerves.

1. Do you even know what a stealth nameserver is? No? Then STFU.

Yes, we will suspend you over a $6 past due bill. It does not matter how much you owe, it matters that you pay it on time, just like any other service provider.

If you’re going to resell hosting service, make a frigging effort to learn some basic things. This will save you and your clients a great many big fat tears. And prevent us from hating your very molecules.

Have a nice day.

And here’s a hint…ending your argument with the succinct and ever-popular “Fuck you, assholes,” is SOOO not going to cause us to change our minds. Just in case you thought it somehow might.

In the third case, the whinger is at least a resident of the US, but seems to think that someone refusing to publish a review of her book somehow constitutes infringement of her freedom of speech. Now, in the US, freedom of speech is not only in our Bill of Rights, but it is right there at the top of the list. However, what Miss Published Author doesn’t seem to grasp is that unless the individual refusing to publish her actually collects a paycheck via Capitol Hill, her bleats of “oppression, wah!” mean precisely dick.

Follow me, people: Only the government of the United States of America has the capability to pass laws that potentially infringe on the rights of its citizens to engage in verbal diarrhea. (Delightfully, anyone can sue you at any time for said diarrhea but the burden of proof is on them.) The First Amendment says, and I quote:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That means, in small words, that Congress can not make a law that tells the press what they can and can not print. Interpretation generally includes publications other than newspapers/magazines, but hey, you don’t see rejected authors whinging to publishing companies (who are, oh hey! PRIVATE companies) about infringement of their right to free speech, now do you?

Well, I suppose you do if they’re as mentally impaired as the three examples just quoted appear to be.

Note to self: Drink more, it helps with the pain behind your right eyeball.

So, while you are also to be congratulated for posessing enough magickal internets mojo to do a reverse lookup on the originating domain to determine the (alleged) perp’s host, shooting us an email demanding the offending site be taken down immediately only makes you look like a clueless tool. As it stands, people can not be punished for being clueless. Yet. So, it would make just about as much sense for us to punish our sans-clue user by suspending their entire site, as it would to actually reply to your silly little missive with a graphically detailed description of your mental shortfall. Instead we shall do what any responsible host would do…delete the phishing files from our client’s account, instruct them to patch/upgrade as appropriate, and write a snarky, anonymous post on our personal site that allows for therapeutic venting.

Ah, much better.