This morning I had a very early Zoom call. Which got the cats all excited, because they thought they were getting breakfast 1-1/2 hours early. But, alas... no.
After washing my face and attempting to make my hair presentable, I sat down for my meeting... went to say "hello"... and... nothing. My voice was completely gone. All that non-stop drainage from my allergies (which have been worse than usual this year) had caught up with me, and that was the end of it. I had to participate via typing in chat, which likely made nobody very happy with me, but it's not like I had much choice.
Allergies during COVID times is no joke. It's tough to come across as though I'm not infected when I'm a complete mess. And can't speak.
So I conitnue to test daily. Continue to be negative. And continue to wonder how long I will be suffering this year. Last year was only a couple weeks. This year feels like it will be lasting a while.
And yet... Spring is still my favorite season of the year.
Go figure.
We’ll crap. Guess I have to go into the office...
Kinda weird to be rooting for a positive COVID test. Oh well. I didn't want to stay home and play video games anyway.
No word if I'm pregnant. I guess I should have peed on it?
"I'm getting too old for the hand-to-hand violence."
I'm celebrating my birthday by leaving this planet.
Except I don't have any extraterrestrial contacts to arrange such an escape so I'm driving over the mountains instead.
It's either that or sit around trying to find an excuse to not clean out my flowerbeds.
And... dead.
HOW MY DAY STARTED:
Here lays David Simmer II, he was electrocuted to death one day before his 56th birthday while trying to repair his garage door opener.
HOW MY DAY ENDED:
Here lays David Simmer II, he died of embarrassment one day before his 56th birthday after realizing that his window was open while he was talking to his cat, Jake... "THERE'S MY HANDSOME BEAR! HOW'S MY BABY BEAR? JUST LOOK AT MY HANDSOME BABY BEAR! SUCH A GOOD BEAR! YES YOU ARE! YES YOU ARE!"... knowing full well that the people in the neighboring yard totally heard him.
I feel like I should go apologize or something.
Well, the wheels on the chair are supposed to go round and round. Which is why I was more than a little surprised when the "soft" casters for "hard floors" that I received from Steelcase (after two weeks of waiting for them to correct their error) are most decidedly NOT soft. They are hard as a rock. Really no difference at all from the "carpet casters" that came with my chair.
But worse than that? They barely go round and round.
I put them on my chair even though they weren't soft like I expected... but when I pull the chair out, half of them aren't rolling. They are scraping! The only way they rotate is when I sit in the chair so there's some weight pushing down on them. But I can't sit in the chair when pulling out from under my desk!
AND PLEASE NOTE: There is no wax or oil on my floors! It's just regular hardwood flooring!
So I had to order an entirely new set of third-party casters that are ACTUALLY SOFT, ACTUALLY MEANT FOR HARD FLOORS, and, oh yeah, THEY ACTUALLY GO ROUND AND ROUND!
Steelcase Customers Service says that the casters are "designed this way."
GOOD LORD, WHY?!?? THEY ARE SCRAPING ON MY FLOOR!!!
It's really shitty that you pay a huge amount of money for a new chair, get it with the wrong casters, wait for TWO WEEKS to get the correct casters, only to end up with something so low quality that it scrapes up your floors.
I'm more than a little raw about it.
I would expect this kind of thing from a $40 generic chair you buy from Walmart. I do not expect it from a $700 chair from a premium brand like Steelcase.
Oh well. Live and learn, I guess. More expensive isn't always better.
As I mentioned a while back, I pre-spent my tax refund money on a new desk chair and an Xbox
Halo Infinite is pretty darn good. It's open-world, which is tasty, and the graphics are pretty spectacular. But I'm not going to talk about Master Chief and Halo. I'm here to talk about a game that has really been wasting my time: Disneyland Adventures (which is included in Xbox Game Pass).
Now, here's where things get weird.
As a GAME, Disneyland Adventures is 100% shit. You play "attractions" so that you can perform tasks for various Disney characters. But the "attractions" have shitty controls, are frustrating for me as an adult (NO idea how kids are supposed to play this crap), and I hate them.
But as a SIMULATION of literal Disneyland? This is one pretty great experience. I've been to Disneyland a bunch of times, and they got so much of it right. I mean, some things are missing... licensed properties like Star Tours and Indiana Jones Adventure are missing (the game was made in 2011 before Disney bought Lucasfilm) as is stuff added after 2011 (like Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge). And Jack Sparrow has been replaced by "Black Barty" for some reason. But still... if you've been to Disneyland, it's pretty amazing to see how faithful they tried to be to the park...
Now, as I mentioned, the controls are shitty. It was originally designed to be played via Kinect, a motion controller, but I don't think that Kinect works with
So that's what I've been doing.
Alas, since the mini games are so awful to play with a controller, there's only so far in the game I can get. You perform all kinds of favors for the Disney characters, but eventually they want you to do something inside an attraction, and I'm not up for the frustration, so I'm blocked from continuing. Eventually I'll be blocked from finishing the game completely and won't be able to finish at 100%, but that's okay. In the meanwhile it's a fun way to visit Disneyland in these COVID times.
Even if my avatar in the game looks creepy as hell.
My one take-away from my Apple HomePod fiasco is that I am not wasting my time trying to make things work as advertised. Apple said that HomePod would play my iTunes Match library, it would not, and I wasted half a day trying to get it to do what I bought it for. Then ended up sending it back when it wouldn't do it.
I swore never again.
I wasted a huge chunk of time trying to force something that wasn't going to happen.
And so I stopped doing that.
It either works out of the box or it doesn't, and I'm not going to throw any more of my life away fixing shit when it's not what was advertised.
And it's shocking how much stuff doesn't work out of the box. Today I just sent back a frickiin' iPad holder that didn't work Because is it really worth spending an hour... or even ten minutes... trying to figure out why the iPad clamp won't affix to the swing arm? Nope. — I read the directions. I followed the markings on the parts. I spent precious minutes of my life trying it one way, then the other way. Then I was done.
And so I spent a few more precious minutes boxing it back up and starting a return.
Minutes. Gone.
But wasting minutes is better than wasting hours.
In all honesty I don't consider myself special for having a miserable day. That's going around a lot lately. Like really a lot. And it does seem petty to be complaining about life when there are people in the middle of a literal war just trying to survive.
And yet...
It sure would be nice to not come off a weekend where I ended up working ten hours only to have a shit-load of crap fall on my head. Made all the worst by whatever passes for "customer service now-a-days." I swear that most companies now just want to deflect problems rather than actually solve them. And it's hard to get mad at the person not helping you because they don't set policy. They're just doing what they're told.
So I try to be kind after being put on hold and getting nowhere, even though I have full documentation to show that I am, in fact, not wrong about what's supposed to happen vs. what's actually happening.
But it's not like the people in charge of these big companies give a shit. They don't have to take customer service calls. They just have to sit back and count their money.
I could really use a vacation. Even if it's just staying home with my cats and watching television.
Happy Monday to me.
Don't let life distract your from what's truly important... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...
• Homemade! The last French rolls I bought were $4.80 for six, were small, gummy, and didn't taste that great. So this time when I wanted an Old Amsterdam Old Cheese sandwich roll I made my own big, beautiful, fluffy rolls...
Cost me less than $1... and they are unbelievably good. So good that I can't stop eating them. I've had three. It will take all my effort to not to eat a fourth.
• Welcome to My Nightmare! Had I seen Nightmare Alley in 2021, it would have made my best-of list for sure. The story is interesting enough, but it's the visuals and atmosphere that makes the film so special. It's a work of art. Its every scene is gorgeously and meticulously constructed...
And the performances! Bradley Cooper can act, sure... but it's Cate Blanchett who drives this bus home. Then you get Willem DaFoe, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, and an utterly brilliant and pivotal character by David Strathairn. It's too good. The fatalistic destiny which haunts everybody is palpable.
• Good Bye. Dang. Dieter Bohn is leaving The Verge. He and Marques Brownlee are the only two tech reviewers that I actively seek out because they are just so good at their job. In his farewell video, Dieter talks about his online handle, "Backlon," which is something I can very much relate to. Online I'm "Blogography" for everything because it's my blog name and how everybody knew me. So it became my handle everywhere. As Dieter says, "The choice causes a cascade of associations for whoever sees that handle." And it's 100% true. This is a fascinating video about our online identity... and everything I will miss about Dieter Bohn...
Best of luck at Google, sir.
• Dave! There have been a lot of great guests on Hot Ones, and Dave Growl is right up there...
And here's a bonus bit of Dave for you...
He is hands-down one of the most fascinating people on the planet.
• Depot-Free! It only took three months, four phone calls, and a dozen messages to get The Home Depot and Citi to credit me the $50 I was promised when I opened my account... but here it is! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I can't believe it. I just made the full balance payment, so I'll believe it when it's posted, I have a zero balance, AND I CAN CLOSE THIS FUCKING ACCOUNT. I wish to God I had never messed with the Home Depot Credit Card which has been a complete nightmare from the very beginning. If you are going to promise a customer "Up to $100 Off" if they open account... and their purchases qualify for a $50 credit... THEN GIVE THEM THE FUCKING MONEY! How difficult is this? Apparently very difficult, given what I've been through. Do they expect people to just give up so they never have to pay what was promised? Well, you got the wrong guy for that.
• Say Human! Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill is disgusting. The inhumanity of this horrific decision sickens me to my very core. And all I can think about is what happens to those kids in school who have two moms or two dads or a trans parent or a sibling who identifies outside the absurd artificial construct of binary sexuality. Their family members no longer exist while they’re being “educated.” Which is to say that they’re not being educated at all. They’re being discriminated against. Fuck those grotesque mockeries of humanity who would be so overtly bigoted and cruel. I’ve long since given up hope that our lawmakers will be decent human beings who want to represent all of us... but I do kinda cling to the hope that I can count on them to be selfish. That they’ll look at friends... family... neighbors... and other people they know... even actors, musicians, writers, and such... and say "I can’t possibly legislate against these people who mean something to me." But of course they can. Because they’re absolute garbage who don’t care who is hurt no matter who those affected may be to them. Appealing to bigotry is how they stay in government, and the money and power they get for that means more to them than anybody or anything. And also? Fuck the heinous assholes who vote for these repugnant pieces of shit. Fuck them twice.
• Just Die Already. And speaking of fucking assholes... this decrepit piece of shit wouldn't know the Bible if it sat on his face...
It defies belief that people believe his idiocy. Has he even actually studied the Bible? I sincerely have my doubts, because most everything he has ever said is not supported by Scripture. These are just his unhinged, demented fantasies. Counting the days until he's sent to hell for his shameless false prophet money-grabbing.
See you in seven days, true bullet believers.
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