Regarding Toilets

And Floods.
Toilets flooding to be exact.
My toilet flooding to be precise.
The stack on the inside of the tank blew sometimes between 4 and 5 pm on thursday of last week spewing hundreds and hundreds of gallons of water into my room and down through the floor and through the dining room ceiling and through the dining room floor into the basement.

My mom came home around six and shut the valve off. She was apparently standing hands on hips in the doorway of the sodden dining room when the enormous chandelier over our dining room table came out of it's bracketing in the disintegrating plaster and crashed down onto the table.

I got to go away to Johnstown for the weekend to work on Rabkindermpath.com with Jacob.
My mom got to stay in a wind tunnel. The insurance company is paying for the damage, but it's crazy.

Our dining room is empty. They took the oriental rug to be cleaned and dried professionally because it's wool. All of the furniture is in the living room. They've turned our house into a dehumidifier and heat-blower-induced vortex.

The awesome upshot is that the cleaner people are hauling massive amounts of stuff out of our basement now. At least it's getting cleaned out somehow. They've already hauled away one dumpster and are now filling a second one. And these are the huge kind.

It's strange that a huge calamity like this is reduced to a minor annoyance in comparison with recent events. Death puts things into perspective like none other.

First of all, a Rant.

Ok. So very recently, i put up some pictures on my Myspace Page .

They were pictures of the various things i've done this summer like go rafting. I am wearing a bikini in some of these pictures. I am not, however doing the inane provocative pose that one sees all over myspace in any of them. The day after...the DAY AFTER I posted them I got no less than 15 friend requests from various men.

I admit that I may have been a bit silly in thinking that people want to be "friends" for reasons other than sex. I am increadibly disapointed in (almost ) the whole human race at the moment. Blech. If any of you guys followed my link to this blog, you are summarily dismissed! Out!

GRRRRR!

A few comments on insane masochism.

Today, I woke up and tumbled out of my bed for the last time in the next 11 days. The following five days will be spent on the ground (albeit padded by the sleeping pad Chad so nicely decided to lend me.) and the following six days will be spent anywhere from Johnstown, PA to Texas. Why have I put two rigerous trips back to back, allowing myself no time at all to rest in between? The reasons are as follows:

1. Life is too damn short to take the physical discomfort of the body into account when making plans to make said life more interesting.

2. The chance to go on a five day canoe trip that I neither had to organize, nor motivate people to participate in may only come around once or twice in my life. Am I going to pass it up just because I'll be all achey and sore for the wedding in Texas? Hells no I'm not. Good lord.

3. "But Christina," you may say, "You have two days between camping and leaving for texas with which to recoup your strength before leaving for Texas. Why not spend it sleeping in your soft, comfortable bed?" BAH I say to you! Bah! I will not rest! I will train horsies and then visit Jacob! That is what I will do and I laugh in defiance in the face of your pragmatism! Because of what worth is mere sleep when I could instead be making headway in multiple areas of drunken debauchery and web design in Johnstown? The answer, I tell you is none.

So. Take that body! Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and you'll have to be damn strong to house this fine mind that just managed to justify a punishing two weeks with very little trouble.

When Lawyer sues lawyer, who wins? The lawyers? Hardly.

Well, maybe.

Seems that this genius made a website ranking his fellow sharkeys "algorithmically" for the quality of their services. Really Mark Brittan? You're going to build a website that actually ranks other lawyers? And you're gonna rank YOURSELF too? REALLY?

3 reasons this is a bad idea:

#1. Dude, you're going to get sued. Do you really expect your colleagues to sit quietly by and watch themselves get ranked under the "Extreme Caution" Category? The only person who needs to use extreme caution is you because I'm sure they're sharpening their knives at this moment.

#2. DUDE YOU'RE GOING TO GET SUED!!! What about that 40 year old pissed of divorcee who used you're rating as the basis on which to choose the lawyer that was supposed to protect his investments and his house from the money-grabbing beotch who ceased being arm candy at 25? An algorithm that rates disbarred and imprisoned lawyers above other people doesn't really fill me with a lot of hope for that guy's case. And who is he gonna go after to recoup his losses? Hmmmmmm?

#3. Have you ever used Google? They've got the best ranking algorithms in the business, and even THEIR results are skewed and often illogical. What makes you think you can do better at algorithmic ranking than Matt Cutts? Did you even bother to take yourself out of your own algorithm? Or is that you sitting pretty with an "excellent" rating on your own website?

In my humble opinion, a lawyer putting up a ranking site for other lawyers belongs gets whatever equivalent of the Darwin award there is for financial stability, mental health and/or professional growth. Good luck Mark Britton. You're going to need it.

Shakedown Cruise for Sarcastic Incredulity

There have been a lot of things lately that beg the question "really?" delivered in a suitably scathing and irascible way. So I decided today to throw my two cents into the fountain of verbosity and air my general good humored malcontent.

Does anyone care what I have to say? The only thing more prevelant than my disbelief that anyone cares what I think, is the apathy which I feel when I entertain the question.

For instance, there are probably very few people indeed who are interested in the article about web latency (how long it takes google to pick up your new website) that I just read at Search Engine Watch, but I'm gonna talk about it anyway, because I think it's interesting.

But for now, I'm going to save this post and see what it looks like on my bright and shiny new blog which was it's primary purpose in the first place. For more about latency, stay tuned.