kitties draw fairies too!
We have several jobs available here at Western Digital in the MioNet division. We’re hiring like mad to push our software development. Check it out at www.mionet.com
We need people with 8+ years of experience with Java, J2SE, communications & networking (not the applet type, the java programming stuff), along with QA people with a few years of Silk experience (they don’t need Java experience for this position).
Let me know if you’re curious or know anybody.
there’s a birthday party at our apartment on Saturday the 27th of September, 2008. If you’re friended with me on LJ, login and you’ll see time and place. 
Don’t forget, the birthday party is on Saturday September 27th, 2008
here’s the location information:
Here’re the directions to our apartment:
From San Jose/Mountain View/Fremont:
Get on I-680 N
Take exit 21B for State Hwy 84 E toward Livermore – 0.4 mi
Merge onto CA-84/Vallecitos Rd – 5.1 mi
Turn right onto the ramp to E Stanley Blvd – 0.2 mi
Turn right at E Stanley Blvd – 0.9 mi
Turn right at Murrieta Blvd. Our apartment complex is the first complex, our apartment number is 19. Don’t wander around 1001 looking for us (it’s the complex right next to us), we’re at 975 in apartment 19!
975 Murrieta Blvd #19
Livermore, CA 94550
If there is no parking in the lot (it’s relatively small), there is plenty of parking in the shopping complex right across the street. You can turn left into the lot instead of right into our complex. There is usually very little traffic, so crossing the street shouldn’t be an issue.
If you have any questions, call or txt me at 650-669-0972
My 26th Birthday Party
Event InfoHost:
Laura and Daniel
Type:
Party – Birthday Party
Time and PlaceDate:
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Time:
5:30pm – 11:30pm
Location:
Our Apartment – directions once you rsvp
Street:
Murrieta Blvd
City/Town:
Livermore, CA
Contact InfoPhone:
6506690972
Email:
lorikitty@gmail.com
Description
BYOBeer, we will have other types of alcohol though. Drinking and Video Games. Vegan-friendly food will also be available. If you have food requests, please leave a message here! Don’t feel obligated to attend if you think you’ll be bored! This is a having-fun get-together so dress COMFORTABLY! 
Feel free to bring alcohol/food. We have a tiny bbq grill! Drinking is after 9pm, feel free to come over throughout the day even if you can’t stay!
I contacted the General Manager of my hosting company, MidPhase, and let him know how I’d been treated and that I was thinking of going elsewhere. He went above and beyond my expectations, let me know it was a very rare occurrence and that they were implementing safeguards to prevent it from happening again. He made me feel like a customer again, instead of a noisy afterthought.
I feel like hugging the world again!
My boss suggested sending an email, and in the state I was in, I wasn’t really going to. I was miserable and wallowing in my own self-pity, and trying to figure out what to do next. I’m really glad I decided to send the email, simply because I was compensated quite suitably and my faith in a service I’ve used for years has been restored. Inadvertantly, the faith in my aptitude regarding choices has also been restored (which was the source of all that self-pity).
Thank you, MidPhase, for making me feel like a customer again.
www.MidPhase.com
So, please standby while I work on getting artkitty back up
For now, you can admire my nefarious tongue 
I apologize, we had some data lose on this server and your account was lost. I have recreated it with the following information.
| Domain: artkitty.net
| Ip: 216.104.33.198 (n)
| HasCgi: y
| UserName: wahwahwah
| PassWord: blahblahblah
Please go ahead and reupload your files.
I’m sitting here sobbing. I can’t find my files.
I think they’re on Jason’s computer. I hope so.
I really really really hope so 
that’s hours and hours of love and thought and coding I put into my website, all by hand, all in notepad.
It may have been crap, but hey, it ws -my- crap. I loved it, it was an extension of me, and now they tell me “oh sorry it’s all gone”
I feel broken, somehow. Really stupid for crying like this, but maybe it’s partially the emotional roller coaster tomorrow’s birthday puts me on.
I don’t know. It hurts though.
I feel stupid for never doing backups, but mad because they PROMISED backups and apparently kept them in such a way as to be completely lost whenever whatever happened did happen.
I’m mad too, but you know me — when I’m mad I start crying.
I’m sure everybody’s heard about the teacher who showed up to work drunk, two times the legal limit.
It’s all over the radio stations here in the bay area. This morning on my way to work, I listened to one station invite listeners to provide input on whether it is right that the school is not revealing the name of the teacher. It evidently hits close to home for a lot of students, because a fair amount of the callers were students of some variety or another.
Perhaps the most distressing part of this whole experience is not in that the teacher arrived drunk. It isn’t something teachers should be showing or sharing with their students. It’s a terrible example to set for students and teachers (especially if the teacher was held in any kind of esteem), and it’s not something most parents want to expose their children to.
That said, I’ve had a chance to listen to these children.
What are they learning in school?
It seems to me they either aren’t paying attention to the teacher in the first place, or the teachers are using some of the most rudimentary “Valley Girl/Guy” talk I’ve ever heard. I know we live in California, and we’re well known for our “like,” “seriously,” “ohmigod” speech patterns, but REALLY! If you’re trying to explain why you think it’s morally wrong for your TEACHER to arrive to school DRUNK, show some class (and I don’t mean the kind that has a teacher). Use that eloquence from apparent bygone eras. It’s not just the english, the grammar — it’s how the arguments are presented.
I can see the courtrooms of tomorrow.
“Yea, my defendant is, like, not guilty. Yea. She totally didn’t do that cause it’s wrong. It’s like, you know, wrong. So yea. She didn’t do it.”
Doctors would diagnose you, let you know that your, like, head was hurting, and like, here, take some painkillers.
Knowledge is nothing without the ability to explain, to express. Knowledge is nothing without understanding.
Try defining a word you use every day (like is a good example!). Now, go look it up on dictionary.com.
Defining and understanding are two different things. There are 29 entries for “Like” on dictionary.com.
It helps to use words in a sentence, and that is actually one of the best ways to actually understand a word instead of defining it.
Knowledge and understanding are half the battle, though. In our downward spiral on an educational level, it seems the blame can lay half on the “system” and half on the parents. I am blaming parents, indeed I am. I will not lay the excuse “I’m a parent so I can blame us” on you parents, since I myself am guilty of the same thing.
We are raising our children so that they will excel in this system, so they will appear to be brilliant when really they are merely excellent data storage systems.
We want calculating, cunning, computing. We have massive hard-drive banks and no CPUs or RAM, no circuitry uniting all together to form a machine that will learn and grow, teach and show. Pink Floyd taught us to be afraid of the machine, but I say, without that machine, we will all start waving fire-on-a-stick around and thumping on our chests.
Let’s start showing our children, helping them learn what things mean by understanding, not by memorization. English is only hard to learn if you try to memorize. The same could be said of any language – computers, math, Spanish, German, Japanese.
Let’s all help rebuild our future so it doesn’t look as hopeless as it does now. Our children are our future, and right now, the future doesn’t look very “bright”
so my car decided it was tired of me pushing it too hard and gave me a “check engine” light. I freaked out, since I haven’t seen that light EVER the entire time I’ve owned it. I’ve had the car so long I feel that it’s a part of me.
I spent the first part of today crying, worried about my car, and talking with people (CB and Arthur) about my car. There was the suggestion of rebuilding the engine, which CB says is preposterous since the problem is likely elsewhere (i.e. fuel, something like that). Daniel decided the car wouldn’t be worth fixing unless it was something as simple as putting water in the radiator, since it isn’t worth what it used to be. KBB suggests $1200 private party or $700 trade-in. It’s fairly beat-up, the hood has had issues (bad paint-job a long time ago) and there are a few dents in the door and sides. It could be considered “fair” condition if it were more driveable; as it is, it has issues going uphill (going uphill made the engine light go on).
Sooo, Daniel and I were looking online for various cars and dealerships. I already knew what kind of car I wanted, I just wanted to find a good deal. MSRP for the car I wanted was 23000, 25000 for a version with Navi. I have been looking into other cars since my car started acting funny (going uphill was one thing, but there’s no AC, the radio/wiring is completely screwed up because of a bad re-wiring done with a mechanic — my radio stations are staticy, and get worse if I’m using the cigarette lighter to charge something; the moon roof causes the wiring to short-circuit also, and the dash lights wouldn’t always turn on so I couldn’t see any dash information, like speed, gas, etc at night).
There is a lot of work needed on the car, and I don’t have that money. It’s up-front money, whereas going to a dealership and buying a car is on a monthly basis.
So, we went to Dublin honda with my car, trying to do a stress test and then I wanted to see what honda clearance prices were. There weren’t any hybrids there that appealed to me, so we went home (it was 107 degrees outside, and I had no AC); we swapped cars, did some research on prices/local dealers, and headed to Fremont. Fremont had $5000 markups on their hybrids, despite the Honda Clearance — their excuse being “these cars fly!”
They had 5 hybrids, and a 6th used one, and hadn’t sold ONE. We walked out after they insisted THREE TIMES on the 28888 price, then proceeded to follow us out harassing us and offering the pricing we wanted + 400 dollars; the manager was actually LEANING on Daniel’s car. Daniel yelled at them to get OFF his car, and then drove off. Since we’d given them my cell phone number, about five miles away from the dealership the salesperson called. He ACTUALLY said, and I quote, “If you come back, we’ll get a different manager, not that Indian one”. This annoyed me, and while he was offering the amount I wanted, Daniel was done with them. We then proceeded to San Leandro, where I’d seen the SAME CARS for the SAME PRICE online (vehix); when we got there, NO MARKUP. At all. Whatsoever. The Hybrids (there were TWO, not FIVE) were both set for MSRP due to the Labor Day Sale.
We decided to go with the +Navi option (the navigation on my cell phone SUCKS. Verizon has an EXCELLENT navigation program, but AT&T has the slowest one known to man); the navi system is actually AWESOME.
My new car is PURPLE. Yes. Purple. In most lights. With my polarized lenses on it looks more blue, but in most lights (including day AND night), the paint is actually Purple. It’s pearlized paint or whatever, so it actually changes color from different angles.
It’s a 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid +Navi, MSRP is about 25000, we paid 25020 for it.
So now I have a retired ’91 Honda Civic DX — there are a few prospective homes for it, although it was promised to Marissa when she was down here; The other folks who might want it if we can’t get it to Marissa (it doesn’t like long distances unless you go V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y) are Daniel’s sister, or Daniel’s sister-in-law, or a training shop for mechanics. It’s a great around-town car, shouldn’t go long distances and certainly nowhere very hilly. I want her to have an excellent retirement before she finally decides to depart.
The car is, as was mentioned before, not worth much. It is one of the most stolen vehicles despite this, which is really strange. It gets really good mileage (it’s an 11 gallon tank and I can go 300-400 miles with it, depending on how it is driven) and while the gas gauge is broken (it randomly jumps all the way down and then goes to half a tank when you put two gallons in), you can depend on the miles being at least 300 on a full tank. I always use the mileage meter thing.
Meanwhile, I have to figure out how the hell to drive a vehicle that’s bigger than my old car. It’s saddening, but I’ve stopped crying since I have a new toy to play with. My heart is so fickle!
I still love the old car though, and very much want to see it go to a good rest-home.
I am not likely the ONLY half-way-through-20-year-old who hasn’t been to college yet (attending classes with Mom in elementary doesn’t count, right?). The cosmos seem to have been pushing me to sign up the past few months. Everywhere I look, there are people going to college, advertisements for college, radio shows, blah blah blah! It’s like the universe is shoving me at school! I’ve decided to take a drawing class. Introduction to Drawing. I can’t wait to start! I’m uber uber uber excited and can’t wait hehe
So hey, does that mean I’m a college girl??
I’ll be attending Foothill college starting September 22nd (Jaiden’s date of conception!), from 6:30pm to 9:20pm on Tuesdays.
so it recently came to my attention (TJ emailed me) that I hadn’t really posted anything about my new job.
I started at western digital in June on the 16th — so far it is totally awesome and everybody is very nice (no tempers flaring yet )
it’s really nice to be among fellow nerd-types. Too often when you get a seemingly-tech job, most of the people you work with aren’t really very technical and so get confused easily when you start talking like a tech-nerd.
Anyway
I’m working for the MioNet division, which WD recently acquired. www.MioNet.com if you’re interested — it’s a really really awesome product that comes with the My Book World and a bunch of other external hard-drive types, in addition to being perfectly acceptable apart from any WD hardware. MioNet allows other people to access your computer (including yourself) from outside your local network, and have your hard-drives listed in their network drives list as mounted drives. It’s pretty cool how it works (like an emulator sorta), and it’s got lots of other features, too — desktop sharing (like VNC), and webcam sharing (which is more secure than IMing, since it’s going through our secure servers). The best part of it all is how simple everything is to set up. When it malfunctions (which is what I see, I get all the not-working cases), it can be a hassle getting it to work (sometimes), but it hardly ever encounters problems when installing it. Our My Book Worlds are basically NASs with samba on them, and when provided with internet access, they can be accessed from ANYWHERE in the world (with MioNet, for the lifetime of the product). It’s really really really cool.
anyway The job is in Mountain View (california), so if anybody wants to hang out at lunch, lemme know!!
I’ll be going to so-cal this Thursday and will be back on Friday around 8pm. Thought it would be interesting — my first real business trip The only other time I’ve been down there was for training, and that was a whole month away and not technically a business trip.
and for THIS WEEKEND — I will, of course, be at caextreme. If you aren’t there then YOU’RE A GOOBER! caextreme.org for more info
Anyway — gonna finish my lunch now! See you guys all later
