Posts in category "Random"

The Woman At Michelle's Baguette

Often when I’m at Michele’s Baguette there’s a woman work­ing there, I’d say in her mid-40s, whom I believe is one of the own­ers. She has these real­ly funky streaks of colour in her hair, and they work real­ly well for her, some­thing which is much less com­mon for peo­ple her age. Whenever she hap­pens to be there I want to tell that her hair looks real­ly cool, but I can nev­er seem to find the right time.

Should I tell her as I walk up to the sand­wich stand? Should I tell her while she’s putting my sand­wich togeth­er? I always think to myself that I’ll speak up as I walk away if she ever rings me through (because she usu­al­ly lets some­one else charge me), but the oth­er day when she was the only one work­ing there I could­n’t bring myself to say any­thing. I did­n’t want her to think that I was just flat­ter­ing her for extra top­pings or fresh­er veg­eta­bles. I bet she gets com­pli­ments about her hair all the time.

Accepting The Help Of Others

It’s funny…I always think of the stereo­typ­i­cal, recent­ly divorced hus­band, and think to myself “I’ll nev­er end up like that”. I’ll nev­er “go back” to liv­ing on canned food, messy rooms, or gen­er­al unkempt­ness if I ever split up with a long-term girl­friend or wife. So I try to live my life the same if I’m in a rela­tion­ship or not, and not depend on some­one else to do things for me, by being healthy and clean when I’m not going out with some­one.

Then I real­ize that there are already things that Loo does for me that I would­n’t do myself. I don’t have the patience to make my bed, but she can’t stand to sleep in wrin­kled sheets, so she makes the bed every day. She buys fresh veg­eta­bles, because I always pur­chase the easy-to-cook frozen ones. Can I go back to liv­ing with­out lit­tle sweet pep­pers packed with my lunch, or with­out some­one to brush the cat hair from my clothes as I get dressed for work? How much of our­selves do we know­ing­ly or will­ing­ly give away, when we accept the help of oth­ers?

No Stupid Questions

Sometimes I ask ques­tions that oth­ers con­sid­er to be stu­pid. That’s usu­al­ly because I don’t make any assump­tions, and the last thing that I want to do is offend or annoy some­one. For exam­ple, I may ask to use the bath­room if I’m a guest at some­one’s house. Some peo­ple give me a look as if I’ve just asked them to take a dump on my chest, then they give me a slow, exag­ger­at­ed “yeeeees” in a tone that makes the answer seem like it should be an extreme­ly obvi­ous thing. To them, the point is obvi­ous; I’m a friend, and of course I can use the facil­i­ties. It’s some­thing that they feel I should­n’t have to ask. But I have no idea whether or not some­one is uncom­fort­able about me using a cer­tain bath­room cause it’s dirty (which has hap­pened in the past), or whether one of the bath­rooms is out of order (some­thing I’d rather avoid before I find out too late), or even if they’re try­ing to cross-breed bankeys by con­fin­ing bats and mon­keys in an ensuite and hop­ing they mate (which I assume will nev­er hap­pen). Usually, just going for the bath­room is not a chance I’m will­ing to take, as with many oth­er things. I’d rather ask first, because there’s the chance that I may make a step out of place (and in cas­es like these, it’s bet­ter to not step than to back­track). But when peo­ple start treat­ing me like I’m stu­pid for ask­ing these ques­tions, some­times I feel like just say­ing, “fuck it”, and not wor­ry­ing about the con­se­quences.

Fighting The Bob Comment Spam

I’ve been get­ting tons of spam com­ments from the “bob@y####o.com” address, and I’m sure that I’m not the only Movable Type user suf­fer­ing from the same prob­lem. At one point I was get­ting a dozen a day, which is much more annoy­ing than spam e‑mail because delet­ing com­ments from MT is a lit­tle more involved than delet­ing an e‑mail. Even though I use MT-Blacklist (which has been a great help), the spam URLs, and even the IP address­es keep chang­ing. The only thing that stays the same is parts of the e‑mail address, so I wrote a very sim­ple reg­u­lar expres­sion to catch the offen­sive com­ments, because no one else seems to have post­ed one on the net:

bob@y\d*o.com

I know that it’s rather basic, but I fig­ure that I’ll adapt it when­ev­er the spam­mer starts using more com­pli­cat­ed e‑mail gen­er­a­tors. So far, the only adjust­ment has been a change from catch­ing four dig­its to catch­ing any num­ber of dig­its. It’s sat­is­fy­ing to check the activ­i­ty log and see that the black­list has caught over 500 spam com­ments over the week­end, not let­ting a sin­gle one go through.