I now have a phobia about fabric softeners.

( amusing! offensive! nonporny! )

O ye lawyers and ferris wheels

The total bill for my vertiginous vomitous vacation to the ER is roughly $900 after my excellent insurance. Otherwise it would have been more like $5000. For which I am grateful. But, so much for paying down more debt next month. Also, the insurer and the hospital are disagreeing about whether I pay that particular bill to the tune of $521 or $487, so I foresee a fun conversation on the phone tomorrow about that.

And then I think about the people who'd have to put that money (either sum) on credit and pay the minimum on the never-never, and how they can't go bankrupt any more, and how their minimum payments will double next year, and I am even more grateful that I'm on the Eloi scale and not the Morlock one right now. If this had been me 15 years ago I would have been in deep shit. Oh wait, that was me 15 years ago, and I got sued in small claims court for $2000 by a medical group!

I was thinking these thoughts as I went over to the Apple Store to get them to fix a bad key on my expensive laptop that I can barely afford, and there was a guy in front of me in the top of the line Mercedes SUV (5 liter V8, MSRP starting at $49,275) driving like a complete dick and endangering others, and as I went down Dover Drive to PCH this person was basically playing chicken with a gigantic tanker truck full of gasoline. So here you had the gas-guzzling luxury pansy-ass dude ranch $50,000 SUV with one old fat white guy in it risking the lives of everyone within a mile over whether he got to go in front, including the working-class dude driving the fuel truck who is bringing Mr. SUV the fuel he needs to keep on with his pathetic lifestyle.

I live in this weird part of the world where almost daily I get an overblown condensed symbol of everything wrong with my country shoved right in my face, and I find myself saying to the Great Novelist: "Where is your subtlety? Enough with the clunky obvious symbolism!"

At the Genius bar I sat next to a 20something perfect California girl hottie with the blonde and the tan and the curves and the hoo and the haa. Not usually my type, but she was exceptionally hot and also really nice. However, I fell out of "love" with her as soon as she used the word "proactive".

As I left, a family was arriving and the little girl was complaining about something. I heard the mother say "Well, we're going to stay here for quite a while. We've FINALLY made it to the MALL!"

mac tech question

Mac heads -

My shiny new Powerbook is a delight, but it does something that I hadn't noticed previously. I'll be working along typing or browsing and suddenly it will just grind to a halt doing something like updating articles in netnewswire or starting a program or copying files. I get the beach ball in that app, whatever it is, and nothing happens for quite a while, maybe 15 to 30 seconds. If I can see load it's normal, and the machine has enough RAM, and doesn't appear to be obviously I/O bound (no disk grinding).

Any ideas what's causing this periodic hangup? It's so frustrating, especially since the machine itself is so fast and everything else about it is great.

oh dear God eyeteeth made me cough out my teeth