The Loneliest Number

There’s an apple tree outside where I live, and when it’s sprayed properly for bugs, it produces a nice amount of apples (in some cases, A LOT).

This year… not so much.

(Excuse the poor quality; I need a new camera) 

That’s it. That’s all that survived except for one that was so rotten that it wasn’t edible. What happened to the others? Groundhogs. Woodchucks. Whatever you want to call them. Needless to say, I am very disappointed about this.

I need a fence.

Commentator

You know what I miss? Being emailed when I have comments on my blog, especially since as most of you know, that’s how I prefer to respond to them. Now I can’t even tell if I’ve gotten a new one unless I visit my blog to check. My life doesn’t revolve around my blog, you know! It revolves around email, obviously, but not my blog?

What is taking google so damn long to fix? This all started almost a month ago, when they starting “updating” the email system, so I’m assuming this has something to do with that. It feels like they don’t care about Blogger or the people who use it and so they’re not going to fix it, they’re just going to say they’re fixing it and wait for everyone to stop expecting it to be fixed. Then they’ll keep slowly breaking it until no one uses it anymore. You know, like Microsoft.

The last I checked, they had a possible fix posted that involved comment moderation… which I don’t have. And a bunch of other people still aren’t getting notifications either. But do you know what did work? That’s so freaking stupid I can’t stand it?

My comments were sent automatically to my email, by going to Blogger/Settings/Email. So I deleted that email and replaced it with another one (my old email address). Then it sent a “Subscribe to comments” message to that one and I hit yes. Then I went BACK to Email and put my normal account back in. And I got the “Subscribe to comments” email.

It works again. But how annoying. I may have to go punch something.

Ads

I have been soooo sick of online ads lately. If I leave my laptop unmuted, I get attacked by obnoxious sound ads. And don’t get me started on the hated pop-ups. It’s like, advertisers think that if they make the ads obnoxious enough, we’ll pay attention to them, which is some sort of logic I can’t wrap my head around, like string theory or why Law and Order: SVU is still on.

But! There are ways to block them. Adblock Plus is considered one of the best, and it’s available as extensions for all browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera if you have to be different. As for Explorer...well, I’m sure it works, but if you’re using Explorer, that’s an entirely different problem and frankly, you’re asking for trouble. Adblock is good because you can adjust it to allow non-intrusive ads (e.g. regular banner ads) so the sites you visit still get their ad revenue. I follow a lot of independent web comics and I want to support them, so it’s a good option. Just remember you have to go into options and adjust it manually.

So that’s enough unpaid shilling for today. Ads mostly suck. And if advertisers really want their messages  heard, they need to stop being so obnoxious.

I’ll be more wordy on the next post. Later!

The Fly

This is the story of my life.

Stick Figures 2: The Fan

Never ask why I don't get anything done.

Inception

Let me set the scene for you.

It was the middle of the night. I was asleep in bed. Dreaming. For some reason, there was a repetitive

BEEP.

beep about once a minute. Finally, I opened my eyes and realized that the beeping was in real life, and what the hell was making that noise because

BEEP.

nothing was on, not my television, not my laptop, not my phone. Eventually, it occurred to me that the only thing that made sense was the

BEEP.

smoke detector, although since it wasn’t a steady OMG YOU’RE GOING TO DIE GET OUT OF THE HOUSE warble, it had to be something else. The

BEEP.

batteries were running low. But I was so tired and being the middle of the night, I was feeling extra lazy and

BEEP.

didn’t want to get up and change them. Still, it was kind of hard to sleep with that thing beeping every minute, so I got up to change get that stupid thing new batteries. Except

BEEP.

that was a dream. So I really got up to change the batteries. Except that was a dream. Then I went into a normal (i.e. crazy) dream, but still, every five seconds it felt like

BEEP.

there was another beep. Cue another dream where I got up to change them. By six a.m., I knew I wasn’t getting anymore sleep, but I

BEEP.

wouldn’t give it the satisfaction. I let it beep. I let it feel the pain of knowing it was slowly dying, every beep a burst of energy it could not

BEEP.

afford, but there were worse alternatives, there was death, there was non-existence. And perhaps I would show mercy, there might be new batteries restore it to life

BEEP.

but for a few seconds while I changed them, it would be dead, just a hunk of plastic, less useful than a doorstop.

BEEP.

Long story short, I’m really tired today.