I found myself.

So I caved and ran out on my lunch break just to pick this up, and read it in the car. The solicit and the cover are TOTALLY misleading, people. In a good way.

I do not have time to give this issue the gushing tl;dr love it deserves. So a couple quick thoughts follow.

( 'No. This is about the point when Ravager tries to stab somebody and Robin starts that grind-y thing with his teeth. You're way cooler.' )

Okay, it's official, I've pretty much forgiven John Rogers for any involvement he had with that Catwoman movie.

( ETA: Two nitpicks that are probably the letterers' doing. )

Happy birthday marielogan!

(brief but I am doing this in the middle of yet ANOTHER DB2 training class and must be stealthy)

This will probably not be as long as my usual rambling, since everyone has covered most of the bases already.

( For me, Quesada's decision boils down to this: EXTREME NARRATIVE LAZINESS. )

...okay. I lied about it being brief. But that's all I'm going to say on this topic and go back to cleaning now.

Wanted to write something remotely profound, but it's already 10 and I only just got home.

Wherever you are, whoever you spent it with, hope you had a Merry Christmas.

That sums it up. :)

So, after spending a couple hours on the phone with one good Tier 1 tech who got cut off, one dumbass Tier 1 tech who didn't realize the iMac software restore disks had the OS on them and was trying to get me to buy another copy of Panther, one good Tier 2 tech who I ended the call with five seconds before the Archive and Install failed, and another good Tier 2 tech who talked me through an Erase and Install, the iMac is working again. With all the software updates, natch.

...but I had to wipe the hard drive to do it.

Guess what I get to spend my weekend doing?

A lot of stuff was backed up, thank God, although I may lose some pictures (NOT the Ireland and Italy photos, yay) but I still have to reload EVERYTHING. bktheirregular was nice enough to listen to me bitch over AIM and found Senuti for me so I could at least restore the songs that were on my iPod at the time. Probably a good thing I had no major plans this weekend.

All in all, though, if you compare this to my Dell experiences, as far as tech support goes and computer crashes go, this actually wasn't so bad. (Seriously, out of the eight techs I spoke to - three of whom were the three guys who tried to fix it at the store - I got one doofus who didn't listen to me. Better than the Dell ratio.)

Oh, well. I had been meaning to clean up my hard drive anyway.

Anyone else here know how to whip Greasemonkey into shape? Its prefs are telling me my scripts are installed and enabled, but they're not working and the right-click menu says "No scripts installed." Bzuh? Oh, never mind, it's behaving now.

For the first time in 3 and a half years, I had to call Apple tech support.

As soon as I restarted my iMac after installing the iTunes, QuickTime and Security Updates, I got the Mac equivalent of the blue screen of death.

So I now have an appointment to take my iMac in to the Apple Store in Columbia tomorrow.

I'd be homicidal if not for two things: 1) I've still got the laptop and 2) I have had the iMac for three and a half years and never had to call tech support til now. After the Dell, that's not a bad track record. Just saying.

So if anyone else installs any of those updates and gets a System Failure on startup, I think I may know why.

For the handful of the people on my friends list who don't know about this yet, just found out depressing news about Terry Pratchett.

I know this should be interpreted as "I am not dead" and it's early stage and he's being optimistic, but still... *wibble*

Makes me wish I was a high-end expert in brain chemistry, let me tell you.

This is a test of the Emergency WTF-Is-LiveJournal-Messing-With-Mom System.

I repeat, this is a test.

Do not touch that dial, do not pass Go.

And if you're Mom, tell me if this comes up.

So, Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood (two of the guys from Whose Line is it Anyway? for those not in the know) put on a live improv show at the Weinberg Center in Frederick on Saturday night, and a couple of friends got tickets and invited me along.

Anyone who watched Whose Line knows that Colin and Brad are nuts. I don't think I was aware just how nuts until last night, though.

( 'Thank you. Lynda with a Y. That'll really help us pronounce it.' )

Either way, we were absolutely on the floor. I went to the restroom before the show, thankfully, but didn't get anything to drink for fear I'd wet my pants laughing. I don't know how the Weinberg in Frederick, of all places, booked those guys, but I'm glad they did. That really was worth the fifty bucks.