Random thoughts and questions

Well shit. The first one I had was about triathlons and had a bunch of parentheticals with numbers. Tried it again and got one about the Guinness Book of World Records, and . . .

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 663
Words Per Minute (WPM): 133
Time (seconds): 68
Errors: 11 (1.46%)

We are the champions.

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 412
Words Per Minute (WPM): 82
Time (seconds): 107
Errors: 3 (0.41%)

Huh. Much better than I expected. ^_^

Didn't think to grab my stats, but I believe my ranking says it all. You can find me under my nom de guerre, Poop.

I thought you were "Gay fuck sex tits".

YAY MY TABLE JUST ARRIVED

Goodbye large tv tray and two lawn chairs. Hello fancy wood table and four fancy chairs!

Now to assemble everything. I love using power tools.

Welp.
...I guess I'll be taking the typing course.

Power tools?
Where on Earth are you buying furniture... or are you confusing 'table' with 'large plank of wood and 4 4x4's'?

You just need a

My brother got me tickets to one of the most popular summer festivals over here. It's notoriously hard to get tickets to it, last year it was sold out in two hours, this year it was one hour. I'll never complain about my brother again. *

*Warning: hyperbole

Much to my dismay, much of it goes together with a tiny allen wrench. The cross-supports for the chairs require a screwdriver though. So YAY POWER SCREWDRIVER.

I was going to post that, except I would say it appeals to the type of people who ride recumbent bikes.

You're meaner than me... and know the word recumbent.
But yes, you're right.

Just start raiding in WoW. I was always an average typer, but having one conversation on vent, one in guild chat, one in officer chat, and a bunch in whispers made me considerably faster. You only have to send whispers like "Just try to ignore him he's 12345553 fucking shitcock" a few times before you get good at switching between chat and combat without thinking too. Or you'll spend a lot of time dead.

I, on the other hand, was the guy with proper use of semicolons in class chat windows. As an off-tank, I died a lot.

I was that person too. Maybe there's a reason I never made it to end-game content.

I'm running into blocking problems on this keyboard. I'm gonna have to retake this test when I get home.

I humbly apologize to the forum, I had no idea typing would warrant so much discussion. It was an actual random question!

But having read through the many and thoughtful responses, I've decided that Mavis and I should go our separate ways (now I have the song in my head, curse you, Steve Perry). If my typing was slower I would probably be more motivated to improve it but the only time I've been affected by the speed is for job testing and there it's always been just fast enough.

Thank you, everyone, for helping me cross one of the hundred million items off my to-do list.

Also, I caught a nasty cold Friday evening, just in time to wreck my weekend, so I will add germs to the list of things I am cursing today. Stuffed head, plugged ears, swollen throat, runny nose, no energy. I got the deluxe package.

I am fighting this with cookies. I am not going to ask for advice on whether or not this is the best approach.

As long as they're ginger cookies. Ginger has medicinal value, right (or so I'm told)?

Let me just say that we had our first Ikea experience a few weeks ago. Why don't ALL RTA furniture joints use the wonderous Ikea Allen key design? I normally whip out a cordless screwdriver for furniture assembly, but Ikea's Allen wrenches are so easy to use I didn't need to.

I am feeling...eerily calm about a lot of things that should be bothering me. It's that weird kind of calm where part of your brain is like "hey, why aren't you getting upset about this?!" and the other part is just like "man, that would take too much effort and it wouldn't get me anywhere, so fuck it".

It's like floating on a cloud made of fresh whipped cream, man.

All the ones I've bought from (West Elm, CB2, Room & Board) do use hex keys. In fact, the only piece of furniture I've needed to use real tools with is my Ikea media stand, for which I needed a power drill and screwdriver to attach the tracks for sliding cabinet doors.

Actually, I have more than 50 of those IKEA Allen Keys. At one point I had the idea, that I would spread the word on Facebook for people to send me all their IKEA Keys and when I'd collected a couple of thousand I would weld them together in the form of a giant Allen Key.
I hadn't quite decided what my next step then would be, but...
...
Profit!?

So, my right hand.
Usually it looks like this:


Today, however, it looks like this:


It's hard to tell from the picture, since there's no discolouration, but where it should dip between the bones leading to the index and middle fingers, there's instead a bulge. Half a centimetre to a centimetre thick. The bulge itself is a little sore, but I have no trouble using the hand, nothing hurts when I move it, grasp things or lift things.

Any idea what it could be? I'm thinking burst blood vessel, but there's no discolouration whatsoever, so that's a little weird.

Also, yes, I am hideously pale.

So, I ordered stuff from an online retailer. I paid for UPS 3-day shipping. Last Thursday, I got a shipping confirmation email with a UPS tracking number. On Friday, I confirmed that it shipped out the previous evening. Great! Except that my shipment stopped dead at 3:41pm on Friday, stuck somewhere in Kentucky, and there haven't been any updates since. The only thing that's changed on my UPS tracking page is that the expected delivery is now Wednesday 2/6 instead of tomorrow.

The mathematically gifted among you may recognize that Wednesday is actually four business days after the shipment, not three, which exceeds the shipping interval for which I paid extra money. I now want to recoup that extra charge. The retailer says shipping charges are non-refundable (probably for exactly this reason).

Has anyone ever had any luck getting these non-refundable charges refunded? Or is it just another case of Joe Consumer being SOL because the retailers can fuck us up the ass without consent?

I'm guessing the latter, if my resigned pessimism hasn't made that excruciatingly clear.

I've had luck with it by alternating "I'm sure you don't have the authority to do this, so just escalate it" with "My bank loves doing credit-card chargebacks; it makes them look awesome to the customer and lets them charge more money to the merchant without repercussion."

Also, it depends on the State; California has some fascinating laws with regards to backing up the claims of what you're selling. If you sell something that doesn't meet the description, whether it's travel insurance, a physical object, or shipping expediting, you can be liable for quite a bit of pain in terms of false advertising charges.

That looks like something my brother had some time ago. We think it was a ganglion cyst. They tend to appear with extreme repetitive activity like typing. I can't remember if my brother said his cyst was painful, but it went away on it's own after about a month.
You'll probably still want to get it checked out, though.

We have a thread for this sort of thing in which posts may not get lost in the randomness of random randomville.

Amazon and other online retailers don't necessarily do anything special when you pick "3-day shipping" or whatever. I know this because I once paid extra for next-day UPS, and my package did not come the next day. When I called UPS about this they told me that this was just a normal ground shipment, and they were sorry, but I would have to take that up with the retailer. I can see why they did it--it shipped from a warehouse not far from where I live. Kind of scummy though, and I would have been mad about it if I had paid more than the couple of bucks I did to upgrade from 2-day to next-day via Amazon Prime.

If you have a bunch of time to kill, by all means, play the phone call game and make threats about chargebacks and lawsuits. Or just forget about it. It sucks, they got your money, but it's not worth fuming over.

I wonder if I should celebrate my new title by vowing not to trim my goatee for the rest of 2013...

Do you keep a normal picture of all your body parts just in case something happens?

... maybe.

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 531
Words Per Minute (WPM): 106
Time (seconds): 83
Errors: 9 (1.23%)

And that's after three glasses of wine, biatch!

I was talking to someone on Saturday who was having an issue with Amazon about this. The bulb went out on his rear projection screen TV and he wanted to make sure he got it replaced for the weekend and the Superbowl. So on Thursday he ordered a replacement bulb and paid extra for "next day" shipping. As of Saturday it hadn't shown up and Amazon wasn't very nice when he called to complain. When he told them to just cancel the order they made a big issue about how they couldn't refund his money until they got the item back. All of which surprised me as my experience with Amazon customer service has always been stellar. Last fall I ordered something and didn't realize the shipping address had defaulted to someone else in my address book rather then going to me. When I realized the issue I contacted Amazon by email to figure how best to get the item returned to them and they not only were very helpful, they also refunded the item before it was even on its way back to them.

Some friends and I were tossing a football around during halftime of the Superbowl and just as we were wrapping up, I caught a bullet straight on into my right ring finger. Hurt like a sunofabitch. I can articulate all the knuckles so I know it isn't broken, but today it is purple and bulbous. Also hard as fuck to do things like: remove cell phone from pocket, type on keyboard, place junk inside pants after peeing, etc.

(pictures not included)

resisting making a lewd comment. self-control, man.

I really wish there were some kind of a karaoke place that had a bunch of video game songs because I really feel like singing "Escape from the City" with a bunch of people and having a good ol' time.
while also drinking.

You need to play in a safer neighbourhood.

What the fuck does "delay in delivery due to external factors" mean? Where the fuck is my package FedEx!?

A bridge collapsed and everybody died.

Why were all FedEx employees currently employed on that bridge!? That is terrible planning. No wonder my package is missing.