DIE SUPER!!! - G'morning, 2009!

[Lady Door]

Today is my birthday.

I had to wake up early, got stuck in traffic that NEVER exists, and got to work half an hour late. I will be leaving work an hour early so I can drop the furry monster at home off at a doggy daycare place (the same furry monster who I found out, this morning, had eaten one of my wire bracelets). Then I get to meet up with two other TCG players and go drive up to Sacramento, a trip that takes 1.5 hours even when you're not driving in Friday night traffic. (By the way, the road to Sacramento? Also the road to Tahoe.)

This has actually already been one of my better birthdays. I HATE my birthday -- it's usually a day full of sorrow and emergency. Let's hope I get to avoid that this year.

[metroid composite]

Happy birthday.

Or should I say: marginally less unhappy birthday.

[Lady Door]

The picture of the cake in my profile is awesome.

And thanks.

I am being dramatic. I don't hate my birthday, I just... usually skate by it without paying much attention, except to grumble at how old I'm getting (hah) and complain about the many things that choose to go wrong right around it.

This year totally beats the year we were evacuated for two+ weeks due to a fire that nearly burned down my house.

[Cotigo]

Presenting that paper today at that Medieval Studies colloquium.  Speaking time is limited to 15 minutes, and I've been able to get it down to 16.  Guess I need to cut more from what I'd read aloud.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

The picture of the cake in my profile is awesome.

And thanks.

I am being dramatic. I don't hate my birthday, I just... usually skate by it without paying much attention, except to grumble at how old I'm getting (hah) and complain about the many things that choose to go wrong right around it.

Happy birthday, and don't worry, you're hardly the only person to dislike your birthday. I sorta hate mine too and I hardly have a reason to!

[Lady Door]

Presenting that paper today at that Medieval Studies colloquium.  Speaking time is limited to 15 minutes, and I've been able to get it down to 16.  Guess I need to cut more from what I'd read aloud.

That's awesome. Congrats! Good luck paring it down, too -- that's a tough one.

--

So my coworkers sang "Happy Birthday" and gave me a cupcake with a candle. It was corporate cheesy and awesome.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

I'm not sure if I still have hemoglobins or if the caffeine overload ate them all already~

[OblivionKnight]

...

Everyone is dying.  

Fuck you, Piglet.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Man, I think I stopped functioning organically about three hours ago. I just want to go to bed already. Fuck you too, sun.

[Clear Tranquil]

Snow's a vampire?

[Idun]

Car troubles. 3 papers due next week. Addicted to tangerines. Going to watch Fly Boys (Flyboys?). Need to get my nails filled in, and.... yeah. Those are my sunshines. Getting dark before 6 isn't with me well.

[Cmdr_King]

How does one get addicted to tangerines?  Does it involve getting the shakes if you go more than an hour without a citrus fruit?

[Idun]

You eat them, and then you get addicted. Or you dry them, then snort them. Or put cocaine in them. Fuck if I know, I got a jones for it.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Snow's a vampire?

Welcome to like five years ago.

Ironically, I actually had sleep this night. Welp.

EDIT:

Fun fact: there are like five people that aren't the cleaning staff working today, and there's absolutely no real work to be done today either. I think the only reason there isn't a campfire in the proofreading room is because it's bright.

[Lady Door]

At the hotel in Sacramento, waiting for other people to be up and ready so we can hit IHOP. The guys were up until 3-4AM building and tweaking their decks, so this will be an interesting day indeed! <_<

Given what I've been hearing from people tweeting about the meta in our region, this should be a very long, very interesting day. 3 matches of constructed (all sets) followed by breaking into pods for 3 matches of draft (1-1-1 from the new block). So... all the prepping is for about 50% of the game. Good times.

[Cotigo]

Presentation went really well.  I feel like I overprepared for it, but eh.  I think I was the only student presenting that wasn't a grad student? Yeah, awesome.

Almost caught up on everything!  Hooray.  Except the JET application is only 50% done... oh well, nothing I don't have time to catch up on.  I hope.

Oh, yeah.

ANYONE WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAW OR KNOWLEDGE OF THE JET PROGRAMME'S APPLICATION PLEASE REPOND.
It's a small thing.  Back in 2006, a party I was at got busted up and I was charged with a minor in possession.  I took a drunk driving class (even though I wasn't driving...), and then the officer met with me just before I was tried, made sure I took the class, and then left.   The judge didn't like that, but when she called for the officer he didn't come back, and she had to throw the case out.

Well, so I know for certain that there is no MIP conviction on my record.  However, the application asks whether I was arrested, convicted, or CHARGED with anything.  I know damn well that I was charged at some point, so I said yes.

But I wonder if I even need to.  Unless my memory's faulty and I was found not guilty instead, I'm fairly sure the case was just dismissed.  Does this still count as a charge?  Will I even need to report something so minor?  More importantly, will this show up on an FBI background check?

I only worry because, if I say no but the charge is still somewhere in the records, then I could be disqualified for omitting it.  However, if I say yes, then I have to make my way all the way to the courthouse and try and negotiate with a bloated bureaucracy until my eyes bleed, and I may not even need to.  So, I'd like to know.  Thanks for anyone's help ahead of time.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I left out a ton of stuff in my application and they didn't care. They don't do a full background check on you until -after- you've been selected. If it turns up after that point, you can just explain it at your interview. They're pretty understanding of that sort of thing.

[NotMiki]

ANYONE WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAW

Can't help you with legal questions, but here's the FBI's procedure for records requests if you want to see what it would say:

http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cjisd/fprequest.htm

It says allow 8-10 weeks for processing, though, so probably not helpful for you in the short term.

[Cotigo]

Mm.  Seems like something I'll be able to hold off on fretting about for a while, then... Thanks.  Still probably best to call the courthouse and find out buuuut yeah.

Thanks, anyway, both of you.  Though I can't imagine

EDIT: ...that I'll be able to avoid having to deal with the metro court and all the pain that goes along with that.  Was the end of THAT sentence.

[Idun]

I am going to be the black girll in Left for Dead 2.

[Lady Door]

Continuing the tradition of why the time around my birthday sucks:

1) My license expired. I knew this was going to happen as I'd gotten a mailing in late September telling me so, but I'd COMPLETELY forgotten, and so I inadvertently drove to Sacramento on an expired license. Thankfully this story doesn't end up with me getting a ticket or anything.

2) I totally scrubbed out of both tournaments I played in over the weekend. This isn't terribly shocking given my play record thus far, but I had a GOOD deck (in fact, 2 versions of it made it to the Top 8). I mainly got screwed over by terrible draw and ridiculously unbalanced match-ups. Plus being matched against Andrew once.

3) One of our friends made Top 8. Hooray! He had a great deck for what was there, and his first match was supposed to be an auto win. When it comes time to play? He makes a HUGE mistake that costs him game 1, and another one in game 3 because he is flustered that is just as bad. This is the kind of error that is so laughably BASIC, especially because he had his opponent's decklist, that our region is going to take some flak for quite some time because of it.

4) Two of the people we play with were dating. They broke up on Thursday, wreaking havoc with our playgroup (naturally).

5) The headlamps on our car randomly decided to die Sunday night. No clue why, the fuses are fine, the side lights work and the brights work. So we drove home with the brights only.

6) The power was out this morning. The ONLY reason I got up early enough to get to work on time was because we have a battery-powered back-up surge protector that beeps every 45 seconds to tell you it's on.

Despite all this, I did have fun. It wasn't all bad. But GODDAMN. Seriously? Glad it's over. <_<

[AndrewRogue]

3) One of our friends made Top 8. Hooray! He had a great deck for what was there, and his first match was supposed to be an auto win. When it comes time to play? He makes a HUGE mistake that costs him game 1, and another one in game 3 because he is flustered that is just as bad. This is the kind of error that is so laughably BASIC, especially because he had his opponent's decklist, that our region is going to take some flak for quite some time because of it.

A mistake so laughably basic that all of us vocalized concerns of something shady going on, because he would never, ever have done that. Ever.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Shenanigans at work! Today, we: had a power outage. This power outage also wrecked the network. Such outage went from 4:40PM to 5:50PM. The network itself didn't pop back up until 6PM. It's now 6:40PM. Guess what happened to the network -again-~?

[Luther Lansfeld]

So today we had a debate in our class about scientific integrity.

Basically, in the early part of this decade, a scientist working for Bell fabricated some really amazing-if-true discoveries, and these were published in the most famous science journals there are. After some academic scientists figured out that he was using the same graph in like five different papers with the same blemishes in the same places, Bell investigated and found that it was all a lie and fired him. Basically in science there is basically a ban on all reputable science publications for like ten years, and he got it. Pretty straightforward except for the fact that the co-authors, people who put their name on the journal page despite doing very little of the actual work, didn't get punished at all. A co-author might deliver a small contribution, like ensuring that the structure is correct or whatever.

So the argument was, should they be punished? I argued that they should; there is a fundamental responsibility of a scientist to make sure that what their name is being put on is sound, otherwise they are contributing to faulty science. Other people argued that the editors are equally at fault as the scientists since they didn't catch it either (but in many cases, editors are hardly experts in the field, especially for journals that cover all parts of science like the most famous ones).

Pretty interesting regardless.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Other people argued that the editors are equally at fault as the scientists since they didn't catch it either (but in many cases, editors are hardly experts in the field, especially for journals that cover all parts of science like the most famous ones).

I agree with your stance. In the case of editors, though, it's pretty clear as to why the blame can't be dropped with the same élan on them. Given the rarity of scientific experts within the editorial field, even assuming they get the insight to realize there's something iffy with the news discovery, they still have to count on second-hand sources with often little knowledge of their own to compliment this truth-searching in one of the densest, most closed fields around. So, it's hard to say -where- they screw it up if they do. The accountability, to some degree, shouldn't be tossed out, but it's hard to pinpoint where their responsibility begins and ends.