A Ceramic Fish Joint

Interesting link from Kottke, which brings up something I’ve loved for years. First, the snippit:

Lera Boroditsky shares some recent studies which show that language shapes the way we think.

How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

One of my favorite examples of this is something that Meg told me about years ago. In English, you might say something like, “I lost the keys” whereas in Spanish you could use a reflexive verb and say something more like “the keys lost themselves”. Her guess was that difference makes Spanish speakers somewhat less likely to take responsibility for their actions…e.g. I didn’t knock that vase over, it knocked itself over. (thx, david)

Gawd, that was a lot of linking and blockquoting there. Anyways, it’s a very interesting theory. In English, there aren’t genders for words. Growing up in WV, I never realized that was an option. Because, of course, I had mastered “hick-speak”* at a young age. Which I’ve hopefully now broken those habits. Anyway, when I started taking Spanish in high school I learned about these things. And it seemed silly. But the thought that certain concepts – death, life – are conveyed by either male or female figures based on the gender of the word in a specific language…ooh…that’s good! This deserves more research!

But the best part of this post is where Jason learns from Meg that in Spanish, many actions are taken by the object rather than the subject. So “I have a headache” translates to “Me duele la cabeza” which literally translates to “My head hurts me.” It’s like saying, “Screw you, head! Stop with the hurting me part!” I’ve always loved that. And for the few years that I knew Spanish conversationally I would often use phrases like this, if only to amuse myself. Sra. Beavers (my high school Spanish teacher) would be so proud.

Also, me duele los dientes. I had a cracked tooth that required two fillings AND a root canal today. 2+ hours of dentistry fun! And I have to admit, the fillings were the worst part. Root canal? Such a piece of cake. Didn’t even feel as weird as the drilling of my tooth. Also, an iPod cranked REALLY loudly helps. My music of choice was, oddly enough, Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. The album that fits when nothing else fits. Actually that was for part one. For the root canal, I went with Stereo Type A by Chibo Mato. Gotta love a little Japanese Punk-Pop.

Finally, my mom just got admitted to the hospital again (like, 20 minutes ago) with an infection in a cyst on her liver. She’s had this problem before, it’s been a big bad and we’re hoping that antibiotics will do the trick this time but…uh, probably they won’t. Also, tomorrow I get the stitches out of my back and find out if I have skin cancer! Yay! I’m fairly certain (like 98%) that I don’t…but there’s always that strain of hypochondria running through my system convincing me that yes, Virginia, there’s cancer running amok.

*I was going to write a funny exchange I had with my dad yesterday that took place in total hick-speak, but uh…the thing with hick-speak is that the words are usually mispronounced. So it would take way too much explaining to show the funny of two people saying “wash down the creek” and “washing yourself at the creek” when one creek = crick and one wash = warsh. In the end it was decided that I either had a speech impediment since I cannot bring myself to say crick instead of creek or warsh instead of wash OR it was the terrible mistake of sending me to some big university type school. Ah, the joys of West Virginia. To me, it will forever be the state that most people are convinced is just western Virginia. That whole seceding thing NEVER happened…nope!

Thanks to Kimli for tweeting this:

A Breakup Letter, Now with Dramatic Reading!

Seriously. Turn on your speakers and check it out. Hell, even without the dramatic reading part it’s still pretty damn funny. Ah, people and their silly butchering of sacred little language rules.

I found my old art journal from high school last night. I knew that it was filled with awesome, but didn’t realize just how much awesome there was. At some point I’ll scan everything to put online. Of course, it will be a hundred pages or so – but totally worth it. Then again, other parts of it are just…well creepifying and morbid. And lame. Still, how can I, in good conscience, deny the public this great work? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Also, I’m in the process of moving this site to a different level on the domain. This shouldn’t affect most of you. You’ll always be able to see it by going to http://ceramicfish.org. But, if you frequently point your browser to http://ceramicfish.org/blahg/wordpress you may have a problem. Well, actually not since I’ll set up a redirect I guess. However, as I’m doing all this, things may be a bit wonky. Also, at some point I’ll undertake the daunting task of collecting all the old entries from my old domain (now defunct) found on the WayBack Machine. And transfer entries from Livejournal. So that everything is in one place. Then again, these things? I’ve been promising myself I’d do it for a year now. So…you know…take that as you will.

Okay, so let’s face it. None of you bought me a birthday present. Even in the year of the dino-birthday. Therefore, I am totally deserving of this, the Philosoraptor t-shirt. Come on, it’ll make you feel good to right the wrongs of neglecting my birthday! And Jesus’ birthday! While it might be easy to simply #blamedrewscancer, I feel that this goes beyond the Drew’s cancer incident. I need this. I need this more than I needed the zombie survival kit (which…yeah. NOBODY got me that, either!)

Show a girl some love.

Okay, so there are many more shirts on that site I need! In particular: Ptrapezoid, Pentagon – Hexagon – Oregon, Geometry is for Squares and Just Jew It.

Have I ever shared my experience with Demeter’s Holy Water fragrance? There’s not much to it, but I’m always a bit amused to think about it.

So, shortly after a Wild Oats (now Whole Foods) landed in Tampa, they began carrying an impressive line of Demeter fragrances. There was Dirt, Funeral Home, Cut Grass and, my favorite, Holy Water. And, well, a lot more. But those are the ones I remember seeing for the first time. So. Holy Water. Not only is it funny for an atheist to be spraying something labeled “holy water” on her body each day but it smelled damn good.

Until my skin started burning. No lie. I had some type of reaction to the Holy Water fragrance. There were welts on my skin and the burning. Oh, the burning. At first I didn’t put the two together. Just thought it was another Heidi-skin-anomaly where maybe I was allergic to regular water again or something. Then I realized it was related to the Holy Water stuff. But still didn’t buy into it. None of Demeter’s other fragrances have that effect on me.

But, uh. Nope. I’m totally allergic to Holy Water. I gave the bottle to my mom eventually. Because, like I said, it smells really good. Just doesn’t agree with this heathen’s skin.

So for irrelevant reasons, I wanted to know when I started using Gmail. Looks like it was late 2004. Anyway, one of my first few messages happened to be some pictures I made all by myself with MS Paint in the style of Exploding Dog. I had sent them to, well, me from my work computer (at Verizon.) I was on an internal help desk there for some healthcare company. Verizon outsourced its help desk employees to various companies. Anyway, it was this high profile company. We were actually overstaffed a bit and rarely received calls. Well, this was increased when a few of us were trained to work with another company from Canada. In the 4ish months we supported them, I had under 20 calls. Anyway, the people who had training for the latter company were put lower in the available rep tree for the healthcare company so there were people always available for both.

That’s confusing. Anyway, it meant that I often went HOURS without a call. Seriously. Those of you who have worked at help desks know this is crazy on any day that’s not a holiday. Which, actually, the holidays I worked while there went by with no calls at all. So I read a lot. First it was fun and fluffy stuff – reading all the Haruki Murukami novels and such. Then I went to science, evolutionary biology, DNA and the human genome. People would comment that where I used to take a day or two to read a book I had started taking a week or two to get through it. If they only understood the complexity of the human genome…

Ok, so the point. Another thing I did while there to amuse myself was draw pictures in MS Paint. It became a thing. There were at least 50, probably closer to 100 pictures created. Sadly, only 12 remain. And nary a banana to be found in any of them. Anyway, I present them to you. Take them as you will. And feel free to ask questions regarding the inspiration of any image and/or my mental status in late 2004. Enjoy!

(Another update: these can all be viewed FINALLY on my other domain all in one place: A Hot Robot Gallery)

Kill X-Mas

Near….Far

Octobot

Slugbunny – Hah! I just noticed an appearance of “The Subtle Knife” over on the left here. Too funny; I must have been reading His Dark Materials at the time. And, thinking back, I’m pretty sure there were a few other instances of The Subtle Knife appearing, once it cut a hole in the floor and took some ducks with it. Another time, it claimed the monkey. Also, the hanging person? An ode to Fight! Kikkoman (Wait, that’s an edited one with english translation…there’s one where the cat hangs himself. Here!)

Untitled

Wood

Blah

Blue

Breakfast

Bunny

Bunny Chase

Cookie

Arg! The domain where I keep “stuff” is being all wonky and all NOT displaying anything except stuff that hasn’t been there in months (wtf?) and now I realize the images are too big to fit my current theme. Glad nobody is awake right now. So, I’m gonna resize all of these to thumbnails – link to the original and let you look if you want. So much work for a giggle.

Arg^2! So, resizing the photos degrades the image so much that it’s just not worth it. Click if you want to see. Some are really funny! Promise! Don’t make this all in vain! Also, damn…can you sense some built up rage in these pictures? Blood! Gore! A sun is going to eat you!

Well, I was gone from the internets (mostly) for a couple weeks. Why? Well, first my ac adapter decided it didn’t really enjoy charging my laptop. Then after some finagling, I was able to sometimes get it to charge. If the planets were in alignment and nary a dust mite sneezed, that is. The slightest movement would stop the charging. So, for about a week I tried to snag a relatively cheap ac adapter on eBay. Didn’t want to buy a new one from Apple as I was (and may still be) planning on buying a new MacBook. We’ll see on that one. (I really need an optical drive for a couple things as mine has failed, the logic board is acting a little wonky and the keyboard isn’t entirely right.) So, since my battery has about a 4 hour life and I really needed to be able to file my unemployment *this* week and didn’t have all the info anywhere but here, I was trying to make the charge last. So of course for five days someone else snagged the auction at the last minute. I eventually found a slightly more expensive one last Monday (6/1) with the whole “Buy It Now” option. So I did just that. Then out of nowhere, was able to make my old adapter work with no issues. And was cursing to myself over the 40ish bucks I had just spent.

Then, I wake up the next day. Laptop had been charging all night as I had been watching a movie on Boxee and eventually closed it in the middle of the night. Which is what I usually do when it’s working properly. I picked it up, plopped it on my lap (in bed) and opened it. Saw orange out of the corner of my eye – inside the cord – the *POOF* fire. Yes, I also had a MagSafe adapter catch on fire about an inch and a half from the side of my laptop. Because of how you have to unplug the adapter (and because it was on fire and I was kind of afraid of tugging on the non-burning end, potentially causing it to snap and keep burning) I had to grab the flames to pull the plug. Which kept sparking and flaming up until I was able to crawl to the end of the bed, on top of the sparking/flaming cord to yank it from the power supply. OUCH. Also, FUCK.

I called Apple. I called Apple because when researching to see what might be causing my ac adapter to not charge at all, I found articles on the fires and – oh yeah – a lawsuit filed May 6, 2009 regarding this issue. I also found out that they (Apple) will swap out your ac adapter for free in these cases if you take it to an Apple store, and they’ve been doing it for months. Which means they’ve known about the potential for months but haven’t issued a recall, hence the lawsuit. Now, this would be great if I lived anywhere near an Apple store. But I don’t. Closest one is about a three hour tour (a three hour tour…) You know, like any real airport. Fucking rural fucking West Virginia. The entire state is rural! You can’t escape it! You’re all…trapped by the ruralness!

So yeah, I called Apple. Spent 50 minutes on the phone. Talked to 4 or 5 different people before I was finally transferred to the right person. Which, whatever. All was fine and dandy until the last guy started referring to the adapter failure as “sparking” which I repeatedly had to correct with “flaming” – and not in the gay way. Flames! Fire! Big Orange Flames! Exclamation point! Then they agreed to swap it, but wanted my credit card for a hold to see if there was “really a manufacturer’s problem, or customer misuse.” Which, okay – Apple does this all the time even when your product is under warranty. I get it. But dude. Flames? Fucking fire? ON my pants? You’ve got to be kidding me. To me, it smacked of not trusting the customer. And regional discrimination (you live in a rural area, not close to an Apple store? Fuck you.) Yes I understand there’s a difference between a “hold” and a “charge” on my card. But, I’m unemployed. I have no credit card, I have a debit card. Meaning that the $60 hold to see if I was playing with matches or was gnawing on my cord to get a new one would come from the very, very limited money I had available. And I have bills to pay. Bills, which if are paid late or missed, cause great problems. Like losing my health insurance kind of problems. I also had a series of doctor appointments pending, which would require payment when I went. So, I needed the money to be free. I don’t care if the hold is immediately lifted when FedEx picks up the old adapter. That still means I have to wait until I get the new one then get FedEx out to pick up the old one. The guy suggested I call back when I was “willing” to allow a hold on my card. I suggested he find a way around said hold, and have the adapter shipped Next Day Air to me since Apple was at fault, they know they are at fault (by their willingness to swap out adapters in their stores) and they’re currently being sued for it. After going around a bit, he said he’d talk to the shipping department to see what could be done.

An hour or two later, I see on my Blackberry that they would be shipping it (Next Day Air) with no CC hold and no demand for return of the original faulty item. The guy who dealt with the case called me back later, leaving a message that included “I got confirmation from the shipping department that they’ve got it out to you and you should receive it tomorrow.” Now, I got a similar confirmation, but it showed that the shipment was “pending” – not shipped. I called the next day and asked for an explanation. The guy spoke with the shipping department, claimed there was a delay, it would “definitely be shipped tomorrow, you’ll get it on Friday.” Okay, fine. I called Thursday at 7:45 EDT, which gives about an hour for an item to ship from Cupertino. Said the status still showed pending and for me to receive it Friday, as promised, it had to be shipped pretty damn soon. The girl talked to shipping again. First time, she told me that there had been an update to the software they use to process shipments which was causing some delays. Okay…. That may be, but if someone in the department had assured the rep the day before that it was set to go out then the delay thing shouldn’t have been a valid excuse. Especially considering I was originally told it had already been sent on Tuesday. So she talked to them again, this time saying that it had just taken longer because my laptop was out of warranty so the “repair” was more comprehensive to ensure that it was actually Apple’s fault. Uhm. Bullshit? They weren’t doing a repair. They were sending me a Brand New Item because the previous one caught on FIRE. Does nobody get the fire part? Anyway, she assured me that shipping assured her it would be sent Friday and received Monday. I said that I sure hoped so, considering what I had been told previously and she said “I hope so, too.”

See, the thing is, I get it. I understand the plight of the people on the phone. I did that job for a long time. I know what they say, how they avoid certain things. Sadly, I also know which buttons to push.

So, Friday comes. I give them until about 7:30 EDT. Still hasn’t shipped. I called and said that I was checking to see what today’s lie was about the delay and when the new estimate for shipping it would be. This time, I was actually transferred over to the shipping department. And actually escalated to a supervisor (who I was previously told only “handle administrative work.”) Heh, a funny aside. On the first day when the final person wouldn’t budge on the whole CC hold thing, I wanted to be escalated to someone else. He said he was the final person to speak to in said area. And was the one who told me I couldn’t speak to any supervisors because they just do admin work. To which I replied, “Well, you’re not Steve Freaking Jobs so there IS somebody above you who can work this out.” Yeah, yeah, Jobs isn’t back yet but still – it got the point across. Which is how I convinced him to escalate to the shipping department.

Okay, so I didn’t actually speak to the supervisor but find out that there had been a hold on my shipment the entire time. Supervisor couldn’t lift the hold himself, but emailed the people who could. Why was the hold there? Because my laptop was out of warranty. Oh, and apparently my particular order had been “flagged” with a customer satisfaction flag – I guess because of my bitching, and there should have never been a hold on it to begin with. Why nobody was able to see said hold is beyond me. So an email was sent to people who could lift the hold. But! They had already gone home so it wouldn’t be addressed until Monday. And I’d receive the adapter “Tuesday or Wednesday.” Can you say fury? As I was fruitlessly complaining (because really, what can you do at that point?) my cell phone cuts out. Fucking hell.

I actually did call back again and got transferred to customer relations. Which is the department that says “I’m sorry” basically. I told the entire story. The lady said she could only see notes from today’s calls – inferring that I hadn’t been told every single day that it would ship. When I further pressed, she said that there were logs from my other calls, but wouldn’t say if there were notes or just a timestamp or anything. I asked her to please explain what she meant, what the call logs meant and she refused. I seriously asked her “why” three times, each time waiting about 30 seconds for a response. Her reply? Was silence. The fuck? Are reps actually allowed and/or encouraged to do this? I asked her if she was going to continue the call in silence or actually engage in conversation to help ease this customer’s discontent. Then she went on a rant about me wanting inside information from the company which would require a subpoena. Uhm…I didn’t say that. I just wanted to know if anyone had acknowledged that I called, and if there were reasons for the delay indicated. Didn’t ask her to read me anything. Just wanted to know if anyone had bothered to notate in my case the problems I was having, since in her words she could just see what had been done that day. Eventually we reached a point where she said, “Look, your case has been escalated – what more do you want?” She was so not a good customer relations rep. Wonder how she ever got that job. I explained how I had lost money not being able to look for a job (a requirement while on unemployment) and that I had repeatedly been lied to and that for years I’ve constantly sung the praises of Apple, its products and its support. And now I felt like the company didn’t care if it pissed off a long-time customer or not and it was clear that my support didn’t matter. I wanted some sort of compensation, something to show that Apple still wanted me as a customer. (You know, like an Apple Store credit – so I would buy from them again.) I asked for compensation FIVE times before she said, “what do you mean, compensation? I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Guess big words aren’t her thing. But that was clear when she just refused to answer my questions earlier in the call. I laughed, incredulous, and said that it would be nice gesture for Apple to give a coupon or credit to show that they actually wanted me to shop with them again. Because at that point, I was ready to buy a cheap laptop and stick Linux on it. And sell this fucker for whatever I could get for it (as broken as it is, the piece of shit) because I was DONE with Apple. She had to ask someone, and finally said she could offer a $30 off $100 or $60 off $200 coupon to me. I said, “I guess if that’s the best you or Apple can do for me, I’ll have to take it.” I had her send the latter, thinking that if I do get another MacBook I could put it towards that. But it expires before the end of the month. And this unemployed girl can’t pull off a laptop purchase in the next week and a half. Now let me digress a bit and say that in the two years that I worked for Amazon.com, we freely gave out coupons to customers who had experienced very minor inconveniences. Sure they were 5 or 10 dollar coupons – but no minimum purchase and they were valid for a year. For people who maybe spent 10 or 20 dollars. No questions asked, didn’t need permission and didn’t have to be prompted to do so. Also didn’t have to be a second or third tier person to do it, we were trained that when it was appropriate (which, I’m thinking it was appropriate in my case) we gave the coupon we felt was needed.

The next day, I got my third party adapter. (And the Apple one shipped somehow.) Oddly enough, it fixed my keyboard. No clue how as there weren’t any updates downloaded until Monday after the WWDC keynote. But the “i” and the “8″ that previously didn’t work? Now work. Well, the “i” is still a little wonky – I have to hit it just right and can only capitalize it with the right shift key. But whatever, it’s better than copying and pasting an “i” when I need one. Which has been a bitch in the past month since the keyboard did its thing. And also led to really weird typing habits on my Blackberry, as I had trained my hands to use a QWERTY keyboard differently.

Am I pleased with how this was handled. Hell to the no. Again, the tech support people were fine and friendly enough – but just relayed canned responses from another department for days before I was ever allowed to talk to them or have my case re-escalated. And to have a hold on a product…a new product being sent because of a fire…because my laptop (not included in said fire) was out of warranty is so very wrong. Further investigation into the ac adapter stuff has just pissed me off more. As I found somewhere (can’t recreate it right now) that there were known problems and eventually replacements out of warranty for iBook and PowerBook ac adapters. As someone who went through FIVE ac adapters for my iBook because they kept fraying (none ever covered by Apple, even when my laptop was IN warranty) I spent a lot of money and frustration on it. After the first 3, I finally started getting cheap 3rd party ones. Eventually, though, it caused so many problems that my battery finally died. (Oh, and while in warranty, the entire power supply system in my laptop had to be replaced because of the faulty ac adapter.)

So, Apple – you’ve pissed me off. Which sucks, cause I really liked you! I’ll never be able to upgrade this MacBook to Snow Leopard without expensive out of pocket repairs. I had only been using the laptop for six months when the optical drive failed. But, I bought it (new, still sealed) from a third party and it was nearly out of warranty when I got it. The hard drive failed immediately on it, luckily I got that replaced. And it all happened before I sold my iBook so I could still transfer my data. Unfortunately, I was sick – in the hospital and then fired when my original warranty expired. So I actually had other things on my mind besides picking up Apple Care – which I had planned to do, and with the unemployment I couldn’t really even afford it. But I figured that surely a new laptop wouldn’t start falling apart right away. Wish I hadn’t been so wrong about that.

Now I mentioned earlier that I do want another MacBook. I do like OS X. The white MacBook is actually a good laptop for the price. The aluminum ones are sexy, though not sure quite worth the extra money. Plus the unibody design? I’m not sold on it. Because it means when the battery eventually fails it will be very expensive to replace. I have a need for a laptop, and one with at least a CD burner. So those cute little Netbooks I had considered are out. And I refuse to run Windows, especially not the recent incarnations of it. Gawd, I fixed a family member’s laptop running Vista and it was horrible! But my experiences with getting my Linux distro of choice to run smoothly haven’t gone well, and I’ve never tried on a laptop. Then again, things have come a long way since I was using Linux.

I guess it comes down to the true value of Apple products. I’m not some stupid fangirl. I tend to know what I’m doing and know what I want and need when it comes to a computer. Apple just happens to have fit the bill for me the past 5 years. But if the company has gotten so arrogant with the recent successes with the iPod and iPhone, and left their core products fall behind, then maybe it’s not the company I need or want anymore. Will have to think on that one.