To the commenter calling himself Henry:
You can leave as many comments as you want, and I will keep deleting every single one of them. You are an ass and you need a new hobby. Get a life. If you hate my blog so much, no one is making you read it.
Alana
This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a very long time:
Food Court Musical (still can't get anything embedded).
Alana
CafePress's legal department is useless. I've had a few run-ins with them in the years I've had a shop there. I like the money I make at CafePress, but I hate CafePress. Let me explain why I'm looking for someone else to make my girlalive.com t-shirts.
A few months ago, all of the Princess Bride related designs were removed from my shop. I did not make any direct reference to the Princess Bride in these designs. I did not use any images from the movie. I did not have anything copywriteable in the design. Just obscure sideways references to lines from the movie. Not even quotes. These are the offending designs: 
Apparently the movie company or someone got pissy about it, and the CafePress lawyers, instead of standing up for their designers and telling them that it wasn't a copywrited image, and they should go to hell, caved in immediately and made me remove those designs. I went along figuring, "They'll lose more money than I will when I remove those."
Now, they have removed all of the designs that have quotes from Albert Einstein. Maybe the Einstein estate complained? Whatever. I did not use any image of Einstein. The "problem" images are these:
Quotes are pretty much public domain. If I had reprinted an entire chapter from one of his books, that would be illegal. But I just used a few well-known quotes from interviews. And I properly attributed them to the originator of the comment. Here's the kicker: if I had printed them without attributing them to anyone but myself, that would technically be plagarism, but I would never have heard anything about it from CafePress. As it is, they have again caved in to baseless complaints about "intellectual property" and removed more of my designs.
Now I'm of two minds on this. I would like to find another company that could make t-shirts and stuff for my web site. But they might be just as bad as CafePress. So here's my other idea. I keep all the same search tags on my images and change them to these:
In the final version of these I would make it clear that they have been edited to fit the CafePress Content Usage Policy. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. And if you know any good print on demand t-shirt stores, let me know that too. I've looked at Spreadshirt, but they only do shirts and I like the tote bags and other stuff at CafePress. Grr. In any case, I'll post later to let you all know what I decide.
Alana
I don't have much to say today, but if you haven't seen the Easy Mac Micro Maniac, you totally have to go and see it. It's just someone putting a bunch of random crap in a microwave. I wish I had a job where Kraft paid me to throw crap in the microwave.
http://www.u-starvin.com/micromaniac/
Alana
I just wanted to point out that I've added a few new shirt designs to my cafepress store. I've been on a bit of a non-conformity kick lately. I've started to get to where all the women on the bus look exactly the same to me, and it is driving me mad. They all have hip-hugger jeans, huge sunglasses, a belt over their long t-shirt, and ironed-flat dyed-blonde hair. I seriously can't tell any of them apart. It's like the uniforms they have to wear in school here never wear off. When you finish school, you just decide whether you're going to wear a trendy, goth, or hippy uniform, and continue to look and dress exactly like all your peers.
Anyway, there are new shirts celebrating how much I hate blending in with the sheep.
Alana
Okay, so every day I go to Babble and I see how big the puzzle is for the day and how I'm doing in the rankings and all that stuff. Usually I think, "Maybe I'll do it later." Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. When I decide to do it, I print out a list of clues that a nice person posts on the web so that I know the first 2 letters of all the words. Then I cross off the words when I find them.
Today I decided to do my puzzle and I went to print out the clue sheet. I always copy and paste into a word processor so that I do not waste paper. I got everything set in Word, and it said that my margins were not set right. When it "corrected" them, it set my margins for something like 11 inches wide on paper that is only 8 inches wide! Word is very stupid! So I set it back and tried to print. It said that my paper settings were not the same as the printer. So I clicked the "ignore" button and it went back to whining about the margins. So I thought, "Screw you, Microsoft" and I opened WordPerfect.
Once in WordPerfect I set the margins and did everything, and it said, "There is no response from the printer." That means my husband's computer is not turned on. (That also means that Word was too stupid to figure out that there was no printer, and it just kept whining about the margins and paper size because it totally couldn't see that the printer was turned off.) So I went downstairs and turned the computer and the printer on. Then I tried again. It still could not find the printer. I closed WordPerfect and opened it again. This time it gave no errors, but still did not print the list! I went downstairs and the printer said, "printing". That was a big lie. If it had been printing, there would have been some paper with printing on it shooting out of the printer. There was not.
After that I gave up on my computer, copied the list into a word processor on my husband's computer and printed it from there. After all that, I could finally do the Babble puzzle.
So that's how boring my life is, sitting around and waiting for my job to start. I was almost completely out of money last week, but just in time for my credit card payment to be due, I got my federal income tax rebate and I got a 401k refund from my last job. So now I hopefully have enough money to last until I start getting a paycheck.
Alana
Okay, so I keep meaning to email people and post to my blog and all kinds of stuff, and I keep not doing it because of the evil internet and its wiley ways.
The first obsession that keeps me from working is The Kingdom of Loathing. I'm level 9 and I'm just trying to get enough goat cheese to go to the top of Mt. McLargeHuge.
The other new obsession that keeps me from doing anything constructive is Babble. It's like online Boggle against everyone else in the whole world. Or at least against the ones signed up at Babble. I have spent the last half hour staring at that grid, certain that there are words I'm missing.
Another one that keeps me occupied some of the time is Sploofus. I usually only do the trivia question of the day because if I get started on the other trivia quizzes, there's my whole week gone answering obscure trivia.
Alana
My dad made a post about Ewido and I'm glad he did. I ran it on my computer and it took about an hour and a half, but in the end, everything it running twice as fast as before. My husband would know that I've been complaining for weeks about this thing being painfully slow. Now it's all fixed! Read my dad's post here. Or just skip that and download Ewido.
Alana
Okay, so to the person named Glenn in Pennsylvania who bought one of the I Aim to Misbehave designs from my t-shirt shop, printed on an infant crawler, baby onesie thing, I just wanted you to know that I think you totally rock. It is not only a good use of the slogan on the shirt (because small children are prone to misbehave), but you are using your child to promote Serenity/Firefly. You rock even more than the woman in Wisconsin who bought a cooking apron that says "I caught you a delicious bass." In fact, Glenn, if you see this post and email me with your last name and the date you placed the order, I might just consider sending you some free stuff or something. (That offer only applies to the guy who placed that order. I'm not giving free stuff to everyone who buys an infant crawler or toddler t-shirt with that design.)
Alana
Okay, so I haven't watched music videos in a long time. I don't have MTV (not that they show any videos anyway) and I don't like most pop music anyway. So maybe my vague memory of music videos being sometimes cool and not disturbing is incorrect. But I still think that this video is the most disturbing thing I've seen in a very long time.
Thank you Hasselhoff.
Alana
I have just set up new world headquarters for girlalive.com. I used to do all my work from my laptop, in the living room. But my husband's sister and soon-to-be brother-in-law are moving in with us while they find a new apartment. Because of that, I didn't want to be spending so much time in the common areas of the house, so I got my laptop and a desk moved upstairs into my new office space, which happens to be the corner of my bedroom.
That is my new office. I have a desk and a chair, and I can entertain visitors and clients, as long as they don't mind sitting on the bed. As you can see, I even have a lovely Homer Simpson mug that my husband got me for my birthday. And since this picture was taken, I have added a thermos, for extra tea with fewer trips to the kitchen.
I need to go to bed because I told my husband I'd go to bed as soon as I finished a bunch of new food reviews, but that was about 2 hours ago and I need to eventually get some sleep.
Alana
This blog thingy is really annoying me today. I'm having technical issues. When I make a new entry, it shows up in the archive page, but doesn't show up on the main page. I have been having issues getting it to work, but I think I can maybe work around it. But I can't get it to post the new stuff *and* show the advertisement for my shirt shop at the same time. Grr.
Alana
If you look at the old entries here, you'll notice that all of them were uploaded on the same day. I used to keep my online diary at diaryland.com, but I have decided that new in 2006, I'm keeping them on my own domain with a blogging thingy I got from Yahoo.
So all the old entries are here, and they're all still over at diaryland. But entries for 2006 and later will all just be written here. 
Look, there are smileys here! 
That's pretty spiffy.
Alana
diaryland entry 2:20 p.m. - 2005-09-28
I had a thing on here a while ago about a thing in the closed captioning on my tv. You can read it here. (link does not work since moving to a new server)
My friend Sara ran the statement from that through the "Lost in Translation" thing discussed in the Babeled Bard thing in the Books page of my web site. Here are the hilarious results.
Original English Text:
I really did want to shave it but I couldn't because of the staples.
Translated to French:
Je vraiment ai voulu le raser mais je ne pourrais pas en raison des
agrafes.
Translated back to English:
I really wanted to shave it but I could not because of fasten.
Translated to German:
Ich wollte wirklich es rasieren, aber ich könnte nicht wegen mich
befestigen.
Translated back to English:
I wanted to really shave it, but I could not fasten because of me.
Translated to Italian:
Ho desiderato realmente raderlo, ma non potrei fissarsi a causa di me.
Translated back to English:
I have wished really to shave it, but I could not fix because of me.
Translated to Portuguese:
Eu desejei realmente raspá-lo, mas eu não poderia reparar por causa
de mim.
Translated back to English:
I really desired to scrape it, but I could not repair because of me.
Translated to Spanish:
Realmente deseé rasparlo, pero no podría reparar debido a mí.
Translated back to English:
I really wished to scrape it, but it could not repair due to me.
Yep. It still makes no sense.
Alana
www.girlalive.com
