scattered ambivalent crap:

1) critical mass friday: amazing. there were over 1100 people, and we took over the lion's gate bridge. it was a pretty impressive sight.

2) sunday: catastrophic computer failure. my beautiful ibook started making this clicking noise and stalled. my attempts to reboot led to additional clickling. it's undoubtedly a hardware problem; i just hope i can recover what's on my hard disk. they say to back it up, but i don't really know anyone who does that...

3) almost one year to the day, some pigfuckers rip off my sweetie's bike again. this time, they didn't even leave the wheels -- everything's gone; it's been stripped down to the frame. what's really retarded is that they're going to take the parts home and realize they can't do a fucking thing with them; the whole chain ring was custom machined.

4) i have to edit a 239-page book on fluid dynamics for wiley, and i'm getting paid far less than what i was paid for my book for springer.

bah!

dear lord.

so one of the things i have to do for my job is compile an author handbook – something editors can give to new authors that explains the editorial process, the formatting requirements of the manuscripts, etc. to do this, i'm essentially taking a bunch of scattered papers that are used in the firm and putting it all together into a coherent document. this is an excerpt from their disk requirements document:

"Manuscripts should be submitted on 3½” disks using recent versions of IBM-compatible WordPerfect or MS Word."

also:

"Never type the letter l (“el”) when you mean the number 1; and do not interchange zero and the capital letter O."

my first thought when i read this was "is this for real?" and after i'd ascertained that it was, my second thought was "how old is this document?" that second requirement is like a throwback to the days of typewriters before they put number keys on keyboard and people had to improvise. WTF?

i asked if CDs or e-mail attachments were acceptable. i mean, i don't even have a 3.5" floppy drive on my computer. turns out they're not a big fan of CDs, apparently.

if there was ever a testament to how technophobic the publishing industry is, this is it.

if i had an indian name, i'd be called 'sandaltan.'

babies.

seems like everyone is having them. my tech instructor at school, the publisher's assistant at greystone, a dude in my sweetie's lab, a friend of a friend i ran into on the bus...

i, on the other hand, dread the thought of having babies. i can't at all understand how anyone in our financial and career situation could even contemplate having babies. it's not that i don't like babies -- although clearly, i'm less interested in them than most people seem to be. i think what really turns me off about the concept of parenting isn't the child, but the thought of being obligated to interact with other parents. people who believe they're the only ones ever to have procreated. women who preface everything they say with "well, as a mother..."

same thing with dogs. some dog people are really cool, but in my brief trip back to alberta two weeks ago, my sweetie and i took his two family dogs out to the off-leash park. i sat back and observed as dogs sniffed each another's asses and the owners were forced to make asinine small talk, which revolved largely around breeds of dogs, dog food, dog toys...

it was torturous.