Monday, March 05, 2007

Things Which Are Annoying Me This Morning

While I am not really pissed off or anything, I have found myself at general low-level of annoyance this morning. These are the sort of things which, by themselves, probably wouldn't a big deal. But they have this nasty little tendency to build on each other. So, here are things which have already annoyed me this morning:

Car Alarms: Okay - so these tend to annoy me all the time, not just this morning. They just happen to be a focus this morning because one went off outside my window this morning about 15 minutes before my alarm. If it had been a little earlier, I might have slept through it. Or at the very least I would have had time to actually go back to sleep. At 15 minutes, however, there's not really enough time to actually go back to sleep in any sort of meaningful way. Now I realize that car alarms are part of every day life these days, but that doesn't stop them from annoying me.

The Fill-In News Caster: So this is one of the little ones. I like to watch the local news as I'm getting ready in the morning. Yeah, I know most of the stories they're covering that time of day are complete bull-shit, fluff stories, but I like to catch things like the local weather, traffic reports, and the local sports coverage. The particular channel I watch is usually pretty good (although I'm noticing a disturbing trend toward things like make-up tips as news stories - I'm sorry, how is this considered important news?), but this morning one of the regular news casters had the day off. I in no way blame her for taking a day off - hell, I wish I could. But the woman they had filling in for her this morning was just terrible. She was one of those people who tries to hard to be a "serious" news caster, but still seem open, friendly, and personable. Didn't work. Lady, you're just filling in - get over yourself.

Ann Coulter: This is another one which annoys me on a regular basis, but has been brought to my attention this morning in particular. If you don't already know, Ann Coulter is an ultra conservative right-wing ideologue. She has made it habit to say things which many (if not most) people consider to be offensive and outlandish. She was the one a few months back who referred to some of the 9/11 widows as "harpies." Well, she's done it again (big surprise, huh?). This past Friday, she referred to Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards as a "faggot." According to a CNN.com story, at the Conservative Political Action Conference she said "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm - so, kind of at an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards, so I think I'll just conclude here and take your questions." Nice. I must admit, I would not be all that sorry to see this woman, whom I consider the really harpy, just go away.

The DHCP: DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Without going into a bunch of techno-babble which most people wouldn't understand, I'll simply say that this program needs to be functioning properly for the computer network on campus is function properly. Without, computers cannot connect to the Internet. Well, it was down this morning. It looks like it's fixed now, but having something like this down early on a Monday morning is bad. Really bad. While there is absolutely nothing I can do about, people still come to me wanting to get it fixed. They hate the fact that only answer I can give them is "It's broken. They are working on fixing it. You'll just have to wait." Luckily, the network admins got it fixed in about half an hour and things seem to going well at this point. But all this happened before I had my coffee - not good.

Spring Training: I know people love baseball. I accept this fact. I don't care about it all that much, but if other people do, that's fine. The problem is that right now it's Spring Training, which means a number of teams are here in Arizona doing their thing. Again, fine, I don't really care. It's the people who are here to watch Spring Training who are annoying me. I have ranted about driving in Phoenix before. It's rather like playing dodge ball with cars. As crazy as it may be, however, there is some method to the madness. Most people in Phoenix understand at least some of the rules. When you toss in a bunch of outsiders, that's when you have real problems. Spring training started last week, and people's spring breaks are going to be coming up over the next couple weeks - thing are only going to get worse.

Post #100!

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