Adventures of a Freelance Murray Slaughter - January 17th, 2005

and went to the bathroom....and unthinkingly pulled my jeans off...without undoing them. These jeans were bought in October, and were 2 sizes smaller than I usually have bought, anyways. The jeans still stay up, obviously, but I figure it'll be about 8 weeks before they need to be replaced just because they're not staying up (they already look seriously baggy on me as it is).

that is all.

Ulysses favourite place in the apartment is in from of the radiator in the bedroom. The floor is heated there, with the pipes running under it to the radiator, and the radiator is frequently so hot that I can't touch it when I want to try and adjust the temp. It's a good thing I don't have children, because I was curious, and put a candy thermometer on it last week, and found it was at about 180F.

Ulysses, though, thinks it's the best thing in the world, and I frequently go into the bedroom to see him laid out, stretched as far as he can, so as much of him as possible is leaning against the lower part of the radiator (which is, right now, at about 120F, so the apartment is about 85, and I'm wearing a tank top and shorts). He looks up at me indolently when I enter the room to get a book, like the application of heat to his body has completely stopped his ability to think. Which, when you consider it, likely explains tanners. Either way, he is one ecstatically happy cat.

This morning, someone posted something to the Toronto freecycle list that was totally inappropriate. I ignored it, but then an hour or two later, the person posted to the list again, 'apologizing' in an incredibly sarcastic fashion, as if they had only offended one person, while lots and lots of people supported it (it was a link to an auction site where she gets $5 credit for everyone who signs up saying she's their referral).

Her 'apology' indicated to me that she didn't actually understand why what she had done was wrong, just that other people had told her she was wrong so she was apologizing, and she claimed people had been 'vicious' to her. I sent her a polite note, apologizing that people had felt the need to be vicious, and explaining that the issue was that the credit meant she was essentially making a profit off the referrals (which it says in the freecycle toronto page you're not supposed to do, but I didn't mention that). She then proceeded to accuse me of being nasty, and sarcastic, and vicious, and told me I was beating a dead horse, since she had /apologized/. The funny thing is, I had started my note to her apologizing that people had been nasty to her, only to be accused of the same things. This is what I wrote:

I'm sorry anyone was mean or cruel to you; that's uncalled for. I suspect that it's not that the site is 'free', but instead that by sending that out to 3000 people on the freecycle list, you were essentially making a potentially large profit with that $5 referral. This list is *not* for things that essentially earn you $$$. Had you posted *without* including your referral name and the fact you were making $5 off of everyone who signed up, I think it would have been fine.

This is apparently sarcastic and vicious. This totally undercuts her post that people were vicious to her, since the first note she got might well have been completely polite, but it told chica she'd done something wrong, and she didn't want to hear it.

Either way, as a graduate of the Elbows Finishing School of Online Textual Battle, I looked at it for a moment, decided that she was just simply too easy. I fought off the 'oh, if you think *that* was vicious, just keep reading' urge. I am getting soft in my old age, I suspect. What I think is amusing is, whenever I get back onto Elbows, and someone there starts to pick a fight with me, is the effect I get, in IMs and email, that's essentially the same as in old time Westerns, when someone rides into town and calls out whoever John Wayne is playing, and the tough guys in the bar all step back and hold their breath. I tried to give up online 'discussions' like that because it was just too freaking easy at times. But every so often one wanders right in front of me and tries to start me off again, and I have a moment of 'ok, you're just trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs here.'

honest. not 20 minutes ago. flurries, barely seeing the apartments on the other side of the street snowing.

The sky is now COMPLETELY blue and it's sunny.

THis has been the most screwy Canadian winter I've ever seen.

I mentioned to Scott (Bateman), that the last time LJ had been down for any period of time, they gave out 2 weeks to all paid users. I figured they'd do it again, and here's the link to claim your 2 weeks for last weekend's outage:

http://www.livejournal.com/misc/claim-2005-01.bml