Month: December 2010

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Cleanliness is right next to smooth softiness

I was in the hospital today and needed to pee, so I walked to the family/guest restroom, locked the door, sat down on the toilet and saw a laminated sheet of paper on the towel dispenser. I know hospitals need things to be sanitary for the sake of the patients, but the instructions on that sheet of paper stepped beyond the realm of hygiene and into cosmetology:

Six Steps to Proper Hand Washing
1. Wet hands with water.
2. Apply hand wash.
3. Lather and wash for at least 15 seconds.
4. Rinse both sides of hands with water.
5. Dry hands and shut off faucet with hand towel.
6. Apply hand lotion to keep skin smooth and soft.

There was no hand lotion in the restroom that I could see and hospitals aren’t known for having well-stocked cosmetics departments, so if you wanted to “wash properly” according to their standards (as opposed to the 4 1/2 steps I followed), you needed to take matters… into your own hands.

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Drugs are bad for you

IOGT is an organization that promotes peace, brotherhood and temperance (which should be interpreted as “peace, brother-and-sisterhood and no-drugs-or-alcohol-but-other-passions-shouldn’t-be-moderated“). I’m a fourth-generation member of IOGT, but that’s not the only reason why I choose not to drink or use drugs; the video below should provide you with some other really good reasons to stay away from that kind of stuff.

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Deadlines? What are deadlines?

As a general rule, there’s almost always time to ramble about whatever crosses my mind on here, but when I’ve only got half an hour to do it before hitting the deadline of the end of the day… at this rate, all I can say is I’m glad I skipped out on NaNoWriMo. Trying to write, what, a couple thousand words in the course of maybe two hours assuming I remember early enough? Rumor has it that novels are supposed to have a plot. If I’m doing it during crunch time, not so much.

In a way, this is kinda strange. Given how many papers I wrote during the last few hours back in college, you’d think I’d be comfortable with something as simple as “I have to pound out a couple paragraphs in 30 minutes.” Maybe it’s because I could always rely on all-nighters. Yes, I pulled those once in a while. Hell, I did that for my application essays for Augsburg, but in that case, I already had some idea of what I wanted to write, I just needed to put it down on paper. And then edit it. And then rewrite it because it sucked. Hmmm… maybe not that much different than college after all. Maybe I’m just getting mentally prepared to be back in school again.

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Time to celebrate!

This is a short entry, but I’m not sure how late I’ll be out tonight and I didn’t want to break my streak of blog entries. I’m heading out because I completed my application for Augsburg’s MBA program! Technically, I finished it yesterday, but how did I celebrate? I stayed at home… ’cause that’s how I roll. But tonight I’m heading out to enjoy myself and I hope you all do, too. Enjoy yourselves, that is—there’s only so much Shawn to go around.

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Back online

Well, that wasn’t as ugly as I thought it would be. The person who’s running this site from her server switched to a new web host and everything was back to normal (or as normal as my blog gets) within an hour. It doesn’t look like anything was deleted during the hacking process, the person just messed with the main page and the administrative dashboard. Awesome.

On another note, I’m sure most of you have heard about the Metrodome collapse, which forced the Vikings/Giants games out of Minneapolis and into Detroit. It gets worse. The Vikes have another home game against Chicago on Monday night and they might be able to use the University of Minnesota’s football stadium, but in doing so, it would force the Bears to find an alternate site to prepare for the game. An alternate site like, oh, I don’t know, the Gophers’ practice football facility.

Remember how I was talking about all of the soccer games being cancelled last Sunday due to all the snow? They were supposed to be pushed ahead a week to Dec. 17th, the day before the Vikings game and likely a good day for the teams to practice. What I may not have mentioned was where our soccer league is playing this season: the Gophers’ practice football facility. Guess who’s gonna have priority and who’s probably gonna get screwed?

Hopefully, we can work something out. Mad Dogs are currently scheduled to play at 1:00 that afternoon, but “last minute changes are a possibility.” *sigh* I hope I can see my team play one more game this year. If not, that’ll be one more reason for me to hope that the Bears lose by a bajillion points. That’s right, I said “a bajillion”. No mercy for those who steal our soccer fields, bitches!

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Mmmm, this website is hackalicious…

Okay, this is really weird. I went to the website itself and the “dashboard”—the opening screen for the site administrator—and both have been hacked. There’s a YouTube video on there about Muslim something something something… I haven’t taken the time to watch it, I’ve just been annoyed. Yeah, having a hacked website is definitely annoying.

But this is the weird part: I was able to circumvent said hacking by using Firefox’s history to go to one of the cached administration pages and it’s been working just fine (relatively speaking). I’ve been able to copy and paste all of my December entries that I hadn’t already saved on my laptop one by one—virus checker coming right up!—and navigate through the administrative stuff with no problems, but I just used a bookmark to get to the dashboard and there’s the hacked screen again.

I figure once I get this entry saved and “posted”—I’m sure it’ll appear somewhere eventually—I’ll try to poke around in here some more and see what I can see. Not that I’ve got a lot of know-how when it comes to WordPress, but what’s the worst I can do? Get the site doubly hacked? So it’s time for a little adventure. Keep your fingers crossed for me.