The Vent and Rant Thread

[Greg Anos]

I went rug hunting for a small rug to cover the spot. This was just too funny for me to resist. . . .

https://www.amazon.com/Ottomanson-Hu...0ZZFJPD7VD61JW

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

I went rug hunting for a small rug to cover the spot. This was just too funny for me to resist. . . .

https://www.amazon.com/Ottomanson-Hu...0ZZFJPD7VD61JW

Given what you're covering, it shoulda been a larger denomination! :-)

Hitch

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Given what you're covering, it shoulda been a larger denomination! :-)

Hitch

But all the wine in the cabinet cost $12 or less. . . .

[badgoodDeb]

Why would a wine do this, anybody know? It's not under pressure, (is it?) like champaigne or cola? Would this imply a fault in the bottle's glass ... or was the wine going bad?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Why would a wine do this, anybody know? It's not under pressure, (is it?) like champaigne or cola? Would this imply a fault in the bottle's glass ... or was the wine going bad?

A flaw in the glass, more than any other likelihood.

A long time ago, Mr. H and I sat down to some takeout, in our living room, in front of the TV. We usually ate in the kitchen, but something was on that night, like the Olympics, or whatever. Anyway, we had pale living room furniture and carpets--the sofa and chairs were creamy in color, and the carpet was a pale beige/tan shade. Mr. Wonderful grabs up a bottle of Barbecue sauce--we were getting ready to eat ribs, I think--and the sauce doesn't want to come out, right?

So, he tilts it a bit more, neck down, now, and he taps it with the heel of his palm.

...and what to my wondering eyes should appear? The bottle EXPLODES. It explodes, everywhere. It's all over my nearly-white chair, my nearly-white sofa, and my (thank god) Scotchguarded beige rug. I mean, this stuff was on him, on me, CERTAINLY on our now-inedible dinner (glass shards), and I have cats running for it, thinking that something FUN has happened.

What a bloody nightmare. I mean...I saw how hard he tapped it, it was nothing. It was just the right pressure at the wrong spot, and it went EVERYWHERE. Glass was broken in his hand, on the floor, in the food, now, having exploded...it took me about two hours to get it all cleaned up, and we still had to have experts in to salvage the chairs and sofa.

Just a flaw in the glass. Probably didn't happen to anyone else, because they didn't tap it in JUST the right spot, in just the right way. Probably what happened with Ralph's bottle--tapped one with the other, and kablammo!

Hitch

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Hitch

It's hilarious to me that you posted this [LMGTFY] --I was JUST showing this to my own crew yesterday, saying "It's a shame it's so rude to send this." It'd be perfect (sigh).

Hitch

I have no compunction sending such links in some circumstances, a lot of people are not very good at "framing the question".

I'm fed up with audio/video journalists who put propositions to an interviewee and ask them if they agree, when they, and their audience, know full well what the answer will be.

Cue BetterRed: looking for a brick after throwing his slipper at his radio/television/computer.

BR

[Greg Anos]

It's been a "Bad Day At Black Rock" for my job, so I didn't get anything after work done.

But. . . A crony recommended "OXY for carpets" to try to remove the stain from the rug. He said it had worked for him before with a wine spill. . .

I will get some tomorrow - I hope. . .

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

It's been a "Bad Day At Black Rock" for my job, so I didn't get anything after work done.

But. . . A crony recommended "OXY for carpets" to try to remove the stain from the rug. He said it had worked for him before with a wine spill. . .

I will get some tomorrow - I hope. . .

There's always Amazon, if you don't have time to go looking for products!

[Rumpelteazer]

Still having a mice problem. I thought by blocking the stairs in my bedroom I had blocked the entrance of the mice. But that wasn't the case. Tonight was a busy night, and I kept hearing rustling around the stairs.

It's a spiral staircase, which once ran from the ground floor all the way up to the attic. At some point the section from the floor below my bedroom to my bedroom was replaced by a normal staircase (which is too steep and a too low ceiling). From my floor to the attic above my it's a spiral staircase again. They've also added a floor in my room so the bottom step sticks out a little bit above the floor on the right side, on the left side there's a gap of a couple of centimeters (everything is crooked in our house).

Tonight I was thoroughly fed up with the mice situation so I went to investigate and found that the top flooring didn't go all the way up to the stair riser below the bottom step, so there was a gap. Which is most likely (hopefully) where the mice got in. I stuffed about half a roll of steel wool in the gaps and wedged in in tightly. Supposedly mice can't gnaw through steel wool.

Tomorrow I'll check the rest of the stairs for any other gaps.

Hopefully the animal shelter will get two sibling kittens for us soon. We want two, but the biggest problem is that at the moment they only have shy siblings and when you get two shy kittens they'll most likely stay shy. If you get one that's shy and one that isn't, the one that is shy will usually change. We're going to give them another call on Friday.

We aren't the only ones that are having problems. When I was house sitting for friends, they also had mice. I heard that a lot of people in their street had mice. I've also hear people from our neighbourhood complaining. We're used to some rodents, living in the city center with a lot of restaurants and bars, but this summer it's been extreme. Normally you get mice are a nuisance in late spring/early summer for a little while and in winter too, though less. I expect it might have something to do with the extremely warm and very dry summer, which forces them to look for other sources of food and water.

It's now past 1.30am and I'm still wide awake. I don't expect to get much sleep tonight, I'm just too stressed right now. So I'll make use of this and catch up on my reading.

[cromag]

I haven't had much success with steel wool, but mice hate copper wool -- apparently it hurts their teeth. I used it to plug a gap in my parents' house, and it worked well.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by cromag

I haven't had much success with steel wool, but mice hate copper wool -- apparently it hurts their teeth. I used it to plug a gap in my parents' house, and it worked well.

Thank you for the tip. I've plugged another hole, year ago, with steel wool and that's still plugged. But I'll keep an eye on the stairs. If I notice that the mice pull away the steel wool or gnaw through it I'll get some copper wool. I got the tip for steel wool from a neighbour who did a rodent prevention course for her job. I didn't hear any mice in/beneath the stairs. There was one mouse that did make a racket off an on all night behind one section of wall. It sounded angry.

Normally when you make it hard for them (with scents or sounds) the mice disappear soon, to a place where they can find food with less trouble I assume. This year there seems to be a cycle of activity building up for one or two weeks, then I up my measures and it quiets down for up to over a month and then it starts again.

I'm fairly sure there might be other access points in either of my rooms. That's inevitable in an old house like this. But this was clearly their main access lately.

I didn't get any sleep, I did doze for a couple of hours. So I'm very glad I only have to work half a day, until 2pm, today. I'll take a nap this afternoon.

[trichobezoar]

My acquaintance with an emotional IQ of a spatula proposed to me and a homeless guy asked me if I was hustling! I gotta stop wearing my colour.

*looking up definition*

If I had known what hustling mean, I would've told that #@%$ off!

[trichobezoar]

Whenever my roommate says "Whatever!" I'm gonna imitate someone who comes from the backroads of Appalachia; it annoys her terribly.

I don't think she likes me being happy... and all my devices... and trinkets.

[Hitch]

So...

Today's adventure. Quoted a nice couple for a book with 116K words and 122 images, along with an index. They accept the quote, time passes, (this is normal, we quote lots of WIPs--works-in-progress that have to be completed prior to production) and today they send in the files for production.

Word count: 198,000 words, not 116K.
Image count: 205 images, not 122.

But the real kicker? Almost none of the images are 300DPI. This is a print book, so they really need to be at least 200. None are 200. They are all 72-96DPI. But wait, there's MORE.

Almost half of the images are .wdp files. "Windows Media Player." Why, you ask? Because they are SCREENSHOTS. Screenshots of Google Search results. Of images that, of course, are not public domain. One is an image that I find was taken from National Review, by a Reuters stringer. Another is taken right out of an existing book, opened up on Google books!

And yet, there's more. All the screenshots, of course, took the entire monitor, and not merely the image being, er, 'borrowed;' so, we'd have to manually trim and crop and fix, every single bloody one of these. And, of course, let's not forget resolution.

I wrote to the client, pretty damn speechless. I pointed out that really, it's MY business that's on the hook here. If they get sued, so too will I, and even a WHIFF of impropriety, around the protection of IP, and I'd be cooked. Toast. Over, done, yesterday's leftovers.

We'll see what happens. I hate to be required to give the dough back, but I don't see how on earth they can solve this. Clearance on 200 images would take MONTHS, even if they were willing to pay the likes of Reuters for images.

I don't know what pisses me off the most--that they didn't know, or they did know, and deliberately tried to get around it (who takes screenshots or images that they find on Google? If you're going to cavalierly lift images, why not just download the damn things?)? That they didn't bother making sure that they were 300DPI, which I'd told them that they'd need? That they didn't crop the bogus screenshots?

It's a ponderment. Days like today just really suck.


aka,
Hitch

[CRussel]

I'm not surprised about the DPI and full screen issues -- you'd be astonished how few people know about the good, inexpensive, and highly flexible screen shot software that's out there. I have used HyperSnap for nearly 30 years. It's regularly and reliably updated, it's inexpensive ($39.95, unlimited installs for a single user), and the support is absolutely amazing.

That being said -- obtaining use rights for screen shots is a royal NIGHTMARE for one. For >200? No way. (I should add that I've routinely used HyperSnap to include automatically cropped screen shots in excess of 2,000 for a single book. But all were the actual program I was writing about. Which comes under fair use, especially if you're writing about a Microsoft product for Microsoft Press. )