a thought on phone ettiquette

I need to figure out a polite way to say "hey, I'm on a pay-as-you-go plan with this cel phone, I really don't like to use it for more than brief 'where are you?' conversation - can you call me back on the land line?". And finally make myself memorize the land line number so I can rattle it off.

If the American celphone companies worked like the rest of the world, where only the person who places the call has to use up their minutes, it wouldn't be an issue for me. Well, aside from the fact that switching to a land line means there's only one source of Really Bad Connections. Maybe I should just accept that most people will default to calling your cel number if you give them a choice nowadays, and raise my rates so I can afford a monthly plan that hybridizes to VOIP via wi-fi whenever possible.

Or maybe I should just quit giving out a phone number. I kinda like that. I don't really like the phone in general, except with people I already know.

(Oh, and thanks for confirming my suspicion about the geographic distribution of "cel(l)" vs. "mobile" the other day.)

a backdrop

If your reaction to my 3 of Swords image was 'hey, I'd love to have that as my computer's backdrop, but the vertical format sucks for that', then you may be in luck: I just added a bunch of stuff to one side and tossed it up on Deviantart. (NSFW: nudity, gleeful self-mutilation)

Obviously this is one I'll want to remember to change before going to meetings. I should see if I can do some clever scripts to swap my desktop image prefs around when my machine can't see the home network.

@!#$%

Arrrgh. I think I am about five frustrations away from cracking open the Flash plugin docs and writing replacements for the old separate 'frame' and 'instance' palettes because the goddamned fucking stupid 'context-sensitive' inspector panel has made it pretty much impossible to do something.

(Flash has some major issues now and then with selecting symbols with masks in them. The stupid 'context-sensitive' inspector panel made me have to go through some gyrations to just find out the name of the damn symbol involved. Goddamn it, guys, the whole reason you folded half the palettes in Flash 5 into that annoying, work-slowing, space-eating piece of shit was because of the Adobe suit - AND NOW THEY OWN YOU. SO YOU CAN FIX IT, OKAY?)

(ps: if you have a symbol whose entire content is on masked layers, DO NOT try to optimize for faster rendering when all the symbol's imagery is displayed by having an empty mask there. Sure, it all shows up, but the editor absolutely refuses to let you click on it.)