"i don't overreact. i just react more violently than most people."

hilarious editorial by a co-ed^H^H^H^Hcollege student who found a condom stuck to the wall in the shower and freaked the fuck out. quote:

Screaming, I frantically shut the water off, grabbed my things and evacuated the premises. I then soaked my feet in bleach, amonia and other various household-cleaning products for the next several days.

What kind of world are we living in when a college student can't take a shower without being completely offended by a perpetrator whom she doesn't even know?

yes, that's right, honey. the guy who threw his condom at the wall is a perpetrator. hey... maybe you should soak your head in bleach for a few days, just to be sure.

why i hate Word

it's not just the general shittiness of Word. it's not just the completely broken autonumbering, the bizarrely whacked style system, or the uselessness of the documentation for the features they actually bothered to document.

no, it's because Word -- a Microsoft product -- doesn't accept the standard Microsoft method of entering ASCII or Unicode characters that aren't on the keyboard. oh, no. instead of taking the standard ASCII or Unicode value for a character, it requires you to know the value in the particular character encoding you're using. they explain this in an only moderately obfuscated way, if you happen to enter the exact right search terms in the Help menu -- which i did once, and have never been able to reproduce. however, they do not actually provide the values of the characters in a particular encoding -- either in Word or in Windows, at least that i can find -- in a human-readable format. nor do they tell you where the hell you're supposed to get them.

thus it was that i spent an hour figuring out how to type an em dash on the keyboard. it turns out -- and they don't actually document this -- that they give you the keyboard shortcuts for certain special characters on the "special characters" tab of the "insert symbol" dialog. (whereas they provide the shortcuts for typing the standard western european characters in the help, just to keep you guessing.) this is, of course, not intuitively obvious, because the "insert symbol" tab is the default tab displayed when you open that dialog, and it just displays a table of the actual characters, and unhelpfully does not provide keyboard shortcuts or ASCII/hex codes for any of them. if you happen to click the "insert special character" tab in the vain hope that it will be more helpful, you find a list of keyboard shortcuts, most of which do not actually work. no, really. try them. you'll see.

fortunately, the one for the em dash does, in fact, work. because i am a kind and benevolent goddess, i will now share it with you: CTRL+ALT+Num - (yes, that's the minus key on the numeric keypad.)

i've never been virulently anti-Microsoft, but after the way this week has been going, i'm about ready to kill somebody. i don't really care who. anyone who gets in my way will do, but it would be especially nice if they were a Microsoft employee.

hope springs eternal

i don't suppose anyone could tape tomorrow's episode of "Numb3rs" for me? my VCR is busted and i don't have time to get a new one before tomorrow's episode, which actually looks pretty cool.

of course, i'm really only in it for the cute math guy.