So Kimli tagged me with that 25 things meme. But since this is a 'blog and you already know at least 25 things, OR MORE, about me, I'm gonna do another meme that I wish I'd been tagged for instead. This one is the "list all the jobs you've had, in order." Also, I tag KIMLI :)

I got my first job at age 13... as a telemarketer. It got better...

• Telemarketer - I convinced old folks to let vacuum salespeople into their homes
• McDonald's employee - not as bad as it sounds
• Multi-level marketer - worse
• Coffee cart vendor
• Carriage attendant / ticket seller - horses no longer scare me
• Busker
• Electronics sales clerk
• Hotel front desk clerk at a scuzzy hotel - but PEOPLE DO
• Receptionist for a (successful!) start-up software company (weekdays) / Hotel front desk clerk at a scuzzier hotel, with a strip club attached (weekends)
• Gas station attendant
• LGBA events coordinator
• Legal secretary
• Kelly Girl
• Government admin assistant - bored with filing, formatting, and proofreading legislation, ended up doing HTML
• Student newspaper writer
• More temp work
• Website designer
• Elecromechanical Systems Technologist
• Freelance graphic designer
• Political candidate
• Electronic Media Coordinator
• SUPREME DICTATOR OF THE WORLD!!!

It's almost bed time. At 9:30pm. Why? Because, starting tomorrow, I get up at 5:30AM. FIVE THIRTY. I didn't even know that they make mornings that start that early. Well, it turns out that they do, as I will find out tomorrow. Why? Because my boot camp starts at 6:15. SIX FIFTEEN. Good lord that's early.

In case you didn't know, I am not a morning person. I saunter into work around 9:30AM and quite happily stay until 7:00PM. It's just how I'm wired. I can get up early, I know I can, because I think I did it once to catch a plane or something. I just really don't want to.

But I can't fit fitness into my day any other way - by the time 7:00PM rolls around, the last thing I want to do on my way home from work, usually starving, is stop at the gym. And by 10:00pm it's far too late, and also I have class work to do.

Oh, yeah, my New Year's Resolution? To NEVER AGAIN try to take two fourth-year classes while working full time. It was the only way I could finish my degree this year, but lord almighty. In the end, I did alright in both, but I could have done better* - and more importantly, gotten a lot more out of them - if I had tackled them one at a time. Especially since I was doing a million other things, too. I hope never to have to do something like that again. Shudder.

Anyway, wish me luck in my new fitness endevour. I will likely hate it, and whine a lot, but I think that getting into shape will go a long way towards both helping me be NOT DEPRESSED and also help me to deal with stress and become more proactive in my work and my life. Hooray! I hope.

* Not to be bragging about my grades, because that is just so crass. I was in a room with a guy once who "casually" remarked to a bunch of people who didn't ask "Of course, I'm at the top of my class," and I rolled my eyes heavenward and was proud of my restraint when I didn't laugh in his face. I didn't punch him, either, although I wanted to, because that's not polite... and also, well, looking like an egotistical jerk was punishment enough.

I'd like to give a shout-out to TekSavvy, my new ISP and telephone provider.

I kept getting these ridiculous bills from Bell, and I'm thinking $50? FIFTY DOLLARS for a stinking POTS LINE? I got mad enough to think about cancelling the phone and just using the cell as our household number. Since I'm a computer nerd and believe that having to talk to people face-to-face simply shows an inability to write a decent email, we don't get a lot of phone calls. Now that I'm not in politics, I don't really need a phone number that I can get crank calls on, either.

So I went looking for a "dry-DSL" provider: DSL without a phone line. Bell grudgingly allows this, and I found some posts on metafilter recommending TekSavvy for the dirty deed. I discovered that not only do they provide dry DSL, they also provide phone service that is WAY WAY CHEAPER than anything Bell gives me. Like, WAY. And their regular (wet?) DSL is awesome: for 2/3rds the cost, I'm getting 200GB throughput instead of 30GB, with the same lightning fast speeds as our crappy Bell wiring allows us now. That's a lot of Terminator episodes. Which, incidentally, the tech I spoke with is a huge fan of.

So my combined phone/DSL bill went from $100 to $65, with a provider that, unlike Bell, is not actively out to get me. I feel bad about deserting KOS.net, our local ISP, but I asked if they could price/GB match and they couldn't even come close. Sorry, KOS.net. All hail TekSavvy!

Ok, so, like, happy new year! It's 2009. Did you know that there are Playboy models out there who were born in 1990? I remember 1990. Sure, I was ten, but still, that's crazy. I think I'm getting old or something. OR SOMETHING.

In other news, I have done nothing this week. Well, almost nothing. Indeed, the following conversation ensued yesterday:

Him: Step away from the computer.
Me: Wha...?
Him: Know what you are?
Me: Wha...?
Him: A workaholic.
Me: I am not!
Him: What are you doing right now?
Me: Um... I'm... surfing pornography!
Him: No you're not. You're programming!
Me: Maybe.
Him: Yes you are.
Me: Well.. yes. But that doesn't make me a workaholic.
Him: YES IT DOES.
Me: Oh, right. Yeah, it does.

Year in review:

• January: Bought a pair of zebra finches.
• January: Enrolled in a full semester of full-time courses.
• February: Got depressed and fat.
• February: Damian got laid off (Note to self: if EI can screw you, they will) and PiC Press, a 15-year-old independent newspaper, shut its doors for good.
• April: Got a car after five years of carless-ness. I tried.
• May: Went to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia.
• June: Discovered Amanda Palmer, Sarah Slean and Hawksley Workman. Had mixed feelings about The Weakerthans' new album.
• June: Saw my first academic paper published in a journal.
• June: Resigned from the NDP as candidate for K&I (I was only nominated for the then-imminent 2007 Spring election, but was expected to put my life on hold for every possible election call after that... No, thanks! Got called nasty names for daring to have a life; quit the executive in October.)
• June: Finished up my job-for-the-past-five-years at the ILC. Was sad.
• July: Started a new job! Was happy.
• August: Discovered that, for various reasons beyond my control, my job was going to be a lot harder than I thought it would be and my deadlines were set as if I'd started in March instead of July.
• August: Grandmother diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
• September: Got more depressed; fatter. Shopped at Addition Elle for the first time. Got more depressed; clothing for fat girls sucks.
• December: Finished my final thesis courses for my degree.
• December: Switched to a new medication that will hopefully actually help and also not make me fat.
• December: Signed up for a fitness bootcamp in January / February. Screw this being fat shit.

I mean, there were other things: the historic election of a black President; watching the fruits of neo-conservatism come home to roost (but couldn't gloat because as always the people who actually got screwed were the poor. As usual)... but other than that, it was a pretty uneventful year.

Anyway, for me, I'd say that overall, despite the prodigious amount of things that happened, it was a bad year. I spent a lot of it being miserable, despite the fact that some pretty cool things were going on. It was probably my least-favourite year to date. I can only hope that 2009 will not suck, because if it does I'm going to be really mad. Anyway, bring it on, I say!

Listening to Quirks and Quarks this morning...

Bob McDonald: ... and we'll find out whether or not cranberry juice cures bladder infections.
Me: It does!
Him: Are you sure that's not a young wives' tale?

I had an epiphany last night. I have been trying to get streaming video working on the new work website. In principle this should be easy - embedding video is simple, right? We do it from YouTube all the time! Yes... but.

Streaming video is a different matter. Streaming video is for things like live webcasts, or long videos, or for when you don't want users to be able to save the source video.

Why was I trying to get streaming video working? Well, because I wanted to show video. And Queen's has a streaming server. And streaming video is cool...

But Drupal doesn't have any streaming video modules that will handle QuickTime (and hell if I'm going to use RealMedia or Windows, but those don't exist either). In fact, most of the video players you can get don't work with streaming video. And embedding streaming video is a huge deal requiring lots of javascript from Apple and other weird things. And oh, my, god. I wasted HOURS.

And then I realized that... wait, why do I need streaming video? I DO NOT NEED STREAMING VIDEO AT ALL. I have a web server. I have Flash players that will embed mp4 files. What else do I need? NOTHING. IT IS EASY.

Sigh. I win "boneheaded geek trying to make something simple very complex" award of the year. Go me!

Argh.

It's 2:00AM and I can't sleep. And I'm woozy. And panicky. And worried. And... um, well, isn't that enough??

Thing is, I've been complaining to my doctor about my total lack of attention span and/or memory. It's a result of my current anti-depressants, for which I am extremely grateful, do not get me wrong. But I've been whining about it for, like, a year, because it's awful, so she finally decided that now was a good time to switch them - what with it being a slow time of year and all. IN THEORY. The reality is that I'm kind of already extremely stressed out, and it actually IS NOT a slow time of year and this? IT WAS A BAD IDEA.

For anybody who is lucky enough to have a brain that functions properly, let me tell you, this stuff that they give you? It is serious stuff. I know people who go on about depression like it's just made up or kind of like being sort of sad (yes, spending my life paying $100 a month for pills does make me sort of sad, thanks). I want to take those people to dinner and crush up 300mg of Wellbutrin into their Coke Zero and see how they like it. I figure that it would be sort of the same as wearing somebody else's glasses, in that you don't exactly get to see what they'd see without their glasses but it's probably a good approximation.

On the bright side, though, the internet is actually kind of fun when you're incredibly sleep-deprived. Now if only it would hold still and stop spinning long enough for me to read all the comments on Pharyngula, everything would be OK.