Groovymarlin.com

So I’m using this neat little web-based tool called “Joe’s Goals” to motivate myself to do some things and keep some resolutions. Here is my “badge” of results for this week so far. It’s really kind of cool. I have four goals set up. They are:

- Exercise
- Update blog
- Bring lunch
- Drink water

Is it working? I don’t know…I must admit, it does remind me to do things that I planned to. You can set the thing to email you if you’ve gone a certain number of days without updating your progress, which is kind of a nice little nag. I’m not terribly strict with myself, so it’s pretty easy to meet most of these goals, most of the time. For example, when I stop at Target in the morning and buy a sandwich to take to work and eat for lunch, I count that as “bring lunch,” because it’s much cheaper and better than the crap that I otherwise end up buying at the food place in the building. And as far as “drink water” – that’s totally open to interpretation, with no specific goal, just more of a reminder to myself to drink some fluids (I’m really bad at this for some reason).

Speaking of fluids, here’s a random observation: this afternoon I noticed that my car smells like coffee. I think it’s because I’ve spilled my Starbucks in there so many times. Pathetic.

Yeah, you heard me. Fuck Flickr. They just pissed me off in a big way.

A while back, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. They started asking people to sign in to Flickr using their Yahoo IDs, but they gave people who had already been members (“Old Skoolers”) the option to keep using their existing Flickr logins. I chose this option because I really HATE Yahoo, their spam, their annoying ads, and the abusive way that they treat your personal information.

Fast forward to tonight. Flickr sent out an email notifying all of us Old Skoolers that as of March 15, we’d HAVE to sign in with Yahoo IDs, or we wouldn’t be able to sign in at all. Annoying, right? Yeah…but here’s the thing. They did this even to Pro users, the people who PAY for the Flickr service (like me). SINCE WHEN is it OK to tell your paying customers that they HAVE to have a Yahoo ID to sign in to your service? Nobody likes to sign up for Yahoo…they take any personal information you provide and whore it out in the most appalling way (not to mention their happy censorship in China and other abuses). I was really angry, but I bit the bullet. I have hundreds of pictures on Flickr now, most of them of my daughter, and I link to those photos from everywhere. I didn’t want to screw that up, so I merged with one of my existing (and almost never used) Yahoo IDs.

Mistake. Now I can’t log in to Flickr (except with my Old Skool account, which technically isn’t supposed to work). Yahoo thinks I don’t have cookies enabled (even though I do), and won’t let me log in at all. Thank God I can still log in with my Flickr ID (for now). I submitted a help request by email, as prompted, and got an email back saying:

Just a quick email from Team Flickr to let you know that we’ve successfully received your recent Help by Email query and we hope to respond within 10 days.

TEN DAYS! Nice.

Oh, and here’s anothing thing I find really annoying…when you have problems with cookies and logging in, their help advises you thusly:

Set your cookies to enable ALL cookies

Right. Great idea. I’ll just enable every tracking site on the internet to store a cookie on my computer, just so I can log in to Flickr with a service (Yahoo) I don’t like and didn’t want to use and did not pay to join in the first place. Nice! I think it’s really insulting that their instructions don’t tell the user to “make sure that cookies are enabled for the following URLs/domains:” and then present a list.

So, in summary FUCK Yahoo and FUCK Flickr. I’m giving them until the end of this week to sort this mess out. If it’s not resolved by then, I’m canceling my account and looking into Picasa or Zooomr or something else.

What a disappointment. It sucks when a company treats their customers with disregard, but it sucks twice as much when it’s a company you thought was really different and cool.

I’ve been trying to get Veronica to start drinking juice from a “sippy cup,” but we’re not making much progress. She will grab the cup with two hands, play with it, and even stick the spout (and other parts of the cup) in her mouth. She just won’t suck on the spout and actually drink. How do you get a baby to start drinking from a sippy cup, or any cup for that matter? I guess I need to Google it or something. She does really well eating her baby food now, and I’ve even found that she will take her heart medicine really quickly if I serve it on a spoon (vs. the syringe we’ve been using). Most days she has solid food (either rice cereal, vegetables or fruit) three times a day, with formula in between. Drinking from a cup, rather than a bottle, is the next step…but I can’t seem to get her to do it. I suppose maybe she’s just not ready? Any other moms out there have a suggestion?

Last night as I was playing The Burning Crusade, I had FX on in the background, and I caught a little bit of their new series “Dirt” out of the corner of my eye. This is the show that’s about a tabloid magazine, starring Courtney Cox, and supposedly produced by her and her husband David Arquette. I’m sorry I can’t give you complete details, because I can’t access FX Networks’ ridiculous website – seems my version of Flash Player on this computer is too old. Which brings me to the two things I want to rant about: the show itself, and the asinine website.

The show: from what I saw, it’s just weird. I saw a photographer hallucinate that he was living with, and having graphic sex with, a dead woman; then later he helped her labor and deliver…kittens? Further, one of his assignments this week was to take a picture of a dead rapper’s disembodied head, now hidden in a…fake cask of wine? Huh? And finally, Courtney’s character gave a toast at her mom’s wedding or something that mentioned the anniversary of her father hanging himself many years prior. Overall, the show was awash in surreality and weirdness — not necessarily a bad thing, but it left me feeling pretty confused. The reviews haven’t been terribly kind. Personally, I can’t decide if I’m kind of annoyed and disgusted by the whole thing, or intrigued enough to want to give it a chance. Dirt is currently taking the place of another weird-yet-good FX show, Nip/Tuck, which took me a LONG time (like three seasons) to warm up to, and I’m honestly still not sure that I love.

I think Slate’s review perfectly sums up how I feel about Dirt so far:

The show, a fantasy about tabloid magazines, might have been a madcap riff on scandal and compromise, frothy with soap and frothing with bile, if developed by producers with the right sense of humor or, in fact, any discernible sense of humor at all. But Dirt is far too busy cultivating its dour heavyosity to bother with funny business, and we must push away the thought of pleasure and poke at the dish we’re served, which is cold, bitter, and bloating, with a gritty aftertaste. Dirt is quick-moving but painfully solemn, somehow constituting a plodding romp. At their very best, the first three episodes play like bad Kubrick.

Yep, that’s spot-on. And here’s my second rant…

The website: is a prime candidate for “Web Pages That Suck,” because it depends COMPLETELY on the user having a recent version of the Flash Player installed. There is no html-only alternative (that I could find, anyway), no plug-in check that redirects you to a plainer text version of the site. It’s all Flash or nothing, baby, and that’s just plain stupid. I’d like to find out more about Dirt – but I can’t. Heck, I’d like to find out more about the new series apparently featuring Eddie Izzard that I saw promoted several times during Dirt – but I can’t.

This basically confirms my suspicion that other than rerunning Buffy episodes every day, FX kind of sucks (and even those got moved from the nice afternoon timeslot to the 7am ghetto).

This is kind of an old picture (taken about two months ago), but she’s still this cute. My birthday is on Friday, and that same day our little girl will be seven months old. Wow. She’s rolling over from front to back and back to front, babbling and cooing like crazy, and she can sit by herself for longer and longer periods of time. I feel like she’s going to start crawling any day now!

One of her teachers at daycare taught her to cluck her tongue, and now she does that all the time. She gets a real kick if she clucks, then we cluck back at her, and she does the same. It’s like a whole clucking conversation, and it makes her laugh. Of course as soon as she’s laughing I have to laugh, because hearing her giggle is amazingly hilarious and just about the most rewarding thing I’ve done since I had her! She’s also back to blowing raspberries a lot, and making every other weird little noise she can come up with.

Parenthood is a trip man, a TRIP.