Pack a gangsters!

I used my credit card and bought, say, $100 dollars of stuff. I then owed the cc company $100. This is pretty easy.

I sent them a cheque towards the end of the owe time and before they sent me one of those 'we will come and take your firstborn and your camper van if you don't pay us RIGHT NOW!!' (BTW here is a survey asking how many children you have/are planning on having, ta) type letters. Which they usually send a 1 day after the 'ha-ha you didn't pay us on time now you owe us $35 as well' letters.

So I paid up.

Next month my cc bill is $1.27.

Why? I say to myself, do I owe $1.27. I am not writing a cheque for 1.27 that's stupid.

I ignore bill (which I freely accept is also stupid)

Next month I get bill for $36.27 which was inevitable. I sigh and send cheque for $36.27.

Next month I get bill for $1.00

I am exasperated and ignore bill for a good while and eventually send the cc company cheque for $36 because I figure they are charging me interest or something and I am in a loop. Also I have probably left it too late again and they charged me.

As it turns out they didn't. So there I am with a nice little buffer so that this interest or whatever comes off the balance when I pay the amount that is ACTUALLY charged me each time.

This seems to flummox the cc for a while and all is quiet.

Last week I got a bill saying that for some reason the cc couldn't work out I had a credit on my cc account and they were  refunding it.

I rang them and said 'oi I didn't ask you to do that feck off!'

Oh no they said we didn't do nuffin you still have a $34 credit and you don't owe anything. You adorably useless to us person you...

'Right' says I (slightly mollified) 'OK while I am on the phone how-comes you keep holding me up for fiddling small change? Is it a scam so I will end up paying late fees?'

'Oh NO' they say like a maiden Victorian aunt turning down a proposition, 'we would never do something like that! How improper! '

We are charging you for paying by cheque.

And where does it say that on the bill?

Oh it doesn't, we assumed you knew. Look the consumer protection agency is preventing us from raising your interest rate to whatever we feel like if you miss one payment, we are only allowed these days to take one of your children in payment on a missed deadline. AND we have to tell you we are going to do that - in less than a page of small print - that is legible - and doesn't need to be translated from Sanskrit. You have to allow us a little fun!

*sigh* sure, OK whatever. And you haven't refunded my buffer money?

Nope.

OK can we help any other way.

No thank you.

Have a nice day!

Hmpf, you too, I guess.....

Two days later I get the refund cheque in the post.


.

Weather

Me: looks like it is going to rain.

Weather: I am going to rain, any minute, just wait.

Me: Yeah that's how I see it too.

Weather: ok we are agreed.

Me: Looks up weather forecast for Burlington.

WFFB : Hasn't rained, isn't raining, isn't going to rain. Nope!

Me: You lied to me, weather!

Weather: Um, I am now raining, 3.45 minutes after the WFFB said that wouldn't happen.

Me: Gets wet.



"As I look out over this magnificent vista...'*



*Moderately obscure West Wing reference regarding the unreliability of weather forecasters....

cat shaming

Don't look like that. You know what you did!

I mean here you are being all cute and innocent and well behaved (not actually sure why this picture is in this set ...)

And this is you being completely unentertained by being in a leash.

No, you are not barred from going outside because of these holes in my hand (because the bill for the antibiotics and the X-ray and the bloodwork wasn't that high, and I have now had the chance to see all the inner operations of the hospital in detail and that was quite interesting ...).

Best quote: "Your cat did that? Is your cat an alligator?"

You are barred from going out because you tried to kill and eat a (male) cat twice your size and nearly strangled yourself while bouncing yourself off  two walls and a fence trying to get out of the leash to do it...

*sigh*

I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate the question I have been working on all day. Not even.  I am very  unimpressed by it, and it isn't finished, and I don't know how to do it properly. And it is SOOOOO boring....

I have written three questions this week and they are all bad and incomplete and stuff. And they are all boring... the questions are boring, the answers are boring, why am I doing this?

I am very tired ... and pissed off ... and am about one bad day off quitting the entire thing.

Sigh

Or maybe I could just go to bed and sleep and maybe I can get it all done tomorrow ... it basically has to be done tomorrow, so...

'Nother sigh.

The joys of research

I'm trying to solve a very basic problem. Which at the moment seems to be unsolvable. I am trying to complete a paper (experimental work that someone else did). The situation is as follows:

Yogurt has 2 starter cultures, which have symbiotic effects.
Generally inoculated milk is incubated for around 6 hours to produce yogurt.
This bit of the paper I am working on is comparing the effect that adding various probiotics has on the survival of the starter cultures (which is back-to-front on what is usually investigated, so is actually quite interesting). It is showing major interference in different ways depending on the probiotic.
If I could compare it to a yogurt with no probiotic that would be good, but that doesn't seem to have been done (sigh).

So in essence I am looking for a simple 24 hour timeline graph of bacterial counts of a product that has been around for people to do experiments on for, like, 6000 years.

"Regard," he said again, "this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple woolly hat. I put the salt cellar in the hat, thus, and I pass the hat to you. ...Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; Douglas Adams

And while I realise the dark ages weren't a good time for scientific research, and bacteria were only discovered in 1683, that was quite a while ago. You would think that one of the scientists in any of 200 odd countries would have done this experiment at some point, but no.

Or if they have I can't get into the relevant paper (Darn you to heck#, Journal of Food Science! *shakes fist*).
Or they only tested for 6 hours.
Or they tested S. thermophilus OR L. bulgaricus subsp. delbrueckii but not a combination of the two.
Or they tested it on day one and day 15.
Or they tested its survival in the gut.
Or with listeria added.
Or they freeze dried the yogurt.
Or tested the plasmid DNA of the ST (that's just showing off if you ask me).
Or tested the changes in sugars / pH / exopolysaccharides / flavor / syneresis / texture ...
Or grew them in soymilk / oatmilk / almondmilk / camelsmilk / dandelion milk / milk of magnesia.**
Or attempted to see what happens when you add green and black tea to the yogurt (?)
Or (which finally caused total exasperation) they tested it every 24 hours for 30 days at 10, 20 and 30 0C. Who stores yogurt at 10 0C? I mean seriously!

And nobody-but-nobody has done a comparable control in all these published papers!

And yes I get that the obvious answer is to do the experimental work myself (at this stage it seems to be the only original research left in the world if the scientific paper results are anything to go by - should be worth a Nobel prize at the very least).

I'm giving up for the evening.

# or similar swearwords.
**guess at what point I started making these up - take note that people in this bizarre state are currently manufacturing human milk cheese.

I defy you to guess what this paragraph is about. I have put a sentence in bold to help you out.

Zinc is essential to proper growth and development, sexual maturation, wound healing, and it may play a role in immune system function and other physiological processes. Zinc assists several hormones involved in reproduction, it is required for DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis, and is a cofactor for many enzymes involved in most major metabolic processes (Flynn, 1992; Picciano, 2000; Guo and Hendricks, 2007). Human zinc deficiency was first reported in the 1960s in the Middle East, resulting in dwarfism, impaired sexual development, and anemia. It is difficult to detect mild deficiencies of zinc, although they have been shown to occur in Western countries, especially in infants and children, and give rise to suboptimal growth, poor appetite, impaired taste acuity, and low hair zinc levels. Mean zinc concentration in mature human milk during the first six months of lactation is about 2 mg/L, although large variations in zinc have been reported at 0.65 - 5.3 mg/L. Dietary zinc intake has no correlation to zinc content of human milk, and zinc supplementation of a zinc adequate diet does not significantly affect human milk zinc concentration. Zinc in human milk is found in three major components: serum albumin (Figure 2.6. National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2010.) and citrate in the whey, and in alkaline phosphatase in the fat globule membrane.

If you haven't been able to post comments in the past week

Try now - it may have been the change I made to the comments system. I just changed it back!

I just read the introduction to this article and, as with many of those you come across on line, the name-calling irritated me too much to read the actual bill he is suggesting...so I scrolled down to the comments. Usually people only read blogs they agree with (like me in this case) or go on to blogs they don't agree with and write illiterate diatribes about the political extremism and antecedents of the author. However in this case never have so many reviewed an article and then slated the author SO deservingly, and with actual points to back up what they are saying...

What a Republican Health-Care Reform Bill Would Look Like

The last comment I have seen is January 31, 2010 at noon.

It looks like there is hope for the internet yet :D

Drat new roommate - just when I thought I was safe!

A protest

It appears that Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, The Spectator, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans], Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, W. H. Auden, Lord Dunsany, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, the OED, The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide and, in fact, the English language since the 14th century, have all used 'their' in the case of the third person singular possessive when the gender of the person is not important.

But those of us who must write technical papers are required to use 'his or her' or 'his/her' because SOMEBODY decided that 'their' was not correct in Latin; as one website put it:
'...the Latin-based rules of grammatical agreement might have been seen as forbidding the English singular "their" construction -- if they were interpreted in a certain linguistically naïve way'.
and also:
'But singular "their" (etc.) is not an innovation, but old established good usage. So here anti-sexism and traditional English usage go hand-in-hand -- and those who object to singular "their" can find no support from history, linguistics, or the aim of inclusive language.'
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html#X1x

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/their

Mind you this is only one website so I suppose you couldn't call it unanimous (*looks up spelling of 'unanimous', goes 'heh', leaves it alone*). Ok then, his/her it is, or, as I saw in one place, 'hs' 'cause that makes sense...

Edit: Apparently you could also have 'ip' or 'wun' - though I can't find either one on line. There are more here: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C005/004.html#EPICENEPRON1