I Feel Violated.

Someone is using my schnuth.com e-mail address — which currently forwards to my gmail account — as a return address for spam. I’ve gotten at least four autoreplies today — no, make that five, as another one just came in — from various recipients, including Yahoo Groups and other mailing lists.

This pisses me off on so many levels. Now I have to wonder if my schnuth.com address will be spamblocked on some random server when I try to send an e-mail sometime in the future. I’ve also run Spybot and Norton Antivirus on my computer to make sure nothing’s hijacked my Outlook Express that I never use. I figure that someone probably just forged their headers in reverse, using their spam recipient list as a perfect source for reply-to addresses.

Bastards.

What pisses me off the most is that the genie’s out of the bottle now. I can’t go and tell all these people and mailing lists, “Sorry, but some spammer is using my e-mail address to spam you. It’s not really me!” Whatever. If some unfortunate result comes of this… *shrug* There’s nothing really to be done about it.

At least I don’t use that address very much anymore.

Piss-tastic Mood

I didn’t wake up in a pissy mood. Granted, seeing the scale jump three pounds in one day — in the wrong direction — made me understandably disappointed, but I wasn’t in a pissy mood yet. My pissy mood ended up being the culmination of a bunch of small things that wouldn’t have been a big deal by themselves, but all together made me smolder.

I was answering phones today (my duty once or twice a week), and I got a teller who said, “Can I put the client on and have him explain his question to you?” Which, when translated, means, “I don’t understand what the client is talking about, and I know you are an internal call center only, and you don’t talk to clients, but it’s going to be so much harder if I have to relay what the client says to me verbatim because I don’t understand.” The client in question happened to be a CPA — and I do give him credit for not rubbing that in my face — but when I took his number and told him I’d research his question and call him back later, it made me that much more diligent in getting my interest calculations correct to the penny and to the day. Which took several hours. When I called him back, he had a client in his office, so I left him a voicemail. He didn’t get back to me before I left at 5pm.

I also got a few calls about things that people thought weren’t done right, and I had to research; or things that really weren’t done right, and I had to correct.

The football kids were standing in the street again on my way home. I seriously hate that smug “you can’t hit me” look they give me. You’ve got a helmet on, kid… you wouldn’t concuss too bad. Don’t fucking tempt me.

I got home and checked my email to find that the LSM forums have started getting spammed, despite the manual registration process and the required e-mail reply to confirm registration. And I found out that the report I had so carefully crafted in such a brief time to the exclusion of other priorities at the moment has either officially or unofficially been tabled for the time being. Which I can understand, being that there are other, more pressing matters for the board to take care of right now, but I guess I assumed that everything on the agenda would be discussed. My bad.

Aaron said I should exercise tonight, that it’ll make me feel better, and I know he’s right. I’m also tempted to just sit down in front of a game of Civ IV for the evening, though, and take it out on the Spanish or something.

I’m dangerous in this mood. I never get mad, so when I do, I tend to keep it going as long as I can, for no good reason. It’s a novel feeling, if not a particularly useful or productive one.

Time to go turn on the news and go eat some food.

The Perils of Suburban Life

There’s some sort of little-league football team that’s been practicing in the vacant grassy lot across the street from our house. Mind you, we live on a dead end, so when all the parents come to watch little Tyrone and Jamal play football, they park their cars / trucks / minivans / SUVs such that our comings and goings are challenging at best. They don’t seem to comprehend that it’s a big, open field, with plenty of room for you to park your vehicle. No, they have to park either on or in the street, often simply stopping to idle in the exact middle of the street, forcing me to come to a complete stop and glare at them until they get the idea and move to the side so I can get around their giant SUV and actually park in my own goddamn driveway.

We were upset on Tuesday morning, when the garbage men actually took the giant branch that had been sitting on our curb for two weeks; that branch had kept the annoying minivan fucker from parking in front of our house. Somehow, though, the inconvenience must have trained Minivan Fucker not to park in front of our house anymore, as she’s continued parking in front of our neighbor’s house.

We’ve had quite enough of the peewee football practice, thankyouverymuch. We’re ready for it to be over, or for it to move elsewhere.

This evening, they seem to be having some sort of cookout. There’s a charcoal grill puffing smoke and tables laden with buns and paper plates. The boys are playing football without their pads and uniforms, and someone is booming rap music out of their truck.

The good news is that this could conceivably be the end of peewee football season. The bad news is that I have to put up with rap music and hollering kids (and parents) for a few hours.

I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

I Give Up

I designed some stickers for Aaron’s podcast. They were adapted from the t-shirt design, which I also designed (with some editorial help from Garza).

The stickers were to be 4.25″ x 2.75″ big. The printer’s online instructions said to submit files at 300dpi. Since I’d resized the design from a larger t-shirt design, I opted to ignore their suggestion and submit the design at 1200dpi instead. This saved me from having to rework the entire design and optimize it for a smaller print size.

The stickers came in this week. All the fine detail is lost. The fantastic black background blends into the mascot’s hair and skirt, because my hairline divider stroke failed to print properly. The katakana surrounding the mascot is illegible. All because I can’t follow directions.

I spent two hours tonight reworking the design from scratch, which was harder than I’d expected. I created a layer of halftone dots (a la newspaper photographs) for shading, then went through the painstaking detail work of cleaning up said halftone dots around the edges of the drawing with the eraser tool. Only when I went to throw in the fantastic black background did I realize that I should have been painting in white instead of erasing. The mascot’s cute mug became akin to some sort of monster movie villain, being that half of it was suddenly filled in with black.

I wanted to have this done tonight. I wanted to tell Aaron I’m sorry, and that the next batch of stickers are on me, and here’s the new design. Instead, I’m going to bed without making my lunch. Again.

Excuse me while I go have a nice cry, then beat myself about the head until I fall asleep.