Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

I'm a technical writer, and I've inherited a set of documents I have to maintain. Someone else created them, someone else named them. One of the file names is anal_timing. It's about timing analyst, so there's plausible deniability on the name, but every time I have to refer to them to someone else, I'm embarrassed. However, as long-time readers of my LJ know, my humor is kind of out of wack -- if someone brought me a file named anal_timing, I'd have a hard time not snickering out loud. My brain would SO go to the adult meaning first. But would other people?

So help me, friends list! What do you think about having a file at work named anal_timing? While the name could be seen as fitting, there are many other, not-potentially-offensive names that would fit too.

[Poll #2035897]

In the last two months, I've been getting a foreign transaction fee on my credit card. Only 40 cents, but still. The only thing that get charged on that card are Netflix and one other monthly fee. I contacted the credit card company (Chase), and they told me:

"The merchant location for Netflix.com is registered at Luxembourg."

Huh? Netflix's HQ is in California.

Is anyone else seeing a fee like that? I've had a membership with Netflix for a long time now, and the fee only started showing up last month...

Google isn't telling me much. Anyone have any idea about this? I was worried this was a test of my card (when people steal numbers, they do small charges first to see if someone notices), but it's listed as "foreign transaction fee".

This morning someone linked me to an image, and I noticed that it had a really odd background (the area of the window outside of the image itself, but within Firefox's view area).

Today I took a screenshot for someone else, uploaded it, and noticed the "blank"/black part outside the screenshot looked very odd in the same way. See: Strange background.

The image in the middle looks just as it should, but the screen to either side of it should be plain black.

Happens in IE and Firefox both, happens on both monitors (hooked up to the same computer).

Darned laptop is only two years old. Looking on the Amazon page I bought it from, the only warranty I see mentioned is "This laptop is backed by a 1-year limited hardware warranty.", so that does me no good.

It has been running hot lately, even though I blew the dust out of it last night or the night before. I don't know which number "counts", but these are the readings I get from my monitor at this moment:

GPU: 76C
HD0: 50C
Core0: 95C
Core1: 86C
(Edit: After rebooting, with no MMO running, the temps are 45C, 53C, 60C, 30C respectively.)

I have no idea how there could there be a 45 degree difference in temperature within a laptop...

How much trouble am I in? I know nothing about hardware. :/

Edit 2: Rebooting seems to have fixed the issue. Would this kind of thing come and go?

This might be the most specific tip I've ever posted. My apartment came with vertical blinds. I love them! Unlike the horizontal one, they don't collect tons of dust. Then they started falling out. How does the little tab break? I have no idea. Is it my fault? It might be? (Sometimes I slide them open without turning them open first.) Since I live in an apartment I could go and ask them to fix it, but I didn't know if they would think it was me. (Let me tell you about the time a squirrel ran across my porch and got caught on my sliding glass door screen, right at the height a cat would scratch... Of course they'll think my cat damaged it even though it was the squirrel!) I tried fixing the blind slat with tape, but that didn't last even a day.

I decided to google before going to management. Turns out there's an easy and cheap-ish fix. Vane Savers! (The official name of the slats is apparently "vane".) This is the cheapest one on Amazon, so I ordered it. Under $10 to fix ten of them? I can handle that.

In other news, my focus for TV shows is so scattered. A friend introduced me to Lost Girl and I love it... but I watched three eps and never returned. I downloaded Teen Wolf to catch up with this season, but watched two eps and now I can't force myself to watch more. I love West Wing, but I've not watched it in ages. So many series on Netflix that I'm in the middle of, but I just can't concentrate on them.

Speaking of that, my google is failing me, so I can't confirm this or not. I wonder if people are more emotional after a long illness/injury recovery period? I swear, I cry endlessly now, at the silliest, littlest things. It's driving me crazy! My doctor said prolonged infections have a lot of effects on your body (for example, your red blood cells explode (I'm badly anemic now) -- "explode" is my doctor's word) Maybe it has an effect on your emotions, too...

On the To Do list for this week: Tomorrow night I'm going to the second information class for my surgery. Two and a half hours (ugh), same exact class I took the first time (sigh). We're required to attend it twice, even though it's the same class. There's not even a break! Two and a half hours sitting and listening to someone talk.

Also must do taxes. I know we still have time yet, but it feels like I'm running late. I'm still trying to catch up with paperwork/bills from my time in the hospital/recovering. Turns out I missed a credit card payment! EEEK! My first one ever, in the nearly ten years I had the card. They waved the fee for me (even without me asking, which was very nice), I just hope it doesn't go on my credit report.

I really want to get this whole buying a new car thing over with. It's been dragging on and on, and it's literally keeping me up at nights. I want to make an offer today, but I'm running into the same problem has been stopping me all along.

Kelly Blue Book (and other pricing sites for new cars) says this for the car I want:

MSRP $24,960
Fair Purchase Price $23,490
Dealer Invoice $23,508

The dealer is quoting me: $22,788

The price is lower than the dealer invoice. Which seems odd, since then they're not making money?

So my question is, since his quote is lower than the invoice price and the suggested fair offer price:
[Poll #1906584]

I could pay his offered price on the condition that they throw in floormats for free. ($100 and change value.)

I have two pounds of bacon in my fridge. Both of them expired almost a month ago.

I love bacon, but the problem is I can eat it all in one sitting, so I try to resist it. Sometimes I give in and buy some (especially when it's on sale), and toss it in my fridge. I did really well resisting it this time! ...too well.

To be honest, I never realized bacon had an expiration date. Silly, I know, since it's meat, but I figured all the chemicals and preservatives probably kept it good forever. (I've likely eaten expired bacon before without realizing it.)

But now I know. My two wonderful pounds of bacon (my favorite brand of it, too!) are expired. Google didn't give me a good answer on if I should risk it or not. So I come to you, wonderful LJ friends!

The bacon has been in the fridge all this time. Both packages are unopened. They expired on 11/27, so it's currently three weeks over the date, but I likely wouldn't cook them until this weekend (though could make them tonight if pressed). I know expiration dates aren't set in stone, but this is meat... So, what would you do?

[Poll #1885935]

Since I'm doing a good job on reducing the size of my To Read pile, I was poking around on Amazon for some new books. The site recommended Wool, by Hugh Howey for me.

On the surface, this looked like a good match. Post-apocalyptic, a whole lot (2,000+) five star reviews.

But then I noticed it. The book is self published. With one single exception, I have not read a self-published book that was worth paying any amount of money for. The one exception was someone on my friends list (hi loupnoir), and I do have another in my To Read pile written by another person on my friends list (though I can't recall which LJ name goes with pen name -- hi AJ Rose!). But non-LJ friends self published stuff? Nothing but god-awful unreadable piles of crap.

And I mentioned all the good reviews of Wool? Contain lines like "One small note to other authors that might be reading this review, part of what makes Wool a joy to read is the lack of grammatical and spelling errors of so many of the self published books.". The fact that a self published book is doing the bare minimum that should be required of a book...

Sigh. It's only $5 and change, but I really don't want to get burned again. I'm sure there are good writers out there who are self publishing, but when so many of them are just so awful they should have their keyboards taken away...

Has anyone happened to have read Wool?

Edit: I wish Amazon would mark books as self published. Once I find a book I'm interested in, if I don't recognize the publisher's name, I always google to see if it's traditional or not.