sunday

Attention, techno-weenies! Stop littering the info highway. Please don’t call a grammatical time-out when you log on. English is English, whether it comes over the phone, via the Postal Service (excuse me, “snail mail”), or on the Internet.

Let’s clean up cyberspace, troops. You wouldn’t use pls for please, yr for your, or thanx for thanks in a courteous letter. So why do it on the Net? You don’t shout or whisper on the telephone. So why use ALL CAPITAL or all lowercase letters in your e-mail? (However, these are exceptions in instant messaging.) Making yourself hard to read is poor “netiquette.”

And another thing. IMHO (in my humble opinion), those abbreviations like CUL (see you later, for the lucky uninitiated) and BTW (by the way) are seriously overused. You’re too busy for complete sentences? So what are you doing with the time you’re saving by using cute shortcuts? Volunteering at your local soup kitchen? Sure. I’m ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing).

You digerati can certainly speak e-lingo among yourselves, but try real English if you want the cyber-impaired to get it. Next time you log on, remember there’s a person at the other end of your message, not a motherboard. Use appropriate grammar and punctuation. Be clear and to the point…And consider phoning once in a while.

DEMOCRATIC: You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful.

REPUBLICAN: You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So?

SOCIALIST: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST: You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for hours to get it. It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pour the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows (located in Mexico). You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating that you have downsized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. You go to lunch and drink wine. Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have some vodka. You count them and learn you have five cows. You have some more vodka. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. The Mafia shows up and takes however many cows you actually have.

TALIBAN: You have all the cows in Afghanistan. You don’t milk them because you cannot touch any female creature that you are not married to. You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons instead.

AL-QA’IDA: You have two cows. They go into hiding. They send tapes of their mooing.

CIA: You have two cows. One is disguised as a pig. You milk them at night, after driving your tractor around the field for two hours, appearing to be doing ordinary farm work.

I’ve only been in D.C. for about a year, but I’ve already figured out that by this time next year, I’ll be in California with my own condo (maybe), a puppy, and a new job. Yeah, I came to this realization about two weeks ago when I was looking for a new place to live on craigslist. At first I looked at places in downtown DC, but came to the quick realization that all the buildings are really old and in terrible condition; they make you overpay on rent for the living conditions being offered. On a whim, I checked out what kind of places I could get in San Francisco. I figure since I’m already paying a gazillion dollars on my rent in Arlington, it really can’t be that much worse in San Francisco. And I was wrong. It was BETTER. I could live in a decent area–even near Union Square!–for less than what I’m paying and get a bigger place. That’s what I’m mainly aiming for right now, a bigger place at a cheaper price. AND I wouldn’t have to compromise on hardwood floors or stainless steel appliances! But this is all contingent upon my finding a job in California before moving (obviously).

A couple of Sunday’s ago, I had brunch with Kiefer and he told me that you should always be on the lookout for your next job. Well, just so happens that I got a job proposition from another government contracting company at the NRO. They’re called Potomac Engineering Solutions. They’re a really small company with killer benefits and pay, but the pay would have to be CONSIDERABLY better than Lockheed Martin in order to get me to move. While they seem like a totally awesome company, they are small, which means I wouldn’t be able to move to Cali as soon as I like (if at all). But I submitted my resume just to see what happens.

And last but not least, I haven’t bought anything in the past two weeks! I’m a recovering shopaholic and almost three weeks dry. I’ve had so much motivation to not spend ever since my exbf moved out and stopped paying me rent and utils :(. It sucks. Because I still have to call my mom to ask her make rent for me, haha.

Hanging in there…

Engadget says it all.