Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I can't quite believe it, but measured by Retweets and Favorites, this is the most popular thing I have ever said on Twitter1.

Appealing to geeks + a solid "your mom" joke = Twitter gold!

1. 1. So far!

You probably haven't noticed, but you are looking at a brand new site. After nearly six years of powering jennatollerson.com with Movable Type, I decided to follow the advice I've been giving out in my professional life for the past year, and rebuild the site using Drupal. This was not a particularly easy decision, as it meant migrating nearly 600 entries, and their comments, and their tags. Not to mention images, audio, and video files.

As you might guess, there is not a super simple way to do this. I got lots of help from this page, but it took a lot of trial and error, after which I went through and audited my content, trying to fix most things that were broken. Many links are still broken. However, it had to be done, because Drupal is a vastly superior CMS, and in the risk of having my salesman persona bleed into this site, I'll tell you why. This is going to be a developer-centric entry, where I talk about lots of geeky things. You might get bored , and for that, I apologize. If you came here looking for an entry all about my dark feelings, you'll have to wait for another day! Read More »

New, souped-up gmail with an inbox at zero (down from at least 200). Today has been a good day.

When you spend your entire work life in your email, this is something worth celebrating.

I didn't get to sleep until six this morning. I had been nothing but exhausted all day yesterday, but when it came time to actually relax, my brain was having none of it. There is way too much crazy bullshit going on in my life lately, and as a result I'm sort of trapped up in my own head all the time.

Ironically enough working — actual problem solving and coding, not this 24/7 hustle I seem to have going lately that consists entirely of solicting — is the one thing that makes me focus on something that is not me. Unfortunately, at the moment, I am not getting enough work, and that is causing a majority of the stress. I'm not sure if that's the correct English professor definition of irony but it's damn close enough for me.

So I finally get sort of unconscious, and I kept dreaming of being trapped in a haunted house with the ghosts of some sick people. I don't mean ill. I mean ill in the head. It was terrifying. I'm pretty sure I woke up about every five minutes, until my empty stomach said “No more!” and forced me awake for good. That was 8:30 this morning.

So here I am, awake and oh-so refreshed on a bright Tuesday. I'm not going to go into specifics but so far today has been nothing but bad news. I'm guessing I have until end of business to turn things around, but lately I don't feel in control. I feel like I'm at the mercy of the universe, and if I believed in God, I would have to assume I'd done something awful and I must be smited. As it is, being a non-believer, I think I'm just running into multiple random acts of badness. Even so, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

I am a music nerd. This statement is probably not a great surprise to many who know me. My taste is vast and idiosyncratic, yet discerning; I have about 7000 songs in my iTunes library, which translates to about 20 days (the majority of which I forked over money to obtain, thankyouverymuch).

All this asshole hipster posturing is to say, I have a number of smart playlists to manage all this music. To make sure everything gets an even chance at rotation, if you will. (If you don't do this, you'll end up playing My Chemical Romance's “Helena” 680 times and never listening to anything else, because it's that good. I speak from personal experience.) A lot of these playlists depend on giving each song a rating (one to fives stars) so that you hear the songs you love more often, and the ones you aren't as crazy about a little less often.

Here's where it gets weird: I have friends that are also musicians. Several of them are represented in my music collection, and I feel a little awkward giving one of my friends a lower rating on a given song. What if they were to come over one day, and start browsing through my iTunes library, only to find that I gave a track they considered their opus two stars? How would that conversation go?

Actually, they are all sensitive creative types so they probably wouldn't confront me about it, they'd just go home and write a song about their feelings.

However, when I thought about it, I decided this whole senario was unlikely from the outset, for three reasons:

1. I don't think I know a single musician whose first impulse upon browsing someone's music collection is to make sure that person owns their record, so we can all listen to it right now!
2. I rarely let people near my computer, especially without my watchful eye.
3. It's my house, I get to pick the goddamn music.

Crisis averted via selfishness and paranoia. That's the Famous Jenna Tollerson™ Way.

Tonight a drunk guy asked me where I work, and I told him I work out of my home. He then asked what I do, and when I told him, he went apeshit.

He gestured wildly, jumping into the air a little. “Oh my god, you're kidding!”

I was overwhelmed by his reaction. “Oh my god. I'm not kidding.” I replied as I rocked back on my heels.

“That is so cool!” A friend of his walked up, and he turned to him in a fit of enthusiasm, pointing to me and exclaiming, “Dude! She's a weapons developer!”

Why, oh why did I feel compelled to correct him?

To Justin Timberlake,
I like your music. I really do! It's is not life-changing or anything, but it makes me shake my booty, and sometimes, a person needs nothing more than to shake her booty. So what possessed you to put not one, but two seven and a half minute songs on your new record? Even worse, what convinced you to order the tracks so these two songs are back-to-back? Pop songs, with few exceptions, and not meant to run longer than 4 minutes, 5 at most. After that, they just wear out their welcome. I beg you, do not make this mistake again. Hours of reckless, fool-hardy dancing are at stake.

To the mostly naked girl sending me friend invites on MySpace,
First of all, I am not a lesbian. While I'm flattered, I'll have to ask you to take your bicurious fantasies elsewhere. In addition, all of your pictures are taken with a grainy webcam in what looks like an office supply closet, next to a copy machine. In your underwear. It seems a bit avant garde, but I don't think that was your desired effect. If you ever want to boost your self-esteem in a way that does not involve a series of "wow, your hawt" comments next to your racy, yet low-quality photos, I would suggest you get away from the file cabinets and fluorescent lights and, you know, go meet some people. Of course, if you've tried this and it didn't work, it may have been because your potential new friends had to listen to you talk.

To Cingular,
Dialing 411 costs $1.79 now? You better watch out; at some point it will be not just cheaper but also easier for me to use my cell phone's internet connection to connect to Google Local and get the number I need for free. Where will you be then?
I guess, serving all the people who still don't have data plans. Sometimes, my geekiness shines through more than I expect.

To Fate/Destiny/The Universe/et al,
Is it some kind of extremely cruel joke that I have been chasing like a madman after work for months, and I suddenly have far more to do than I can handle? Or is this just your way of smacking me upside the head while yelling, “Be careful what you wish for”?

To the young men in my life,
I realize I get a little handsy when I'm drunk. If you have a problem with that, we can not hang out when I'm drunk. That gives us almost no opportunity to hang out though, so choose carefully!

Many people have asked me how the month of sobriety went, or even stranger, “how the not-drinking is going”, present-tense. It made me realize that I never wrapped it up, never gave it a conclusion in the narrative of my life. Someday, I may have a publicist for this sort of thing, but for now, I'll have to make the announcement myself—and ramble out some thoughts on the whole matter. Read More »

• Thanks to a new more powerful server, I'm able to put more things on this page that scream Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!. A generation of livejournalers and myspacers rejoice. Everyone else gets nauseated.
• Sitting at a computer for fourteen hours a day of late has caused me to have scores of geeky nightmares, like the horror of command line errors in Unix, or a senario where Indiana Jones style spikey walls are coming at me from both sides while I try to restore a couple thousand backend applications in the space of five minutes. This is either a sign that I don't have any real problems to have nightmares about, or an indicator of serious, disturbing amounts of anxiety. I don't know that dreaming about error messages is supposed to make a person wake up in a cold sweat.
• I turned 23 this week. I celebrated in style with a very large posse at Barcode. I don't remember the last couple hours of the evening very well. I'm told that is what is supposed to happen on your birthday.
• I want summer. Badly. I want t-shirts, flip-flops, hot steamy days and cool balmy evenings. This winter, these past several months, have been some of the longest of my life.
• And now to bed. To bed I said.

attempting and succeeding at chocolate chip pancakes; a hard-earned fatigue; a new puppy; waking up to my iTunesAlarm well before the buzzer goes off; hope; having somewhere to be first thing in the morning (no, really!); My Chemical Romance (I've listened to their single, Helena, 72 times in three days); being at my lowest weight in at least 4 years