So I contact Microsoft support.

Here is our conversation:

Pedz: Welcome to Microsoft Customer Service Chat. Please give me a moment while I review your question. Would that be alright?
me: sure
Pedz: Hi Katrina.
me: Howdy.
Pedz: You can delete the other account but it will be on that account’s process since it’s not a Microsoft product.
me: Hmmm.
me: Well, I’ve tried closing the [usual email] one, once I disconnected the new computer from it.
me: But it won’t let me.
me: SOmething about making sure I’ve stopped all billing transactions. But I don’t have any.
Pedz: Please contact the email client, retstak.org.
me: Uh. That’s my personal domain.
Pedz: I see.
Pedz: We can only provide links if it’s a Microsoft product.
me: yes.
me: but that’s the email address I have a live account under.
me: I have two live accounts. One under the retstak.org domain, and one at the hotmail one.
Pedz: I understand but that’s not a Microsoft account.
Pedz: You only associated a Live account under that email, right?
me: Okay. So who do I talk to about Live accounts?
me: yeah.
Pedz: You can still access your Live account separately, right?
me: yes.
me: that is, my login for the live account is that email address, but it gets me into a microsoft live area.
Pedz: Try this link.
Pedz: That’s the direct link to close an account.
me: Okay.
Pedz: I hope the above information would be beneficial to you in resolving this issue. Did I fully address your question?
me: I think so.
me: :)
Pedz: Thank you for using Microsoft Customer Service Chat. Please feel free to come back again. We are available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

I really love technical support…

This piece of wood is the edge of a bleacher seat from California Memorial Stadium, home of my beloved California Golden Bears. In the process of renovating and modernizing the facility, which was originally built in 1923 on top of a major earthquake fault, they tore out the wooden bleachers.  I’ve not had a chance to get back to Memorial since the renovation and retrofit, but I’m told it was done well. 

Turns out, though, that those wooden bleachers date back to the original opening of the stadium.  Wow!

The Wooden Duck, a company in Berkeley that specializes in making furniture out of reclaimed wood, managed to get its hands on the old bleachers and, from there, offer pieces for sale. They’ve done some gorgeous work, which you should check out.

My thanks in particular to TwistNHook, the proprietor and head honcho of the zany crew over at the California Golden Blogs, the best Cal sports blog on the entire Internet, including the North Korean parts. ;) He procured the bleacher piece for me, and I owe him.

I eventually plan to get a nice photograph or lithograph of Cal Memorial and frame this block with that. It will go nicely with my 1959 Rose Bowl pennant/program/ticket and my copy of the Daily Californian dated Monday, November 22, 1982 in my tiny museum of Cal memorabilia. :)

But that is my cool thing.

There are many tools in a system administrator’s arsenal. But none are quite as awesome as the bent paperclip for manually popping CD drives. :)

Why get up and go downtown at stupidly early hours of the morning on a day I don’t have to work?

To see the penguin, of course!

It’s too bad this trip was to say goodbye to Endeavor. I may have more to say about the shuttle later, but for now, it’s enough to say, I saw this.

I can has all the root beer?

(Taken outside River City Brewing, which does have really good root beer. And also some excellent microbrews, I’m told.)

And geez this place is dusty and a bit stale. So gotta clean it up a bit.

So, making some changes around here. There’s a sweet extension called Jetpack that lets you tie your hosted WordPress blog into a lot of wordpress.com features, and I’ve enabled the comment feature. You can now comment via your Facebook, Twitter, or WordPress.com account. (Or you can still fill in the blanks yourself, I think. Needs testing.)

I might change up the theme, I haven’t decided yet. I am going to make some changes to the content. I’m debating whether to force LJ commenters over here or not — for the moment, I’ll leave the option, but it is something that I’m thinking about. I know I occasionally use the LJ account for musings that I’d prefer to keep semi-private and consolidating comments on an all too public blog doesn’t help that goal.

Other question — as I’m starting up the blog slog again, topics would be a nice suggestion.

A few I’m likely to veto, though:

I’m not entirely averse to discussing politics, but I’m a bit tired of it and at the point where I’m likely to descend into long rants that will offend half the political spectrum, including several members of my family. (I love them very deeply even if I do not understand why they vote the way they do.)

Religion’s also a tough one, as I’m capable of some rather unorthodox opinions on the subject. That said, I actually own a Qur’an and have been wanting to read it for a while now, but I want to get a better handle on the founding religious document of the faith of my culture first, so I’m thinking about doing a Bible read. (I’m also thinking about doing a Book of Mormon read for two reasons: (1) the lulz (2) like it or not, Mormonism is a uniquely American religion and is going to play a larger part in the culture going forward. Mitt Romney might be the first Mormon to make it this far, but I am certain he will not be the last.)

Other than that, I’m pretty much open to subject matter. Go ahead, toss away. See what you can come up with.

That’s about it. Please bear with our mess, we hope to have construction complete in the near future.

In the meantime, katster go sleep.

The Ambassador to Libya was J. Christopher Stevens, Cal ’82. He majored in history, the same major I would graduate with eighteen years later. I know there are Berkeley alumni around the world, doing amazing and fantastic things, but we’re all connected in some crazy way. I was already sad over the events in Libya (and throughout the rest of the Middle East), but this just adds another small connection to the event and a reminder that we’re all connected to each other in ways we may fail to realize or understand.

The life of Ambassador Stevens represents everything we hope for in our students. He majored in history to learn about the world, and then he used that knowledge to make the world a better place. We are proud of his career. His death is a tragedy, and we mourn his passing.
History Department Chair Ethan Shagan (link)

(I have other degrees of separation to another man killed in the attack, and that one is also bothering me because I’ve thought seriously about joining the diplomatic service as an IT professional. I may or may not write about that later.)

Rhyme & Paradox #1½ [PDF]

Or if you want to read past issues, you can go here: Rhyme & Paradox main page

My thanks, as always, to Bill Burns, for hosting.

The photo is credit Patrice Dufour, and can be found here on stock.xchng, a nifty free for non-commercial projects stock photo site. When I saw this one, I knew it would be perfect for this issue of Rhyme.

Now to get the rest of the layout done.

Here’s what they looked like — click through, it’s definitely more obvious on the Flickr page, especially on the back of my uncle’s shirt:

They looked like that, because they were under a tree, and the sun looked something like this:

(That’s shot on a cellphone camera through a pair of welder’s goggles, so my apologies for the size.)

Yeah, it was definitely worth it to go to Redding this weekend to see an annular eclipse.