Health Hazards

I continue to suffer through a cold. I woke up with a badly sore throat and watery eyes. I think I'll probably work from home tomorrow, which is okay with the project team because it gets me to work at least an hour early -- good when dealing with the East Coast -- but bad because I was expecting the Dell technician to come to my office on Monday to replace the motherboard on that laptop. The tech is supposed to call me before actually coming to the office, so I hope to be able to reschedule or (if he's willing) send him to Fremont instead.

Last night, an hour after dinner, I took a blood sugar reading: 198! That's another way-too-high reading caused by too much food and too little exercise. Sick or not, I had to do something, so I put on my shoes and took a walk around the complex and down to the train station and back. I did not enjoy it one bit, but after two hours, my blood sugar was back down to a more-reasonable 108.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

As many of you may be aware, L.A.con IV is offering discount tickets of various sorts to Disneyland. These are a decent deal, and I saved $14/each for the pair of 2-day park hoppers I bought, and I'm happy the convention was able to get the deal. This is extra work for the convention. They have to get the tickets from Disney and deal with sending them out to people and the cash handling. The convention is not offering every possible type of Disney ticket. If you need more than a 2-day pass, you should go the Disney tickets page and get your pass directly.

So, when L.A.con IV announced the discount tickets on their LJ, they attracted an Anonymous Idiot who has complained bitterly about the tickets not being a good deal and that they should be cheaper, etc., etc. S/he has done this in a barely-literate fashion that made me wonder if maybe s/he qualifies for the child ticket.

As usual, it seems that even when a convention does a good thing, there will be someone who yells at them about it. It's unreasonable complaints like this that make you want to quit putting in the effort. Reasonable complaints we can sometimes do something about, even if it's just apologizing for our mistakes. Unreasonable complaints drive you crazy, because you know you can't fix them. Even if L.A.con IV did provide the mythical super-discounted tickets this fool wants, it probably wouldn't be enough.

I actually hope that Anonymous Idiot decides we're all too stupid and stays home, selling his/her membership to someone who will actually appreciate it, rather than lumbering the Worldcon with yet another spoiled, selfish, childish, self-centered fan who thinks the convention has a duty to provide for his/her every want without regard to the needs of the other thousands of people attending the convention.

World Cup Wrap-Up

And so another World Cup comes to an end. I had no dog in this fight, having no ethnic background from either France or Italy. (Well, "Standlee" and "Reynolds," my paternal and maternal family names, are probably both Norman French, but I don't identify with the French ethnically. To the best of my knowledge -- my family history gets cloudy prior to the American Civil War -- I'm Anglo-German-Cherokee.) The first half was pretty good, but the second got dull, and overtime was painful as both teams were clearly out of gas. And but for a mis-hit penalty, we might have seen sudden death go to sudden death, as the keepers stopped none of the attempts.

It's a shame that the Zidane ended his career on such a classless note. As soon as I saw the replay of him head-butting the Italian player, I said, "If any of the officials saw that, it's got to be a red card!" And it was, no doubt about it. Even if the Italian player was taunting him, Zidane made a terrible mistake. He had an opportunity to end his career like Beckenbauer, and instead wasn't even on the pitch when his teammates collected their second-place medals.

More encouraging was the show of good sportsmanship between the two teams' goalkeepers before the penalty kicks began. Also, I think the match overall (unlike most of this World Cup) was officiated excellently, with the players being allowed to play and to decide the game on the pitch. You hate to see a World Cup decided by penalties, but this one was so equal that it was possibly inevitable.