The new apartment is super cute, and in an awesome location. Pod says he doesn’t think we could have gotten a better place without paying out the nose, and I’m pretty inclined to agree. We’ve got the MAX walking distance on one side, and all kinds of stuff on the other side; Fred Meyer’s, Monteaux’s, IHOP, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Great Clips, and more! Freddy’s has pretty much everything we’d need.

Our couches are totally awesome.. they’re vibrant red without being tooooo bright. Ok, they’re pretty bright, but not Stop Sign Red bright. Our coffee/end table set has cool black bars and black tempered glass.. they’re sleek and shiny and I love them! My new desk sits in the corner and has a whiteboard, though I need a new chair.

We’ve still got some unpacking to do but it feels like home. I can’t wait for it to be all clean and unpacked though! There’s a few sneak peak pictures on my Flickr.

In totally unrelated news, some of you may remember me talking about getting involved with the roller derby. I still really want to do this, but need some help as I’m super broke and getting started is not cheap. I made a page for donations; every little bit will help! If you can’t donate, you might spread the link. Anyway, the page is at Katie On Wheels

Their blog post doesn’t even hint at the gravity of the change. They took away people’s ability to choose what they saw. So really, they made things worse for everybody.

One of their reasons was that only 2% of their users were opting to view @replies to people that they weren’t following. I admit- most of the time I had the feature turned off. But I’m still mad that they took it, and here’s a few reasons why.

1: I did occasionally go in and turn on @replies to people I didn’t follow, because it was a good way to find new, interesting people. This is why the 2% that had it on did so, I assume. It was nice to be able to pick and choose when I saw those replies.

2: So, when the ability to choose was turned off, people started mangling their replies by starting them with other symbols before the @reply, which forced it on my FL. Ok.. so, by taking away my ability to turn off @replies to people I didn’t follow, I’m actually now BEING FORCED to see them because everybody is dodging the filter. Thanks, Twitter.

3: I hate being given the ability to choose, then have it taken away because “big brother knows what’s best for you.” Yeah. Bite me.

So Twitter has now “reversed the settings change”, except for the part where they only show up if they’re not actually replies. O…k… question! How many of those @replies are not replies? Doesn’t that take away the whole “reply” part of it? Isn’t it then a “mention” which Twitter just recently added that confuses a lot of people? Oh wait. That’s the best part about this whole thing. Apparently Twitter took it off because “it was confusing”.

The whole thing is dumb. Every day I find myself wishing more and more that Google had bought Twitter instead of Jaiku. Twitter shot themselves in the foot with this one- could this be the beginning of the end?

Here are some other articles on the issue:
Goodbye People I Never Knew
Is This Why Twitter Changed It’s Reply Policy?
Only A Little Reversed
Twitter Decides We’re Not Smart Enough for @Replies

I very much wish I could spend the day with my mom and grandmother, but they are 1000 miles away I’ll be down there in July though, so I’ll get to see them soon!

I sent my mom a custom card that I made on Scrapblog and some super cute purple dangly earrings that I forgot to take a picture of, and she loved them. I sent my grandma flowers, even though it felt like cheating, but she loved them

What all did you guys do for Mother’s Day?

Right now I’m working on why removing index.php from my URL’s works on some browsers and not others, and trying to figure out why the hell it was working for a day and then stopped working when I wasn’t even touching the sites at all.

Subdomains don’t work as easily as they used to, my email has to be outsourced, I don’t have a cpanel and nothing is where I expect it to be. It’s driving me up the wall.

I’m looking forward to everything being done, I can’t even tell you how close I am to ripping out all my hair. Just a status update. I’m going out of town this weekend and really hoping my websites don’t self destruct.

Can I just say that Spring time makes me ridiculously happy? Cause it does! Portland is still rainy sometimes but we had a few days of clear skys and warm weather and the weather guy says it’s supposed to be nice like that again in a few days. I’m really looking forward to nice weather. Rain is nice and all but I miss the sunshine. I wish I could get a tan up here!

But yea, spring! Believe it or not I actually love bright colors. All the flowers and trees (and yes my allergies will start acting up and then I’ll hate Spring, but that hasn’t happened yet!) and cute clothes! I need to set my sewing machine up somewhere so I can make a ton of skirts and buy a bunch of footless tights and more flats. I found some really cute patterns that I think I can manage (sewing in a straight line isn’t as easy as it sounds ) Spring also makes me kind of crafty. I need to go buy supplies!

In other news, things on all my sites and most sites in the KSF Bloglomerate may be a little wonky for the next week or so; we’re moving servers and that is going to be a huge headache and things *will* go wrong, so don’t be surprised.

That is all!

Usually when I leave a job, it’s a little more bittersweet than this. There are certainly people I’m going to miss here…  Scott, Wesley, Dan, Brandi, Lara, Chris, Larry, Jason and so on and so forth.. but that’s all I’ll miss. Just my peeps. There’s a lot of things about working here that were really getting to me. Like.. have you even been somewhere where you keep wondering “WHY do I keep coming back?!” It was kind of like that. There are more places than this that I feel like that about, but we’ll skip that for now haha. I won’t get into it more though; that’s not the type of dirty laundry I like to air out on my blog. I love and will miss my coworkers though. They brought me cake! Everybody looks sad to see me go.

I am very excited for my new job though! I will be doing email and occasional phone support for Freeway, as well as various other tasks. It is an excellent opportunity and I am looking forward for Monday, when I get to start my new job.

I’ve still got some tweaking to do; I want to redo the Links page especially, but as far as I can tell, everything is functional. I’m particularly happy with the Archives; I like them!

I made some rather fundamental backend changes though, so if anything seems broken, PLEASE let me know so I can fix it! I’m tired right now… it’s kind of late and I’ve been coding for hours and drinking beer.

As always, praise feedback is welcome.

His insurance agency has been really good though. I’ve had to talk to them a few times, and they’re covering my trip to the doctor to make sure that it’s just “normal” aches and pains (it is) and also my trips to the chiropractor, which is awesome. They put my boyfriend in a nice rental car, too.

So, I can now add “been in car accident” in my list of Things I’ve Done Before Dying

So, I started a new blog. Yea, I know, I’m addicted.

Names Changed* is now up and running and open. There’s only 2 entries so far, and I don’t know how often it’ll be updated, but the stories will be interesting. It’ll give some insight as to how I got where I am today.

I hate moving. I’m kind of excited though. Xoie will have a friend to play with, since my friend that we’re moving in with has a dog, too. I think having more places to go will help calm her down, as well as running and playing more. Pod is going to bring his computer over to my house so that we can get a little more spread of where we spend our time, cause I’m *always* at his house, and I would really like to spend more time at home, but still spend time with him. We haven’t been playing EQ a whole lot, cause we’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead, which is totally awesome. If you’re on Steam, add me as your friend. lifelessmind. I’d link to my profile but I can’t find the URL while I’m at work cause anything fun is surfblocked.

I had to take back the super sweet 3.16 dual core processor I bought. Turns out my motherboard only supports 65nm processors. So I already bought a new power supply, and got a video card sent to me, and if I bought a new motherboard to go with my new processor I’d need new RAM cause mine is slow, and I’d need a case, and at that point I built a whole new computer and that just wasn’t in my budget I did pick up a 2.2 dual core, which is the best 65nm I can still find at this point.. which, yea, is still better than the 1.8 I had in there, but not NEARLY as exciting as the E8600. Cest la vie. I’m excited for my new video card My friend Shawn says the video card will do me more good than the processor anyway, so the combination of the two is pretty good I’d say.

I’ve also been doing a lot of designing/coding lately. I’ve started (and scrapped) a good 4 or 5 layouts for this site already. I’ve got the main page (mostly) coded for the one I think I’ll be keeping. Here’s a sneak peak of it. Don’t bother clicking any links; none of them work yet. If you have any feedback, let me know. I always like hearing other peoples ideas. I’m also starting a new project. Domain has been bought… but I’ve also scrapped 2 or 3 layouts for that one. I don’t want to get too much into specifics until the site is up, but it was inspired by this random freak-out I had over the weekend. While Kat Scratch Fever mostly is about the NOW of my life, this new project will give a little more insight about my past. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

Oh, and I got a new tattoo. I suppose technically it’s 2 tattoos (that technicality meant I had to fill out the paperwork twice! that, and I split it up into two sessions cause we ran out of time the first day). I just got the second one last night and it’s crazy swollen and red still. The left one hurt more than the right one. Probably because I’m right handed so the muscles in my right arm are stronger and more used to abuse. Anyway I don’t have pictures of both of them together yet, but they look the same, just mirror images. Pictures on my Flickr. Go look, leave comments!

That’s all for now.