I could have been a sailor, could have been a cook
A real live lover, could have been a book.
I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock.
I could be
Here and now
I would be, I should be
But how?
I could have been
One of these things first
I could have been
One of these things first.

I could have been your pillar, could have been your door
I could have stayed beside you, could have stayed for more.
Could have been your statue, could have been your friend,
A whole long lifetime could have been the end.
I could be yours so true
I would be, I should be through and through
I could have been
One of these things first
I could have been
One of these things first.

I could have been a whistle, could have been a flute
A real live giver, could have been a boot.
I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock.
I could be even here
I would be, I should be so near
I could have been
One of these things first
I could have been
One of these things first.

Seriously. It’s free…and funny as all hell.

It’s Virgin Mobile’s phone sales line, which respects your wintertime celebration choices to a great degree.

1-888-353-7667

I had one of the most profoundly unsatisfying experiences with United Airlines and Orbitz yesterday.

See, when I booked my flight home to Oregon, I booked it all the way to Redmond. Then, several days later, I decided I would rather fly to Portland, stay a couple days, and then drive down to Bend with some friends.

One would think that all this would require is notifying the airline that I would like to have my bag taken off the plane in Portland, and that they are free to go ahead and sell that seat to someone else. But OH NO! Not that easy. If I want to stay in Portland, I have to PAY THEM an extra $350! Can you even fucking believe that shit?

The reasoning behind it is even more retarded. See, what they do, is instead of canceling just that particular flight off of my itinerary, THEY REBOOK THE ENTIRE TRIP, at whatever price is the current going rate. Well, it turns out the current going rate is $250 more than it was when I first booked, and then they charge a $100 change fee on top of that.

I already PAID for the entire fare, all the way to Redmond, all I want is to NOT fly on part of it. They can keep my money for that leg of the flight, and resell the seat to someone else that they are screwing. But no. It costs $350 to not fly on that flight that I already paid for.

Now, here’s the real kicker. Right now, I can book a flight from Redmond, back to Portland on the 22nd, which departs out of Redmond 1 hour after I arrive, for $94! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

I’m simply dumbfounded, and well, hateful.

So my plan as it stands right now is to go to the airport on the 22nd, and while checking in explain to the nice ticket person my situation. If they tell me it costs me $350 to change it, I’ll just tell them I want a one way ticket from Redmond to Portland that departs as close to my arrival time in Redmond as possible. I’ll then lead the ticket person right along the convoluted illogical path I’ve been on for the last day. And if I get lucky, they’ll take pity on me and give me a break and just let me not fly from Portland to Redmond in the first place. I know they can do it…the ticket counter people have all the power. If it doesn’t work in Hartford, I’ll try again when I’m in Chicago. If it doesn’t work there, I’ll make a last ditch effort in Portland, and if it still doesn’t work, I’ll go ahead and buy the ticket from Redmond back to Portland, and fly back and forth, drinking their free micro brew and fuming with rage.

Ok - I’m posting this here so that I don’t forget how I did this again. It just took me about 2 hours to figure out what had changed.

If you notice my blog archives over to the right…when you click on one it takes you to the archive page for that month, and shows the oldest post first. The navigation links at the top and bottom then make sense “Next Entries” take you forward in time, previous entries take you back…and the individual posts are listed chronologically down the page, rather than in the main blog structure where to newest post is at the top, and them reverse chronological down the page. I like it much better this way. The stock way is totally retarded.

Anyhow…in the interests of remembering how to do this next time I upgrade I’ll outline the procedure, as I have to make a change to a core file that gets overwritten during upgrade.

First, you must have a permalink structure set up. I just took the default one, and after hassling with my .htaccess file for awhile, got it working.

Now my links to the archives are like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/2005/04/

Instead of like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/?m=200504

This is important as the old, non-permalink way will not allow the next step to work.

Then, I went in to ‘../wp-include/template-functions-general.php’ and edited the “get_archives_link” function, and added “?order=asc” just after the ‘$url’ sections of each line, so that now the archive links all look like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/2005/04/?order=asc

The only other thing you need to do is edit your archive template in your theme, and reverse the navigation links, as they will now do the opposite of what you expect. For instance, the “previous entries” link will now take you forward in time, rather than to a previous time.

So I’m running the newest version of Wordpress for my blog now.

I haven’t spent enough time with it to know what’s new about it or anything, other than the administration backend seems a little quicker.

If another Tribal Blogger would like the newest version, I’ll be happy to install it. I would particularly like to try it on K@ and Taylor, whose comment RSS feeds seem to be broken. I don’t think anyone else is running as many weird plugins and shit as I was, so installing it for the rest of you should be a lot quicker than it was for me.

Anyhow, I cleared all the snow off my car, and upgraded wordpress. So that’s two accomplishments for the day.

Too bad I have to go to work now.

I arrive in Redmond at 1:00pm on December 22nd.

I depart out of Redmond at 11:50am on January 8th.

Word.

Damn. Today I finally feel somewhat back to normal.

Saturday, I didn’t have any plans. So I slept in until about 11:00 and then got up and made coffee, and spent some time reading “Searching For The Sound : My Life With the Grateful Dead” by Phil Lesh. It’s a pretty great book, if you like the Grateful Dead. Anyway…after a couple hours of uninterrupted reading, JR came home from work and wanted to go to City Steam for lunch, so we did. Lunch passed into dinner time, and by the time we left, we both were a bit on the hammered side. I had a couple more Celebration Ale’s when I got home, and then had a grand old time recording drunken covers of various bands into my awesome little recorder until about 2:00am.

So I slept until about 11:00am again on Sunday…only to be woken by JR wanting to go to John Harvard’s for the Mug Club party. We are members of the Mug Club, meaning we get our 25 ounce mugs filled for the price of a regular tall. On mug club party days, you get an extra dollar off as well. I barely know what happened, all I know for certain is that I passed out after puking at about 7:30pm. That’s right, I was barely awake for 8 hours on Sunday…and spent nearly all of them at the bar….yeah me. I also passed out without setting my alarm, and when I woke up to get water at about 2:00am, I remember distinctly that I thought it was Saturday night/Sunday morning and that I didn’t need to get up for work the next day. Stupid me. I was about a half hour late for work. JR just laughed when I came crawling in…

I stayed FAR away from alcohol yesterday…and today feel relatively normal.

Tonight I’m going to see Phil Lesh and Friends in Wallingford. It’s nice and fitting that I just got his book and have read about 3/4 of it, and now he’s playing 20 minutes from here. It should be a good show, although I can say I’ve never seen a Dead related show indoors…it should be quite a trip.