A pedometer is a device that counts the number of steps walked, and also estimates distance covered (based on stride length) and calories burned in the process (based on body weight). I acquired one recently to find out how much walking I do in my daily life. It's an Omron HJ-112, and I have no idea how it works, except I keep imagining that it contains artificial semicircular canals. That's probably not it, but it manages to be pretty accurate as long as I either clip it to some part of my clothing that doesn't move much (the top of my pants works well) or keep it in a snug pocket. Too much swinging around in a loose pocket confuses it mightily, as does walking funny.
The recommended walk count is 10,000 steps per day. I get nowhere close to that. On a workday it tends to be somewhere between 2000 and 2500, and on weekends it's much less - but that's partly because I forget to wear it while I'm bumbling around at home. Could I actually manage 10k steps in a single day? Hmm. I'd probably have to leave the computer and go outside. o.O
09 May 2009
Initial Thoughts on Star Trek: The Reboot
I went in with no particular expectations. I'd not gone out of my way to read any descriptions of the movie, so I didn't know a whole lot other than that it existed and was going to have an all-new TOS cast.
1. They weren't kidding when they said "reboot." It was not hyperbole. o.O
On the pro side, people who have never seen any Star Trek before will probably enjoy this movie quite a lot - especially the next generation down. It's a good pilot-type story for introducing new characters and setting. The rebooted characters have just enough development on them to get things started, and now that they have license to pretty much ignore everything that happened after Enterprise, they can basically go anywhere they want with it.
On the con side (the retcon side?), I kind of liked what was there before....
2. People who have read a lot of Star Trek TOS Pocketbook novels may be at a disadvantage for enjoying the movie, especially if they read and liked Enterprise: The First Adventure, Final Frontier (the book by Diane Carey, not the movie), and Kobayashi Maru. The story the movie tells bears no relation to what the books say. On the other hand, the books are technically non-canon, so it's not exactly an arguable point. (Except possibly to argue against reading media tie-in novels, ever - but then you'd miss out on a lot of great stories.)
On the other hand, those who haven't read any of the novels may not like the discrepancies and total departures from previous canon either, so maybe I'm not saying anything useful here.
3. Apparently they decided to aim for comedy. Unfortunately, the villain was kind of cardboard as a result, and there were some plot holes big enough to drive a starship through. Also, the impact that should've been there for *mumble mumble* (!) and *mumble mumble mumble* (T.T) was decidedly nerfed.
That's all I should probably say about it at the moment. I might do a more detailed post later, when more people have seen the movie and I can stop worrying about spoilers. My reaction overall: mixed.
On another note, I was the only one who dressed up for the occasion (finally got an excuse to wear my Spock shirt!), and everybody looked at me funny. This town has no clue how to do geek properly. T.T
1. They weren't kidding when they said "reboot." It was not hyperbole. o.O
On the pro side, people who have never seen any Star Trek before will probably enjoy this movie quite a lot - especially the next generation down. It's a good pilot-type story for introducing new characters and setting. The rebooted characters have just enough development on them to get things started, and now that they have license to pretty much ignore everything that happened after Enterprise, they can basically go anywhere they want with it.
On the con side (the retcon side?), I kind of liked what was there before....
2. People who have read a lot of Star Trek TOS Pocketbook novels may be at a disadvantage for enjoying the movie, especially if they read and liked Enterprise: The First Adventure, Final Frontier (the book by Diane Carey, not the movie), and Kobayashi Maru. The story the movie tells bears no relation to what the books say. On the other hand, the books are technically non-canon, so it's not exactly an arguable point. (Except possibly to argue against reading media tie-in novels, ever - but then you'd miss out on a lot of great stories.)
On the other hand, those who haven't read any of the novels may not like the discrepancies and total departures from previous canon either, so maybe I'm not saying anything useful here.
3. Apparently they decided to aim for comedy. Unfortunately, the villain was kind of cardboard as a result, and there were some plot holes big enough to drive a starship through. Also, the impact that should've been there for *mumble mumble* (!) and *mumble mumble mumble* (T.T) was decidedly nerfed.
That's all I should probably say about it at the moment. I might do a more detailed post later, when more people have seen the movie and I can stop worrying about spoilers. My reaction overall: mixed.
On another note, I was the only one who dressed up for the occasion (finally got an excuse to wear my Spock shirt!), and everybody looked at me funny. This town has no clue how to do geek properly. T.T
08 May 2009
Hey look! Bakho's on TV!
Bakho, for those who don't follow this blog regularly, is a good friend of mine from Croatia, a psychology student in Zagreb, and one of my favorite RPoLians. He's the guy with the megaphone that appears at 5:12 and 6:41.
What's he doing? Why has there been a countrywide uprising going on in Croatia for the past three weeks? Because he and his fellow students (and many of their fellow citizens) believe that all have the right to free public higher education. Presently, about half of them have to pay for theirs - which they believe is wrong. So they've staged barricades of the colleges of several cities, not preventing anyone from entering or leaving the buildings but disallowing all lectures by being loud and disruptive.
It doesn't sound like the sort of thing that should work. It sounds completely unrealistic, in fact, especially when one wonders where governmental funding is supposed to come from. Well, taxes of course - and as the students' argument goes, there's a lot of wasteful spending going on that could (and should) be cut - like expensive public works in whole other countries and new sports stadiums.
But it seems to be working anyway. The government hoped that they'd get bored and go away. Three weeks later, however, they're still there - and someone leaderlike is probably going to have to Do Something.
As for me, well, I hope bakho remembers to eat regularly and get some sleep once in a while. And that he passes all the exams he's not been studying for, when it's all over. (And that he gets back to running his RPoL game. >.> ) Meanwhile: Vive La Révolution. :)
27 April 2009
Recent Reading Vol. 2
What I read in 2008:
1. Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
2. Dzur by Steve Brust
3. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
5. Thud! by Terry Pratchett
6. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
7. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
8. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
9. Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett
10. Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
11. Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
12. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
13. Mort by Terry Pratchett
14. Blue Moon by Laurell K. Hamilton
I stopped keeping track mid-October. There may have been others after that point that I've forgotten. On the other hand, Nanowrimo happened in November, and December had interstate travel in it, so it's just as likely I didn't read anything after that.
What I know I've read so far in 2009 (not in order):
1. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
2. The Last Colony by John Scalzi
3. Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
4. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
5. On Writing by Stephen King
I'm trying to get my library habit started back up. Something I've noticed, though, is an interest in memoirs and nonfiction. Often, the first parts of a book I'll read are the author notes. I also enjoy following the lives of people with completely different lives than mine - to see what paths they've travelled and how they came to be the way they are today (yay blogs :) ). Since there's a library to explore, I may have to do some more in-depth exploring along those lines...
1. Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
2. Dzur by Steve Brust
3. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
5. Thud! by Terry Pratchett
6. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
7. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
8. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
9. Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett
10. Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
11. Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
12. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
13. Mort by Terry Pratchett
14. Blue Moon by Laurell K. Hamilton
I stopped keeping track mid-October. There may have been others after that point that I've forgotten. On the other hand, Nanowrimo happened in November, and December had interstate travel in it, so it's just as likely I didn't read anything after that.
What I know I've read so far in 2009 (not in order):
1. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
2. The Last Colony by John Scalzi
3. Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
4. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
5. On Writing by Stephen King
I'm trying to get my library habit started back up. Something I've noticed, though, is an interest in memoirs and nonfiction. Often, the first parts of a book I'll read are the author notes. I also enjoy following the lives of people with completely different lives than mine - to see what paths they've travelled and how they came to be the way they are today (yay blogs :) ). Since there's a library to explore, I may have to do some more in-depth exploring along those lines...
19 April 2009
What do I believe?
Fellow UCFer Jeri lost her husband very suddenly a month ago, and asked for thoughts on life after death. Here are some of mine.
My father survived his death, and I saw him in the corner of the ceiling behind me when I went to visit his body. It was one of the most distressing things I've ever seen - for here was my father, in the room with me, but he wasn't in his body. His body lay before me and looked just like any other inanimate object, a piece of furniture, like it had never been alive. And he, no longer hidden beneath all those representative facades that everyone wears as they go through life in various roles, he was purely him.
I don't know that I'd call it a soul, because that word is laden with so many connotations from every religion. Maybe spirit, or (as I called it before I knew anyone else had vocabulary for the same concepts) essence. Everyone has an essence, and when they are open and being themselves, glimpses show through. Right after my father died was when I saw the whole thing, he as himself and completely true.
I was very upset, because due to a miscommunication between the hospital staff and the rest of my family, nobody warned me before I stepped into the room that he was dead. My first instinct was to grab hold of him and put him back in, but I didn't know how and also thought that might be bad. I wanted to turn around and look at him directly, but there was the nurse with me, and what would she think of me if I did? So we didn't talk to each other, and I'll always wish that i'd been better prepared so that we could.
After that, there came the dreams. He would visit me and try to talk to me. The first one, my mundane dream had taken me out into our garage, and he was standing there like he always did when he smoked, and he asked how we were doing. We talked while my own dream tried to call me back, until eventually I was distracted and pulled back in. Other times, we were in our original house, in his office area on the third floor.
But his questions almost never made any sense. Dreams are places where reality is ever-shifting, where things change around as attention shifts from moment to moment, and where communication doesn't happen in speech, but in symbols and emotion. But he kept coming back and we kept trying.
A lot of the early ones were colored with dark melancholy, and I remember them all as being tinted blue. There was one in particular where we were on a very long journey, on a flat, featureless road across an empty plain. I drove while he wallowed in despair. Our car broke down and we stopped at a tiny motel. He was blind stinking drunk, chain smoking, in a completely self-destructive mood, and absolutely did not want to go anywhere. I think he wanted to just lie there and rot away. But I knew we had to keep moving, he had to get to where he was going (which I knew in the dream, but don't remember now). Our car disappeared at some point while we were resting - while he was resting while I was scouting ahead. Forward momentum was clearly going to be totally hopeless, because the only way to continue was on foot. I accepted that with quiet resignation, because stopping wasn't actually an option. But he didn't want to go, so I had to half drag, half carry him along. Finally he turned to me and asked, why would I want to help a sad, pathetic, miserable wretch like him? couldn't I see how worthless he was? And I stopped, the journey disappeared as I turned to him and replied (and I think my voice resounded through the land), because he was my father and I loved him, what kind of stupid question was that? now come on!
I like to think that I helped him along the way to where he was going. As time went on, the blue melancholy tinting went away, and there were dreams tinted in yellow. In the next to last dream, he appeared to me outside some kind of public building (a school, maybe), and he was in good spirits. We did our usual try at talking, where he asked questions that made no sense and my answers probably made less sense, and then I thought that was the end. After that, I assumed he had moved on and all was well with him.
But several months later, he was back with the blue tinting. I didn't handle that visit well at all. What are you doing back here? You're supposed to have moved on! If that's not what really happened, leave me to my fictional belief that I helped you and that all is well now and that you're gone. And he withdrew, and I haven't seen him since. And now I'll always wonder what that last visit had been about, and wish I had been better prepared to listen.
So what do I believe, about what happens after death? I don't know. I'm standing on the wrong side of the veil, on the beach at the edge of the sea, and the ones who have departed are seeing things and doing things and concerned with things that I couldn't begin to comprehend.
My father survived his death, and I saw him in the corner of the ceiling behind me when I went to visit his body. It was one of the most distressing things I've ever seen - for here was my father, in the room with me, but he wasn't in his body. His body lay before me and looked just like any other inanimate object, a piece of furniture, like it had never been alive. And he, no longer hidden beneath all those representative facades that everyone wears as they go through life in various roles, he was purely him.
I don't know that I'd call it a soul, because that word is laden with so many connotations from every religion. Maybe spirit, or (as I called it before I knew anyone else had vocabulary for the same concepts) essence. Everyone has an essence, and when they are open and being themselves, glimpses show through. Right after my father died was when I saw the whole thing, he as himself and completely true.
I was very upset, because due to a miscommunication between the hospital staff and the rest of my family, nobody warned me before I stepped into the room that he was dead. My first instinct was to grab hold of him and put him back in, but I didn't know how and also thought that might be bad. I wanted to turn around and look at him directly, but there was the nurse with me, and what would she think of me if I did? So we didn't talk to each other, and I'll always wish that i'd been better prepared so that we could.
After that, there came the dreams. He would visit me and try to talk to me. The first one, my mundane dream had taken me out into our garage, and he was standing there like he always did when he smoked, and he asked how we were doing. We talked while my own dream tried to call me back, until eventually I was distracted and pulled back in. Other times, we were in our original house, in his office area on the third floor.
But his questions almost never made any sense. Dreams are places where reality is ever-shifting, where things change around as attention shifts from moment to moment, and where communication doesn't happen in speech, but in symbols and emotion. But he kept coming back and we kept trying.
A lot of the early ones were colored with dark melancholy, and I remember them all as being tinted blue. There was one in particular where we were on a very long journey, on a flat, featureless road across an empty plain. I drove while he wallowed in despair. Our car broke down and we stopped at a tiny motel. He was blind stinking drunk, chain smoking, in a completely self-destructive mood, and absolutely did not want to go anywhere. I think he wanted to just lie there and rot away. But I knew we had to keep moving, he had to get to where he was going (which I knew in the dream, but don't remember now). Our car disappeared at some point while we were resting - while he was resting while I was scouting ahead. Forward momentum was clearly going to be totally hopeless, because the only way to continue was on foot. I accepted that with quiet resignation, because stopping wasn't actually an option. But he didn't want to go, so I had to half drag, half carry him along. Finally he turned to me and asked, why would I want to help a sad, pathetic, miserable wretch like him? couldn't I see how worthless he was? And I stopped, the journey disappeared as I turned to him and replied (and I think my voice resounded through the land), because he was my father and I loved him, what kind of stupid question was that? now come on!
I like to think that I helped him along the way to where he was going. As time went on, the blue melancholy tinting went away, and there were dreams tinted in yellow. In the next to last dream, he appeared to me outside some kind of public building (a school, maybe), and he was in good spirits. We did our usual try at talking, where he asked questions that made no sense and my answers probably made less sense, and then I thought that was the end. After that, I assumed he had moved on and all was well with him.
But several months later, he was back with the blue tinting. I didn't handle that visit well at all. What are you doing back here? You're supposed to have moved on! If that's not what really happened, leave me to my fictional belief that I helped you and that all is well now and that you're gone. And he withdrew, and I haven't seen him since. And now I'll always wonder what that last visit had been about, and wish I had been better prepared to listen.
So what do I believe, about what happens after death? I don't know. I'm standing on the wrong side of the veil, on the beach at the edge of the sea, and the ones who have departed are seeing things and doing things and concerned with things that I couldn't begin to comprehend.
14 April 2009
Oh, The Pressure
My blog is up to six followers. Last week there were only three. I should probably say something entertaining. o.O
05 April 2009
Downsizing
Despite the low pay, the perks of working where I do largely outweigh the lack of money to do a lot of other things. Such as:
a) No dress code. I can wear whatever I want.
b) No set lunchtimes. I can eat whenever I want for as long as I want. (I prefer to just munch on things all day long while I work, instead of having an actual mealtime.)
c) No required clock-in/clock-out times. I can work whenever I want, so long as I do 40 hours' worth per week.
d) Full internet access. I can do whatever else I want at work, so long as I do 40 hours' worth of work per week. (We're not allowed to look at porn, and we'd get in serious trouble if caught, but it's not actually blocked (at least, not as far as I know. I've never checked).)
e) No restrictions on how we decorate our work areas. (Weaponry isn't permitted, but compared to tales I've heard of other places, that's minor - and doesn't really apply to me anyhow.)
f) Beautiful workplace. We're next to a river, surrounded by trees, and have our own nature trail.
My first office was in a large labspace at the far end of a building with no other offices near it, and I had it all to myself. I had multiple large windows with great views of the trees and river. I had full control of the thermostat, could play my music as loud as I wanted, and could eat whatever I wanted (e.g. Indian curry was not a problem). When I code, I tend to do a lot of pacing, muttering, and bouts of maniacal laughter - which was possible without bothering anyone else.
Then some drama happened with the owner of the lab, and my second office was in a cluster of other offices, and about a quarter the size of the first office. It had a single small window with a view of a parking lot and a brick building. It had thin walls, no thermostat control, and a tantrum-prone grad student across the hall who came in no more than twice a week on no predictable schedule and hated my music, my food, and the way I breathed.
Then some politics elsewhere shook out, and my third office is in the main building, is shared with someone else, and my part of it is half the size of my second office. I have no view of our small window because the other guy decided to take the half that includes it, and then he put up a bookshelf between us. Despite the lack of view and thermostat control, it's still a step up from Office #2 because the walls are thick, and everyone around me is on a predictable schedule - I can plan food, music, and the bulk of coding accordingly.
Last week I got an email about how my phoneline has been scheduled to transfer to a "workstation" in our new, almost-finished building. My fourth office will be a cubicle in a large, central plaza, with about half the space of my current office.
I'm wondering if I can beg my way back into my first office (the drama resolved while I was in the process of moving out, and then it was too late). If not, my new workschedule will resemble my current one, but the four days will be Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - and on Tues/Thurs I'll probably just not arrive until 4:30pm.
If there's ever a fifth move, I'll probably have to request a red stapler.
a) No dress code. I can wear whatever I want.
b) No set lunchtimes. I can eat whenever I want for as long as I want. (I prefer to just munch on things all day long while I work, instead of having an actual mealtime.)
c) No required clock-in/clock-out times. I can work whenever I want, so long as I do 40 hours' worth per week.
d) Full internet access. I can do whatever else I want at work, so long as I do 40 hours' worth of work per week. (We're not allowed to look at porn, and we'd get in serious trouble if caught, but it's not actually blocked (at least, not as far as I know. I've never checked).)
e) No restrictions on how we decorate our work areas. (Weaponry isn't permitted, but compared to tales I've heard of other places, that's minor - and doesn't really apply to me anyhow.)
f) Beautiful workplace. We're next to a river, surrounded by trees, and have our own nature trail.
My first office was in a large labspace at the far end of a building with no other offices near it, and I had it all to myself. I had multiple large windows with great views of the trees and river. I had full control of the thermostat, could play my music as loud as I wanted, and could eat whatever I wanted (e.g. Indian curry was not a problem). When I code, I tend to do a lot of pacing, muttering, and bouts of maniacal laughter - which was possible without bothering anyone else.
Then some drama happened with the owner of the lab, and my second office was in a cluster of other offices, and about a quarter the size of the first office. It had a single small window with a view of a parking lot and a brick building. It had thin walls, no thermostat control, and a tantrum-prone grad student across the hall who came in no more than twice a week on no predictable schedule and hated my music, my food, and the way I breathed.
Then some politics elsewhere shook out, and my third office is in the main building, is shared with someone else, and my part of it is half the size of my second office. I have no view of our small window because the other guy decided to take the half that includes it, and then he put up a bookshelf between us. Despite the lack of view and thermostat control, it's still a step up from Office #2 because the walls are thick, and everyone around me is on a predictable schedule - I can plan food, music, and the bulk of coding accordingly.
Last week I got an email about how my phoneline has been scheduled to transfer to a "workstation" in our new, almost-finished building. My fourth office will be a cubicle in a large, central plaza, with about half the space of my current office.
I'm wondering if I can beg my way back into my first office (the drama resolved while I was in the process of moving out, and then it was too late). If not, my new workschedule will resemble my current one, but the four days will be Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - and on Tues/Thurs I'll probably just not arrive until 4:30pm.
If there's ever a fifth move, I'll probably have to request a red stapler.
03 April 2009
Soup Without Cornstarch
Today I ordered some egg drop soup from a drive-thru Chinese takeout (not the one I worked at), and asked for it to be made without any cornstarch.
The lady at the window remarked that the kitchen staff prefer it that way too. She had never tried it that way herself, but now she was curious.
I told her that the reason cornstarch is added is because Americans like it that way. Americans prefer their broths and sauces to be thick, so Americanized Chinese food has cornstarch in everything. But Chinese people themselves prefer thin and watery.
("Americans" is the term that Chinese communities use amongst themselves to refer to white people. That or "foreigner" - as in foreign to China. The thought that it doesn't technically apply when all people mentioned are living in America, never really comes to mind. (Black people are just called "black people."))
Of course, then I had to start saying "non-Asians" in order to make sense to the window lady, who was white. I probably still managed to offend her. Doh.
The lady at the window remarked that the kitchen staff prefer it that way too. She had never tried it that way herself, but now she was curious.
I told her that the reason cornstarch is added is because Americans like it that way. Americans prefer their broths and sauces to be thick, so Americanized Chinese food has cornstarch in everything. But Chinese people themselves prefer thin and watery.
("Americans" is the term that Chinese communities use amongst themselves to refer to white people. That or "foreigner" - as in foreign to China. The thought that it doesn't technically apply when all people mentioned are living in America, never really comes to mind. (Black people are just called "black people."))
Of course, then I had to start saying "non-Asians" in order to make sense to the window lady, who was white. I probably still managed to offend her. Doh.
22 March 2009
More Azaleas
We've been having lots of flowers here. It turns out that the magenta azaleas across from my patio are still alive and well - and right now they're blooming with a vengeance. I can also see whites, pale pinks, and salmon pinks from here, though there aren't as many and most of them are nearly done blooming now.
20 March 2009
Day of Silence
Yesterday, one of our members suffered a terrible personal tragedy. Out of respect for her loss, the UCF member blogs will be offline today. Our thoughts and prayers are with her. We will return tomorrow.
17 March 2009
Quiescence
I have nothing to say.
I have lots to say, actually. I'm just not in the right frame of mind to organize my thoughts into anything coherent, that won't somehow manage to offend everyone left and right. I haven't been in a good frame of mind for almost a month now. Hence the silence, which is better than anything I might possibly say.
So instead, I'll just list everything I've been up to lately. Maybe it'll be an interesting read to someone somewhere.
1. Work
a) I'm making a database of every satellite image I've ever made. They date from late 1997 to present, and I've finished 2003 but haven't yet started 2004.
b) There's either something odd going on in the water off the southeast U.S. coast, or both satellites pointed at it are glitching in exactly the same way. Which is it? I'm assembling the overall big picture so that we can look at it and hopefully figure that out. This is taking a while.
2. Play
a) The RPoL chat community has become about twice as active as it used to be. First there was a keystone banning; suddenly, a slowly dying chat sprang back into full health and vibrancy overnight. Less than a week later, someone posted a thread in RPoL's community forum, asking about the chat - and for a while we were getting a dozen new visitors per day. That's settled down to 3-5 new regulars now, but it's still quite busy.
b) My favorite GM came back after a 5-month absence, restarted two of his games and made a third.
c) Mad Scientist on Facebook. T.T I have zombies, robots, a SkyCom AI, and a doomsday device. And I'm making more! It turns out that this particular game is the perfect speed for playing in between rounds of working, so I expect I'll be playing quite a lot.
3. Writing
a) Nonfiction is basically at a standstill (in case that wasn't obvious by observing my blog). I haven't written any new eHow articles either.
b) I've been putting a lot of work into Vengeance Returns. It's accumulating a few hundred words or so every other night. It turns out that midnight to dawn is an excellent time for writing. Unfortunately, this also means less sleep, which is probably contributing to the whole bad frame of mind thing.
That pretty much covers it, I think. How are you?
I have lots to say, actually. I'm just not in the right frame of mind to organize my thoughts into anything coherent, that won't somehow manage to offend everyone left and right. I haven't been in a good frame of mind for almost a month now. Hence the silence, which is better than anything I might possibly say.
So instead, I'll just list everything I've been up to lately. Maybe it'll be an interesting read to someone somewhere.
1. Work
a) I'm making a database of every satellite image I've ever made. They date from late 1997 to present, and I've finished 2003 but haven't yet started 2004.
b) There's either something odd going on in the water off the southeast U.S. coast, or both satellites pointed at it are glitching in exactly the same way. Which is it? I'm assembling the overall big picture so that we can look at it and hopefully figure that out. This is taking a while.
2. Play
a) The RPoL chat community has become about twice as active as it used to be. First there was a keystone banning; suddenly, a slowly dying chat sprang back into full health and vibrancy overnight. Less than a week later, someone posted a thread in RPoL's community forum, asking about the chat - and for a while we were getting a dozen new visitors per day. That's settled down to 3-5 new regulars now, but it's still quite busy.
b) My favorite GM came back after a 5-month absence, restarted two of his games and made a third.
c) Mad Scientist on Facebook. T.T I have zombies, robots, a SkyCom AI, and a doomsday device. And I'm making more! It turns out that this particular game is the perfect speed for playing in between rounds of working, so I expect I'll be playing quite a lot.
3. Writing
a) Nonfiction is basically at a standstill (in case that wasn't obvious by observing my blog). I haven't written any new eHow articles either.
b) I've been putting a lot of work into Vengeance Returns. It's accumulating a few hundred words or so every other night. It turns out that midnight to dawn is an excellent time for writing. Unfortunately, this also means less sleep, which is probably contributing to the whole bad frame of mind thing.
That pretty much covers it, I think. How are you?
22 February 2009
Azaleas again
Last summer, a bunch of overhanging tree limbs got removed from the fenceline between my apartment building and the patch of woods behind it. They destroyed some of the brush lower to the ground in the process, and I was afraid there wouldn't be any more azaleas.
Well, there aren't any in front of my own patio anymore, but some of the other ones are still alive. They started blooming last weekend:
There are also a couple other colors, but they're farther into the woods and I can't get close enough for good pictures. Here's last year's pictures (which technically weren't actually taken last year, but that's when I posted them ;) ).
Well, there aren't any in front of my own patio anymore, but some of the other ones are still alive. They started blooming last weekend:
There are also a couple other colors, but they're farther into the woods and I can't get close enough for good pictures. Here's last year's pictures (which technically weren't actually taken last year, but that's when I posted them ;) ).
19 February 2009
Couple Quick Followups
What electric outlets and light switches look like in Croatia
Comment about the light switches in particular: the Europeans in my audience took one look at the example in my post and basically all thought, "wow, retro." Apparently light switch technology is more advanced over there than here.
So is their dishwasher technology, for that matter. Ours are big clunky obvious machines that tend to be fairly noisy when they're running. Theirs come with front panelling that match their cabinets, and are so quiet it's hard to tell that they're on. I wouldn't mind having one of those. :)
Some insightful commentary inspired by the 25 Things meme
It started as a reply to some whining going on in the mainstream media about the meme, and tangented out to observations about modern-day racism. Good food for thought.
18 February 2009
Fox News: News on an informativeness level you'd get from reading my blog (if I ever did news)
Today I went to a pizza buffet for lunch. I foolishly chose a seat right under one of their TVs without checking to see what was playing. It turned out to be Fox News.
I now understand why everyone calls it Faux News. o.O Did any of those people even go to journalism school? What happened to reporting verified facts and all the opposing viewpoints surrounding a newsworthy event in an unbiased manner?
Example: 16 year old girl found dead, another found unconscious nearby, at Fort Lewis (an army base in Washington). Something about drugs and one of the soldiers being involved (no really, that's all the info I managed to get out of their story). Fox News says "well gee, they were civilians, so we don't even know how they got on the base in the first place, I think they have to be escorted by a military person or something? And their IDs get checked? And there's some kind of curfew involved about that but we're not sure." Uhhh. IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIND ALL THAT STUFF OUT BEFORE YOU GET ON THE AIR.
They did have one report that I wanted to hear. Facebook is currently having a debacle about its Terms of Use. I learned this last night because they put up a big sign on everyone's home pages, and also a number of friends had status updates talking about it. I read the sign, then checked their terms of use page, found the problem paragraph, read it, discussed it with a friend, etc. What did Fox News say? "Oh yeah, Facebook is trying to claim ownershp of everyone's info." Uhhhh. No. >.< DID IT OCCUR TO YOU TO READ THE TERMS OF USE THAT YOU'RE REPORTING ABOUT? OR WAS YOUR COMPREHENSION SO BAD THAT ALL YOU CAN DO IS REPEAT THE HEARSAY?
Yeah, I think I'll go back to getting all my news from other people's blogs now.
I now understand why everyone calls it Faux News. o.O Did any of those people even go to journalism school? What happened to reporting verified facts and all the opposing viewpoints surrounding a newsworthy event in an unbiased manner?
Example: 16 year old girl found dead, another found unconscious nearby, at Fort Lewis (an army base in Washington). Something about drugs and one of the soldiers being involved (no really, that's all the info I managed to get out of their story). Fox News says "well gee, they were civilians, so we don't even know how they got on the base in the first place, I think they have to be escorted by a military person or something? And their IDs get checked? And there's some kind of curfew involved about that but we're not sure." Uhhh. IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIND ALL THAT STUFF OUT BEFORE YOU GET ON THE AIR.
They did have one report that I wanted to hear. Facebook is currently having a debacle about its Terms of Use. I learned this last night because they put up a big sign on everyone's home pages, and also a number of friends had status updates talking about it. I read the sign, then checked their terms of use page, found the problem paragraph, read it, discussed it with a friend, etc. What did Fox News say? "Oh yeah, Facebook is trying to claim ownershp of everyone's info." Uhhhh. No. >.< DID IT OCCUR TO YOU TO READ THE TERMS OF USE THAT YOU'RE REPORTING ABOUT? OR WAS YOUR COMPREHENSION SO BAD THAT ALL YOU CAN DO IS REPEAT THE HEARSAY?
Yeah, I think I'll go back to getting all my news from other people's blogs now.
16 February 2009
One of life's little slow-motion mysteries
Today I caused the collapse of a house of cards.
I also learned some disturbing things about a second house of cards. Will it also collapse in the wake of the first one? Or will it remain standing to get bigger until, when it finally does collapse by some other force, its dust will take months to settle instead of only weeks?
And will the house builder ever learn a thing?
I also learned some disturbing things about a second house of cards. Will it also collapse in the wake of the first one? Or will it remain standing to get bigger until, when it finally does collapse by some other force, its dust will take months to settle instead of only weeks?
And will the house builder ever learn a thing?
13 February 2009
A Crash of Waves
My original low-resolution scan of a photo I took in southern California in 1994:
I passed a more recent, higher-resolution version of the scan to a friend (Robert Sloan 2), who turned it into art:
It's in soft pastels, for a contest that involves expensive prizes if he wins. He hears back about it probably in April.
Then I sold the high-resolution scan to BigStockPhoto.com. :)
(... and that's pretty much it for "good things that have happened to me this week." The rest of the week has been from blah to crummy.)
I passed a more recent, higher-resolution version of the scan to a friend (Robert Sloan 2), who turned it into art:
It's in soft pastels, for a contest that involves expensive prizes if he wins. He hears back about it probably in April.
Then I sold the high-resolution scan to BigStockPhoto.com. :)
(... and that's pretty much it for "good things that have happened to me this week." The rest of the week has been from blah to crummy.)
07 February 2009
A weird little geological bowl
This cliff is part of a rocky beach somewhere in southern California. Notice how there's a dark-colored band of rock that winds around the bottom, like a bowl, that there's more tightly folded light-colored rock in the bowl, and there's a big crack down the middle (with the trees growing in it) that doesn't seem to go through the bottom of the bowl.
My first thought was that the crack is a fault. The light-colored rocks on either side of it don't appear to meet up with each other. However, because the dark-colored band is continuous along the bottom, it might be a dike that just weathered faster than the surrounding rock.
Which is not to say that there aren't faults in this picture. To the right of the bowl, some of the light-colored rock is doing some interesting folding action, and in one spot it comes to an end against another band of the same stuff.
All in all, a fun little head-turner for the casual roadside geologist. ;)
As for where it is, I hope someone out there can tell me. The picture was taken in December 1994, and is of the same place as these:
I was there with some extended family during a two-week visit, my first trip to California, and they were showing us around.
I mention all this now because I just found the original photos while excavating my storeroom, and was rescanning Crash of Waves for a friend to turn into art.
06 February 2009
25 Things
There's been an Internet meme going around Facebook for the past month or so, and recently it has spilled out into the blogosphere. The basic gist is: "list 25 random things about yourself."
I'm going to cheat on mine, and use a similar meme from last year for ten of them. Also, I'm planning to copy/paste this into Facebook as well, where some of the audience hasn't heard from me for 17 years, so not all of this will be new stuff to people reading along here ...
1. I was supposed to become a world-famous concert harpist. My instructor, a world-famous concert harpist herself, so believed in me that she gave me lessons worth $100/hr for free. Unfortunately, it turned out that I wasn't that big a fan of classical music, and was even less a fan of the associated social trappings that went along with being a concert harpist. Me and high society fancy schmancy schmoozing - they don't go together.
2. I was in the children's choir for a production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, which we performed for him on his 70th birthday (1988) in Massachusetts.
3. I once stood in the eye of a hurricane. Bonnie came straight up the Cape Fear River in North Carolina in 1998, and she moved so slowly that we were in her eye for an hour.
4. I spent a couple summers helping a fellow grad student do research on royal terns. It involved lots of time on small sandy islands in the middle of the Cape Fear River (their breeding grounds).
One time we were late getting off before low tide, and we got stranded. There's a picture somewhere of us tugging our 8-foot motorboat through ankle-deep water, between the channel markers (for a channel that clearly no longer existed; they'd evidently not dredged recently).
5. The most fun part of the tern study was the annual banding event. Once the tern chicks are old enough to be out of the nest but not yet old enough to fly, they all get herded down the beach into a corral. Then they get metal bands clamped around their legs. They're really cute at that stage - little white fluffballs with feet.
We also did a few laughing gull chicks. They're pretty cute too, if you don't think too much about what they grow into. Laughing gull chicks will fall instantly asleep if you drop a towel on their heads. So, there was much chasing them around with towels after we were done with the terns.
6. I also helped another grad student with an age and growth study on some juvenile groupers. My part in it was to keep them clean and fed in some outdoor fishtanks. While I was doing that for the groupers, I also kept some snappers - since they were the subject of my own research. They were supposed to all die of cold before the winter really set in. The groupers did. But the snappers, whose range is farther south than the groupers, were a lot tougher than anyone expected. So every two weeks all winter long, I put on five layers of short-sleeved shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, scarf and winter hat, and plunged my arms up to the armpits into icy cold water so I could suck the uneaten food and algae out of their tank.
7. Whenever I go on offshore science cruises, there's always at least one crewmember who is really big into deep sea fishing. This works out well since we get to eat a lot of fresh fish that way.
One time someone caught a 100 lb yellowfin tuna. It took 45 minutes to reel in. The guy cleaned it immediately after it was caught, and sliced off chunks of superfresh sushi for the rest of us. While its muscles were still twitching, even. It was a bit warmer than I liked, but the next day it got served up properly chilled with the wrong kind of rice, the wrong kind of soy sauce, and tubed wasabi. It was still yummy. :)
8. The most unusual thing I ever pet-sat was a 10-gallon tank of 20ish juvenile clownfish. (The kind that likes anemones.) The clownfish in the biology building's lobby aquarium had spawned, the eggs had hatched, and one of the other grad students had taken them under her wing. They were about half-dollar sized or so when she brought them over and set them up on the floor of my living room for three days.
9. I once swam with a barracuda. This was in the Florida Keys, near the end of high school. Without my glasses on I couldn't see what it was, only that it was long and skinny and fairly large, so I was following it around. Then I noticed that everyone else had fled to the other side of the boat...
10. Every year, the place where I work holds an Open House, where we let the general public mob the place. It's supposed to show off what great science we do, so that they'll want to give us more of their tax dollars. But in practice, most of it is a bunch of games and activities for small children. I've done the rounds to all sorts of things, from manning the check-in desk to helping with boat tours to explaining arcane oceanographic equipment. One year I was dressed up as Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. It was like being a celebrity. Small children loved me, grownups were confused ("is that a cucumber?"), and the DNR boat patrol staff wanted to use me for target practice.
11. I've been on a horse exactly once. (Not counting the merry-go-round live ponies at travelling carnivals and etc.) It didn't much care for my opinions on where we ought to go, and kept trying to run me into low-hanging tree branches. I was sore for a week after that ride.
12. The most fun thing I saw in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii, when I was snorkeling there last spring was a sea cucumber. It looked like a gigantic fat black worm. It was kind of squishy when I prodded it with my foot.
13. In college we were required to take a foreign language, and the language I took was Tibetan. The first year was awesomeness. The instructor was all about an immersion approach, and we learned things in the same order that we would've if it was a first language - first some hearing and speaking, then the alphabet and reading and writing. I also had fun comparing it to Mandarin, as some of the basic words are similar. I remember a lot more of the basic phrases ("what is this/that? this is a table, where is the library" etc.) than I do anything about French, which was three high school years of grammar drills.
The second year got very esoteric, with an instructor who thought we wanted to learn how to read ancient religious texts rather than be passably conversational if we went there. I lost interest and didn't take a fourth semester like I'd originally thought I would. The only thing I learned there was that I have an excellent short-term rote memory. The exams asked us to translate 2-3 passages of Tibetan into English, given 20-45 possible ones that might be on them. The final exam had a ton more passages than the midterm, I think because the instructor didn't understand how I could've possibly passed the midterm, and wanted to make sure I couldn't do it by sheer memory alone. I did.
14. It was in Montana that I learned just how short my physical limits are. Most of us started out the 6-7 week geology field courses in bad physical shape. The difference was that they became fit, while I did not. I reached an early plateau, and thereafter I had to start walking much earlier than everyone else if I wanted any hope of being not so far behind that I couldn't still see the next farthest behind student when they reached the next station. It was the first I'd ever really run into any limits on things I can do if I put my mind to it. Those field courses are a large part of the reason why I dropped geology, though I still love rocks.
15. My favorite subliminal advertising is Wall Drug.
16. Someday I want to do a grand months-long roadtrip all around the continental U.S. I figure I'd go across on 80 or 90, down the west coast, then across again on 20, hitting all the major national parks along the way.
17. I've been to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and Tijuana in Mexico, and I didn't drink at either of those places. There was plenty of fun to be had by watching other people having fun, and enjoying the company I was with.
18. When I was ten I wanted to be a writer. Then I was supposed to become a world-famous musician (see #1). Then in college I fled from music into science. Then near the end of grad school I lost all will to live for a while, and passion for doing science along with that. Now I'm working a science job (but nothing resembling anything I studied), and I'm back to wanting to be a writer.
19. I've worked at Wendy's, Einstein's Bagels, and a local-run Chinese takeout. Each time I learned all sorts of interesting things about life, the universe, and everything. Everyone (able-bodied) should do some food service at least once in their lives, especially at a well-managed, well-run one, and see what the world looks like from the other side of the counter.
20. For those who may have missed the memo (or joined us after it), I'm in the T part of the LBGTQ spectrum. This is a social birth defect, not a lifestyle choice. I say "social" because we transpeople aren't mentally or physically defective, by and large - but we have some interesting problems trying to interact with other people. I have male body language and male reactions to things, which nobody expects or comprehends out of a female body. People tend to get confused, some decide that I'm somehow being "rude" though they might not be able to pinpoint exactly why (it has to do with body language microcues), and a lot decide it's easier to just stop talking to me. Online I find it much simpler to present myself as male to people who have never known me in real life. (I'd prefer to not have to specify at all, but some people get really weirded out if they don't know. Also, English unfortunately has gendered third person pronouns.)
21. I love food. I'll try almost anything at least once (by "almost" I don't mean things like balut), and will discuss food at great length at the slightest excuse.
22. I used to be really big into Star Trek. Then when that started petering out, I was really big into Stargate. Now that's petering out too, and I'm not big into any particular sci-fi franchise at the moment.
23. Enya's Orinoco Flow (Sail Away), which I first heard while in high school, was the first I knew that there was any kind of music besides classical, pop rock, and country. I was really big into New Age instrumentals for a while (but not Yanni :p). Then at some point I discovered I liked alternative and metal. And that's where I am now, more or less, with my interests mostly for European metal. But I'll listen to just about anything. Even some occasional hiphop.
24. I'm an awful teacher, but an excellent tutor. Standing me up in front of a classroom of 20-30 students is a bad, bad idea. But sit me down with someone who just needs a nudge in their thinking in just the right place, and epiphanies happen. Partly I think it was because the tutee was of the right mindframe by asking for help, and was therefore listening to begin with. But there's still some art involved in knowing not only what to say, but also when to talk and when to wait in silence for the wheels to spin. Most of my tutees only ever came in once, and then I never saw them again - but then their friends all came. ;)
25. Yoga didn't seem like much when it was my mother doing the poses out of an exercise book when I was a kid. Then a year ago a chiropractor ordered me to start going to classes twice a week. Now I think it's awesome. I'm stretching all sorts of muscles I didn't know I had, and even building some new ones (slowly). And I keep trying to talk everyone else into it too. ;)
Hmmmm. It took me all day to come up with all that, even with help from the previous meme. Now I'm going back to not talking much about myself. :p
I'm going to cheat on mine, and use a similar meme from last year for ten of them. Also, I'm planning to copy/paste this into Facebook as well, where some of the audience hasn't heard from me for 17 years, so not all of this will be new stuff to people reading along here ...
1. I was supposed to become a world-famous concert harpist. My instructor, a world-famous concert harpist herself, so believed in me that she gave me lessons worth $100/hr for free. Unfortunately, it turned out that I wasn't that big a fan of classical music, and was even less a fan of the associated social trappings that went along with being a concert harpist. Me and high society fancy schmancy schmoozing - they don't go together.
2. I was in the children's choir for a production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, which we performed for him on his 70th birthday (1988) in Massachusetts.
3. I once stood in the eye of a hurricane. Bonnie came straight up the Cape Fear River in North Carolina in 1998, and she moved so slowly that we were in her eye for an hour.
4. I spent a couple summers helping a fellow grad student do research on royal terns. It involved lots of time on small sandy islands in the middle of the Cape Fear River (their breeding grounds).
One time we were late getting off before low tide, and we got stranded. There's a picture somewhere of us tugging our 8-foot motorboat through ankle-deep water, between the channel markers (for a channel that clearly no longer existed; they'd evidently not dredged recently).
5. The most fun part of the tern study was the annual banding event. Once the tern chicks are old enough to be out of the nest but not yet old enough to fly, they all get herded down the beach into a corral. Then they get metal bands clamped around their legs. They're really cute at that stage - little white fluffballs with feet.
We also did a few laughing gull chicks. They're pretty cute too, if you don't think too much about what they grow into. Laughing gull chicks will fall instantly asleep if you drop a towel on their heads. So, there was much chasing them around with towels after we were done with the terns.
6. I also helped another grad student with an age and growth study on some juvenile groupers. My part in it was to keep them clean and fed in some outdoor fishtanks. While I was doing that for the groupers, I also kept some snappers - since they were the subject of my own research. They were supposed to all die of cold before the winter really set in. The groupers did. But the snappers, whose range is farther south than the groupers, were a lot tougher than anyone expected. So every two weeks all winter long, I put on five layers of short-sleeved shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, scarf and winter hat, and plunged my arms up to the armpits into icy cold water so I could suck the uneaten food and algae out of their tank.
7. Whenever I go on offshore science cruises, there's always at least one crewmember who is really big into deep sea fishing. This works out well since we get to eat a lot of fresh fish that way.
One time someone caught a 100 lb yellowfin tuna. It took 45 minutes to reel in. The guy cleaned it immediately after it was caught, and sliced off chunks of superfresh sushi for the rest of us. While its muscles were still twitching, even. It was a bit warmer than I liked, but the next day it got served up properly chilled with the wrong kind of rice, the wrong kind of soy sauce, and tubed wasabi. It was still yummy. :)
8. The most unusual thing I ever pet-sat was a 10-gallon tank of 20ish juvenile clownfish. (The kind that likes anemones.) The clownfish in the biology building's lobby aquarium had spawned, the eggs had hatched, and one of the other grad students had taken them under her wing. They were about half-dollar sized or so when she brought them over and set them up on the floor of my living room for three days.
9. I once swam with a barracuda. This was in the Florida Keys, near the end of high school. Without my glasses on I couldn't see what it was, only that it was long and skinny and fairly large, so I was following it around. Then I noticed that everyone else had fled to the other side of the boat...
10. Every year, the place where I work holds an Open House, where we let the general public mob the place. It's supposed to show off what great science we do, so that they'll want to give us more of their tax dollars. But in practice, most of it is a bunch of games and activities for small children. I've done the rounds to all sorts of things, from manning the check-in desk to helping with boat tours to explaining arcane oceanographic equipment. One year I was dressed up as Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. It was like being a celebrity. Small children loved me, grownups were confused ("is that a cucumber?"), and the DNR boat patrol staff wanted to use me for target practice.
11. I've been on a horse exactly once. (Not counting the merry-go-round live ponies at travelling carnivals and etc.) It didn't much care for my opinions on where we ought to go, and kept trying to run me into low-hanging tree branches. I was sore for a week after that ride.
12. The most fun thing I saw in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii, when I was snorkeling there last spring was a sea cucumber. It looked like a gigantic fat black worm. It was kind of squishy when I prodded it with my foot.
13. In college we were required to take a foreign language, and the language I took was Tibetan. The first year was awesomeness. The instructor was all about an immersion approach, and we learned things in the same order that we would've if it was a first language - first some hearing and speaking, then the alphabet and reading and writing. I also had fun comparing it to Mandarin, as some of the basic words are similar. I remember a lot more of the basic phrases ("what is this/that? this is a table, where is the library" etc.) than I do anything about French, which was three high school years of grammar drills.
The second year got very esoteric, with an instructor who thought we wanted to learn how to read ancient religious texts rather than be passably conversational if we went there. I lost interest and didn't take a fourth semester like I'd originally thought I would. The only thing I learned there was that I have an excellent short-term rote memory. The exams asked us to translate 2-3 passages of Tibetan into English, given 20-45 possible ones that might be on them. The final exam had a ton more passages than the midterm, I think because the instructor didn't understand how I could've possibly passed the midterm, and wanted to make sure I couldn't do it by sheer memory alone. I did.
14. It was in Montana that I learned just how short my physical limits are. Most of us started out the 6-7 week geology field courses in bad physical shape. The difference was that they became fit, while I did not. I reached an early plateau, and thereafter I had to start walking much earlier than everyone else if I wanted any hope of being not so far behind that I couldn't still see the next farthest behind student when they reached the next station. It was the first I'd ever really run into any limits on things I can do if I put my mind to it. Those field courses are a large part of the reason why I dropped geology, though I still love rocks.
15. My favorite subliminal advertising is Wall Drug.
16. Someday I want to do a grand months-long roadtrip all around the continental U.S. I figure I'd go across on 80 or 90, down the west coast, then across again on 20, hitting all the major national parks along the way.
17. I've been to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and Tijuana in Mexico, and I didn't drink at either of those places. There was plenty of fun to be had by watching other people having fun, and enjoying the company I was with.
18. When I was ten I wanted to be a writer. Then I was supposed to become a world-famous musician (see #1). Then in college I fled from music into science. Then near the end of grad school I lost all will to live for a while, and passion for doing science along with that. Now I'm working a science job (but nothing resembling anything I studied), and I'm back to wanting to be a writer.
19. I've worked at Wendy's, Einstein's Bagels, and a local-run Chinese takeout. Each time I learned all sorts of interesting things about life, the universe, and everything. Everyone (able-bodied) should do some food service at least once in their lives, especially at a well-managed, well-run one, and see what the world looks like from the other side of the counter.
20. For those who may have missed the memo (or joined us after it), I'm in the T part of the LBGTQ spectrum. This is a social birth defect, not a lifestyle choice. I say "social" because we transpeople aren't mentally or physically defective, by and large - but we have some interesting problems trying to interact with other people. I have male body language and male reactions to things, which nobody expects or comprehends out of a female body. People tend to get confused, some decide that I'm somehow being "rude" though they might not be able to pinpoint exactly why (it has to do with body language microcues), and a lot decide it's easier to just stop talking to me. Online I find it much simpler to present myself as male to people who have never known me in real life. (I'd prefer to not have to specify at all, but some people get really weirded out if they don't know. Also, English unfortunately has gendered third person pronouns.)
21. I love food. I'll try almost anything at least once (by "almost" I don't mean things like balut), and will discuss food at great length at the slightest excuse.
22. I used to be really big into Star Trek. Then when that started petering out, I was really big into Stargate. Now that's petering out too, and I'm not big into any particular sci-fi franchise at the moment.
23. Enya's Orinoco Flow (Sail Away), which I first heard while in high school, was the first I knew that there was any kind of music besides classical, pop rock, and country. I was really big into New Age instrumentals for a while (but not Yanni :p). Then at some point I discovered I liked alternative and metal. And that's where I am now, more or less, with my interests mostly for European metal. But I'll listen to just about anything. Even some occasional hiphop.
24. I'm an awful teacher, but an excellent tutor. Standing me up in front of a classroom of 20-30 students is a bad, bad idea. But sit me down with someone who just needs a nudge in their thinking in just the right place, and epiphanies happen. Partly I think it was because the tutee was of the right mindframe by asking for help, and was therefore listening to begin with. But there's still some art involved in knowing not only what to say, but also when to talk and when to wait in silence for the wheels to spin. Most of my tutees only ever came in once, and then I never saw them again - but then their friends all came. ;)
25. Yoga didn't seem like much when it was my mother doing the poses out of an exercise book when I was a kid. Then a year ago a chiropractor ordered me to start going to classes twice a week. Now I think it's awesome. I'm stretching all sorts of muscles I didn't know I had, and even building some new ones (slowly). And I keep trying to talk everyone else into it too. ;)
Hmmmm. It took me all day to come up with all that, even with help from the previous meme. Now I'm going back to not talking much about myself. :p
02 February 2009
A highly technical geek story (or, a farcical tragedy)
Hooking up a printer in XP is supposed to consist of these easy steps:
1. Plug the printer into the computer.
2. Turn on the computer.
3. Turn on the printer.
4. Wait for the computer to fail to autodetect the printer even though it's on a USB port, then go to Control Panel, then Printers, then Add Printer.
5. When the computer asks, insert the CD that came with the printer. (This step may take a while if the CD in question is nowhere near the printer and hasn't been thought of since printer purchase, and is lying in the bottom of a box somewhere.)
6. Wait for the computer to find the printer info on the CD and copy over all files.
7. Print out a test page. Voila.
What actually happened:
Well, we got through step 5 with only a minor bump in the proceedings (when there was much rummaging around the house to find the aforementioned CD, accompanied by rumors that it might've been thrown away, and also a fair amount of angst by the child who most wanted the printer to be working).
Then came Step 6.
I should stop and mention at this point that the XP in question was running in Chinese. I couldn't read a darn thing I was doing, and the friend who could read it wasn't at all computer-savvy and didn't understand everything she read. Also, her English is weak and my Mandarin is weaker. Yay for universal picture icons. :)
Anyway, so there was a bit of a problem when it turned out that the computer was unable to locate all files on the CD. It wanted to find a somethingsomething.dll that didn't exist, in a directory that didn't exist. As usual when dealing with Windows, I quickly gave up trying to look at files via the GUI and went over to DOS, so I could see what all was on the CD. There wasn't a "cht" directory, but there were a number of other three-letter ones that looked like "rus" and "fra" and "dan." Presumably different languages then. So, not knowing what the dll file was for, I found a dll file with the correct name in the dan directory, and told the computer to use that.
Moving on to Step 7! I tried to print something. An error box popped open. It was in ... Danish? o.O
It turns out that most freebie online translators don't do Danish, and the ones that do, don't do it very well. (Or "dan" stands for some other language that isn't immediately obvious.) I think the error was trying to say something about low ink. But I don't know. The printer itself complained that it was out of paper (it wasn't). We didn't get it to print anything. :(
1. Plug the printer into the computer.
2. Turn on the computer.
3. Turn on the printer.
4. Wait for the computer to fail to autodetect the printer even though it's on a USB port, then go to Control Panel, then Printers, then Add Printer.
5. When the computer asks, insert the CD that came with the printer. (This step may take a while if the CD in question is nowhere near the printer and hasn't been thought of since printer purchase, and is lying in the bottom of a box somewhere.)
6. Wait for the computer to find the printer info on the CD and copy over all files.
7. Print out a test page. Voila.
What actually happened:
Well, we got through step 5 with only a minor bump in the proceedings (when there was much rummaging around the house to find the aforementioned CD, accompanied by rumors that it might've been thrown away, and also a fair amount of angst by the child who most wanted the printer to be working).
Then came Step 6.
I should stop and mention at this point that the XP in question was running in Chinese. I couldn't read a darn thing I was doing, and the friend who could read it wasn't at all computer-savvy and didn't understand everything she read. Also, her English is weak and my Mandarin is weaker. Yay for universal picture icons. :)
Anyway, so there was a bit of a problem when it turned out that the computer was unable to locate all files on the CD. It wanted to find a somethingsomething.dll that didn't exist, in a directory that didn't exist. As usual when dealing with Windows, I quickly gave up trying to look at files via the GUI and went over to DOS, so I could see what all was on the CD. There wasn't a "cht" directory, but there were a number of other three-letter ones that looked like "rus" and "fra" and "dan." Presumably different languages then. So, not knowing what the dll file was for, I found a dll file with the correct name in the dan directory, and told the computer to use that.
Moving on to Step 7! I tried to print something. An error box popped open. It was in ... Danish? o.O
It turns out that most freebie online translators don't do Danish, and the ones that do, don't do it very well. (Or "dan" stands for some other language that isn't immediately obvious.) I think the error was trying to say something about low ink. But I don't know. The printer itself complained that it was out of paper (it wasn't). We didn't get it to print anything. :(
01 February 2009
Dandelion!
Most people think of dandelions as a weed plant, but there's nothing like a lush green grassy meadow dotted with these cheery yellow flowers. They're edible, too. They don't grow well down here in the coastal southeastern U.S., alas.
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