mess.

it snowed on thanksgiving. as predicted, it rained on christmas. now it's new year's eve and we have sleet and snow. stupid weather. i hate winter.

more holiday.

merry christmas!

happy hannukah!

a day late on both of them. oh well.

now for more coffee.

so much food.

i shouldn't have bothered to bring lunch to work today. on the tabe in the lunchroom right now is sitting: bagels, donuts, 3 kinds of cream cheese, a tray of homemade cannolli and cream puffs, banana cake, homemade fudge, and a tray of meats and cheeses with honey mustard.

so much food!

happy holidays.

someone sent me a link today to a story about a cnn poll that asked if people prefer "merry christmas" over "happy holidays." quite frankly, as someone who celebrates multiple holidays this time of year, i'm finding it hard to care.

but i mean, really. there's, at a minimum, thanksgiving, christmas, and new year's. and there is hannukah. and kwanzaa, which is a manufactured holiday of a more recent era, but it's still a holiday. my family celebrates both christmas and hannukah. i don't see why it even matters.

the problem with taking a too-inclusive stance is that it becomes disrespectful when you're just throwing everything around without taking time to think about it, like when my brother's high school last year put up "happy hannukah" signs after the holiday was over, and "happy tet" signs, which isn't until february.

quite frankly, i just think we've come to a very depressing state when merely trying to be polite has to be politicized.

hardware.

i am now the proud owner of a Seagate 160GB SATA 7200RPM harddrive with an 8MB cache. and my second install of WindowsXP in 4 months. why, do you ask? because on monday, i was playing dungeon siege, and as i closed the game and heard my old harddrive swap out the memory, i heard a clank.

harddrives making clanking noises are Bad Things.

tuesday, i heard some more clanks, and then windows froze.

wednesday, i went out and bought a new harddrive and a sata controller.

well, this machine is just shy of 4 years old, so i guess it's about time for things to start dying. sigh.

in anticipation of a newish machine, it has a new name now. Medea to Iseult to Phaidra and now Aeth. i know, i know, i broke the pattern. Aeth happens to be the name of my protagonist for my nanowrimo project. but hey, it's my machine.

biting my tongue.

"more snow tomorrow," i said. seven fucking inches! eight? who knows. way too much. stupid weather.

if i was a proper blogger, i would have pictures of our winter wonder-freaking-land to post here. obviously, i remain a defective blogger, because i don't. hmf. take it from me, it's white. and cold. really, really cold. you can't take a picture of cold anyway.

oh sure, you can take a picture of the expanses of snow and ice glittering under the pale winter sun, which shines weakly from a dead grey sky, but that really can't convey in any useful manner the absolute bone-chilling temperatures you're suffering as you wait for your stupid digital camera to decide to auto-focus, or the bitterly cold wind that freezes your fingertips and steals your breath away as it pummels your body.

my goodness, that was one hell of a sentence.

the snow is pretty, though.

we have achieved cookies.

chocolate chip, this time.

well, more or less. i don't think it's normal for the cookie to come away, but leave the chocolate chips stuck to the cookie sheet, is it? i'm really not meant to be a baker, i think.

also, more snow tomorrow.

snoo.

it has snowed twice now. this isn't a promising start to *ahem* "meteorological winter."

on the other hand, my search for new sneakers can be put on hold because now i'll be wearing my boots for a while. why do most places carry all of about 2 different walking sneakers, both white? what kind of sense does this make? hmf.

encore.

once again, i did it. no one is more surprised than me.

50,045

happy thanksgiving.

it snowed last night. the last time i remember a white thanksgiving, it rained on christmas. it seems to me there's something ever-so-slightly wrong about that.

i am looking forward to the food, though. mmm...food.

woo.

40,457 words. we're in the single digits now!

that is to say, single digits for the thousands. i suppose i could say down to 4 digits, but it doesn't sound quite as accomplished somehow.

another baking disaster.

it was meant to be peanut butter cookies.

"cookies" might be overstating what the final result was.

this is what happens when i don't get out of the house enough. in better news, i am now one day ahead of schedule for nanowrimo.

ARGH.

i am so fucking pissed. for the second time this week, a goddamned mailserver has lost my stupid password. first it was the one at work. outlook can't check mail anymore. i can't check from the webpage. but for some reason thunderbird is ok. and of course i have my password stored under encryption. so i have no idea what my password is. and, of course, microsoft products are officially required at work, and now i'm going to have all my email in thunderbird. and now my stupid email at home also lost my fucking password. argh. argh. argharghargharghARGH. i fucking hate computers.

and it's november. i'm trying to write fifty thousand words. and i'm so stupid! i have to volunteer tomorrow with the kittens, i have to volunteer all next weekend, the weekend after that is thanksgiving, then we have to go to new york to see mom's family. and then i'm volunteering again on sunday! how could i have been so stupid??

he's home. at least he can call the stupid hosting company.

(*time passes*)

ah. they're having trouble with their email servers. i feel...mollified.

they did.

they did. they really did. Doom: the novel

how the fuck do you write a book based on a movie based on a video game that had no plot? and how much do you get paid to actually let your name be put on the cover?

edit (7:30pm): he downloaded the movie. he described it this way to me: "you know, like, army of darkness, with bruce campbell, how it's so bad, it's good?

this movie doesn't go there. it's just bad."

observation skills.

i have no decorations up. i have no lights on. and yet, people are ringing my doorbell.

geez, no refuge from the sugar-craving hordes nowadays, eh? ;)

happy halloween.

checks and balances.

The withdrawel of Harriet Miers' nomination to the supreme court of the united states has caused consternation in several political circles. it has also caused a lot of blame-slinging, with most people opining that, underneath it all, it was the religious conservatives who defected from their own president and bashed his nominee. the religios conservatives are slinging the blame on themselves, in fact, and crowing about the repercussions of not listening to them.

the problem is, they appear to have forgotten exactly how this country works. harriet miers was not rejected by senators on both sides of the aisle because of her conservative credentials, or lack thereof. she was rejected because she had been nominated to the bench on the highest court in the nation, and she had no experience as a judge. none. zip. she was a lawyer and a politician. she also had no experience in constitutional law. the voice of a single minority, however loud, should not be, and is not under our constitution, enough to swing the direction of our government. the religious right may continue to pat themselves on the back, however, for they are taking the credit for an action that cost them absolutely nothing in terms of effort or finger-lifting.

the other thing the religious right has forgotten is that the constitution of the united states structures our government in a system of checks and balances. neither the executive, legislative, or judicial branches outweigh each other. this is very convenient to forget, because while you can lobby politicians, you cannot lobby judges. the recent accusations of "legislating from the bench" overlook the fact that this is exactly what scotus is supposed to do. the supreme court is explicitly given the power to overturn legislation or executive orders that are unconstitutional, as analyzed by recognized experts in interpretation of said document. the judicial branch, as much as the other two, has the power to shape the legal landscape in this country. it is not to be a rubber stamp for congress and the president. it is to be an independent judiciary.

the moral stance of a minority cannot be allowed to be the guiding principle of this country. personal feelings are not law. the laws of this nation are not based on the establishment of a religion, but based on the rights of the individual. what the conservative christian lobby is doing is both un-american and un-christian. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law." Galatians 5:22-23

(concience compels me to destroy the punchiness of that conclusion by adding that this is not to imply that christians qua christians should not get involved in politics at all, but to point out that that is a guide of conduct for all behaviour)

once more into the breach.

because i'm utterly insane, i am going to do nanowrimo again this year.

yes, you're absolutely correct. i never actually finished the story from last year. i mean, i made it over the 50,000 word mark within the time alotted, but i never actually finished the story. my brain is like that. but what the hell. that doesn't mean i can't write another novel, right? ;)

a review.

Serenity, as reviewed by a non fan(atic).

two weeks ago, a friend called me up and asked if we'd like to go see Serenity with him, as he had no other friends even willing to consider the movie, so otherwise he'd have to go by himself. we said sure.

a little research basically gave me the impression that someone had finally taken gene roddenberry's "wagon train to the stars" idea seriously, as well as bringing to my attention the fact that the reason i had never seen Firefly (the tv series on which the movie was based, for those of you who aren't interested in sci fi either) was because it just happened to air the fall of my wedding. i was having enough trouble trying to delegate wedding organization (so i had to do as little as possible ;) and i can't manage to watch a tv show under normal circumstances, much less those.

so we went to see the movie. and it was good. it was good sci fi, and it contained things sci fi rarely contains nowadays, which is to say a) decent acting, b) the ability to laugh at itself, c) nicely complex characters, and d) a good low-budget grittiness (similar to the first star wars, not to be confused with low-budget cheesiness).

it also had problems. the first being a discordant dialogue. this movie demonstrates the pitfalls of trying to write in dialect. it works if the dialect is kept consistent and does not become distracting. when the actors are demonstrably tripping over the folksy phrases and deliberately ungrammatical delivery, it's a sign you've gone a bit too far. also, maybe mr.whedon will get a larger budget next time so he'll be able to hire a dialect coach and keep his main character's accent from careening wildly between cowboy and irish peasant.

the writing did, however, do a phenomenal job of giving the characters' backstory without having to resort to an exposition dump, for those of us who were taken by our friends and had not gone to see the movie of our own idea. the characters themselves are also really well-developed in the time he had (see earlier point). although while the plot looked cool and glossy up front, it, quite frankly, left some holes you could drive a truck through, as well as breaking continuity with the show (if what my friend told me is true). no spoilers here; if you want to debate, feel free to email me ;)

all in all, it was, in fact, a good movie. good action, complex and sympathetic characters, a sense of humour, edge-of-your-seat tension. better than average :)

sodden.

it's still raining. i haven't seen the sun in 5 days.

i know we were in a drought, but this is a little bit ridiculous.

comfort food.

i don't think there's anything better when you're home alone on a wet, rainy fall evening than a hot cup of earl grey tea and a piece of buttered toast.

happy new year.

l'shanah tovah. 5766 started last night. cool.

happy birthday to me.

another year older and deeper in debt.

;)

the new, healthier office.

it's the 21st century. everyone's worried about obesity. so sitting on the table in the lunchroom is your normal box of donuts. but sitting next to it is a bag of someone's homegrown tomatoes.

the healthier workplace. indeed.

i guess it works.

i turned on blogger's "word verification." now i'm not getting any comments at all *grin*

proof?

if we're looking for evidence of racism in our judicial system, i don't think we have to look any father than L'il Kim's impending incarceration.

L'il Kim, a black rapper, got the proverbial year and a day in an urban lockup for...lying to prosecutors.

Martha Stewart, a white homemaker-turned-businesswoman got 5 months in a minimum security prison camp for...lying to prosecutors.

to his credit, the judge did seem to see the similarities.

He [the judge] also considered how his sentence on "a young, black woman entertainer" would be perceived in the wake of the Martha Stewart perjury trial, which centered on "an older white woman entertainer."

Stewart spent five months in prison and five months home confinement for lying about insider trading. Prosecutors in Jones' case were pushing for 33 to 41 months prison time.

"Do you think I could justify to the newspaper-reading public why [Jones] gets a sentence seven to eight times higher?" Lynch asked prosecutors. He agreed with them, however, that Jones' case was "unquestionably a more serious case" because she perjured herself to protect "people carrying machine guns and shooting at people."

to his further credit, i suppose, the judge did reduce the requested sentence.

black man still looking for a fair trial, i guess.

happy autumn.

happy equinox.

new season. anyone want to help me find a new job while we're at it?

when you have a moment.

dear corporate america,

if you could explain why taking personal calls at work is ok, but checking personal email is "misuse of company resources," i think we'd all be a little more clear on these seemingly-arbitrary restrictions you put up.

no rush, i know it takes a while to think logically when you're out of the habit.

the cost of doing business.

DHL sent us chocolate. that certainly makes an impression ;)

some of us have to get up in the morning.

by the way, if it's illegal to utilize a water balloon slingshot and a bottle of bleach in a defensive manner when someone decides he's going to rev an engine with no muffler at 4am is illegal, IT SHOULDN'T BE.

i feel like shit. exhausted and allergy-ridden.

current reading.

Neuromancer

by William Gibson.

probably followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive (i believe they've been dubbed "the sprawl trilogy"). i haven't read this book for a couple years, and i'm really enjoying it again. it's unique as far as i know among gibson's novels in that it actually follows one protagonist and one plotline all the way through instead of interweaving four or five. while its title of the founder of cyberpunk occasionally has things thrown at it by the various elitists out there ;) it still stands as the seminal work in the genre, i think.

this is getting annoying.

second time now this blog has been spammed. i've heard bad things about blogger, but i never really paid attention to them much.

do i kill the blog, or do i disable anonymous posting? i don't really want to do either, but something has to be done, and i don't like being used for google bombing.

opportunity.

when people talk about helping minorities and people who are the first in their families to go to university, they're thinking, it seems to me, of ethnic communities in cities, not middle-class families in the suburbs. because the suburbs are white, right? or asian, and asians don't need help with school. ha. what asians are is proud. too proud to ask for financial or academic help.

he's just left to go to his first class of his third try at completing university. he's scared all over again. his parents are immigrants and refugees; they would not have gone to university in their home countries, and they only ever completed community college here. they had no idea what it would be like, they had no idea how much it would cost, and they insisted he work while going to school his first time around. and his second time. needless to say, the demands of feeding oneself quickly outweigh an educational goal that is treated as nothing more than optional glorified job training.

but this is, after all, the U.S. of A., and whatever else you may say about it, people here to get as many chances as they can make for themselves.

all my support and love goes with him. third time's a charm, right? :)

information gap.

every once in a while, you hear someone complaining about how the internet has led to "information overload." the usual accusations follow: that it offers people so much choice, they are overwhelmed. paul virilio described the computer as a "window" on the world, changing our concept of the day to a 24-hour one, eliminating night, and therefore rest and sleep.

i am beginning to think that these conclusions are the result of the gap between a generation watching the world change, and a generation experiencing the world change. one is passive, watching as through a window. the other is actively involved, both absorbing the changes and exciting new ones themselves. a tight sub-set of the younger generation is what we used to call "generation y": the group in between gen x and the (*shudder*) "millenials." this is the group that participated in the mainstream rise of the internet, that still remembers when internet chat meant IRC, and who pioneered the use of napster. these are the kids that dropped out of college to make it rich in the dot-coms, or dreamt of doing so. we also remember a nastier internet and tend not to fall for phishing scams or put our cellphone numbers in our IM away messages.

these people do not suffer information overload. we came to it at a mature enough age to be able to filter it, but also to appreciate the potential it offers. we have people on our IM lists from countries all over the world. we follow international news because we are acutely aware that it affects us personally. to be the ignorant, uninformed, britney-spears-consuming american is an anathema. we are not consumers at all, in fact. we are customers, fully cognizant of the concept of comparison shopping, the existence of amazon, edmunds, and pricewatch-type sites, for everything from video game consoles to travel. our music comes from europe, our entertainment comes from japan. we have opinions, and are expected by our peers to be able to discuss reasonably intelligently current events, politics, economics, both foreign and domestic.

the sudden wealth of information available has caused this generation to be, i believe, the most "global" if you will, moreso than the ones before or after it. it is causing a societal shift towards a rational, manageable information addiction (if that's not a contradiction in terms). when your social expectation is to be informed, it's hard to be on information overload.

fast-paced lifestyle.

argh. the last week-and-a-half have been really quite hectic.

it started last wednesday when my mom called me at work to say, "there's...techno tonight at the musikfest. do you want to go?" so we checked out the website. it turned out, the dj doing the house set used to hang out with us. in fact, we remembered when he first decided he was going to be a dj and had all of 4 records. so we went, and we hung out, and we listened to the guy's house set and then a live acid trance show, and we drank beer, and got home at 1am.

thursday was a friend's birthday. so we went out, and we drank beer, and we saw a movie (Wedding Crashers, funny, but about half an hour too long), and got home at 1am.

friday, we went out for dinner with our families because both our little brothers are going off to university for the first time this year.

saturday, i volunteered with 2 really gorgeously cute kittens. that was the first time i was really tempted to take one home with me. so soft, very cute, like a black tabby smoke. awwwwwwwww.

sunday morning, we had to get up at 7am to take my parents and brother to the airport. getting up that early on a weekend ought to be outlawed. the one good thing about it is that i get my mom's car all this week. that evening, we met some friends for dinner, and drank beer, and hung out, but got to bed earlier than 1am. slightly.

monday and tuesday were mostly spent recovering. schedules are all messed up this week. wednesday night, we had friends over for dinner again, and we drank wine, and went to bed at 1am.

yesterday, it mostly all caught up to me. i came home from work and did nothing but play the new Dungeon Siege II demo for about 4 hours. i forsee losing lots of time to it this weekend while he has to work because his boss is on vacation.

gragh.

watching live techno is actually very interesting, despite the apparent contradiction in terms. i probably would have enjoyed it more, however, had it not been acid trance in the same mode as it was when it was hot about ten years ago. since then, dance music has changed somewhat, partly fueled, i think, by the drugs people take while listening to it. the rise in popularity of ecstasy in the quote-unquote rave scene (yes, i know i can just put " around it, but sometimes you want the sound) seemed to have equally given rise to not only music that panders to the effects of the drug, but enhances them. you get the concept of "programming" and "progression." the guy who DJed the house set was actually very good at that. you start off slow, and you mold the energy of the crowd with the music.

old-style acid trance doesn't do that. it's just the same level of energy and sound all the way through. when we were in toronto last easter, we went to hear a goa/acid trance dj. he was spinning fairly new stuff, stuff that had evolved with the scene. it was entirely enjoyable. he had programming. it was fun. i wish some of the other guys could get the hang of that.

assets.

it's funny to think about that when i walk to work i may have absolutely no cash in my wallet, but i'm carrying close to $500 in electronics.

weird.

speaking of assets of a different sort, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff has declared that security trumps privacy, and american citizens will be made safer if they give up ever more personal information to government databases.

"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"

it sounds to me like he's trying a carrot-and-stick approach there, except...i don't see any carrot.

social responsibility.

two sites i find fairly interesting are Petfinder and Local Harvest. the former is a site for shelter groups that's sponsored by purina and bissel and a few other major corporations. it's where we found our cat, and where i found the group i volunteer for.

Local Harvest is another cool site which allows you to find local farms, farmers' markets, or co-ops in your area. maybe it's the fact that i live vicariously in philly's food scene, but one of the main themes that's been coming out in the last few years has been an emphasis on fresh, local food. and i'd rather pay a little more and support my local farmer, who's more likely to use sustainable, humane, if not organic methods, than to give monsanto more money for their ridiculous patents. we already get our eggs from a local poultry farmer, so i thought i'd look around a little. using the site, i found a farmers' market right down the street from my parents which i finally got to visit last saturday. now i have fruit. yum.

i'm all for buying local and adopting a pet who would probably be killed otherwise. maybe a cat from a shelter doesn't have the cachet of a CFA purebred, but now he's got a good home and a healthy, happy life. and so the plums i bought are little spotty and uneven on their skin; i also know they were tree-ripened and not sprayed down with chemicals by underpaid workers, picked early, and loaded onto a ship somewhere. hey, if the oppurtunity to do something that much better for the world is there, i'll take it.

grrr, dammit.

i hate reinstalling windows.

but now my computer is all happily working again. no more missing .dlls, no more crashing explorer when trying to access "My Computer"...

the ipod gave me a scare, though. upon discovering i don't have usb 2.0, i plugged it into firewire and got the folder-with-exclamation-point again. plugging it back into usb caused windows to reboot, but then everything was fine. just slow.

also managed to figure out how to restore a profile in thunderbird. that took longer than it should have.

i think i fogot to back up my warcraft iii saves. bah.

gadgetry.

we have achieved consumer electronics.

new ipod arrived.

computer dentistry.

yesterday, after driving back from new york (and let me tell you, there's nothing to build anticipation like going 85 mph down the upper west side), we attended what is known as a "lan party."

it was actually quite a lot of fun. we spent roughly six hours, minus time for smoking and pizza, playing the freeze tag mod for quake iii, 6-on-6. i aquitted myself respectably, if somewhat without distinction.

however, i was using a different monitor than my own. it happened to have problems. so i did what any computer-savvy person would do. i opened up display properties, clicked on Settings, and then the fabled Advanced button. imagine my absolute shock when a little window popped up that said, "This application failed to start because mscms.dll could not be found." oh joy.

turned the computer back off, unplugged the monitor, swapped with another, plugged that one it, unseated my video card, reseated my video card, rebooted the machine, display properties, settings, advanced. still no mscms.dll.

i have to reinstall windows. it's like when you wake up in the morning and know you have to go to the dentist. it overshadows everything you do.

except it's slightly cheaper.

love/hate.

about 3 weeks ago, we took advantage of the fact that he's going back to school, and bought a powerbook, which came with a "free" ipod mini. since he already had a 30gb ipod, i got the mini.

it was silver.

at first, i was very confused. for one thing, you can't just rip songs from a cd and put them on your ipod. at least, not using itunes. itunes likes to keep them in a "library," which means it stores them all on your harddrive. i don't want music stored on my harddrive, that's what i have an ipod for. alright, so it's only 4 gigs, it's still the principle of the thing. computers, in my mind, are Not For Music. i understand that i am unusual in this, but that's just the way it is. possibly, it's because i don't really listen to music in general. nearly 10 years after receiving my first cd player, i believe my entire collection tops out at something like 30 cds.

we decided to put my music on the server, because he had never ripped my cds anyway, and he's not one to ever turn down more music. so, over the course of a few weeks, i gradually ripped my cd collection and slowly built up the ipod. then, i bought new headphones for it so i could listen to it while i walked to and from work. my ears are too small for the earbuds; they hurt. this is going to be so cool, i thought. now i can listen to music while i walk. i like listening to music when i have to go places in the morning.

i bring the headphones home sunday afternoon, and put them in the ipod. for those of you who don't know, even if the ipod is locked, it will still turn on when it detects headphones.

nothing happened.

i held the pause/play button. nothing happened. i took the ipod upstairs and plugged into my computer's usb port. nothing happened. at this point, i was a little concerned. i plugged the ipod into the ac adapter. ah! it turned on. i plugged it back into my computer. nothing happened. well, maybe windows was being funny; it had also stopped recognizing my digital camera earlier. so we plugged it into the mac's usb. nothing happened. we attempt to reboot it by holding down the menu and select buttons. it turned off. we plugged it back in. it turned on, but still did not recognize the pc nor mac, nor was it recognized by either of them.

we took a break to watch The Simpsons.

then, we had an idea. why not plug it into the firewire port? we plugged it into firewire. success! thinking the firmware might be screwed up, we re-formatted it for mac. then we plugged it into the firewire on my computer. i didn't even know i had firewire until sunday night. i downloaded the newest ipod updater and told it to update my ipod's firmware.

it said, disk write error.

well, shit. then it popped up the folder-with-exclamation-point icon. no apple, no music, just a folder with an exclamation point. i gave in, and actually went to www.apple.com/support. it told me to uninstall the ipod software, uninstall itunes, re-download and install them, and attempt to update the ipod again.

i did. it worked. yay! now all i had to do was copy all my music and podcasts back onto it. so i sat there and copied everything back. at this point, i saw why it wanted to keep all your music on your computer. then i turned off my ipod and went to bed.

this morning, i was supposed to walk to work. having packed my lunch, grabbed an extra t-shirt, found my phone, wallet, and keys, and put my shoes on, i was ready to leave. i clipped my ipod to the strap of my bag, and held down the pause/play button.

nothing happened.

i put the headphones in. nothing happened. he came downstairs and did the same thing. nothing happened. and now i was late for work. so he drove me to work, and we decided we'd take the ipod back to the apple store because the thing was obviously fucked.

we did. i gave them an edited version of this story, concluding with, "i think the firmware just keeps crashing." the young man in the black apple t-shirt looked at it and said, "yep. we'll just replace it." then he came back from the back of the store and told me that there were no more warranty replacement silver ipod minis in stock. would i give them my phone number so they could call me when they got some more?

4 days until my new ipod.

current reading.

Dissolution

by C. J. Sansom

a murder mystery set in a monastery in the political turmoil of tudor england, specifically, shortly after the death of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour. as such, it reminds me to some extent of The Name of the Rose, albeit with less semiotics. and you don't need to speak 5 languages to understand it, although a smattering of medieval latin might come in useful. i'm maybe a third of the way into it right now, and i'm enjoying it thoroughly. well, almost. it's a little slow.

pix.

just updated the flikr site with more pictures from the vacation as well as a couple new ones of the cat. enjoy.

it lives.

my parsley is still alive!

argh.

Harry Potter 5 is too damned long.

yes, i said 5. i got it out of the library monday and just finished it now. i read them as summer fluff reading; i'm not mad enough to go stand in line with a bunch of squishy-minded fan-things at midnight so i can pay an outrageous amount for a book i'm only going to read once.

er. that came out a little vitriolic. what i mean is...i don't take them seriously, so i tend to be a little behind. there. that's better :)

owie.

you don't really realize just how much your fingernails actually protect your fignertips until you lose a couple of them.

and then the stupid band-aids fuck up your typing.

current reading.

The Wee Free Men

by Terry Pratchett.

not precisely a discworld book, but in the same universe, if you will. funny, but in that understated way that i'm beginning to associate with his most recent, and quite frankly more mature, novels. i am enjoying quite a bit.

also, happy bastille day.

free lunch, here i come.

my boss dropped a wad of business cards on my desk yesterday. i have never once, in all my employment history, have been asked, "oh, do you have a card?"

on the other hand, they identify me as a "Software Engineer." which i suppose is better than "Q/A Monkey."

reality check.

i was going to blog about my new ipod, but there are more important things this morning.

it seems the two people i know who work in central london are both alive and unhurt.

i think that's about all there is to say at the moment.

en vacances.

well, not anymore. back at work now, after spending 5 days in upstate NY with my sister and her boyfriend. it was quite a bit of fun. her boyfriend owns a 20-foot fishing boat and took us out on lake ontario for an afternoon. after my sister caught a 12 pound lake trout, i had the oppurtuniy to wrestle in a 15 pound king salmon from 275 feet of line *grin* that was fun. actually, it took all 4 of us to get the damn thing in the boat. it's over there; i'm sure you've noticed it by now. it's still alive in that picture, btw. that's my sister's bf holding it.

blogger image sucks, btw. there are more pictures, but i'll have to post them later. i should probably qualify that: blogger image sucks, where sucks means it breaks in 2 different browsers and can't seem to actually upload any images.

anyway. sunday, we went down to lake seneca, one of the finger lakes out there, and trolled through some of the wineries down there. unfortunately, it seems most people in NY like sweet wine. if one more person proffers a "dry" riesling with 1.5% residual sugar, i think i'm going to break it over their head o:) although not dry, some of them were still very nice, and we bought a bottle for the next time we go out for good asian food. we also bought a miraculous cabernet sauvignon, and tasted many, many other wines and beers. thank fuck one of the wineries has a restaurant. popcorn and little crackers only go so far to tamp down tastings of 10-15 wines.

the cat seemed to miss us quite a bit, and even went so far as to curl up and sleep next to my face for several hours last night. aww. poor lonely kitty. and now back to the daily grind.

inconsequential roundup.

yesterday was his birthay. happy birthday!

hot. humid. freaking summer. i haven't seen the heron in a while; i wonder if it's as disaffected with 90+F heat and mosquitoes as the rest of us. the heat killed off my herb garden. bah. i was looking forward to fresh rosemary too. we need rain.

going on vacation tomorrow through monday. upstate new york to see my sister. yay vacation! although it still looks as if i'm not going to get to the beach this year.

i need more books to read.

usa today has an interesting article on their website today, containing man-on-the-street type interviews about what it means to be patriotic, or how americans express our patriotism. i am struck by the fact that the first category it opens with is "Activists/critics" and never once includes the "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude in the whole column. unfortuantely, there's a lack of analysis to the comments. a single sentence from a professor of sociology is not going to do much to deflect anyone who wants to make an accusation of the liberal media conspiracy.

the intersting thing that often gets lost in debate is that the person who burns the stars and stripes can be just as "patriotic" as the person who plasters their house with them. the freedom of speech that is so enshrined in our constitution allows for both. if you can't have one, you can't have the other. when people say "the terrorists" hate us for our freedoms and our ideology, i have a hard time imagining a group of bearded islamists sitting around in a cave cursing the first ammendment. they don't hate us because we allow our citizens to criticize the government; they're engaged in the exact same activity. what they are are religious fanatics who want to wipe us off the planet because we do horrible things like let women drive and work and own property. and we don't allow men to beat their wives or children or hold people in involuntary domestic servitude. they're religious fanatics, and if they're going to rant about anything in the first ammendment, it will be the "no law abridging the freedom of religion" bit, not speech and the press.

i will say that i am, in fact, incredibly grateful to be living in this country, and able to take advantages of such simple things as an uncensored blog, uncoerced voting, and a life relationship with someone of another race. these are the simple choices we are defending, based on principles, if not always practises, that this country has always clung to. somehow, somewhere, the amazing concept behind the rallying cry of the revolution, "no taxation without representation," has been lost.

i do "support our troops," because i think one of the worst things you can do to someone who has already borne the physical pain of war is to reject them at home for decisions that were not theirs. if we haven't learned anything else from vietnam, we've learned not to spit on the people that were sent overseas to dodge shrapnel and hold dying children.

ok, so maybe this post didn't end up quite so full of inconsequentials :) happy independence day.

supreme court states the bloody obvious.

pause, for a minute, your obsessive clicking on any and all major media news sites. consider this (warning: pdf).

what that actually says is what everyone ought to know: 1. it is illegal to download copyrighted material for free without the copyright holder's permission. 2. it is illegal to create a "device" that has both infringing and non-infringing uses and then to promote it, specifically emphasizing the infringing uses (i.e. the betamax decision is still 100% safe).

the main key that i see in that decision is that napster was ruled illegal and SCOTUS saw kazaa and grokster promoting themselves as napter replacements, therefore explicitly claiming to enable the same copyright infringement that got napster smacked down.

also, don't forget that all this decision does is throw the case back to the 9th circuit, who ruled in favor of grokster and sharman networks in the first place. this ought to be fun.

i'd like to help you son

but you're too poor to vote.

this is how zimbabwe should have done it.

finally, someone's saying it.

gragh. this was supposed to be monday's post. anyway.

finally, someone has come up and pointed out that identity theft exists because there's a whole industry that depends on the same things that make it possible.

Why isn't this brutally simple and effective solution more widespread? Simply put, it disrupts the free flow of credit information on which consumer lenders and data sellers depend.

To be fair, big banks and other credit-card issuers, retailers and data peddlers aren't the only ones who thrive on the ready accessibility of information. You benefit too: It's never been easier to get a credit card, find a mortgage or buy a car. ...

This is what no one acknowledges about identity theft: that there's a conflict of interest between the consumer and the system.

the middle class in this country is drowning in debt, partly because of easily available credit. as he rightly points out, it has never been easier to get a credit card. my question is, however, is this a benefit? how many people use credit cards to live beyond their means? and then the banks make even more money by charging their exorbitant interest rates and fees and so on.

another article offers this viewpoint:

In Utah, a credit-freeze bill was defeated on the last day of the legislative session after car dealers argued it would hurt their business, says Laura Polacheck, associate state director of AARP Utah, which lobbied in favor of the bill.

The car dealers "said 90% of their customers decide to buy a car and want to open credit the same day," she says. "It was enough to kill the bill."

now, my question is, who wakes up one morning and says, "i'm going to finance a car today"? usually, spending upwards of $20,000 isn't exactly an impulse buy. so you know you need a new car, and you give yourself the 3 days to unfreeze your credit report so you can finance that car. yes, i know there are always exceptions to the person who can wait 3 days before buying a car, but is that enough to scuttle a bill that would protect the majority of the population from identity theft?

i am 100% in the camp that says that companies ought to notify you if your information has been compromised. i check my credit card balances online. why, when i went to the websites last night, there was no "by the way, the CardSystems database did/did not include your account"? how hard is it to add that to a website?

everyone, but especially the financial industry, needs to sit up and take responsibility for what their eagerness to turn a buck is doing to this country. once your identity is stolen, you're fucked. it's so easy to get credit because our credit reports are so easily accessed, but it's next to impossible to protect against not only the possible abuses of that system, but also to resurrect one's standing once the abuse is perpetrated. not only do we need to allow credit freezes, but we need to make it easier to clear the customer's name once fraud takes place. if an industry is going to build its business model on something so blatantly abusive to its customers, then they wholly deserve to be forced to curb those abuses.

hell freezes over.

and maybe pigs are flying too.

Powers to gather information on the books people buy in US bookshops and rent from libraries should be repealed, the House of Representatives has said.

the republican-controlled congress standing up for civil liberties?

"We can fight terrorism without undermining basic constitutional rights," said Bernie Sanders, an independent representative from the north-eastern state of Vermont, who proposed the measure.

*cough* gee, ya think? as a side note, i'm quite frankly shocked to see that an independent managed to make a change to the patriot act, but i suppose i shouldn't be, because he probably gave it a better shot than if it had been proposed by a democrat.

my goodness. just when we thought things were hopeless, we get some hope. everyone, start writing your senators.

frustration.

i started this blog with one major goal in mind: to force myself to find something worth saying every day.

there were roughly two major, though intertwined, purposes behind this. the first was a desire to form a habit of critical and/or creative thinking. since i've graduated from university, i have felt, to some extent, mentally stagnant. with no outside pressure forcing me to think and read and research, i left those habits behind. so instead of "form a habit of," i should probably say, "get back into the habit of."

it was, if i am being perfectly honest with myself, slightly motivated by jealousy. as may be fairly obvious by now, i read a lot of webcomics. and i found myself thinking, well, if they can force themselves to do something creative every day (or every other day), surely i could too. i didn't even insist to myself that it be creative, just that it would be something worth saying. some thoughtful, critical commentary, maybe, on some news event. interspersed with the occasional neat image or wordplay that i tend to come up with on a regular basis. and possibly the occasional dream (i suppose i can at least be proud that that helped to spawn the dreamdump). but the main goal was to make this a daily thing. to exercise my mind at least once a day. just something maybe small and superficial, but something. the long view looked towards eventually being able to serialize a creative work. it would be, i thought, theraputic.

which brings up the second purpose: to stave off depression. although diagnosed while in university, i was lucky enough to come across a therapist who would allow me to insist that i not take drugs for it. i'm doing much better now than i was back then, but it's always there, as if i'm walked along a slippery riverbank, always a step or two away from sliding into a flood of hopelessness, lonliness, apathy, self-destruction. i've found that if i can keep myself busy, if i can keep my mind active and not let it chew itself up in idleness, my path takes me a little further away, maybe, from the slippery rocks (it's my blog, i can extend a metaphor if i want to). hence my voracious reading. i'm always looking for new books. also, why i walk to work, in everything from a sleetstorm to the oppressive heat. and why i started this blog.

and now, as is the way of things, it appears i've pretty much failed. not only am i forced to deal with the frustration of losing my office, but also i have to face the fact that i can't, apparently, get myself into the habit of finding something worth saying once a day. that which was supposed to alleviate my hopelessness is instead feeding it. it's very frustrating.

man is a political animal.

i'm not sure i should even be writing about this and its ensuing controversy (?), because i am not a webcomic artist, i am merely a passive consumer of them. on the other hand, i'm pretty much guaranteed that no one with any real stake in the matter (emotional, financial, or otherwise) will ever
read this, so that's ok ;)

*shrug* and i like penny arcade (as well as goats). i respect that webcomic artists need to make money off their art, because they, like everyone else, need to eat and pay for housing and feed their families. and while i can't pay probably as much as they would like, i am the proud owner of a plushy bun-bun and two volumes of the megatokyo manga, and i also once sent a handwritten cheque to penny arcade because i don't believe in paypal, but i don't hold against them the fact that i never got my subscription to Over Easy (ok, so maybe i'm not a passive consumer). webcomic artists are, in many cases, lucky enough to be in the position where they can make money doing what they love. i completely respect those that open up stores or provide extra content to those who can donate on a regular basis.

but i think these guys succeed because they're writing good comics. they're funny, they're well-written, in many, many cases the art is amazing. just because my silly little blog isn't boingboing or time magazine, i'm not going to go sobbing about some evil media conglomerate The Man keeping me down. sure, everyone wants to hit the big time, and while people even say i have talent, and i'm a good writer and researcher, and so forth, i'm not so wrapped up in my own dreams of fame and fortune that i'm going to do anything but say, "thank you" and send my friends some cyber-snuggles (er. or something. i'm not really the snuggling type:) sure the web is a fairly new and different entertainment and information dissemination medium, and sure it's a heck of a lot more democratic than the "traditional" forms previously, but just because you have something on the web doesn't mean it's amazing and is only being kept down because of who you are (or aren't, as the case may be), and where your content is being published.

i guess what all this rambling is bringing me to is that i don't really believe all the hype about the web being this awesome brave new world. i recognize the extremely strong democratic and meritocratic underpinnings and reward system, but when you get down to it, it's the people who have money to advertise, the people who are already People Who Know People who succeed. i probably would have never read, for instance, megatokyo if they hadn't bought ad space on penny arcade. but if you suck, you're still going to suck on the web. maybe writing or comicking or music or whatever just isn't your Thing, as much as you may love it, as much as you may want to succeed at it.

i was just going to ask if there wasn't something better to do than navel-gazing, but then i remembered i'm writing on a blog. even if it is a blog that encourages commentary ;)

i don't know, maybe my ego just isn't big enough. i lack the self-aggrandizement gene. but i think maybe i'll go support the creators of a funny and wonderfully well-done comic by buying some of their stuff.

overkill.

i don't believe this. i mean, yes, ok, meth is a very dangerous drug, both to consume and to make. i'm not really against meth labs being shut down. but you are going to have to sign a log to buy decongestants? and we need the federal government to dictate this? i'm really just shocked.

personally, i need to be able to buy pseudoephedrine. an antihistamine alone will not cut it during bad allergy attacks, or the flu. and i don't like using the nasal sprays, for a number of reasons. besides rebound congestion, they end up dripping down the back of your throat and getting swallowed, which more or less is counterproductive to the "why treat the whole body when only part has symptoms" philosophy.

i guess this is just one more depressing symptom of the legal state in this country slowly descending to an assumption of guilt. you're a criminal the moment you're born, and the burden of proof is on you to say that you're not.

told you so.

reason #548 to never use UPS.

summer's coming.

saw the first fireflies last night.

current reading.

Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

having purchased Sunshine, and seeing a certain subtext in it, i went back and bought the second of McKinley's re-telling's of Beauty and the Beast. i haven't read the first, so i may be missing something, but this one is still a good story. though an earlier effort, it's hard not to be a fan of McKinley's flawed-yet-tolerating-no-bullshit heroines (i'm also a fan of The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, although less so of her Maid Marian in the Robin Hood re-telling she did).

also, happy memorial day.

so trendy.

even the government is getting in on this RSS thing. what's next? meteorologists podcasting?

please note: in the unlikely event that this does actually happen, i pre-emptively abdicate any and all responsibility.

also, it is extremely hard to type with a cat leaning on my arms.

tempted.

i'm not really much of a baker, but when i saw a recipe for caffeinated spice cake, i just had to try it. i am now splattered with batter.

somehow, i don't think either of those facts surprises anyone.

one advantage of having my own kitchen is that now i don't have to fight with anyone over who gets to lick the beaters ;)

there goes the weekend...

saturday afternoon after my volunteering, i got a call informing me that my grandmother went in to the hospital friday night. it appears it's nothing serious, but they keep doing various tests and she can't go home. so we went to visit her saturday afternoon, and now we're waiting for the results of her MRI so we can take her home today. my parents were out of town, so on top of being in the hospital for four hours, i was fielding frantic calls from various family members. and i still am, attempting to keep everyone up to date.

and somehow, we have to work in grocery shopping in here today or we have no food for next week. something tells me this may get hectic.

the best laid plans...

we did go see star wars after all, last night.

the cop who pulled us over for speeding even gave us a break because we said we were late for the movie.

it's friday night.

i am not going to see the new star wars.

stay tuned, faithful readers.

spring is in the air.

and apparently positively teeming with wildlife. i saw the heron again this morning, as well as several families of canada geese with their goslings.

also, we now have a company pet. one of the guys here was befriended by an adolescent squirrel which now lives in the warehouse out back and consents to be petted and climb around on most of us.

i have so far declined the honour.

global effects.

as if nigerian spam with hacked up english wasn't bad enough, i am now one of the many people getting german spam. reports say that the spam directs you to websites for "nationalist"/right-wing german political parties and neo-nazi websites. they seem to have the usual gripe, complaining about foreigners taking away jobs and spoiling the quality of living, and so forth.

however, one of the more interesting things i found was that if you send the der spiegel article through the babelfish, one of the subjects comes up as "Policy on Foreigners." this is really interestingly close to hitler's "Policy on the Jews." something tells me this is not a coincidence.

of course, the main problem with this spam is that it seems to be largely hitting english-speakers, who are looking at it, complaining about garbage, and deleting it. probably not the desired effect of the people who took the time to not only set up the websites, but also write a series of worms to distribute them. on the other hand, they're not being ignored, either, just ridiculed. i wonder which is worse?

wasteland.

last friday, we were thinking about going out, and of course the suggestion, "wanna go see a movie?" came up. i went to 3 or 4 different sites and after reading synopses and brief reviews, i solved the mystery of the disappearing box office receipts: THERE ARE NO GOOD FILMS OUT THERE.

with the possible exception of "Crash," but not everyone wants to see a serious film on friday night.

Rick McCallum, producer of the new Star Wars trilogy, thinks that Hollywood may have dug its own hole by over-hyping movies that haven't delivered.

"They've learned how to market and advertise movies so they can make $100 million," he says. "But audiences are getting wise to that. The only way you're going to be profitable is by improving the product and making good films."

gee, ya think?

missed oppurtunities.

while i was walking to work today, i saw a great blue heron in the perkiomen creek. i know what you're thinking: in perkasie?? yes. in perkasie. i really wanted to stop take a picture of it with my phone, but i was late for work already. in addition, we can't find the bluetooth dongle that will let me transfer pictures from my phone onto the computer anyway >_<

also, i left my keys at home today, so i was locked out. thanks to g, who came over and kept me company in my flakiness :)

fuzzy.

it's hard to work up the energy to make a long, insightful post about corporations, "digital identity," privacy and the destruction thereof, and free speech when you have a cat sitting on your lap nuzzling you sleepily.

my cat is sabotaging my blog! but he's so cute.

mmm...fat.

on the advice of the originally intended recipient, i'm going to be lazy and post this here:

Wizgeneric's Quick Guide to Cooking with Fat:

Fat is a requirement for all cooking. Not only can it add flavour of
its own, it also acts as a flavour transporter for the other
ingredients in the dish and helps them to blend.

1. Butter - milkfat. 100c/T
pro: tastes great. adds a creaminess to dishes other fats can't. adds a fluffiness to baked goods. less calories than other fats.
con: cholesterol and saturated fat. low smoke point, burns easily.
best for: eggs, potatoes, anything milk-based, baking, vegetables.

2. Extra Virgin Olive Oil - the first pressing from the olives. 120c/T
pro: tastes great, high in "good fats."
con: expensive, low smoke point.
tip: for frying in european dishes, and when flavour really matters, combine olive oil with butter. the flavour is phenomenal, and the olive oil will keep the butter from burning.
best for: tomato sauce, pan-fried chicken, potatoes (with butter), finishing steamed vegetables, cold in dressings.

3. Virgin Olive Oil - early pressings, but not the first. 120c/T
pro: still good flavour, high in "good fats," cheaper than extra virgin.
con: still retains low smoke point, not as rich flavour as extra virgin.

4. "Light" Olive Oil - later to last pressings. 120c/T
pro: cheap, high smoke point compared to other olive oils, still retains the "good fat" benefits of olive oil, essentially flavourless.
con: won't give you the flavour of the higher quality pressings.
best for: frying, stir frying, baking, anywhere you want a healthy oil without the flavour of ripe olives.

5. Canola Oil - also called Rapeseed. 120c/T
pro: nearly flavourless, cheap, high smoke point.
con: not entirely flavourless.
best for: deep frying, industrial uses. i personally don't use it at all, but it's used all up and down in restaurants and packaged foods.

6. Sesame Oil - pressed from roasted sesame seeds. 120c/T
pro: great flavour, a must for asian cooking
con: expensive! difficult to handle, low smoke point.
tip: add it in the beginning of stir fry to get it fully heated before adding the vegetables. sesame oil has a weird temperature range where it tastes burnt, but heated above that, it just gets nice and nutty. because it is so expensive, i usually do 2 parts light olive oil or peanut oil to 1 part sesame oil
best for: asian cooking or dressings.

7. Clarified Butter - aka ghee. ?c/T
pro: good flavour.
con: either expensive or labour intensive
best for: a must for authentic indian cooking. also really, really good for baking if you're feeling indulgent.

8. Other "vegetable oils" - corn, sunflower, safflower, soybean. 120c/T
pro: cheap and flavourless, really high smoke points. sunflower is getting attention for the same "good fats" in olive oil.
con: flavourless, most lacking of the "good fats" in olive oil.
best for: deep frying at temps over 400F. corn oil is traditional for latin american and caribbean cooking.

9. Margarine/shortening - solidified vegetable oil. 120c/T
pro: cheaper than butter, essentially flavourless.
con: trans fats!!
best for: well, given the research about trans fat recently, i'm not sure it should ever be used. no one's come out with a shortening vs. lard comparison, so i still use it for pie crusts and biscuits...any shortbread. some companies are coming out with trans-fat-free versions, which i have yet to try, but are probably healthier than lard.

10. Lard - pork fat. ?c/T
pro: adds an incomparable flakiness to pastries, shortbreads, and pie crusts.
con: saturated fats, cholesterol. personally, not a fan of the flavour.
best for: traditional pastries or pies.
tip: if i'm going to cook with pig fat, i'd rather choose a recipe that has bacon or sausage in it and just render the fat out of that.


11. Schmaltz - chicken fat ?c/T
pro: cheap, easily accessable.
con: saturated fats, cholesterol,limited use.
best for: traditional eastern european cooking, especially jewish.

12. Peanut Oil - 120c/T
pro: also good for asian cooking, cheap, high smoke point.
con: some people are allergic to it, not as much flavour
best for: deep frying, asian stir fries, combine with sesame oil.

13. Gourmet Nut oils - walnut, pecan, etc. 120c/T
pro: high in good fats, tend to retain flavour of nuts.
con: severly expensive, very low smoke points
best for: dressings. finishing steamed vegetables. don't even bother heating these.

current reading.

Eight Plays

by Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth, Night of the Iguana.

this ought to keep me occupied for a while. and no, i haven't finished The Silmarillion yet. i'm stuck somewhere in chapter XVIII: Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin.

unrealized potential.

while we were driving down to manayunk the other night for a hair appointment, we were listening to a podcast on his ipod from some guy in london who apparently had a fondness for bootlegs and red wine.

he spent several minutes between each song wittering on (his own word, in fact) about something or other which had caught his attention. in particular, the last song in his set sent him off about "the lonliness and ennui of the city." he was talking about the phenomenon of living in a major city, and yet feeling bored, lonely, and alienated.

what was interesting there was that he brought in a newspaper article he had read about the so-called "paralysis of possibility." he presented it as the unexplainable urge for people to not go out, not meet someone new, not see something new (and in a city like london, the article said, you could do something new every night), but to just come home and "sit in their little boxes."

i found it interesting that he stopped there. i'm not sure if he was just drunk or tired, or if it was a case of muddying the water to appear deep, but he just stopped with that essential indictment. i suppose it's also possible that the article stopped there too. but, from what i've read, most analyses of the situation continue, pointing out that the more we give people choice, the more they get afraid and/or overwhelmed. when you could go out and see something new every night, that very possibility overwhelms you with its enormity. it becomes easier and safer to not do anything, than to try to make the decision about what you're going to do and what you're going to miss.

i see it in my own life. it's much easier and safer for me to keep this job that i hate, that i very often describe as "soul-destroyingly boring," than to take that step to find a new job. my current one pays the bills. it's convenient. i can walk to it, which is sort of important when we only have one car. it's too easy to look at any other job and say, "well, it will be just as boring." or "i don't have a car, i can't get to it anyway." or "what if i have to take a major pay cut?" and so i don't use my education, i don't do what i love, because the status quo is easier. and less threatening. it's not that i'm bad at what i do, it's just that it's fairly obvious that my talents lie elsewhere and are essentially being squandered.

i wonder what society would be like if people were given the oppurtunity to use themselves to their fullest potential? no matter how much we talk about it, it's not something we're really interested in. it's much cheaper to pay someone to do something they hate, than to give them a fair salary for something they're good at. if your talent or passion tends towards something society has deemed superfluous or unworthy, then you're equally screwed. but i have to think, what if? what if we really rewarded (for instance) teachers for teaching and artists for art? what would we become?

woohoo.

mmf. it's been a hectic week. no posting from work makes blog get lonely.

but they gave me more RAM yesterday! w00t! now windows has progressed from "painful" to "almost usable." ;)

failure.

it's very strange. since i've been out of university, i've been plagued with creative impulses. however, i can't finish any of them, with the exception of those with a culinary bent. you'd think someone for whom NaNoWriMo was shockingly effortless would be able to follow up a creative impulse now and then, but my nano is languishing at about 57,000 words, nearly the same place it was december 1.

i get fits and starts, a character, a setting, the inkling of a plot and then...nothing. it withers, or tails off, or i get frustrated and depressed and become convinced i'm writing nothing but adolescent trash. it's almost as though i need a deadline to be able to write. i know my best papers were written in that delicious state of panic where you know you've got less than 12 hours left before class (10pm-4am was about ideal). when i was under the "50,000 words in 30 days" deadline, the words flowed. after that passed, there has been nothing. setting deadlines for myself doesn't work either; i wanted to have the novel done by the new year. ha. fat lot of good that did me. even promising it to people didn't help (and if you're reading this, i am sorry >_< it's just as frustrating to me).

and then, you know, i end up hanging out in the sf/f section of barnes&noble and i look at the crap on the shelves and i think, "fuck. if they can get published, i should be a shoo-in." you know, assuming i ever do actually finish anything. i don't think publishers take manuscripts with big chunks of the story missing. every now and then i want to give up and say, well, if i never finish anything, it's probably not worth attempting in the first place. but the ideas still come. how? why? someone get me a psychiatrist, seriously. this is getting ridiculous.

i have motivation insofar as i have frustration. but i've lost inspiration. banging your head on your desk only gets you so far. it's not so much angst as it is just straight anger. i don't really do angst. but i do get angry. and there are very few things that make me as angry as when i look at something i've failed.

oh, the horror.

i lost my office, so i can't blog from work anymore. i'm not sure what this is going to do to my update schedule, as i tend to have less energy when i come home from work.

stay tuned, faithful readers.

corporations.

grrr. so i get a thingy in the mail yesterday titled "Important Changes to Your Credit Card Account." already i'm apprehensive. the changes are:

1) the interest rate is going from 9.99% to 24.99%. this wouldn't normally affect me as i pay off my balances in full with each payment. but it gets better.

2) the due date is going to be changing. it may now be only 20 days after your closing date. which means even less days between when the statement is actually delivered and when your money is due.

so first the up the default rate, and then they make it easier to, oh shit, NOT GET YOUR PAYMENT IN ON TIME. the best part?

We made these non-APR changes to your account primarily due to a change in our business practices.

oh, i see. so you're not actually making enouch money by ripping people off to begin with, you have to make it harder to avoid interest and finance charges. granted, it says "non-APR" because you can write them and reject the change to your APR, but then of course, they might decide to close your account.

i understand credit cards are a necessity of life nowadays. it's not practical to carry all the money i need as cash on me all the time. but, seriously. is it in your best interests to fuck your customers? oh, of course it is. you'll make more money that way. except...we have a discover card, and not only do they give us cash back, but they credit the payment by the postmark, instead of whenever they get off their lazy asses and decide to notice our cheque cleared.

well, fuck you, MBNA. anyone know a better visa/mastercard issuer?

i was right.

it was a busy weekend. oy.

happy passover.

the calm before the storm.

literally. we're supposed to get rain all weekend.

also figuratively. it's a boring friday at work. we're now on the sixth revision of a spec that has never even been close to working. which essentially translates to continued inaction. and even my meeting was cancelled. but i've got 15 million things to do this weekend to make up for it. argh. i wish i could just go home now and not sit here for another two hours. maybe i'll give in and have another half of a cinnamon bun.

media frenzy.

i've come to the conclusion, recently, that the media frenzy surrounding the recent developments in the roman catholic church has two basic causes:

one, people just get a kick out of saying "pope." for example, see goats.com "Congratulations, Pope!". or how a friend of mine insisted, "The new pope will be made entirely of poponium." it ought to be a drinking game. every time the newscaster says "pope", take a drink. if s/he says "popemobile" just go ahead and pass out ;)

two, the funeral and election process are full of these elaborate medieval-esque trappings which we don't understand, but are intrigued by because they're so elaborate. the pomp and colour and solemnity of the whole process is fascinating because it's so alien. they keep saying there are 1 billion catholics in the world, but that means there's another 5 billion who have very little idea of what's going on. i don't think i've spent more time at the catholic encyclopedia than i have recently. although that's possibly not the best source, because the text online is (c) 1917, and therefore pre-WWII, pre-VaticanII, and it ignores all protestantism except for the C of E, the Lutherans, and the Presbyterians. but since i don't have a catholic theologian handy, it's the best i can do.

seeing as the newly-selected benedict XVI is 78, maybe there won't be such a frenzy next time around because we'll all still remember it.

good intentions.

what a gorgeous spring morning, i thought to myself, just before a gnat flew into my mouth.

volunteer.

i am now a volunteer adoption-type person for Stray Cat Blues. we got our cat from a shelter, and really, you can't help feeling sorry for the animals that end up at these places. and i don't have to worry about getting attached to one and taking it home, because our cat doesn't like other cats! ;) so it'll be just me and a cat in a pet store for four hours one saturday afternoon a month. when you sit down to think about, four hours a month is hardly going to have a major effect on any schedule, and i like cats, and they just opened a new adoption center in a pet store about 10 minutes from my house, so it was hard justifying not volunteering.

however, i forsee a jump in my activity at the local library.

slowly...slowly...

ever so freaking slowly, the discipline known as "classics" is moving away from its crippling attachment to the 19th century. the discovery of a way to read previously unreadable papyri found in egypt is exciting, not only for the content they contain, but also because it will introduce a whole new series of texts for which there is no 19th century baggage.

this may be a pet peeve of mine. one thing that so infuriated me as a classics student was its desperate insistence on retaining the narrow-minded attitudes of the victorian scholars. while it is true that we do owe quite a lot to them, to their studies and archaeology and translation, they have also crippled the discipline by essentially being too influential. where in literature and art, for instance, critical techniques have progressed and idealogies such as feminism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism have been allowed to add their own level of interpretation, the concept of a "feminist classics scholar" (for instance) would still strike many in the field as an oxymoron (women in 19th c england weren't even allowed to learn greek). many classics scholars still have problems with the idea of "context," for example, and venerate the unfortunate gentleman whose life work was a book on greek particles, which are one-syllable words that are not even translated.

the chance to get new translations of new texts, as opposed to a new translation of oedipus rex/oidapos tyrannos is extremely exciting to me as a somewhat lapsed 21st century classics scholar. the classics offer so much knowledge on where we came from as the western civilization that their decline in popularity is nothing short of tragic. we need to shed the idealogical restrictions surrounding the discipline and make it accessable to everyone. the classics informed who knows how much of western art that followed. why study shakespeare when you can't understand the allusions he's making? no wonder people have no desire to learn these things anymore; they're seen as remote, confusing, and utterly irrelevent to modern life. the misconception of these artists as "dead white men" has more to do with the narrow-minded men who are attmepting to preserve their dominance over the art and knowledge than it actually does to the original sources themselves. classics are not all the high-minded (and boring) sentiments of aeschylus; they are the obscene poems of ovid, the fart jokes of aristophanes, the anger and passion of euripides. oedipus rex is all the fault of a 19th c theoretician named sigmund freud. euripides' bacchae is not only more interesting, with more complex characters, but it also offers us today an amazing parallel in the chorus's desperate fear of "unbridled female sexuality." in this amazing period of cultural self-discovery, it depresses me to see people turn their back on the very things that can help them see where they came from.

postscript: as an aside, it is absolutely amazing to see what egypt, of all places, has done for the study of the classical world. something like 90% of our extant sappho library is the result of papyri that had been ripped into strips and used to line a sarcophagus. these papyri came from a trash dump. when the library at alexandria burned, countless manuscripts were lost. personal idealogical considerations aside, it's exciting merely as a scholar and an academic to see these lost works come to light again.

taking down the pose.

one thing that everyone noticed howard dean for was his lack of political posturing. uniquely, he said what he meant, and he meant what he said. whether you admired him for it or felt that he just had no idea how to conduct himself is something else entirely :)

i'm relieved to see that he's doing it again. he's cutting through the rhetoric and the pose, and he's quite frankly saying what needs to be said.

"We need to be a national party, we need a national message, and we need to understand why people in dire economic straits — people who certainly aren't being helped by Republican policies — why they vote for George Bush," he said. "We need to respect voters in red states who want to vote for us, but we make it hard for them by not listening to what they have to say."

yes. thank you. when the map of the country has the coasts blue and the rest of the place red, you've got something wrong with your message. john kerry avoided states where he supposedly had no chance of winning. so why would people vote for him anyway? howard dean is going to those states, giving them money, saying, "we want to work with you." he's not going to roll over and cry when he hears the word "values."

shit. maybe there is a chance after all ;)

always the way.

the spring after i move, a whale shows up in the delaware river. he's been spotted, among other places, right near the apartment complex where we used to live. hmf.

mmm. logic.

southeastern PA is under a "Red Flag Warning" today for a high risk of fire. so i've been poking around the web doing a little research.

in the process, i discovered this map. for some reason, it is extremely amusing to me to read the key and see the order they put fire risk in.

Low
Moderate
High
Very High
Extreme
Water

yes, that says water. perhaps they were thinking of this bit of history?

i have to admit...

i'm liking this whole "sunlight" thing. the warmth isn't bad either.

i could do without the allergies, though.

background information.

i was having a conversation with a co-worker this morning who shoots competitively in marksman contests. we were talking about video games and first person shooters, specifically. he said, well, he didn't really think people should play those kinds of games because, you know, all the school shootings. he has 3 sons, the eldest of which is in his second year in university.

i said, look. your sons know how to shoot a gun. they know how to hold it, how to aim it, how to handle it. they've seen you set an example by shooting a rifle for sport.

all i know how to do is click a mouse.

whether or not video games encourage violent behavior is something i'm going to leave up to the psychiatrists. anyone who's played a game knows it certainly has psychologic and physical effects, including adrenaline rushes, rapid heartrate and breathing, and so forth. but for any kid who has picked up a gun and shot someone, there was someone else who had a gun, who taught that kid how to use it, and who introduced the kid to that culture.

i'm not against gun ownership. i believe they knew what they were doing when they wrote the second ammendment because history has shown that one of the best ways to control a population is to criminalize weapons ownership. but we need to sit up and ask what's going on that high school kids take a gun and go shoot up a school, or that people want to own assault weapons that frankly have no other purpose than to kill a fair amount of people in a short amount of time. no one's going to take an AK-47 deer hunting. you're not going to need it for self defense, either. but don't blame videogames when you've got a loaded gun in an unlocked cabinet, and you've taught your kid how to use it.

oh my.

headline of the day: CNN.com - Secret Service protects expectant duck - Apr 8, 2005

i don't know whether to be enthralled with the cuteness of the whole thing, or to be appalled at what my tax dollars are paying for.

i guess i ought to just be grateful for the bush administration engaging in environmental protection for once ;)

what do we pay these people for?

comcast was down for 6 hours yesterday. blerg.

and yet they're still better than verizon. anyone's better than verizon.

progress.

it amuses me that the second most important headline this week is the postponement of prince charles's second wedding. it's worse than celebrities. there have been opinion polls about whether he ought to marry her or not. it's a delicious story/scandal everywhere.

why? is it just because he's a prince? nah. it's because we're watching, played out in the exquisite manners of upper class england, the oldest of revenge dramas: competition at its most raw, most base level. diana, the publicly scorned, jealous, beautiful wife who died in a sordid car crash in paris. camilla, who met charles first, whose husband gave up the field to the prince. and in the end, she won. literally.

this columnist said it very succnintly:

Camilla has got the last laugh. She's got her man. She's nabbed the future King of England. She may yet be Queen.

the reason i think we're so fascinated is because this is the couple we all want to be. they both defeated, not their social rivals, but their sexual rivals. theirs will not be a romantic, fairy tale wedding, as his first was. it will be more subdued, a mere recogniction of a fait accompli. their wedding on saturday is not going to be a celebration of love, but a celebration of victory.

omg!!!

the sky is blue!! and there's a big freaky yellow glowy thing in it! run away!

unintended consequences.

i've stayed quiet on the debate, making the decision not to shoot my mouth off until it was over.

the case of terry schiavo and her family has become, to me, in the words of one woman, an example of "everything that's wrong with this country," and even more so, everything that's wrong with politicized religion.

of all the things that happened in this media circus, this was the saddest to me:

Despite the Schindlers' requests that people spend Easter at home with their families, demonstrators showed up outside the hospice Sunday. Their son, Bobby Schindler, asked protesters to stop volunteering to be arrested.

people feel that making a statement that no one wants to be made is more important than spending a holiday with their families. they're knocking down their own support. how can they stand there and talk about life and family when they've abandoned their own?

as far as any other claims to christianity go, this about covers it:

"The courts didn't ask Michael Schiavo, 'What do you want to do to Terri?' They asked him, 'What do you think Terri would want you to do?"' said University of Florida research associate Barbara Noah, who lectures on medical law and bioethics. ...

Clark and other protesters have accused Michael Schiavo of violating "God's law" by withholding nourishment from his wife and by having had two children over the years with the girlfriend with whom he lives.

But the legal tradition now separating Terri Schiavo from her parents' presumed protection also has a foundation in biblical law. In Genesis 2:24, it reads: "Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."

this was a family in a sad, sad situation. a daughter struck down, parents and son-in-law fighting with each other. there was, however, never any proof offered, as the courts determined that ms. schiavo would ever recover, or that her parents had ever really thought out the life that waited before them caring for an invalid. they appeared merely to loathe her husband. they seemingly refused to accept that a woman might have conversations with her husband that she might not have with her parents. when a man says his wife told him she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially, and her parents have no concrete statement from her one way or the other, they really don't have a lot of ground to stand on from a rational, logical point of view. the fact that they were "supported" by people who were more intense, more emotional than they were themselves just says that there is a big problem in this country.

when you politicize frothing-at-the-mouth religion, you get the taliban. you don't get the united states of america, which guarantees "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." 50 years ago, she would have died. 50 years ago, so-called christians wouldn't have been screaming, crying, and tearing their clothes over it. if history goes in cycles, i fear we are entering another phase of muscular, aggressive fundamentalism, apparently all over the world. an extremist is an extremist, and the selecitve application of religious texts to effect erosion of individual rights is, in fact, in exact opposition to what christianity is about. but ignorance is required for fundamentalism and extremism to exist.

sigh. maybe i should get that M.Div (you may all run in fear now, yes ;)

bah.

sunlight notwithstanding, i'm feeling cranky and antisocial. in order to avoid doing something adolescent and embarrassing, regularily scheduled programming has been suspended and will be resumed tomorrow.

just in case you were wondering...

canada is still cold.

we saw most of the family this weekend. his uncle who had a colostomy appears to be amazingly cancer-free. i received four badly-written regency romance novels that are disappointingly bereft of any sex at all from a maiden aunt who works for harlequin. i believe they're destined for the library's book-for-a-dime sale.

saturday we ate too much but avoided the veal marsala and the squid casserole. also sunday we ate too much. there is a container of singapore noodles in my fridge. mmm...

we also played pool with two of his uncles while various other wives and daughters-in-law watched and professed ignorance of the game. eventually they went to watch the matrix which was playing in the background (2 or 3, i'm not sure...it was the one with the guys in white who disappear a lot).

saturday night we went clubbing. goa trance has come a hell of a long way from its origins. it now has a house beat, and the standard build-break-build-break-build-mix structure of other trance. so it felt kind of like hard trancy house with the 303s. but it was a lot of fun, all the same.

the ipod was pressed into service to offer techno, prog rock, lewis black, and jeff foxworthy. i'm much less impressed than he is by audio-only standup comedy. it's just not as funny without the visuals.

we've also determined that we ought to drive across the country sometime before we're too old to enjoy it. watch this space for the soapbox across america. don't hold your breath, though ;)

sigh. back to the drudgery today. at least we didn't lose an hour of sleep sunday night. we get to put that off until next week.

en vacanes.

driving up to toronto tomorrow to sped easter weekend with his family. hopefully, it will be a nice little vacation. and unlike last time, i won't be the center of attention, which is even more promising.

today is being miserable. still cold. still no sun. what season is it again? i frigging hate march.

bah.

i wanted to post something interesting today, but i walked 1.7 miles home in the cold. and snow. and sleet. did i mention sleet? sleet stings when it hits you. and my gloves leaked. and my jeans are currently melting in the tub. and now it's dark. i'm going to have more tea.

too much of a good thing.

i've been thinking a lot about wine, recently. it's been the result, i think, of having seen Sideways and then having the oppurtunity to visit Moore Bros within a couple weeks of each other.

i don't want to call myself a wine snob, but the truth is that i like good wine, the same as i like good food. i can, with some proficiency, discuss tannin, acid, structure, fruit, nose, palate, and finish. i'm not so hip to terroir yet (besides the obvious, say, chablis), but then, terroir tends to be a mystical realm at best, open to all kinds of mythologies and superstitions (i'm not kidding. there is such a thing as holistic viticulture).

however, as i introduce him into the subtler aspects of wine, i find myself having to compare things that perhaps aren't ideal. i mean, when you compare one really good bottle of cabernet sauvignon with a really good bottle of red zinfandel, there's little room to explain one's antipathy towards the mass-produced, characterless merlot that floods the market. i'm finding myself having the odd urge to hop over to the state store (for those of you unfamiliar with the structure, the pennsylvania government regulates all sales of wine and liquor and runs their own retail outlets, some of which are better than others) and pick up a $5 bottle of merlot, and maybe another one of white zin, just so i have an example of the travesties that can be wreaked ;) it has come to me that when you can compare an estate-bottled, handcrafted vintage with a blended, industrial prduct, you can better explain not only why one should drink good wine, but what the qualities of good wine in fact are. just as you won't really understand why mcdonald's sucks if you never eat there (or conversely, if it's all you eat). and, you know, it probably won't end up being poured down the drain, because these wines are vinted specifically to be smooth and unchallenging and, above all, drinkable.

i think it might be an interesting experiment.

repercussions.

i haven't thought about it in a while, but one of the things i got really into when i was in university was what i came to call "cultural reverse engineering." what it is, essentially, is taking the productions of a culture (their arts, their laws, their language and so forth) and figuring out from those remains what was or was not important to that culture.

this caught my attention today. especially some of these quotes:

Serious, adult sexuality a turn-off for movie audiences... According to studio marketers, it tends to make them (especially men) uncomfortable. "If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn't sell," producer Peter Guber says. "If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. ... Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can't portray the sexual intimacy most people crave." ... "Today's audiences aren't comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex," producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. "If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers." ... "We are a Puritan society," Press says. "We'd rather watch it at home."

what does this say about our society? more specifically, what does that say about our relations with ourselves, with our sex partners, and our conceptualizations of gender?

it's getting even more dangerous.

"I want people to start thinking critically about how these images affect black women today," said Jennings, a Spelman College alumnae and now a law student in New York. "We're telling people [black women] are bitches and hos and sluts and not worthy of respect," she said. "And that's exactly how society is treating us."

later on in the article, they quote a gentleman from Black Entertainment Television telling women not to watch if they don't like it. but let's cut the relativistic marketing naïveté and think about this critically: if you're calling youself black entertainment, this implies if you're not entertained, you're not really black. and you're also implying that blacks are entertained by and construct a culture that values women by their sexual availability. if you'll sleep with a man, you're a ho. if you don't, you're a bitch. there is no room in this structure to respect a woman, and certainly no room to think about a woman's intellectual capabilities.

to back out further, when sex comedies and violent sex are the only way to entertain people, regardless of race, you're walking a very interesting line. especially when we take into consideration that men tend to make most of the visual entertainment and men are made most uncomfortable by depictions of mature sexual relations. if people never see adult, mature sexuality, where are they going to get their information from? especially among ever-increasing calls for "abstinence-only" sex education, which doesn't even discuss anatomy or biology, parents' increasing reluctance to talk to their kids about sex, and in fact, parents' apparent reluctance to engage in mature sexuality themselves. we're slowly heading back to ignorance, because ignorance is more comfortable. if we don't have to accept the emotion, the intimacy, the vulnerability inherent in sex, we don't have to worry about it.

sometimes it's important to see things that make us uncomfortable, if for no other reason than to sit down and think "why does this make me uncomfortable?" yes, sex is uncomfortable. but it is also a part of life. and it can be beautiful and fun and subtle and joyful, all without the inclusion of violence, tension, or fart jokes. to ignore the possibilities or dilute them is to do a disservice to ourselves, to those people that we could love, and most importantly, to our children and to our children's children, who will have to combat the myths and prejudices all over again.