These are simply the random thoughts and musings of a young Cantabrigian mother, matron and student. If you are interested in this conglomeration of thoughts, notions, conceptions and impressions, open a correspondence with me and I shall most likely allow you to join me on my pilgrimage through my eccentricities.

my phone died. AGAIN. Motorola, STOP MAKING YOUR SOFTWARE SUCK. I MEAN IT.

This will be the fourth Z6c.

I just can't do anything else. I'm really sorry.

+ Lynne and Hyoun are married!
+ I think I succeeded as being their matron of honour.
- Their photographer physically shoved people, repeatedly, if they were in the way, as she got ready.
+ Their photographs will probably turn out well.
? Their photographs were taken against the backdrop of the ocean.
- Did you know that winds coming up off the ocean are freaking cold?
- Scrambling over the rocks in the photographs while wearing 3-inch heels ... am not mountain goat.
+ Both my daughters and both of Lynne's mum's goddaughters were in the wedding.
+ All four children behaved absolutely perfectly.
- One of the children's roles got messed up.
+ She was awesomely relaxed about it.
+ I did all the ceremony I was supposed to do.
? Hyoun paid homage to the ancient custom of paying bride-price. As a symbol of her willingness, Lynne gave it back. I didn't know brides came with refunds.
+ My husband has yet to figure out refunding a bride.
+++ Chris was a groomsman-at-large, figuring out where to go, what to do, what people needed, what people wanted, and did an awesome job and I owe him so much.
- It turns out that formal roles in a wedding mean that you spend so much time doing ceremonial stuff that all the stage-hand type work can't get done.
+ Alicia and Julianne both sang at the reception.
? Neither of them can carry a tune in a bucket.
+ Lynne and Hyoun did well at the reception.
+ I made my matron-of-honour toast well, I think.
+++ People were surprised that it was brief.
+ I danced with crschmidt and didn't even fall over that often.
+++ Which means at all, despite his ability to do some major club-kid moves and my ability to do the fox trot.
? I need to teach him the box step.
+++ I was the only lady on the floor to last the entire reception in heels.
? The last dance may have been the hora. We did not raise Lynne and Hyoun in chairs, though.

... lots of other stuff. I promise to come back to this. Let's just say bad stuff happened too (I injured myself pretty seriously the night after the wedding, we forgot my medication in Boston, & c.) as well as good stuff (girls got to ride cable cars, I acted as impromptu seamstress at the wedding reception, we walked S.F. some, I met hepkitten whose three children are completely adorable, I saw friends, stuff like that.)

I am glad to see a good wedding that will go into a good marriage. It's hard to predict, but I know these two. It's gonna be fine.

Userpic is the only one I have with Lynne in it.

I rather think I love this woman.

"Englishmen are allowed to express emotion. Well, they are allowed to express some emotions. Three, to be precise. Surprise, providing it is conveyed by expletives; anger, generally communicated in the same manner; and elation or triumph, which again often involves shouting and swearing. It can thus sometimes be rather hard to tell exactly which of the three permitted emotions an Englishman is attempting to express."

In the words of Bender, "We're back, baby!"

„Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”

Traditional translation:

“He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Free-form translation, as given by me whilst a bit tipsy on white wine:

“He who would read /b/ should be careful, lest he himself become a /b/tard. And if you indulge in morose self-analysis, you shall find yourself with a LiveJournal account.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I got interested in the predictive text feature.

Among the options that the predictive text could give, it included ...

The aardvark asked for a ride.
The absinthe arrived by airmail.
The abortion went well.
The actor asked for an aardvark.
The actor asked for abstinence.
The actor asked for redemption.
The advertisement was effective.
The agile aardvark arrived by airmail.
The agile aardvark bathed with beauties.
The agriculture was cultivated by the coral.
The aggravated driver beeped on his horn.
The aggravated rooster scratched the dirt.
The Althusserian scholar gave his copy of Lacan's "Ecrits" to the abortion doctor.
The amiable Althusserian scholar asked the aardvark for an absinthe.
The amiable crocodile brushed his teeth with a toothbrush.
The admirable doctor performed the operation admirably.
The annex was covered with asbestos.
The annex was crawling with beetles.
The apple was airmailed by the doctor.
The apple was consumed by the amiable crocodile.
The apple was inquiring about the amiable crocodile's friend.
The aquamarine lifevest was not used.
The ass asked for a better absinthe.
The ass brayed at the moon.
The assumptive doctor did not accept our personal check.
The assumptive agricultural expert eyed our absinthe suspiciously.
The attractive peanut farmer graded the term paper.
The attractive rooster preened its feathers to attract absinthe.
The auxiliary generator has malfunctioned!
The awning covered the agile aardvark during the amiable rainstorm.
The awning was too tall to touch.
The babbling baby asked the aardvark for some absinthe.
The babbling baby baked brownies with the amiable crocodile.
The babbling baby basked in its mother's affections.
The babbling baby bounced the ball at a babbling brook.

There's two sides to this whole Dreamwidth business.

The obvious side is that LiveJournal has always been a hugely influential blogging community in Russia (why this site happened to appeal to a Russian community is most likely somewhat random) and with Russian management, it is slowly yet surely becoming more and more Russian. Therefore U.S.-based users are likely to find themselves scarcer and scarcer among a larger Russian community.

This isn't the first time by any means. Remember Friendster? It is now predominantly Southeast Asian. Remember Orkut? It's got a huge Brazilian contingent. Bebo is U.K.-heavy (though the migration of AIM to Bebo may change that) and SkyRock is pre-dominantly Francophone. (Note that a common language is far more likely to link social networks together than a common country, for some fairly obvious reasons.) If you enjoy reading about that sort of thing, have at it.

So, a lot of people perceive that the Anglophone original site user base is going to disintegrate and decay into nothing, and indeed already has, and thus they're moving to the currently trendy (for some versions of trend — it's been interesting for me to map which groups are In On It and which are not) Web site, for fear of/due to exasperation with the more and more heavily Russian user base.

Personally, as a particularly wise (or perhaps experienced) friend pointed out, I'd sure as hell rather blog on a site under foreign ownership than one that was run by a company of scared venture capitalists who are trying to squeeze every penny out of a user base. Is it annoying to run into Russian spammers? Sure. But no more annoying than English spammers, or Portuguese spammers, or any other kind, so frankly, it doesn't bother me as a positive point of data. (Positive as opposed to normative, as opposed to positive as opposed to negative.)

The other side, and the bigger question, is how long does a LiveJournal-type site actually suit people?

I'd say I'm past it, frankly. I don't mind writing updates and communicating with friends this way, and it's nice to be able to maintain some level of locked posting. But, like all authentication, it's only as trustworthy as the people you let see it. And, more importantly, it doesn't really matter any more, I shouldn't think. It's one thing to be in the continuous melodramatics of the late teens and early twenties, but eventually you just get past it. You'll write things. People will read them, or not.

Most of my posting to LiveJournal lately has been strictly cross-posts from other blogs anyway. I'm maintaining a spiritual/meditative journal, very sparsely, at Word Press. I'm maintaining a general-commentary-on-the-news journal at Blogger. I've even posted to the journal hosted by Last.fm a few times.

The more important thing, I think, is how much active participation from others that I need to feel motivated to write. Given that I'm scattering my efforts and getting very few comments, the answer is "Little to none," apparently. Face Book has lost all of its personal one-on-one appeal — I don't even pretend I have a chance in hell of tracking down my news feed to the point that I know what's happening — but it's a reliable way to find people when you need them.

The days of lengthy conversations in comments and posting an all-points bulletin to LiveJournal, trusting people will read it, well, they're pretty much over. Were I to go through another crisis on the scope of my divorce and disability, I'd probably appreciate the personal feedback. But I'm not and I probably won't (and I devoutly hope I didn't tempt the Fates there) and thus, a lot of my writing is more for my benefit than an interactive audience.

A lot of people like the interactive nature, and I still leave comments on people's journals, albeit in a scattered fashion. I read all the comments I get. I still read everything on my friends page.

But this is something that both crschmidt and I have been fighting for a long time — the lassitude that leads you to not write for the benefit of your friends. A few friends over the last year have said, "I'm too old for this" and moved on. They dealt with years upon years of the conversations, of the relentless requests for updates, & c. and they realised they simply haven't the energy to continue to write a comprehensive update on everything that happens in their universe, and thus shut down their journals or just left them.

I'm not shutting down or leaving, but having the momentum to go join a new site? And deal with all sorts of people, all of whom have more energy than I do to write about their day-to-day lives? It sounds exhausting, that's what.

So, I shall remain in situ. If you cross-post, I'll probably read it. If you've decided not to, more power to you, and I wish you only the best.

I'm 27 and I have an adolescent daughter and a school-aged daughter whom I will have to home-school next year. I lack the energy to also chronicle everything separately. I will probably continue to post the occasional personal update — LiveJournal has remained my forum for strictly this-is-my-life type updates — and continue to post more problem-focused and topical updates to the appropriate blogs.

I appreciate what this very personal, diary-like site has given me. But I must say, I can't imagine having a personal life exciting enough to bother anyone with any longer.

1. Johnny wants to buy a bicycle, which costs $200. He has only $120 in his savings account, but he knows of a way to earn the rest of the money he'll need for the bicycle. In his neighbourhood, there is a man who will pay $15 apiece to have certain individuals bumped off. Johnny goes to see the man, and that day he is given $45 and 3 names. He successfully pulls off all 3 murders, but somehow slips up and leaves a clue. The police catch him, and he spends 3 years in a juvenile detention house. When he gets out, he still has the money in his savings account, and the $45 hit money, but due to inflation the cost of the bicycle has gone up.
   
   If the annual rate of inflation is 8%, and Johnny has been earning 5¾% interest on his savings account, compounded quarterly, how many more people will he have to kill before he can buy the bicycle?
   
   
   
2. Mr. Smith wants to get from Plainville to Anytown. He can take either the train, the bus or a plane. The plane is the quickest way. The plane will take Mr. Smith from Plainville to Anytown in 2 hours. But the plane is the most expensive of the 3 choices. The plane costs $200. The cheapest way to get from Plainville to Anytown is by bus. The bus costs only $35. But the bus is also the slowest and least comfortable of the 3 choices. The bus takes 24 hours to get from Plainville to Anytown. The train, on the other hand, is relatively comfortable yet still moderately priced. The train costs $75 and gets from Plainville to Anytown in 15 hours. Mr. Smith decides to take the train.
   
   Mr. Smith kisses his wife in Plainville good-bye. Mr. Smith is going to Anytown to see his other wife. Mr. Smith is a bigamist. Mr. Smith has 2 wives.
   
   Mr. Smith leaves his house in Plainville at 2.00 P.M.. His train leaves at 4.00 P.M.. It takes Mr. Smith 45 minutes to get from his house to the train station. When he arrives at the train station, Mr. Smith is propositioned by a hooker. Since he has some time to kill, and since he has saved $125 by taking the train instead of the plane, he decides to go with her. They go to the Paradise Motel, which is a 5 minute walk from the station. A room at the Paradise motel costs $10. A room with clean sheets costs $12. Mr. Smith gives the desk clerk $10. They get to the room and the hooker explains her schedule of fees. Her basic rate is $50, with an additional charge of $15 for "Greek", and she doesn't get into S&M. Mr. Smith decides to pay the extra money for Greek, since neither of his 2 wives allow him that outlet. After he is through, he asks the hooker if she'll marry him. The hooker declines, explaining that she doesn't get involved with her clients.
   
   Mr. Smith stays in the room with the hooker until 3.30, when he decides it is time to start heading back to the station. He gets to the station at 3.35, and is informed that his train will be 15 minutes late.
   
   The train is actually 20 minutes late, and when it finally comes, Mr. Smith gets on and takes a seat.
   
   On the train Mr. Smith meets Miss Doe. They talk for 22 minutes, then Miss Doe tells Mr. Smith that she has a sleeper, which costs an extra $20, but that two can sleep as cheaply as one, as long as they're discreet. Mr. Smith, never one to pass up a bargain, goes with Miss Doe to her sleeper, an upper berth. They do not sleep.
   
   The train pulls into Anytown the next morning at 7.20 A.M. Mr. Smith takes a cab from the station to his house in Anytown. The cab ride takes 18 minutes and costs $3.65, plus a 75¢ tip. When Mr. Smith enters his house he discovers that his wife is no there. She has left a note on the kitchen table explaining that she has turned gay and gone off to live with a woman in Plainville.
   
   Where does that leave Mr. Smith?
   
   
   
3. Mr. Green has been working for Mr. Cod for 10 years. Mr. Green is upset that after working for the same outfit for 1 decade, he earns only $3.50 an hour. Mr. Green has resented his employer for some time, but he has just now gotten up the courage to ask for a raise. Mr. Cod denies Mr. Green a raise on the grounds that he is retarded. When Mr. Green counters by saying that handicapped people deserve a liveable wage just like everybody else, Mr. Cod accuses him of ingratitude and fires him. Mr. Green, unable to face having to tell the bad news to his wife and 3 children, takes his own life by jumping off a bridge. Mr. Cod now has to find a replacement for Mr. Green, another token handicapped individual. He interviews people with all sorts of handicaps, but they all turn the job down based on 2 factors: 1. The job, which entails nothing more than the individual sitting in the firm's reception room, wearing a placard that says: MR. COD HIRES THE HANDICAPPED, is wholly undignified; and 2. The pay is too low. Unable to find a bona fide handicapped person, Mr. Cod instead hires his cousin Phil, who is to all appearances completely normal, though he has been unemployed for 2 years. Mr. Cod offers Phil $3.25 an hour, which Phil gladly accepts, since any wage, however small, is preferable to the indignity of unemployment. However, several months later, Phil learns that his predecessor had been paid at a higher rate. When he complains to Mr. Cod of this discrepancy, Mr. Cod explains that Mr. Green was retarded, and therefore was entitled to more money.
   
   Assuming the validity of Mr. Cod's argument, what would Phil have to do to earn a raise?

Reproduced from Peter Cherches, Condensed Book, 1986.

I saw three posts paging me and I'm on ?skip=300&show=P as it is.

If you're looking for me, for the love of all that is holy and unholy, just e-mail me. LiveJournal is what happens when I don't have enough life to live.

To compensate, here:

I spent the morning in bed, my sleep so heavy as to obliterate utterly my consciousness, like a man who falls asleep on a fast-moving train, letting a well-worn novel slip from his hands and onto his lap, and whose dreaming head remains throughout his long journey through quaint country towns wreathed with memory; countless hours pass and the sleeper stays motionless, his interior vision turned away from the markers of civilization outside his window and inclined instead toward his interior existence, like another man, who, tormented by the practice of a hidden vice that alienates him from his fellow man, seeks sympathy in the forgiving eyes of simple beasts, and the first man awakes with a jolt to find his head has slipped onto a stranger's shoulder and he is drooling.

I've been spending a lot of time in this room lately; I should do some redecorating. I've heard good things about cork.

Location: My room
Mood: Pensive
Music: The whistle of a country train muffled by a passenger's gentle weeping
Tags: memory, trains

As we all know, currently, institutions all over the Western world are removing "unnecessary" and "redundant" positions from their administrative and support staffs, focusing more specifically on their "core" functions.

Which is a reasonable concession to make in this economic difficulty.

The idea came to me when I was speaking to my husband about a friend who was commenting on an event at Harvard Law School. "Oh? He still has his post? I thought he'd been made redundant."

Redundant being current American slang for, "You're sacked." Its connotation is kinder than being sacked — it's more of a "This is none of your doing, but we need to take away your pay packets anyway. Hope you don't mind too much."

But, to return to my friend, my husband answered, "No, as far as I know, he's still there." He was a systems administrator and IT specialist, so presumably he has yet to be made "redundant", another interpretation of which is, "We can afford to let go of everyone in your department, as we'll handle this for ourselves from here out. So long!"

Somehow, my mind in turn related this to the television series Futurama.

In Futurama, there is a recurring character named "Scruffy". No one ever seems to know who he is or what he does, and in fact, they cannot identify him from scene to scene. He informs them, each time, in a rather dry voice, that he's "Scruffy. The janitor."

BENDER

Come on, we've gotta go fix the plasma fusion boiler.

[CUT TO: Basement of Planet Express. The boiler is rocking and steam is hissing from it. FRY and BENDER walk down the steps and find SCRUFFY reading a magazine called Zero-G Juggs.]

BENDER

Who are you?

SCRUFFY

Scruffy. The janitor.

BENDER

(Clearly agitated and annoyed.)

Well, why aren't you fixing the boiler?

SCRUFFY

(Indifferent to BENDER's agitation)

Schedule conflict.

SCRUFFY licks his thumb and turns a page in Zero-G Juggs.

It occurs to me that, indeed, we could reach a point at which all "superfluous" administrative and support staff were reduced to, "Scruffy. The janitor."

"Excuse me, but do you know who I'm supposed to see? My pay wasn't deposited into my account this week." "I'm having difficulties with the audio-visual presentation for foreign students that allows for simultaneous translation." "Oh, God, send help! Someone just had a heart attack!"

With the removal of enough support staffers from any institution, we could indeed reach a point at which virtually all complaints were re-directed to, "Scruffy. The janitor."

Cross-posted from jpallan.blogspot.com. All comments should be directed to the linked post.

I managed to fail at jailbreaking a CueCat. How do I manage to do that? For the love of God, I was about 8 or 9 when my dad had me as his assistant to replace the math co-processor on our computer.

I think I'll take it apart later and try to re-do the connectors, but I have a feeling it's deader than a coffin nail. Eh. I kind of wish I had a Linux machine handy so I could probe the hell out of what it's sending, to see if it's the cable (as in it's not actually communicating, in which case I'd check the cabling) or if it's just not capable of sending anymore (as in I bricked it).

Man oh man. That's something else.

I think it's time to update my LiveJournal biography and interests list.

Really, I just need to update my blogs. Seriously, it's time to start communicating again.

So, how are you today? Yes. You.

You, scanning past this and wondering if it's too soon to grab a snack again. You, half-listening to television. You, listening to terrible Internet radio and wanting to issue a فتوى against modern musicians. You, bored out of your mind and compulsively re-loading URLs because you've given up washing your hands 25 times per day.

So. Tell me about yourself. Anything you like. It can be true or a lie. It doesn't matter. Only 1 in 4,000 people can successfully tell the truth from a lie 4 out of 5 tries anyway. So what does it matter? No matter whether you tell me something that is true or untrue, the fact that you conceived of such an idea is, in and of itself, illustrative. Souvenez-vous Sartre et sa définition très personnelle de la mauvaise foi.

To smile and to gain perspective on my statement, read Jim Stallard's brilliant comic piece in McSweeney's, Goofus, Gallant, 羅生門.

(It'd be better to simply watch the film 羅生門 but I realise that the Internet is a fundamentally lazy place, and moreover, it is difficult to follow through sub-titles. If you do have the patience, however, you will be amply rewarded.)

So, I would like to hear some accounting of yourself, whether true or not.

"If I tell you the truth, I get flipped off, and if I lie to you, you yell at me! What am I supposed to do?"

I kind of stare in disbelief at my husband not understanding the nature of the wife.


I settled on, "We have always been at war with Eastasia."

Julianne and Alicia handled themselves quite admirably at tea today.

Lynne and I had quite a lovely tea, though I found it a bit too sweet and a bit less savoury than I might have liked. Cheddar biscuits, tea sandwiches (tuna, egg, ham and chicken salad — where would tea be were it not for the invention of mayonnaise?) as well as prosciutto wrapping cheese. The sweets were blueberry scones, chocolate turtles, blondies (as opposed to brownies), fudge squares, bittersweet chocolate cupcakes with coconut shavings in the icing, chocolate scones topped with almond slivers and I may have forgotten a couple of things. I'm sure ursamajor was borderline taking notes on the entire event. We each had a pot of tea, I had mint and she had silver needles or some such, at any rate, we both chose tisanes. We also both had a glass of champagne, very good and very very very cold.

The girls had two cups of chocolate each (although Julianne also elected to take some of my mint tea, and Lynne also chose a cup of chocolate in addition to her tea), which was topped with an entire melted marshmallow, much to the girls' delight. Alicia noted the "latte" art done in her hot chocolate on the second cup of chocolate, although the first time, they just buried themselves in the chocolate. In fact, Alicia handled herself extremely well — her table manners are now as good as mine — but Julianne did get a touch of marshmallow on her eyebrow. (Well, Lynne got some marshmallow stuck to her lips, so I suppose I shouldn't say anything ...)

The children's tea was grilled cheese, cheese and apple and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with bugs on a log and French fries, and their sweets were chocolate chip cookies, fudge squares, the chocolate cupcakes described above and blondies.

Alicia is now usually ordering off the adult menu in most restaurants, and you could tell she was a touch put off by the sandwiches, although she did say they were very good, and ate them with relish. She simply thinks that she is far too old to be given peanut butter and jelly, good or not. We are approaching the "why is everyone so immature?" age, I can tell. Thankfully, I entered it at approximately age 5 and never left, so we should be fine.

Julianne was a bit wiggly, and still not entirely sure on her table deportment — for example, she lost her napkin twice and once began to slide down to the floor after her fork, rather than simply asking me to secure her another one. She also wasn't entirely comfortable with serving herself from a central platter (or rather, the concept was a bit off to her, even though we usually serve from platters for supper in this house), or the idea of having service items removed at each course. But overall, certainly not bad for an eight-year-old, and I was pleased to have tea with two such lovely ladies.

Well, really, three. But Julianne and Alicia, unlike Lynne, are my ladies.

Went to the post office this morning and spoke to a woman wearing a fake fur coat. We agreed, however, that if we saw a mink in the yard, we'd kill it. Then we talked about the ethics of trapping and hunting.

After that, I stopped at the hardware to get keys carved for Alicia. Outside the hardware store, I got accosted by three smiling, suspiciously well-groomed gentlemen carrying clipboards. "Have you a moment to spare for gay rights?"

"Well, no. Not other than muff diving."

Went into the shop. Got the keys carved. Asked the clerk for the smallest pry bar they sold. I said, "I know how that sounds." But I actually have to pry off a grating plate that is completely painted into place. Still, it was a bit amusing. After I paid, I went outside and started to go down Mass. Ave., and then turned around and greeted the gentlemen with a tenner in my hand.

I said, "Let's cut a deal. You skip the spiel. I give you a donation. I skip feeling guilty all day. Deal?" "Deal."

I went into the art supply store because I had to pick up more brown package wrapping paper. I couldn't find it near the other padded envelopes and such. I finally gave in and found an employee. He led me to it, it was stored near the drawing paper. (???)

I looked for more double-sided tape. I found it and said to the nearby clerk, "I'm glad I didn't have to distract you again." "Trust me, nothing is worse than stocking." I paused to look at a photo box near him, it resembled one I was considering buying before. I looked at the price tag. "$28.99? Not unless it comes with a blowjob."

He cracked up behind me.

I had a ruinous therapy session. And then a trip to Russo's during which the clerk discounted my items (???) and told me she'd really bonded with me. I went to Martinelli's, trying to hunt down the awesome honey wine I'd had with ludimagist and kerinda, and they didn't have it, but I grabbed lemon liqueur, Rumpelminze, Goldschläger and crème de cassis.

I walked over to Staples to look for a new flash drive and a new filing system for Alicia, because what she has now is So. Not. Working. Found both, and an employee said, "This is ludicrous. There's an 8 gig drive available for $18. You should get that. It's a good deal." And it was. But they were out of stock. "Wait. I will totally find it for you." He spent twenty minutes rummaging through the backstock, and found one. I thanked him. "How'd you know to find me here?" "I found the door that had stupid team-building mottos next to it." "Right. That'd pretty much do it, eh?" "Ah-yuh."

Heading out, I had a total Big Lebowski "Dude, where's my car?" moment before I realised I'd been at the liquor store that shared the same parking lot.

On my way home, I stopped at T.J.'s to pick up naan for the Ethiopian I was cooking tonight for Neil, since I wanted to prepare something vegan. We worked on it together, and had dinner at 8. The girls enjoyed it, which is good because they'd never had Ethiopian before.

We talked until eleven. I always feel like Neil never knows quite what to make of me. I'm probably right.

So, yeah. Ma vie est assez bizarre.

Blame kickthehobbit.

My idea.

Take Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Take Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott, or two such similar. Make damn sure they're stoners.

Have them play Beckett. Straight. Like Baz Luhrmann's 1996 interpretation of Romeo & Juliet.

...

Think about it. Arguing about what day it is? Being convinced that there is a depth to events that really isn't there? Long drawn-out rambling parables about nothing?

How many times have you heard a holier-than-thou stoner try to explain to you what it's all about and just drift off?

How many times have you seen a burnt-out old drug-using wreck ramble about nothing? (Lucky could totally be played by any of the dudes who hang around Central Square. We'd have to calm them down a lot about the rope, though.)

It completely has potential.

Tell me about yourself, Jeffrey.

There's not much to tell. I was, hmm, one of the authors of the Port Huron statement. The original Port Huron statement, not the compromised second draft. And then, I, uh, you ever hear of the Seattle Seven? That was me. And six other guys. Music business, briefly. Was a roadie for Metallica. Speed of Sound tour.

What do you do for fun?

Oh, you know, the usual. Bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.

Came across this. Laughed. Darkly, but laughed.

Ken Stott has been in some dark places - he's seen some of television's worst - but becoming a Hibs fan and running on to their pitch at Easter Road was almost more than he could stomach. "It's the hardest thing I've done on screen - I'm a big Hearts fan."

And the article goes on to casually mention ...

Mr. Stott, who played Hitler in Uncle Adolf ...

Addendum: I nearly wrote my standard tagline for articles dealing with Brittannia (detailing my location as 236, Allston Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, New England, British America), and then I realised that ever since 1296 a.D., there's been some upset on the part of the Kingdom of Alba about their dealings with the House of Plantagenet. So perhaps referring to myself, however comically, as a colonial subject is not wise ...

Lots to say, no time to say it in, so I'll just get straight to the point.

Note to the Lancashire lads: Choose life. Choose a job. Choose getting on a train at half six in the morning, with an 80-pint barrel of beer. Choose drinking all the way to London. Choose getting into a drunken fight with another yob. Choose getting thrown off the train at Leeds. Choose your future. Choose life.

You know, at least a heroin addict that's gotten his fix then ceases to be annoying, until they crave another one ...

SpringCleaning for the Mac is slower than molasses, has a bunch of utilities that are easily reproduced elsewhere for much cheaper (though I definitely did not pay $50 for it), and has no capability whatsoever to differentiate between Things You Need and Things You Don't.

Why am I finding it for the win? Because I had 5GB left of hard drive space. Your average movie comes in at 700MB, an app takes up to 50 or so. And thanks to their relatively-easy-if-still-annoying utilities, I now have 12GB free.

Things that are for the win yet do not have absolute win capability yet:

iTerm, which is an absolutely awesome terminal application that allows tabbed terminals, a ton of customability, and far more diverse abilities than OSX's default Terminal.app.

Why it's not for the win yet: I cannot find a way to alias a key other than my option key to mean Esc+ or Meta. They do have keyboard aliasing in a handy GUI. What they lack is an interpretation of which key means what, so I am faced with the lovely options of changing my F20 key, my Del or my Delete key, my Insert key, my hex key, & c. to mean Esc+ (assuming I can even do that either — all of which keys do not exist on a modern Macintosh and I am left puzzled as to how to a) switch windows in irssi while b) remaining capable of typing in the French-language channels I read.

Also not for the win: Scripting is only described in high-level geekery terms. I know the difference between the tcsh, bash and other shells. I do not know how to rewrite zsh scripts to the bash shell, which I have been using in one form or another since, oh, 1995 and unlike most geeks, I do not find "New and Shiny" an adequate reason to leave an environment I know how to work in.

Probably my fault: Why do I have to read, Welcome to Darwin! Reading ~/.bashrc every single time I start it? Welcome to Darwin helps no one who is using a laptop and if it has to let me know where I am, let me customise it. Yes, knowing what machine OS I'm working on is great if and when I ssh elsewhere. I will ssh elsewhere, have no fear, but this is annoying and useless.

Adium, which, for whatever reason known only to the gods, the developers and likely the Facebook API, does not actually capture the identities of Facebookers for your contact list when you use Adium. Oh, you can use Facebook chat for Adium, but as soon as they sign off, they are "forgotten", which is definitely something the Adium crowd can fix. This means that if I happen to go up to my menubar and notice that someone from Facebook is signed on, I get to frantically go and drag them to the appropriate contact group in Adium, because as soon as they sign off, they're no longer recognised by Adium unless they're in another contact group.

I have a lot of Adium contacts, well over 500. I need to sort these. That means when I see a Facebook contact sign on, I want to alias them properly but it may well take me a moment. I completely understand they did not see the Facebook chat capability and download every single one of my contacts, reasoning, probably correctly, that not everyone is going to use it. I would, however, prefer it greatly if they captured the names of those people that did sign on, so I would be able to go through the "currently offline" contacts at my leisure.

Related gripe: Apple's Address Book. If I am removing duplicates and consolidating duplicate entries (an entirely separate gripe), it should be a given that an e-mail address that is character for character the same does not, in fact, need to be placed again in the entry. That's just moronic and annoying. In fact, the vast majority of the time, e-mail addresses can, indeed, be considered unique identifiers, so why are you offering the option of consolidating contacts with similar names but not the same e-mail address? There are 1400 contacts in there as of this morning and I would bet folding money that at least 10% of those are duplicates that got set up by some moronic application (yes, MailCM, I'm looking at you, and you're definitely not off the hook either, Plaxo). And not only are you incapable of looking at more than one field that your developers chose and I didn't when removing duplicates, you're also incompetent as all fuck at it. Also, stop assuming every address I add is a "work" address. While we're at it, allowing me to define other categories, such as "school", "alumni" & c. would be very kind of you.

And GMail script for Jabber in AddressBook, you are pissing me the hell off. If someone has a foo@gmail.com address, do not, not, not assume their Jabber address is foo@gmail.com. It isn't and the Google API developers would happily tell you that. It's foo@talk.google.com. So shape up.

Most of all, for the love of God and the sake of all things that are holy, someone write a damn script to export Adium contact information (and associated information such as aliases) to AddressBook and vice versa.

I am tired of doing things that are absolutely, definitely, totally scriptable by hand. It is stupid and it is moronic. My code monkeying years are over, and moreover, I don't want to go back.

So I end with a simple plea.

Is there any non-sleazy website where I can hire a script monkey? AppleScript is not a particularly diffuclt language, but it is quirky. I am not doing craigslist because the point is to find people who are competent with AppleScript, not people who are local. I'm thinking of a specialty site such as macscripter that allows me to say, "Hey, write this script with these specs and I'll give you $25" or whatever.

Oh, and Mozilla, don't even begin to think you're off the hook. I have an entirely separate rant reserved just for you.

I was about Julianne's age, more or less, and I learned how to construct such things as a simple AM radio. In fact, the radio was the last project in the book, and it's the only one I remember well.

I learned how to read the diagrams and my father helped me with some of the more frustrating projects.

I was tormented earlier by trying to express what I was, what I needed.

The person who I am is not someone who cares for complexity. I enjoy it, mind you, but that is not my ideal. I do not want to be a politician or an inventor or lauded throughout the world.

I want to be the person playing cocktail piano in a room she believes empty, but someone else hears a few bars and it changes their mood for the evening. I want to be the person whose inconsequential essay leads someone to change something deeply in their life, and they can draw out the idiom I used when explaining that shift, but cannot remember my name. I want to be the woman who flippantly seduces a virgin unknowingly, and colours ever after his perceptions of sex, and is remembered with fondness, even if he cannot recall the details of my face.

In a way, it's humility, in another way, it's hubris. I don't wish to be an agent for change that anyone can recognise. Instead, I want my trail to be an inch deep and a mile wide, touching many people in ways that they may not even recognise at the time, but making permanent changes, helping to shape them in ways they will never know.

When wiring those simple electronics projects, there was a type of circuit to wire. An acquaintance, spinfire on IRC, was kind enough to name what I was thinking of — a thyristor.

Once that shift from 0 to 1 has occurred, it is done, unless forcibly stopped.

I am not sure what else I want to do in this universe.

But I want to provide current to as many of those switches as possible.

During jc's visit, we attempted to engage in cultural exchange. As I'm talking to one of my favourite Brits, rho, I was discussing same.

jpallan (12.03 p.m.): He tried to get me into a couple of British panel shows.
rho (12.06 p.m.): did he introduce you to "i'm sorry i haven't a clue"? that might appeal.
jpallan (12.11 p.m.): I didn't know what the hell to make of the panel show he was showing me.
jpallan (12.11 p.m.): It showed various MPs being sent on a bizarre send-ups by a vaguely creepy panel host.
jpallan (12.11 p.m.): is that what it is?
jpallan (12.12 p.m.): I asked if this is how MPs proved they were Hip.
jpallan (12.12 p.m.): He said, "In a sense, yes."
rho (12.12 p.m.): which was it? have i got news for you?
jpallan (12.13 p.m.): Possibly?
rho (12.14 p.m.): HIGNFY doesn't have a regular presenter. they have different ones every week.
rho (12.14 p.m.): can't think ofwhat else it could be, but i don't watch a whole lot of television, so could quite easily have missed something
jpallan (12.15 p.m.): I don't know. The presenter seemed schizophrenic.
jpallan (12.15 p.m.): Like one of the drunks you can find in our town square going on rants. The ace of diamonds, bookshelves, the man trying to kill him, those goddamn bananas, people from St. Louis, closed-up straws, Trapper John, MD, and papers, papers everywhere.
rho (12.16 p.m.): *blink*
jpallan (12.17 p.m.): Not quite that bad.
jpallan (12.17 p.m.): But basically that kind of disjointed rant before presenting an MP.
rho (12.18 p.m.): are you sure it wasn't just the House of Commons?

Edited to add, six weeks after the fact: jc confirmed it as Have I Got News For You?

Allison Crews died this morning.

She was a little younger than I was. We weren't close and we had definitely different viewpoints on things, but we were both young mothers and she faced challenges raising her son that inspired me to keep on going with the challenges Alicia presented me. She inspired a lot of women and was a truly gifted writer.

Send your thoughts out to her partner, Julie, and their two children.

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