Beowabbit

When I haven’t posted for a long time, it’s hard to get posting again, because I want to fill in all the blanks, but that would be a post so long that (1) I would never get around to writing it, and (2) nobody would ever bother reading it. So I’m going to try to divide things up thematically. This post is about things.

I have a new camera that I am so far very pleased with. It’s a Samsung Galaxy Camera. It does 21x optical zoom (with optical stabilization), and has an automatic mode but also a fully manual mode (except for focus, but you can tap on the part of the image you want the camera to auto-focus on). ( More about the camera. )

I have my car back on the road, which is wonderful! If I’d realized how little it was going to cost to fix, I would have gotten it done a long time ago; I’ve spent several times that much on Zipcars in the interim.

( The car saga, and an auto-body recommendation in Quincy. )

I had assumed the car would be a few hundred dollars to repair. It wasn’t. So today [looks at clock] er, yesterday, I finally bought a powered lawnmower. ( On lawn mowing. )

Had some shopping to do after work. It was raining, and very windy. Windy enough that several of the metal tines in my folding umbrella broke and started hitting me in the face and head in the wind (although they were still attached to the fabric). Rather than potentially get cut or poked in the eye, I threw away the umbrella.

The wind was being driven more or less horizontally, anyway. The front of my jeans, facing into the wind, is as wet as if I’d worn them into a swimming pool.

So I got to the grocery store. On the bright side, they had a wonderful selection of umbrellas, including a nice big strong umbrella that survived the walk home (although I thought I was going to Mary Poppins a time or two). On the less-bright side, I found the empty spots on the shelves where the ingredients I needed would be if they weren’t out of them.

Got home, and the mailbox was wide open. Somehow, the letter carrier manages to close it consistently except when it’s raining or snowing. I think s/he has a vendetta against me. Fortunately, the only thing ruined by the rain was a catalogue; my mother’s lovely and amusing letter came yesterday when it was dry and sunny. And the UPS package that was left in the open on the front steps (instead of on the covered porch), unlike the last two delivered in the rain or snow, was in plastic rather than cardboard.

However, I have a warm dry house, family and friends who love me, and a beloved honeywuzzle who fills my heart with joy. (I should just lay these jeans out in front of her bright warm smile; they’ll dry in no time.)

PS — Also, LiveJournal seems to have completely broken my ability to select a userpic. Assume I’m posting this with my clear-umbrella userpic, ’cause I can’t select it. [EDIT: I was able to pick it when I came back and edited this post a few months later.]

An interesting perspective on the problems ЖЖ, er, I mean LJ, has been having recently with distributed denial-of-service attacks.

EDIT: I haven’t read much of it yet but at a glance Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat theory of Internet communication looks pretty interesting.

On Friday I met plumtreeblossom after work (see her weekend write-up here) and we took the train to Quincy Center together. We had dinner at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t like their corporate politics, but I love their food and sometimes I just need a hunk of cow. As it turned out, I’m very glad we did, because I ordered an Australian beer I wasn’t familiar with — Cooper’s Brewery Sparkling Ale — and it was so good I ordered a second, and then went looking for it at the liquor store later in the week. (If you are wise enough to follow my example, be cautioned that it’s fermented in the bottle, so there’s some sediment in the bottom; you want to pour it into a glass.)

After a yummy dinner, we went to my house and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, which was very funny, and a little bit of the original 1930s exploitation/propaganda movie, which was a bonus on the DVD.

( Another few meals, another movie, some geekery, and some games with darxus and cathijosephine. )

At some point in the weekend, plumtreeblossom took a whole bunch of pictures of grim warrior beowabbit, including the one that I eventually munged into my new userpic, and I also took some pictures of her cats, who were sleeping together on her bed looking especially cute.

The one bad thing about the weekend is that towards the end of the workweek I’d been having little twinges in my hip, and they got considerably worse over the weekend. I’m going to need to drive to the T tomorrow (where parking is $7); there’s no way I can do the normally 15-minutes walk to the T station with the ice that’s on the sidewalks. I’m not sure if this is a return of my sciatica or if I did something to my hip slipping on the ice. But if a hurt hip is the price for all the joy and fun I had this weekend, it was worth it.

Howdy. Just wanted to mention two Firefox plugins I’ve started using lately and find extremely useful:

It's All Text! lets you edit text-entry areas (like LiveJournal post and comment fields) with your favourite real text editor. (So you can search-and-replace, load prepared files, and use whatever convenience features like abbreviations or filters your editor provides.) Works on Linux/Unix, and I gather it works on Windows; evidently it doesn’t work on MacOS X. "Remember, with great power outages come great responsibility outages."

Aardvark lets you interactively delete things from the page you’re looking at (or alternatively, select an element and delete everything else). It’s especially useful when you’re printing, because you can print out that one recipe that’s in the middle of a long string of comments, or print out the map and directions to the hotel without including the hotel’s banner, navigation sidebar, and list of reviews. Presumably you could also remove that one wide image that’s messing up your whole Friends page, although I haven’t had to try that since I installed it. It’s also useful for web developers or HTML/CSS geeks to see the structure of pages they’re looking at.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about this before! In fact, I’ve sort of been observing radio silence here, just because I’ve been so busy. But next Wednesday through Saturday, the 29th through 1st, I will be performing in the Post Meridian Radio Players’ performance of Tomes of Terror III. Live radio drama is basically people standing up at microphones with scripts and performing radio-style audio stories, along with life sound effects and music. This particular event is three separate radio dramas, a Hallowe’en-themed episode of The Baby Snooks Show, “Reyndardine”, an original adaptation (by PMRP’s Renée Johnson) of a short story based on an old English ballad, and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, as adapted for radio for the CBC’s Nightfall series.

I’m playing the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and plumtreeblossom is doing foley (sound effects) for “The Tell-Tale Heart” and for the Baby Snooks episode. It’s tremendous fun for us, and it will almost certainly be tremendous fun for you, too. All shows are at 7:30; if you want to come see it, I strongly recommend you make a reservation at http://pmrp.org/, since we have lots of reservations already and some of the shows may be sold out. You can reserve tickets online and pay for them when you arrive for the show.

I highly recommend this, and not just because I’m in it.

OK, must go sleep now.

PS — And tomorrow night at midnight (Friday night) you can hear me and lediva, with plumtreeblossom doing a tiny bit of foley, doing a couple minutes from the show on WBZ’s The Jordan Rich Show on 1030 AM. There will also be a section from Baby Snooks, and our director(s? Not sure if the Baby Snooks director will be there) and sound designer/technical director will be interviewed. If you happen to be able to record that, I’d love a copy; I’m not sure whether the radio station will make it available for download.

starkeymonster and several other wonderful people on my Flist have called my attention to International Blog Against Racism Week. From starkeymonster’s post:

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! YAY!

How to participate? oyceter says...
1. Announce the week in your blog.

2. Switch your default icon to either an official IBAR week icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBAR week icon, you may modify one of yours yourself or ask someone to do so. Here's a round up of IBARW icons.

3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn't yours, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc. (Linking back here (ibarw) is highly appreciated!)

For inspiration, here are last year's IBARW posts. You can also check out this post for further resources.
...

PSST: It will help a lot on del.icio.us if you title your entry something topical, as opposed to just "Intl. Blog Against Racism Week."

I’m unlikely to manage to actually manage to post anything appropriate, since I’ve been busy enough lately that I haven’t even found time to post about the important stuff that’s happened to me personally¹, but I think it’s a great idea and I wanted to point people at it.

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¹ F’rinstance, I twisted my (other) ankle on Saturday and fell down in the middle of the street. Got an awesome bruise on my thigh from the curb. I’m fine, though; the nice drivers stopped and didn’t hit me, and I’m back to walking almost normally now.

Hi! I’ve just created the quincy_ma community, “for those who live, work, or play in Quincy, Massachusetts”. The userinfo page has more about what it’s for. I’m probably going to shop it around in South-Shore related communities soon, but thought I’d give y’all a heads-up now.

(There was already quincy_losers, but it seems like its populace was pretty exclusively high-school age and it seems like it’s been quiet for a while, so I don’t think the new community is superfluous.)

So my sister, bcat1 has just posted her first ever LiveJournal post, in which we learn that she is slothful, unlike anybody else on LJ. If you feel like it, pop over there and say hi.

(I need a baby-picture userpic.)

(1) That was a short race! I’ve changed my journal back.

(2) I just came home from Star Wars III: Return of the Sith. It was much better than the other two movies of the prequel trilogy. Of course, that’s like saying it was more honest than Richard Nixon. I find it amusing that the best acting in the movie was done by a CGI animation based on a puppet. Still, as a special-effects extravaganza, it was pretty fun, and the special effects were such that I’m glad I didn’t wait for video.