魔法少女プリティジューリャ

I'm attempting to watch "Hairspray" and the opening song (Good Morning, Baltimore) has stuck in my brain.
I'm hearing "Good morning, Voldemort"

I leave this thought for one more demented than I to run with.

Today, if you'd been at my house, you would have had the opportunity to watch me melt. Apparently, the older i get, the less heat-tolerant i am, and the low-to-mid thirties (that's upper 80s to low 90s for you Fahrenheit people) is just too damn hot. Was dizzy, vaguely nauseous and just generally felt like dreck most of the day until the temperatures fell. Tomorrow, thankfully, the high is projected to just be a few degrees warmer than it is now (it's now 17, projected high tomorrow is 19), so it should be significantly more comfortable for the boys' combined birthday fete.

Major, major props to waywind, who was kind enough to point me at a service called LJBook.com. It's the tool I've been trying to find for years now.

In short, it takes your journal and makes a very well constructed PDF backup of it. It lets you pick the date ranges, what security levels, how much of the media (pictures) to include, and so on. Then it bundles it all up into a .PDF file with a full table-of-contents, broken in to date-wise chapters. All comments are included, as well. The end result is wonderfully readable, unlike countless other LJ-Backup tools I've tried.



Turns your journal into a PDF Book.


LJBook (gads_ljbook)


(yes, that's their official 'plug' code; I felt it was only proper to include it.)

I feel a lot better now knowing that my journal is backed up in an offline fashion that's still searchable/readable. I've put a huge amount of my life's last six years into this journal, and if it all went away one day without warning I'd be crushed. As I type this the data is making it to physical media and remote storage. I'll re-do the process every few months, breaking it down into year-wise .PDF booklets at the year ends.

The current stat: 4800 pages. 60Mb. Just... duuuude. That's a lot of stuff for "oh, I think I'll just keep a journal for a while and see how it goes."

The nifty thing, though, was to take the MobiPocket reader (which I have to run under Parallels, but no worries there) and convert the "My LJ as a Book" result into the .mobi format. The reason: my Kindle can use .mobi natively. I've copied the result over to an SD card to sit alongside the big collection of sci-fi, fantasy and trashy romance novels I keep in the little e-paper device. Even after the double-conversion, it looks great. All the pictures show up. All the comments are there. Every link, every tag, every note. The chapters all work as do the search indexes, letting me quickly scan for things I've written years ago. As an added bonus, every link is still clickable due to the Kindle's EVDO connection and built in browser. The active linking helps keep the 'alive' nature of the original online journal.

It may be silly, but it's kind of neat to see this little leather-bound book (which is what a Kindle looks like when closed) sitting here on my desk, knowing just how much of my life -- and comments from my friends about that life -- it contains. What will it look like to me when I go back and read it in 10 years? 20? 30?

I wisely opted out of the double-size spread I was initially going for. This is a much tighter design than what I had originally attempted.

So today for dinner I made a roast duck. Added to this tastiness was a combination of steamed green beans and brussels sprouts, tossed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and feta cheese. I couldn't do much fancy with it as yiaya was over and her food restrictions on the antibiotics are fairly severe, but it was very yummy and tasty, with crispy skin and tasty tender meat and yummy vegginess.

We then watched a movie together and I hustled her off home. I am now sitting with a glass of chianti, after having slurped up a very ripe mango for dessert.

Life, she is good.

I also finished northwestpass aka Brendan Myers' The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues really came from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us today. Overall I think it was definitely worth reading. It talks about virtue ethics as a necessity of defining and living a good life, and in particular its final section, "Fifth Movement: The Calling of the Immensity" offers some very cogent and useful analysis of appropriate responses to the great mysteries of life. It challenges the logics that arise from both monotheism and existentialism, offering a third way that is difficult and challenging, but ultimately rewarding.

Overall, the book really needed a much better editor. Typos, mismatched tense, and other editing issues came up often enough to be downright distracting, and I see this as an editor rather than an author issue. There were a couple of places where I was left scratching my head wondering where Brendan had come up with one of the names of the Norns, or the idea that the Morrigan is an "earth goddess." The discussions leading up to the final movement of the book were necessary but a little lengthy and circuitous. Of course, it's the nature of philosophy texts to be lengthy and circuitous -- I think it's in the philosophers' job description. I would have done better with less attempting to be poetic and more straightforward discussion, to be honest. The opening section felt awkward but well-meant. The strength of the book is definitely in its concluding arguments.

It is certainly an important contribution to the creation of a modern Pagan philosophy of life, though I think that by the very nature of Paganism there will end up being many philosophies under that vast aegis. As a first salvo from within the modern Pagan movement proper, it's not bad. I hope that we'll see many more attempts to articulate a virtue-based ethics from within the vast and varied Pagan communities, and I do think that those attempting to do so will need to first examine Brendan's discussions and arguments before moving forward to struggle with the mysteries in more refined and tradition- or culture-specific ways.

As a religious movement, Paganism is in its infancy, but each attempt to push the boundaries further helps us to mature and to seek out larger answers. Each step on the way, each book and article that deals with issues of our place in the world, how we treat others, and how we face death is one more spark in what could be an immense bonfire of creativity and growth. Thank you, Brendan, for bringing us one step closer.

Three and a half virtuous vikings of five. Would have been a four with a better editor.

• 01:17 @ afterparty, saw Esperanza! Tyord, might go home soon. #
• 08:59 up early... class at 11 (Romany dance!) and YAY the heat's broken! can it RLY be almost over though? what an AWESOME time!! k, need fud nao. #
• 15:24 Ugh. Just ugh. #
• 18:40 Gotta dance gotta dance there's a chicken in my pants! #
• 20:02 "summertime"is the new "habibi ya nour al ein" #
• 22:12 Lots of highs & lows today. Ppl have been cool, ppl have been awful. Glad 2 b here but there's been a price. #
• 23:17 Dayum am I evar sick of steampunk! #

mwah!

(this posting automactically brought to you by LoudTwitter!)

to dduane

This is awesome.

Well, the other mushrooms are in now, give it a few weeks and if all goes well, there will be mushrooms for all!

http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/2008/05/to_the_moon.html

In name only, but NASA will be sending a database of names to the moon on the forthcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can add yours.

Oh, the name? seemed right when I wanted one with a quote in it.

Dammit, if you can't boredom eat when dieting what are you supposed to do with your boredom?

Bleh.

Yaaaay :D

We had a ubunch of people come over and cooked meat on the grill for delicious food

also lots of booze

Karol isn't here, so my new bed seems way too big :<

I'm reallly drink ringht now, I decided to come in and pass out for a bit.

Humble and Prelude are over, and Seven's friend Max too, and Max's frend Everet (I think) and of course Stephie and Jummi too :D

Oh wow booze. time to slepe it off I think. nini!

RELENTLESS SOCIALITY CONTINUES OMG.

dinner with _tove, "The Visitor" with erika b, and her housemate zoë; we repaired to Eat 'n' Park for breakfast foods. subpar of all people calls me up says he's in town, drops by. Then gustavolacerda and letters_in_sand do too! Some entertaining conversation all around. Also it was pleasantly not raining on the walk home.

We found soggy bits of a monopoly set on the street.

Today was a trip on the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, it was impressively scenic, but I'm particularly interested in scenic vistas. Also, while Durango is a mildly interesting place, Silverton is a tiny ex mining town that has become an impoverished tourist horror. All in all, a long and very dull day - the train jostled enough that reading was impossible. However, tomorrow (far too early) we head for home. teaotter also made a very short post mostly consisting of a few of her better and odder photos.

Coming home tomorrow. Whirlwind tour of Mesa Verde and the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad completed. Saw many things. Had many thoughts. Will have to find complete sentences later.

( For now, have some teaser photos )

They lost tonight.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

MUTO, an animation done with the artist painting on various walls, it's just mind-boggling, I love it. Stolen from xshardsx


Anyways several questions for folks.

First off, just curious, who is heading down to the HK Open House? Just curiousity.

Secondly, does anyone have an experience or pointers for group evocations? Specifically Goetics.

Next week, or the week after, it seems like I'm going to be doing my first Goetic evocation with more than just me. I'm trying to think of what to do to limit interference, how others can participate, safety (if that's an issue), what things might go wrong, etc. I'm debating (mostly joking) of using one person for a vessel, rather than the traditional mirror, but that might not be the best choice.

I had a tarot reading last night, which is actually something I rarely get from anyone else, and even more rarely from someone who I think might actually get stuff right. Parts of the reading annoyed me, but I think that is a sign that she was on the mark. It was surprisingly centred around my emotional stuff, which was slightly irksome to me, as I often downplay what little emotional stuff I do have, though I am in the habit of trying to change that. Though I will have more on that in another entry, and the demon that is dancing around me about that (or is it just a dancing demon around me?).

Important papers are important.

I have only a few clear memories from 1979, when I was nine years old.

One of them was when my folks took me and my sister to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre to see both The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, both of which were playing there.

You see, at that time, Mann's Theaters owned The Chinese and they'd recently constructed two extra theaters to turn it into a sort of multiplex. The Black Hole was thusly being played at one of these auxiliary theaters and Star Trek was playing on the main screen. We saw The Black Hole first and then went to see Star Trek.

Though I did and still do like The Black Hole, I was very much more in awe of Star Trek. At the time, I was really really clueless about the whole nature of Trekkies, and what a fanbase Star Trek had. So I was surprised when, for the very first time that Captain Kirk appeared on the big screen (in the scene at Starfleet Headquarters), the whole audience cheered.

But I did think that was fun.

So X. got me to my train with plenty of time* to spare, and I was able to get on-board right at the front of the pack, allowing me to secure one of the all-important seats at the four-person tables. Those have outlets right there. It's awesome. I got twenty pages of edits processed on the train, that's how awesome those seats are. I love Amtrak.

My train was about twenty minutes early, so of course, Michelle was about twenty minutes late, allowing me to do a slow roast in the early afternoon sun of Sacramento. I am not actually sunburned, but I was a trifle off for several hours while I tried to recalibrate myself.

Now here I am; Kaia's watching In the Night Kitchen, Michelle and David are giving Lady her medication (Lady, like Nyssa, is A Very Old Cat Indeed), and I'm letting people know I got here alive before we put Kaia to bed and move along to having an evening of adult conversation and, knowing us, dozing off mid-word. Life is pretty good.

See y'all tomorrow.

(*About eight minutes. Thank you, Martinez, for UNEXPECTED, UNANNOUNCED STREET FAIRS cutting off ALL LOGICAL ACCESS to the train station. No, really. THANKS A LOT.)

it's 8:30 on saturday and E and I are looking for peeps to go to dinner with, pre-pop roxx. Anyone interested? we're leaving soon.

Been drinking with the 'rents all day. Yeah.


Come on down.

Hi! I have a question about drug interactions. A friend of mine is taking Effexor, and wants to try MDMA. I checked on Erowid, and discovered that SSRIs reduce the effects of MDMA...but Effexor is an SNRI, which is apparently similar, but not quite the same? Does anyone know what effects Effexor might have on E, or has anyone had experience with taking them both at the same time? Thank you!

*installs windows SP3 on her WinXP machine*
*wonders how long until it blows up*

The plumbing.

It is fixed.

Finally.

I heart Verizon. My Phone has been randomly turning off and having issues turning back on this week, so I went in and told them "She's taking a lot of unplanned naps, I think she's sick!" and they said "Awwww" and then handed me a shiny new one. :D It took like 5 minutes. Hooray for good customer service!

also, I have a nice mahogany jewelry box that I don't need anymore. anyone need one? it's a medium-ish one. it's got slots for 10 rings, and 4 2"x3" bins. also a mirror in the lid. free to good home

I am extraordinarily proud to announce that Necroville, my second full length feature film, will be available for mass market sale on September 30th, 2008.

Many thanks go to everyone without whom this project not only would not have been possible, but would not have even been dreamed of.

Who likes mushrooms, specifically portabello mushrooms. It appears I am going to have lots, an awful lot. Plus in another few weeks I am going to have normal mushrooms as well.

Anyone, anyone?

Realistically, Robert Downey Junior could have played every character in the movie. I guarantee that if he pulled some Eddie Murphy stunt like that, no one would know. The rocky romance between Robert Downey and Robert Downey would flow perfectly while the business-rivalry-turn-deadly would actually cause you to hate Robert Downey and root for Robert Downey. -- It's hidden in the comments...somewhere...

Yeah, that's pretty accurate. :D

Original post here.
My son is doing very well considering how serious his injuries were.  He is off ventilation.  He no longer has a feeding tube.  He isn't even on IV fluids right now.  They will be doing some scans tomorrow and hopefully we will be able to bring him home and switch to in-home therapy to help with his recovery.  I really appreciate all the well wishes I received here.

I first posted about my son because of the prayer aspect of the situation.

There was another religious aspect to the situation that was really disturbing to me.

My mother-in-law, bless her heart, is a worrier.  When she saw her grandson lying in the hospital bed, she was very much afraid that Gabriel might die.  This idea never really entered my mind, but it wasn't an entirely irrational fear.  At one point my mother mentioned to me that my mother-in-law wanted us to contact our minister and make sure that he would be available to basically do an emergency baptism.

Now, there are many things wrong with this:

One - My mother-in-law almost always talks to me about important things through my mother because that is how we stay civil.  My entire family not knowing (for sure) that I'm an atheist is also a way we keep peace.

Two - My minister is not a Christian (not even a theist) and would probably not be comfortable performing a sacred rite of the Christian church. 

Three - My father understands that my minister is not a theist and would be horribly offended if my minister were to baptize his grandson.

Four - My mother-in-law worships a version of God that may send an innocent 11 month old baby, killed in a car accident, to hell - presumably because the baby's parents had sex in order to conceive him.

My mother suggested a fix for the awkward situation.  Perhaps my mother-in-law could baptism my son because basically in their denomination anyone can perform the rite of baptism.  I refused this compromise.  "Baptism is supposed to be a sacred covenant.  If my son isn't old enough to understand what he is agreeing to, he is not going to be baptized."

As you may notice.  I do live a bit of a lie when it comes to my family.  I just don't think it is necessary to basically "come out" as an atheist to them.  About the most blasphemous thing I've done to cover up my non-belief is to take communion at my grandmother's funeral.  That's another story, but generally I do respect religious rites to the point where I avoid dishonestly participating in them.

I told my mother that I wouldn't mind if my mother-in-law "blessed" Gabriel, but that I would be offended if she said, "I baptize you..."

Now, my son is doing extremely well.  There was no point where I thought the doctors believed that he might actually die.  (If they thought this, they certainly were smart enough not to mention it.)  I do wonder though, how I would have reacted to my mother-in-law's request if her fears were more warranted.  I think that she and I will have to talk at some point just so we can hash things out.  If something even more horrible were to happen to a member of my family, I certainly don't want to be bothered by having to hash it out then.  I most likely wouldn't have the sense to keep it civil at that point.

My air conditioner works. It is a nifty cooling machine. Installing it was the most byzantine procedure I think I've ever had to complete, on par with getting the Babel Fish, but with more physical labor. I absolutely couldn't have done it without mmsword's help. He thought up most of the hacks necessary to make the hardware compatible with my version of windows.

Jacob Robbins; NIH Scientist Known for Thyroid Research (From The Washington Post, May 16, 2008.)

Jacob Robbins first set foot on the eighth floor of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in 1954. Claiming one of only two working labs available to him in the year-old hospital, he immediately launched what would become groundbreaking work on the function of the thyroid and the treatment of thyroid cancer, particularly cancer caused by exposure to radioactivity.

On May 12, Dr. Robbins died of cardiac arrest -- at the Clinical Center, not far from where his NIH work had begun 54 years earlier. He was 85.

"He died surrounded by the work he treasured," said Griffin P. Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, or NIDDK.

I'll miss him.

Yay, Caltrain! Heading back to the city.

We were all out there in the graveyard at noon, not feeling sad at all, doing bar tricks with matches. Then someone came by with a tea set, with silver tray and little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Everybody just couldn't stop talking; every story led to three more stories, and it seemed like the sunlight and the tea would last forever. The tea was genmaicha that left the air thick with roasted rice.

Somebody — and it might have been me — suggested that we invite some bees to come join us. Amanda was the only one who had a cell phone that could talk to bees, and so she called a local hive or two and invited them over for a picnic.

You would think it would be a mistake, since usually people don't want bees at a picnic, but there's a big difference between invited guests and partycrashers. The bees brought nectar, and stories, and picnic games. Nine-legged sack races are a hoot! Toward the end we were all kind of tired and silly and the bees would swarm up and lift people in the air one at a time.

Thanks, bees! We all had a blast.

Yay! No more land line or other bullshit.

It occurred to me rather suddenly last night that here I am, a 61-year-old, notoriously reclusive and socially inept computer nerd, attempting to dispense avuncular advice on relationships, marriage, and psychology over the internet. And in person, I might add.

This strikes me as highly improbable, totally out of character, mildly amusing, and more than a little mind-boggling. I feel a little as though, after many years of playing an assortment of jesters and other fools, I have finally moved up to playing Polonius.

I’m not really a “horse guy”, and I never watch horse racing. But today while visiting the family we watched the Preakness, and damn Big Brown is a gorgeous horse. It looked like he won without even really trying, and had a fun time in the process! Impressive!

*manic laugh* My "quick look" report is already nearly 30 pages, and I still have a few more worth to write. Granted, there are a lot of pictures and about 9 of those pages don't really count, but still. I think I'm certifiably insane. At least I drew the line at actually trying to do the math to figure out what metabolic loads the people were generating and I'm just making general comparisons to results of prior tests with known metabolic loads.

But hey, maybe I'll get another "good job!" certificate with a shiny sticker on it for my trouble. I'm definitely overdue for another one of those - the last one is dated 2/07.

Edit 10:20 PM: Oh, fuck me. I made the same mistake as last time I did this, forgetting a unit conversion in one formula that's in half a dozen places in all of my several-hundred MB each Excel files. *headdesk* I just wrote a macro to go through all the files and fix it, so I guess I'll leave that running overnight and come back in the morning to clean up the plots and redo a whole bunch of numbers and pictures that I spent a bunch of time on today. *cry*

Edit 11:40 PM: Well, actually, that wasn't as bad as I feared. The macro got all the files done in half an hour, and I realized I could have "good enough" numbers for the tables by just manually multiplying everything by the missed conversion factor. I got several of the plots quickly replaced, too, but I'm mentally and physically done for tonight. I'll have to work all day tomorrow, too (until my movie date in the late afternoon, anyway).

It's 29C outside.

It was 18C max just two days ago.

Thank God I have a fan.

Two more hours to sunset and cooldown.

...as it's gone from chilly every day, to scorching every day. I think there's a bug in the weather; where's the init option to turn temperature off? I've been napping to restart and try to find that option, but all I get are dreams of face pulling.

lisa and i just went out for sushi, my first time doing so. it's been scary due to a past experience, so i've been avoiding it for the last... 7 years or so.
was soooooo nuuummmmmmy. *squeee*
also went to the agriculture museum today (on a farm) and saw sheepses and shearing and such, and i got to weave on a loom a little bit. was fun and nifty and dangerous, as looms are large and the *last* thing i need is another hobby to take up time/money/fibre ;)
having a very, very, very good vacation. :)

Yay. Electronics.

Milpitas-bound. Oh boy!!

http://cryptome.org/cn-quake6/cn-quake6.htm

May 17, 2008

Bleeehhhhhh. SO BORED.

My hair has all new color and extensions. I'm all purpley red now. But it's too hot to show it off so I just went straight home and pinned it all up.

Too hot to do homework (yeah, I know, that doesn't really make sense).

My computer is so broken. I got a new battery, but the problem is the same: It won't turn on with the battery in, and if it does, it doesn't get any juice from the battery, just the powercord. WTF?

Damn, I really just want to go swimming somewhere!

No real angst or depression these days (thankfully), just a whole lot of drudgery and endless tasks.

June 12th really can't come fast enough.