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Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
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Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
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bunnyjadwiga
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one of my co-workers had printed this off...
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, December 21st, 2009
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hrj
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Sure enough, pretty much the minute I left work for my vacation on Friday, I started coming down with a cold. Saturday was tied up with the memorial. Thanks to everyone who contributed refreshments -- while we didn't have overwhelming crowds, a good dent was made in the contributions with the remainder donated to a rotating homeless shelter that the Palo Alto Friends Meeting participates in. The memorial was quiet and low-key as Quaker gatherings generally are. Afterward the family group adjourned to my relatives' place in San Mateo for general socializing. (I confess I would have been happy to go straight home to bed, but one does what needs to be done.) The universe conspired to free me from any need to do airport runs on Sunday, so I scheduled it for getting as much sleep as possible with an aim to kicking the cold as quickly as possible. With a few ups and downs for more fluids, I slept more or less until 11am, then got up and walked over to Emery Bay to take in Avatar in 3D. (I was planning to catch the IMAX version, but they were sold out for the mid-day show and I figured the differential wasn't worth the wait.) It was sprinkling a bit when I came out and walked home, but not so much as to be uncomfortable. More hot soup and back to sleep from about 5-8pm. Up for more fluids and then managed about a solid 12 hours more of sleep. I haven't kicked the thing entirely, but I think I'm better positioned to survive the red-eye tonight to Maine. Packing has happened. I need to wash all the platters and bowls from the memorial refreshments (and tag things for who they go back to).
If I wait to do a full review of Avatar, I won't get around to it. So let's just say, it's an overwhelming visual feast of imaginative worldbuilding. And it's a real shame that they used up all the imagination and creativity on the world-building and didn't have a single drop left over for the hackneyed plot and the stereotyped characters. I think my judgement can be summed up with the following:
If your characters are referring to the valuable McGuffin-mineral as "unobtainium", it should be ironically humorous. It wasn't.
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, December 19th, 2009
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cronesmoon
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I found reviews of a book interesting, so I looked at the first pages, and found this on the first or second page: "I rose slowly from my chair in the front parlor, scanning my eyes over the worn furniture with the eyes of someone who hadn't become accustomed to its growing shabbiness for over twenty years."
I put it back on the shelf. Perhaps I've become too critical in my old age, but I just didn't think I could read through that style, no matter how intriguing the plot. It's harsh to judge an author by one awkward sentence; OTOH it's pretty careless of the author to allow something that infelicitous right in the first couple of pages.
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Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.
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montuos
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Snow 12/19/2009; view from my front door. SNOWPOCALYPSE not yet reached. I didn't put on outerwear or footgear to go far enough for a reliable measurement, but I'm guessing this is somewhere around six or eight inches.
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Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.
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Friday, December 18th, 2009
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hrj
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Evidently, according to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aryanhwy I came up with a variation on the "first sentences of first posts of the month" meme that involves running them together into a narrative. I guess I'll go with that one.
Dear Mr. Drunken Lobster Man[1],
So it started as a standard travel anxiety dream (although I have no impending trips in the near future). So clearly it's time to start thinking of a class to teach at West Kingdom Collegium in late April. There's nothing to take the stress out of starting the tourney season like the knowledge that your SCA camping checklists will preserve you from egregious logistical failures. West Kingdom Coronation ... now with Emu. [1] I rather enjoy the "menu planning by what's ripe" aspect of the CSA box, but this week I'm getting it from all sides. Take the bunch of carrots and the bag of beets from the weekly veggie box. When you wake up at 9am (for real) from a dream in which you wake up at 10 am and, in a panic, try to phone your friends to tell them you'd misremembered the brunch date at 10 as being at 11, it is a comfort to be able to verify that the (real) brunch date is for 11, not 10. I've been having weird project-stress flashbacks. The final play of this year's Cal Shakes season totally rocked. Spent the evening getting caught up with the CSA veggies. Home again and looking forward to some decompression time before it's back to the family whirl.
[1] Actually the subject line, but too good to pass up.
So the main themes seem to be SCA, CSA, and stress.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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hrj
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I have the best friends in the whole world. Just saying. They've helped me assemble a great refreshments spread for the memorial tomorrow. I have the photo-collage prepared. I have the music set up on my iPhone (and have acquired mini speakers to use with it that have quite adequate sound). I've delivered the text for the "memorial minute". The service runs itself, for all practical purposes. I still have no idea how many people are going to show up, but that was never in my control. All I have to do tomorrow is is an airport pick-up in the morning, pack the food and other paraphernalia (including passengers), get to the site in time to get the food organized before the service, figure out when the most appropriate time for the music is (I was originally thinking as people arrived, but now I'm thinking as background during the socializing afterwards). Pack up and deal with any leftovers. Deliver people back to my place. Do an airport drop-off Sunday morning. Then pack for Maine. At some point after that I may think about Christmas shopping. Or not. We'll see.
And that tickle in my throat better be the after-effects of presenting a training lecture this afternoon. Or else.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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bunnyjadwiga
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We'd like to have people be able to send us a phone text message (that we could reply to) either to Meebo or to email. Is it really as easy as having them put in our email address?
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
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bunnyjadwiga
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Fear the Google Books project? worry about copyright grab? THIS is the way to deal with it:
Nicolas Sarkozy fights Google over classic books
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6811462/Sarkozy-fights-Google-over-classic-books.html
Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to keep Google's hands off France's classic books and national treasures by spending £680 million making them available on the internet.
I get so tired of listening to information access specialists (librarians, etc.) who haven't digitized material for lack of funding, staff, time, or, worse, fear of the copyright police, complaining about how Google Books is a copyright grab.
Authors? Publishers? I know where they're coming from-- they don't really care if nobody can discover their material if discovery might mean revenue goes to someone else.
But it's fashionable to sit around complaining about Google (google search, google scholar, google books, etc.) and not ask "So why aren't we doing something better?" Because we aren't doing something better because we don't have the money, or we put the money into something else.
(Why can't people convince governors that libraries and schools ARE economic development?)
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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herveus
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This has been an interesting trip to Korea. That's mostly all a Good Thing.
I didn't get a chance to go silk shopping in Daegu. :( I did get a chance to walk around downtown wearing The Hat. This brought smiles to lots of faces. It also yanked the chain of one of my cohorts. Very amusing.
I saw something interesting on the Seoul subway. On line 5 betwee Yeouido and Yeouinara stations, they have a stretch of LED panels that flash up an advertisement as the train roars by. There is about 15 seconds of display that is synchronized with the train's movement so it appears more or less stationary to the riders whizzing by. Pretty cool.
Now, back in DC, everytime someone manages to jump in front of a train, the question of "What can we do?" comes up. Many of the stops in Seoul have full barriers with doors that make it more or less impossible to jump in front of a train. Of course, that means that the trains have to stop pretty precisely at the station so the train doors line up with the barrier doors. Now, every station has bronze markers in the floor marking which door of which car will stop there, so they've already made a commitment even where there is no barrier of any sort.
Another interesting thing I saw was a chart for Line 1 showing you the "best" car/door to be at to make the shortest transfer at each transfer point. It's something you can figure out for yourself, but it's a nice touch to actually point it out to the ridership.
Back to shopping, I did get over to Dongdaemun to buy some silk yardage and some more silk sewing thread. I got some nice blue, some bold yellow, and some creamy yellow.
When I returned to Seoul from Daegu, I was unable to get a reservation at my "usual" haunt in Seoul -- the Hamilton in Itaewon -- nor could I get a reservation for my full stay at another hotel some other folks on this trip are staying at. I ended up at the Courtyard at "Times Square" in Yeoungdeungpo. It only opened in September. Looking at the location in Google Maps shows a completely different picture. It's about a 45 minute trip between walking and changing subways, but it's not bad. Among the food vendors in the Times Square complex was a surprise: Auntie Anne's. Apparently there are 14 outlets in the Seoul area.
Tomorrow, I'm planning on wearing The Hat to work. That should be entertaining.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, December 14th, 2009
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Sunday, December 13th, 2009
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hrj
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So every once in a while I browse some of my LJ-friends friends-lists to see who else might be posting interesting things that I'm not reading regularly. What I find is that even for people with whom I share only about 20% of our friends-lists, the overlap in content of our friends-postings is typically around 60-80%. Part of this is that -- because I f-lock so few of my posts -- I don't feel the need to friend people just so they can read me. So if I get friended and on poking around I discover that the person either doesn't post much of anything or only posts memes, I generally don't friend back. So if I'm comparing f-lists with someone and they don't have a similar strategy, our f-list overlap percentage is going to be smaller than otherwise. It's also possible that a fairly high proportion of posters (overall) f-lock their posts and, of course, when I browse someone else's f-list I only see postings from people we have in common or who don't f-lock. Checking my own f-list postings, if I eliminate feeds and communities, about a third of the posts I see are f-locked. So someone else viewing my f-list would only see 2/3 of the personal postings that I see. If my friends and my friends' friends f-lock at similar rates, then if I share 20% membership with someone, and I see 100% of the 20% overlap posting but only 67% of the 80% non-overlap posting, then I'd expect the shared visible postings to be 20/(20+54)= 27% overlap of what I see on that persons f-list. Now to approximate the effects of my not friending non-posters (and thus artificially decreasing the potential f-list overlap) I note that people I haven't reciprocally friended represent about a quarter of the number of mutual friends I have. But as a wild-assed estimate, if this increased the potential f-list overlap to 25% (from 20%), then the expected shared visible postings would be 25/(25+50)=33%, and still not close to the approximately 60% or so overlap that seems to be the minimum I see.
From this, I jump to the completely unwarranted conclusion that my friends are simply, on average, much more interesting and prolifically-posting people than other people's friends. :)
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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hrj
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Yesterday and today I set myself to working on titles and forms of address to be used in the novel. I ran a large number of possible roots and compounds through the phonological mill, applied my general principle that romance roots are considered more upperish-class and germanic ones more lowerish-class, and picked the results with the right "feel". The next step was putting together a matrix of all relevant combinatorial interactions of class, formality, age, and intimacy and sketching out the general social rules for address and reference. The exciting part was that as I started firming up the results, I could feel the tone of the story shift from "generic Englishy feel" to "definitely Somewhere Else". "Mistress *placeholder*" is a rather different person from "Maisetra Sovitre". One of the fun things I hope to do in my overly-analytical way is to track the shifting relationships between the main characters not only in how they address and refer to each other, but -- in the case of the two POV characters -- how people get referred to during their "stage time". Yes, it's a bit excessively picky, but it's sort of like getting the food right, or the clothes right. I have most of the main characters named at this point, so I think I'm ready to start the revision process on Part I. I'm guessing that what with one thing and another this process will take me through the end of the year.
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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Friday, December 11th, 2009
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hrj
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1. Dad arrived for a week's visit (a wedding and a memorial) and told me all sorts of horror stories about his flights. On the other hand, if you're going to absent-mindedly pack a kitchen knife in your carry-on, you can't expect the trip to go completely smoothly.
2. Over lunch today I started matching names with characters on my Dramatis Personae list. I'm starting with the major characters and will fill in the minors as I do the revision I think. But I'm not quite ready for that as I need to work on surnames and place names as well. Also forms of address. Using the usual English words just doesn't feel right, so I think I once again need to pick some Latin roots and ring my changes on them and see how it looks.
3. Wrote another fill-in scene in Part I. It occurred to me that if one of the justifications for saddling the unexpected heiress with a professional bodyguard is the potential for abduction and forced marriage to gain control of her fortune, then it would probably be a good idea to actually have a foiled abduction somewhere in there, otherwise everyone looks unnecessarily paranoid. Besides, it means protagonist #2 gets to kill someone on-screen, and it may actually be her only chance to do so in the entire story. I'm sure it would be very frustrating to be a highly trained bodyguard and professional duelist and then not get to kill anyone on-screen in the entire book.
4. It's a good thing I like to do lectures fairly free-form and off-the-cuff, because when I got pulled in to do a training session on one day's notice, only got my hands on the powerpoint file hour before the training, half an hour later discovered that I would have no power except emergency lighting in the conference room (and therefore would need to print out the slides as handouts), and then got bumped from the room by a bunch of engineers halfway through the hour and needed to move the entire class to the break room instead ... well, let's just say that a rigid presentation format wouldn't have worked very well. Got some very useful questions as well.
5. Some friends sent me the following: my very own plush headless dancing chicken. (It has a purple tutu -- that's how you know it dances.) It was made by Stuffe & Nonsense. I don't think I'll take it in to work, but a better version of the picture may well become an icon.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, December 10th, 2009
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herveus
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OK, I'll play along with this one:
If I came with a warning label, what would it be?
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Comments: Read 11 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
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hrj
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I think I'm happy with the tweaking of the look-and-feel of my name set at this point. Now I have about 90 items to name so far, roughly equally divided between men's names, women's names, and names of places and things. I think I can make a good start with that, but this is the point where the names have to "fit".
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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indescribable.![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/newsinfo.gif){kind=small}
awake.
shocked.