 |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rmd |
| 2008-07-23 23:34 |
| blah blah twitter blah blah |
| Public |
|
twitter sez:
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Readercon 19: We're Gonna Need More Stickers. This year I was cheerfully informed that there were 130+ different sentences to be gathered, and enough gatherers turned out that I was reduced to asking various authors to recite their works so that I could transcribe for inclusion. To the surprise of exactly nobody, quite a few authors can indeed recite their works off the tops of their heads. (Especially if they've only just given away 30 copies of the sentence in question, the last one gone 30 seconds before I sidled up.)
I did not acquire 130 sentences. However, I did acquire many, and as usual attached them to the sheet as I received them, attempting to cobble together a story without recourse to rearrangement. I do this without a net, people. Forthwith, the story:( Read more... )
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| n5red |
| 2008-07-23 22:05 |
| Steampunk style! |
| Public |
| geeky |
|
Your result for The Steampunk Style Test... The Gadgeteer
You are the Gadgeteer, the embodiment of steampunk technology. Ironically, many of the things that most define your style are probably too large to easily carry about, but given the opportunity you would prefer to be seen surrounded by boiler engines, gear-driven calculators, and incredible automata. Of all the steampunk fashion styles, you place the greatest emphasis on technological accessories, and you are the most likely to create elaborate gadgets that are as much a part of your outfit as your clothes. You probably have goggles, but unlike most people you consider them to be for more than decoration. Whereas most people might look odd carrying a satchel of tools around, for you they may well be essential. Above all, you remind everyone that what sets the genre apart from Victoriana is simply the level of technology. Try our other Steampunk test here. Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
| mangosteen |
| 2008-07-23 22:47 |
| On Professional Communication, and Playing the Ball |
| Public |
So, here's an essay I wrote about geeks and professional communications skills. I ask for general feedback (i.e. "Does it make its point? What do you think that point might be?").
Also, if you consider yourself a geek in a professional role, tell me if it resounds with you (i.e. "Wow. Yeah. I really wish I had someone sit me down and tell me this a long time ago. I figured it out on my own, but this would have been a lot less pain.")
( Essay within. ~650 words. You know you want to. )
Now, the interesting thing about this particular essay is that more than half of it could be summed up using the sports metaphor "Play the ball, not the player." If you grew up in Western society and played team sports as a kid, you probably heard a version of that saying at some point.
Which makes me wonder.....
Postulate: Because geeks and sports don't really get near each other during the younger years, there are a whole bunch of social memes that are taught through sports that never really make it into the heads of most geeks until they learn them later through trial and terror. This doesn't mean that sports are the sole route for lessons about sportsmanship, team play, etc. Rather, it's a well-known way to transmit them quickly and early.
Like I said above, feedback is good. There will likely be more (and likely in a bloggish venue).
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
OK, something current this time.
Back when I visited the Cape at the beginning of Bear Week, I had dinner with eric_mathgeek and mark_shutterbug. We shopped for dinner goodies at the local Grand Union (didn't even know these still existed!) and Eric and I spotted this beverage. Sunkist Float? An ice cream float in a single bottle? Can it work?
It can! I'm having one right now and it's not bad! The orange soda is not very fizzy and the cream... is creamy. I'm not a fan of root beer so someone else will have to try that one, but I like this one!
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
| rsadelle |
| 2008-07-23 19:48 |
| Fan fiction taught me everything I need to know about reading books. (Blahblahblah edition.) |
| Public |
This entry is part of a series.
They didn't call on me before the discussion moved on from how fan fiction has changed your reading habits to some other topic, so you get to hear about the other piece of my perspective on this (this is, after all, what a blog is for): I am much less tolerant of world-building and description now. When I read fic, I already know all of that, and I want to just get to the story part of the story. Now, even when I read original novels, I just want them to get to the story part of the story rather than spending forever and a day on setup. This is especially true of books in a series. I remember hearing that Lois McMaster Bujold's Beguilement and Legacy were originally one book that got split into two due to length, and it shows, especially when you compare Legacy to Passage, the third book. Passage resets the stage for us (although more gracefully and less tediously than other authors might) where Legacy just keeps going from where we left off in Beguilement. One of the worst - or possibly best - offenders is Catherine Asaro who seems to just copy and paste the same two paragraphs about how telepathy works in her world somewhere into the first chapter or two of each Skolian Saga novel. Bad because it's irritating; good because once you've read it in the first book, you can skip it every other time. (This relates to an interesting discussion from the bad books panel at last year's WisCon: one woman said she thinks we need to relearn the lost art of skipping. She contended that when you read letters and whatnot from people of the past [I have the impression of eighteenth or nineteenth century literary types, but that might not be who she meant], they were always skipping parts of books. She decided to take up this practice when she realized she'd been reading Anna Karenina for three years. She liked the Anna parts, but would get stuck at the other parts, and so she just started skipping the other parts.) Because of fan fic, and especially the matter-of-fact approach it takes to whimsical genres like wingfic, genderswap, and centaurfic (yeah, that last one is new to me too), I'd rather Catherine Asaro just tell the story without feeling like she has to give a sciency-sounding explanation for the telepathy. Similarly, I loved J.L. Langley's My Fair Captain, but found the blahblahblah about the Regency background of the society tiresome. Don't try to sell me on your world; just tell me the story. If you're any good at all (and J.L. Langley is), I'll pick up on the background as we go along.
"But Ruth," I can hear you thinking, "what about all that stuff you said six posts ago about not enough description?" Yeah, I did say all that stuff about not enough description. Somehow, there has to be a balance. I have to know enough to get what's going on, but not so much that I stop reading because there's no story amidst the description. There also has to be the right kind of description. Nathan first seeing Aiden? Yes. Regency background of their world? No.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Another recent activity that's a little late in the telling...
I was on my way to work. And I approached a traffic light intersection and the light turned yellow on me. So I slowed down and stopped. I wasn't there two seconds when a bicyclist happened by right in front of me. He hadn't just started going; he was already on his way! So he was in the process of running his red light.
If that light hadn't changed when it did, I could have smacked right into him! Don't these people realize what the hell is going on??? Perhaps someone could double-check the law here but I know I have to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk, but am I legally obligated to stop for bicyclists who are going against their light?
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| lordlnyc |
| 2008-07-23 22:35 |
| I should be at the TriState Polyamory fourth Thursday munch tomorrow |
| Public |
| much, poly |
|
I am planning to go to the "TriState Polyamory fourth Thursday munch" tomorrow. I hope to some of you local poly people there.
The munch is held at "Empire Szechuan Village", 173 7th Avenue South New York City (Between Perry Street & 11th Street) From 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm.
TriState Poly is a social and discussion group; we gather for conversation, company, and, generally, food. Newcomers are welcome.
Subway directions: take the 1/9 line to the 14th Street Station. Go few blocks SOUTH on 7th Avenue. It's on the left hand side of the road.
For more information, contact tristatepoly@egroups.com or visit http://www.polyamory.org/nynj/.
restaurant: 212/243-6046.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| rubbermummy |
| 2008-07-23 19:48 |
| Weekend (a little late) |
| Public |
|
Never thought I wouldn't get to last weekend by Wednesday. Anywho, here goes...
( Fetish Fair Flemarket )
( Eric and Mark's )
( Wilma's Christmas in July )
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
. . . to the first person to shout "Book, ho!" when they sight the new paperback of Delia Sherman's Changeling in an actual bookstore! I hear it's out and everything, but have yet to see one myself.
Actually, last time I called deliasherman's cell phone, she was signing copies to leave for customers of Porter Square Books in Cambridge. So I guess she's seen it.
But then, she's the author. What about the rest of us??
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| mecooper |
| 2008-07-23 22:05 |
| Confession time ... |
| Public |
 mischievous |
|
The time has come for me to be completely honest.
I'm watching Brett Micheal's Rock of Love on Wednesdays. I'm actually only able to watch the last five minutes ... but it's like a train wreck. I can't take my eyes off it. deakat seems to have the same macabre fascination with it. SNL did a wonderful parody of the show ... except it really isn't a parody. Its pretty much a perfect re-enactment. I now wander around the house grunting "Facetime! I need facetime!" at odd moments and have begun to bite my tongue from asking deakat if she'll stay in my house and rock my world. I'm so ashamed.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
| rsadelle |
| 2008-07-23 19:02 |
| A Most Excellent Novel |
| Public |
Last week I read Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins & Fenway Park, and if there's any justice in the world, this is only one of many reviews of it to play off the "excellent" in the title for the review headline. With five and a half months to go, I'm already prepared to say that My Most Excellent Year is one of the best books of 2008. I'm even willing to go out on a limb and say that it's one of the best books of the decade.
( Spoiler-ish Review )
Overall, I highly recommend the book. For the four of you for whom the "highly recommended" is upgraded to an "absolutely must read" (thefuturenow, schuyler, and j_crew_guy and elekdragon), copies of the book should be arriving in/on your doorstep/mailbox/desk shortly, if they haven't already. The rest of you should beg, borrow, or buy a copy from your local friends, library, or book store.
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
|
This was a very fast and a really intensely busy (and deeply sleep deprived) trip to London. I really love this city... and I don't get to enjoy it's summer enough... sigh... I wish I had more time here.
Keeping busy has been good for keeping my mind and heart from dwelling in grief. I wonder how I'll feel when I get back home. When I call home I have to stop myself from asking "so how's Grrr?"
I landed last Saturday. The flight was delayed 2 hours so by the time I got in it was too late to go to Kew Gardens as I had planned. They have a great canopy walk among their tallest trees for the summer. Unfortunately I didn't get to go at all this trip and the canopy walk will be down by the time I return in October.
Sunday: Up by 6am. So I had at least 7 hours of sleep on top of jet lag. Journey by train to the far east end of London and get picked up by my ride. Then we drive out through beautiful country side to Essex. I'm there styling and rigging for www.thefetishsaloon.com. The location was a farm... rolling green hills, a late, boat house, bunch of geese, small apple orchard, a tractor barn, a mechanic's garage.... Lovely place. I've been going to London regularly for over a decade now, but I really haven't seen much of anything outside of London - so this was a great change of scenery for me. (I know - some of you wonder why I've not seen much beyond London and why don't I just do it. It's not that easy. My teaching and performing gigs are at night. That means that any personal time I might have has to be within return distance to Covent Garden, SEOne, or where ever in town. Then I need to build in time for transit across this massive city and time to prepare for the class or show. Taking extra days off is difficult as that means other teaching jobs elsewhere won't happen. Life of the freelance, right? It's a good thing that I really enjoy London.)
Worked with a really nice first time model. All the crew spent the night out there and returned to the farm to shoot with the same model and another gal who joined us. I'll post photos of that in a separate post with a "not safe for work" LJ cut. worked on 4 hours of sleep.
Monday night, back into London with the execs from the web site. Midwifed a meeting with them and some of my talented friends over dinner.
I get back to the flat around 11pm (Turns out my friends back at the flat I'm staying at had an improptu weekend long play party and I missed out!)
I get a call that the product promotions rep for the big presentation at Coco De Mer wants me in for a meeting the next day at 10am. I get this at 10pm. Yike. I get an e mail that Coco De Mer needs class descriptions for the new class by morning. Also news to me. Double yikes. I have a deadline for my article for SocialKink.com Triple Yikes. I stayed up waaaay late. So late it was early. I got to sleep at 5:30am and had to wake up at 7:30am. 2 hours of sleep. Oh goodie.
The article turned out pretty good. I'm taking my "Beyond Twisted" class and making it into a series of columns. I'm pretty happy with it.
The class descriptions are pretty good to. Launching two new classes at Coco De Mer in October. I'll have the popular classes of JoyStick Secrets, How to Eat a Peach, and Sensual Whip - but we're adding "Rosy Cheeks: Beginner's Guide to Love Swats, Spankings, Paddle and more" plus "Bedroom Burlesque and Seduction for Beginners: Wiggle, Jiggle, Take It Off with Confidence!" Women Only."
(more soon. I'm very tired now so I'm going to bed. Woo hoo! I'm actually getting almost 6 hours of sleep tonight!)
Here's a photo from my airplane window. Perfect banking maneuver across the West End, The Eye, Tower Bridge, Tate Modern and of course the Thames.
The cloud parted and framed it like a painting.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| shadesong |
| 2008-07-23 21:31 |
| Brighter happier side... |
| Public |
 thankful |
|
* Elayna is having a blast in Session Two of Explo, with classes in ecology and Japanese language & culture and mini-courses in swimming and tennis. She's staying there from tomorrow through Sunday, going to Heifer International's Overlook Farm and Water Country, and she is very psyched. :)
* Blogathonners, she's cool with one of you using her laptop, if you need. It's missing an "s" key thanks to Jack, but is otherwise just fine.
* Speaking of Blogathon, bids on the auctions are up over $650. :) No straight-up sponsorships yet, though, that I know of! Remember, if you donate to BARCC, send me your e-mail receipt so I can keep track!
* I get to hang out with some really awesome people this weekend, doing something great.
* I've gotten very sweet e-mails from a few people lately, and a great LJ comment from bodhifox.
* Date night with my husband tomorrow. :)
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| shadesong |
| 2008-07-23 21:06 |
| Like a tightrope in the mud |
| Public |
 contemplative |
|
Yesterday's doctor was a nutritionist. So yesterday I sat down and said, basically, "This is the highly condensed version of the past four years of my life. In 2003, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. The first meds they put me on caused me to rapidly lose 50 pounds - the first 30 over the course of two months. I kept dropping weight even after the med change, and went down to 85 pounds before I could be stabilized. The meds that finally controlled my seizures caused me to put that all back on, and then some. In the interim, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia as well, making it difficult to exercise sufficiently due to chronic pain and fatigue - and the extra weight makes it more difficult as well. I'm kinda screwed there. In addition to that, I have IBS, which has a high comorbidity with fibro. I have several conditions interdependent with each other, I'm on six medications (none of which are optional), and my body's reacting violently and unpredictably. To top it off, y'know the old joke 'What does a Jewish mother make for dinner? Reservations*'? In my case, totally true. So I never learned anything about nutrition, really, and some knowledge in that regard has become increasingly important. I spent the last several years forcing myself to eat every time I possibly could so I didn't have to go on a feeding tube, then having my body's response go in full reverse, but not changing my behavior.
"So. Doc. Tell me how to eat."
Yes. I'm a grown woman, needing to be told how to eat.
The thing is this. My body is a complex system with faulty wiring. Everything that I do affects it. Can't stay up too late. Must take meds on schedule. Must ration spoons/activity level - if I walk Elayna to the bus stop,I won't be able to walk to the library later. If I do air travel, I have to allot recovery time. Sometimes it feels like every minute of every day is devoted simply to maintaining that balance - teetering over a morass of pain, of fatigue, of seizures, gripping with my toes...
And I have been incredibly resistant to allowing food to be a part of that. Because it feels like fewer and fewer things exist out of that state of constant hypervigilance. It feels like this is one more thing that gets absorbed into the medical hell.
So it was very difficult for me to go in there and say "Tell me how to eat for IBS and for weight loss." The weight loss because I need to be able to exercise, because not-exercising makes the fibro worse.
It feels like another loss. It feels like giving up ground.
I remind myself that my health is the only thing wrong in my life, and that helps. I am rich in my family and friends and beloveds, if not in money. I have my writerbrain. I have a lot.
It just takes so much energy to stay aloft, sometimes.
Meh. I'll be okay tomorrow. After my next doctor appointment. *wry smile*
* I can tell this joke, because I was raised Jewish (and still am, partly). So you know.
8 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| n5red |
| 2008-07-23 18:12 |
| Head. Wall. Repeated high velocity impacts |
| Public |
| fried |
|
Yeah, this is a rant. If you don't want to read, keep scrolling...
I'm currently still putting together a High Performance Compute cluster. It hasn't been going tremendously well. I didn't get here until after the hardware had been ordered. Some of the decisions really weren't all that well thought out and there was a serious lack of planning as to exactly what they were going to build. When it got here, a fellow that is only working very part time for this project jumped in and did lots of stuff his way. He doesn't play well with others. It took a few weeks and lots of energy to convince a couple of layers of management that I really, really wasn't willing to support "his" cluster. He has been here for years and has been running his own one man show. No clue about real systems administration and maintainablilty, but really good with bailing wire and chewing gum. In addition, there have been a lot of on the fly design changes by everyone involved. These have left me without some of the resources I need to manage this cluster. The fact that somebody else threw together an install on the head node of the cluster also meant I wasn't able to use resources there. In fact, it's still totally useless to me, I should have degaussed the whole thing a couple of months ago. Instead, in an effort to not pick any fights, I left it alone. Bad mistake. The cluster is now partially in production, totally unmaintainable and when I go to reinstall, it is going to crater very badly. It will take days to find out all the ad-hoc changes that this other fellow did.
This brings me to today's headache. I wasn't involved in the initial hardware selection. Later on it was decided that we need a system with two 10Gb ethernet interfaces for high speed data transfer in and out of the cluster. This same fellow decided that we absolutely must have a dual-port card even though two single port cards would easily fit in the 2U system. He searched and searched and searched, finally coming up with a car from Sun. I asked if it was well supported under Linux and was assured that it was. Surprise, not only are the drivers extremely difficult to locate, partially because Sun's online documentation has a totally bogus link, it turns out that it supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Since RHEL5 has been out for well over a year, this is unacceptable. Having to waste almost an entire day tracking this down is also unacceptable.
What else? Well, since this other fellow had ordered all the hardware originally, and I don't have a thorough understanding of the process or the contacts, he was tasked with ordering some other parts we need. Like three more SAS cables, a couple more fiber patch cables and at least one more power supply for the HP switch (it has two, which is the minimum it needs). So far none of that has been accomplished.
I have been working pretty much straight through for the last few months on this project. I'm burned out. There's a lot of pressure from the big boss to get this cluster fully operational. There's also a lot of pressure to deal with problems on a number of existing systems. There's also only one sysadmin, me. I need some help, there's more work here than I can manage. I also really, really need a break.
5 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
|
|
|
hopeful
