aesmael

For a couple of days now I have been back on my laptop, since it came back repaired. For almost the same time I have been back in Vista, because there were people who wanted to talk with me on Skype and the company has let its Linux version lag very far behind the current state of Skype-art.

Am likely to continue using Vista a while again because I am somewhat relying on the calendar app for the Google Sidebar to keep myself on track in my life. If I don't have something that pops up alerts without my input then I fairly completely lose track of time and lately especially I am feeling the need for being reminded to take some breaks, get some space and distance. Having that definitely does not completely fix things, and I often do not act on it, but merely having that there in my sidebar reminds of these things.

So I think I am better off for now using Vista than Ubuntu.

soltice has been selected to be a guest on the OSNews podcast. She can be heard on episode 18 and it was very strange hearing her familiar voice in a radio sort of context. She is also on the just released episode 19 and I think will be appearing in future too. Am really still stunned by all this, a bit amazed and proud and still blinking.

Meanwhile

lost_angelwings' post comparing the crew of Primetime Sports with the Justice League got her mentioned on the front page of their website. Primetime Sports, that is, not the Justice League who are too snooty to do more than monitor her covertly.

So that's pretty rad I guess.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Handle With Care - Travelling Wilburys

It seems upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 got my speakers working, handy since I no longer have any working headsets and apparently a contrary experience to many other people. That seems to be a primary complaint with any new version of Ubuntu, "My sound stopped working!"

Unfortunately I still have to deal with programs intermittently freezing and becoming unusable for periods of time, more often than happens in Vista, and puzzle out why Pidgin seems to be experiencing this to the point of being completely unusable (for now, using Kopete). Those are at least old problems and not new problems, unless 8.10 has fixed the old problems and replaced them with new ones which look identical. We shall see how much clearing out this months-old saved session of Firefox helps, perhaps with freeing up RAM - it can't cure the problem though, as it happens with Pidgin even if that is the only program I have started, at all.

Hopefully. When it is working well I tend to prefer Ubuntu over Vista.

Current Mood: apathetic

Yes, I wrote more last night and that is a wonderful, terrific thing. Two bursts, later than I would like, as is becoming unfortunate habit.

First, a bit more than four hundred words beginning at 20:00, which was not bad in itself. Then after midnight I broke for a bit to update some programs. It turns out Firefox autoupdate had not informed me of any increments between 3.0.0 and 3.0.3, which seems to be because I do not use the admin account in Vista - when the admin Firefox started automatically after I did the update manually, it unlike the one normally use had the 'check for updates' option not greyed out. Plus on closing the program it asked if I want to save my tabs for next time, something I have also been frustrated about not working for me in Vista. I intend to find out if these have been reported as bugs and, if not, to learn how to file them and make them be reported.

Among the other upgrades I changed OpenOffice.org from 2.4.2 to 3.0.0. Not being informed of that update was also annoying, especially as the 'check for updates' option was actually available and told me there were none after I had discovered elsewhere about 3.0.0 being available. And there was a recent security update after 2.4.2 so even if we are not being informed automatically of version 3, no excuse.

Now I am beginning to wonder if there is something installed on this system which is blocking information about updates (Firefox extensions do fine though, as do several other programs). There better not be; as much as I can I instruct programs to notify me of what they are and are not doing.

And after all this, another burst of writing right before sleep. From about 06:09 to 06:41, another six hundred or so words.

Epic Fantasy

10,262 + 1,036
(10.1% more)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Bizet - Carmen Fantasie

( Is lengthy )

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: ABC Classic FM

Google Reader Shared Items

Thank You Thursdays: Your (Notice I Didn't Say Female) Brain [via gentle_gamer. Comments to the post made me warier of this video. Did she have that brain cut in half to illustrate her point? Am pretty sure most brains I have seen are in a single piece unless cut. Much of her described experience of having a stroke is not unfamiliar to me, if to a greater degree. Not, I stress, identical, but apparently similar to something which can be accessible to me. If I were to release certain brakes, if I could remember how. I have a lot of hostility to the frame in which she presents her thesis, despite finding much recognition or even agreement in the details.

I dislike the way people jumped on ropty's comment ("Non-gendered? Dividing the world into two parts, one is linear, unemotional, calculating and the other about feeling, emotions, timeless oneness. Gee, that sounds rather gendered to me.") because this is a thing which is done, this is a way in which brain functioning is presented and those traits are very gendered in this society. Also that my readings of other writings on neurobiology suggest this is a highly oversimplified perspective on human brain hemisphere functioning, though as this was a talk for a lay audience that may have been deliberate. And it still seems to me her described experiences are very 'on point' even if I am not so fond of her presentation of them.

I wonder if making such experience accessible at will would have the effect on the world Dr Taylor describes.]
Video: Blaser tournament unwisely fits Japanese robots with lasers -- PEW PEW [via soltice. If we intercut this with some footage of people we could make a movie of it.]
New Hubble Images Reveal Plethora of Interacting Galaxies [via soltice. Pretty!]
Young feminists just want to "go wild and pole dance" [via gentle_gamer.]
How To Sing Like A Planet [via gentle_gamer. Wherever there be medium and motion, music. The article makes me angry, with it's talk of 'merely' as if scientific explanation of such magnificent happenings cannot be also magnificent, wondrous or beautiful themselves. I lost a lot of esteem for the writer's prior musings when I read that part.]
Atheism is a condom for your mind [via soltice. The part I disagree with is the phrasing suggestive that removing religious belief is a part and precursor to mental hygiene and health -- I would place taking care of the mind first, and if that leads to the removal of religion then so be it. Someone eventually said so too.]
Equality Through Intimidation? The Houston HRC Dinner Protest [via gentle_gamer.]
Comical Surroundings [via soltice. This is interesting but I think I would not like my furniture to be displaying always the same images and words. After so many repetitions reading, wearying.]
Modular, shape-shifting robots get right back up to creep you out [via soltice. Shiny! Still a ways to go before they are as capable as the version seen in Terminator 2 though.]
Australia to Remove Antigay Discrimination From 100 Laws [via soltice. An improvement, but not enough.]
Maintaining Moore's law with new memristor circuits [via soltice. Fascinating (a thing said when {in this case} interested but uneducated in a subject).]

Scienceblogs

Vaccination doesn't cause autism volume what-are-we-up-to-now? [And yet we see how well the continued lack of evidence substantiating a connection is received. *sigh*]

Current Mood: sleepy

I wonder very much about continuing these. If I did not, then I would say nothing of most of what I read, and give it less thought than if I attempted to find words for each. If I did not, I would read more, and quicker. I cannot quite shake the feeling that posting these is a pointless mechanical activity, a task continued because it was once set.

These links do not form an entirely honest record. There are items I have read and not noted because I did not wish to give the tacit approval of a link and did not know how to express or form criticism of the content in question.

The reason the majority of these are from shared items is, of course, that I have resolved to first become current with those before reading material of my own subscription.

About.com: Agnosticism / Atheism

Bias and Vested Interest: Interpreting Facts Unreasonably [Well, yes. I strive to avoid this but on good days do not pretend I achieve it.]

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Even More Political Chutzpah [I suspect most people do not investigate such claims - I know I tend not to, and rely on information provided by those who do.]

Google Reader shared items

Mysterious White Rock Fingers on Mars [via gentle_gamer. Mars may not be my favourite planet (which is? none, really, the overexposure of Mars or any other location seen as a prospect for life grates on me) but areology is fascinating!]
Because I can't help but make a LIAR out of myself [via soltice. I agree with this post. That photo is far too pretty for me to quite believe. Really, flower-filled meadows? Wild grass is brown, not green, and never contains flowers. This sort of scene is about as fantastical to me as the elves and snow I read of in stories.]
Inflation Theory Takes a Little Kick in the Pants [via soltice. The people commenting (at least at first) do not seem have understood what they read - the main claim is that a previously thought clear test for inflation has been found to produced by other sources too, and thus detection of this gravitational radiation cannot easily be taken as confirmation of the theory.]
Industry execs sound IPv6 alarm - is the sky really falling? [via soltice. Mm. I tend to be wary of people saying we have plenty of time to deal with a foreseen problem. Often, it seems solving it takes longer than projected.]
HP Mini-Note gets unboxed, causes extreme jealousy [via soltice. Presumably this computer is a big deal.]
Let's all pack up and move to Great Britain [via soltice. Odd seeing posts from feeds I have subscribed to shared by other people, and not reading them more directly. this comment sort of seems on the nose to me:

"Us Brits aren't precisely an areligious lot - most of us have some sort of faith, but it's so vague and noncommittal that it passes for atheism.

You know the kind of thing - "I believe there's something comforting out there but I don't know what it is and whatever it is I'm not going to let it affect my life. It's just nice to believe sometimes."

So, when Brits say they're afraid of "religion", what they're really afraid of is passionate religion. And seeing as Anglicanism is by definition almost never passionate, they're afraid of other religions being passionate. And in practice that means...Islam.

When my countryfolk talk about the evils of religion, they're talking about mosques, the Quran and ramadan. But what they're thinking about is bombs.

So you see we're not so elightened after all."]

Pam's House Blend
1. NYT article on convention bloggers features Pam's House Blend
theinferior4+1
1. Border Crossings

Current Mood: blank

Forget the preamble ramble. I want to be reading again. So I am. These are the things I am reading today accompanied by brief reactions. Look how far behind we are!

a denizen's entertainment

Geeky, philosophical and scientific things... [Still love the zombie movie. Not interested in reading the environment link again, but recall both agreeing and disagreeing with parts. Now, the paper on the hypothetical weakless universe? That was so fascinating I did not read it last time, wanting to save it for when I could better appreciate it. It looks to me like the purpose of this simulation was to probe the anthropic principle. Which is a tricky thing to phrase and apparently rather contentious, but the experiment appears to demonstrate that whatever factors constrain the laws of this universe to be what they are, at least in the case of the weak nuclear force it is not that were things different there would be no observers to observe this. It seems I misunderstood from the abstract, but what they did is no less fascinating. Please, do take a read of it yourself - it is fascinating and reinforces just how much I want to get back into astronomy.]

Everything Jake
Unlike most times I do this while reading through a comic, I am not going to link to individual strips to give reactions. I want to save talking about this comic until I am caught up.

Google Reader shared items

Accordian-style USB drive actually solves a problem [via soltice. Not really clear on how it solves the problem of loseable caps.]
I have no words :O [via gentle_gamer. Way back last time I was reading and using Reader, shared some posts I intended later to write on. Seems then gentle_gamer found lost_angelwings's blog interesting enough to inspect from this. And the links here linked, bizarre comic indeed. Manga girl Jesus.]
What is Darwin? [via soltice. Interesting. Content took me a bit to find though.]

Paradise Lost

Introduction [This looks very much in reference to the poem's contents. I will read it after the poem, when I have hopefully some context for this.]

Not really so much for a day, but more than none and I feel okay about it. Got distracted by being happy, which is a pretty decent distraction.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Various - Silent Night

Suddenly advertising this thing called TiVo:

"Unlike its US counterpart, the Aussie TiVo is a crippled box. Shipping with (what we understand to be) a 160GB HD, the TiVo allows you to record up to a pathetic 32 hours of HD or 62 of SD television. If you like a show forget about copying it to DVD or your hard disk; there is no DVD burner and the Ethernet port is strictly for downloading the EPG from TiVo. No problem you might think, simply open the box (having acquired a set of security screwdrivers) and pop the hard disk into your computer. Don’t bother, as Channel Seven representatives assured us the TiVo is designed to respect Australian copyright laws and all data on the hard disk is encrypted (hence the acknowledgement of Turing encryption in the credits).

So why would you shell out nearly $700 on a TiVo?"

We do have other DVRs available here so I do not know what the point of this is.

The iPhone went on sale today in Sydney, apparently.

And I just saw a report about an Australian woman who was finally released after reportedly being dragged off a bus and held for three weeks in Texas before being able to see a judge.

The story appears to be that she stayed in Canada for six months before beginning a six week tour of the United States and did not realise that because on the initial flight to Canada there was a stopover at Hawaii expiry of her visa was counted from this point rather than her later re-entry. Consequently when her visa was inspected she was found to have overstayed by twenty days and had to spend a similar period of time sleeping on bare concrete before being released. She claims the information she received from the US consulate about procedure was at odds with the actual state of affairs over there.

There does not seem to be much information available on this. Event the news site for the network I saw this on appears to have deleted the pages in question. The US official spoken to on the matter seemed to be suggesting it was not so much a mistake as just something which happens. Well, she got her case looked at sooner than people seeking asylum over here do (and one Australian woman was held locally in a detention centre for three years because it was not believed that she was a citizen).

What information I did find on the matter online is located here, here and here. The last is from a messageboard and not recommended for those who do not enjoy seeing vitriol directed at the United States by foreigners.

Current Mood: bored

Plain enough. Music library of choice on shuffle, list the first ten songs (I would say tracks, but mean to skip any podcasts which come up).

Grainger - Country Gardens
Luciana Souza/Romero Lubambo - Muita Bobeira - I think this track came with Vista *shrug*
Queen - Killer Queen
Akira Yamaoka - April Fool's Song
Yuki Kajiura - Sweet Memories - (would have been: Jason Rennie - The Sci Phi Show Outcast #53 - Sci Fi and Politics with Dr Courtney Brown)
Starsailor - Don't Stop Moving
Yuki Kajiura - Sweet Memories #2
See-Saw - interlude
The Beatles - Love Me Do
Delerium - Forgotten Worlds

I desire to include some substance of my own deliberate composition so I will say that over the past few months I have been working to abandon the rich text interface as much as possible, using it only long enough to learn how to input something I did not know before. So I am proud at knowing how to format this list without having to consult any outside source.

I have not been learning much, have not been making a deliberate study as I have felt always more pressing things to do and then sleep, yet what I have been learning is very satisfying. It reminds me of the latter half of last year, when I had to learn some LaTeX formatting for the wiki on which I was keeping my Electromagnetism notes.

It is not something I know yet how to describe yet learning such things, seeing something of how they work and fit together, is a very... clean pleasure for me. Similar to how I have felt in my brief studies of Mandarin too, and now I am thinking if I could find this in mathematics too that would be rather wonderful. Perhaps my perspective has been mistaken? Focus on the operators rather than the individual problems maybe. Might help with astronomy/physics too.

... I was supposed to be writing.

Current Mood: inspired twice over
Current Location: arxisan
Current Music: Enya - Deireadh an Tuath

If it did not taste so good with every drop, surely we would stop drinking it.

Since it was not visible from here, ~~I am going to watch the lunar eclipse via Celestia~~. Celestia is being finicky in GNOME and KDE. Going to try installing the GNOME frontend, see if that helps. Also xorsa because it looks fun.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Flying - The Secret Machines [Across the Universe]

Here is a video demonstrating yet again that mutation and selection can produce complexity without design.

I find evolutionary algorithms fascinating and hope someday to play around with and write some myself.

Current Mood: cheerful

When I tell the people I know who code that I would like also to learn that dark art they ask what my goal is, what I want to make with it. I might at last have some things to qualify as answers.

The first is, the lead of one of my stories is living in a ten day week. I would like to build something calendrical to make tracking her time easier. Currently I am getting by with a spreadsheet but do not find it optimal. In about six months to a year her calendar will change, so that is a deadline of sorts. If I can learn and make before then, perhaps I can also make something flexible enough to handle new and old calendars both.

The second relates to something I created in my mid-teens, a transliteration of English. Possibly other languages using the Latin alphabet too but I do not know them well enough to say. It is a simple enough pattern, based on hexagonal tiling with text spread across a two-dimensional plane. I would like to build something to display this transliteration as an output.

At the moment it is seeming like a quite complicated project and I doubt it would be of any more use than passing encoded between friends (perhaps as an image?). I wonder if I could extend my original idea, perhaps into a third dimension (layers or angles?). Sentence arrangement was terrible in what I came up with, maybe I can fix that too.

Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: Ailes Grises - various [Haibane Renmei, Haneone OST]/Days At Old Home - Haibane Renmei [Puchi no Ne]

I am very pleased with the Keramik theme for KDE. Should have changed it sooner.

Although I removed the communities filter from my Morning Coffee reading list I still find myself not having the time to do things that need doing. It seems like most of my time currently is being taken up with talking to people and reading personal journals. The people I talk to are wonderful and I would happily converse with them until one or both of us dropped from exhaustion; unfortunately I am not good at multitasking. ~4 conversations and reading is about as much as I can handle without neglecting someone and with even one person it becomes much more difficult to do anything else.

Right now I want to make a terrible analogy and say it is like I am a quantum entity. If someone observes me by having a conversation with me I am collapsed into a particular form. Each person observes something different but none of them are what I am when no one is around (I wonder what I am when I am not around?), which is not necessarily bad. Possibly I sometimes need focusing and definitely people help with many things.

I think it is not the fault of other people that I have difficulty doing anything else when they are available. I think it is possible for me to have both conversation and productive activity and I think I need to learn how. It is also possible that attempting to understand people and formulate responses to them takes up so much of my brainpower there is not capacity for anything else of significance. Or it could be as simple as nothing else being sufficiently compelling recently. I should perhaps withdraw and take time to contemplate this.

Memo to self: resume efforts at efficient communication and composition.

Things I intended to get back to:

The article I read at Encarta whilst undertaking my examination concerned the subject of men in professions dominated by women and do they face glass ceilings? I never did go back to it for further study. I'm not sure what they gained by specifically interviewing men who were successful in those careers. I do think I remember a teacher in one of my classes saying something which made me think there were more men in upper-level positions in the library industry (relative to their proportion within the industry as a whole)
Probably in relation to this post, I meant to return to the matter of the donut and say that, since I could well decide in the future that it is not moral to eat meat I should refrain from purchasing any for myself. Unfortunately I have since broken this resolution on one occasion, but I have not abandoned it. Though it does make me look at shop food with longing (fortunately I am more tempted by baked foods)
The other things can wait, probably meriting a full post

I maintain that I wish to be a writer. Insofar as I write stories I suppose I could claim that title, except I would not feel right about it unless someone had paid me to publish a thing I had written. Once I reach that point, then I can find some other reason to not feel comfortable claiming that title [insert canned laughter here]. This paragraph is aiming at the point that, if I become a successful writer there is a good chance of people subscribing to this journal who are fans and not friends. There are some things I want to be open with and others I wish to keep private and I am not yet settled on what things fall into which category. Recently I have been erring on the side of keeping too many things locked down and would like to change that. A shift in policy had crept up on me until nearly nothing was left public.

My mouse problems seem confined to Vista. It does not work unless I adjust the plug and was not responding immediately before I switched to Kubuntu. It is working fine now without adjustment.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Inside Out - Traveling Wilburys [Volume 3]

I have been remiss in following through on my stated intentions. Well, the actual elections are in a little less than a week and it is a busy week for me. I will cover as many as I can. Time to finish looking at the Family First policies I missed last time.
( Warning: Contents Hazardous to Families )

This is what happens when someone gets hold of programs used for malicious attacks on people but does not know the first thing about computing.

via

pecunium

Current Mood: amused

Most of the time they are selectable from a small list, only, and I do not fill them out because the answers are all facts someone else could discover about my life. I prefer to be given freedom to write my own questions, the answers to which have never been uttered or penned.

Current Mood: grumpy

    Been spending a lot of time lately reading this thread at Making Light, which began by talking about an overzealous attempt to remove copyrighted material from a website and turned to copyright itself.
    On the topic of free electronic copies and what effect they have on sales a number of people spoke up enumerating their experiences with downloaded e-texts, legal and not and how those have affected their purchasing habits. Most claimed their sampling of electronic text convinced them the paper version was worth purchasing, often along with other works by the author.
    I cannot recall if it specifically came up in this conversation but I recall many times people expressing the sentiment that e-books (will I settle on a term? no! well, maybe) drive the sale of dead tree books because the latter has qualities superior to and unreplicable by the former.
    In my opinion the reason paper volumes are preferred over electronic texts is because of 1) the current low quality of the technology and the commensurately poor reading experience and 2) the fact that the currently purchasing public has grown up with paper books. They have a resonance and history with us which is simply not shared by an e-book. Not once have I ever enjoyed the scent of one, for example.
    As technology improves and subsequent generations become less nostalgic about books-as-we-know-them I suspect people will be more likely to choose an electronic text over a paper one.
    There is also, which I have seen mentioned only once and not in that particular conversation, the effect on people's ability to sustain concentration of having so much material to read, so easily switched between. I would not dare to venture an informed opinion on this subject (Oh, but when do I ever?) but I will not that it has always been easy to put a book down and do something other than reading, for as much or as little time as one has available. It has not, however, been so easy to jump between such a vast amount of written material unless one has a truly spectacular library.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Concerto for Two Horns - Franz Joseph Haydn

    Today we were learning MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing). I was amused when our teacher described field 521 (target audience, e.g. film classifications) as 'censorship information'.

    After class I frivolously purchased a new headset and a new outfit. That headset has better sound quality than my laptop speakers or any other headphones I have used and now that I have it I ought to add my skype account to my profile. It is a new account since I forgot my password for the old one. It would be advisable to warn before calling, should anyone be so mad as to wish to call in the first place, since most of the time I am in a less than private location.
    The outfit is one I have had my eye on for weeks now. Secret pictures tomorrow, maybe. It looked better on the manikin but oh well.

    The store where I bought the headset, by the way, had a television out front running a reel from the new Transformers videogame. It looked better than the movie because, even if the graphics were not as good, at least I could see what was happening.

Current Mood: blank
Current Music: ABC Classic FM

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aesmael

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The return of being back

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