devvyn

Ayup, just what the subject line says. A power supply failed on the server that hosts my sketch site. The Wuffy says it may be up later tomorrow, or it could be down a couple days. It all depends on when the replacement power supply arrives, and whether anything else failed with the old one.

Send the Wuffy some love and encouragement - this is a major pile of stress that he didn't need right now.

It occurs to me that our culture is based entirely around the evacuation of waste, but it's something no one wants to talk about it. More than religion, more than culture, the driving force behind technical innovation and growth as a species is finding new and different ways and places to take a poo, from a hole in the woods to an outhouse to indoor plumbing. If there is one defining thing we have as a culture, it is the fact that, at one time or another, we have all had to poop.

A table of places people have taken a poo:
• In the woods
• Behind the shack
• In the bathroom
• In space
• On the moon
• Around the corner
• At the Gas-station
• At a restaurant
• And many, many other places


If you think about it, even momentarily, it makes a lot of sense. Every building people like or work in has a bathroom — many have more than one — all for eliminating waste product. There are more bathrooms than churches and shrines — there are even bathrooms in churches, and every culture has created a toilet in similar fashion. Our buildings and culture are based around the need to evacuate waste. We have more toilets than churches.

More than that, cultures that are considered "higher" are the ones with more sophisticated means of pooping. The Romans were civilised and they had running water to get rid of their waste. The middle ages were a step back, and people lived in squalor and filth lined the streets. Modern plumbing has made cities possible, but it wasn't until indoor plumbing and toilets that carriers of disease and pestilence are almost completely eliminated — when a seasonal flu is all you have to worry about, life is pretty good and your society is clean.

Even our language is structured around it, but has built up the elimination of waste from our bodies — a very natural thing — into a taboo subject. The words "poop" and "pee" are hilarious to small children (don't tell me you didn't giggle at them, too, because you did). The words "shit," "piss," "crap," and "ass" have all become dirty words. People don't say that they are going to poop — they say that they are going to go "use the bathroom" or "go number two," as if they are ashamed of a perfectly natural process. The fact is that there is nothing to be ashamed of — it's natural and everyone does it. It's not good or bad — it simply is, and it's a commonality among all humanity, yet we still seem reluctant to acknowledge that any of us do it.

In fact, to make words for natural acts into taboos is to give power to these words and to say that these things are bad, when they're not. Even calling waste management "number one" and "number two" is silly. It also presents a layer of abstraction to the whole mess that is difficult for small children to understand.

Pooping is simply a fact of life. If you're alive, you poop. It's that simple. Let's not glorify it by making up fancy words or using euphemisms for it.

“I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the nth time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.”

I know exactly how that is. Sometimes you just have to act on the feeling — you can't rest till you do.

Neven Morgen via Daring Fireball

 Now the report says it was just a bird that dropped a bit of french bread into the collider. Yeah, that's what they SAY.

I think the birds know now about the LHC and are trying to have one of their own have "an origin" to create the world's first superbird.

What follows next was phrophesied by Alfred Hitchcock. Its all there in black and white folks! *giggles*

(OK, just feeling silly today and wanted to use the new icon. :) )

This quarter has been busy. Very busy. I'm taking 17 credithours. It's intense. And I've been busy outside of class.

Anyway, I got back to my room a couple hours ago after heading to town. I went to 1) drop of a disc of pictures, 2) get some new jeans! and 3) setup a computer for my dad.


The first is a series of pictures I took for a sculptor on the dedication of her statue, which looks something like this (I'm not good at making up names. Also, I think that the photos should stand on their own without needing a title, only a description of when and where):


Except for the above, the pictures in this post are unrelated to the content, simply recent uploads I want to share, so it's pretty as you scroll by, like the next one below (which I suppose is also the only other exception) and is larger because it is more stunning that way (seriously, it's more stunning the bigger it is; making it small gets rid of the Depth of Field):



The second are a pair of Levi 501s and a pair of 505s. Classic blue denim. They'll last a year each before the knees get holy like the pair they replace, like the pair that replaced the one before it, like the pair those replaced …


Three: My dad has a great MacBook Pro. It's better than mine, as well as quieter when running Flash. It runs OSX. He recently also started a job as a realtor, and many of the websites he needs to use are the sort that require IE. I tried every free option I could think of: I tried Safari, Firefox, Opera, and even IE for Mac (5.2; it sucked even back in the day when it was the only Mac OS browser). I tried spoofing the user agent strings. I even tried using WINE and running IE through that, but that didn't work either. It was crashy — too crashy for even me to use. I finally gave up after I was unable to get a virtual machine to do the trick, recommending Parallels as an option (I wanted it to be mobile, and there was no way in hell I was giving him back his old laptop — it was too slow and too loud.

I went home this evening to drop off the aforementioned disc, got two pairs of jeans, and a tasty salmon dinner. At home, I dredged up an old desktop machine (slimline tower), because this seemed like a decent solution. I had a computer in the basement, as well as an extra keyboard and monitor (one of my two 19" Samsung SXGA TFTs), so I set him up with a 2.0 Ghz Celeron "Northwood" running Win 7. I had a bit of trouble getting the first drive to boot, so I replaced it with something newer. It's an adequate, functional computer and runs 7 just fine, if a little sluggish — but it's better than XP by leaps and bounds. It'll do the job of printing and accessing ActiveX websites, and it was a problem taken care of with parts I had on hand.

Also a new addition, I got a replacement for my crappy RAZR (which was stolen). I used my backup Nokia 1208 for a couple weeks, but I now have a 2007 HTC T-Mobile Shadow, care of kistaro. It's a good phone, and my first experience with Windows Mobile (apart from playing with my ex's WM5 Motorola Q briefly a couple years ago, but that was a poor experience to say the least). It's slick, but it's been easy to get used to.

It has good battery life with an extra large 3rd party battery, wi-fi for email (my router's WiFi magically started working again, AND I got the G router I was lent working as an access point tied to my hub), and is a decent crossover device. Actually, it's much nicer than the BlackBerry Perl with which I started this contract — faster, more intuitive, more versatile, and more useful, and while it does have a little bit of chunky and clunky, I'm getting more used to the interface; it has its quirks, but it's nothing that I can't ignore as a developer. It's no iPhone, but it's not supposed to be — it does its job just fine, has no touch screen, and does my Email. It can even automatically switch from "normal" to "vibrate" modes based on my calendar.

Actually, I've found that the killer app for it is Google's sync. Google employs an exchange server to copy contacts, calendars, and send and receive email, so moving into the new phone was as easy as setting up Google as an exchange server and BAM! all my contacts and my inbox are there on my phone. I read a message and it marks it read in my inbox. Since I use Gmail's IMAP server for my desktop client, it means that all changes propagate across all devices. Even better than that is the fact that I have iCal linked with Google Calendars via WebDAV, and Address Book syncs to Google as well, so I add a contact on my phone, and he or she appears on my computer. Honestly, this is exactly how computing is supposed to be.

Additionally, it would have been an absolute nightmare trying to coerce Windows Mobile into syncing with anything non-windows-mobile, since I'm almost exclusively Mac/linux.

So, I've been using it to stream internet radio while I sleep (a laptop is overkill for this), and I've got an ebook reader installed on it, too (the Window Mobile version is much nicer than the BlackBerry one). It used to be so nice to be able to have books with me on the bus — especially since I don't like carrying many things with me, and when the Blackberry died, so did a lot of the reading I did for pleasure. Now I can finally fall asleep again reading stories about Honor Harrington and the Star Kingdom of Mantacore.

So, yeah, Windows Mobile doesn't suck — and this is coming from a Mac/Linux user and a design geek (so it's as close to a ringing endorsement as you'll get from me without torturing me with a BB Storm). Believe it!

Ugh, I feel like I'm constantly rushing back and forth between work, home, my moms place and Kentarus place. Specially the last few weeks have been very stressful. I really cherish the time I have this weekend, with no plans at all (until another week of night shifts start tonight at 23, then I'm back in the trivial rutine for a few more weeks or months).

Yesterday I even had time to go for a stroll in a nearby stretch of forest. I felt pure joy in having no worries other than which way to turn the next time the path split up, with the decision based largely on a "I wonder what lies ahead this way"-factor, not "I need to be home in so-and-so many minutes". I even managed to get a bit lost, which is always fun. I wish I could do that more often.

Really, what's life worth if all you ever do is rush from one end of it to the other?

I have officially decided that I am bored of politics. It's just another thing for people to complain about.

I think I'm going to turn all political conversations directed at me into weather conversations from now on: it's something to complain about and no one is deluded into thinking they can change the weather ;)

Cant wait for the next election. I think I'm gonna vote for the most meteorological name ;)

“Do you think that is acceptable wolflike behaviour?”

Today I got a laugh to see an Ebay seller had tagged the comic below with the following description.

“FUNNY ANIMALS, v3 #18, May 1944, Fawcett Publications. Pirates / Captain Marvel Bunny / Bondage (yes, bondage!) cover”

I've been reading a bunch of articles this afternoon on The New Republic and they're all smart and very well written.

• Rush Limbaugh and his Reverse Racism
Halp, white people are being oppressed!

• Quayle v. Palin: Quayle Pulls Ahead!
Even mister “Tomatoe” is better than Mooseburger

• The Worst Argument You've Ever Read For Banning Openly Gay People From the Military
Apparently, according to the Right, gay people are pussies.

• The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage
If the last article talked about in the previous link wasn't bad, this one is.

• Assimilation and its meaning: The End of Gay Culture
And finally, we end with something sensible, about how gay culture as a subculture is disappearing and no longer the single defining thing about gay people.