In which I share a few nice things with y’all.
1. I have paid off my 2007 surgery completely and in full.
2. I got laid last night. Yum.
3. I received a new classic camera today. It’s another Argus C3 and it’s in fantastic condition:
4. This weekend is Teh BF’s birthday! This is excellent for two reasons. The first is that I will finally get to give him his present, which I’ve had for weeks and which is burning a hole in my brain because I want to give it to him NOW and he won’t let me. The second is that he’s taking me to Coeur d’Alane for the weekend! We’ll be staying at this chichi hotel and playing at this nifty casino.
5. The weather is nice!
In which I like him. I really, really like him.
I’m not a political animal.
I think politics are in equal parts numbingly boring and distressingly childish. While legal language is probably a neat game, I particularly loathe political talking heads and find them to be a most repugnant breed of humanoid: self-important and brash, and doing nothing but deconstructing the work of others and contributing nothing but dissent. Ick.
I think it is impossible to govern a capitalist democracy because it’s impossible to please everybody all the time. It’s impossible to be fair to everyone. Impossible to guarantee rights, when one of those rights is to have more wealth than everybody else does, and another is to be a total fucking ignorant moron that the state cannot legally or morally allow to starve to death.
But I really dig Obama. It’s nice to have a proper orator in the White House. It’s nice not to cringe when imagining his meetings with leaders of other countries. He probably actually reads his briefings and manages not to look like an American punk.
I watched much of his address [transcript] while eating my omelet and toast this morning. While I don’t care enough to speak to specifics of policy, I do have to say that I like the man. (He’ll be reviled and feared by the time he leaves office, but that’s the office’s fault, not the man’s.)
I like that he is still responding to public opinion (they all quit doing that after they’ve been in office for awhile). I like that he states opinions in the first person, like, “(A)nd I promise you, nobody is more frustrated than me with AIG.” I like that he explains his administration’s rationale with care, as here:
“And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of to banks — one of my most frequent questions in the letters that I get from constituents is, “Where’s my bailout?” — and I understand the sentiment. It makes sense intuitively, and morally it makes sense, but the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. That’s why we have to fix the banks.”
I like that he rather scolded us a little for our greed and short-sightedness. I like that he seems to think our educational system sucks, and that he’s pro-science. I even like the Biblical references. Not because I’m Christian, because I’m not, but because it’s a time-honored tradition to reference one’s own culture’s historical documents. (I call the Bible an American historical document because we wouldn’t all be here if our ancestors hadn’t been such total whacko splinter Christians in the first place.) The Bible’s a powerful piece of literature when properly used, and I liked his use of the ‘house upon the rock’ parable. It worked.
I live with a woman who remembers The Great Depression. She lives frugality. She saves rubber bands, gives plastic bags back to the newspaper boy so he can recycle them, eats all of the groceries she buys (no slightly-soft tomatoes in her garbage), and buys nothing on credit ever. When Obama said that his administration intended to create legislation that would protect future generations from ever experiencing this sort of recession, she snorted because she knows shit happens; she’s seen it.
I waste a tremendous amount of resources. My whole generation does. We buy food, don’t eat it, and throw it out. We replace tools and electronics rather than bother to repair them, because we consider our ‘free time’ to be more valuable than money because we have more of one than the other. I can’t even guess how much paper I’ve wasted in my lifetime of using computers and printers; just today I printed two addresses on two sheets of paper, cut out the addresses, and threw 95% of the paper into the garbage.
I toss clothes rather than re-purpose them; I have an attic full of computers that still work but just not well enough; I’ve filled landfills with household waste and empty plastic bottles and bleached toiletries for forty years. I’ve lived in the bubble all my life. I don’t really know how not to.
But I know that I like having someone who seems intelligent (and less than wholly corrupt) in the office of president for once in my life. You couldn’t pay me twelve times his salary to do his job; and I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to be the president of the United States and therefore distrust any creature who self-selects for the position, but the dude really seems to be well suited to it.
I wish him luck with it. I really do.
In which there are some events of the not-so-stunningly-fantastic sort. It’s not that interesting. You may talk among yourselves.
Saturday I had the first roll of film shot through The Brick developed. Several of them turned out really well, particularly considering that the rangefinder window is filthy and I can’t see through it, and that I totally guess on aperture and exposure times. (The roll is here if you wanna take a look at what a 1962 Argus C3 shoots like.)
I had my hair colored Saturday afternoon. No more roots! (I also had my eyebrows waxed. Best use of seven dollars EVER.)
Saturday night Teh BF and I went to bed – and to sleep – at 8:30. It’s a totally rockstar lifestyle, I’m telling you.
Sunday we went to brunch at The Oasis with family: G’ma, my brother, my aunt and uncle, two of their friends, my aunt’s mom, and KJ’s mom. The food sucked – the Caesar salad was fishy, the eggs were green, and the hash browns were those awful frozen fried potatoes with green and red peppers, and the rest of the buffet was FODA1 so naturally I couldn’t eat it – but the company was congenial.
Sunday afternoon we spent at my place; KJ watched golf with G’ma while I installed the giant hand-me-down flat monitor he gave me and watched a couple of episodes of Firefly and Torchwood on it upstairs. For dinner, I made black bean soup. He took off around seven; I did laundry and watched Mystic River and went to bed early.
I’m not sure if it’s blogging or aging, but though the agency of one or both I’ve finally relaxed enough to be utterly vacuous. I no longer worry about coming off as deep and self-reflective; I post utterly vapid shit with no greater meaning whatsoever and feel pretty good about it. I talk about getting my eyebrows waxed, for chrissakes. Is this what they mean by ‘mellowing with age’?
—
1 Flesh of Dead Animal.
In which I actually had breaking local news to share, but my favorite way of spreading it was down.
Last night, Teh BF and I went out to Kelly’s in Milton-Freewater, OR for a change of pace. We had fried food and a couple of cocktails and it was pretty fun…
…for awhile. But then the place started to reek like burning garbage, and shortly after that it started to reek like burning plastic! Very toxic, nasty, terrible-smelling burning plastic.
Apparently the diesel place two doors down? Was on fire.
A few minutes later we couldn’t stand the stench any longer, so we polished off our drinks and tabbed out.
As we were pulling out of the bar’s parking lot, gaping at the massive column of smoke rising from the Morton building two doors down, I pulled out my cell phone and Twittered, “The diesel place two doors south of Kelly’s in M-F is currently on fire,” thinking that @Carlos72 over at The U-B might like to know about it (as a reporter, he uses Twitter to keep up with local breaking news).
Then this morning I checked Twitter and saw this:
Yeah, that’s right: no activity on my account for fourteen hours! Which is utterly unheard of, since I’m following 63 people around the world, with several time zones covered. There’s never more than an hour without some sort of tweet! Never!
The four tweets I sent last night – two from my phone, one from my iPod, and one from my netbook – don’t exist anywhere. The Twitter blog mentions this outage not at all. Their status page sorta-kinda references it, but not with much clarity.
I’ve never had this kind of problem with Twitter before, so I guess it was just my turn. *sigh*
Update: Wow! Within ten minutes of posting this, all my missing stuff reappeared in my feed (not on my Twitter page, though)! So: yay! Color me impressed. Er, partially impressed.
In which I can’t figure out why TV still sucks so much when there are technologies available that could easily make it suck less.
Last night, while sitting at the brew pub eating a Gardenburger and idly gazing at the cable commercial showing on the glass teat hanging above the bar, I, who am really not much of a television watcher anyway, wondered why the television industry hasn’t yet invented TV that doesn’t suck.
Consider the following:
– If you shop at Amazon, the site will track what you’ve bought, what you’ve looked at, and what people like you have bought, and make intelligent suggestions.
– If you listen to Pandora, the site will build you an entire radio station based on of the single track or artist you enter, and tailor it to your preferences over time as you click “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to the songs it offers on your station. The more you listen to Pandora, the better it gets at only playing stuff you like.
– Apple’s Genius algorithm (or music genome database or whatever it is) totally works and is awesome, and it collects anonymous information from its users.
– Desktop computers offer profiles, allowing multiple users to store multiple personal settings on the same machine.
– A 1.5 terabyte hard drive only costs $120.
Since all of these things are true, I want to know why my television (or closely attached DVR-like device) doesn’t already do all of the following:
– Keep separate profiles for all users and groups of users in a house, and offer different programming based on who’s watching and when. (“Bob” might want to see football on Sunday afternoon and Debbie Does Dallas when he’s watching at two in the morning by himself.)
– Show me what I most want to watch based on the date and time I turn it on. (If I always watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on Wednesday nights, why doesn’t it just show me that the minute I turn it on? Why must I touch the remote at all?)
– Have me fill out a brief demographic survey (age, sex, orientation, income, favorite channels, least favorite channels, favorite programs, hobbies) when I first buy and install my television or closely attached DVR-like device that enables it to target me for advertisements. Ideally there would be no advertisements, but since we’re adults here and realize that we cannot escape commercials we should be able to influence what we have to see.
Targeted advertising would theoretically enable small companies to pay smaller amounts to get ads to a smaller demographic. For example, my favorite yarn store could never afford television ads now, but they could probably cough up a few grand to show only people like me that their new yarn line is in for the summer. I would love to see an ad from them, and I’d probably drop by their site and buy more superfine alpaca if I saw them on telly every so often.
A lot of people are paranoid freaks and would absolutely wet themselves if they thought they were being targeted, but I know from using Google that I prefer targeted ads to random ones and from using iTunes’ Genius function that allowing a company to gather my data can actually benefit me. I hate seeing commercials for SUVs because I don’t have kids and I’ll never, ever fucking buy an SUV, ever. I hate commercials for housecleaning chemicals because I’m not a housewife. I don’t want to see ads for investment firms because I’m poor and I don’t have investments. But if I could turn on my TV and see only ads for things I’m actually interested in – yarn, iPods, Caribbean vacation packages, Neutrogena facial products, jewelry, low-priced eco cars, web hosting, photography, cooking, and related items – I’d be happier about the fact that I’m paying for television in the first place.
They say we self-select for advertisements by the channels we choose, but take KJ as an example. He watches both the Today show (a habit he learned from his family) and the golf channel (because he plays golf), but he’s neither a stay-at-home-mom nor a 60-year-old white male in the $100 per annum bracket. The commercials he sees – tampons and air fresheners or expensive cars and investment services – are still badly targeted.
My television should, whenever I turn it on, ask me who I am and then immediately show me what I am most likely to want to be watching just then. If I don’t like what it’s chosen, it should then show me the second most likely show, and so on through a list that contains only things I like and none of the crap I don’t: in other words, I should never be confronted with the speed channel or a hunting show or that Criss Angel crap unless I specifically go searching for it.
My television should occasionally offer me new stuff to like. If I’ve watched ER for twelve years, it should offer me something else to watch during that slot based on my known and recorded preferences.
My television should have a profile for me alone, and the ability to make another profile for me and my boyfriend together, since we will be likely to watch together different shows than we would separately.
My television should offer me ALL programing on demand, not just the occasional pay-per-view movie. The only live TV should be sporting events, politics, weather, and news; literally everything else should be on-demand because bandwidth and storage are so cheap.
My television should push me all the sci-fi, cooking, travel, history, and comedy I can stand, and protect me from car shows, bad buddy movies, shows about fishing, ghost and psychic phenomena bullshit, and HSN. It should tell me when my favorite old movies are on, it should introduce me to new series, and it should only play ads that I might care about. Other than to turn my TV on and off and to answer the occasional query, I should never have to touch my remote again unless I’m in a weird mood and want to watch something unusual.
Modern TV is completely archaic compared to the intelligence of all our other media, and it’s way past time for somebody to do something about it. Too bad I’m in the wrong industry, or I’d totally invent SmartTV and change the world!
Or the worlds of a bunch of couch potatoes, that is.
In which I told you so.
It’s April 1st, 2009, and Conficker has NOT destroyed the Internet.
Some cranked-up jarheads got their panties in a wad for a few minutes [WaPo has a sense of humor! how awesome is that!], but that was pretty much all she wrote.
Now be good boys and girls and keep letting Windows Update do its job and we’ll all (particularly me) be fine.
In which it totally feels like hump day, but it isn’t.
Weather in the Walla Walla Valley
First there was sun.
Then there was wind. Then there was hail.
Then the power went out. Management decided to send everyone (but me) home, and they all left and had had just enough time to get into their cars… and the power came back on. So they all had to come back.
I didn’t have to help clear the queue, though, because it was my lunch break.
Vintage Photography
I’ve been playing with The Bricks every day because they’re just so cool looking. Finally got the Tele-Sandmar on Brick The Younger today:
Still need to clean and adjust the rangefinder before I can actually shoot anything with it. I ordered cheap film from Adorama and it won’t be here for a few days anyway; hopefully the camera will be ready by then. Last night I learned how to remove (very easy) and replace (total pain in the ass) the exposure counter. This means I’m one step closer to taking the top panel off of the camera so I can clean and adjust the rangefinder!
I don’t think I know anyone with a scanner. I realize it seems weird to take film images simply to put them into electronic format, but I’ll tell you what: all the pictures in my Flickr account? are still there. All the photos and photo albums I once had? are gone. No idea where they are. Maybe I have some in boxes, but I think most of them were rotten and not worth saving from the farm. So I’ll have to pay extra when getting my film developed to have them all scanned.
I wonder how many rolls of film it will take me to really grok this:
Even though you focus your camera lens on a certain distance, the picture will be sharp in front of and behind the point focused on. This “range of sharpness” (depth of field) depends on the lens opening used and the lens focusing distance.
The smaller the lens opening, and the greater the focusing distance, the greater is the the lens’ range of sharpness. The range of sharpness will be least when the lens is used at its largest opening and shortest focusing distance.
Working at an ISP
In other, wholly unrelated news, we had a six-state DSL outage that lasted about two hours. An hour into it, all the rest of the staff’s shifts ended and I ended up in here alone. My brother gave me the saddest little “Sorry to leave you with all this, but my day’s done” shrug on his way out the door. I have about 40 calls to complete.
In other words, I am alone and TOTALLY FUCKING SLAMMED AT WORK TONIGHT.
And now, to close, a little about this bullshit worm scare story in the news:
A pox upon CBS and CNN and every other news agency that picked up this stupid Confiker/Downadup worm story! You are making my job stupider!
I’m not against educating people about Internet security, not at all. I am against hysterical reporting. I am against having customers freaking out on my phone and over LiveChat and through email for two days because some reporter learned about a particular kind of threat that’s been around since last autumn!
Here’s an email reply I sent to a customer:
>From : XXXX xxxxxx@bmi.net
> Phone : (xxx) xxx-xxxx
> O/S : Windows XP
> Comments : Do I need to worry about a virus tonight?
Hello,
Run Windows Update and make sure you have all available service packs and security patches installed in your operating system. Then force your anti-virus program to update as well. You should be fine.
The worm that made the news isn’t really news; it’s been out for quite awhile. The operating system hole it exploits was patched by Microsoft last year. The only people vulnerable to this worm are those using non-patched copies of Windows. I really have no idea why this thing even became ‘news.’
Have a great night!
Actually, the one good thing about all this is hearing people practically say “fuck” in German all day long and knowing they have no idea they’re doing it.
In which there were three boxes on my desk when I rolled into work this morning!
Today was eBay day. It looked like this:
I received two Argus Rangefinder C3 cameras, one made in 1941 and the other in 1962 (they ended up averaging about $11 apiece):
And an entire lot of hard-to-find flash bulbs from an estate sale for a screaming deal:
A damn good day, all in all. I would finish up with something like, “And now I’m going to spend all weekend shooting actual film!,” but I can’t because I don’t have any actual film. Plus one or both of The Bricks will have to be cleaned and tuned before I can actually shoot anything with it. The 1962 Argus is in overall great shape, but the range finder is too filthy to actually see anything through. The 1941 has cleaner optics but everything else is tight and the body probably leaks light. And I ordered the wrong film for my Polaroid, so I can’t even pop a bunch of flash bulbs!
In which I post a picture of the dress I made last weekend.
It’s made of rayon knit. I had already drawn the pattern for the 4-panel skirt, so for this project I copied a favorite long-sleeved t-shirt for the bodice, and made up the cowl – which is big enough to be a hood or a capelet – as I went along.
It is not now, nor will it probably ever be, hemmed.
I really want a serger!
[moar the dress pictures]
In which there are clothes now that didn’t exist before because I made them. Plus photography and food because I’m a woman of leisure with many hobbies. Many!
I found an orange cloud filter on eBay last Friday, which made me think that I should buy some Polaroid film for my classic Land camera.
Well, it turns out that Polaroid stopped making instant film last December and I have no idea which Fuji films will fit in my 103! So I posted my question here and the nice photography geeks assured me that most of the Fuji instant films will fit. Whew. Now I want another classic Polaroid camera… maybe this one.
Friday night Teh BF took me to the PnE, where I drank FAR too much. I drunkenly made plans to hang out with Lannie for Saturday, so I actually had to get out of bed on Saturday morning and act like a real human being in spite of The Curseâ„¢ and the hangover and everything.
Lannie came over somewhere in the neighborhood of ten in the morning, and somehow I produced mugs of tea and hash browns and veggie sausages and eggs over easy and we had brunch together. Then I got the sewing machine set up, and we got to sewing… or we were going to get to sewing, but I’d somehow managed to purchase carpet thread and there was no way I was going to sew lightweight rayon knit with freakin’ carpet thread.
So we all went to JoAnne’s – even G’ma, who needed some flower stuff for the porch – and I bought thread. And I also grabbed 1.5 yards of green rayon knit and matching thread and made Lannie a dress out of it because she’s a poor starving college student with no money and the stuff was only thirteen bucks.
When we got back to the house I poured myself a glass of Coke and whipped up a tube top dress for Lannie. She’s in love with it. My pattern needs 2 yards of fabric but I’d forgotten that and only bought her 1.5 yards, so instead of a 4-panel skirt she got a 2-panel skirt with kick pleats. It worked out well, though, and she was totally involved in the design process and we used damn near every inch of the fabric we bought.
Then I made myself a dress. In fact, I made myself THE dress! It’s the coolest thing ever! Totally custom and awesome! It’s brown, of course, and floor length and long-sleeved and has this big cowl thing that can be worn loose or as a capelet or up as a hood and I absolutely love it. (The only reason I’m not wearing it today was that I was trying to exercise a little restraint since I’ve basically been wearing it since it came off the machine Saturday afternoon. Yeah.)
Saturday night Kaje and I went out for Mexican food and then went back to his place and stayed in. I think we watched about three chick flicks this weekend because he’s indulgent and I had The Curseâ„¢.
When we went to Petco on Sunday, the clerk asked me where I’d gotten my dress and told me she really liked it. I got to say, “Uh, I made it. Yesterday! It isn’t even hemmed yet!” It was really gratifying. I felt like a sewing rockstar!
My next sewing project will be a wrap. Something out of the purple cotton knit I have. Something that’s sleeveless and about knee-length with a button hole in the side and long ties that wrap around the waist. I haven’t designed the pattern yet, but knit’s very forgiving so hopefully it’ll turn out as well as The Dress did!
This morning I made spicy potato curry for my bento. Since there was enough, I packed a bento for my bro as well and he said “nom nom nom” and eated it right up. I’m like the Easter Bunny of bento or something!
Teh BF’s birthday is next month. He likes to golf for some reason, so he’ll probably be spending a weekend at Wildhorse and he said I can come too. While he and Caddie are out smacking little balls around with expensive metal sticks, I intend to soak in the hot tub until I turn into a prune.
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
