Sunday, July 31, 2005

Happy Birthday to me, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, and Wesley Snipes!

I am celebrating my birthday doing homework. When I told a client on Friday that this was how I'd be spending most of my weekend, he said, "But you write papers every weekend!" I replied that being in grad school is a little like having your back waxed; it's uncomfortable and inconvenient at the time but the results are worth it.

Actually I'm very bored with this class and can't wait for it to be over. It doesn't help that she's taking forever to grade our previous assignments so I'm not able to gauge how much effort I need to put in at this stage. I'm the biggest procrastinator in the world and it's getting harder and harder to motivate myself to get this stuff done.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

I fixed a leaky toilet today, and I even drank a beer while doing it. The toilet in my mom's bathroom has been running for weeks and all the other easy fixes haven't made a difference, so today I replaced the fill valve. All by myself. (Well, almost. I needed my mom to hold the valve assembly in place while I tightened the lock and coupling nuts. See how easily I toss those technical plumbing terms around.) Futhermore, t was a fill valve of a design entirely different than the original. Absolutely nothing at Home Depot looked even remotely like the original. The beer part seemed like sort of a requirement, and it was f'ing hot today so beer just sounded good, even to a person like me who rarely drinks beer. I had picked up some Rogue Dead Guy Ale after listening to Michael and Evo go on and on (and on) about it on Wingin' It the other day. I am very suceptible to suggestion. The HazelNut Brown Nectar actually sounded better, but BevMo sadly does not carry it. The Dead Guy Ale, however, has a cool label.

Friday, July 29, 2005

Slightly tilted again this morning after a few days of feeling completely normal. I think it's congestion this time. Taking Sudafed.

I also realized last night that I will for the second year in a row spend my birthday writing papers. Oh well. The end result will be worth it (I hope).

Thursday, July 28, 2005


I've never really enjoyed Dark Horse's licensed efforts before, but they did a great job with Serenity #1. The art is impressive and the story reads just like an episode of the show. Can't wait for the next issue.

Bought General Grievous #1 at the same time... meh.

Why is it that every podcast I listen to this week features Michael Stackpole? Mike, get back to your studio and record some of those The Secrets Interviews you promised us months ago. Sheesh.

My new favorite place to buy neat cheese is... Safeway. Yes, Safeway. Not Whole Foods. The Whole Foods in San Ramon (and its parking lot) is why there's a waiting period to buy guns. Anyway, Safeway--in it's determination to be like Whole Foods but with Ho Hos and Pepsi products--has put in a little cooler with gourmet cheeses right next to its new olive bar. My thing is to try one new cheese every time I go in there, and the two cheeses I've tried so far have been hits. A few weeks ago I tried Dubliner Irish cheese and really liked it (good with stout!). Last week I picked up some white Stilton with lemon peel and loved it. I cannot get enough of this cheese. They suggest on the label to chop it up and serve in a green salad, which is excellent. I read somewhere to try it on a gingersnap. Must do that.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Our online searching exercise for this week was cancelled, thank heaven. I could not face spending another entire weekend on the computer fighting with Dialog.

So instead of searching my fingers to bloody stumps, I am reading Harry Potter. Gave up on Jedi Trial Friday night. However, after being steeped in Star Wars for the past two months I'm noticing parallels between Anakin, Harry, and Voldemort.

Or maybe it's just that all whiny adolescent boys start sounding alike after a while.

Friday, July 22, 2005


And this garden spider built a huge web next to the walkway up to the front door.


All the spiders make for some good photo ops. I saw this web in the morning sunlight under the orange tree. Couldn't find the occupant.

The Map Room and Boing Boing have both posted links to Feorag's Tube map that removes the lines closed due to the bombings and illustrates the impact on greater London transport. Sad to see my beloved Metropolitan Line take so much abuse, especially between Hammersmith and Baker Street, my old commute to school.

I am sloooooooowly dragging myself through Jedi Trial which I started two weeks ago and am only about a quarter of the way through. It started off ok, with a tense situation on a small but strategically important planet (as all these EU Prequel novels do), and a potentially interesting female character, the unfortunately named Odie. She's a tough, resourceful soldier at first but then suddenly a hot fighter jock appears and she turns into entirely different person, bursting into tears and falling into the guy's arms even though they just met and are in the middle of a freakin' battle. This is the stereotypical argument against women in combat embodied in a poorly written pulp novel. Furthermore, the villian, Pors Tonith, and the anti-hero, Zozridor Slayke, are cartoonish to the point of parody.

Anakin is supposed to get back into the story at some point (he's on the cover, though that's never a good indicator of what a Star Wars novel is about), along with Corran Horn's father. We're due for some Anakin-as-the-legendary-warrior action, and I hope it picks up soon because I also have to get through Yoda - Dark Rendezvous before my hold copy of Labyrinth of Evil becomes available at the library.

Mark Morford's column in the SF Chronicle today puts a new spin on the Hot Coffee kerfuffle. Can't say I agree with him 100 percent, but it's an interesting perspective.

I'm very disappointed in Luann for suddenly getting interested in Elwood now that she knows he's a mildly successful indie game developer. He was still a jerk about the whole dance episode. Did she forget about that?

Up at the top of the comics page, I'm also not sure I like where this thing with Elizabeth and Anthony is going. Can't we just accept that their lives went off in different directions and leave it at that? What happened to the helicopter pilot Elizabeth met before she started her new job? He was a cuter line drawing than Anthony is anyway.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

The one thing I have been able to concentrate on is Sudoku. The SF Chronicle just started running the puzzles regularly this week, curse them.

Still tilty, but not terribly so most of the time. I'm very tired though, and it's been hard to concentrate. Today I meant to get my car washed (tried to convince the mirror spider it was in his best interest to move out before powerful jets of soapy water force the issue), but it was too busy so I went to Joann instead. I find it calming to wander around and look at fabric. Don't ask me why because I can't sew. They are also beginning to put their Halloween stuff out, so that's fun to look at. Then I got a pearl tea. She gave me a honeyDEW pearl tea instead of a honey pearl tea, but I'll live. Then I went back to work. The spider is safe for now.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Still tilted but mostly functional. I apparently grabbed the wrong variety of my diuretic because it's some new "advanced" formula that turns my pee a shamrock green. That's a little bit of a shock first thing in the morning.

Spent about 10 hours working on homework this weekend. I'm beginning to hate Dialog.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Having a Meniere's attack of the tilting variety. It started yesterday afternoon when I noticed the tinnitus in my left ear was getting louder (normally I don't even notice it), and my right ear started to feel full. Those are the warning signs I used to get back when this all started 10 years ago but they haven't been happening as much in the past couple of years. Usually I just notice that I'm suddenly on a slant. I can't tell what set it off, either--the usual combos of triggers haven't been present. It could have been that I spent literally all day on the computer yesterday working on my assignment. Who knows.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last night... extremely funny. I couldn't shake the comparison to Michael Jackson for about the first third of the film, but it wore off after a while.

Still waiting for UPS to deliver Harry Potter. The Aussies and Brits on the Girl's Own list are already aflutter over it and have had to take the discussion off-list to honor the embargo. I won't get to read it immediately anyway as I have a huge amount of homework to do for class. With the incredible heat this week I haven't been able to concentrate enough to get anything done and it's the toughest exercise we've been given so far. This will be a fun weekend. It's still blazing hot.

In my stress-related compulsive shopping this week, I've managed to pick up several new games: bought Rook and Kaboodl the other day and Lost Cities last night. Hive and Coloretto are in the mail. Could not resist the funky design of the Kaboodl cards... no idea how it plays yet. It came in a double pack with another basic Uno deck, which of course I need like a hole in the head.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Taco Bell and Uno product designers are tied for the people who can get the most variations with the same basic materials. Today I saw the new Uno H2O edition, which may seem pretty stupid at first but could be a good idea for camping. We play a lot of Uno when we go camping. Shuffling might suck.

Website on which I wasted the most time today:
BoardGameGeek.com

Last night we had a power outage that lasted 6 hours and we could not come up with a single game that my mother and I both wanted to play. That it was also about 138 degrees didn't help the general mood.


In other news, my Tammy annuals finally arrived. I bid on these five Tammys on eBay in May after checking with the seller to make sure she was willing to ship to the US. She was. I was the only bidder and I won. After she got back from holiday several days later (who schedules auctions to end when they're on holiday?), she told me that she had no idea how to send the books. I finally arranged for her to courier them to a woman I know from Girl's Own in the UK whose husband comes to the US about once a month. He brought them in his suitcase and sent them to me in a pre-labeled Fed Ex box I sent ahead for him. After all that, my Tammys are here and my collection is complete. The seller never left feedback for me, and now it's far too late for me to leave feedback for her. (Thank goodness, because I'm not sure what I'd say.)

Anyone got any Jintys from the 70s they'd like to send me? Mistys?

Lawyers with nothing better to do sue the Internet Archive (registration required).

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Chococat saves the day! I wandered into the Sanrio store on Saturday after unsuccessfully trying to find new casual clothes for hot weather, and found that the new(ish) Chococat mobile phone case fit my Zen perfectly. The best part is the open top. It even has detailing in the right color! Yay!

My stupid cat Isis has suddenly started marking her territory, which in her mind consists of the living room and the loft. I think it has to do with her new goal of driving Koosh out of the house so she can sleep in my closet. Sunday evening she peed on a bunch of paperbacks on the bottom bookshelf in the loft and then later on she peed in the corner of the living room on the edge of the drapes. The second time was right in front of me. I've gone though a half a bottle of Nature's Miracle, but the smell seems to be gone in both locations now. Had to trash most of the books, and I didn't see the "dry clean only" label on the drapes until I pulled them out of the dryer so they are 6" shorter now. On the bright side, if she pees there again it won't get the drapes.

Yesterday when I left the office to get lunch my car spider was sitting at the edge of the passenger mirror, but a block or so later it had disappeared and I didn't see it for the rest of the day. Worried that it fell off somewhere in the middle of Dublin Blvd., I broke a section of the web when I got home in the evening hoping it would come out to see what I was up to. By this morning the broken web had been replaced by a very nice new web, so the spider apparently is fine.

IGN has posted an interview with one of my favorite people, Michael Palin, on his Himalayas project.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Looks like an all-PBS night tonight between a new History Detectives and the premiere of Guns, Germs, & Steel. Just heard Jared Diamond on Talk of the Nation while going to get lunch (Taco Bell... what else), and even though the guy sounds like Ray Romano, he has a lot of interesting ideas.

History Detectives is a hit-or-miss kind of show, but I it's cool that they actually go talk to real, live archivists and get all excited about doing research.

Haven't been in a comic book shop in years, but I feel compelled to go pick up the first issue of the Serenity comic coming out Wednesday. The preview looks promising.

We're entering our fourth week of Dialog in my Online Searching class and many of our brains are going squishy. (The class is not, as it might sound, all about fooling around with Google.) I'm extremely grateful to my instructor last semester who made Dialog available to us to play aroud with a bit so all of this is not completely new territory. It's like learning to speak a new language so some extent. I'm also glad to hear that I'm not the only one who is dreaming about search strings.

We had two assignments due yesterday because of the holiday. One was much more complicated that the other, but you can't help feeling while you're doing it that it's suspiciously simple and so you must be doing something completely wrong. Doing the weekly assignments is such a switch from the usual parade of papers that I feel off-balance anyway. Speaking of papers, I guess I need to start thinking harder about my paper for this class since it's due in a month.

Last week we were assigned the Marcia Bates berrypicking article again, along with her fallacy article which I hadn't read before. Always happy to read anything by Bates. As Dennis says, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!"

Friday, July 08, 2005

This is what my life as a SLIS student has become: I now dream about searching on Dialog.

Steadily working my way through the Firefly DVDs. That show really grows on you in subtle and insidious ways. It also features some great knitted and crocheted items! The only thing I don't get is why every planet they land on looks the same.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

We're being overrun with spiders of all varieties. Yesterday morning I saw four between getting up and leaving for work, and my mother tells me she found a black widow behind the knife block next to the stove. (I'll give my mom the benefit of the doubt on this one since the stove is right by the window under which is the log carrier where a black widow has been living for several weeks.) Apparently the cool, windy weather that's been keeping the yellowjackets away is great for spiders.

I park under a tree at work and when leaving the other day noticed a tiny brown spider clinging for dear life to the beginnings of a web it had begun on my passenger side mirror. When I stopped at the light, it skittered around behind the glass. I forgot about it for a couple of days until starting up the car one morning, I saw it had woven an incredibly intricate web between the mirror and the door frame. Since I hardly ever have passengers in my car, and he does not seem at all bothered by my opening and closing the door, I guess I'll leave him alone until he decides to move on or blows off.

So far most of the people I know who might have been in central London today have checked in as safe and in relatively good spirits considering. I got chills this morning when they said Edgeware Road as that was one of the stops on my Metropolitan Line commute to school many years ago.

The BBC has a nice representation of where the blasts occured, and the London Transport site has an excellent representation of the Underground lines with a street map overlay. At the bottom, click Real Underground Map, then Show Stations and Show Streetmap.

BBC News In Depth
The Real Underground

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

With all the very cool podcasts out there now, I'm using my Zen to listen to those more than music most of the time. In fact, I've had to cut down my subscriptions because there is just too much to listen to.

Rich Sigfrit, one of the brains behind the Star Wars fan audio show Requiem of the Outcast, recently launched a new (non-SW) podcast and it's pure genius. Campfire Tales is a series of short recordings of Rich's wife's grandfather telling stories of the old days, just like your grandparents probably did: funny, sad, pointless, poignant, whatever. Its great stuff.

Other must-listens:
Tartanpodcast
Tom Corven by Paul Story
KnitCast

Hooray... it's fall! Yes, it's 80 degrees outside and the neighbors are barbequing this evening, but for crafters and knitters, the leaves have turned brown. (They're putting the Halloween stuff up at Michaels already, too.) I picked up the new issues of FC Easy Knitting and Interweave Knits over the weekend. Time to sink back into fiber goodness!

Also old (hey, I've been busy lately!): the recent announcement of a movie based on a certain title from a certain publisher made us laugh really, really hard. And not at anything to do with Vin Diesel, who I'm told is a pretty nice guy, but at the mention of a certain marketing person in an unspecified producing role. Is there really a demand for producers who excel at combing their hair?

This is a little late, but John Davison's account of being ambushed on Donny Deutsch's show is getting a lot of attention over at 1up.com. While the invitation was a set-up, John should have probably been a little more prepared to deal with something like this given the recent hysteria on Nancy Grace's show over 25 to Life. To be clear: I am not defending my industry for making poorly conceived and/or tasteless games, but the media and the general public need to understand two crucial points: 1) most game players are adult males, not children, and 2) what motivates people to commit violent acts is far more complex than people seem to want to believe.

Kelly Wand's column about meaningless game review scores in the August issue of Computer Games completely misses the point. Yes, review scores are meaningless, but not for the reason Wand thinks. Reviews themselves are pretty much meaningless in the game industry, period. By the time a review comes out--even online--the retailers have already decided which games will be the "hits" and the rest get price protection. The only editorial coverage that matters these days is preview coverage... and that wins you an equally meaningless, but critically important, "score" on GameRankings or GameStats.

The retail buyers are so lazy now they are using these two sites to determine which games will get shelf space and which games they can safely ignore, because taking meeting after meeting with all those vice presidents from all those game companies just gets too tiresome. But all these decisions get made months before the game is done or the "reviewable beta" is even ready. Planagrams for Christmas 2005 were mostly decided by the close of E3 in May (at the EA, Microsoft, and Sony booths). Any leftover space will be determined by preview coverage over the summer. With very few exceptions, retail buyers are not gamers. They'll use whatever easy, objective-looking tool they can to make their decisions, and reviews come way too late in the game.

Current reading: The Cestus Deception by Steven Barnes and The Dialog Lab Workbook by Dialog.

The Cestus Deception is coming along very slowly, much more slowly than any of the other EU novels I've read. It might just be that I'm getting a little burnt out on Star Wars novels.

The IOC's choice of London for the 2012 Olympics surprised me a little, though they have certainly been pursuing it aggressively with the likes of Becks, Nelson Mandela, and Sebastian Coe schmoozing for the cause. I never thought New York would get it; that their selection for the final round was a sympathetic nod to 9/11 was no secret. Too many of the last several Games have been held in the US, and logistically NY would have been a nightmare. I can't see that London will be much better, however. Of the US bids, the Bay Area seemed to make the most sense (and that's not only because I was a volunteer for BASOC). We might have stood a slightly better chance than New York in the final round, but we would not have won for this Games.

Just booked my room for SAA in New Orleans in August. The conference is at the Hilton Riverside, a big, sprawling, shiny hotel. I may regret this, but my inclination is to stay somewhere less sterile so I booked a small hotel in the Quarter, just a couple blocks from the streetcar that goes right to the Hilton anyway. It might end up being so hot and damp that I'll be kicking myself (limply) for not staying in the same building, but it's worth a shot. The hotel in the Quarter is quite a bit cheaper, too. It came down to two choices and I went with the one that has fridges in the rooms, though the ambiance is a little less funky. Since it's right by the farmers market, hopefully I can rely on that for some of my meals.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005


Other recent craftiness...

The nice thing about only taking one class over the summer is that I have time to think about other things. When Chris was moving from LA to Portland and stopped by for a couple of nights, I made him help me clean out the creepy shed in the backyard where I knew some boxes of mine had been stuck. (Good thing Chris was there, actually, because I'm not sure I could have handled finding the dead, mummified cat body on my own.) Turns out that my old scrapbooks and some of my Star Wars stuff were in those boxes, so I made a Boba Fett shadowbox with my signed photo of Jeremy Bulloch, the button I made at a con when I was 12 and still qualified for the tiny geek activities, and my original Boba Fett action figure. Since it's the cheap shadowbox from Aaron Bros, the backing doesn't quite fit and I still have to shave it down a little.

I have been told it looks a little like a shrine, and I guess it does. A shrine to the character BF coulda been. Sigh.



Before buying my Zen Micro, I read about making a case for it out of an Altoids tin and got all excited because it seemed like a great crafty thing to do. Plus I had two empty Altoids tins I'd been saving for no good reason. So the other day I dug out my Dremel, charged it up, and prepared to slice up the tin. I screwed up the first tin by not paying attention and cutting into the back instead of the front. (Never mind... that just meant I got to use my dad's cool clampy thing for a while longer.) I decided to leave the exterior as is, the thought being that if I left it on the front seat of my car while I ran to the ATM, people would be less inclined to grab a tin of ginger candy than a new MP3 player.

It turned out pretty well overall, except that I used the craft foam that comes with adhesive backing, the snot-like stuff they use to stick perfume ads into magazines. It doesn't stay stuck to the foam all that well and got all over the back of my Zen. After slightly scratching my player trying to get it off, I had to resort to Goo Gone. I also realized after carrying it around in the tin for a few days that I actually like and use the little kickstand a lot, so I need the shell cover to attach that. Plus, when it's in the tin you have to take it completely out to get to the on/off switch. And I'm terrified of scratching the thing more, a fear that the sharp edges of the cut up tin didn't really help much.

So for now it's back to using the tacky black drawstring bag the Zen came with until I have time to knit a cosy for it.

I love my Zen!


My Skywalker Ranch wine arrived today. The labels are gorgeous, and I don't think the merlot image looks very much like a woman's chest.

Of course now that I have it, I have no idea what to do with it. I certainly can't drink it!