Key Combinations

11:59
The year in review, 2009 edition

I should have done this weeks ago, I guess, but didn't get around to it. But here we go. First sentence of the first entry of each month in 2009, unless more is necessary for context.

January: I've already called back to say that I've arrived safely, but, as I was told to do, posting here also: I am safely back from this year's Darkfriendly celebration activities in Chicago.
February: Sent my father home yesterday afternoon.
March: Snow day snow day snow day yay!
April: I have reached Zen---zero to fully-made-and-printed quiz in fifteen minutes.
May: That went surprisingly painlessly. The propose-propose-review-propose mess of yesterday, I mean.
June: This year's American-Turkish Council annual conference is being held at the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center, at that place that most of the DC-area residents probably know as "That massive resort-looking place you see when you're crossing the river north from Alexandria."
July: Let's see. Went to the orthopaedist on Monday. Two things: "Start putting weight on it," and "I'll see you in three weeks."
August: Progress on the 17-minute reference point mentioned in this post from 10 days ago: Now the same distance bearing almost the same load is down to 10 minutes, with no need for pauses to rest.
September: On my way back from Turkey; I'll be traveling for close to 26 hours door to door probably.
October: One more hesitant step into the Century of the Anchovy... at least, I think that's the century we're in now, right?
November: And if The Gathering Storm is nothing else, it is an impressive Clearing of the Rubble.
December: The theme of this entry was inspired by a discussion that I saw in a friend's journal; I'll ask her permission to name her and edit the entry if she grants permission later. Late last week, she wrote a letter to the ombudsman of The Washington Post; she complained that they were giving too much coverage and media attention to the couple who "crashed" the state dinner at the White House while taking time and space away from, you know, news that might actually matter to more than five people and the Secret Service---or news that people might actually need to know.

This is actually a fair review of the year: This was the year of the consumerist for me (new computer, new TV, new phone, NetFlix membership) and the first serious injury (and subsequent surgery) of my life; my father visited twice, I went to Turkey once; the one significant thing (~3 months of physical therapy) is not mentioned, but it's there; neither is the new dance/martial art (capoeira), but it's also there.

Moving on, ahead.

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14:30
Dragging myself, kicking and screaming, into... something

I passed another one of those rites this morning: I now have a Maryland driving license. Whee.

(I have had a Turkish driver's license since 1998. It's written in two languages, so technically it's valid here along with your passport, or something, and it's definitely valid for the first three months in the country, or something, I don't know, the laws change every fortnight and I am very sure it would make cops very flustered and sad anyway, so I almost never drove in the US. The result of the lack of practice was to make me fail the first time I tried the test, yesterday morning---I had Issues with the parallel-parking bit. One late-afternoon and four hours of practice later, no further problems this morning.

Also, practicing parallel-parking for hours in a rental car whose power steering intermittently fails is very good for your biceps, triceps and pecs. In other words: Ow, my arms.

Also, I owe Breno quite a bit, for his willingness to stand in the cold and imitate a post for hours on end so that I could practice. All the cones etc. we could find on the sides of the parking lots were, not surprisingly, buried in 1.5 yards of heaped snow earlier this week.)

So yay.

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18:55
And then that happened.

My Sedai just had oral surgery very recently. Must be the Warder bond: I couldn't sleep all night last night from serious dental pain that laughed at the medium-heavy guns I brought to bear. (Codeine+acetaminophen did Not A Damn Thing. Finally, at around 5 am, I gave up and broke out the Percocet, which put me to sleep as well, which I should have done hours ago instead of the codeine.)

Thankfully, my dentist could see me briefly this morning, and I am now the proud possessor of a bottle of Amoxicillin (of course it was infected, to hurt so much) and an oral surgery appointment past the New Year's (that was the earliest that they had possible) because it does not seem possible to save the tooth.

Grpmh.

Weird thoughts that come around 3:30 am while hoping the pain will listen to the non-synthetic opiate and go away: Epistemology is the study of what we can know and how we can know. Is there a study of what we like and how we can like, that is analogous? What is it called? "Philology" did not sound right, and still does not sound right to my seriously sleep-deprived brain.

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14:32
Bitties, again

Problem with not being a girly-girl, really, but attempting to wear fingernail polish while working in a chemistry-lab: You forget and try to do stuff with acetone. Then everything gets red.

(It's ironic, because the last time I painted my nails, I commented to Breno that the part of the process I found most interesting was how acetone removed the nail polish.)

Craft Watch, 2009: Yesterday evening, I tied off both the front and back sides of the vest I had been knitting. I also finished half of the front neck line. Remaining: The rest of the neck, arms, sewing the thing.

Media Watch, 2009: Done with the Viscount of Adrilankha [1], started the pre-Jheegala reread. I like Sethra Lavode, but I was a bit disappointed, because I wish I had a bit more information about her on you-know-what, you-know-that-thing-she-does. But I guess Brust could not do that, really, because people who come to the series late and decide they want to read them chronologically will... well, actually they will have a really hard time with that within the Taltos books, but they can at least unambigously pick the Paarfi books as being earlier, and then that would quite spoil the fun in Orca.

Weather Watch, 2009: It can stop being sharply cold any time now.

Politics Watch, 2009: Do. Not. Want. About many things, national and international.

Bureucracy Watch, 2009: Still Gah. Still cannot say more. [2]

Music Watch, 2009: You can put in "Nobuo Uematsu" as a seed in Pandora. I really should have discovered that much earlier.

Work Watch, 2009: There is that and that other thing that I need to finish before next Thursday. Consequently, I hate all of you who keep talking about Christmas breaks lasting two weeks. "Hate" might have been an exaggeration.

Later Edits in the form of footnotes:
[1] Apropos, a wonderful discussion.
[2] Well, actually there were two bureucracy problems, and I managed to finally solve the small one this morning with the judicious application of the phrase "You've been very helpful, but obviously you do not have the authority, can I talk to your supervisor?" But about the big one: Still gah, still cannot say more.

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11:43
Bitties

Heron Watch 2009: I have seen the great blue heron I mentioned here before quite often since then; I also got to see him fly and walk around in the pond he seems to have adapted as his winter home this year. This morning he was sitting, not on the branch he usually sits on, but on the ground on a sunny patch of the pond edge. Cannot blame him---the shallow edges of the pond had a distinctly slushie-look this morning, and it must be warmer on vegetation-covered sunny soil.

Abs Watch 2009: For the last two days, I have been trying to get back to "mix of 100 ab reps of some sort" routine of days past. So far so good, that is to say, my abs hurt now.

Media Watch 2009: About done with the Viscount of Adrilankha trilogy. I think that next in line is a partial reread of the Taltos series to remind me of things, then I'll catch up---I haven't read Jheegala yet.

Annoyance Watch 2009: There is Annoying Bureucracy happpening, about which I cannot really say any more, but it is most vexing.

That's it for today...

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12:02
Consumerism Re-redux

I have a new cell phone.

I have had a Motorola RAZR---the original, the V3, not V3i, not V3m, the V3---for more than three years. It served admirably and was also quite robust, and would no doubt have gone on serving admirably had I not dropped it very forcefully and just at the wrong angle on the very hard tile floor of Dulles Airport this August.

The outside screen cracked. The phone kept working. A few months later, half of the outside screen went dark. The phone still kept working. As of yesterday, it was still working, but I decided that maybe I would not mind a replacement that much, so I found a RAZR2 V9x.

Still not a smartphone, or a 3G phone---for reasons of work, Do Not Want, and I don't want to pay for a data plan anyway---but it is new and shiny. So there's that now.

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15:24
The weekend that was

Got to watch vol.2 of Cowboy Bebop. Still interesting and entertaining. Also, its music is spectacular but I am not wondering whether it is available in soundtrack formal anywhere, because I am sure it must be. The only question is where.

(Another question is, why is "Venus", in its almost entirety, the city I know as Istanbul? Up to and including that one courtyard in Topkapi Palace where they set the climactic battle? And since I recognized Istanbul that strongly in Venus, what cities am I not recognizing elsewhere in the system?)

Other than that: Very nice party at

lonebear and

giraffeaholic's for the combined birthday celebrations of

lonebear and

badmagic; thanks for hosting, guys.

Sunday: Went to Silver Spring with Breno. Bought Breno a pair of black boots. Looked at black boots for myself. Did not buy black boots for myself. Had lunch/dinner at Moby Dick, which is Iranian, then went to the place of friends Adrian and Magda to watch The Counterfeiters on their New! and Shiny! 44-inch Samsung. It's an interesting, well-made movie, Austrian/German coproduction, based-on-a-real-story. As part of a economic-warfare initiative during WWII, the Germans got some incarcerated Jews with particular skills together, segregated them from the rest of the concentration camp community, and treated them marginally better---to get them to make counterfeit Allies currency. They made more than 100 million pounds, but dragged their feet on the dollar counterfeiting to delay things on the "let's flood the Allies' economy" plan. This won the 2008 Academy Award for the Best Foreign Movie.

Also, almost finished the knitting project I'm on. As in, nine more rows then I cut the neck on the back; then it's only the trims and the sewing.

But now, back to work.

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10:04
I tried to make this happy, but CNN didn't let me

Nice new morning---fresh, if a bit watery and weak, sunlight; the quiet of an empty lab, the potentiostat ticking gently on the bench behind me as it switches modes while doing cycle tests, the beautiful smell of fresh hot coffee, full of the promise of... report writing.

Hey, I never said I would maintain a certain level of "poetic".

The heron is back on his tree. He isn't always visible, but whenever I see him, he's always sitting on that branch of that tree. He seems more awake today than he has been in a while too----he's turning his head to look around.

At the entrance of this lab building there is a wall TV that is tuned to CNN 24/7---yes, they never turn it off, and I am still biting my lips at the waste of energy, but maybe I shouldn't---and when I walked in this morning, they were advertising a program for this evening: "Global Warming: Trick or Truth?" by highlighted words from the infamous leaked e-mails.

I want to have time so that I could go read through Real Climate. Or this (Link, most recently, thanks to

paradoxicmotion, but I've seen it elsewhere before). I feel ill-informed and afraid of doing more damage than good [1]. I wish, purely internally, that seeing people hell-bent on contributing to the destroying of their environment and possibly their future [2] did not make me feel so helplessly angry [3].

One thing I do know: I don't care about temperatures per se. Funny, but really I don't. So don't come to me talking about the medieval warm period. I care about this. That page is under very much construction, and if you click on the graph, it will take you to a poster that is not very easy to understand unless you already speak the language. But the y-axis of the graph and the slope are scary, especially when you think that 450 ppm is often considered a tipping point [4]. If you want another e-cookie, eyeball that graph, assume the slope stays as it is, and let me know how old you will be when it hits 450 at that rate. You will need to average over the seasonal variation, obviously.

[1] No, you are not the only one thinking of "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". Whoever you are.
[2] You know, Pascal's Wager can be reworked to apply to the climate change/environmental conservatism question. Put it in the form I am thinking about in the comments and you win an e-cookie. Yes, by the way, I know it is not a zero-sum game, thankyou.
[3] Maybe I am assuming the worst of the CNN program; I would be very glad if I am.
[4] That is data obtained from satellite measurements and, unless I am much mistaken, calibrated with ground measurements, including measurements from planes at various altitudes.

...wow, I meant to write happier things today. So here, have something incredibly cute. I think I will make an icon out of that, actually.

Anyway. Tonight is movie night, and apparently no one is coming, so if you are coming, please let me know---because otherwise I will not buy any snacks and you will be condemned to cans of non-diet Pepsi and whatever cookies I can scrounge from the pantry. There are many, many worse fates, I know, but there are many better ones, and those involve me stopping by at Target on my way home. So let me know.

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14:32
The weekend that was

Friday night I headed to Hulu (while knitting) and caught up with House M.D., which, yes, I am still watching, thank you very much. Although I cannot help but think that there is a degree of meta-commentary that must be involved in its new levels-of-soap-operaness---are they trying to point out that it is impossible to set a medical drama in a hospital for five seasons without it devolving into soap, or what? Although-although, in the last few episodes Jesse Spencer got some serious acting in, so you go, boy.

Saturday, I worked. Ten-to-nine, in my office/music room, playing the piano when I took breaks. And it was the kind of work that feels really good---you get things accomplished, and want to get back to it when you're taking a break. Maybe the piano was what made it go fast. I think we need a piano in the lab. Maybe it was because there was no one asking questions and interrupting. Maybe it was because I had good tea. But... no. I still believe it was the piano, and we need a piano in the lab.

Afterwards I popped in the first disc of Cowboy Bebop that I got from NetFlix (conclusion: intriguing, and fun) and knitted.

Sunday was lazy day. I took a walk to College Park and back, tidied up a bit, and cooked a very passable bean stew-like-thing from beans I had soaked a day before. Then I played Baldur's Gate 2, and knitted while watching episodes of the Hutton-Chaykin A&E adaptations of Nero Wolfe stories, and then later watching some Star Trek: The Original Series episodes. No, I have never seen it end-to-end, only pieces here and pieces there.

So the theme of the weekend is, in terms of hours spent, work and knitting, with some music and much TV thrown in, a soupçon of cooking, and a smidgen of tidying and exercise. All in all, satisfactory.

Movie night reminder: Tomorrow (Tuesday) the 7th, 7:30 pm, Snatch.

Several people have already mentioned that they will not be there, so for once, please let me know if you do plan to be there, so I will know if I do have to go home early or not.

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20:50
French toast time

Statement as of 2:17 PM EST on December 4, 2009
Winter Weather Advisory

... Winter Weather Advisory in effect from 7 am to 9 PM EST
Saturday...

The National Weather Service in Sterling Virginia has issued a
Winter Weather Advisory for snow... which is in effect from 7 am
to 9 PM EST Saturday.

Snow is expected to begin in the Washington DC and Baltimore areas around
sunrise Saturday. Moderate to heavy snowfall is expected Saturday
afternoon. 1 to 2 inches of snow is expected to accumulate before
tapering off during the evening. Temperatures during the day will
be in the upper 30s.

I think I have half a gallon of milk, six eggs and a whole loaf of bread at home for the weekend, which is a Good Thing, because by the time I'm back from capoeira class I expect Target to be completely stripped of French toast ingredients.

Not that this is a particularly bad fall, but it's the first one of the season, and that plus the "will snow for 12 hours!" perception will make it a goodly-sized DC-area emergency, I expect. Thankfully, it's for Saturday.

(Yes, I said I'd be busy, and yet I am very chatty on here today. That tends to happen when I am very stressed with work, from past experience.)

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10:57
Sentences

First, a sentence that made me laugh very hard, which is actually difficult to do (discretely or not) in a very crowded bus while on your feet:

After this work has been completed to the best of the historian's ability, to create a situation in which the author must omit even more is to deny the validity of the work---and this is even more true in the case of this author, who prides himself above all on brevity, precision, and narrowness of focus, so that nothing unnecessary is included, and no information, however vital, is repeated, and not even so much as an extraneous word is permitted to creep into the body of the text.

Well-nigh every word is funny and it gets stronger as it goes along; wonderfully-done, Brust. This is from the "Preface" to The Lord of Castle Black, which I started this morning. Those of you who were mildly baffled about my previous declaration that I could not "get into" those books before might now commence mocking or "I told you so"ing, as per personal preference.

The second sentence is from page 708 of a book, and I will have to put it behind a spoiler cut because the book is only a year old. That book I finished last night, and it has immediately entered the "will reread, probably multiple times." category. All in all, it may read better as a philosophy-themed book than a story book, but that is not something I begrudge the text nor the author. We're talking Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and the sentence in question has packed a punch for me way beyond what I would have expected---I was a little surprised at the strength of my reaction, which tells me that the buildup has taken me in even more than I realized.

( And it is a mega-size spoiler, so if you haven't read Anathem, stay away, no, really, I am not even kidding. )

Outside the spoiler-cut, brief review: Read it. Yesterday. It is a very ambitious book in what it attempts, and it well-nigh pulls it off. (It is not often anyone takes the entire history and philosophy of science as a theme for a novel, but if anyone in speculative fiction were to do it, it would be Stephenson.) It is not just a "slow beginning," it is actually a slow book, and there is nothing to begrudge it its speed. Those of you who were mildly baffled about my previous declaration that I could not "get to it" before might now commence mocking or "I told you so"ing, as per personal preference.

(Also, help me LazyWeb, you're my only hope: What are the real-world names of Syntactic and Semantic philosophies? I know there is something, and

speaker2animals and I even searched a little last night, but I have no more time today and it is driving me nuts.)

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11:46
Heroes do not sell ads

The theme of this entry was inspired by a discussion that I saw in a friend's journal; I'll ask her permission to name her and edit the entry if she grants permission later.

Late last week, she wrote a letter to the ombudsman of The Washington Post; she complained that they were giving too much coverage and media attention to the couple who "crashed" the state dinner at the White House while taking time and space away from, you know, news that might actually matter to more than five people and the Secret Service---or news that people might actually need to know. The ombudsman actually replied. The essence of his/her letter was that "we are giving the public what they want, see, that piece of news was always in the top five most visited of our webpage, so I disagree---the public is getting what they need."

Allow me to respond in high-falutin Latin: Non sequitur, quoniam "want" non "need" est. OK, I probably mangled that last bit. But you probably got it.

This is not a new idea; it is in fact getting to be an old and tired one---is it not disingenuous of newspapers and news media in general to hide begind the idea of "if we do not give the public what they want, we will not survive, because we live to sell papers/website clicks/ads after all" so exclusively?

They do have a point. But I have to notice that there is a middle ground---newspapers in Turkey still seem, all in all, more relevant (and closer to being a real political power) than newspapers in the USA seem to think they are, and they do succumb to sensational news and stretch some news stories for days, yes, but they always also seem to find space for stuff that matters more or makes for a more informed public. Some of them, yes, sing their parent corporations' tune. But they at least sing it in a nuanced and in-depth way. Some of them are outright political party mouthpieces---Zaman, for instance, has always been the fundamentalist Islamist newspaper. Some of them even eschew sensational-news-of-the-day altogether and make for political and informational coverage only---I know, *gasp*---and here's the thing: They are the worst sellers, but they survive, and have survived for twenty years. If people stop reading them, it is because the readers' political views have changed and they have switched to another paper with similar quality but a different viewpoint.

So it can too work if you keep some actual real journalism in the mix.

There's another side to it: Considering "giving the public what it needs---" well, who are they to determine what we need? Shouldn't we worry our pretty little heads about it? But once again, I have to point to the Turkish examples: The readers ultimately choose what they think they need, and they have a number of in-depth choices to go with.

(Also, I am ignoring the sort of propaganda Fox News, or on the other side... um, I'm not sure who is on the other side, routinely engages in.)

I should probably provide an example of what I think would be a more proper path. Yes, cover the couple-who-crashed-the-White-House for two days or so; it's interesting; it's got security ramifications. Then take it off the front page, however, and assign your front-page-quality reporter to provide preparatory research articles for, say, the health care discussions that began in the Senate this week. It is not like there is not enough depth in that particular subject to make for couple of weeks of front pages; it is not like those discussions are not going to matter five years from now. Five years from now, no one will remember anyone even crashed the Obamas' first state dinner.

Or rather, no one should.

Ever since I started the "You Haven't Seen That?" movie night series, I noticed that one sub-genre of movies I really like watching are the Good-Investigative-Journalist and the In-Depth-Newsman genres. All the President's Men, State of Play, Good Night and Good Luck, even Shattered Glass from the "through a mirror, darkly" angle---you name it. Every time I watch one of those, I feel a twinge: They are heroes; where are they now? I want a few of them more than I want a Superman.

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9:50
\small Owie. \normalsize

It was time for the yearly "let's try exercising before the workday" thing, so I dragged my...self to the gym this morning at TooEarlyO'Clock.

And ran for the first time---at speed, 6 mph, and distance, 1 mile and some change nonstop---since the Incident with the Fibula.

My ankle took it during the run, then my calf tendon screamed at me while I was walking to cool down. Apparently, jumping "up" to run: Fine. Pushing forward strongly to walk at 4 mph: Not so fine. And after I cooled down, the ache tells me that further complaints are being drafted formally. We'll see how I am tonight. If there is swelling and the pain does not abate at a reasonable pace, maybe I'll go back to walking fast and waiting some more.

(By the way, 6 mph was "speed" in my pre-accident days: It is my usual sustained speed. And 1 mile nonstop was an OK distance, towards the low end of the scale.)

Let's see how it goes.

Last night on the way to gaming, I complained to Chort that I need two clones of myself and an extra eight hours in the day, and I still feel the same. Remember the self-evaluation I was mentioning a week ago? This has to do with that, too, and things are still gelling. Let's see how that goes, too.

In case you celebrate it and/or care, and in case you do not read LJ tomorrow, happy Thanksgiving.

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11:07
Bitties

The first item on my to-do list today is, literally, "Make a to-do list." Well, we put it more formally, along the lines of "design an experiment matrix," but cutting to the chase...
If you know me personally you know that I am not that much of a girly-girl, usually, but if having sparkly purple fingernails is wrong, I don't want to be right.
I keep forgetting exactly how strong the black tea from Ten Ren is (a local Chinese tea shop, though their teas are made---or imported---by the company of the same name in San Francisco), and caught unawares with the amount of sugar I add every time I brew it anew.
Earlier this year I bought a pair of brown knee-high boots. Now I'm considering a pair of blacks. OK, maybe I am becoming a girly-girl in my old age with a limited amount of disposable income.

Work now.

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