smokepaw

Current Location: JAX
Current Music: The Gong Show

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Current Location: bed room
Current Mood: irate
Current Music: whitenoise

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Current Mood: optimistic

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Current Location: JAX
Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: This is Not The End - The Bravery

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Happiness is walking down a busy street filled with nothing but the smell of cars and warm pavement ... and suddenly being olfactorily overwhelmed by the wonderful scent of homemade spaghetti sauce slow-cooking in someone's kitchen.  Oregano ... fennel from the plump sausages infusing the succulent tomato base ... it reminded me of my grandmother.

Well, OK, it would have, except that my grandmother used sauce out of a jar, because her "old country" was Germany and not Italy.  But you get the idea.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

On my way home from work yesterday, I passed a few people who were standing at a bus stop waving handwritten signs at the passing cars.  I expected "Stop the war!" or "Honk if you love Jesus!" or the usual.  But no.

"GOLDEN PRESIDENTIAL DOLLARS!", they trumpeted in all caps, exclamation mark included, with no further explanation whatsoever.

I felt the urge to join them with an equally inscrutable sign, like "BOXES OF TWINE!" or "OLD DUTCH WINDMILLS!" ... what?  Are they buying them, selling them, wanting you to give them some?

Ah, no, hang on ... they just went to the Post Office, got 19 of them in change from the machine from their purchase of one stamp using a $20 note, and are desperately trying to get rid of them before their pockets rip.  That must be it.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I am getting so much more done at home in the evenings since FurAffinity went down.  I wonder why.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

English is a simple-ish language when it comes to grammatical gender: nouns that refer to human males are masculine (he); human females, feminine (she); everything else, neuter (it).  This spares learners of English the need to remember whether it is un table or une table, der Auto or die Auto or das Auto, and so on.  But we do make a few exceptions: animals can be masculine or feminine if we want to treat them as individuals or neuter if we want to treat them as things.  And if we want to take a thing and sentimentalise it, we can make it (almost always) feminine, which shows that it's males who came up with this idea.  For instance, unless you want everyone to know you're a landlubber, don't ever call a ship an "it".  A ship is a lady.

This springs to mind only because I recently had a class in computer programming, and the teacher of the class was a fellow who'd been in the business since before I was born ... and I noticed that he maintained the (to my mind) affectation that I tend to see only in older programmers: he makes computers masculine.

"If you click 'execute', he'll try to run the code that you've given him".  "Any code that comes back highlighted means that he saw it and he didn't like it".  You get the idea.

Now I must agree that, if you're going to "genderise" a computer, masculine is the correct gender.  Imagine this conversation:

Husband:  "OK, honey, I've taken out the trash like you asked!"

Wife:  "But ... you left it in the middle of the front lawn."

Husband:  "So?"

Wife:  "You were supposed to take it all the way to the kerb!"

Husband:  "Well, you didn't specifically say that!"

That's a computer for you.  But to me and to pretty much everyone of my generation, a computer is an "it"; and I honestly find the whole "he" thing to be a touch creepy.  I don't get sentimental about computers or feel a need to interact with one as though he/it were a person and not a collection of silicon and software patches.  A computer is a tool to me, nothing more.

Besides, if my computer's a "he" I may have to buy him a drink or something lest our relationship end before the warranty expires.

Current Mood: amused

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Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: sasha - fundamental
Tags: breckenridge, co

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A few years back, I was given a gift of a backpack.  OK, it was a self-serving gift, as when I'm wearing it I walk around advertising IBM on my back; but still, it was free, and it is a nice backpack.

The cool thing about having a backpack is that it's possible to carry around things that don't fit into a pocket and that I may not necessarily need on a regular basis ... but which are nice to have around anyway.  As an example, it "never rains" in Los Angeles, so folks like me never bother to check the weather forecast and don't carry an umbrella in our hand as though it had grown there before birth as an extra appendage (as one might in Seattle or the Lake District) ... but then when it does rain, we Angelenos all run frantically for cover, getting soaking wet and wondering how the hell this travesty of all things Californian could possibly have happened.

Thus, into the backpack goes my umbrella; because while I need it only rarely, when I do need it I really really value having it around.

The hazard with planning for low probability - high cost eventualities is that there's no good way to cross them off the list and declare them now to be irrelevant just because they haven't happened in a while.  If I decided, for example, that if I'd carried something around for three months without using it that I'd remove it from the backpack, I'd ditch the umbrella right around October, when the rainy season starts.  The day that I decide I can safely leave the border collie at home is the day that my office will be invaded by a flock of rogue sheep.

So things go into the backpack ... but once in there, they tend not to come out again.  As a result, my backpack now contains the following things:

An umbrella
A book of postage stamps
A pair of sunglasses
A local bus timetable
A sweater
A bag of earplugs
A remote control for the garage door
A flashlight / torch
A swimsuit
A pack of Kleenex
A Rubbermaid lunch tote
A touch-up paint stick for my car (just cuz I was wearing the backpack when I bought it)
A small bottle of aspirin
Two condoms
And three pens

I would fit in a partridge in a pear tree if I could.

I do need all these things ... or at least I did at the time that something happened that prompted them to go into the backpack in the first place.  But it raises, to my mind, one question:

At what point does this thing become a "man purse"?

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Current Location: back again
Current Mood: unasleep
Current Music: Dead Or Alive--You Spin Me Round

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Current Location: JAX
Current Mood: amused

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He looks good in stripes.

Current Music: Tori Amos - Mr. Zebra

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Current Mood: amused
Tags: assholes, drama, furry, global warming

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Kay and I have begun Bay Area house hunting ... by which I mean that I've started browsing through Craigslist and going, "No.  No.  No.  Too expensive.  Doesn't take dogs.  No.  By 'convenient to 101' you mean there's an offramp in the back yard, don't you?", and so on as I go down the list.

But every so painfully-not-very often there's one that intrigues me.  It may look like a decent house ... but every house looks decent in the listing.  What's the area like?

Google to the rescue.  For all the now-died-down spluttering about how Street View invades people's privacy because, you know, they were out in public at the time, this is the most handy thing ever to be created on the Internet since distributing pornography made the Net commercially viable.

Type in the address, select Street View, and look around.

Brown lawns?  Chain link fences?  Cars parked on the street with missing hubcaps and faded paint?  Nice house indeed.  Shame about the neighbours, who will likely be trouble.  And you want ... $2,000 a month for it?  Oh, that's funny.

Well-tended green lawns, tree-lined street, little low white picket fences that keep only the honest out, late-model cars on the street that look as though they've seen a car wash lately?  There, sir, we have a winner.

Well, OK, at least theoretically.  The Bay Area is pricey, so I haven't found a winning rental house yet that we could actually afford.

But man, shopping for a place to live from 400 miles away has never been this easy.  Now all I need is Street Sounds so that I can tell if the neighbour's kid is in a garage band.

Current Mood: geeky

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We made it home in good order! More words eventually--in the mean while, have a coyote. :]

Current Music: Coyote Bones - 39 Forever

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Current Location: JAX
Current Mood: working
Current Music: Two Kinds - Film School

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Spotted during my walk to work this morning on a maroon Nissan 240SX that was motoring the other direction, this number plate:

WUF WUFF

I barked at the driver.  He didn't bark back.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

It was 3:02am.  I was sound asleep in my bed, lulled to sleep a few hours earlier by the gentle thrum of the fan in the window.  Outside, I'm sure the annoying noisy bird that has been singing outside my window in the middle of the night was attempting to irritate me in spite of the white noise from the fan ... and was failing.  All was well.

BZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Slight stirrings of conscious awareness creep into my brain.  My subconscious desperately tries to hold onto sleep, but my conscious brain is sure it's heard that sound before ... somewhere ...

BZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZZ!

A text message.  I have a text message.  I don't know what time it is, but I don't need to look at the clock to tell that it's not an hour when I should be getting text messages.

BZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Ah, right.  My phone is sitting on the dresser.  The dresser is full of drawers, and is therefore mostly hollow.  It makes an excellent resonance chamber for the vibrating repeating notification from my phone that tells me every two minutes that yes, indeed, I do have a text message.  Oh well ... I'll just ignore it and go back to sleep.

BZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Fine, fine, I'll go read it!

"From: 56678

[name of friend] [phone number of friend]
--
Get Loopt now and we can share geo-tagged location, messages and photos.
Click link: [long URL ending in a unique identifier]"

Even in my groggy state, I form two thoughts:

First, screw you, Loopt.  You want me to sign up for your "let your friends know where you are based on the GPS in your phone" service?  Don't send me a message that I have to pay for at three in the bloody morning.

And second ... friends don't give out their friends' phone numbers to dodgy websites.  That's MY phone number.  You are out of line if you share any of my contact information with anyone who intends to use it for their own financial advantage.  That's just rude.  Sure, give my phone number to mutual friends ... I don't mind that.  But a possibly-shady business with an unknown privacy policy?  Ask me first, m'kay?  Cuz if I start getting a flood of spam SMS messages, you're getting the bill for me to get a new phone number.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

It is not, strictly speaking, illegal to walk around naked in California per se.  Sure, the state has a law against "indecent exposure", but it's curiously worded:

"Every person who willfully and lewdly ... (e)xposes his person, or the private parts thereof, in any public place, or in any place where there are present other persons to be offended or annoyed thereby ... is guilty of a misdemeanor."

Well, back in the 1970s some folks who frequented an "unofficial but everybody knows it's a" nude beach got tired of being cited ... so they sued, claiming that their nudity wasn't "lewd", as they weren't doing anything or soliciting anything, so their nudity was no more lewd than taking a bath is ... and besides, the lawmakers must have intended to make some sort of distinction or they wouldn't have put that lewdness qualifier in there in the first place, would they?

They won.  The County of San Diego, home to two of the state's best known nude beaches (Black's and San Onofre), came up with a truce: they wouldn't cite beachgoers for indecent exposure unless some other private citizen complained that he was offended or annoyed thereby, and then the offender would first be given a chance to put a suit on.  As long as he didn't then immediately just take it off again, it would be no harm, no foul.

And since the stretch of beach at San Onofre where folks went to sunbathe as God intended was so isolated, nobody cared.  Even for the puritans who might have deliberately sought it out solely in order to be offended, it was just too remote to bother.

Now, in response to growing use of San Onofre beach and growing misbehaviour on the part of people who are hitting up the isolated traditionally-nude section for reasons that are honestly lewd rather than for the "naturist experience", the County have announced that they're going to crack down.  "Nudity prohibited" signs have gone up.  The Sheriff has said that, although one could perhaps argue that his department's limited resources could be put to better use, they do actually intend to enforce this.

The County doesn't dare mess with Black's, which is "world famous" and brings in the tourist dollars, and where (perhaps because it's located, unusually for a nude beach, right in the middle of the metro area) people are smart enough not to try to have sex on the beach.  But little isolated San Onofre is about to bite it.  The well-behaved naturists who go to the beach just to enjoy their freedom and without intent to try to get in a screw with a view say they intend to sue again.

I wish 'em luck.

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It sucks right now to be trying to run an airline.  Unless you're Southwest or JetBlue, which had tons of cash a few years ago and as such were able to pre-purchase their fuel at nice low prices for the next few years, the price you're paying for one of your primary costs has gone through the roof ... and you know full well that holiday travellers are tremendously price-sensitive.  The person who will fly in a heartbeat at a $300 fare will hem and haw for quite a while before paying $400 and will tell you to go screw yourself at $500 ... but business travellers alone won't fill all those planes.  And your efforts to "raise fares without raising fares" by introducing things like checked baggage charges are blowing up in your face as people get more angry at the prospect of paying $25 to check a bag than they probably would've got had you just raised the round-trip fare by $50.

What to do?  The latest tactic seems to be, "Blame futures speculators."

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Current Mood: depressed
Tags: angry, depressed, jobless, unemployed

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Dude, this has to be the funniest photo of Hillary I have ever seen!!!


Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!

Current Location: Work
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: New Soul - Yael Naim
Tags: perky hesitation

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Back in the 1820s, as early steam locomotives began to get better and could reach speeds faster than a man could walk, there was genuine concern about the feasibility of "high-speed" passenger rail service.  After all, at 30 mph, the Venturi effect of the air passing around a carriage at that sustained speed would surely suck all the air out of the carriage and asphyxiate the passengers.

It didn't, of course; and the quest for mechanical speed was on.  By the 1930s, humans had lots of ways to go fast with the assistance of coal or oil ... but for obvious reasons, none captured the imagination quite like the aeroplane.  Trains had been around for a century and could therefore be taken for granted; cars were just carts without horses; but planes ... planes were not only faster than both, but could go where no one could go unassisted: up.  And unlike trains or cars, which could function perfectly well even if they were shaped like nothing more than a block on wheels, planes had to be aerodynamic.

Designers love nothing more than to copy a cool idea and apply it someplace else, and soon an obscure term from fluid dynamics and wind tunnel testing became all the rage: streamlining.  Locomotives were redesigned with rounded noses to reduce drag.  Chrysler introduced the Airflow, the first wind-tunnel-tested car.  The Art Deco movement seized on streamlining as the cure for boring design in products that weren't even intended to go anywhere, like toasters.  Heck, there was a whole school of architecture called Streamline Moderne that designed buildings that looked as though they might shoot off at 200 mph any minute.  Everything was curves on curves on curves.  Straight lines and flat surfaces?  Those were so 19th Century.

Heck, we still use the word to mean simplifying and improving something ("I've streamlined the process for getting new code into production").  It's a seductive idea.

Ironically, at the same time that streamlining is going out of fashion in areas where it actually matters (e.g. the Scion xB), it seems to be coming back in when it comes to the design of things that don't need it at all, because they don't move.  "Beige box" computers are out; rounded designs are in.  The seatbacks on my recent Virgin America flight from New York to Los Angeles were made of smooth white plastic with every surface delicately curved ... except fortunately for the usable surface of the tray table (echoes of the other great era of Jetsons-esque rounded shininess, the 1960s).  Heck, coffee creamer now comes in these swoopy bottles that look more like matryoshka dolls with oversized bustlines than what you'd expect for a container that holds mere vegetable oil.

Why do I care?  Because at our office we just acquired a new photocopier.  It's a Hewlett-Packard something or other, it's somewhat larger than my first apartment, and it's ... streamlined.  The lid for the massive ten-ream paper tray has a delicate upward curve to it that blends delightfully into the soft, sculpted handle to open it.  The top of the machine curves gracefully down into the front, with extra curves to blend the of-necessity flat control panel into the design.  The sheet feeder on the top has a lid that's practically a dome.  Even the top of the output stapler-sorter-jams-constantly gizmo is rounded and sensual and looks as though it could slide through the air with the greatest of ease.

It's lovely.  I have a weak spot for Art Deco and good ol' 1930s-style streamlining.  I don't quite want to have its copier babies, but I at least like it.

Except ...

WHO DESIGNED A COPIER WITHOUT A SINGLE FLAT SURFACE ON IT SO THAT ALL YOUR PAPERWORK KEEPS SLIDING OFF ONTO THE FLOOR BEHIND THE MACHINE?!

Current Mood: silly

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Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Deadliest Catch on TV. TV? What's that?!

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Any fax received with a big 7/7 in the date field on the cover sheet has to be lucky.

Counter Offer No. 3: accepted and executed by both Buyer and Seller.

T minus 45 days!

(Right, next step ... moving truck ... and please oh please let them get their financing ... )

Current Mood: happy

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It’s time for an Anthrocon convention report.

Very long report ;)

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Current Mood: drained

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