The Mandelbear's Musings

08:18 am - Done yesterday (20091119 Th)

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Again, a pretty good day. The highlight was a good hallway conversation at work about phone avoidance, which I've already posted about. A good, long walk, though I had a little pain in my hips coming back. What's with that?

The walk included Safeway, which is where I get my at-my-desk lunch munchies. I added some fish-oil softgels, in hopes that the omega-3 fatty acids will help with my triglycerides.

No, I don't think the "scrim" is entirely due to dirty glasses; I didn't wash them, but things still looked the way I've come to associate with getting out of a long down phase.

Cleared a couple of to-do items; signing up for the Conflikt brunch and buying Kat her membership have been on the list for a long time.

The day's hot links are a page devoted to the Moosylvania Jazz Festival - Jay Ward (from wcg: Meta-vignette 19: Moosylvania), and The Ferrett's Journal - Moments Of Finding Doom. The latter is about those moments when you look at a new technology and realize that it changes the game.

06:58 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to marythefilker!!!! Have a great one!!

10:21 pm - Done yesterday (20091118 We)

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It was a good day; basically in a good mood. I'm not going to try to characterize it beyond that -- I may not be completely alexithymic, but I come close.

I've already posted about the day's "aha" insight into my limited definition of "social life".

I had a good, if geographically-limited, walk. That's because I was on the phone with cflute, so I kept to the top of the hill behind work, where there's a good signal and very little traffic noise. Both of us were pretty cheerful, so that's good too.

Placed a book order with Powells, almost equally divided between self-help and fiction.

The day's link sausage includes An Argument for Friendship (in fiction; from haikujaguar), more profound whimsy from Tom Digby, and speaking of whimsy, Photos from Robolamp (from from gizmodo)

09:22 pm - River: Avoiding the phone

I had a fascinating conversation with a couple of coworkers this morning about avoiding the phone. R. described herself as "phone phobic", and it brought home the fact that it isn't a phobia at all. There's no fear involved; one simply... doesn't make calls. As R. said later, one simply doesn't think about it except at times when it's impossible to make the call. Or, as K. said, it's something you can do any time, so there's never a pressing reason to do it now, and there's always something else more urgent/desirable/easy/fun to do.

So what is it?

Maybe it's just that it reminds me of or requires me to think about things that make me uncomfortable. That seems to be generally true of things I avoid. It's not just the phone: taxes, anything involving paperwork or finances -- my finances are a trainwreck and I really don't want to think about that. But phone calls? I can see being uncomfortable with calling my broker on some financial matter, but Callie?! What's making me uncomfortable about that?

Maybe it's the whole "I don't want to interrupt anything; I'm not important; why would anybody want to talk to me?" thing. Low self-esteem. That's this month's whipping boy.

Or maybe there is some fear down there -- I already know that I'm not in touch with my feelings. But fear of what? It doesn't made sense.

Of course, if it made sense, it wouldn't be an irrational behavior, would it?

05:52 am - River: social life

A somewhat delayed insight from a comment Naomi made to me in IM when I told her that I didn't have a social life in high school: all this time I've been defining "social life" in a way that focussed on dating and other activities where the point was to have or find a romantic partner.

I've also been very shy, for as long as I can remember, so of course I didn't have one, by that definition. I did have some fairly close (male) friends. But that didn't count, by that definition.

Even now, what I've been calling my "social life" (what there is of it) consists mostly of the handful of parties I go to, and things I do with Colleen. I don't think of conventions, late-night conversations, song-swapping sessions and filk circles as part of a "social life".

Silly old Bear.

Fortunately, my background in science and software makes me familiar with the idea that changing the way you describe a problem can drastically simplify it or even make it go away. It's never too late for a paradigm shift.

Not that knowing that I had a social life after all would have helped me get dates...

05:03 am - Done yesterday (20091117 Tu)

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A pretty good day, for the most part. Started with Kaiser's "Avoid Avoiding" group, which promises to be very useful. Had to leave early because I'd managed to double-book myself for an appointment with a long-term care insurance broker (http://www.barbarahansonltci.com/). Appropriate enough because I'd been avoiding that particular item for over a decade. Bottom line: Colleen is uninsurable, and I'm borderline; I may be able to get coverage for about $3.5K/year. If we'd signed up 5 years ago we could have covered both of us for less than that.

... which is undoubtedly why I'm still awake after waking up at 2:30 for a bathroom break.

Link: http://psychcentral.com/, which advertises itself as "the Internet's largest and oldest independent mental health network, providing reliable, trusted information & self-help support communities for over 14 years."

04:45 am - Done day before yesterday (20091116 Mo)

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I seem to have been calm and contented most or all of Monday; I noticed on the way to work that what I call the "scrim" of dysthymia seemed to be gone. (I have since wondered whether that's just due to having washed my glasses, but it wouldn't hurt my mood to do that every morning anyway.)

I greatly enjoyed Gizmodo's series This Cyborg Life. Fun and fascinating. A few other links in the raw notes.

Basically a good day, and a "good mood", whatever that means. I can't complain.

06:53 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to lapislaz!!!! Have a great one!!

07:53 am - Done yesterday (20091115 Su)

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Another good day -- too early to say whether I'm getting the hang of it, but I won't complain.

I got Colleen's new purple Kitchenaid mixer set up in time for the YD to use it to make a batch of tasty gluten-free corn muffins. YAY!

Colleen and I then went up to San Francisco for the Lamplighters parody gala, titled "Star Dreck: the Generation After That". The YD didn't want to go, and Marty was injured and couldn't, so we took Marty's daughter K. The show was wonderful, of course. We came home so Colleen could hit the bathroom and change, collected the YD, and went to Red Robin for dinner. They are apparently very good at handling allergies, which is useful.

Yeah; good day.

The day's link sausage is a Steampunk wheelchair, captured at Windycon by gmcdavid.

Current Mood: okay

10:10 am - Done yesterday (10091114 Sa)

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Yesterday was the "big" work party at the Starport. Huge amounts of progress were made cleaning up the driveway and the back yard, though nowhere near as much as if we'd had the hoped-for 10 people instead of 5. The next one will probably be in January sometime.

I spent most of the day runing errands, doing dishes, and assisting in the kitchen -- yard work is hard on my back, and somebody has to do the support. Infrastructure is my specialty, after all. My impulse buy of a bag of potato chips and a large salami at Safeway (while out for ground beef and large garbags) proved an essential component of lunch. So go me!

I noticed myself feeling pretty good in the morning. Contented and perhaps a bit optimistic. Colleen sent me out for a walk in the mid-afternoon; my mood was basically calm and pretty neutral. I took the Leigh-Parkmoor-Bascom-W. San Carlos route around the neighborhood, and checked out the new $.99 store. It was predictably unimpressive, with a lot of things in smaller-than-normal packages, but the purple shopping carts and tote bags were awesome. I'll almost certainly go back sometime just to get a couple of bags (which are, of course, $.99 each).

Spent most of the evening in the living room being more-or-less sociable. Tried to get printing installed on Colleen's Eee, but no joy. Probably something having to do with my wacko network topology; need to fix that soon. Or it could be Ubuntu's GUI for CUPS. Anyway, grumpf.

And I was feeling a lot less achy and generally slightly-under-the-weather; maybe that was a mild flu? Anyway, a good day. I should do that more often.

12:54 pm - Done yesterday (20091113 Fr)

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Fortunately, Colleen had given me a French press/coffee mug a couple of years ago. It's convenient enough that I'm going to take my time looking for a new coffeepot.

Two shipments arrived: my new "office" phone (a Motorola Droid) and Colleen's purple Kitchenaid mixer. YAY!!

Somehow, no matter how late I plan on leaving for work, I never manage to pry myself loose from the computer early enough to get in a walk. Don't know what's up with that.

An "ok" day. Better than "not ok" -- I'll take it.

08:09 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to birthday twins kyburg and aerowolf!!! Have a great one!!!

08:46 am - Done yesterday (20091112 Th)

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Odd day; something of a rollercoaster. To start things out, the coffee maker failed halfway through the pot. One cup for me, one for Colleen, and that's it. Time for a new one, I guess; I'm tempted to get one that grinds the beans...

There was an all-hands meeting at work; big news but not bad news, about how our lab is having an impact on the company. The only part that affects me is that one of the four people in my group is one of the two people moving to a different group. Fortunately, his part of $PROJECT is nearly done, so the timing is good.

I walked down to the pond, but with two stops. Stopping or slowing down while I'm out for a walk is usually a sign that something is wrong -- that's me and my inability to feel emotions except from their physical effects, again. This time it closed the loop, with the question "if I can't detect emotions directly, does that mean I may never experience happiness? Joy? Are those even meaningful concepts for me?"

Or, on the other hand, are those even meaningful or useful questions to be asking? Probably not. That's just where I'm starting from. So I was discouraged and disappointed, but mostly puzzled. I was mostly back up to calm and neutral by the time I got back to the lab, but the puzzlement remains. It's going to take some research, of a sort that I don't really know how to do.

On the gripping hand, I came up with a new affirmation: "It's perfectly ok to be an introvert. It may sound as though everyone is an extrovert, but that's because we introverts don't talk as much."

Transcribing my notes from the walk, I ran across two more: "I am an interesting person" and "People enjoy talking with me."

I also remembered that N. had told me on Wednesday that she didn't think I looked particularly fat, or old. So obviously my self-image needs a lot of work, along with my self-esteem.

The evening was much better: we went out intending to try a new restaurant that turned out not to be open yet, so we diverted to Arya because we were close. Yum. For an appetizer we had a plate of little rice crisps with three different sauces. Gluten-free and delicious.

Took a drive on the way home.

Current Mood: okay

10:09 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for:

• Colleen and her continuing progress.
• Family of choice
• Professional opinions and friends' observations agreeing. (Even if I don't always like what they agree on.)
• A friend who doesn't hesitate to call foul when what I'm saying about myself goes beyond the bounds of reality as she sees it.
• The beginnings of self-knowledge and acceptance.
• tetralizard's help in sorting the health-care receipts.
• Everyone who's fought for our country, whether or not they came back as veterans. Yeah, it's a day late. Sorry about that.
• Songs that sometimes absolutely nail what I can't put properly into words myself.

08:10 am - Done yesterday (20091111 We (Armistice Day))

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I see that not a whole lot got done yesterday, but it was moderately productive for all that. I booked our hotel room for Conflikt, bought a neck-roll pillow for Colleen (she wanted to steal mine, so I had to), and had two "aha" moments.

The first insight was realizing that I've been avoiding the (free to building tenants) health club in the building where I've been working for the last 17 years because "I know I'd hate it". Just how do I know that, when the last time I saw the inside of a gym was 35 years ago? Right. I should pay for a session with a trainer and get checked out on the equipment.

The second was realizing that having trouble meeting and getting to know people is a common problem. The reason why it doesn't seem to afflict many of the people I've spoken to about it is that the set of people willing to talk with me at that level of intimacy is a small, self-selected, biased sample.

And Colleen figured out how to make gluten-free bread pudding, using gluten-free stuffing mix, eggnog, and an extra egg. How cool is that?

I didn't sleep very well Tuesday night, and started flaking out around 10pm. Finally gave it up, took a cyclobenzaprine, and went splat somewhere around 11.

09:26 am - Wishful Wednesday, Work Party

Today is Wishful Wednesday, when I point at my Caregiver's Wishlist.

Thanks especially to tetralizard, who sorted my health care receipts last weekend.

And a reminder: Saturday, November 14^th, our friend Andrew M Crockett (contact him via the preceeding name, with no spaces, at gmail dot com) has organized a "Starport Hardware Upgrade" work party. This will not be a potluck -- we're supplying food and drink, so you need to contact either Andrew or me so we know who's coming.

We also need rakes and shovels and implements of destruction: we'll be putting in raised vegetable beds in the back yard, and concrete ramps in the front. Besides the "day laborers", we could also use some help in the kitchen and elsewhere inside the house -- don't feel that you shouldn't come if you can't do yard work.

Thanks in advance.

08:32 am - Done yesterday (20091110 Tu)

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I spent most of yesterday feeling rather groggy and underslept -- I think I got four or five hours, between having trouble getting to sleep in the first place, and being up between roughly 2 and 5am. The snuggle was good, but I paid for it.

Took a good walk at lunchtime: down to Safeway on Sand Hill, and back the long way via the pond. Noticably out of shape, but I think improving.

I have been working my way through Ten Days to Self-Esteem by David D Burns. So far it's almost entirely about depression and anxiety. It took me a while to resign myself to writing in a book; it's not something I normally do. Some of the exercises are surprisingly difficult -- they assume some background information that I don't have, and ways of thinking that I'm not used to. Good for me, I suppose.

I slept soundly last night thanks to a hot bath, cyclobenzaprine, and snuggle.

Links up in the raw notes -- I'm feeling lazy.

08:21 am - Done yesterday (20091109 Mo)

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The big news from yesterday was that Colleen walked from the toilet to the bathtub without using the walker! (She was presumably holding on to the tub for most of that, but it's not the same as the two-handed support that a walker gives.) This is major progress. She also had me haul out the rolling walker, which is also progress. It has a seat, so she can use it for more extended strolls.

I'm still having issues with my knees; I would probably have had to cut my walk short even if I hadn't thought that I'd have to leave early for an appointment. It's next week. But even five minutes in the fresh air and sunshine helped.

I've already posted about my success in upgrading the hard drive on my fileserver. It goes nicely with cflute's finally getting the external drive I sent her to work. The problem turned out to be a connection that got shaken loose in shipping.

On the down side, the buyer at Batteries and Bulbs called to say that the bulb in our fan is indeed made of unobtainium. In a way that's OK; the problem turned out to be in the fan. (We have two; I have verified that both bulbs work in the front fan, so we have a spare anyway.) The options for the back room are: A. replace the whole thing, and B. keep the fan (which is working for now) and install some extra lamps. We'll go with Plan B.

In connection with my weight, several people suggested exercise. That's probably worth a separate post; it's not simple: in addition to time and motivation, I have problems with both knees and ankles.

I have added embarrassment to the list of emotions I don't feel -- several times recently people have told me I'm blushing, usually in response to an unexpected compliment. I wouldn't have noticed if nobody had mentioned it. It does make me wonder whether it's a good idea to go messing with what's obviously an effective defense mechanism.

And I need to go back and work on my list of affirmations, which I've been neglecting of late. I need to add a rather obvious one: I am a Middle-Sized Bear.

Links later, I think.

07:49 am - I've been Kaneffed!

Now that he finally has it posted, allow me to present Monkey Brains [lyrics here], which Bob commissioned Kathy Mar to spring on me at ConChord. Yes, of course I like it!

08:36 pm - Successful upgrade

So I guess it's been a while since I posted anything really geeky. This is probably because my brain has been mostly mush recently. Anyway, I finally got around to upgrading the hard drive on the file server. The main partition has gone from 99% full to 31%. This makes me happy.

Of course, the job is only half finished. The old drive is still there, with the root partition still on it. It will stay there until I get Lenny installed (on the new drive) and know that it's working. One of the reasons this is taking so long is that I like to do a lot of planning and prep-work. It paid off handsomely in this case -- I only had the fileserver down for about half an hour total.

Note to self: when you play this game, you really need to reboot not only the server but anything mounting drives from the server over NFS.

The next step, as I said before, is Lenny. I also need to upgrade the gateway; I'm going to switch to my fanless mini-ITX board (which has SATA) and upgrade the disk to 500GB at the same time. The big disk is for the Debian mirror, and I'm thinking about Ubuntu.

At least I'm getting a few things done.

08:48 am - Done yesterday (20091108 Su)

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My weight has crept up to 200 lbs; DO NOT LIKE. I probably need to be stricter about the low-carb thing. And take my walks, even though I still have trouble finding the time. tetralizard sent me a link to Timpany Center, a nearby theraputic pool that does drop-ins. *Waves at cflute* If I don't have time for walks, I certainly don't have time for that, however.

I had to cut my walk short yesterday because my right knee was complaining. I'm in better shape than a lot of people my age, but not by much. Some looking around at Office Max and REI yielded the decision that the REI "boarding bag" looks like the best bet for my new shoulder bag; it's light, and has enough pockets and dividers inside that I might even be able to abandon the wallet. Though the Timbuk2 travel wallet looks like a good replacement for my current one: the card slots are wide enough for photos and business cards.

(The idea behind getting a larger shoulder bag is that it would have room for the netbook if necessary, but could go mostly empty most of the time. It's a nice theory...)

After getting back home I had a bit of an anxiety attack, probably from thinking about the mess I've made by not signing up for long-term care insurance 20 years ago. We'll be talking with an agent next week, but given my age and Colleen's health it's probably too late. As usual, it apparently took a couple of hours for the anxiety to build up to where I could notice it, and several more hours before I was able to trace it back to the cause. But relaxation, deep breathing, and herb tea with valerian got it under control.

I was in no shape to go out again, though, which caused some friction with Colleen, who was rapidly going stir-crazy and had been hoping to go to Yamagami's nursery and look at plants. In the end she took the scooter out to the front yard and deadheaded roses.

I made shrimp scampi and rice for dinner, and did some practicing late in the evening. Yet another thing I need to force myself to make the time for.

09:31 am - Done yesterday (20091107)

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I made a double batch of fried rice for lunch -- Colleen liked it. Afterward, we went out shopping, mainly to buy a new lightbulb for the fan in the back bedroom. FAIL. We took it in to the place where we'd bought the thing, Galaxy Lighting, only to find that they no longer sold that fan and didn't have the bulbs. They sent us to Batteries and Bulbs on El Camino, where the expert took one look at it and said "buy a new lamp". Apparently it's a custom job. He'll look... The topper is that when we brought it back home, thinking I'd swap it with the known-good one in the living room, I found that it worked fine there. Apparently the problem is in the controller.

So... no more buying fans -- or anything else -- at Galaxy. They're also expensive. We'll stick to brands that are likely to still be around in another decade, and only use standard Edison-base bulbs.

On the plus side, we found a lovely little grocery store with inexpensive, fresh produce and falafel chips. Win. We're guessing they'd taste really good with hummus. We also checked out a discount store called Tuesday Morning, which Colleen had heard of but I hadn't. They had discount luggage, but not nearly as good prices as Ross.

I didn't take a walk, but got a little exercise wrangling the scooter in and out of the car.

Got a moderate amount of receipt-sorting done.

I see that I listed my mood as "unusually happy". I have no idea what caused it, or where it went. I found a self-help book about "structured journaling" earlier in the week, and was on the edge of buying it until I realized that it was all about "managing your [presumably, excessively-strong and out of control] emotions." That's not my problem; I just want to find my emotions. I don't recall ever seeing a self-help book about that.

Thanks to tetralizard, who brought back my box of random health-care receipts, neatly sorted. There are a few missing, apparently. Grump.

10:11 am - Done yesterday (20091106)

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Work was moderately productive, not necessarily much code, but a few other things got done, and I spent some happy time reading all of the GNU Make manual. I took only a very short walk; it felt like rain was in the offing. Even a short walk is worthwhile, though.

I'm back to working on moving my fileserver onto a larger drive (from 500GB to 1500). Not a moment too soon -- the big partition is 99% full. Upgrading from Etch to Lenny is another matter, but I can postpone that.

It was a good day for friendship. In the morning I mailed a package up to Promusica with a contribution for Naomi and a slug for Callie, who has been unable to make her laptop recognize the USB hard drive I sent her.

The high point of the day was when I found myself smiling delightedly after hearing about an affectionate moment between C and N. Maybe I am getting better at recognizing my emotions -- this one was definitely mudita.

Marty and Colleen were telling me how much they enjoyed the weekend when I was away at OVFF. I don't remember which of them said something to the effect of "we'll have to see about doing that every month". But that makes me happy, too.

tetralizard came over in the evening to help me with a wishlist item: sorting the health care receipts. YAY!!!

Elseweb, KitchenAid is selling purple mixers again!! Ricoh has put out a press release about the latest bit of cool stuff to make it out of our lab and into production. And V-Innovate, the company my son-in-law works for, has a demo of their cool stuff up (Windows only for now, unfortunately).

08:30 am - Gizmodo on Android

Here's a good article on Gizmodo about Android. Things could get interesting.

08:11 am - Done yesterday (20091105)

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I moved everything out of my old wallet and into a travel wallet with more slots for cards. A bit of a tight fit, though, and of course larger and heavier. So I may end up moving back. Or getting one with slightly wider slots.

It was a fairly productive day at work again. I'm not sure why I seem to have the most fun when I'm hacking on Makefiles, but there you have it. Perhaps it's because they automate so much of the repetitive, boring stuff. And also because debugging them can be... interesting.

Took a nice walk around the pond. Rather scattered thoughts, but I ended up pretty calm and somewhat refreshed.

Got a well-timed call from cflute, while we were on the way to our date-night dinner at Estrellita's, a Mexican place in Los Altos that's been there forever and has a wonderful mole poblano and excellent sangria. Also three different dipping salsas with their chips. We drove home the long way, of course.

Ended the evening making a signal boost post for pocketnaomi, and hunting down my old but still functional (and still unused) slug, since cflute's laptop doesn't want to recognize the USB hard drive I sent her. I'll send that and a check this morning.

Went to take a bath and ended up in the back tub, because I still haven't finished taking the drinks out of the front tub after our party last weekend. Oops.

06:07 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to tenderstone!!! Have a great one!!

09:27 pm - Signal boost: A friend in need

My sister-of-choice, Naomi, needs help.

What would help most, of course, would be jobs for her and/or her partner Callie (cflute). But they also need to feed the kids and pay the rent while they work on finding jobs.

I figure that instead of sending money to a couple of charities working to cure diseases we don't have yet, we can send it to our friends this year.

There's an email address in her post for PayPal, or you can email her for her snail-mail address. Even a little bit would be helpful.

Thanks in advance,
==steve

09:51 am - Thankful Thursday

Today I'm thankful for...

• Colleen, of course. Always and for everything.
• Family of choice.
• Friends who offer to help, and me being sensible enough to accept it.
• Gainful -- and even socially useful -- employment.
• Eggs and sauteed leftovers for breakfast.

09:30 am - Done yesterday (20091104)

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In spite of a little meditation in the morning and a walk around noon, my brain felt like mush all afternoon. Very scattered and difficult to concentrate. I finally did dive in to a Makefile and made some progress, though not as much as I would have liked, and fixed a bug in the one of the last two systems that actually still run my demo.

Spent most of the evening hiding out in the office until things thinned out somewhere between 10:30 and 11.

Quote from a comment made elsejournal: "I often wonder what it would be like to be, if not 'normal', at least enough like other people to be able to experience a few things in close enough to the same way as to find them comprehensible." It's an exageration, of course; many things about other people are comprehensible to me. With others, though, I'm never entirely sure.

Links: My sister-of-choice pocketnaomi pointed me at this post by osewalrus, in part to introduce me to the phrase "Elija moment". cflute pointed me at books about self-esteem by Nathaniel Branden and Jean Illsley Clarke. I'm currently starting on Ten Days to Self Esteem by David D Burns.

08:15 am - Done yesterday (20091103)

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A productive day at work -- and at home, for that matter: I got my hotel reservations made for Loscon (having discovered over the weekend that they'd slipped through a crack somewhere between ConChord and OVFF). A good walk, and I scored an APC XS1500 at Fry's for about 2/3 the price of my first one, which I love (in large part because you can permanently disable the "on battery" beep).

But I spent much of the evening tired, sleepy, but restless and with a bit of a headache. At a couple of points I was wondering whether I had a mild case of the flu. Other times I wondered whether the restlessness was just missing a friend.

I had some sleep-time tea and went to bed early, at about 10:30. Some nice snuggle when Colleen joined me shortly thereafter.

For link sausage, Techdirt comes through with articles on music (UK Music Critic: This Is The Golden Age For Music and Yet Another (Yes, Another) Study Shows File Sharers Buy More) and the latest development in mapping software: Is Google Going Better Than Free On Navigation? Will That Set Off Antitrust Alarms?.

That one's fascinating. It links to Bill Gurley's article pointing that Google's turn-by-turn navigation software is cheaper than free -- if a manufacturer puts it on a device, they get a cut of the ad revenue. The article shows what happened to Tom-Tom's and Garmin's stock prices when Google's announcement came out. As Gurley points out elsewhere, "if a disruptive competitor can offer a product or service similar to yours for "free," and if they can make enough money to keep the lights on, then you likely have a problem."

09:33 am - Done yesterday (20091102)

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I didn't take a walk yesterday; that probably explains the restlessness, though pocketnaomi was quick to suggest that what I really needed was a trip to Seattle. I really need a teleport, is what.

Several phone calls: I called Mom, Colleen called Callie and passed the phone to me after a while, and Callie called asking for help setting up the wireless router I'd sent up. I realized that I've probably learned a great deal through not asking people for help, but on the other hand I didn't learn to ask for help when I really need it. On the gripping hand, I'm slowly acquiring that skill now, but it's harder than it would have been forty years ago.

I was mortified to realize, on checking my history, that I hadn't booked our hotel rooms for Loscon yet. (I did it this morning.)

Spent some time looking at travel wallets and filing receipts.

Today's hot links are the Finding Free eBooks blog, and Musician Making A Living With Forty Committed True Fans at techdirt.

07:12 am - Done yesterday (20091101)

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A good, relaxing New Year (for suitable values of year). Since it coincided with Fallback Day, I spent some time in the morning resetting clocks. I also cleaned the print heads on the Epson multifunction machine (apparently nobody is using it much) and put a trackball on my laptop table -- the mouse was really starting to hurt my hand.

Took a good walk by the Los Gatos Creek, and stopped at REI to look at bags and travel wallets. The Timbuk2 looks as close as anything I've seen to what I'm looking for.

After that, I went out to Santana Row with Colleen; first for shopping and then for dinner (after confirming that the YD wasn't interested in going out with us). Since "date night" had consisted of leftovers and a drive, and I didn't feel like cooking, this was just fine. We ate at Consuelo's, a little Mexican place that serves small portions tapas style. Yum.

The main purchase was a rolling garment rack at the Container Store, because it's impossible for Colleen to get into the closet and I was getting tired of piling clothes on the chairs. I may commandeer a few inches of rod space for myself, too. We also went to Borders, at Colleen's insistence. I found her a Crohn's Disease/IBS cookbook, and she spotted The Cookie Sutra, which will make a fun gift for somebody. Now that we've both read it *wicked grin*. Joy of Sex meets Joy of Cooking.

Today's link sausage includes cosmic latte (from APOD), the average color of the universe, and the Wikipedia article on unusual time signatures, chained off of Gridlore's post mentioning mathcore.

I spent much of the late evening sorting and filing 2009 receipts, now that I have space for them. It's barely noticable so far. Sometimes I have a lot of trouble remembering that it's better to do something than to spend an hour sitting and staring at my to.do file and wondering what to do next.

Current Mood: okay

06:20 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to mamagnome and persis!!!! Have a great one!!

09:26 am - Done yesterday (20091031)

( raw notes )

It was a good party yesterday; I spent most of the time in good conversations, and a little time singing (including Kanef's new parody of Paper Wings, which he still hasn't gotten around to posting).

While waiting for things to get started I lugged soda out of the guest room; went out to buy eggs, butter, grated cheese, and a bus pass; puttered around the house; and did some re-arranging in my home directory to get more files under git control. So it was a pretty productive morning, too.

02:47 pm - Party at the Starport -- right now

If you're not at Grand Central Starport right now (and I can see from the empty chairs that most of you aren't) you're missing the party.

10:22 am - Done yesterday (20091030)

( raw notes )

Poking around in the Wolfling's room looking for a missing USB hard drive interface I managed to find the roll of purple gaffer's tape, a coffee mug, and a Windows XP SP2 OEM install disk that matched an envelope I found in the office a couple of weeks ago. But no interface.

A nice walk, twice around the pond, with a little meditation break in the middle. A call from Naomi in the afternoon.

And I boxed up the last of the 2008 receipts, put the tax returns in the filing cabinet, and took the box up to the garage attic. And moved enough other boxes around that someone could actually sit in the other chair, and maybe evem use a computer if I have time to set one up.

A bath and some lovely, warm cuddle, and I drifted off to sleep.

09:26 am

( raw notes )

Yesterday was a pretty good day; a nice way to put me back into the groove of "done" posts.

I got in a proper walk, and a fair amount of actual work.

"Date night" consisted of a huge salad and leftovers at home, followed by a pleasant drive, and ended up in bed with a particularly sensual cuddle. I slept very soundly, for once.

Today's link sausage includes the Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu, and Scott McCloud's comic about Google Chrome.

Some of my poly friends might be interested in theferrett's recent three-part series. The middle one, The Vital Skill Of Jealousy - is particularly interesting and a little more generally applicable than the others.

04:31 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for:

• Colleen and her continuing recovery.
• Colleen's willingness to let me go to OVFF, and the opportunity to catch up with old friends and make a few new ones.
• Continuing insight into my mind's bizarre inner workings.
• A demo that, this time, just plain worked when it needed to, after a long string of failures.
• A job that continues to be both interesting and moderately lucrative.
• Our friends.
• Comfortable walking weather, at least some days.
• Cheap airfares on Southwest to Seattle.

08:08 am - Done yesterweek (20091022-28)

( raw notes )

Eeep!! A week is way too long to be playing catch-up. I haven't fallen behind on my reading, so my pants aren't bankrupt; I wonder what item of clothing corresponds to posting. Shirt, maybe.

I think that if you want the details, you'll have to slog through the notes. (Ugh!)

Most of the week was, of course, taken up by OVFF, which was wonderful even if I didn't win a Pegasus -- there are people I only see once or twice a year, and I did a lot of catching up. I even met a few new people. I only sang a handful of songs. That's ok.

MEW's concert was magical, with a stage full of backup musicians. Wow. And it was especially good to hear Duane Elms in concert after all the years he's been away from filk.

The netbook worked out OK; I only felt a need for more battery life a couple of times. The biggest problem was not having set up synchronization via git before I left. Next time.

I didn't end up paying up as much attention to my emotions as I intended to, but I don't think I noticed much anxiety interacting with people. The major insight is that most, if not all, of my problems in that area are due to low self-esteem, not social anxiety. It's not that I expect to be rejected; I expect to be ignored. Or perhaps that I set things up so that I'm more likely to be ignored, because that's easier to handle than rejection. Yeah. That.

I have a really hard time imagining that somebody might prefer talking to me to whatever they're doing at the moment.

The next week is likely to be busy. My boss cornered me late yesterday afternoon and said something like "You know that server project you've been working on that's due to be finished at the end of December? How about getting a simplified version going by the end of next week?" Right. Oddly enough, that's going to be pretty easy. But still...

08:52 am - Wishful Wednesday, and Party Announcements

Again, it's Wishful Wednesday, when I point people at my Caregiver's Wishlist and casually mention that the household could use a little help.

This Saturday we're having our "sometime around Halloween" party on Halloween. It's the usual potluck. There will be children present, so any costumes should be street-legal. Directions and contact info on the household website.

... and just two weeks later, on Saturday, November 14^th, our friend Andrew M Crockett (contact him via the preceeding name, with no spaces, at gmail dot com) has organized a "Starport Hardware Upgrade" work party. This will not be a potluck -- we're supplying food and drink. The goals are ambitious: nothing less than making the house handicap accessible, and making the back yard into a vegetable garden. Needless to say, this will take care of a whole bunch of wishlist items if we can pull it off.

Current Mood: awake

07:02 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to katt1028!!! Have a great one!!

08:30 am - Not dead yet!

I'm not dead, and my pants aren't bankrupt, but my shirt is badly in need of a loan. I was keeping my "to.do" file on my netbook, and the data has yet to be synced up. Maybe this evening.

OVFF was a good con for me: lots of great music, conversations, and people. Only three things could have made it better; maybe next year.

08:53 am - Done Recently (20091020-21)

( raw notes )

Quite a lot done, but I'm afraid there's been enough going on that I haven't had time to pause for breath recently. Life's been improving this week, and I seem to be doing better than I would have expected on, say, Monday. See the notes for details and links; time tends to be short when you're on West Coast time at a con three timezones to the east.

03:16 pm - Travel update

I indeed missed my connecting flight; I'm stuck in Denver until 7:15, and will be arriving at OVFF sometime well after midnight.

Current Mood: calm

07:37 am - Travels with Plink and Rolly: En route to OVFF

Or else not -- there's some maintenance issue, and then flight is delayed for an unknown amount of time. If I miss my connection in Denver there's no telling when I'll get in. Grump.

Meanwhile at least SJC has free wifi.

Current Mood: discontent

06:53 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to chipuni!!!! Have a great one!!!

09:12 am - Done yesterday (20091019)

( raw notes )

Not a terribly productive day. (Short) meeting and (interesting) talks in the morning at work, with a short afternoon so I could get to the (twice-monthly) caregiver's support group at Kaiser. Odd session, with a lot of silliness. Humor helps, obviously. Oddly enough, I'm not the cynical curmudgeon of the group. I passed out my card because my rolly had led to the subject of travel, OVFF, and filk.

I'd loaded up my netbook with a large page from my internal RSS aggregator; that worked very well.

Spent most of the evening hanging out in the living room with Colleen, listening to music and not doing much of anything else. Some practicing, and then I attempted to get the YD's new desktop system installed, and her old one moved to the hallway desk. The latter worked, though it required several trips to the garage attic to untangle and extend the ethernet cable. The former didn't: the thing stubbornly refused to recognize either of its IDE devices. This morning, weirdly enough, it did boot after the YD pulled and reseated the plug.

But I went to bed frustrated, defeated, and depleted, though a hot bath and warm snuggle went a long way toward fixing the first two. I was up for another hour or so at 3:30, with more snuggle. Not quite enough sleep, but that wasn't what I needed most anyway.

07:40 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to flikcook!!! Have a great one!!

09:05 am - Done yesterday (20091018)

( raw notes )

I started the day with a little light hacking, preparing the YD's new desktop computer for its trip upstairs. Mostly setting up printing, and giving it a static IP address. She installed and played some of her games downstairs in the evening, a rare instance of the whole family working on our various computers within sight of one another.

Colleen and I went to the Baycon 2010 meeting, to be introduced as fan guests (not that there were many people there who don't already know Colleen, at least). We came home the long way, via Tasman, 85, and Stevens Creek.

My walk, in the general direction of the Rose Garden, was rather short because it was colder than I was dressed for. Just as well; it started drizzling just after I got home. A call from my sister-of-choice, who I'd carelessly left dangling on IM without making it clear that I was just giving her some time not to answer questions if she didn't want to. We share some problems; it still feels odd and awkward to be the one trying to give advice.

Getting home, I answered voice mail from another friend, also asking advice. I'm still rather bemused, but apparently the Middle-Sized Bear is alive and well, and living in California with the Cheshire Cat.

I seem to spend way too much time staring at my to.do file, and way too little tearing myself away from it long enough to actually do something.

I don't regret not taking the time for a hot bath, though, since it meant more time in bed for warm snuggles. I have some of my priorities straight, at least.

07:06 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to khaosworks!!!! Have a great one!!