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| Monday, December 28th, 2009 |
jwz
|
12:28p |
2009 music wrap-up
Please enjoy my 2009 music wrap-up. I'm slacking this year: no mixtape, no micro-reviews. However, it is a list of 40 fantastic albums that I advise you to acquire at your early convenience.
Current Music: Metric -- Gold Guns Girls |
emergent
|
9:19a |
A curious phenomenon
On the thickly foggy mornings here, the first offhand glances out my window suggest a world colored white. It makes me think, for a moment, that everything is layered in snow... Current Mood:  wistful |
mat_defiler
|
12:34a |
random interactions, that's the title
I tell people that my tactic for winter bike riding is that i take public transit when the snow is actually coming down, but that it is always fine a few hours later, the streets plowed and salted. I don't take alley ways. i wait a day two take minor side streets. But the snow has been coming down for long stretches of every day -- in slow and medium flurries. The amount on the ground right now could've happened in twenty minutes flat, but no, it's been days. On the third day i gave up and rode in the snow. I told myself i could throw my bike on the bus if the snow got bad enough to impair my visibility. I took median arterials, veered away from the slushy patches, watched the rusty colored swirls start to pop up on my chain. It was fine. There was no competition at the bike rack. There were smiles and waves when another cyclist passed by, even if we couldn't see eachother's faces under the balaclavas. When the snow comes slow and protracted, i just have to ride in it, that's all there is to it. ( blahblahblahblahblahblah ) Current Music: penetration |
| Sunday, December 27th, 2009 |
emergent
|
2:48p |
Just got back from seeing Avatar. I quite liked it! The plot was boilerplate, but many things about it were done very very well. My favorite aspect, though? I don't think I can recall the last time I saw a Hollywood movie where the scientists weren't evil, hubristic, and/or heartless. |
jwz
|
12:36p |
The Great Gravitar Attack of Ought Four. NEVER FORGET.
 Anniversary of a cosmic blast The sheer amount energy generated is difficult to comprehend. Although the crust probably shifted by only a centimeter, the incredible density and gravity made that a violent event well beyond anything we mere humans have experienced. The blast of energy surged away from the magnetar, out into the galaxy. In just a fifth of a second, the eruption gave off as much energy as the Sun does in a quarter of a million years. Oh, and did I mention this magnetar is 50,000 light years away? No? That's 300 quadrillion miles away, about halfway across the freaking Milky Way galaxy itself! And yet, even at that mind-crushing distance, it fried satellites and physically affected the Earth. It was so bright some satellites actually saw it reflected off the surface of the Moon! I'll note that a supernova, the explosion of an entire star, has a hard time producing any physical effect on the Earth if it's farther away than, say, 100 light years. Even a gamma-ray burst can only do any damage if it's closer than 8000 light years or so. Current Music: Massive Attack -- Superpredators |
jwz
|
12:25p |
|
captainecchi
|
3:30p |
Upgrade, at last
Originally published at Frugal in the Fruitlands. You can comment here or there. I just upgraded WordPress to version 2.9. It’s a bit trickier than can be handled by Dreamhost’s one-click install – as I started this blog in one directory and moved it to another – so I had to do a manual install.
And yet, I seem not to have broken anything! Please poke around the site and confirm that this is true? |
captainecchi
|
12:26a |
Just got back from seeing Sherlock Holmes
I quite enjoyed it, even if I kept thinking things like, "Isn't this a little late in the 19th century for bustles?" and "Shouldn't Holmes already know Mary Morstan from The Sign of Four?" I think I liked Jude Law's Watson better than I liked Robert Downey Jr's Holmes. There is a real shortage of non-bumbling Watsons in film. I liked that he affected Watson's limp, and other small details that are reminiscent of the character from the stories. Also, hello, slashiness. Well, I've found the stories have always been slashy but, I'm told that apparently RDJ "outed" the characters on Letterman? Oh dear. Now there will be more fic, but they won't be quite as well annotated as the other Holmes/Watson fic I've read. |
| Saturday, December 26th, 2009 |
jwz
|
12:39p |
Horton Hears a Microbial Extinction Event
Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear? The human body has some 10 trillion human cells -- but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing? With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment -- which is still largely uncharacterized -- most of these rapid changes are not yet understood. Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have," Foxman says. Previously, previously.
Current Music: Hanzel und Gretyl -- Mutant Starseed Creation |
| Friday, December 25th, 2009 |
lil_fatty
|
11:01p |
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jwz
|
3:09p |
|
captainecchi
|
2:56p |
Merry X-Mas, X-Mas people
Christmas pictures are here - with lots of pictures of Burnbright crawling in wrapping paper. Also of note: our schizophrenic Christmas tree, caused by running out of one type of blue light and trying to replace it with another. My Christmas loot: From Matt: - various accessories for our cell phones, including a dashboard mount, car chargers, memory cards, and adapters for other Samsung models - a bag of dark chocolate Lindt truffles, and a couple of Lindt chocolate bars - a Jolly Holly Days gift box from Lush - volumes 5, 6, and 7 of Shaman King (since I'd gotten back to reading that) - the first two Hellsing OVAs (which still have not arrived) - a box of Harry & David's Royal Riviera pears. From my mom: - Four Cadbury Dairy Milk bars - the ones made in England, because the ones from the U.S. and Canada are not the same - A Virginia Woolf - Room of One's Own mug from Oxford - clothes - a white button-down shirt with ruffles on the front, a black t-shirt, pink jeans, pajamas, and swim suit. (I half expected that last one to include tickets for a cruise, or something). - a knitting needle case from a fleamarket in Oxford - a Mason Pearson pure boar bristle hairbrush, also purchased on my mother's trip to England - moar chocolate There's also the fact that she recently bought out a deceased woman's yarn and knitting supply, and I now have a giant bin of yarn and needles, plus more on the way. From my dad: a $300 check. He's simple like that. From Matt's parents: - a rust-red turtleneck sweater, to join my collection of red sweaters :) - a pair of star and moon earrings Matt's parents also got us both a Garmin Nuvi GPS. From Matt's aunt and her partner: - a purple-blue cashmere cardigan with glass buttons from Lands' End. From me, Matt got the first season of The Muppet Show, and a new pair of Ove'Gloves, since the ones he had before now seem to be dedicated to using on the wood stove. My mom sent on to him a garlic lovers' cookbook, a Sherlock Holmes mug to match my Virginia Woolf one, and "vampire tea" from Distinctly Tea in Stratford, Ontario; which is apparently rooiboos tea with garlic. Apparently my mother thinks my husband is a vampire who needs to be kept at bay ;) He too got a cashmere sweater from his aunt, but they seem to have mistakenly sent it in XXL, so that will need to be exchanged. His parents also sent on some clothes. All in all, good gifts, despite the tight financial circumstances of all concerned. |
kesyrah
|
10:59a |
These are two of my favorite things right now, Merry Christmas! |
somehedgehog
|
2:07a |
I salute you
I salute you. There is nothing I can give you that you have not. But there is much, that, while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven can come to us, unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven. No peace lies in the future, which is not hidden in this present instant. Take Peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take Joy. And so at this Christmastime, I greet you - with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away. --From a Christmas Eve letter by Friar Giovanni Giocondo |
wildelven
|
12:10a |
|
| Thursday, December 24th, 2009 |
jwz
|
1:35p |
|
| Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 |
jwz
|
6:41p |
|
amyamy
|
6:46p |
Holy jeebus I own a lot of books
BUT the books are all sorted and stored and on my bookshelves IN ORDER. -dances about- My reward for completing this massive feast, I think, will be dinner and mulled cider. NOM. And maybe some WoW. I'm totally going to finally hit 80 before the end of break, it's a goal. Good to have goals. |
ninjaslug
|
4:42p |
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| Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 |
jwz
|
6:17p |
|
jwz
|
4:33p |
How to use Facebook with a feed reader
I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds. Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.) Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use. So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds. - Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.
- Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.
- Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.
- Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.
There. Wasn't that SIMPLE? Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.
Current Music: The Coathangers -- Bury Me |
| Monday, December 21st, 2009 |
jwz
|
9:50p |
|
jwz
|
8:47p |
|
wildelven
|
9:47p |
Florida
I am in Florida now, in Daytona Beach. If you happen to be in the area, or the area of Orlando, and want to hang out, let me know. Also, I might be stopping in the Atlanta area on the way back up, if folks want to hang out for a bit. Washington, DC folks, that goes for you, too. Exact dates and times TBD. |
emergent
|
1:14p |
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