In which I had a great time on New Year’s Eve at Pub 21 with the band.
Load-in was at 4:30, but I was late because I had to take a paper copy of my resume (and cover letter and references) to WorkSource to apply for a job.
WTF? Why wouldn’t they let me email it to them? Not only did I have to drive over there in the snow to deliver three pieces of paper, but they scanned the documents to send – one assumes electronically – to the employer; somehow they couldn’t use the DOC and PDF format copies I’d helpfully brought along on a thumb drive, and they wouldn’t let me email the items in the first place! The mind boggles. It’s like it’s still 2002 at WorkSource or something.
Anyway.
We finished setup and did a sound check and still had three hours left before the gig. The weather was crap – snow and freezing rain – and the streets were treacherously icy in a pickup with no weight in the bed.
I went home and changed my pants (it turned out there was a hole in them) and read Makers in the interim.
The gig was a blast. People started dancing during the second song of the first set, and danced most of the night. The substitute bass player – the regular guy had another gig – did a fantastic job. (So fantastic, in fact, that I gave him a big ol’ bossy lecture about how “you only regret the things you didn’t do” and why he should move to a city and actually play for a living.)
Bob gave me a couple of glasses of wine for free because I was in the band. I gave out a bunch of business cards so people could get free downloads. My friend Sheila came and I danced about twelve bars with her and Shelley. Rob sold a bunch of the Kings’ latest CD.
Since I never make New Year’s resolutions, I made none this year. Yay! I’ve already averted much fail by simply doing nothing.
Speaking of doing nothing, I was supposed to be back over at the venue at one o’clock the next day for load-out, but The Curse™ had arrived and I slept all damn day instead. I suck. I’m lucky anybody ever hires me.
Today, I need to find a job to apply for (ideally via email, fer chrissakes) and I’m going to read a bunch of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother on my Kindle.
In which I share with you some of my prized possessions.
Part Two: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali
This is a pocket-sized copy of Patanjali’s sutras:
I bought it at Powell’s Books a long, long time ago.
Sutra means suture or stitch.
I’ve kept this book while letting go of hundreds of others because it represented a fork in the road. I bought it because I wanted to be the kind of person who would read such dense philosophy – read and grok such dense philosophy – but I wasn’t. I just knew that I wanted to be. I carried it around with me long before I was ready to read it, because I thought it made me look deep.
To identify consciousness in that which merely reflects consciousness – this is egoism. – 2:6
Since the desire to exist has always been present, our tendencies cannot have had any beginning. – 4:10
The mind is not self-luminous, since it is an object of perception. – 4:19
Now it’s twenty years later. I can now say I’ve read these sutras many times. (And the Gita, and the mind-blowing Concise Yoga Vashishta, and maybe a quarter of the Mahabarat. And several of the Upanishads. And most of Mother’s teachings. And the New Testament. And a bunch of other stuff.) But I still haven’t read the commentary in this particular edition, because I’m not there yet.
I even got the sidhis, when I lived in Iowa. (The TM Sidhis Program, that is. Here’s a the Wikipedia article on the subject, obviously written by some Movement PR lackey.) It turned out that they – the sidhis – were simply the mental repetition, after meditation, of a series of the aphorisms in this book! (I still can’t believe what I paid for that.)
I did my TM sidhis regularly for… well, I never did them regularly. I quit doing them pretty much immediately after getting off my flying block, because it seemed useless and time consuming. Actually, after having gotten them, I thought the sidhis were a bunch of crap sold to Westerners to make them feel deep when in fact they were just rich children from a culture devoid of significant history or depth.
I never thought the TM sidhis were bad for anyone; they seemed to be beneficial for those who loved them. I just thought we’d all paid too much for information that is available for free, and I never was happy with where the money went. But that’s a Movement rant, and not the point of this post! The point of this post is that I’ve had this little book ? For a really long time.
(Read terse and commentary-free sutras here!)
—
In the early 90’s, I deserted my life in Oregon and went to Iowa “for a year.” I left the vast majority of my stuff with my roommate, including but not limited to an antique dining room set and all of my vinyl. But because I stayed in Iowa for five years, I never got any of that stuff back: I went from having a home full of stuff to pretty much being able to carry all my worldly possessions.
In the late 90’s I moved again. I ended up trapped in Albuquerque with no way to transport what little stuff I had, so I threw most of it into a dorm incinerator. When I was done, everything I owned in the entire world amounted to about six boxes of stuff. (I’d left the rest of my stuff back in Fairfield, had given most of it away.)
Two and a half years later, I drove I-80 from San Francisco back to Fairfield. Everything I owned fit in my little Toyota pickup. I’d gotten rid of yet another sofa, set of kitchen implements, and bevy of houseplants, and owned only clothes, a few small items of furniture (a futon and a wooden asana), and other random knickknacks like books, my cat, my computer, my altar, and heirloom items like photographs.
When I arrived back in Iowa, I got an apartment within the month and was immediately given a household full of furniture. Eventually I got married and bought a farm house and ended up with 3,000 square feet worth of stuff. Sewing machine, desk, shelves. Books. Sheets, blankets, towels. Laundry baskets, Windex, bread machine, candles. Dog bowls, recliners, end tables, chrome citrus juicers. Blender, futon, Christmas decorations. Bowling ball, framed prints, entertainment center, flatware.
In 2007, I drove from Fairfield out to Washington state. Everything I owned fit in my jeep. I’d abandoned all my stuff once again.
There are a few items I’ve kept through several downsizing phases, and I’ve decided, since I’m unemployed and have the time, to share them with you.
In which I share with you some of my prized possessions.
Part One: Espresso Maker
This is my beat up old Italian stove top espresso maker:
I bought it at Merchant’s Deli, in Walla Walla WA, about thirteen years ago. Merchant’s has been open on Main street for thirty years, but has just been purchased. (My New Year’s Eve gig there on Thursday will be the final event in that particular business.)
I’ve made espresso with this thing thousands of times. I don’t really drink that much coffee – not as much as I’d like, because my body gets pissed off at me when I try – but it’s really nice to be able to brew up a couple of shots of espresso whenever I want.
It cost less than $20. I’ve had it for over a decade and the gaskets are still good. It can be used over nearly any source of heat, it’s small and portable, and I’ve made lattes with it in at least five different states.
I’ve chosen to keep this thing three separate times during three different purges.
I think I keep it because it’s small, it does its job well, I use it a lot when I’m too poor to buy lattes, it’s imported, and I’ve had it longer than any man or pet.
If you don’t have stove top espresso maker, you should get one! They’re awesome, and far cheaper and more portable than any countertop-style espresso machine.
—
In the early 90’s, I deserted my life in Oregon and went to Iowa “for a year.” I left the vast majority of my stuff with my roommate, including but not limited to an antique dining room set and all of my vinyl. But because I stayed in Iowa for five years, I never got any of that stuff back: I went from having a home full of stuff to pretty much being able to carry all my worldly possessions.
In the late 90’s I moved again. I ended up trapped in Albuquerque with no way to transport what little stuff I had, so I threw most of it into a dorm incinerator. When I was done, everything I owned in the entire world amounted to about six boxes of stuff. (I’d left the rest of my stuff back in Fairfield, had given most of it away.)
Two and a half years later, I drove I-80 from San Francisco back to Fairfield. Everything I owned fit in my little Toyota pickup. I’d gotten rid of yet another sofa, set of kitchen implements, and bevy of houseplants, and owned only clothes, a few small items of furniture (a futon and a wooden asana), and other random knickknacks like books, my cat, my computer, my altar, and heirloom items like photographs.
When I arrived back in Iowa, I got an apartment within the month and was immediately given a household full of furniture. Eventually I got married and bought a farm house and ended up with 3,000 square feet worth of stuff. Sewing machine, desk, shelves. Books. Sheets, blankets, towels. Laundry baskets, Windex, bread machine, candles. Dog bowls, recliners, end tables, chrome citrus juicers. Blender, futon, Christmas decorations. Bowling ball, framed prints, entertainment center, flatware.
In 2007, I drove from Fairfield out to Washington state. Everything I owned fit in my jeep. I’d abandoned all my stuff once again.
There are a few items I’ve kept through several downsizing phases, and I’ve decided, since I’m unemployed and have the time, to share them with you.
In which I review the new device!
For Christmas, I bought myself a Kindle. (It probably wasn’t particularly clever to spend nearly three hundred bucks on an unnecessary electronic device the very week I got laid off, but whatever. This may be why I never had kids. Moving on!)
The form factor is nice. It’s light, thin, and sleek. It’s comfortable to hold. The screen is, surprisingly, quite easy to read, even in fairly low light situations – though I’ll still be buying a clip-on light since I happen to like to read in no-light situations. A lot. (Side effect of having read ebooks on backlit devices for the past twelve years is that I expect to be able to read in the dark: cars at night, unlit rooms, pubs, etc.)
I think the ‘NEXT PAGE’ buttons are placed too low. I have monstrously long thumbs and I’m pretty sure the button placement would be annoying to men or other persons with large hands. The 5-way mouse thingy could have been a little more elegantly designed, but for a second-generation device it’s fairly well thought out. It’s attractive-looking. (I never in a million years would have purchased the original Kindle. OMG that thing was hideously ugly.)
I don’t know why it’s white, except that maybe they were going for a clean, upwardly mobile Apple thing. I wish it came in grey or black, because I think the white case makes the screen look dingy.
The keyboard is almost entirely useless, but at least it’s there. The ‘experimental’ browser is the same because it can’t display a lot of common web content, not just because I have a slow Whispernet connection.
It’s really, really easy to browse Amazon.com and buy ebooks, though. Wow. They totally got that part right! Instant delivery! I can already imagine the joy of this feature when finishing book 2 of a trilogy and being able to get book 3 immediately no matter where I am.
The ‘HOME’ layout is stupid and needs to incorporate tags or genres or folders or something, to save one from having to page through 1,500 titles at a mere 10 titles per page. I’m still digging around in various Kindle superuser forums to see if there’s a hack for that.
The battery life is astonishingly good. I’ve seen some complaints in various forums that leaving the wireless on will drain the battery faster, but my device hasn’t been charged since the day I got it and has used only 25% of its charge. I’ve left wireless on the whole time.
Another wonderful feature is native PDF support. This is freakin’ awesome! I currently have my résumé and a sock pattern – both PDFs – on my Kindle just because I can.
Two of my favorite ebook stores, Fictionwise and Baen, support Kindle. All of my non-DRM Mobi format ebooks can be read on the device.
My particular Kindle is a K2i, which means “Kindle 2 International,” which means it’s an AT&T device (rather than a Sprint device like the U.S. version). I mention this because, well. Here’s a map of the AT&T coverage where I happen to live:
Dark purple is 3G, lavender is lower-speed EDGE, and the red box in the middle is Walla Walla. I only get one bar most of the time; two if I’m standing in the yard.
Still, although book downloads don’t take place “in under a minute” for me, I signed up for free 14-day free trials of The New York Times and Blog Kindle, and it’s pretty cool when they’re both there when I wake up in the morning. It would be an especially trick freature for those with long bus or train commutes, because they wouldn’t have to do anything like sync the device to get their news each day.
Each Kindle comes with its own @kindle.com email address, so you or designated others – maybe people at the office – can email ebooks to your device. Neat! (Oh, but Amazon charges you a dime or more every time you do so. Boo! Hiss!)
I discovered Calibre, an iTunes-like ebook application (it’ll even download cover art) that syncs with a variety of ebook readers including the Kindle. I told it where all my ebooks were, and it organized them like iTunes organizes music. It will even convert ebooks from one format to another so that they can be read on different device types. Best of all, it aggregates feeds and either syncs them to the Kindle over USB, or emails them at a particular time every day, neatly solving the $12 per month fee one has to pay Amazon for daily delivery of each blog or newspaper. (Calibre looks like this.)
Apparently, Mobipocket Reader software can also be used to manage one’s Kindle and news feeds.
I had to hack my Kindle, of course, to take custom wallpapers, because… well, I just had to. (Here are the wallpapers I made.)
I’m pretty happy with my Kindle. We’ll see if I’m still in love with it in six months. It’s not half as portable as the iPod Touch, on which I have three different ebook reading apps installed (including Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone, which syncs furthest-read with the Kindle so I can switch back and forth easily).
I suspect that my Kindle will live at home, and I’ll use it primarily for long novels and news while continuing to carry the iPod Touch literally everywhere with me and reading short stories on it.
Total: 4 out of 5 stars
The Kindle is everything Amazon says it is, I just don’t know if I’m the right user for this particular device. I’m so used to having my ebook reader be a single application on a device that does a variety of other things that a dedicated ebook device seems a little stunted. I think if I’d magically received a Kindle DX I might have thought, “Now here’s a proper dedicated ebook reader!” because honestly the screen real estate on this device doesn’t pack the punch I’d need to see. The Kindle is a joy to interact with, and while my functional needs might be otherwise, intellectually I like the simplicity of a dedicated device that does only one thing, and does it well.
Update: A few weeks after I got my Kindle, AT&T rolled out better coverage in the Walla Walla valley. Yay!
In which there is an itemized list. And reindeer. And a puppy.
First of all, reindeer:
Second of all, I received the following items for Christmas this year:
– guinea pig plush toy, small
– candles (2)
– baskets, organizational/decorative (2)
– hat, crocheted
– gloves, knit
– mittens, wool, knit, lined with fleece
– $50
– Starbucks gift card ($15)
– notebook, small, decorative/portable
– gum, a whole bunch, in a tin box
– jewelry (earrings & necklace set)
– flashlight, pink, small
– chocolate (Hershey’s kiss, large)
– jacket (decorative, Indian)
– photo, framed (feat. self with mom and bro)
– mug (Disney, feat. evil characters like Cruella)
– shoes (stripper-style, feat. heels)
– Kindle
I gave everyone on my list socks, lucky Happy Cat tea cups from Japan, portable chopsticks, and/or makeup, depending on who they were, except my brother, to whom I gave a sweatshirt that did not fit and which has to be returned. I did not mail out Christmas cards because I just didn’t get my shit together on time.
For visual aids, view my Christmas 2009 photo set. And in particular, view this, my aunt’s adorable new puppy:
Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope your celebration of the day was mellow and comfortable and not fraught with weirdness!
In which I ramble on about nothing.
I stayed out all night last Wednesday playing a silly drinking game called Beirut with beer, ping pong balls, and three awesome people.
Friday morning’s yoga class was awesome but left me sore for two entire days. No more classes until the middle of January, sadly.
I sold my old cell phone and gave the resulting $15 to my unemployed brother, who had originally purchased the phone as a gift for me a couple of years ago.
I mailed my present for Josh’s awesome gift exchange at the Very Last Moment.
I’ve slogged through binary math and two chapters of the CCENT/CCNA ICND1 Official Exam Certification Guide.
I received my present from Josh’s awesome gift exchange. It was from Adam and it was ZOMBIES! And a Sensitivity Consultant! I love them.
I gigged Friday and Saturday nights in the Tricities. Not only was it totally fun, but I made two hundred bucks so I bought myself a Kindle! Probably not the smartest thing to do while unemployed, but it’s Christmas and I’d been planning a big electronics purchase for months. (Did you know that Fictionwise is currently selling no fewer than three different electronic ebook readers? None are wireless, though.) I just hope I don’t end up wishing I’d upgraded my iPod instead.
I spent well over an hour at decalgirl.com surfing Kindle skins. And LG Lotus skins. And Eee PC skins. And iPod Touch skins.
I got all my Xmas stuff wrapped and put under the tree:
(I have only three Christmas gifts yet to obtain. They’ll probably be gift cards: lamesauce but easy.)
I need to go to the post office and ship a couple of boxes this afternoon. I also really need a manicure because it’s been a month and my nails are all sorts of screwed up-looking.
I have applied to two jobs since I was laid off. I haven’t been able to file for benefits yet because the Job Seekers site is “experiencing high volumes” and/or the back end totally shat the bed (there were “database is missing” errors late last night when I tried to file online), but I have until Friday. One has already called me back for a phone interview. I don’t really want to get a job quite yet; I’d like to take a month or two off and finish my CCNA before going back to work full time.
Happy Christmas/pagan holiday/solstice week, my babies!
That is all.
In which I’m not really having a very good day.
I got a heads-up yesterday that I was going to be laid off today so I did the right thing last night and cleaned up my work computer, uninstalling silly applications and clearing browser caches and passwords and blah blah blah.
Today I went in to the office at nine o’clock to sign the paperwork. The drive was ultra treacherous because of the freezing rain and snow. (Yes, you read that right: I got up early to lose my job and went to do it even though all the schools are closed due to the shitty weather. Bah humbug.)
I was given a week’s severance, which I hadn’t expected since I was only there for four months. They were really nice and apologized for downsizing. Eight minutes later I was walking out the door with some COBRA paperwork and my trackball mouse in my hand.
The truck was stuck. I rocked it, but it was sitting on a sheet of ice and wouldn’t go anywhere.
The guy they laid off right after me had a 4WD, though, and was awesome enough to tow me onto blacktop. I drove home gingerly, put the truck in the damn garage, and walked to the store on ice because I wanted a fucking consolation latte but wasn’t willing to get the truck stuck again just to get one. (Have I mentioned that 1. Walla Walla doesn’t plow, and 2. THE FREEZING FUCKING RAIN?!?)
When I finally got home, I made Vegetarian White Trash Breakfast from Hell and a cardamom latte. Then I came upstairs to study base 2 a little more, but when I went to click on the tutorial link I noticed my toolbar was empty.
Yes, last night, Xmarks somehow synched with the server AFTER I deleted all my local shortcuts and CLEARED ABOUT FIVE YEARS’ WORTH OF FUCKING BOOKMARKS. I’m really smoking pissed off about it, too, because I don’t have a local backup any more (which is my own fault, I know).
I did everything in the correct order, too (I’m not an idiot luser, I do this shit FOR A LIVING) and Xmarks fucked up anyway: I uninstalled Xmarks for IE, then deleted my IE Favorites. Then I deactivated Xmarks in Firefox, then deleted my shortcuts. When I closed Firefox, it asked me if I wanted to sync my changes AND I CHOSE NO! It apparently synced anyway, for fuck’s sake, and now I have NONE, ZERO, ZIP, ZILCH of my 500+ saved and carefully organized fucking bookmarks.
Of course, because I’m a geek I was able to restore using these directions (once I cooled down enough to look for them) but my newest links are lost and I was really, truly smokin’ mad there for awhile.
Happy holidays!
In which I totally don’t even work for Facebook, but you’d never know it by listening in on my calls.
Me: …this is Michelle, how may I help you?
Caller: Is there something wrong with your network in Idaho?
Me: No sir, there are no current known service outages. What symptoms are you experiencing?
Caller: I keep getting blank pages in Facebook.
Me: The problem is specific to Facebook?!
Caller: It’s just not working right.
Me: You’re able to view other web pages, and send and receive email though, right?
Caller: Oh, yeah, everything else works just fine. It’s just this Facebook application called FarmVille that —
Me: –Facebook has been having problems for days. They were all the way down yesterday for awhile. Also, when you attempt to login to FarmVille, you’ll see a notification inviting you to play at farmville.com if you’re having problems playing through Facebook! This has nothing to do with our network!
Caller: Really? No kidding. That’s, like, wow. You’ve been really helpful!
Me: Oh, my pleasure. For real. Have a great evening.
Teh tech support, it rulez.
In which I’m suddenly considering where I might be living next Spring.
1. Dear Walla Walla: It snowed. YESTERDAY. And today, the streets are still full of snow! Why don’t you plow when it snows? What the hell is wrong with you?!
2. For reasons I haven’t been working here long enough to understand but which may be political as much as financial, it appears that I’m likely to get laid off this week. I will probably spend the winter holed up in the attic, hoarding UI benefits and getting my certs.
Apparently all the tech jobs have migrated to Denver. I don’t really want to move there, but there sure as hell isn’t any decent work here. I checked tech jobs in New York (of course), but they all seem to want a year’s worth of experience administering freakin’ Blackberry Enterprise. *shudder* Get thee behind me, Microsoft Exchange Server and derivatives!
There is a very cool-sounding support gig currently open in Chelsea, though, and a couple others in Brooklyn I’m qualified for…
In which I spend a lot of time online, reading stuff. And then I write about it!
It’s important that we all become aware of, and defend against, the “natural family revival.”
There are some batshit crazy Xians out there, and they’re all banding together – some even with (gasp!) Muslims – to bring back the “natural family” (patriarch, baby machine wife, and offspring only: no non-traditional family structures allowed) because it’s the ‘natural basis of society’ and its loss is directly responsible for all kinds of terrible moral degradation.
They dislike the rights individuals within families have been slowly accumulating in the past few generations, and are, essentially, against women’s or children’s rights where they conflict with the family’s (read patriarch’s, I assume) goals.
Scripture
According to this article at The Nation, this coalition wants to increase birthrates. (Well, white birthrates.) How they rationalize this in terms of the earth’s available resources, I don’t know, but they’re really taking the old biblical injunction to multiply very seriously.
They’re even making movies about it. Behold the pseudo-science of Demographic Winter:
The bottom line, essentially, is that heathen brown people are breeding too fast and we gotta keep up in order to preserve our way of life, and our women had best be making babies, and don’t even start on the whole gay thing, please, and the best way to do that is to keep girls out of higher learning and build a culture that celebrates their womanly duties: pregnancy, lactation, and, one assumes, cooking.
Due Diligence
Because I believe that most people are essentially good and that no one is really that crazy, I went and found a rebuttal to the Joyce article.
The author claims that global birthrates are falling alarmingly and that we’re going to run out of people to drive the trains by 2050.
Really? Is that true? Are birth rates really that low? Is contraception and abortion really that common?
I googled ‘birthrates worldwide’ and as far as I can tell, yeah, birth rates are dropping from where they have been, but world population is still increasing and there are no serious trends indicating that it will stop.
In fact, the Wikipedia article linked above states that the world’s population increased by 220,980 people every day in 2009, and that only one of the UN’s multiple estimates indicate a growth rate of zero:
“In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN. In 2009, UN projections for 2050 range from about 8 billion to 10.5 billion.”
I’m religious. I believe in God. I even pray. I understand from experience how a person can believe in and even fight for something they don’t understand: I’ve heard my own Guru speak against the genetic engineering of food crops, and I’m inclined (although I haven’t sided yet) to be against it too even though I don’t know why. (When people are starving it’s hard to be against a strain of rice that produces in difficult conditions; it just is.) But I cannot understand how an otherwise rational person can possibly move forward with a “go forth and multiply” world view just because it’s in the Bible: the world simply cannot sustain 1960s-level birthrates infinitely. It just can’t.
Which indicates a whole ‘nother motivation for the “natural family revival,” and that freaks me right the hell out.
Population
The research seems to show that poor and uneducated people have more children. (They also lose more children so birth rates don’t necessarily equal population.) When people get access to education, they quit having as many children. And very educated, urban people tend to drop the birthrate to less-than-replacement levels.
Maybe that’s the plan, huh? When you get a bunch of us all together thinking about stuff, we stop breeding like animals and start acting more… human?
Jesus was way cool. Religion is good. The Old Testament is a lovely historical document. I think it’ll be awesome when the world’s all brown. Because seriously: white people just don’t look that cool in comparison.
VSCO
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4 random books from my Library!
