Well, at least I've barely avoided having two consecutive missing weeks! *8)
I have a halfway decent technical excuse; I'm switching computers for (among other things) the stuff that I use to post this weblog, and there's something messed up somewhere, and while I'd copied all the data over to the new computer (that one over there), it's so far still unable to run the scripts that update the weblog (some misconfiguration in SSH or something).
So for the instant I've re-declared this computer here (whose keys already feel strange and archaic, and whose screen already looks dinky and quaint) as the Official Home of the Weblog, and I'll post this from it at least this one more time.
Had a tooth break off on the way home from work the other night, eating a caramel. Or actually as it turned out had the very expensive "onlay" that the dentist installed last year sometime pop out, eating a caramel. For no very good reason I saved what popped out, and it turns out that I may be able to save one trip to the dentist and who knows how much money by giving it back to him so he can glue it back in next week.
Why do I find it hard to say to doctors and dentists and similar people, "so I hope there's like a warrantee on this stuff, and you're not going to charge me another n-hundred dollars to re-attach this thing that you attached poorly last year"?
Been spending lots of time in Second Life, scripting and building and trying on clothes and dancing and talking and so on and so on. No more pictures for right now, though! Have also been sleeping, although it doesn't really seem to help with the "being extremely sleepy in the mornings" thing.
I've been having a cup of coffee pretty much every weekday morning; I wonder if I've developed a dependency or something? Should try decaf for awhile...
Had a couple of them nice Watchtower and Awake! ppl drop by the house the other day and leave copies of Watchtower and Awake!, and since they had words printed in them I couldn't resist reading them.
One of the articles was called something like "Are our actions predestined?" or something like that, and that sounded interesting. It started out very well, laying out the argument that a truly omniscient etc deity would know all along what every one of us mortals was going to do in life, and therefore how could He be surprised or angry or anything, and did it really make sense for Him to punish us, and isn't He really, in some important sense, responsible for everything that we do, since he created us knowing that we'd do it?
It then quoted various places in the Bible that imply strongly that we do have a choice about what we do, and that the Deity isn't responsible for our bad actions, and stuff like that. So that's good, I thought, it's pointed out the contradiction between a sensible argument and some Biblical statements. I turned the page, expecting to fine some at least mildly interesting attempt to resolve the paradox.
And on the next page the next article started, about how to tell if your boyfriend would make a good Christian spouse or whatever.
I checked carefully to make sure I hadn't missed a page or something, and sure enough at the end of the part where it quoted various Biblical passages about how we have choices and all, there was the little "end of article" symbol.
Sort of disappointing and/or lame. I guess the idea is that if there's a very solid-seeming rational argument for X, but the Bible says not-X, you just believe not-X, and assume there must be something or other wrong with the argument, and don't worry too much about the details.
I'm so not the target audience there...
Let's see what else can I whine about? *8) I'm a Salon Premium Member, a privilege that I don't think I take much advantage of. The other day something or other lead me to a page with pointers to all the recent Free Downloadable Songs that Salon Premium has made available to me lately (Free Downloadable Songs being one of the features of membership), and on a whim I downloaded them, and added "listen to songs, decide whether to keep" to the infinitely growing to-do list.
I actually found a slice of time when that was the most sensible thing on the to-do list to do (just as, tangentially, "weblog!" is currently the most sensible thing on the to-do list to do), and as it turns out the answer to "whether to keep" was a resounding "no". This from someone who generally considers any and all free bits to be a Good Thing.
I mean, I don't know where they find this Free Downloadable Music, or how they select it, but it wasn't worth the price. Generally people with no particular vocal talent or natural expressiveness moaning uninteresting lyrics over an utterly repetitive (and often annoying) background music loop. Of the like seven that I listened to, only two of them made it all the way to the end before being deleted. I mean, owch!
So, miscellany!
I stuck a picture of the Indolence build onto SnapZilla, just for variety. Now of course I want flickr to have a way to reference a picture that's actually hosted somewhere else (I wonder if they already have that?).
Did everyone but me already know about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud? I mean, whoa! All that charging-by-the-MIP computing model stuff! I wonder if it makes money or anything? (Can flying cars be far behind?)
An' lots of these are pretty hysterical, if you're properly twisted...
