Thursday, September 13, 2007  

Woot, omg!

Yesterday afternoon a box came UPS, and now (after only a bit of sweating and cursing to get the cables run right) the house is now getting bits via the cable TV wires rather than the telephone wires. An' since the former are big an' coaxial rather than lil an' copperish, we're getting like ten times the bandwidth we used to. Huzzah!

M spent the evening being gleeful about how much faster audiobooks an' stitching patterns an' iTune tunes come down. I mostly noticed that I can jack up the Second Life network-speed control to the highest it'll go, without anyone in the house saying "is someone hogging all the bandwidth?", which is v nice.

Now hafta remember to tell the DSL folks that we don' need their DSL anymore after the cable's been working okay for a lil while. An' then when fibre finally comes get to decide whether to switch yet again, given how painless it seems to be!

In the box was a CD full of "cruft that you don't want but that people pay us to give you", but I managed to not use that at all by pushing the "if you don't have the whatever setup thingumie CD, click here to register your modem" button on the page that appeared when I had all the cables connected, registering my modem, and then not installing the big package of cruft that it wanted me to download and install at the end.

Really must spend a bit less time in Second Life, despite how fun it is. Got to sleep relatively early last night; fortunately the friend who accidentally retextured her entire house did it early in the evening, so showing her how to make the windows transparent again an' stuff didn't keep me up too late, even given a certain amount of mandatory dancing about in dance clubs. *8)

(Dancing in Second Life is one of the more suprising things, psychologically. I mean, it sounds like it should be completely lame, but in fact it's great fun. I've heard many people comment on this, as well as having said it variously myself.)

Found and very much like the Hardcore Zen guys' weblog, in which he says stuff like:

So this is the second time I've participated in a study where scientific types have wanted to peek inside the brains of meditators to see if our are different from those of just plain folks. I'm always game for these things. I think it's great that such research is being done and I'm as curious as the next guy to see how it turns out. Maybe my brain is like totally round and has developed a special gland that can shoot out lazer beams or unhook girls' bras from ten feet away or something. That would be rad!

(Recall that this is an actual Zen master talking, woot!)

Phrase that I randomly found sitting around in my "things to log" file with no explanation o' the Day: "extrusion protection".

An' I dunno, what else? It was a really lovely day yesterday, with bright sun and cool air and no humidity, and I was actually slightly chilly with the window open last night, and ooooh I'm ready for it to be Autumn. (Except that we haven't put the leaf-net back on the Big Tub of Water this year yet.)

An' leaking toilets are really annoying! *8P

Monday, September 10, 2007  

A cheeky reader (I love that, "cheeky") writes:

I remember when you had a weblog.

Oh c'mon, that was just last week.

What's been happening since then? Well, you've probably all seen the coverage of Britney Spears' marvelous Madonna parody at the MTV Something Something Awards show. Have to say it's nice to see her maturing from bubblegum pop star to biting social satirist.

Had a very nice, and extremely social, time in Second Life over the weekend. Spent lots of time in my little shack on Pier island, and there seemed to be a pretty constant stream of people coming through, introducing the friends they'd come over with, modelling their Green Bay Packers cheerleader outfit (apparently it's hockey season again), sitting around on the various sitting places and talking, petting the cat that lives in the white pillow, admiring the art, dancing on the dance ball, and so on and so on.

This is so not the kind of thing I ever do in Real Life, but it's wonderful in SL. Various people talked about how much less shy they are in SL, and we speculated as to reasons. And it's probably not all just shyness; it's also logistically so much easier for friends to just teleport over for a sec than it is for them to drive in from Wisconsin, fly in from Findland, or whatever.

What else to report on? Some fascinating discussion on the Pier dance floor led to me looking up "Vagina Dentata" on Wikipedia, which led to this memorable comic strip, which led in turn to my reading pretty much every single strip on the site and writing a nice letter to the creator (who hasn't answered me yet, hmph). I'm not sure why, exactly; just liked the people and the general ambiance and the tone and stuff for some reason.

From Salon, this heartwarming story:

She's run a newsroom at a daily newspaper, but now she wants to build a co-op brothel, run by and for prostitutes.

Yay, workers controlling the means of seduction!

Today's spam poetry:

order cheap soma ,cheap soma
  cheap soma

Short but impactful.

Life is quite good. The demons seem to be at bay, I'm feeling competent and valuable and valued, I'm not stressing too much about the future, and in general I seem to be back to my old sensible and sensing self. Knock wood, cross fingers, etc.

So go out and find a stone for me, and put it there on your desk or table or counter or bookcase, and once in awhile look at it and think of me and smile. And maybe I'll write in my weblog again before the month is over. *8)