{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko","title":"mikeneko","subtitle":"(la nuit, tous les chats sont gris)","author":{"name":"mikeneko"},"link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"service.feed","type":"application\/x.atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom","title":"mikeneko"}}],"updated":"2012-09-25T09:23:09Z","entry":[{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:258504","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/258504.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=258504"}}],"title":"yuletide","published":"2012-09-25T09:23:09Z","updated":"2012-09-25T09:23:09Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"yuletide"}},"content":"Yuletide nominations are open, and here is the info<\/a>. If anyone needs an invite code for AO3, let me know. I've had one cooling its heels for years that no one's ever wanted. So, yeah, Fanfic YAY.

I don't know if I'm doing it this year. Work has been oppressing me for several months now, and I'm in the midst of slow-mo negotiations with another potential regular client. However! Nominating doesn't require a commitment; without nominations, there'd be nothing to sign up for at all. So I'll just do this and make a decision later. By that point, I ought to have some notion of what this New Client's job is going to entail. (Maybe.)


I did remember to mail my paperwork to get back into the state's low-income health insurance pool. As I'd mentioned back when, I'd been in it before, but you have to renew it every year (i.e., resubmit your tax returns). I screwed up the dates and didn't get my renewal paperwork back on time, and they dropped me. Bye-bye health insurance.

On the one paw, I'm pissed that I got dropped, then additionally slapped down with a penalty that I couldn't even reapply for a full year. On the other paw, the appeals process and the screwing around that entailed resulted in my penalty reapplication date landing in October -- unanticipated bonus! That is, before, I'd had to mess with their paperwork in the middle of winter, when I am good for zilch but huddling in front of a heater under a pile of blankets with my laptop. That really was an issue for me, hence lapse the first time around. Fall is better.

So I got my forms and tax returns mailed before the end of September, and we'll see what happens. I may just get dumped on the waiting list, but that's an improvement over no chance at all.

If I do manage to get back in the pool, that'll bring a second set of problems. Regular work with New Client may well push me into an ineligible income bracket. Naught to be done, if so.

There's also mouth-breather teabagger Republican guy. He's already said that if he's elected as governor this fall (and I expect he will be, because people really are<\/i> that stupid here), he intends to fight any attempt to bring \"Obamacare\" to our state. He'll very likely take an axe to the existing program as well. So all this may be moot. :P
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:257880","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/257880.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=257880"}}],"title":"finally ;_;","published":"2012-07-09T15:11:36Z","updated":"2012-07-09T15:16:18Z","content":"I've turned off the poor, struggling air conditioner and opened my windows and doors again. It didn't do a great job, but I can't even imagine what it would have been like in here without that puppy perched in the window. We've been hovering in the high 90s up to 100+, with humidity from hell, and it wasn't even cooling off at night. We're supposed to have a week of reasonable weather in the 80s. (Um. We could also use a little rain. Just saying.)


My sister brought back four mystery tomato plants from a farmer's market in southern Indiana, so my mom put two of them in a pot, and I put two of them in a pot, and we're patiently waiting to find out what they are. Mine have radically different leaves from my mom's. Hers also are growing more like vines, and they have no flowers on them yet. Mine do have three flowers, but the plants overall are looking yellowed and sickly. I'm keeping them watered, but I think I let them sit way, way too long in the super-hot sun over the past few weeks. I probably should have moved them into the shade instead. I am not very good at this. Sorry, little tomatoes!

In the meantime, I did a few books and a load of articles.

One of the books was a philosophy book (Descartes), and it turned out to be as terrifying as that last philosophy book I'd worked on (Whitehead). The manuscript made no sense to me; it read like a series of free-association blog posts by someone who'd been hittin' the bong since dawn. Soooo once again I had to locate that mental space where I stop panicking, concede that I will never figure out what the author is trying to convey, and accept that making sense is not the point. All I'm responsible for is ensuring that it's stylistically and grammatically passable. Attaining this frame of mind is difficult.

Honest to god, I am never going to take another philosophy book, not unless I acquire my own supply of weed. They're unbelievably stressful. This one had added pressure because they'd made it clear that this was a shiny new client, so they needed an ~impressive~ copyedit.

Stress plus pressure equals freaking the fuck out. Yikes.

Also, the job got off to a rocky start because the manuscript file I received was an amorphous blob: it had clearly started life as a doctoral dissertation, and all chapters, all notes, everything was stuffed in a single file. Bwah? So, after a few moments of being very sad and despairing and wondering about life, a flurry of emails ensued, along the lines of
Me: HOLY COW. But ... I can deal. First, I'm going to split this mess into chapters, then I'm going to clean out the garbage and standardize the font and stuff.
He: I guess that might be okay. Let me ask about it.
Me: Done! Now I'm converting the footnotes to endnotes.
He: Hang on, I need to find out if that's what they want.
Me: Done! I wasn't asking; I was telling. Copyediting over a thousand footnotes isn't feasible in Word. Now I'm tagging the elements.
He: But you need to wait until I get a response from the press.
Me: Sorry, you want a sample in a week, and I need files I can work with. All done now. :D Everyone can look it over when I send the sample. This is how it goes.

As expected, everyone was happy, but meh. I don't know. Just once in a great while, just as a nice change of pace, could somebody out there assume that I know what I'm doing here? Since I've been doing it over twenty years? I realize that there are variations on crazed-manuscript-disaster that I've yet to encounter ('cause writers are inventive fiends), but I do think I've seen the majority by this point. It really was beginning to sound like I was dragging Project Editor Guy through a bush backward. (Let's go! \/ No, wait! \/ No waiting!)

From there, I went into a book on evolutionary theory applied to women's health and physiology. This one was clearly destined for college split-level seminars, so the content and writing level stayed basic. I was already familiar with a lot of the concepts after a decade or so of working on That Annoying Journal. The book had a few mildly kooky notions, but I had zero problems understanding any of it. (Which was good, 'cause the author was not a native English speaker, and it needed a heavy edit.)

The downside was that it had an enormous bibliography (over a hundred pages), and it used APA-style text citations instead of endnotes. WOE IS ME. However! By coincidence, just as I was pep-talking myself into starting the horrible cross-checking slog, someone on the mailing list randomly posted a link to a macro package that can perform reference cross-checking. What are the odds? I shrieked when I read that and startled the cats (them weenies). OH MY GOOOOOD.

I dumped all the chapter files and the bibliography into a single file, downloaded the package, installed it, and let it grind away on the manuscript in Word while I passed out. About three hours later, voilà: it had verified everything except citations with nonstandard formats. It generated a (wow, long) list of the unchecked items, which I had to check hand, but still.<\/i> In the end, instead of taking me well over a week to cross-check the citations, it took me a few days. So the macro package may have been astonishingly expensive to buy (;_;), but I'm still feeling lucky (^_^).

Anyway, that book's gone, and another one's coming at some point this week (something about anthropology and psychiatry, dunno). It was supposed to be dropped on me last week, but I suspect those electrical outages on the East Coast have played a role. The delay's fine with me because last week I was feeling hot and miserable and sort of sick and not at all like starting a new book.

I also was contacted by the guy at the production place that used to do That Annoying Journal before it was shipped off to Our Indian Overlords, and he asked me if I'd be interested in working with them again (yesyesyes) and then if I'd be open to chatting about it on the phone. For which he then made an appointment.

Oh. Um?

I haven't talked to a client on the phone since . . . well, since the professor a few months ago, but that was an atypical situation (as in, the only individual writer I've ever worked for). Other than the professor, it's been years and years and years of blissful telephone silence. So I was rather anxious and paranoid about the whole thing: But why does he want to talk<\/i> to me? No one wants to talk to me! What does this mean? What does he want to talk about? Is this a Bad Thing? WUT.

I'm still not certain why he needed to talk about it on the phone, but I have to admit that it was easier to listen to a major infodump--stuff about the journal, about training, about rates, about lots of things--than it would have been to read a series of multipage emails. Anyway, they've picked up a journal they'll be publishing directly for the owner-organization (as opposed to being the next contracting tier down from a publisher, as they were for That Annoying Journal), so they're setting up a stable for it. I'm less than enthusiastic about copyediting on a pharmaceuticals journal, and the rate is nothing like impressive, but it'd be a regular gig with an outfit that I once enjoyed working for. (I've had to work with so many irrational, unpleasant, and\/or incompetent editors in the past that just being nice people counts for a lot with me.) Also, no long-term freelance relationships last forever, I presently only have two monthly regulars, and I've been with both long enough to make me uneasy; I really do need a third in case something goes wrong.

So. That'll be starting up this fall, at which point I may do the mystical hermit crab transformation (insert theme music here) and never emerge from my shell again. I'm already pretty booked, and this'll add a pile on top of that. I guess it depends on how this works out, but I suspect yuletide won't be doable this year. I'm also wondering if their tracking software is going to force me into a Word upgrade, which I've been avoiding for years. We shall see.

Oh yeah. A weird thing that happened about a month or so ago. I was snoozing into my keyboard when someone started pounding on my front door. So I threw on some clothes and scrambled out to find out what was on fire or whatever. It was some dude I'd never seen before.

Me: Um? Yeah?
He: I wanted to ask about your car. You're selling it, right?
Me: Huh?
He: I'm interested. I'd buy it. What are you asking?
Me: Uh. I think you have the wrong address? Was there an ad or something--
He: That gray car beside your house there. Isn't that your driveway?
Me: Oh. Well, yeah, it is, but--
He: You don't drive that car, right? I'd take it off your hands.
Me: My ... I can't sell my car. Why would you think--
He: Well, it sure doesn't look like you drive it. It's covered in birds--uh, stuff.
Me: Oh. Uh, yeah. I guess it is. But I do drive it. Once in a while.
He: Oh. You sure? Because I could--
Me: Very sure.
He: Okay. But if you change your mind, could I just--
Me: I won't. Really. But, uh, thanks? For asking?

Yup, my car sits under a tree, so it is typically covered in guano, which doesn't bother me because a) I tool around town on my bicycle in the spring\/summer\/fall, and b) appearance is secondary to function. I do need wheels to get to the next town for groceries and suchlike, as public transportation does not exist around here--and I just bought it new tires last year, dang it--so, no, not<\/i> selling my car.

But that was weird, so I decided to poke around online to see what people are asking for cars like mine these days. The car's not rare or even recent--an early '90s 4-door Honda sedan with manual transmission, which I bought used back when I messed up my last Honda. Even though this car was in quite nifty shape, they weren't asking very much for it, presumably because not many people want manuals, even though they are fun and get ~awesome gas mileage. I guess the situation has changed since then; I see that the used car ads online for cars like mine in far, far crappier shape are asking more than I paid for it back then. I guess high gas prices are having an impact. Huh.

Related to this . . . brother the younger drove one of the cars he tinkers with down to give to the niece creature moving to southern Indiana; she needed something cheap to drive to work. So I drove him and his hound back up north in my car.

He refused to get into it until he'd taken a hose to it. \"I don't want anyone<\/i> to see me in this car,\" he said. He does not admire my decorative bird shit. Weenie. :D

But I got a free soapy scrub out of it, so whatever. I did figure he'd be picky that way so, while I didn't wash the car, I did sweep out the inside and move the tools and stuff out of the backseat so that his hound would have lots of room. While I was fishing old water bottles from under the front seat I pulled out a handwritten memo from the Military Satellite Communications Systems Directorate in Los Angeles. Another overlooked memento of the previous owner to go with the air force base stickers on the windshield and the golf-club covers in the trunk, hee.

It wasn't until we were on the road and sweating all over ourselves that I discovered that my car's air conditioner has given up the ghost. (I hardly ever use it, so I didn't know. Hey, it was still working last summer!) I can't simply get it recharged because the type freon it uses is illegal now. It has to be converted with a kit to the new standard, so I need to call around to find out who could do that. I've already called the Honda dealer, and I'm taking their estimate as the far upper end of the scale. (Foo.)

Only half a tank to drive all the way to Lake Michigan and back. Like I said, ~awesome.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:257632","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/257632.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=257632"}}],"title":"hey, i bring gifts :D","published":"2012-07-07T20:07:12Z","updated":"2012-07-07T20:07:12Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"music"}},"content":"As it turns out, whatever was going on with my old laptop that kept me locked out of my box.net account, it's not happening on this new machine. Woo hoo! Let's celebrate! I have dumped a few more things into it. I'll leave this open for a week then lock it down--feel free to grab anything that sounds attractive in the meantime.


The whole folder is here<\/a>. It's a mix of youtube rips, Amazon free bin (where I have been known to lurk), borrowings from fanfic soundtracks, things I've bought, things I've ripped myself, etc., etc. Multiple genres. (Some of them I uploaded in the past and either did or did not post here. I don't remember.)

Individual links:

Aimee Proal - Alone Tonight<\/a>
- Youtube rip of a demo. First heard this over on Myspace, Google stalked her for well over a year until she finally posted her stuff online in a form I could grab.

Austin Allsup - Free Ride<\/a>
- It's called red dirt<\/a> country.

Belinda Carlisle - Lay Down Your Arms<\/a>
- Evidently the album this was on was only released in Europe and elsewhere. I grabbed it via torrent for La Q.

Butterfly Boucher - To Feel Love<\/a>
- Tossing the Amazon free bin so you don't have to! One of the participants in the last Lilith Fair.

Cheap Trick - Tonight It's You<\/a>
- Headbanger blast from the past. As I told La Q, I used to loathe Cheap Trick, but I like them now. I had this same adverse reaction to a lot of things that were overplayed on the radio when I was younger--it turns out that a decade or several can work musical renovations.

Donny Osmond - Soldier of Love<\/a>
- 80s! The (surprisingly) good comeback single that owes a lot to Peter Gabriel being one of the producers.

John Doe - The Golden State<\/a>
- Possibly the free bin. I'm not sure with this one...

Kimmie Rhodes (feat. Willie Nelson) - Love Me Like a Song<\/a>
- This one's grabbed off someone's fanfic soundtrack.

Kris Allen - My Weakness<\/a>
- Off his new CD (I made this mp3 :P). Winner of AI8, natch.

La Petite Jessica - Nakuitaji<\/a>
- Singer originally from Africa. I can't remember how I fell over her album, but I listened my way through it via online stream, and I bought this track.

Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer - Now We Are Free<\/a>
- From the Gladiator<\/i> soundtrack. The reason the language won't sound familiar is because it's not an actual language<\/a>.

Lisbeth Scott and Nathan Barr - Take Me Home<\/a>
- True Blood<\/i> soundtrack. I forget which season...

Live - Deep Enough<\/a>
- Fast and Furious<\/i> soundtrack.

Madcon - Beggin'<\/a>
- Cover! Source of the group number on the AI8 tour.

Marshall Crenshaw - Whenever You're on My Mind<\/a>
- Have I posted this one before? Same singer who did \"Someday, Someway.\"

Melanie - Peace Will Come (According to Plan)<\/a>
- Time for some Vietnam protesting. Was friends with a rabid Melanie fan when I was an undergrad and had to sit through complete albums back to back.

Mummy Calls - Let's Go<\/a>
- Possibly posted before. Lesser known single from an '80s British group who're only known now for \"Beauty Has Her Way\" on the Lost Boys<\/i> soundtrack.

Neko Case (feat. Nick Cave) - She's Not There<\/a>
- Off the last soundtrack CD for True Blood<\/i>. This cover was recorded specifically for the TV show.

Patti Smith - Paths That Cross<\/a>
- 'Cause I like her.

Raymond Wong - Running Out of Time OST - Interlude<\/a>
- Youtube rip. I'd love to have the soundtrack CD for this movie, which is long out of print. Someone posted this track from it on youtube.

Saybia - The Day after Tomorrow<\/a>
- Courtesy a fanfic soundtrack.

Siouxsie & the Banshees - Dazzle<\/a>
- Someone on Napster recced this one, and it's been hanging around the playlist ever since.

Tara MacLean - Reach<\/a>
- Obligatory Canadian content. Uploaded for La Q.

Tegan and Sara - The Cure<\/a>
- One of the tracks they did in a studio-live thing on youtube, and I bought it after that. (I ripped the youtube version as well 'cause it's kind of cool.)

The Audition - Warm Me Up<\/a>
- I do not remember where I got this. Someone on LJ. Wish I could remember who.

The Duchess & the Duke - Hands<\/a>
- Found a few of their tracks via the free bin, then got the rest of the CD.

The Hooters - Satellite<\/a>
- Maybe posted before. 90s!

The Kinleys - I'm In<\/a>
- Country. Uploaded at some past point for La Q (we were talking about the Corrs, I think?).

The LA's - There She Goes<\/a>
- More 90s! Possibly posted before.

The Moon and Her Mother - The Red Dove<\/a>
- Amazon free bin, yay! :D

The National - Fake Empire<\/a>
- First heard this one as background on Southland<\/i>, and have since heard it as background on several other shows. It surely gets around.

The Stablilizers - One Simple Thing<\/a>
- 80s! I think I've posted this one before.

Therapy? - Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)<\/a>
- Abba cover by Irish headbangers Therapy? that I first heard on the old audiography LJ comm.

Tracey Ullman - They Don't Know<\/a>
- 80s! Uploaded at some past point for La Q (when talking about Belinda Carlisle, I think).

Trading Yesterday - One Day<\/a>
- Free bin? Probably. I don't remember...

Visiqueen - Hand Me Down<\/a>
- Definitely the free bin. :D

When in Rome - The Promise<\/a>
- 80s, British group.

Zooey Deschanel - The Fabric of My Life<\/a>
- LOL. This is a free advertising single. Just ignore the pitch for cotton fabric.
<\/a>

Gah, it's so hot here."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:257196","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/257196.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=257196"}}],"title":"fingers crossed","published":"2012-03-24T10:17:05Z","updated":"2012-03-24T10:22:46Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"la fam"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"computer"}}],"content":"I'm now on round 3 with this laptop after two complete system restores. This hasn't been going well. There have been software incompatibilities, a raging trojan infection, and peculiar behavior from supposedly compatible software. Also Windows 7 doesn't act like I expect it to act, which has resulted in files unexpectedly disappearing and others getting lost in the shuffle.


I've been searching online to answer questions, such as how to get the machine to recognize me as an administrator, to stop throwing warnings and threats at me every time I try to do something. How to get it to stop demanding that I log in over and over, every time I reboot (which I've had to do constantly). Also how to get McAfee behave itself (an ongoing issue with no apparent resolution).

I have now used the tech support \"web chat\" feature from three different places. I'd never used one of these before, so that's been interesting. (Those people type insanely fast without any typos--that's . . . pretty impressive. Or maybe they're using voice software. I don't know.)

Windows 7 despises some of my older software. E.g., it seems to be okay with Paintshop Pro, TextPad, and VUPlayer, but my version of Acrobat Pro is barely functional. For my email, I didn't want to reinstall cranky Eudora 8 OSE (i.e., Thunderbird in Eudora packaging), but my Eudora 7 attempt kept tossing errors I didn't know how to deal with. So, after spending way, way too much time reading about other email clients (and learning that online mail services have killed this arm of the software industry -- hardly anyone sells\/supports email clients now), I wound up backtracking even farther. I downloaded and installed Eudora 6.2 from 2005. Since the company has abandoned the software, all the registration info is free on the forum. Win7 hates 6.2 just as much as it did 7.0 and refuses to recognize it as my default client; even so, the software does<\/i> function. I just needed some assistance from my host server's tech support department to get the fiddly settings right. (This time I took screenshots of the settings and tucked them away. IIRC, I always used to have this problem getting all Eudora's settings fixed, so nothing new there.)

This has been a blast from the past. I remember now how much I liked this client. Also, this version introduced the \"Mood Watch\" feature -- when people began cursing on the mailing list expressly to get Eudora to mark their posts with chili peppers. :P

Another unexpected hurdle was getting my macros installed in Word. It refused to recognize them, and after some mulling over the help files, I hauled out the Word installation disk and picked an Office feature I'd skipped the first time around. Bingo, solved. The macros loaded at last. While I was at it, I pasted in a few extra routines that I'd found via Google into my cleanup macro, which should should save me a bit more time. Woot. :D

Trying to round up more compatible versions of some of my older stuff meant I had to pay to upgrade and\/or rebuy some from scratch. This led to my credit card being suspended, which I didn't realize until I tried to put more time on the cell phone and the charge was refused. So I had to call the credit card company to find out what was going on.
She: You tried to make a purchase from a company in the Netherlands.
Me: Oh. Yeah, software. So I guess that's why it wouldn't let me buy it . . .
She: Did you realize it was in Europe?<\/i>
Me: Uh. No. But it doesn't surprise me. Lots of smaller software companies are based there.
She: You have to be careful<\/i> about buying things from Europe.
Me: Uh.
She: In the future, you need to call 24 hours in advance and tell us that you're going to charge something from a European company. We'll place a notice on your file for 48 hours so that the charge will clear.
Me: Seriously?
She: Yes.

So. Europe is louche now? Yet they didn't seem to have an issue with Amazon.uk.

Oh, and I completely killed my Internet connection at one point, and had to call tech support on the phone to be talked through reviving my dead DSL modem.

Anyhoo, I think<\/i> third time was the charm. Everything seems to be working. For now. Maybe. So I did need the entire week I'd set aside for this, and it's been . . . stressful.
<\/a>

We took off at ungodly a.m. to pick up the niece creature at the airport. As it turned out, my sister really did<\/i> want to go, so we wound up leaving my car in Anderson at the school, going to Indy in her car, then going back to the school to drop her off while I kept going in her car with the creature and her many large baggages.

The new airport's really, really big. It was also really, really empty as the creature's plane was the first arrival of the day at 5:30 am. At any rate, it has rather ugly \"public art\" that I didn't much admire -- like these red canvas thingies suspended from the parking garage roof.
She: They're supposed to rotate in the breeze.
Me: They're not rotating.
She: No.
Me: That one looks like it has eyes. Doesn't it look like it has eyes?
She: Oh. It does, doesn't it?
Me: It's looking at us. That is fucking creepy.
She: Yeah. It really is.
The walkway from the parking garage to the airport has a rolling belt thing, and the ceiling has these round panels that light up in different colors and make terrible sounds as people move underneath them. My sister didn't warn me of this on purpose, so when I hopped on the ramp and the ceiling went BLORP! BLEEERG PONK! I shrieked a little -- I thought I'd set off some bizarre security thing.

The central area has a window wall on one side where you can watch the planes, though it was dark outside and only one plane was moving -- the one the creature was on, sidling up to dump its passengers. Also on the other side of those windows was a lower walkway where the people who've been through security can walk back and forth in their own area, separated from everyone else. You can peer down at them in their habitat.
Me: Wow, this is like the Andromeda Strain, isn't it?
She: I hadn't been thinking that.
Me: Well?
She: And now I am.
I also watched people going through security for a while; they were shuffling along in these penned rows while uniformed people in latex gloves were strolling free around them.

The whole place reminded me vaguely of scifi movies.

They also have benches over by the baggage claim that look exactly like stacked suitcases. I thought they were<\/i> stacked suitcases until my sister explained otherwise. So while I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go sit on one (just because! :), my sister busted out in a loud rant: \"That's so disgusting, they shouldn't be doing that in public. No one should have to look at that.\" There was only a handful of people in the entire area, all of them off the flight the creature had come in on, and I must have been looking as confused as I felt, 'cause the creature said, \"She means those two chicks macking on each other over there.\" \"Who? Where?\" \"Lean over.\"

Ah. Over on the other side of a baggage belt, blocked from my view by a support column, two girls were indeed making out. I'm very grateful to them, 'cause my sister in full-on Scandalized Oldster mode won for hilarity.

So I delivered the creature to my mom's house and went home to collapse. (Also: my sister informs me that the \"puffy fur thing\" hanging off my car's keychain is \"gross\" and the tiger toy with the laser eyes is \"creepy.\" :)
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:256905","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/256905.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=256905"}}],"title":"it's posted from the new machine.","published":"2012-03-19T23:02:23Z","updated":"2012-03-19T23:25:04Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"la fam"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"computer"}}],"content":"I am posting via New Machine. I sent off the book on Friday, then I slept for a really, really long time, then on Saturday I sat down and started working on the big move. First, I let it sit for a few hours doing its battery drain\/recharge thing. Then I made some factory-defaults restore disks. Then I uploaded a few preliminary bits of software.

Then I stared at the blue screen of death, which I haven't seen in years.

Then I used the restore function to wipe everything and start over. Damn it.

OK. So after restore had wiped everything<\/i> I'd done up to that point, I started from scratch and loaded a few programs, excluding the one that had evidently caused the problem. No more ZoneAlarm; McAfee doesn't want to work with it any longer, and I just have to accept that. I liked<\/i> ZoneAlarm because it let me decide on the fly what was and was not going to be chatting with the Internet off my machine. Alas.

Then I uploaded a few more. And one thing led to another, and I'm still moving and upgrading and reregistered stuff. It's an ongoing process here. Needless to say, in the midst of the infinite reboots, I looked up the procedure to turn off the feature that makes you log in every freaking time the machine reboots.

I'd told everyone it would take me at least a week after I finished the book to get my machine issues sorted out, and that wasn't really a lie. Physically, I'm having some issues with the machine's layout, mainly with the touchpad. It has a faintly rough surface rather than smooth; after a few hours of hardcore clicking and dragging, my fingertip was rather sore. Also, bizarrely, the touchpad is offset to the left rather than centered; as a result, the side of my left hand keeps brushing and\/or resting on it. Mousing weirdness results, which is not just distracting but also periodically shutting down screens I'm working on. It also results in random activation of this touchpad's zoom and scroll function--the screen zooms, zips me forward and backward among displays. I've looked over the settings, but there's no way to turn this function off. None of the contortions I've tried keep my hand permanently clear of the touchpad; I'm going to have to tape a thin strip of paper or cardboard down that side of it.

Last night, I devoted quality time to some tidying up in my old directories followed by a final major backup of my old machine onto the peripheral drive. At some point today or tomorrow, I'm going to suck it up and start the big file migration.

In the meantime, some major issues have cropped up. I installed Word on the new machine, entered my key code, and it refused to register. The telephone registration screen was blank. Fortunately, we'd already confronted this particular issue with my mom's new machine last year, as she also uses an older version of Word. I failed to find the call-in registration number on the Microsoft site, but my brother found it. So I knew it was there somewhere, I'd just have to dig. I finally turned it up (yeah, it is<\/i> on the site, but it's in a pretty obscure place), and I got Word set up. I still haven't set up my macros or my publisher template; I can't work without them, but assembling and installing them is a bizarre, unintuitive process that I'm not looking forward to.

My email is another outstanding issue. I've been using the so-called open source version of Eudora, but it has some serious downsides. It tends to lock up silently, and you won't know it hasn't been checking your email until hours have gone by without a peep, at which point you have to shut it down and restart it. Setting up accounts in it is a bear, and I still haven't figured out where it stores its email archives. In old Eudora, it was an .eml file found in a subdirectory of the same directory as the program. With this version . . . I honestly have no clue. I've looked everywhere. I can't move my emails over until I figure this out.

So I've been looking into possibly changing over to a different email client. I adored Eudora right up until they started their free\/light-with-ads version as standard for everyone<\/i> until you registered. I did<\/i> register faithfully (even though at the time their license fee was pretty onerous), but I couldn't get the damned ads to shut off; I wound up moving to one of the early versions of Thunderbird--which didn't work, messed up my emails, and crashed constantly. So I gave up and used the browser email interface on my host's server, which was primitive and crappy, but I got by with it for a few years.

Then I started shopping around for a client again, saw that Eudora had gone open source, and went scurrying back to download it.

I've been using it for a few years now. It's . . . not good. In this case, \"open source\" is a euphemism for \"We've abandoned this software, won't support it any longer, but refuse to release the code so that someone else can fix it.\" This sucks so hard because Eudora used to be a lovely, simple, easy-to-use email client without all the nasty bells-and-whistles that made Outlook et al. horrors to work with. (Of the people accidentally multiple-posting and forwarding their private emails to the mailing list, 100% were Outlook users.) I don't know what to do about this. Why can't anyone just produce a simple email client with filters and a nice, old-fashioned directory tree display? Why?

But in the end it may not matter because, as it turns out, something I've long been fearing is indeed the case: I've been blacklisted as a spammer. Early last year, the in-house editor told me that I hadn't gotten paid one month because my invoice had landed in her spam filter. I assumed that something about my wording had been tagged, and I didn't sweat it--I started to attach the monthly invoice onto emails returning chapter files. A few people after that informed me that my emails had never shown up, but I didn't think that much about it--accidents happen by email all the time.

Then the professor popped up again out of the blue a week or so ago, emailing me at my Gmail account. (This is the sociology professor whose textbook I'd edited for Oxford University Press many years ago. When he wanted to self-publish a textbook, he hunted me down over the Internet. He's now my one and only private editing client.) I didn't see his email when it first arrived because I only use Gmail for mailing lists and account\/product\/user registrations--accordingly, it is the high holy home of spam, and I don't check it regularly. (Apparently he got that address from Paypal, which he'd used to pay me for his book.) So I returned his email from my main address, and his university promptly threw it back at me with a SpamCop notice.

Bwah?

I tried again, got the same result. In the end, I had to email him back via Gmail, and I've set a forward on the Gmail account for his address to my mail account. So this is an issue I've been mulling over all week. Then I forwarded my software registrations off my old machine to my Gmail account so that I could grab and open them on the new machine--none of them arrived. After some frustrated hunting around the Gmail screen, I finally located the spam folder and . . . every email from me was in there.

WTF.

I honestly have no clue what I can do about this. I placed a call to my host server. I explained the issue--that emails I've been sending through their POP server are being dumped into everyone's spam folder. I forwarded the bounce email from the professor's university and sent a few emails to their Gmail test account, and he confirmed that I was being tagged consistently by the spam filter. WONDERFUL.

He told me that they'd \"negotiate\" with the company that published the spammer list on my behalf. I'm pretty sure this likely happened because at some point I was sharing a server with some client of theirs that was<\/i> legitimately spamming, so gosh, thanks! But I have a feeling that this is doomed to failure. As I recall from other people's woes in the past, once you're listed as a spammer, the information propagates and never truly goes away. I may have to dump my domain and host and start over somewhere else under a new name to get free of this.

In the meantime, I'm trying to be optimistic about this, and I'm shopping for a better email client.

What else? Oh. I didn't realize how poor the sound and video display were on my old machine until I tried them on this new one. HOLY COW. Also, streaming video is just as slow and clunky, which is an ISP issue, but generally once it finally loads it plays a lot smoother. Wowzer. I installed the newest version of the software that disables Windows's region coding, so I can play my out-of-region stuff.

I stupidly upgraded to Firefox 11 when I hopped to new machine, and that's been a fairly hair-tearing experience. I should have waited so that I didn't have this to contend with as well. About a third of my extensions were instantly defunct, though I've managed to find replacements for most (but not all). Several things I used all the time I haven't located yet in this new version. I also devoted a few hours to tossing skins to find something I could live with. Gah. Thanks so much, Mozilla.

Windows 7 and I have a precarious relationship at present. After a lot of doodling, I've mostly got the file manager's appearance set to something I can interpret. Windows is stacking open programs and documents at the bottom of the screen under a single icon; this is fine for programs, but it's VERY VERY BAD for documents that you're working on simultaneously. I can't just click quickly among the document screens anymore; first you must hover, then you must choose. I don't know how to make it stop stacking them and just display them flat, side by side. (I must figure this out. ^^;;;)

Yeah. I'm going to need the whole week.
<\/a>


My sister called and asked if I could follow her to the airport on Friday to collect her youngest. (At first there was some confusion because I thought she was talking about the airport in Chicago, which was the destination last I'd heard. Evidently the creature found a cheaper route with an airline change in LA rather than a direct to Chicago.) Once I'd figured out that we were talking about a trip to the Indy airport, I asked why we couldn't just go in the same car, she said that if the niece creature's plane is late, she'd have to leave in my car to go to work and I'd have to stay there with her car. When I asked why I couldn't just go by myself to collect the creature, she said my car likely wasn't big enough for the creature's luggage. When I asked why I couldn't just swap cars with her for the entire day, she said, \"You've never driven my car before!\" When I pointed out that it was hardly rocket science--and that I'd be driving it anyway if she had to abandon me there--she said, \"You've never driven 465 in the morning rush hour!\" When I pointed out that that early in the morning isn't<\/i> rush hour (which I should know since I used to commute downtown there every day for work), she said, \"You've never been to this airport!\"

Huh?

As it turns out, she's right. I've never been to this airport. In the years since I was last at the Indianapolis airport (for the first leg of that trip to Seattle), they've built a new one. I've been peering at maps and reading online stuff trying to figure out what looks like a crazed splat of spaghetti. I guess we'll see how this goes. At some point this week, I really need to sit down with my sister and get straight the wheres and whens of collecting her daughter, but my sister is never home<\/i>. I'm having serious doubts about all this.

At any rate, the niece creature is coming back from Korea (where she's been working for English-teaching schools for well over a year) on one of the Chinese airlines via Los Angeles. She has a two-hour layover there, then it's supposed to be four hours to Indianapolis, scheduled to arrive at 5:30 am. But who knows? (I'm remembering that mega-delayed six-hour sardine-hell trip from Chicago to Seattle.)

I'd assumed that the main reason my sister was making a fuss about my going by myself to meet the flight was because she wanted to be at the airport when her kid got off the plane. Or at least that had been my assumption until she explained to me all about the wonderful free \"cell phone lot\"--where you can park temporarily and wait to be informed that a flight has arrived. You then swoop in to collect your person at the curb, and that's what she intended to do. But this presupposes an optimistic universe where one doesn't mind sitting in a parking garage for several hours waiting for a flight to arrive and\/or be late after one has already spent several hours on the highway in a car, and that the sleep-deprived person you're collecting will be able to promptly wrestle their many baggages out to the curb to meet you.

So no, I<\/i> am not going to be doing that.

The creature should go through customs in LA, so that shouldn't be any issue in Indianapolis. There's that, at least. My sister doesn't have anywhere to put her, so I'll be taking her to my mom's house. We'll get this figured out somehow.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:256756","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/256756.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=256756"}}],"title":"it's here...","published":"2012-03-09T02:56:15Z","updated":"2012-03-09T06:18:31Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"computer"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"work"}}],"content":"It's here, and it's lovely.<\/i> It is a pretty<\/i> laptop. (I didn't realize it would be.) It's more or less the same size as the one I'm using, but it weighs less. Now it is gulping down antivirus and Windows updates, and I'm trying to ignore it so that I can get more chapters read. Evidently I need to make some recovery disks, as it came with . . . nothing. I am not used to this unhappy new world where you get zero OEM discs.


Yesterday I hopped off to rebuy Stedman's medical checker. I'd stopped upgrading it after they told me last time that I'd waited too long to qualify for their upgrade price (Stedman's = NOT CHEAP x grr grr). But now it's been a considerable amount of time, and I've been noticing a steady uptick in the number of terms I'm having to look up -- so rebuy time it is. Sigh.

I couldn't get their online order form to work properly, so I gave up and called the publisher's number instead. I am so happy that their website let me down. She pulled up my customer records and asked me if I had my discount coupon number handy -- and I told her I didn't have one. Whereupon she informed me that I ought<\/i> to have one and gave me the discount on the spot. $25 dollars off! Holy cow. I am SO GLAD that I called.

While I was at it, I looked up OEM Word 2007 and\/or 2010. The reviews of these aren't good, with lots of complaining about the new user interface. Plus .docx, which already has been a minor bane of my existence. I don't want to upgrade Word, even though I'd really like to have that nicer equation editor that's in it. Sigh. I also looked at upgrading my Acrobat Pro, but ... it's just too expensive. It really is. I can't see spending so much on a program unless it was something I'd be using all day, every day (which I don't). So that's that. :P
<\/a>

In the meantime, I was offered another book overlapping the one I'm desperately reading right now, I have a small pile of medical articles to get through before Monday (though I asked for -- and received -- a deadline delay on those if needed), several TWC articles to read before Monday (there had been more, but I asked them to give them to someone else), and<\/i> the sociology professor suddenly popped up to ask if I'd like to do some of his stuff as well (which I really would, 'cause he's cool). And at some point I have to get started on my taxes.

I ... don't even know what I'm doing. Maybe I should turn down this next book and concentrate on getting moved to the new machine. Or maybe I can do both at the same time. Or not. I don't know. I have to decide before tomorrow morning. Yikes.

(Aside to La Q: I found a small cardboard box outside under my mailbox, getting rather damp. Guess what?!? I will tell you about it when I see you . . .<\/small>)

eta:<\/b> No new book for me. Had to turn it down. T_T"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:256338","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/256338.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=256338"}}],"title":"holee cow","published":"2012-03-05T01:32:01Z","updated":"2012-03-05T01:32:01Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"computer"}},"content":"I have just spent a lot of money on a new(ish) laptop, which is due to arrive in about a week. Haa haa, hyperventilating.


Given the sudden, alarming issues with my laptop, getting through the work I've got on hand is a bit anxiety-inducing. The video card has been spontaneously overheating and blanking the display; I have to shut down the machine's power to let it cool -- and lose everything I haven't saved. The rollback was only a short-lived fix; that driver update damaged something. I might be able to ferret out a replacement card, but I think it's a bit chancy with a machine this old.

Not that it matters. I can't do major hardware swaps in the middle of a book. That lesson has already been learned -- something unexpected always, always<\/i> goes wrong. So-o . . . I'm going to nurse my laptop though this book, then I'm just going to retire the machine before another book lands in my lap.

My wobbly plan is to have a new machine on hand when I'm done with this book. Then, real quick like a bunny, I'll have to copy all my files over, wrestle with the router, get my software, macros, templates, and checkers reinstalled, and redo all my custom settings. Oh, and learn how to use Windows 7 while I'm doing it.

To this end, my mom and my sister have been hauling me around to poke at display machines in stores. I've figured out that I still like the machine I'm on, and I don't like the present generation of laptops.

Sigh.

Both my laptops -- this one and its predecessor -- are HP machines. Their keyboard configurations are Old Skool IBM-like (yay!), and I like their touchpads as well (very Cirque-like, yay!). So naturally HP has redesigned both. Also, a number of online reviews I've read have mentioned overheating issues in current HP laptops that sound awfully familiar to me -- from both these machines. So. Why did HP redesign away the good points but leave the crappy stuff intact? Mystery!

So I'm getting a \"refurbished\" (i.e., used) Lenovo, with a hard drive and RAM that're way, way larger than I've got, a DVD drive that can write disks as well as play them, a keyboard and touchpad I can live with, and assorted junk I don't care about.

On the plus paw, if this new machine works as it should, I may be able throw my stuff on it with a minimum of weeping this time around. The (relative) minus paw is Windows 7; I've already messed with it elsewhere and have found it pretty frustrating. I'm just going to have suck it up and to learn how to use it. (IIRC, my upgrade from MS-DOS to Win98 involved mucho wailing of woe, but even the crankiest of late adopters get over their drama eventually.) My brother has told me that I should be able to force it to visually emulate XP (which I have adjusted to look like Win98 :), and my XP software ought run on it. I guess we'll see. (And I have no plans to pay Microsoft a few hundred dollars for a \"product key\" -- they can bite me. I'll wipe that stuff and load my old versions. Word 2002, still pretty awesome.)

At least this time I don't have to forage the Internet for every freaking driver the machine needs. That should be a nice change of pace.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:256252","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/256252.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=256252"}}],"title":"worrying","published":"2012-03-03T17:10:19Z","updated":"2012-03-03T17:10:19Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},"content":"Apparently winter is over -- a few months early. I've got flowers blooming already and have been woken up twice by thunderclaps outside during huge rainstorms. Right now, the wind is blowing like a sonuvabitch. This isn't supposed to be happening. I don't know.

eta<\/b>
Ha. I started to type this last night, but my stupid laptop shut down again, so I went to bed instead. I need a new laptop . . ."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:255913","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/255913.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=255913"}}],"title":"stoopid files","published":"2012-02-25T13:11:41Z","updated":"2012-02-26T01:35:08Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"work"}},"content":"Have book, am irritated. For some reason, the entire manuscript--not just the chapters with equations--was typed up in LaTeX. So all the book files are conversions. It's an unholy mess of a sort I haven't seen in years. I'm not even going to try cleaning this up; I'm going to edit what's here and let the typesetter tackle the Word style disaster.


So far, two of the chapters are a complete loss. I open them, page down about halfway, and Word instantly crashes. I've tried running my own cleaning macros on them, but the files continue to crash. So I've emailed to request new copies; we'll see if maybe it was an email-related issue, which is entirely possible. Inexplicably, rather than neatly compressing these files into zip archives for emailing, Project Editor Guy attached all the book files separately as batches onto emails. So it came as four emails with with up to eight separate files attached to each email. That made for a rather problematic download.

Anyway, I've already got all the text in the usable files tagged, and the bibliography is finished. He was, like, hey, we'll just convert those bazillion footnotes into endnotes when you return the book. I'm, like, the hell? Screw that. *converts notes* No clue why he didn't just do the endnote conversion himself -- it's only a couple of mouse clicks per file. This idea of his that I'm going to cross-reference against this many Word footnotes . . . uh, no. That's not going to happen.

The math looks horrendous. It's full of garbage characters, erratic spacing, large chunks of white space, and other quirky conversion artifacts. Yet he hasn't provided me with me hard copy or PDFs of the originals. Because I am not psychic, I've asked for copies of the originals, pointing out that this is not going to work<\/i> unless I can see what the author intended this disaster to look like.

So-o, we shall see how this turns out. It's funny that it's a University of Chicago book (my first!), but the book doesn't use Chicago style -- it's another \"just go with the author's weird, made-up style\" book. Heh.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:255553","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/255553.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=255553"}}],"title":"teeth? yes!","published":"2012-02-24T04:15:08Z","updated":"2012-02-24T06:29:10Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"books"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"work"}}],"content":"I have teeth again. :D

In the previous installment of dental woe, they'd carved down two of my molars, put some temporary crowns on them, and sent me home. Then one of the temps fell off, and I went back to get it glued back on. It fell off again, and I went back again. Third time was apparently the charm -- it stayed put.

I had an appointment to go in to get the permanent crowns put on, but they called me the day before the appointment and told me that the crowns had yet to arrive. So my appointment was cancelled; they were to phone me when they had the crowns in hand.

Over a week later, I called them to say, \"Hey?\" So I was told they'd call me back. Later that afternoon, they phoned to tell me the crowns would be there the next day -- could I come in that night to have them put on?

I could. Even though I had this ominous feeling that some slacker somewhere had quickly whipped up a set on the spot 'cause they'd called up and complained.

So I went in the next night. They put one in, I bit down, and the top of it instantly broke off. The other one didn't fit. Dentist guy came in and frothed a bit (\"This is not acceptable work. Look at this. It's not acceptable.\"), and he decided I was going to be upgraded to some more expensive crowns at no cost to me. (\"Because this is just not acceptable!\") Ummm. OK?

So new temp crowns were put on. They were incredibly uncomfortable, but by that point I'd been there several hours with my mouth hanging open, and I just wanted to go home.<\/i> One began to wobble on the way home, and I tried various things to keep it in place ('cause I did NOT want to go back), but by the next day it was toast. I called and made an appointment for the next week to get it glued back on.

The next week, a temp crown was put back on; I bit down and broke it in half on the spot. So a solution to this ongoing problem was devised: rather than making a new temp crown and gluing it on, she just globbed the material directly over the tooth stump in my mouth and hardened it in place.

It felt bizarre, but stayed put. I could eat something that wasn't soup again. I had another appointment in a few more weeks to get the permanent crowns.

So today<\/i> I went over to get the permanent crowns. After a lot of chipping and pulling (and ow ow owwww!), she got the globby covering off my tooth. Then some fussing, and calling in the dentist,* and bite this, bite this, bite this, and open up, and hot, smelly stuff . . . and they're in? Bite down some more. Now let's whittle!

So whittling was done, and . . . okay, I guess these are them.

The weirdest part was how Dentist Dude cooed over these crowns. I am not joking. It was alarming.

He: [cradles them lovingly in his palm] Now these are so much better than the others. This is such wonderful technology.
Me: Uhh?
He: Haven't you seen them yet?
Me: Unh unh.
He: Here, look at this. Isn't it wonderful?
Me: Uh. O_o;
He: And here's the other one! There's no metal at all in these, you know. [coo:] They look so natural.
Me: Uh. -_-;
I'm thinking, in the back of my mouth, who'd even care? But I did not say this -- I may be a guinea pig, but I am not a ruiner. This is clearly his new fandom.

But the problem here is that I honestly cannot remember what my old molars felt like or how my upper and lower jaw fit together. I mean, it's been a fair while, and I've been through numerous iterations of temporaries, some which were freaking uncomfortable. So I have NO CLUE whether this is a reasonable approximation of what I had before. I guess I'll wait and find out if my jaw starts to hurt? I don't know.

If these don't fall off or crack in two or otherwise secede from the union, my mom has promised to buy me a hamburger and fries to celebrate my graduation from the Soft And Nonsticky And Noncrunchy Foods Only Brigade. I also have a box of muesli that's been sitting on the counter for MONTHS. I am excite.
<\/a>


I've got some maintenance software I run on the machine periodically, and it informed me a bit back that there was an update available for my video doohickey (a technical term).

Backstory: This laptop originally came with Windows Vista OS. I didn't want Vista, but the company wouldn't provide XP when I asked. (They don't provide any OS install disks at all. Boo, HP.) So I bought an OEM copy of XP, reformatted the harddrive, and installed that puppy. Then I had to scour the Internet for XP drivers for the hardware -- and download them by dialup, grumble bitch. (The ethernet modem's driver took a while to find...) But the display driver was the most obscure of them all -- it took days of poking through forums until I fell over a post from someone else who had the same issue, and an HP support employee had evidently covertly uploaded the old XP driver to a file-share site for this dude. Yay. That upload had long since expired. Boo. But when I searched on the file name, I located another copy on Megaupload that was still alive.

It took awhile to score, but that's the driver I've been using all this time. So did I want to try this update? Hmmmmm. What the hey, I gave it a shot. <-- a creature not known for its intelligence

A few days later, a weird thing happened: my screen shut down spontaneously right in the middle of an article I was working on. The laptop itself was still running, but the screen was black. I had to force a reboot with the power button to get the display back.

That was . . . odd. Huh. So then I pull up the Southland<\/i> episode and start watching it and . . . black screen. O noes, John Cooper, has your angst crashed my machine? Then it happened again a few hours later. And again a few hours after that. The side panel on the machine felt a little hotter than normal as well. HMMM.

Worse, none of my recovery stuff in my software functioned when this happened, so apparently ye laptop wasn't viewing this a full-on crash. As a result, I was losing stuff right and left. So I tried to roll back the driver; it didn't work. I tried again; it didn't work again. GRAH. So finally I gave up and asked my brother for help, and he said, \"It's just your power settings. Let's change them.\"

So then the machine shut off again . . . but this time it was because I'd forgotten to plug in the fan underneath. Duh. So I thought, hey, I'm cured!

Nope. Not long after, the blackouts started all over. I went back to trying to roll back the driver, and on the other side of the reboot I'd check and . . . same version as before. *tears hair* Windows, why do you hate me?

So I went to Google and whined, \"How to roll back video driver? XP? Display driver? NVIDIA? HELP HELP HELP.\" And I started reading forum posts of advice, and carefully wrote down all the suggestions and directions, and gave it another shot. Ha. This time, Windows lodged a protest screen: \"Hey! Wait! What are you doing?! That funky driver is not approved OMG!\" STUFF IT DO IT ANYWAY FOOL. \/slap

Windows does say it's using the old driver now.

So far, so good. I've been waiting for another big shutdown of doom, but . . . it hasn't happened. Yet. The side casing also isn't heating up like it has been doing all week. Maybe it worked this time?
<\/a>


In the meantime, while dodging laptop misbehavior, I finished a book on national health care and economics plus some articles. I'd gotten into the habit of hopping off to find other things to occupy me whenever the laptop went berserk as a means to preserve my zen, so I missed an email yesterday asking whether I wanted another book.

Today, right in the midst of discussing whether I wanted this book, I had to jet off to the dentist. So I still don't know whether I've got the book.

I may not want it? I've been warned that it is converted from LaTeX and is chock full o' equations. Bleh. That means a) the files are probably a mess, and b) I will have to tag everything for the typesetter. Granted, I used to code ALL books myself (STM tagging guru!), but I have become VERY SPOILED by all these university press books. Most of them take care of their own file clean up. They use Word styles instead of tagging. It's nice. Restful.

Yesterday over lunch with my mom, I was complaining about my computer (as usual), and she made a joke about how she'd owned one of the first computers in town (which is true -- they had one before I did), and somehow, remembering my own first PC triggered all these resentful software memories.

At that time, I had a copy of MS Word for DOS, a copy on a stack of floppies that I'd scored from the first publisher I edited for; they ran it off under their license umbrella so that I could work on their books. Which was a godsend because there was no way in hell I could have afforded it myself. But I saved up to buy WordPerfect because everyone was certain it was going to win the publishing war. (I figured the other contender, XyWrite, was toast. At least I was right about something... :P)

Blackwell et al. would always ship me their untouched authors' disks, complete with viruses; depending on the authors, some of these would be Macintosh disks.

So I was an antivirus software early adopter (McAfee for MS-DOS :); I'd run every single disk through McAfee, then dutifully inform the publisher what I'd found. (And they were never concerned because they had no idea what I was talking about. LOL.) But the Mac problem was pretty intractable. I couldn't open Mac disks on a PC, and I didn't know anyone who had a Mac to open them for me.

Initially, I'd just mail those disks back and ask them to take them to their art department, convert them to something IBM compatible. This wasn't a great solution. The general rule of thumb back in the day was that publishers hired freelancers to do their computer editing because the freelancers were supposed to know about computers<\/i>. No one who worked for the publishers' editing departments did. Most of them didn't even own their own PCs. Every single time I'd point out that MACINTOSH IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH IBM CLONES it was like explaining this to the neighbor's dog. No one on the other end of the phone understood what the hell I was talking about. After all, all they dealt with was the manuscript printout I made them when I was done; the disks I made went straight to the typesetter.

In the end, I wound up buying this unghodly expensive conversion software so that I could open stupid Mac disks and convert the files myself. The software would also convert some rather obscure word processing programs into plain text format, but that wasn't the main reason I bought it. And I really resented this because if they'd just made me IBM-compatible disks in-house on their Macs, I wouldn't have HAD this problem.

I also had to come up with various ways to edit files on the computer because no one in-house ever had a clue what they wanted me to do. I started off with a tagging system based on HTML. (Later, when I was trawling one publisher's first set of Guidelines for Authors online, I noticed that they incorporated most of the stuff I'd developed into their house guidelines.) When I ditched them and sidled over to Elsevier, I picked up SGML.

I was not paid extra for editing on the computer rather than on paper. In hindsight . . . yeah. So very stupid, me. Should have taken them to the cleaners. :P

Anyway. Things have changed a lot. But this is the reason why, when people these days ask me whether I know how to code a manuscript file, my brain stutters to a stop. That's . . . such a bizarre thing to ask. O_o;

Which was why the email exchange over the book ran smack into my dental appointment, because she DID ask me that. And the hamster upstairs on the mental wheel went into overdrive. (She isn't seriously asking me if I knew how to code a manuscript? No, she can't be. So that means she really means something else. But what? I don't know!) I asked her what she meant, and then I had to leave, and by the time I got back she'd left for the day. Email tag. :P

Anyway, the whole point of the nutty lunch tangent on software was me appreciating how it is soooo much better now. . . . And yet publishers are still shelling out the same rates as back then. \/scratches head
<\/a>


At this point my lengthy lunch rant about software got totally derailed by Kris and Pat wailing mournfully about their breakup on the piped in radio, as I'd mentioned. So I cooed in a dentist-like fashion, and, as a result, had to explain why.
Me: So then, uh, you remember me telling you about Singapore Woman going to that concert.
She: That's the one?
Me: Yup! Uh. See, uh, anyway. Uh, one was very tall, and the other was very small, and they'd hang off each other, and it was all really adorable. See. Very cute.
She: Uh huh.
And I could SEE the wheels turning, and her thinking, Is This What You You Write Porn On The Internet About?, but she did not ask. This is what happens when one's family is aware of one's louche habits.
<\/a>


The other thing was that my sister and I had this long-running discussion about getting my mom an ebook reader. This started after wrestling with her pile of library hardcovers while she was in the hospital last winter, and continued as much time was killed in doctor's waiting rooms. So after my reading a lot of blogs -- and my sister saying, \"Whatever! I don't care!\" repeatedly -- we wound up getting her a Kindle when the newer, cheaper ones came out.

I was not aware that she and my mother had been plotting to get me one as well at the same time. Uh. So, uh, a Kindle. What on earth do I do with it? I did poke at it a bit to be polite, but I didn't have wireless at my place -- and the single neighbor who had had an unsecured connection had dealt with that little oversight a few months before. (Dang.) Putting a book on the laptop, then hooking up the Kindle, then moving the book onto the Kindle, then unhooking the Kindle . . . it all seemed kind of a pain in the ass when I could just, y'know, read the file on the damn laptop or whatever.

THEN I tagged along on a roadtrip my mom was making to Muncie. In Muncie, they have a BestBuy, and I happen have an elderly gift-card for that store courtesy some past birthday. There aren't any of those stores in this vicinity, so it had never gotten used. But I had this notion. I've tried different wireless routers with my laptop, and none of them have worked out. But my mom's router has been working fine with my machine when I've been hanging out at her place, why not cash in the gift-card to get one that's like hers? Let's do it!

HOLY COW IT WORKS. I can stop swearing at my wobbly ethernet cable now, which falls out whenever I sneeze. Woot.

A week or so later it occurred to me that I ought to find out if that Kindle could talk to the Internet over here, too. IT ALSO WORKS. So I decided to try getting a book for it. And I read the book. Then I got another book. And I read that book, too. And I read a few more. And I grabbed a bunch of free, public domain titles and started on them.

I haven't read this many non-work-related books in years. I, I . . . I like this thing? I can change the font. I can make the text so much bigger.<\/i> Yet it is very small and light, and I can carry it around like a paperback.

It is awesome.<\/i> I am living in a crazy scifi world. ;_;

Later I spent a whole afternoon poking buttons and finally figured out how to make directories and stuff, then I installed Calibre on my laptop and messed around with that for a while. I figured out how to get other publishers to send things to the Kindle, too. Woot.

While this was going on and I was pushing around files, I smacked into the wall of DRM. So irritating. Boo. Hiss.

SO THEN, over on flist, <\/a>lucitania<\/b><\/a><\/span> is saying, \"Woo, a book!\" So I scooped up that one, and then I logged in as my mom so SHE got that one. We were both reading the same book at the same time, which has never happened before in the history of the world. :D

BUT. The thing with ebooks is that a lot of them . . . the editing and proofing are not always up to my standards. This has been GNAWING at me. (\"Rats! Rats in the walls!\" Like that.) So. I sat down with Google and said, \"Teach me what to do, O Internet.\" I have since learned how to strip the DRM off ebooks, and how to convert them to formats that I can edit, and now I can fix what is WRONG with them.

So. Much. Better.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:255075","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/255075.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=255075"}}],"title":"Miscellaneous","published":"2012-01-17T03:47:20Z","updated":"2012-01-17T04:11:24Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},"content":"Last week, I sent a text: \"The water, it is hot. very hot!\"

And I got this in return: \"It is a beautiful thing.\"

That is so true.


The issue was that, although I had a wrench for the purpose of taking elements from water heaters, it was not budging mine. Also, shutting off the water to the heater was only partially effective--the valve, for whatever reason (i.e., lime, most likely) doesn't completely close, so using water anywhere in the house continues to incrementally fill the heater. Because the tank never completely drained, the hose had to be attached to the outlet the entire time, which ran out the door, into the garage, and outside. In effect, I've had an open door all winter.

So my brother said he had a ratchet socket that was big enough to fit over the element and that he'd bring it down next time he visited. I doubted this, but whatever.

I shouldn't have doubted it. He brought down his Big Bucket o' Sockets, and he did<\/i> have one that was big enough. And he wrestled with the damned thing for a while, and he got it out.<\/i> I'm still a bit in awe.

With judicious application of cussin' and swearin', he managed first to unscrew it; when it still wouldn't come out of the heater, he yanked on it for a while with a big set of pliers until he got enough lime knocked off that he could go at the rest with a screwdriver. He got the element pulled out far enough to get a grip on it and tug it a few more inches out; then we both yanked and jerked on the pliers until the element came out the rest of the way.

So, in other words, like this:
<\/a> <\/a><\/a>

Top element and bottom element in place, and bottom element extracted, respectively. The top element wasn't too bad; it came out with the wrench and some effort, but that bottom one was stuck. It was completely coated in a durable layer of lime (a lot of which has been knocked off by point of picture), and it had been warped out of shape in addition.

Once the bottom element was pulled out, the other issue became apparent, namely, why it'd been so fantastically difficult to drain the tank and keep it drained. The mineral sediment inside was packed so high that you could stick your finger into the bottom element's opening and prod the surface of the stuff. So that's at least seven to eight inches of goop that the water has to drain through to get to the hose at the bottom outlet. Dumping two gallons of straight vinegar into the tank and leaving it for a few weeks didn't really make much of a dent in it.

The water around here is very, very hard.

(My brother keeps insisting that dumping CLR in the tank will \"clear that right up.\" He doesn't seem to think that having lingering poison mixed in with the goop in my tank will affect the water's potability. UH HUH. No. Let's not do that.)

So we taped the new elements, screwed them in, rewired them, turned on the water, then turned on the electric. We left it overnight. The next day ... ta da! No hot water. Back to the manual! It said that somewhere there was a reset button that we'd needed to press. Where could it be? Where? Oh, I don't know ... could it be that big red button right in the middle of the top panel that says \"RESET\"?

Gaaah. So we pressed the button a few times. And a few hours later, hot water at last.

It only took a few months. Granted, the cold-water lifestyle is superior to the no-water lifestyle, but I've grown a bit tired of it all the same.

I don't think there's much to do about the overall problem. I don't think it'll be too long before this new bottom element is completely buried in sediment. Replacing the water heater again<\/i> is on the list now. (The current one is my third.)

A weird thing: Cubby the Mystery Cat not only put in an appearance but followed my brother around and meowed at him, raucously and persistently, while he was here. Aliens have replaced my silent and spooky cat with a noisy, obnoxious model. It's the only explanation. <\/a>


I'm so pleased that I can finally dispense with the hose because the temperature has been falling outside at last, and it's started to get seriously cold in here accordingly. It hasn't managed to drop below 45F yet, so it's fine. Adding the straw bales to the foundations last fall seems to have helped. The space heater in the kitchen had been making unfortunate noises toward the end of last winter, so I'd gotten a spare while they were on sale at Sam's Club this fall. I switched them out a few weeks ago, and this new one does seem to work better than its cranky predecessor. The other two are still plugging away, and the place is liveable without adding in the oil heaters.

Other than that, the stupid temporary caps seem to be staying on the stupid teeth for now, making them one less thing to fuss about until I have to go back to be dentaled again. (Joy.)

Oh. Another weird thing. This was in November, but I forgot about it until I was messing with book boxes here lately. I've been boxing up the books and trying to ditch some of them, and I decided that no one really<\/i> needs a complete set of the works of Charles Dickens printed in the 1930s. Well, I don't need them--it's not like they're difficult to find online. I think these came from some auction or other, many, many years ago; they were eating up an entire shelf to themselves. So I wrote down all the titles and posted them on the mailing list -- \"must take complete set\" -- along with two cases of Vernor's ginger ale. The latter were leftovers from my father; he'd been a fan, but no one else likes the stuff. I figured a lot of people might want the free pop, but very few would be interested in a big box of Dickens.

Wow, was I wrong. A few people were interested in the pop, but it was ... rather nuts with the books. I got about 15 replies in the first few hours, and they just kept coming. Even after I shot off a \"pending\" notice to the mailing list, new people emailed me anyway about them. I was not expecting it to turn into a competition. O_o;

Here's the thing though. Explaining to me about your home-schooled children or your private Christian academy or your church's library is not the way to get my stuff. Nor do I find emails ending in Bible verses or warnings about the End Times to be heartwarming. Quite a few people went direct to the delete bin. I gave the box to a woman who lives over in the trailer court here in town who wanted them as a present for her brother.
<\/a>


Here's another trip to a diner, this time to 38th Street in the next town over. I've mentioned this place before, as it has tons of cheesy stuff on the walls -- NASCAR, Colts football, and raging patriotism, with a side order of whatever else is popular: dolphins, waterfalls, wolves, Elvis, tigers, romanticized Native Americans ... at the moment, it's heavily lighthouses and bald eagles. Their parking lot is always, always full.

This is one of the day's two lunch specials: meatloaf platter (meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy), which comes with a roll and two sides--I picked coleslaw (as shown) and banana pudding (hasn't shown up yet). The other meal is the #3 Breakfast, which is scrambled eggs, pancakes, and bacon.
<\/a>
Regardless of what it looks like, it's really good.<\/i> ;_; E.g., they're actual mashed potatoes, as opposed to the box mix kind.

Oh. The other big clue that this is a rural midwestern diner: ashtray in the middle of the table.

Also, in case you're country blocked as well, last video<\/a> on the Watson blog. Don't watch it until you've seen the last episode though, because it is 100% spoilers.
<\/a>

I've got another book coming through shortly. Something about health insurance? Not sure. Yale UP this time."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:254961","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/254961.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=254961"}}],"title":"xsmoonshine, for you.","published":"2012-01-08T03:38:43Z","updated":"2012-01-08T03:38:43Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"tv"}},"content":"Here<\/a> is a long and discussy meta on that last episode by someone concerned with omg-canon and<\/i> the affairs of fanfic writers."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:254542","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/254542.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=254542"}}],"title":"Moar dentistry","published":"2012-01-08T00:55:41Z","updated":"2012-01-08T00:55:41Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},"content":"So at 8:30 am, I plonked down in a chair and started the wait. (Receptionist: \"Again?<\/i>\" Me: \"Yes. Again.\") And about an hour later, there was time to make a new crown and shove it in my mouth. This one feels better than the first one and does seem to be staying in place. For now.


Otherwise, it's better. Much. My mom wanted to hit the store that afternoon, so we took off, got her stuff done, came home, and about an hour later I was zonked. And stayed that way for a long, long, long time. I realized that I hadn't had much to eat (aaahhh, food), but I hadn't really noticed that I'd not been getting much sleep while this was going on. \/groggy

I'd also not been getting any work done. Instead, I decided to do maintenance-type things on the machine. My antivirus software had been nagging me to upgrade to the next version; after I did, it stopped working rather abruptly -- error messages, lock ups, the works. So I tried to uninstall it (unsuccessfully) and go back to the previous version (also unsuccessfully). After some wrestling with that, I gave up on it and switched over to different software. The latter software slowed my machine to a crawl; I spent a lot of time staring at the Hourglass of Doom, waiting for a few keystrokes to take, and fiddling with the settings. No luck.

So I uninstalled the second one, tried (again unsuccessfully) to go back again to the original software, and wound up installing a third company's software. I'm not incredibly pleased with third software either, and I'm still getting periodic lockups and slowdowns. I have to reboot a lot more often now, which has the (questionable) benefit of making me even MORE paranoid about saving constantly.

I also did my drive back-up to the portable, which I'd put off for over a month. Phew. A few months back, I'd installed some software to do things like cleaning off unwanted files and fixing the registry, and a defragger that works in increments in the background, and those<\/i> have been great -- nice to see something working well around here for a change. :D

So now I'm back to pounding away at articles, trying to make up for lost time.

While I was on a break, I wrestled with FFnet last night. The Pit of Voles system seems weirdly complex to me; each time I upload something I have to figure out from scratch how to do it, and the learning curve feels awfully steep. It's difficult and unintuitive to edit documents there. I wonder if one of the site goals is to make uploading so twisty and complexicated that only the Most Dedicated Voles won't be frightened away. On the plus paw, you feel an odd sense of accomplishment when you finally<\/i> get it over with. I was very surprised to discover that there was an existing category for me -- of which I appear to be the sole occupant. Uh.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:254423","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/254423.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=254423"}}],"title":"Dentist, bis.","published":"2012-01-05T23:39:19Z","updated":"2012-01-05T23:49:26Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},"content":"So the wonky crown fell off this afternoon, and I went back to the dentist again. Sat in waiting room for about an hour until a free spot came up, and it was glued back in place. It felt much better than it had before. So on my way home, I stopped by my mom's house; when I walked up to her back porch, The Cat In Question was sitting by her back door, waiting to be let inside. So I eased out of my coat and pounced.

I let myself in, arms full of madly squirming coat, and I found my mom had just come back from the store. So I said, \"Well? Well? Hurry! Get the stuff!\"

She: \"What stuff? What are you ... Why do you have ... the cat!\"

Me: \"Yes! It is! Get the stuff!\"

So that went easily enough. I got the rest of her groceries out of the car, and I made myself a piece of toast, as I hadn't had anything to eat since the day before. I got halfway through the rather limp piece of toast when the (just replaced) crown cracked down the middle and fell apart.

One phone call later, I'm going back to the dentist again tomorrow at 8:30 am. I dunno. Maybe none of this was such a good idea. ;_;

I stopped by the grocery on the way home from my mom's to get some nice, soft eggs, and I was contemplating the bananas as well when I walked right into someone. My sister, who saw that I was paying zero attention, had planted herself directly in my path. She said that the dude who digs graves out at the cemetery will come dig up her yard tomorrow or Saturday, provided that the electric, phone, and gas people move their buns and do their excavation marking.

My younger brother is coming down to pick up his christmas presents, and he's said he'll help me wrestle with my water heater some more if I'll work on his résumé. He works for that Big Huge Powerplant outside of Chicago (i.e., Stateline); it's closing down this year.

NB: My mom's cat who hates to be picked up and\/or medicated is Calliope; she is also the cat in my LJ icon.<\/small>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:254002","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/254002.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=254002"}}],"title":"Dentist, etc.","published":"2012-01-05T03:35:15Z","updated":"2012-01-05T04:40:08Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"yuletide"}}],"content":"
Went to dentist today and mostly have my face back now. Wow, even my ears were numb. There are temporary caps on my two lower back teeth, which have ragged edges that I keep unconsciously worrying with my tongue. One of them popped off when I did this; my jaw and tongue were still mostly dead at that point, and I didn't immediately realize what was happening. So I dropped it back in place, bit down hard, and kept chomping on it in hopes that the glue or epoxy or whatever it is simply hadn't completely set yet. It hasn't come off again. We'll see.

Going back in two weeks for the more permanent arrangement. Unless I really can't stop myself prodding the ragged edges. Unless this stupid thing decides to pop off again before that point.
<\/a>


In the meantime... One of my mom's two cats had an infected tooth, which had resulted in her not eating. The vet had given my mom some antibiotic that must be squirted into the cat's mouth, a course of several weeks. So we managed to trap and wrestle the cat into submission for several days, then I got wrapped in the fanfic thing and completely spaced the whole cat-squirting deal. So at christmas, since she hadn't called me about her cat, I assumed she'd figured out a way to medicate her solo. But when I asked how her cat squirting had been going, she told me she hadn't been doing it at all. She couldn't catch the cat, and I hadn't come over.

This triggered my pissy lecture mode: I am allowed<\/i> to forget things once in a while like a normal human, and no one likes a martyr, and I appreciate being reminded<\/i> when I've forgotten something important. Grah. So she called me the next day, and I walked over, and I trapped the cat in the bath towel, and she medicated her. Only a little of my blood was involved that time. We've gotten much, much better at this maneuver after all this practice, and no blood has been spilled at all the past several days.
<\/a>


My sister roadtrips to Bloomington at every opportunity. One of her daughters lives down there with her boyfriend (the daughter being an I.U. student), and my sister has an Eternally Unfinished Dissertation that she (strictly in theory, from what I've observed) is working on. Her latest plan is to quit her teaching job, rent her house, and move to Bloomington next year. She's decided to move in with her daughter\/daughter's boyfriend\/their dog. I have seen the overstuffed, glorified closet they call an apartment, in which you can't take a step without treading on clothes and books and dirty dishes and god-only-knows-what. So. Three terminally messy people. I'm sure that will be great fun for all. Sanity is not strong with these people.

So my sister's school hasn't started up again yet; she left others to feed her cats and beelined for Bloomington. Today, the dude from the water company started knocking on my mom's back door. It seems my sister's water line between the meter and the house had broken underground and was flooding her yard and the street. The water company couldn't contact my sister, so they wanted my mom to give them permission to shut her water off. Which, naturally, she gave them. Since the leak's on my sister's property, she's responsible for fixing it. Which means she has to come home...
<\/a>


My mom has also been working on me for over a month now. I'd decided to just let my hair grow out again. They'd discontinued the color I liked, so I lost interest in messing with it and figured it was time to give it a break anyway, pick it up again in the spring. But for some reason it's been making her nuts. \"I will help you,\" she said (repeatedly). \"I will let you use my bathtub if you'll just dye<\/i> it again.\"

But I still wasn't that interested until I found myself in the position of being trapped in a dentists' chair while two people with their hands in my mouth were having a discussion over my head about how fast my hair must grow to get that effect... OK FINE.

So I took the bottles over this week and let her pick a color, since she's the one who has to look at it. She wanted it green again, so green it is. On the plus paw, she's been very smiley whenever I show up. \"It's so green!\" she says. Indeed it is.
<\/a>


The worst thing about the dentist wasn't the shots or the caps or the bite-this, now-bite-this, now-bite this<\/i> ... the worst thing was the TV. This is one of those places that puts a small TV on a swivel over your chair to keep you occupied while waiting for someone to get around to you. I do not want to be occupied by TV, but usually I can ignore it. But today it was playing repeated<\/i> airings of Mitch Daniels's fucking \"Right to Work\" commercial, in which he explains how his amazing<\/i> plan will bring new employers to our state by getting rid of obstructive employee unions. Mitch's Right to Work commercial played over. And over. And over. By the time the Indy news started -- and, no kidding, the talking heads started praising the wonderful Right to Work legislation<\/i> -- I'd had enough and kicked the TV. Dentist walks in, sees their TV turned completely around, sees me glaring at the ceiling, says not a word. I cannot express how much I hate Mitch Daniels. Make. Him. Go. Away.

It's a source of constant wonder to me that the Republican party has managed to convince the very people whose unions are pretty much the only thing<\/i> still standing between them and Wal-mart level indentured servitude that Unions Are Bad. But manage it they have. It's like living in bizarro land.
<\/a>

Oh, and while I'm at it, how about a fic rec? This one, all by its ownsome, made yuletide worthwhile for me:
Yip et Non<\/a> (by longwhitecoats). Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairveaux are naughty Pomeranians."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:253758","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/253758.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=253758"}}],"title":"Pics for xsmoonshine","published":"2012-01-01T21:42:33Z","updated":"2012-01-01T21:47:20Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},"content":"Here they are. Random stuff off the camera:



Outside of town where the two highways meet is a diner, and this is one of the specials of the day (chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, roll) and a hamburger plate (with fries).
<\/a>

I cut down the peony plants every fall. Out in front of my house, each year I find one of these lurking in the peonies: preying mantis! They're not very big, and they blend in well.
<\/a> <\/a>

Sam's Club is the big-box version of Wal-Mart (same company). This is through the windshield of the car in the parking lot at the Sam's Club in Kokomo. As you can see, horse and buggy (Amish) are also in the parking lot.


<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:253640","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/253640.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=253640"}}],"title":"Let's test this puppy...","published":"2011-12-30T03:07:16Z","updated":"2011-12-31T05:30:38Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"lj"}},"content":"I saw, on this page<\/a>, some fixes for the LJ comments issues. So here's an entry to test the installation...

eta:<\/b> It works."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:253357","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/253357.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=253357"}}],"title":"Having some LJ issues","published":"2011-12-28T21:52:21Z","updated":"2011-12-28T21:52:21Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"yuletide"}}],"content":"Some things on LJ aren't working properly for me now, and I don't know whether to try switching to some other style or what. *sigh* I think I'll wait to see if they decide to change something else before making any decisions.


So. Anyway. Survived another round of yuletide and am mostly intact. That said, the tighter deadline was hell (still wobbling from lack of sleep here), which has settled for me that I'll sit out in future if there are similar time constraints. No can do, and shouldn't have done. In the end, I had to slide out of all paying work to get finished (and a steady infusion of booze also played a role here), and I was still editing in major revisions at 11:58 on 12\/24. So it's done, posted, and probably still ridden with typos, but I'll get around to ferreting those out eventually. Hit 21K this year after a lot of sleep-typing and ruthless chopping.

I've volunteered for this particular fandom every year someone's asked for it, but no fics have ever been posted for it. So this would be the debut for an oft-requested, never-assigned series -- and I finally got it in the year when our writing time was cut in half. (Damn.) Plus, the specific request presented a few problems that translated into spending quality time with Google. I was worried the result would be disappointing, but the people who've read it so far who're familiar with the original say it sounds all right. Which has been a relief, under the circumstances.

During the mental-health breaks, I beta-read a bunch of fanfics for stuff I knew nothing about when other volunteers were lacking (I don't remember how many, but at least ten, likely more) and proofread a journal article that came sailing through unexpectedly.

Hit the dentist last week -- or the week before? I forget -- and have to go back at the dentist in January. I've been informed that several teeth are showing fissures around fillings that were put in ... I don't even know when they were put in. Maybe when I was a teenager? I don't know. So they're going to put some crowns on them. This does not sound entertaining, but I s'pose the alternative is worse.
<\/a>

Nothing else is going on, really. It snowed yesterday, which was unusual because it hasn't been doing that this winter."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:253055","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/253055.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=253055"}}],"title":"happy holiday :)","published":"2011-12-25T23:57:52Z","updated":"2011-12-25T23:57:52Z","content":"Hey, happy holiday you guys. (I spent most of mine asleep. zzzZz :)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:252636","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/252636.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=252636"}}],"title":"brown county picspam","published":"2011-10-09T19:59:05Z","updated":"2011-10-09T19:59:05Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"brown county"}},"content":"The niece creature who is attending I.U. and Significant Other (aka Tree) decided to spend the day in some sort of fantasy-game card tournament. So they asked my sister to drive across the state to babysit their dog for the afternoon. My sister, being my sister, saw nothing wrong with a request like that. She'd intended to go to a meeting in Indianapolis on Saturday, and after the meeting would keep driving south. I wanted to go look for pawpaws in the woods (though it's really too late for that), so she said I could tag along and we'd go to Brown County State Park after we'd collected the dog.


When my sister makes a plan, it generally doesn't go precisely as planned. In this case, she'd caught a cold and decided that she didn't want to go to the meeting after all. But she'd promised to babysit the dog for the afternoon, so off we went. As it also turned out, this particular Saturday was a home game for the I.U. football team (vs. Illinois), so the traffic was congested and nuts. We were late in getting started anyway because she'd wanted to sleep in later and then wanted to stop at a car lot and drool over a car -- then got chatted up by the sales guys, then went in to haggle a bit over one of the cars . . .

So. By the time we got down there, it was around noon. First we went to the farmer's market. They have one of those down there, and it was fairly interesting. Since we got there so late, a lot of tables were shutting down, and we bought some late-minute cut-rate stuff (for me, this translated into a loaf of bread and scone). I'd been hoping for pawpaws, but everyone said it was already too late in the season. Bah.

Then we went to get the dog. I hadn't met Whisper before. She's not the world's most neurotic canine, but she's a contender. She doesn't like people. She does not want to be touched. So rule of the day: Do Not Touch the Dog. She doesn't bite, she just shies away violently and freaks out.

As it turns out, Whisper is otherwise very well behaved (unlike the brother's dog Rebel), and she doesn't care who's holding the leash as long as no one tries to touch her. So we went for a long, long walk around that side of the campus, Whisper got to play in the creek in Dunn meadow, Whisper got to stare hard at chipmunks, Whisper got to meet some other dogs, and Whisper got to run around madly in a few grassy vacant lots. Then we went back to the niece's teeny-tiny claustrophobic apartment so that the sister could lie down, and I could sit outside on the stoop and stare at the sea of red-and-white walking down the street. When the sister was ambulatory again, we tucked the hound into the backseat and headed for Brown County State Park.

So did the rest of the world. Literally. I have never seen that many people packed into such a (relatively) small park or heard so many languages during a rather brief hike (1.5 mi, dirt trail, ravines, but nothing drastic). Chinese, Korean, Hindi, and a number of others I didn't recognize at all, people and their kids, their grandparents, their dogs, their mountain bikes, their motorcycles . . . The trail was a hurry-up-and-wait affair as every time we stopped to let the dog check out items of interest to dogs, we had to get off the trail to let the stream of other people get by us.

I discovered that I don't like being crowded in the woods like that. It was a weird and uncomfortable feeling.

First overlook inside the park. Unlike up here, the leaves are mostly still green(ish) down there. Overlooks make me uneasy because I'm not really used to them (it's perfectly flat around here, as has been illustrated in the past), and I don't like heights. The grass has all been nicely mown, but it was a bit of a challenge to find an angle that didn't have a lot of fellow tourists (sitting, standing, running, biking) in it. As it is, their shadows were still present.
<\/a>
<\/a>
Whisper is happy to be out of the car.

Ogle Lake looks oddly pretty and scenic in picture form. It didn't look all that impressive in person. There were a lot of people fishing along the cement retainer at the side of it.
<\/a>
<\/a>
At several points we said Screw it and climbed off the trail down to the water. Where there was AWESOME MUD for Whisper to commune with. Oh my god was that dog muddy . . . someone else looks less than pleased with the situation.

These shrubs along the trail had turned a nifty shade of lavender. My sister insists they are a gooseberry. I don't know if she's right, and I am too lazy to look into it (I don't really care -- the color was interesting).
<\/a>

A beaver dam. We didn't see the residents, but as the tree with the notches attests, it is a work in progress.
<\/a>

We're headed home now. It's another overlook!
<\/a>

We bought Whisper an ice cream cone in Nashville for being such a Good Dog! Then we went back to Bloomington, and Whisper got yet another long walk. My sister took us to a grassy, lower courtyard between the Psychology building and the business school (?) -- and we let Whisper off the leash and chased her around madly for a while. She really, really, really gets into that. Then we took her back to the apartment only to discover that my sister had locked the apartment keys -- and all our stuff -- inside. So instead of making a quick getaway, we had to wait until the niece creature and Tree came home to get our stuff back. Then they insisted on taking us both to dinner. (Aside to Q: Hey, I made it through an entire meal with chopsticks. The practice is working out! The lessons have not gone to waste!)

We finally made our big escape, but we didn't get home until after midnight . . .
Sister: I don't feel good. I have a headache.
Me: So I'll drive. Pull over.
Sister: I'm fine.
[later]
Sister: My nose is all stopped up. God, I'm about to fall over here.
Me: I feel fine. Why don't you let me drive?
Sister: I'm fine. I feel fine.

*eyeroll*
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:252130","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/252130.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=252130"}}],"title":"picspam","published":"2011-10-06T21:59:50Z","updated":"2011-10-06T22:00:50Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"picspam"}}],"content":"This is what I had for lunch:
<\/a>
I tried a martini, the gin and vermouth variety. The guy said, No, wait, you should try the cherry and vodka one, but I wanted the Real Thing.

It was awful. So awful.

My mom tried it and verified that it did indeed taste like a Real Thing. Urgh. But here's the thing . . . about, oh, I dunno, five or ten minutes after I'd finished it off, it hit. Really strong stuff. Wow. (But still awful.) Never again.
<\/a>

Also brother the younger and his constant companion came down last weekend.
Which means you get the back of my brother's head and Rebel's ass.
<\/a>
<\/a>
No, wait, here's Rebel. He looks like Fenrir, doesn't he? :D
<\/a>
Also at some point I was screwing around in the cemetery with my sister.
So a couple of the older limestone ones.
A log pile, back and font (and a single log on the side):
<\/a> <\/a>
In the background you can see trailers. I used to live on the same street as that trailer court before I moved to where I am now, so I could see this cemetery when I crossed the street to get my mail. :D

A piece of limestone that's been carved to look like a pile of limestone:
<\/a> <\/a>

Two of the upright stumps. One has vines, and rope, and (for some reason) an anchor, and the other has vines and ferns (click to embiggen):
<\/a> <\/a>
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:251832","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/251832.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=251832"}}],"title":"the bath cow","published":"2011-10-04T23:00:40Z","updated":"2011-10-04T23:00:40Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"workish"}}],"content":"I got a small, cheap cell phone back when I was doing census stuff, and to celebrate my joining the modern world, La Q sent me a doodad to hang off it. Later, she sent me another doodad to keep the first one company. The niece creature (the one in Korea) sent me yet another doodad, so now there are three.
<\/a>
So now there are two bells, and it is very musical. The niece creature also sent the thing they're sitting on, which is a back washer. I believe it is supposed to be a whale, but it has two ears. So my sister has dubbed it the bath cow.

I got the book done (finally...), and it turned out to be an iffy, weird experience for various reasons. I also got the medical articles done, but another load was promptly shot my direction, which I got done, and now I'm trudging though yet another, which is due tomorrow. I got rid of all the TWC articles, but then discovered that I was also slated to proofread nine more -- which became ten, which became eleven . . . grah.


In the meantime (as in last week), Delicious imploded. I've been maintaining a sock account over there for years where I squirrel away links to the fanfic I've been reading (while airing various opinions, pleasant and un, about these fics, hence the account's sockish nature), and the account had several thousand links, all tagged and bundled. So one part of my brain was flailing over my looming book deadline while the other was wailing and gnashing teeth over Delicious more or less destroying years of bookmarking. However! Back when the word first went out that Yahoo was planning to dump Delicious, I'd bought a Pinboard account to back up my Delicious account--because I am mistrustful like that. So Pinboard had been silently siphoning off and backing up my Delicious links ever since. As a result, my situation wasn't as awful as it could have been. Pinboard isn't free, and it doesn't have all the features that Delicious had for organizing your stuff, but the owner seems to be willing to consider adding them.

In fact, the dude is really, really happy to have fandom migrating en masse<\/a> into his previously nerdy realm, though judging by the Twitter stream his regular user base is unsettled by the sudden influx of slash fics mixing with their programming links. It's just . . . so strange to see a service on the Internet that's not only pleased to host fandom -- and a ton of slash fic links, accordingly -- but is actively wooing fandom away from its previous nest. I don't think I've ever<\/i> seen that before. (As usual fandom appreciation is taking the form of fanfic about Pinboard<\/a>.) As more and more people move over, I've been slowly building a new network on Pinboard of people who are multifannishly inclined and read a strange variety of fandoms, so more stuff for me to read as a result. Silver lining. :D
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:251475","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/251475.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=251475"}}],"title":"google today","published":"2011-09-06T18:21:02Z","updated":"2011-09-06T18:21:02Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"lulzy"}},"content":"The logo for Freddie Mercury's birthday is cheesy and lengthy and v.v. fun. There's tiger-riding and bears with mustaches. Check it out. (Also on YouTube.<\/a> \/working. no really. I am."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:251294","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/251294.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=251294"}}],"title":"ooookay!","published":"2011-09-03T16:58:24Z","updated":"2011-09-03T17:02:46Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"workish"}},"content":"Here we go:
TWC: 4\/9 read, returned
FNS: prelim formatting done, prelim tables done
Book: endnotes done, glossary reformatted, chapters and xrefs renumbered

Wuf. Basically, if I just keep going this weekend, I'll be in good shape. Maybe. I think the plan ought to be to get the articles done and out of here soonest. Both batches of articles have the same deadline, so yeah. ^^;;;;

The book has a few undisclosed problems, but that's usually the way of these things. \"Light edit\" can mean . . . oh boy, anything. It can encompass such a huge, weird range of issues. In this case, as it turns out, the author has very unique ideas about referencing. I don't recall ever encountering a book that was quite this confused about the purpose of endnotes.

But, in general, endnote issues are par for the course. The ameliorating factor is that editing on a computer means you can paste all the separate chapters' endnotes into a single file as you go along. This enables mass searches while you're working on later chapters, which in turn means you can reuse items and achieve some sort of consistency overall. That is nifty.

So.

First off, with this book they'd asked for straight Chicago style, rather than 'make whatever oddness the author's dreamed up this time work a little more consistently' style. (I'm fine with either one; whatever they want, they get.)

However, in this case, the author only provided the first author for any multiauthor study; in pretty much any style available, naming at least<\/i> three authors is the rule. In the days of paper-shuffling, this meant a massive Post-It offensive (\"Author: Please provide three authors,\" over and over and over...); these days, it means you embrace Google and look the damn things up yourself. This cuts down dramatically on the number of reference queries, and is a great time saver for everyone. Well, everyone except the beleaguered copyeditor. Woot.

But I did it. Fuuu. Quick(ish) method: Copy full title plus quotes, paste directly into Google, smack Enter. When the only hit that turns up is from the endnotes to the author's previous book in Google Books, remove one set of quotation marks, smack Enter again. Then edit the title accordingly, insert the missing author names, quickly check the rest of the publishing info as well.

In the process of looking up only the items that had a visible problem (or several), I discovered that 80% of the time the author had the book or article titles wrong. Or the dates wrong. Or the volume wrong. Or the page numbers wrong. Or the book\/article's author's name spelled wrong. The author was, in fact, rather consistently wrong. (The author even got the published titles of her own<\/i> articles wrong, which was exasperating.) My assumption at this point is that the items I did not look up because they had no obvious issues are most likely wrong in some fashion as well. But we have to draw a line somewhere; I am not going to do all her reference work for her. (Just, apparently, an awful lot of it.)

Which brings us to the peculiar way this author is using endnotes.

In every chapter, page citations are scattered all through the text:
\"Here's some quoted text\" (p. 45).<\/blockquote> This is what endnotes are for.<\/i> So I'm slowly moving all these page citations down into the notes, creating new notes as I go along. That's when I can figure out which publication they refer to, which isn't always clear.

Oodles of quoted text appear in the chapters with no sources provided. When she also tags a page citation on these, I can look around in the surrounding text to try to figure out which person she's quoting (unfortunately, it's not usually obvious); then I search the chapter endnotes and try to identify another item from that person that has a page range that could encompass the cited page. So, for instance, the author has mentioned both Brown and Jones, I go back through the chapter endnotes to find books or articles by either Brown or Jones; generally one of these will have a range of pages that \"(p. 45)\" will fall within. Bingo! I make a new endnote. Sometimes I have to search on the collected notes from the entire book to find a suitable item. Other times it remains a mystery -- time for a query!

In at least one instance so far I've identified a mystery source only after dropping a quoted phrase into Google and turning up an article -- one that wasn't referenced anywhere in the book. Fuuu.

The book is part memoir and part overview of work, and the author is apparently a personal friend of many of the people whose works she's citing. So even at this early stage it's getting difficult to tell when she's quoting an actual publication or some random conversation or email. She's keeping me on my toes here. :(

She also tends to refer to studies in an offhand way without identifying the sources:
Brown's 1955 study has evidence of whatever, and in his conclusion he argues blah blah.<\/blockquote> She provides no endnote to identify this Brown study, and not even a page number clue. So I run a search on the collected endnotes to see if any suitable Brown studies with that date were cited anywhere in the book. Usually they don't turn up, so I place an endnote and slap a query on it for the author to fill in a reference.

She's also citing websites as sources. She mentions the title of the page, the date she looked at it . . . and that's it. So. I drop the page title into Google, locate the site and the page in question, then construct a reference item for it. It's becoming obvious at this point that the author isn't being what we'd call discriminating in the sites that she's choosing. Some of them are rather sketchy. For instance, she cites a homeschooling resources site for her definition of several genetics terms.

And I really, really<\/i> didn't want to spend quality time tossing David Duke's site to relocate a specific blog entry. Never again. D:

This author isn't the first scholarly sort I've encountered who's been blundering around on the web this way. I did a science-related book with notes that were a sea of Wikipedia URLs. It's ironic: academia smacks around its students for doing this sort of thing, with endless lectures on evaluating the quality<\/i> of sources. So it's great to see academics setting this fine example for them!

Anyhoo, these are just issues that came up while I was working on endnotes and glancing over the chapter text. I can tell this is going to be happy fun time when I really sit down and start reading. I don't know what the deal is here. This author has published a lot. Many, many, many articles and a couple of books. She ought to know how to do basic source citing by now.

I'm gonna earn the check on this round. :P

It could be worse though. It doesn't also<\/i> have a bibliography to tear my hair over. Also, it's not in APA\/Chicago B style, which I loathe with a burning, paw-waving passion.

The TWC articles are in Chicago B. Hate, hate, hate.<\/i>

I was at this meeting once and started to get into an argument with another editor over comparative styles. My take was that AMA (which is based on Vancouver) is a thing of beauty -- rational, simple, streamlined, fast. She insisted that APA was superior because . . . I never got to hear the reason. Just then everyone else jumped up and stampeded for the door, dammit. To this day it bugs me. I wonder why anyone would be so incredibly wrongheaded about this. Possibly she was a secret crack smoker or something.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mikeneko:250787","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/250787.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/mikeneko.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=250787"}}],"title":"new book!","published":"2011-08-29T17:45:44Z","updated":"2011-08-29T17:45:44Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"home"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"workish"}}],"content":"New book already in progress. It feels like I just turned one down ... and now I'm peering at a new set of files. So much for the vacation. This one has fifteen chapters and over forty tables, all of which have to be renumbered by yours truly. Sigh. But it was a topic I was curious about and wanted to read, so I went ahead and took it. It's about the Minnesota identical twin studies.

In the meantime, I'm still hacking away at my kitchen issues, and I'm being inundated by freecyle emails about the grapes in my backyard. The person I emailed about coming after them is turning out to be flakey, and I'm now wishing I'd picked one of the other fourteen (so far) people. The mod of that ML hasn't cleared my \"Pending\" notice from the weekend, so I'm still<\/i> getting emails from new people. Grah.


The main street in town was closed off for a while on Saturday. For reasons inexplicable, someone phoned in a bomb threat on the Dollar General store. So this resulted in a lot of discussion about why anyone would want to blow up a Dollar General of all places. (These are very small, cheap-ass discount stores, for those not in the know.) My favorite theory is disgruntled employee. But my mom is holding out for teenager prank.

Mom: You'd think if you were going to make a bomb threat, it'd be the bank.
Me: Why the bank?
Mom: That's where the money is.
Me: Um. How does it make more sense to blow up the money?
Mom: . . .
Mom: I don't know, it just seems like it would be the bank.
Me: Like, down with The Man? Or what?
Mom: I don't know. Or maybe one of those antique stores.
Me: So why would you blow up a bunch of junk?
Mom: I don't know. Because they're annoying?
Me: They kind of are.

For some reason, the antique shops here outnumber every other type of store. I guess I could see the rationale for blowing up a few. The Dollar General thing's still a mystery though.
<\/a>"}]}