Geekiness 101
A kinda old poll from Thudfactor, but I found it amusing.

</td><td valign="top">You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you'll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you're a technical geek, you'll be able to afford it, too. If you're not a technical geek, you're geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don't date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You'll constantly try to out-geek the other.</td></tr>

You are 63% geek

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

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Bumper Sticker Funnies
One of the things I like about the Santa Cruz region is the, umm, how shall I say it, unique personal expressions on their cars. Here's a few that caught my eye.

1. Printed over the standard republican re-election sticker: Bush-Orwell 04.

2. On a beat-up truck: Change is inevitable, Growth is optional.

3. On a yin-yang symbol: That was Zen. This is Tao.

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Carly and Me
When I was in my late 20s, Carly Fiorina and I were friends for a time, and I've followed her career on and off since then. For those interested on my musings regarding powerful women and her ouster from HP....( Read more...Collapse )

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Early Spring Cleaning on LJ
Although its raining like mad, the coastal hills have turned velvety lime green and spring is in the air. I've been sick with that deathly flu that's been running around, and now that I'm feeling better I'm in the mood for some early spring cleaning, which includes my LJ friends lists.

To everyone I removed, please accept my apologies. People fascinate me, and y'all have interesting lives. But there's only so much time, and other matters, like getting my business off the ground, demand my attention.

Au revoir.

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WoW on Crack
Ok. I have to admit I am thoroughly addicted to World of Warcraft. After lunch today I thought I'd play for just 10 minutes or so to clear my head. Flew out from IF to do some mining S of Lock Modan, slipped and fell into the quarry at Ironband's Excavation, got stuck between one of the wooden sidings and the quarry wall, and died SIX times in a row trying to retrieve my corpse. An hour later I logged off. And I wonder why I'm not productive at work.

Current Mood: amused

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Molly Flogging and other random thoughts
I went to hear the Flogging Mollies play at the Blank Club in downtown San Jose Monday night. I got dressed in my best goth getup, went, and found out that contrary to the paper's report, tickets *were* required. The show had sold out, so I didn't get in. After milling around outside for a while with other disappointed patrons, I went home. But there is more to the tale worth reading, for those interested....( Read more...Collapse )

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Media Geniuses
Ok, who's bright idea was it to schedule BOTH baseball games and the presidential debate ALL AT THE SAME TIME! Grrrrr. Stupid idiots who run this country.

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Mendocino Spa Weekend
After much sturm und drang on the homefront last week, my much-anticipated weekend at a spa finally arrived. All I can say is, everyone, and I do mean everyone, should try this.

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Current Mood: busy

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Yesterday I had to get to a doctor's appointment and couldn't find a ride. So I drove myself.

All I can say is EEEYOOWWWW. Whimper, whimper, whimper.

Note to Self: Doctors are very smart people who go to school for years to master their craft. When Dr. S tells me I can't drive yet, LISTEN TO HIM.

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You're a Centauri. Your hobbies include serving the
Republic, re-applying your hair gel, and
arranging to have your enemies assassinated.
You also have six sex organs instead of just
one. Go you!


What species of Babylon 5 alien are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Giggles. I knew I was a Centauri before taking the quiz. Glad it confirmed my opinion.

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Military Tribunals Rant
The subject on tonight's MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour (PBS) is the military tribunal process that will be used to try the 650 or so prisoners taken in Afghanistan 2 years ago during Operation Enduring Freedom. They've been held at Guantanomo Bay during this time.

The first two prisoners to be tried are what our gov't is calling a propagandist (the actual charge is he tried to broadcast video by hacking into satellite signals) and a paymaster (more like payroll clerk, if you ask me).

As described on the show, I can't believe anyone would even think of calling these tribunals justice. The main points:

--Human rights organizations have been denied access to the prisoners.
--Standard rules of evidence are waived. For instance, both hearsay and unsubstantiated rumor are allowed into evidence.
--Prisoners have no right to directly confront their accusers.
--The prisoners are classified as non-POWs, so any rights normally accorded to POWs by the Geneva Convention are waived.

Our government says these prisoners are not POWs because they did not wear a uniform?!!! Um, during the Afghan war with the Soviets, didn't they wear mufti then, the same as now?

In its defense, the Bush administration offers up the fact that they have declined to ask for the death penalty. Gee, isn't that nice of them.

The Bushies strain my capacity for compassion to the bursting point.

BTW, a repeat airing of the News Hour is on tonight locally at 11PM on KQED Channel 9. The interview is in the second half hour of the show. It has to be seen to be believed.

Current Mood: Furious

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Random Medical Updates
Yup, I guess its official--I am well and truly sick. Doc gave me 2,000 milligrams of Augmentin to take for the next 10 days, plus ear drops, plus asked if I needed something for the pain. She laughed when I told her I am still on Percodan for my shoulder. In comparison, the ear aches are a minor blip on the radar.

Speaking of Percodan, I have now taken so much I have a pretty strong resistance to it. Swallowed 6 tablets in a 2-hour span last night and still had screaming pain in my shoulder. OTOH, at one point I remember touching my own face and thinking how cool it was my fingers could feel my face but my face couldn't feel the touch of my fingers. For a while I was on the phone and remember thinking I had to be very careful to place my tongue next to my teeth so I could speak clearly. I felt like God directing the universe, issuing specific orders to this part of my throat or that part of my tongue, all the while marveling at how it all worked together to form actual words. Simultaneously,

The extreme shoulder pain was due to that wonderful, modern version of medieval torture otherwise known as physical therapy. Torturer=Physical Therapist. See, there are always jobs for people who really, really like to inflict pain. Of course, its always cleverly disguised as doing it for your own good.

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RIP
Upon returning home from DunDraCon, a local gaming convention, I found out that a dear friend had died and been buried over the weekend.

I had thought my first post after getting back would be a report on the con and the current state of the game industry. Instead I'm going to write a few words about Marie Small.

Marie was like millions of other ordinary women who lived through extraordinary times. She was born in the 1920s and grew up in Nazi Germany. Blue-eyed, blond-haired, and fair-skinned, she could have been a poster child for the Hitler youth, and in fact joined the Jungenfreunde as a teenager.

Shortly after the war ended, she found work as a translator at an American army base. When I asked her how she could work for the Americans, given they had killed a lot of her male relatives, her answer was simple: "The Americans had food, and the only way to avoid starving was to work for them."

While at the base she met an Army captain 15 years her senior, fell in love, and got married. Over the next decade she worked at various bases in Germany while having 4 children. When John Sr. retired, they moved to the US.

I met Marie when I started giving trumpet lessons to her youngest, John Jr. Although I was only 20 and she was 46, we struck up one of those odd friendships that transcend age and nationality. It wasn't long before I made sure Johnny's was the last lesson each week so I could spend time with Marie afterward.

Over the next 5 years we met regularly, drank schnapps, and talked about everything under the sun. I was fascinated by her stories of growing up in Germany during WWII. She witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall and the birth of modern Europe, as well as the transformation of America into a superpower. We discussed German Romanticism, Goethe, Wagnerian opera, Vietnam, and politics. In between, she bitched about her marriage, her children, and her life in general.

Although in turns Marie was kind, conscientious, and caring, she was by no means a saint. She was depressed a lot of the time, impatient, demanding, hated Russians, and despised Jews. But she gave a me a great gift, of seeing how the tide of history is composed solely of the droplets of individual lives run together. And that war is nothing more than intense human suffering on a large scale, regardless of whose side you're on.

After I got married, Marie and I drifted apart. We saw each other at church every so often, until she broke her hip and moved permanently to a retirement home a few years ago. By then it was difficult to talk to her, as the depression had evolved into some sort of aggressive, angry, hostility.

Her death came as a shock--I knew she had been feeling poorly the last few years but was unaware of any acute illnesses. My life was blessed by her presence, and I can only hope she has at last found the peace she searched for all her life.

Current Mood: sad

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Hmmm, is LJ acting up again? I'm getting text overwrites from one screen to another, entries don't fit within the window, and its generally acting weird.

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Surgery Update
Its been 2 weeks exactly since surgery on my right shoulder. On the whole, it could have been a lot worse. I am finally able to type, albeit with a fair amount of pain. For those of you who are interested in the results....

The surgeons found I had a badly frayed rotator cuff, which most likely caused most of the swelling that cut off circulation to my arm. They also found a massive bone spur, shaped in a half-moon like a headsman's axe, growing down from under the collar bone. Every time I moved my arm, the bone spur sawed into the rotator tendon. The doctors found that the tendon was nearly severed.

The fixes were pretty simple--shave down the cuff so its smooth again, cut off the bone spur, and re-attach the tendon. They also sculpted (read: cut off) the bone of the shoulder blade to make more room for the veins and arteries in the joint.

What the doctors *didn't* find is why I'm pretty happy about the results.

1. The enlarged cyst in the bone marrow of my upper arm was *not* cancerous.

2. Neither the long nor short bicep tendons were severed, so I didn't need to get steel screws riveted into my upper arm.

3. There was surprisingly little arthritis in the joint.

So, 4 more weeks of healing, then a couple of months of rehab, and I should be better than new.

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Endlessly Narcissistic Self-Absorption

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Can Anybody Read This? Or, Lost in Space
Hellloo out there. I'm not getting any automatic updates for anybody on my Friends list. I know LJ has been twitchy recently but this is bizarre, even for them.

Anybody else have the same problem? Any ideas on how to fix it? Thanks much.

UPDATE: Thanks to all for the info. I hadn't received a Friends update since Monday afternoon. The last I received was a post by artistic_chaos about trying out the phone/text messaging upload. (H: Did you do something to break LJ again? G)

But, after hitting reload, I got everybody's. Not sure why its not automatic, like before, but I'll give the LJ people another few days to fix it before filing a complaint.

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"You must remember this, a kiss is still a
kiss". Your romance is Casablanca. A
classic story of love in trying times, chock
full of both cynicism and hope. You obviously
believe in true love, but you're also
constantly aware of practicality and societal
expectations. That's not always fun, but at
least it's realistic. Try not to let the Nazis
get you down too much.


What Romance Movie Best Represents Your Love Life?
brought to you by Quizilla

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Faulkner's View of Artistic Integrity
I was musing on the meaning of artistic integrity this past weekend when I ran across this quote from William Faulkner's 12/10/50
acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"...the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths
lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors
under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which
nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of
all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal
bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and
watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy
enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the
last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless
rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then
there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible
voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will
not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone
among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a
spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

If you liked the end of his speech, the full text is at:

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html

Current Mood: chipper

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If I were only a movie star

Cmiddaugh in In the Singlehood

Describing itself as extravagantly magical, this classic piece of motion picture history, set in the early Twenties, draws the viewer into the journey of companions, ian_hess (Billy Bob Thornton) and cmiddaugh (Alicia Silverstone), who find themselves on the run from the law after an experiment gone wrong has been set in motion by her heartless rival, artistic_chaos (Téa Leoni). Countdowns have been known to be less predictable.

Produced by ianiceboy

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