Go frolic in the desert where a tortoise belongs, and leave my heart alone!

Skipper's

algeh — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 01:12:19 GMT

When I was a little kid, Skipper's once gave out a bicycle reflector as their kid's meal toy. I did not happen to go to Skipper's that week, so I did not get one. (I don't remember how I learned about the promotion - it's possible that a friend of mine had one.)

For the next several years, every time I went to Skipper's I would ask if the toy was a bicycle reflector (it never was) and fill out a comment card telling them to have bicycle reflectors as their kid's meal toy. I suspect this made the job of reading and tallying customer comments a little more surreal for someone. However, it was totally ineffective as a method of getting a bicycle reflector.

Anyway, I bring this up because I'm starting to feel similarly about job applications.

(Side note: I've been spending less time online and more time walking outside, so I have no idea what y'all are up to these months. Sorry! Feel free to let me know in the comments.)

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/295029.html, where it currently has comments. You may log in and/or comment there using your LiveJournal account via OpenID.

Pretty much offline

algeh — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:24:23 GMT

So, I haven't actually been caught up on my Typical Internet Obligations since....um...November, I think.

Basically, I sprained my ankle again on Thanksgiving, and my computer set-up was not conducive to elevating it. Then I decided to be really militant about doing the PT this time in hopes of the ankle getting better, and that kind of sucked up all of the fucks I could give, leaving none left for getting caught up on everything in the internet.

Then, in January, just as my ankle was starting to recover, I found out that the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission in my state changed the license renewal rules without bothering to tell anyone, and I now needed 25 hours of professional development before I could renew my license in May as opposed to the zero I needed before the change. That took up pretty much all of my spare time from January through March, and I was again out of extra fucks to give about getting caught up online.

By now, the backlog was pretty overwhelming.

Also, I decided that if I had to spend the equivalent of a used car on my goddamn ankle (PT, new orthotics, expensive new hiking boots with proper ankle support) I was going to appreciate it. Otherwise, I would have been better off to get the car and hobble around. (My poor car needs the dashboard fan repaired. Depending on what is wrong, it will cost between $5 and $500. Finding out which would cost about $45 since they have to take stuff apart. I've borrowed the van from my dad until I have $500 spare so I don't have to pay the $45 twice if it's an expensive fix.) So, I've been making a point of taking a long walk every single day, which further cuts into my online time.

So anyway, if there is anything going on that I really need to know about, call or text me and don't assume I'll see it if you post it here or Twitter, or really even if you email me (I'm currently trying to dig out April's email). I'm not sure how hard I'll try to get back into the internet again. My computer is pretty much in need of replacement and I'm both broke and angry about Secure Boot, so I don't really have a clear path to replacing it. (I want both a new desktop and a tablet that is almost, but not entirely, unlike anything I think I could actually buy.)

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/294734.html, where it currently has comments. You may log in and/or comment there using your LiveJournal account via OpenID.

Christmas Card Post!

algeh — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:31:20 GMT

I've been really terrible about posting online this year and so my year has stayed pretty much undocumented. I've decided to solve this problem by sending out Christmas cards and including what would be a typical Christmas letter if I had normal, grown-up accomplishments but will, instead, contain at least some of the following things I never got around to writing about online this year:

con reports for the three conventions I went to (ConFlikt, SpoCon, and OryCon)
trip reports for the two trips I took to see extended family in Idaho
a trip report for time several generations of my family went to Sunriver and my mom decided to take both the dog and the turtle along
injury reports for the two times I sprained my goddamn ankle (only one of which was on a family trip to Idaho)
a picture of Annabelle the Basset Hound in a different funny outfit than last year

If any of you internet-people would like a card, please fill out the following poll:

View poll: Christmas Card Address Collection 2012

If you can't fill out the poll for some reason, leave a comment letting me know and I'll work out some other way to get your address. LiveJournal people without Dreamwidth accounts should be able to vote in the poll on Dreamwidth by logging into Dreamwidth with their LiveJournal OpenID.

I don't mind sending out cards to people I don't know well, but if you're not someone I follow on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, or Twitter I'd appreciate a heads-up on how you found me and why I might know you so I can keep some sort of context going in my head. Reciprocal cards are not required, but are welcome.

Speaking of LiveJournal and Twitter, I've been kind of terrible at keeping up with them lately. Don't assume I've seen anything you've posted at either place in November or December. I might have, but it's not a sure thing. I've been keeping up with Dreamwidth, because it's less overwhelming and also Dreamwidth pages don't make my ancient computer slow down horribly the way LJ's new comment pages do. (I know, I know, custom comment pages like all the cool kids use, but I'm still using an S1 style over there and never got around to figuring out how to port it to S2 and blargh. I also know about their new friends page plans and am not happy because I hate change and my computer hates fancy, so it's a double blargh. I may go to keeping up with LJ through RSS feeds and a desktop RSS reader. I can't even think of a good way to make Twitter less overwhelming; it's just a really unpredictable timesuck because so much of it is links to articles that I may or may not care about and casual conversations between people I semi-know, so checking it can take anywhere from a half an hour to eight hours, and I avoid checking it because I don't have the eight hours right now.)

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/294327.html, where it currently has comments. Comments at LiveJournal are now disabled due to my dislike of their new comment format.

Thank you, person or persons!

algeh — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:49:58 GMT

So, today has been kind of a strange (but awesome!) day for me in Dreamwidth-land.

There's a post in dw_biz about a possible future icon add-on feature and I've been following along and commenting (I have opinions on basically everything I read about ever, pretty much regardless of whether or not it affects my life in any way, so I love places like dw_biz where I can actually share those opinions in a useful and non-annoying way).

In the process of poking around the various FAQs and the DW shop to better inform my opinion on icon add-ons, I discover that someone (or several someones) has apparently gifted me some DW points, because I now have 350 of them and I know I haven't bought any. This is pretty cool, but I can't figure out who and I'm not sure whether or not that's intentional (because I can't find any associated "history" page to tell me when they were given and possibly tell me who, just that I have them now) so I decide to open a support request and see if there's such a "history page" and I just didn't find it.

I also go to eat dinner, because food is a good thing and I should really remember to eat instead of being on the computer all day.

When I come back from dinner, not only is there an answer to my support request (donated without an attached note, so they can't tell if it's meant to be anonymous or not and thus, understandably, won't tell me who gifted it, gift happened back in December) but I notice that I now have a paid account (since it lists account status by your name in the support area for troubleshooting reasons). Some additional person has just bought me two months of paid time (thank you, person)!

So, um, it's been a pretty neat day Dreamwidth-wise.

I've since dug through my email, which I pretty much completely didn't read in December between my head injury and the holidays, and discovered the original points were gifted by sandrylene. Thank you, and, um, this is why it took me so long to get around to thanking you.

Also, anyone else who's been wondering why I haven't been responding to your email, it's probably because I'm really terrible at email and never checked it for about a month. I'm sorry. It is almost certainly nothing personal.

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/290483.html, where it currently has comments. Comments at LiveJournal are now disabled due to my dislike of their new comment format.

Trying to make a go of this Dreamwidth thing

algeh — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:36:43 GMT

So it's been several weeks and the LJ changes are still, in fact, really annoying to me (and breaking all kinds of things, to the point that I'm still finding new broken things on a regular basis, such as current mood disappearing from my friends page), and LJ hasn't shown any signs of undoing them (ideally accompanied by profuse apologies and process changes to make them not happen again), so I'm trying to find more to do on Dreamwidth in an effort to slowly shift the bulk of my reading over by the process of not finding more things on LJ to read whenever I have more time, but instead finding more things to read on Dreamwidth.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I've been following lots of links and adding people and communities on Dreamwidth that sound vaguely interesting but I have no real pre-existing connection to. I plan to keep doing so whenever I've Bored On The Internet for at least the next week or two. If you're finding my journal as a result of that, this post is mostly my way of saying hi and letting you know that I'm adding people based on them saying something interesting somewhere and not based on, say, going to school with you in the 8th grade (although if any of you happened to go to my tiny hippy school in Portland that'd be a pretty awesome coincidence).

Also, between the possible new visitors and a curiosity about how many people are still reading actively in such a way that they might have questions, I'm throwing this post open to questions from the peanut gallery. I don't see any easy way to disable IP logging for just this entry so I'm keeping that on, and thus be aware that your anon comments may not be quite as anon as they could be. Aside from that, feel free to ask questions either anon or logged in (you can use OpenId to comment with your LJ account here if you prefer). I may or may not actually answer them, but I'll try. Some questions may be answered with "that's not something I discuss in unlocked posts" - I use a bunch of filters for different things rather than post vanilla locked posts so there's no clean way to do a locked question post without people getting a bunch of copies in a row.

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/289923.html, where it currently has comments. Comments at LiveJournal are now disabled due to my dislike of their new comment format.

Student loan hell

algeh — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:36:01 GMT

For whatever reason, one of my two student loans has changed servicers twice in the past few months (the other one changed last year, and it was a pretty terrible experience as well - I posted about it here but they've avoided doing anything obnoxious since, thankfully).

The previous time, in October, this involved them sending me an email 5 days before my bill was due informing me that they weren't actually going to get my bill printed in time due to the new processor but that I needed to send my payment in on time anyway, which was pretty obnoxious (particularly since the email didn't include how much the bill was for and I don't have online stuff set up with them, so I had to look at my checkbook to figure out how much the loan payment probably was). They then, of course, applied that payment late and sent me out the next month's bill noting that I now owed for two months (they were nice enough not to charge a late fee). After quite a bit of musical hold and automated phone menu hell I determined that they'd gotten my payment and I just owed the normal amount. Thankfully, the next month's bill also reflected this version of reality.

In December, I received a letter that they were changing payment processors again. Since the previous new processor hadn't exactly impressed me with their competence I hoped for the best from this. Unfortunately, I got the letter on the 23rd or so, and had already mailed my payment for the month to the old processor (my payments are due the 28th). The letter said that they'd forward the mail for 30 days, though, so it should work out fine.

Yesterday, I got a bill from the new processor, apparently run on the 29th, showing that they never got last month's payment. I was too damn cranky to call them today and ask if they've found my check yet, but tomorrow I guess I get another round of musical hold and automated menu adventures to see if they've gotten my check yet as I'm really not interested in making a double payment on my loans right now, nor am I interested in being reported late in payment to the credit bureau when I am, in fact, paying my loan on time.

I don't even have the words to be clever or snarky about all of this. I feel so trapped since it's a student loan and therefore not the kind of thing I can refi with a new company that hasn't pissed me off (I am a big fan of my local credit union in terms of financial institutions that have yet to piss me off). I can't afford to pay it off early, so I feel like I'm stuck dealing with this nonsense on an unpredictable basis until 2017.

Blargh.

I'm beginning to wish I'd never gone to grad school to become a math teacher in the first place. I can't find a damn job in this economy, these loans are almost as much as renting a room in someone's house each month, and I get undeserved accusations of not making payments regularly and a lot of stress sorting them out. I liked teaching when I could find work, but this is all pretty much ass.

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/289121.html, where it currently has comments. Comments at LiveJournal are now disabled due to my dislike of their new comment format.

Thoughts from New Year's

algeh — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:14:40 GMT

So, as I do most years, I went up to Seattle for Sean's birthday party on New Year's Eve. I meant to do an actual post about this, but then I got All Caught Up On The Internet instead of writing a post and I want to go to bed eventually, so you're getting more of an outline.

On the drive up, one of the other women at the rest stop was wearing a tail. I almost asked her if she was going to the same event I was, but didn't when I paused to think of the the name of the event I was attending, realized that I couldn't remember the name of the event I was attending, and then realized that this was, in turn, because I was going to a birthday party rather than a con, faire, housefilk, or other such event. This was probably the only time all year that I drove to Seattle without doing something fannish once I got there, and it's clear that going to Seattle has been firmly associated with such things in my mind at this point (especially since Steve sold his house and moved a while back, and Sean moved to the tri-cities, which have combined to decrease my non-fan Seattle houseparty invites substantially). (The tail-wearing woman was not at the birthday party, but this is much less surprising than it would otherwise be.)
I really need to find a nice place to hang out and decompress in south Seattle before actually going to wherever I'm trying to get. Now I always arrive in Seattle tired, grumpy, needing to pee, running about a half hour behind the time Google said it would take me, so glad to finally arrive at the address in question so I can finally get out of the damn car and WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO CIRCLE FOREVER TO FIND PARKING EVERYTHING IS RUINED AND I WANT TO SET SEATTLE ON FIRE. I don't know if all of Seattle is impossible to park in, but it seems like in the past few years all of the Seattle friends I've visited have lived places with really obnoxious on-street parking. Circling all over for parking while trying not to get lost in a place you've never been before really sucks, and doing so while really tired of driving and needing to pee does not improve the experience. Seattle also does all of their signage with with things like "No Parking West of Here", which is totally useless to me when I've been circling a neighborhood, not tracking all of my rambling turns, and had absolutely no idea which way was west to start with because it's not my city so I don't know the landmarks.
Relatedly, I had to park on-street in Seattle 4 times on New Year's Eve this year. Blargh. (I got to the house I was crashing at, but the people I was meeting were at that point at a bowling alley in Capital (Capitol?) Hill, which was of course not anywhere near the apartment I knew how to get to and had parked near before texting people to let them know I was in Seattle. The party then migrated to Belltown, and then I had to drive back to the apartment I was sleeping at, which was of course also not in Belltown.) The first time was the hardest because I was alone in the car and had no idea where the likely spots in that neighborhood would be.
Relatedly, I stayed sober enough to not need any cabs this year, which was one of my goals since getting a cab sucked last year. This made the Really Loud Bowling Alley less fun (I don't like loud music with lots of bass unless I am very drunk and probably also wearing earplugs) but otherwise didn't make New Year's any less fun (and probably made me a lot more fun to be around) so I'll try to keep it in mind for future years. Most years I try to keep up with Sean's drinking level, but this year he had such a head start by the time I got there (between 9 and 10 pm by the time I actually got to the bowling alley and parked) that it didn't seem reasonable to try to catch him (also they were at a bar when I got there, and I'm not going to get 5 or 6 drinks worth of drunk at Seattle bar prices).
I didn't get to spend too much "quality time" with Sean this time. Often, we stay up all night drinking and talking, but because I was crashing at Jeff's I had to leave the party around 3:30 am. Sean and I were going to meet up the next day, but his phone died so he didn't get any of my texts and I finally gave up and left Seattle about 1:00 pm after spending over an hour reading in my car while waiting for a text back. (Jeff had to work on New Year's Day and he also has cats, which are the most adorably snuggly allergens ever, so I cleared out of his apartment when I woke up a bit after 11, and grabbed semi-breakfast at 7-Eleven while waiting for Sean to get back to me regarding an actual meal.) I guess I should have texted Jenny as well when Sean didn't respond, but it didn't occur to me at the time because I don't have her number programmed into my texting phone. Sean and I did talk some at the party, but he was pretty drunk and also was trying to catch up with all of his other friends, so it wasn't as much rambling Sean and Linnea talk time as I'd like. I hope our lives eventually get to the point where we can see each other when we're not in a hurry or at a party.
Eating nothing but two terrible 7-Eleven donuts for breakfast and then driving all the way back to Portland without stopping for lunch is a dumb idea and I shouldn't do that. On the bright side, whole wheat pasta and a big kale salad for dinner when I got home was DELICIOUS and far better than anything I would have eaten if I'd stopped at a diner along the way. I need to figure out foods to pack in the car for trips like this because stopping at restaurants along the way isn't a great idea for either my budget or my food needs, so instead I sometimes talk myself out of eating at all. Picnics at rest stops seems to be the way to go, but I don't like or can't eat most typical picnic foods, so I need to think of things that I do like that can be eaten cold without a lot of fuss.
Gas was easily the biggest expense of the trip, probably coming in at about $50 (I filled up the tank for about $40, and it took somewhat more than one tank to get there and back). Food was a distant second. Actually hanging out with my friends was negligible, although I probably should have gotten Jeff a thank you present of some kind for letting me crash on his couch. (I brought a box of brandy-filled chocolates for a host gift, but because I thought the party would be at Jeff's and then it wasn't I only brought one box and left it at the party house rather than the sleeping house.) Normally I'd have bought him breakfast the next day as a thank you, but he had to work.

Anyway, that was New Year's. I'm going to try to actually be active on Dreamwidth this year and see if I can recapture the spirit of online journaling, but I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'll stick with it. I just don't find what I have to say about my day as interesting as I did when I was younger, and I don't think I'll ever get back to the long, rambling, oversharing, whiny entries I used to write on my first webjournal (which is probably for the best).

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/288975.html, where it currently has comments. Comments at LiveJournal are now disabled due to my dislike of their new comment format.

Screw it

algeh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:26:35 GMT

Screw you LiveJournal and the horse you rode in on.

(Yes, I am mad about them re-doing the comments pages. I WAS USING THOSE OPTIONS. Also, encouraging people to post more damn videos and images in the comments where they can't be put behind a cut is the last thing I want.)

I am now closing comments on LJ on my crossposted posts going forward. I plan to continue to crosspost the posts themselves for both public and locked posts for the time being. I'll make another post if that changes. Commenting will now be on DW only.

Anyway, my understanding is that Dreamwidth doesn't require invite codes through the end of the year, so I encourage you to get a DW account. If you don't, feel free to comment with your LJ account using OpenID, which will also let you see and comment on any friends locked posts you're able to see on LJ. If I don't already know who you are on Dreamwidth and you don't mind your LJ and DW being linked to the same person, pleaser comment here with both your LJ (using OpenID) and DW accounts to let me know that you're the same person so I can add you to the appropriate filters and such.

I apologize for the extra login step for those of you who are usually on LJ yet want to comment, but I'm really sick of how LJ treats the userbase these years and it's time to take one more step away from using them for my personal stuff. To my knowledge, they never even addressed anyone's concerns from the last news post and just went ahead and implemented the changes despite it being less functionality without explaining why the change was necessary.

This post originates at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/282451.html, where it currently has comments. Comments at LiveJournal are now disabled due to my dislike of their new comment format.

Adventures in head injury

algeh — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:24:44 GMT

This is going to be stupidly long and rambly post about how my week has been going. Since I know not everyone has time (or interest) to read such a thing, I'll summarize the important parts above the cut:

1) I am now home from the hospital.
2) I am basically fine.
3) I have health insurance, so hopefully this won't spiral into a giant, credit-destroying financial disaster and I'm not asking for donations from people or anything of that sort.

On Monday (December 12th) I woke up about 5:15 in the morning with terrible period-type cramps. My period wasn't due for another week or so, but I got up and went to the bathroom to check anyway. The next thing I remember is kneeling on the floor with my head in the tub and the shower curtain and being REALLY CONFUSED (although I think I would have found having my head being in a shower curtain like that confusing regardless). I had a lot of trouble getting up and started yelling for my dad (I live with my dad). I was having trouble seeing and understanding what was going on, but I somehow managed to get the bathroom door unlocked and open before falling down again, which is when my dad found me. I'm pretty sure I was yelling that I needed to go to the emergency room. My vision was pretty white and my ears were whistling, and the whole thing was pretty frightening.

After lying on the floor for a while, I felt well enough to get up and get dressed so I at least would have normal clothes on while waiting in the emergency room. By the time I'd gotten dressed, I felt well enough to wait until my doctor's office opened for the day so I could call her rather than going to emergency, so I went downstairs and discovered the joys of morning television (one of the cable channels is re-running Quantum Leap!). I left a message with my doctor's receptionist around 8, but it took until about noon before she had time to actually deal with it (this is one of the perils of having a solo-practice doctor - she had another emergency that day as well). By this point I felt basically fine but hungover, so I wasn't in a huge hurry to get to the doctor. I spent some time tweeting back and forth with The Doubleclicks about a dream I'd had (in the dream we were arguing about which was the worst episode of season 2 Star Trek TNG, and the awesome thing about liking local geeky bands is that in the waking world they also have opinions on this and will share them when asked) and generally goofed off on the internet. Eventually my doctor called back and sent me to the emergency room.

I decided that, having been to the emergency room before and knowing how long it takes, I was DEFINITELY eating lunch first. This was a very wise decision, as I wouldn't manage to get any more food until after 9 that night. My dad drove me to the emergency room after we ate, and I got there some time between 1 and 1:30 in the afternoon. After getting checked in, they put us in a room with a clock three hours off, so it was on Samoa/Midway time. I would eventually decide that this is because this is my tropical island vacation, as it will cost at least that much. I got to have all kinds of fun tests, including both a CT scan and an MRI. Also, although I didn't find this out until later, my doctor was at the hospital looking for me, but they'd told her I was already admitted so she was on a completely different floor and not in the emergency department. They eventually ruled out all of the really scary things they could think of, decided that I didn't need neurosurgery or anything along those lines, and my doctor concluded that the original cramping was probably an ovarian cyst and that I presumably passed out from the pain and wasn't likely to do more passing out. They also decided that I had a concussion and admitted me to the hospital for the night for observation.

I finally got to my hospital room about 10 minutes before the kitchen closed for the night, so I ended up with a dinner consisting of the first three things I could think of that I wouldn't be allergic to, which was pretty much a lot of raw vegetables and a lot of the same vegetables, but steamed this time (also a fruit plate, which I ordered every single meal because I never think to buy fruit at the grocery store for some reason so it was a novelty to be able to eat fruit all the time). At least they had milk so I could get something with more protein in it (being a vegetarian that needs to avoid soy, there are some situations where I just can't eat any of the intended main courses). They never assigned me a hospital-based doctor, just my normal doctor, which struck me as kind of odd. They also put me on fall watch, which meant I had to call someone before getting out of bed, which was really irritating since all I wanted to do at that point was drink all the water I possibly could (since they wouldn't let me have any in the emergency department all afternoon) and resultantly pee pretty often. I'd had a headache all day, and I wanted to figure out if it was from the concussion or from dehydration. After the first few times the nurse did at least give me two water bottles so I could pester them for refills less often.

The next morning they took me off of fall watch, which meant I could at least wander my room. Breakfast was a lot easier to order than dinner because they served eggs (although they somehow manage to put soy in their poached eggs, which is pretty mystifying to me as normal people poach eggs in water, so I had to have hard boiled instead) and oatmeal, so I actually got a meal that resembled what I'd have made at home rather than a healthy-but-not-very-satisfying vegetable festival. It was a really boring morning, though, as they still hadn't assigned me a hospital-based doctor so we were waiting for my regular doctor to come over on her lunch break. At least I'd brought two books and a video game system (as I've mentioned, I've been to the emergency room before) so I had something to do while I waited. I spent quite a while brainstorming with the food services people over lunch, but ended up with a pretty nice rice and beans focused lunch that bore limited resemblance to anything on the menu, so that worked out well in the end (they gave me a printed in-room menu, but it didn't list ingredients so it was pretty much impossible for me to guess which things would have soy in them). It also helps that I like broccoli without any kind of sauce, so it was easy for me to get a vegetable side.

My doctor could finally get up there after I ate lunch and cleared me to go home. The hospital didn't really give me any information on what restrictions I should be under once I got there or what to expect, which I now realize means I should have kept pushing until someone came in to talk to me in more depth. My doctor did talk to me, but she's really not a specialist in things like concussions and didn't have a bunch of concussion-focused handouts or anything to give me (to my knowledge she does primary care, gynecological stuff, and acupuncture - she's always referred me to specialists for anything far outside of those areas). Anyway, I was told by my doctor that I was fine to drive and generally resume my normal activities, but no drinking for 7-10 days, and no contact sports or major jumping around for about two months, and I should avoid situations in which I might fall (like walking the kind of dogs that drag you around - I currently only work with one dog with a history of doing that to people, and he's not scheduled for the next few months so it shouldn't be an issue). When I got home, I took a shower (since I hadn't wanted to the morning before so soon after fainting, and I'd known I'd be going home that day so didn't want to do so at the hospital that morning) and drove over to see my grammy, who had called me several times while I was in the hospital and was generally worried sick about me. (She's finally given up driving, so she couldn't come visit me in the hospital on her own, and they had a two visitors at a time limit so she couldn't have come the previous night because my mom was too nervous to drive and had her husband drive her over to visit rather than driving herself.)

Grammy and I went out to dinner (which we usually do on Tuesdays, becuase I want to make sure she gets out of the house on a regular basis and has something to look forward to each week) and I was feeling pretty good so I went to my usual Tuesday bar trivia afterward even though I couldn't drink. It went pretty well (we lost by two points, there was at least one question I was the only person on my team to know the answer for, and we both gained points due to things I argued for and lost points due to things I argued for, so I couldn't reasonably have been much more less help to the team if I'd been more or less assertive about speaking up), but when I tried to read the ingredients on the candy we got as a consolation prize the words wouldn't stay still and my eyes were really dilated, so I got to go back to the damn emergency room again. Fortunately, someone else on my team could drive me and knew where that hospital was, so I didn't have to try to navigate there myself. Someone else on my team covered both of our bar bills (mine was only for an herbal tea, but still), so I really need to think of something nice to do for the team next week.

At the emergency room, I got my first vision test since 8th grade (I could read line 10 on the vision chart, so I suspect I still don't need glasses, although this obviously wasn't a full eye exam) and to sit in an eye-focused room instead of the normal emergency room from yesterday. After talking with me about the extent of the problem and doing some more vision and balance tests, they told me that was reasonably normal for post-concussion and that I wouldn't really be "back to normal" for a month or two. They also gave me a nice handout of what symptoms were going to be "normal" for me for a while and what symptoms meant I needed to come right back, which I really wish that someone would have given me when I was discharged earlier that afternoon. Thinking "here we go again" and going back to the emergency room was a ton of extra stress for me and my family (dad met me there while mom and Tom rescued my car), and it's not like my bar trivia friends, as smart and widely-knowledgeable as they are to let us win so often, should be fonts of knowledge on post-concussion symptoms and what does and doesn't merit an emergency room trip, and generally goofy vision + head injury = emergency room. I'm sure if I'd been home and mentioned those symptoms to my dad he would have made me go back to emergency too, because that's just what people do.

Anyway, the good news is that I'm home now (I'm going to go rescue my car from my mom's house tomorrow - I gave both of my parents keys to my car way back when I first started driving just in case I locked myself out, and that pays off in situations like this) and that my insurance lets you apply any expenses in the last quarter of the year to the next year's deductible, so I should have easily met 2012 deductible with all of this and, depending on how much the remaining bills from this end up being, may make 2012 the year of dealing with all of those little nagging health problems that build up because they're not urgent and not that obnoxious, but should be dealt with sooner or later (for example, I get a rash on my hands from pretty much any soap other than Dove sensitive skin, and I'd love to see a dermatologist to see if there's any kind of cream or something I can use to protect my hands in situations like cons when I'm washing my hands in public restrooms a lot or at least get them to heal faster afterward).

I'm also very grateful that Oregon has a thing called portability insurance, which required my insurance company to sell me an individual portability policy without a health questionnaire when my COBRA from them ran out in October, because otherwise I would probably be uninsured right now. Before this I was reasonably healthy, by which I mean this is probably the first time in my adult life that I've used more in benefits than I've paid in premiums in a given year (most years the only time I see the doctor is for my annual women's exam and maybe once for something like strep throat), but insurance companies are incredibly picky about who they'll take for individual policies generally and I've been rejected for individual insurance before after completing the health questionnaire.

So anyway, I have a headache the comes and goes and sometimes just feel a little off, and I'm holding myself to a lower standard of both grammar and overall construction on this post than I usually would, because I wanted to get this post out there and I also want to go to bed. At this point I'm not really sure if the injury means I'll be on the internet more or less. So far, looking at a monitor doesn't seem to create any vision problems, so I suspect more since I'll be taking it easy and sticking around the house more. We'll see.

This post is also available at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/282158.html. There are currently comments there. Feel free to comment in either location.

Мои твиты

algeh — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 06:14:35 GMT

Чт, 23:58: RT @gfish: If you're not following the #mockupy news, do so. The whole world is about to collapse into a meta singularity of awesomeness.

Three rejected holiday card photos and how to get the winner

algeh — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:20:24 GMT

On Tuesday, I took Annabelle the Basset Hound to a local park in an effort to get Christmas card photos to send out to my pet-sitting clients. It was pretty much a fiasco, and I've concluded that if I do this again I'll have to bribe someone else to go along to either camera-wrangle or dog-wrangle.

If you'd like a card mailed to you, please comment to this post (on either Dreamwidth or LiveJournal) with your mailing address. Comments will be screened, although I'll unscreen comments that don't include an address.

I'm sharing three of the outtakes here. At least I didn't have to pay money to have these developed.

Wrong end, Annabelle.

Improper hat use, Annabelle.

The expression on my face is what happens when you already know the picture is ruined.

So anyway, while the card I'm sending out will not be a beautifully posed masterpiece, it will be much, much better than any of those.

This post is also available at http://algeh.dreamwidth.org/282033.html. There are currently comments there. Feel free to comment in either location.

My tweets

algeh — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:54:38 GMT

Tue, 09:13: Spent several minutes deciding if wool socks were a pair or if they belonged to different pairs. Conclusion: one was inside out. #coffeenow

OryCon 33

algeh — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:47:55 GMT

I went to OryCon 33 over the weekend. I'm always so tired and out of social interaction points by the time I get done with a con that I never get con reports typed up. I'm making myself get one written up this time because I do enjoy reading everyone else's.

As per usual, I mostly spent time hanging out in the filk room with some excursions to other tracks during breaks in the filk programming or when something looked particularly interesting. This is also a commuter con for me, which makes it harder for me to get to morning stuff because I sleep in and eat a big meal at home before I go to the con each day.

Friday

I was worried about whether or not they'd lost my pre-reg because I'd looked up my badge name (Algeh), my first name, and my first and last name on their website reg-checker and it kept telling me I wasn't registered. (I just tried it again today, and it turned out that I also needed to put in my middle name, and it came up registered with all three names present, but when the only instructions are "Enter your name here to see if you are registered" and a single text field I don't leap immediately to putting in my full name like that, particularly when it seems to be checking character by character as I typed, so I kind of assumed it was looking at partial matches and that no one whose name started Al was in its system when it told me "Yes you are Registered" when I typed A and switched to "No you are NOT Registered" when I typed the l. Also, I'm pretty sure that in previous years this kind of information was dispensed by badge name rather than real name and was usually in the form of a list everyone could see so you could see which of your friends were going. I could just be getting mental con cross-pollination on that one though, since that's how Conflikt does it.)

However, they did have my registration waiting for me when I got there, so it all worked out. The line was also fairly short. Annoyingly, I got to wait in it twice as they were giving out the parking discount passes at registration this year and no one told me this as I picked up my badge (there was a sign, but it was over in the non-pre-reg area so I didn't see it when getting my badge). (Over the course of the con I got to wait in the reg line 4 times as a result of this new policy, as opposed to the two times - getting my badge on Friday and registering for the next OryCon on Sunday - I normally would.)

After I got my badge I hung out and talked to some of the filkers for a while, mostly runnerwolf. (I'd allowed extra time for a argument at reg over whether or not I'd pre-reg'ed, so I had some extra time before any of the panels I was interested in.) Then I hit up one of the "ex-military people and military SF writers" panels (there are a group of guys who are on a bunch of panels together each year that more or less boil down to this, and I generally attend whichever one fits my schedule best regardless of declared topic) before I disappeared into the filk track.

The Friday night concert track was a little different this year. We had a couple who played mostly eastern European folk music in addition to some of the usual filkers, and we had at least two filkers get stuck in traffic and miss part or all of a panel or concert they were scheduled for. Also Frank Hayes was at Windycon so Orycon had other people doing covers of his stuff in place of his usual Friday night concert. The concerts we had were all worthwhile, though. I always enjoy hearing Cecilia Eng, and it was nice to get the variety of the folk musicians and the different musicians covering Frank's stuff.

I skipped the Megatherium concert because they've been way too loud for me in the past and went to a panel that was basically people who've been doing cons forever swapping stories. I was tempted to tell the story of the time Guy Letournaeu (who was also in the audience for this panel) showed up at my anime club barbecue with two vanfuls of people without warning me first, but decided that I shouldn't talk because he was the only person in the room I even vaguely knew and it was a pretty "in-group" kind of panel. I was probably the only person there who'd been attending cons less than 10 years (I'm pretty sure my first con was a SakuraCon back in 2003, and my first SF con was an OryCon in 2006). They decided to keep going past their scheduled time because no one was in the room after them (OryCon is TERRIBLE for this kind of thing - constant schedule-slippage and no concept of passing time between panels) but I decided to go check out The Doubleclicks instead despite only the vaguest of descriptions in the program book. I am glad I went, for they are exactly the kind of thing I like. (I was worried they'd be another rockish group that would be too loud for me, but they were acoustic and at a reasonable volume.)

Friday open filking was bardic-style, as is traditional for OryCon Friday nights. A lot of familiar faces were missing this year, and I don't really know why. If any of you who couldn't make it are reading this, you were missed. However, the smaller crowd made for a much more manageable bardic, and it took almost exactly an hour the first time around and only slightly longer the second time. It then took a half hour the third time and pretty much petered out soon after that. Quality-wise, there was never a logical time for me to take a bathroom break (I usually try to time them for when someone is going to play something that they play every con and I am getting a little sick of because I see them several times a year) which is a good problem to have (I finally snuck out while Cecilia was playing her song about the werewolf game, which I have at least heard several times before although I'm not sick of it). It seems like we ended a little earlier than usual this year, which may have been due to the smaller circle as well. (I suspect that most filkers only have two or three songs that they are invested in getting a chance to play in a night of bardic and are willing to give up and go to bed after that point.)

I made a brief pass through the room parties because open filking ended so early, but there wasn't much to hold my interest that late at night. If I'd been staying in the hotel and thus able to have a drink I probably would have found more to do, as the parties seemed to be either drinking-focused, dancing-focused, or catching-up-with-old-friends-focused at that hour.

On the never-ending filk argument front (yes, I read the Emerald Forest Filk list in August, why do you ask?), I took stats of requests and how many requests each person answered. (Because of the way I take notes, I don't have data on who requested each song or whether each request was for a specific song, a specific person, or for a specific topic open to multiple potential filkers, nor do I have data on unanswered requests. I just put a * by the performer's name if it was a request as I was writing the song listings.) Out of the approximately 20-25 people in the room, either 7 or 8 (depending on whether or not you count a duo as one or two people) answered requests, 4 of them more than once. No one answered more than 3 requests, and neither of the 3-request answerers had a solo concert at OryCon this year. I don't have a good direct measure of who is and isn't a "big name" (and I'm unwilling to base that on a personal judgment call), but only 12 people performed more than one song at the bardic (which I'm trying as a not-terrible measure of who might have enough material and energy to answer requests if asked, although two of the requestees played only their one requested song and passed or requested songs of others on their turns, so this may not be a very good measure after all) and only 15 total different people performed, so it seems like the requests were fairly well-distributed on this occasion. The most songs anyone performed was one filker with 7, followed by another with 6 and one or two with 5 (there are a few things I'm not sure how to count). These were all filkers who pretty much stayed until the end, which helped them in racking up their relatively-large totals. The most songs performed by someone who received no requests was 4. I'm not counting backing/supporting roles in these stats when possible, and I also don't have good data on how long anyone was or wasn't in the room when not performing and thus was available for requests. I am including spoken-word pieces in these totals, but not things like announcements. I assume that all sides heavily invested in the never-ending filk argument in question are now pointing their fingers at their monitors and yelling SEE!, but I wanted to put the data out there regardless. I have no interest in posting names along with the data generally, but if you want to know how many songs you personally performed I'll be glad to tell you (and give you recordings of your own work if you want them, although it will take me a while to edit them out of the larger sound file).

Saturday
In a fit of unusual optimism (and a desire to support OryCon programming in trying new things) I decided to sign up for the band scramble, which was new to the con this year. Unfortunately, only 5 people signed up, so I ended up in a duo, and I'm not a strong enough musician to bring much to a duo on 24 hours notice. (I was hoping to get to do harmony or supporting vocals in a larger group.) Also, there was no logical time or space for rehearsal, which was kind of a mess. I don't know if everyone participating was supposed to show up at noon when they announced the bands and then go off with their band to form a plan, but in practice this didn't happen and I didn't happen to cross paths with my bandmate until later in the afternoon. (If the con does this again next year, I suggest announcing the bands right before dinner break on Friday night or during sound check for one of the after-dinner bands on Friday to give people more time to locate their bandmates and pick rehearsal times. It would also be nice, if possibly impractical, to have some space set aside with some filk books, a computer, and a scanner/copier to facilitate bands picking songs and getting everyone a copy. A time and space set aside for rehearsal would be awesome but almost certainly impractical.)

Anyway, I spent the middle of Saturday not finding my bandmate, getting too hot in the dealer's room (I swear it was like a sauna in there this year, and that kept me from lingering long enough to actually buy stuff), not being able to find the right booth to buy the Doubleclicks CD at (later in the day, I finally discovered it was a fan table rather than a dealer and so I was looking in the wrong room entirely) and finally getting enough anxiety going that I needed to check out for a while (not knowing what I am supposed to do or where I am supposed to go causes a lot of anxiety for me, which makes trying new things hard). I finally ended up going to another of the "ex-military people and military SF writers" panels just because it'd be in a small room that hopefully wouldn't be overcrowded and I could sit near the door and not interact with people. It ended up being a pretty good panel, too. Then I caught a space-focused panel (another thing I try to hit at least once each con) before heading back to my "home" at the filk track.

The Eugenics concert (for the non-locals, it's a pun based on the band's hometown, Oregon's third-largest city) was pretty good, although I remembered the band having more members last year so was initially surprised to just see a duo this year (another case of filkers who couldn't make the con this year for one reason or another, I suspect). I think the highlight for me was watching admnaismith wander into the audience to entertain a small child with a stuffed bear puppet during a song that only Dave was playing on. It just summed up a lot of the best part of the filk community to me, as I can't think of many other places where musicians would be able to do such a thing. (As an aside, I also appreciate that admnaismith posted a track list in his journal, as it helped me correct the song titles in my notes. For whatever reason, the norm in the filk community is not to announce the name of each song before you play it, so I often have no idea what a lot of the songs I like are called unless the performer gets a CD out or posts them all to a website somewhere.) The actual music was pretty awesome, too. I finally touched base with my bandmate at around this time, and we concluded that we had no shared spare time until open filking. This is the peril of trying to add in one more thing on a Saturday at a con. I stayed to listen to the jam, then decided that my nerves needed a nice, quiet sit-down dinner all by myself, so I walked over to Village Inn. I have no idea where everyone else goes to eat at the con, but it's clear that Village Inn isn't it, and it was nicely quiet for me.

After dinner Katie Tinney performed with her temporarily-named band Bowl of Monocles, then Vixy and Tony went on. Katie did a nice mix of originals, covers, and traditional tunes, and Vixy and Tony surprised me by having quite a bit of new material since the last time I'd heard them. I'm glad I decided to stay for their concert. (I almost didn't because I didn't want to be too overwhelmed to see Tempest later and considered ducking into another of the "ex-military people and military SF writers" panels to let my batteries recharge a bit.)

Tempest was the music GOH this year and had their concert in the main ballroom rather than over with the rest of the filk programming. As a result, open filking technically started in the midst of their performance, and I hear from other con reports that I missed some good stuff by going to the concert. The con staff did a good job of running the concert, making sure that people in scooters and wheelchairs were able to get in before others and answering my question about audio recording without me having to go bug the band personally (I generally record all music performances at cons, and I try to ask performers that I haven't recorded before whether or not that's ok with them, but I didn't feel like it was appropriate to pester a band with that big of a crowd while they were trying to get set up - I generally try to ask before/during sound check while the performer in question is waiting for their turn with the sound people but the room was closed during sound check in this case). I suspect that Tempest is the kind of thing I'd really enjoy at a venue like Faireworlds where (a) I'm not baby-sitting my audio recorder and a bag full of my con stuff, (b) I'm able to get further away from the band and their speakers since it's outside, and (c) I've been drinking. They seemed like a fun band to dance to, but dancing is just not something I enjoy doing sober (particularly on days when I've already had anxiety problems). I enjoyed the concert anyway (although I really, really wish I'd brought earplugs) and I expect that I'll enjoy listening to the CD I picked up as well.

Open filking (chaos-style, as is traditional on Saturday nights at Orycon) was lightly attended, probably as a result of the concert going so late. I got there about 11:20, and it ended before 2 am. I don't think we ever even got up to 20 people, but the people who were there were more than able to carry the circle, so the net result was probably that those in attendance got to perform the things they'd been wanting to perform rather than feeling stifled by a really competitive circle as happens some years. Unless someone really wants me to, I'm not going to post a bunch of stats from the chaos filk, particularly since I didn't get there until after the concert so I don't have a complete record. I've also finally gotten to the point where I know almost everyone who performs in the circle's name, which is a lot of progress for me because I'm terrible at matching names and faces. I've been keeping notes of who plays what in circles for a year now, and on both Friday and Saturday nights I was able to either read badges or get up the nerve to ask the few people who I was still writing descriptions rather than names for. I'm sure I'm still spelling a few wrong or only know either a badge name or a real name for some others, but that's a smaller problem to work on. I also need to do a better job of learning the names of the other listeners. That will be my next project, but I'm not quite sure how to approach it.

Also, at the very end of open filking my bandmate and I finally got a chance to try our song for the band scramble, and I discover that it's a tune I completely don't know for the verses (I'd sung along with the chorus enough times in previous open filks that I had that fairly solid.) When I got home, I poked at Wikipedia and pulled up a page from a 1907 hymnal for what Wikipedia says is the tune for the original song the filk is based on. (I am a very visual person, and the best way for me to learn a song involves sheet music and a piano. The second best way involves just the sheet music. Listening to a song a bunch of times is not nearly as effective, or I would have just recorded my bandmate singing it and played the recording a bunch of times before I went to bed. This is one reason that I don't generally perform in filk circles - if I haven't specifically prepped and rehearsed something or have the sheet music in front of me it will be a total train wreck.)

Sunday
In the interest of coherency and emotional stability, I decided to skip the 10:30 am Alexander James Adams concert and sleep in and eat a large breakfast before leaving home. Most years, I skip eating breakfast, go to his concert, and then eat a big brunch or lunch right afterwards at some place that does bottomless coffee (Village Inn is a pretty good choice, as they leave an actual carafe of coffee on the table). However, this year I knew that wouldn't work because the band scramble was at 1:00 so if I were to have any shot at practicing with my bandmate at all I was going to have to skip lunch. If I were to skip both breakfast and lunch I'd be a big, whiny meltdown waiting to happen, so I decided to let that concert go this year. It was fortunate that I did, because the concert ran late and thus one of the judges missed part of the song contest he was judging because he was at the concert and didn't realize that the contest was going to start on time even if the concert was still going on (I suspect that other people at the contest had made a similar sleep and food vs. Alec trade-off and weren't aware that the concert was running late). This in turn let my recording-everything habit be actually useful to someone other than me, and I handed him my recordings of the already-performed songs so he could get caught up while we waited for the final performer (who had also been at the concert and had no idea that the contest was running on time rather than waiting) to show up and get ready.

At around this point, my bandmate and I discovered that the tune he knew for that song was different from the one Wikipedia gave me and I'd been practicing all morning. That's when we decided to give up and just have us both sing everything and not try anything at all fancy (the previous plan had been to alternate verses and both sing on the chorus). I'd just have to sing quieter during the parts that I was fuzzy on the tune for, because the only other option at that point was beatboxing, and that would have been an even worse idea. (This did, however, give us our band name, which was "Plan B is Beatboxing".)

Because the band scramble had only two acts and an hour allocated for the performances, they very nicely gave us a little more rehearsal time, so we did at least sing the damn song all the way through together once before getting on stage. I also got to try out my partially-written "Dollar Tree" filk (tto "Lemon Tree") as my sound check song, which was kind of fun. (I'm going to try to finish this before Conflikt, so if any instrumentalist out there would like to learn how to play Lemon Tree before then it would be appreciated. Unless I lose my mind and decide to sign up for a two-shot, this would be something I'd do during open filking. If I actually get the words finished and am happy with them I'll start asking around more thoroughly, but I'm also optimistic that it's a common enough folk tune that I'd be able to find someone spontaneously at the con, particularly if I bring the chords with me.) I'm pretty sure the actual performance was a train wreck on my part, but we got all the way through without stopping and giving up, which is always goal #1. I tried to emote the song with facial expressions, but realized partway through that it probably looked more like I was making faces at my own performance instead so I stopped. I have not yet listened to my recording of it and I'm not sure I will. The other group did a much better job, and had words written by one of their group members to boot. I felt kind of bad that my bandmate was stuck with me rather than them.

I then went to the con feedback panel, which I try to do in years when it doesn't compete with a concert. I'm bad at knowing when to talk and when to shut up at things like that, but I hope I handled myself appropriately this year. I suspect that this was one of those years in which balls got dropped along the way earlier in the year and concom spent the con scrambling trying to fix things, but was well aware of where those failings were well before the feedback panel started (since they'd spent the con trying to fix them), so I tried not bring up some of the more glaring issues along those lines. One of the most interesting moments that shows how these long-running cons can get totally entrenched in a certain way of thinking is probably worth mentioning here, though. Someone else mentioned that he'd like to see more panels that were reader-focused rather than writer-focused in the literary track. The explanation he got back had to do with panels being chosen on the basis of which ones the panelists want to be on and on the basis of which ones go well with the panelists they have, which to me kind of missed the point. Obviously writers want to be on panels where they can (a) talk about writing and (b) promote their books. Readers, who probably make up a much greater proportion of the con membership than writers, would like some panels about, say, which other books they might want to be reading if they like a certain author or subgenre that are less well known or older and they may have missed when they came out. The logical thing to me at this point is to recruit some new panelists who know a lot about different books rather than asking author-panelists who already have a dog in that fight to be on those panels, and I suggested that librarians would be excellent panelists for those types of panels. Someone else offered to give programming a list of several local librarians he knew who already attend the con, so maybe something will come of that. I'd personally like to see more outreach to people like educators and librarians generally (I suspect that teachers without a whole lot to say on a topic would do a better job as panel moderators in some of the rowdier panels compared to people with more invested in the topic and little other experience in managing a group of people who all want to talk, for starters), but I also admit that I'll spend most of the con in the filk room no matter how much they do what I want in the rest of the tracks, so it's perfectly reasonable to ignore suggestions from me if they aren't things other people want too.

The last formal con programming I attended was a Betsy Tinney concert, and it was a wonderful way to end the con. The number of people, most of whom were pretty tired by then and many of whom had a long drive ahead of them, who showed up for a concert of mostly instrumental cello music was pretty impressive, and Betsy did a wonderful job of performing it. She also did an excellent job of speaking between songs, and I wonder why that task does not more often fall to her when performing in groups. (I suspect it's because she doesn't usually have a vocal mike, and that's kind of a disappointing reason.)

Rather than a dead-dog filk we mostly had a chance for people to actually talk to each other. One of the few things I dislike about filk is how little time there is to have conversations and get to know people at conventions. Because it's rude to talk while people are performing, there is very little time for casual conversation. OryCon filkers used to all go out to dinner together one of the nights (I think it was Saturday night) but that tradition seems to have ended with the new hotel as there isn't an obvious choice for a nearby restaurant that would work well for us. I think the dead dog is also more sparsely attended because Powells does an author event on the Sunday afternoon of OryCon and a lot of people go over to that. I decided I was too broke to get dinner out again and come back to see if dead dog filking would happen in hospitality later, so I just went home, had dinner, and went to bed early. (There was no time in my day for lunch, so skipping dinner was not a good option.) I didn't wake up until after noon today and I never did manage to go outside or talk to anyone. I will probably go rescue the newspaper before I go to sleep, but putting on socks just seems like an unreasonable demand today.

Personal observations/what worked and didn't work about how I managed the con

This section is mostly notes-to-self stuff about what I can do to make future conventions go smoothly for me, kind of like an internal feedback panel.

On both Saturday and Sunday, I made a full pot of coffee at home and poured half of it into two Contigo travel mugs that I'd gotten at Costco a few months before. (I like these mugs and water bottles because they are virtually impossible to spill from as you have to hold down a button to keep the spout open. I call them my "adult sippy cups". I wish they'd make travel mugs with carabiners like their water bottles, though.) This worked out pretty well. The coffee was still warm (if not overly hot) by the time I drank the second mug in the evening, and it saved me from paying $2 for each cup of coffee out someplace. I'll have to remember this strategy for future commuter cons. (It may not work quite the same for cons where I stay at hotels because the in-room coffee makers tend to be tiny, so I'd have to make multiple pots and they don't often give you enough coffee and filters to do that.)

I need to find some additional food to keep in my con bag besides cashews. I like cashews, and they certainly helped when I got hungry, but I feel that some sort of vegetable would have helped nutritionally. I didn't want to haul around an insulated lunch sack or worry about the food getting crushed, so I think I went too minimal here. I just can't think of anything other than nuts or dried fruit that can hang out at the bottom of my bag all weekend and not get crushed or otherwise gross. Adding the two travel mugs meant that there really wasn't much space left for food in non-crushable containers. I at least need to add some dried fruit next time, and ideally some sort of veggie. I might also want to get another travel mug and fill it with milk or drinkable soup, but sour milk would smell and taste awful and I worry that it's hard to get these mugs completely clean (which is less of an issue with coffee).

Eating one meal at home (brunch), one meal out (dinner), and otherwise packing snacks seems like it'll mostly work for me. I get really hungry again around midnight or 1 am, but I suspect that I'd have that problem even if I ate separate breakfasts and lunches. This year I ate mall pizza on Friday and breakfast for dinner at Village Inn on Saturday. I'd like to find less carby options next year so dinner sticks with me a little better, but it's hard to find protein-heavy food I can eat (vegetarian and not made of soy) out places.

For my home-meals this year I'd cooked up a bunch of black beans on Thursday and made bean and cheese burritos each day. That worked out really well, and 2 cups of dried beans was just about perfect to get me through Thursday dinner and one meal per day of the con. Since that's just microwaving after the initial bean-cooking, I may bring the pre-made stuff for this to hotel cons in the future, although I've found it really difficult to get a refrigerator and microwave in my room at cons before so I may skip it rather than bring my own microwave and a cooler. It's nice to have one filling meal a day that I know doesn't contain anything I'm sensitive to, though. (I have only one food - bell peppers - that I'm severely allergic to but many foods that I'll get varying degrees of sick after I eat or, in some cases, eat more than once every few days. This means that I can be reasonably non-picky about what I eat once or twice a con, but at the cost of being really fussy the rest of the time. I try to save the non-picky meals for times I'm going to eat in groups.)

I felt really overwhelmed and anxious for a while on Saturday, and the thing that sucks about commuting to a con is that there's no place to go to be alone. It's particularly bad at OryCon because they put hospitality an elevator-ride away and elevators make my anxiety worse, so I didn't go up to see if it was reasonably empty or really crowded. This is the one thing I miss about their old hotel - hospitality could be reached using stairs from most of the programming spaces so I'd go check it out a lot more often. I finally just decided to go to panels in small rooms and sit near the door for a few hours, which helped somewhat. This was also part of why I decided to got to Village Inn for dinner, because for some reason it's not popular with con attendees so this is the second year I've gone and it hasn't been at all crowded.

I need to seek out some people to specifically hang out with at cons. I ate dinner alone both nights this year, and I probably didn't need to do that if I'd be proactive in asking people if they wanted to go to dinner with me. The second night I really needed the alone time, but I probably should have asked a few people if any of them wanted to walk over to the food court on Friday night. I can tell I'm on the fringes of the social group, and if I want to make any progress with that I need to both make sure I'm on my best behavior so people want to include me and to try to reach out to other people.

So anyway, that was OryCon. As with every year, I have moments when I wonder why I keep doing this to myself and other moments when I remember why I keep coming back. I've already bought my membership for next year, and this year I also offered to volunteer before, but not during, the con (with my anxiety I don't want to commit in advance to doing anything in particular during the con so I can adjust my con schedule as needed if I'm having a day when I can't handle much). We'll see if they take me up on that.

Next up: possible December housefilk at my dad's place in Aloha (I'm not sure that there's enough interest, so I need to put out a few more feelers before committing) and then Conflikt in January.

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So, I got a twitter (Algeh_T)

algeh — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:12:16 GMT

I gave up and got a twitter account because I realized that I had no current contact info for some of my friends and it seemed less obnoxious than facebook (among other things, I generally click out of a sign-up process if it requires me to specify a gender). If you're interested, I'm on there as Algeh_T .

(I have no idea why anyone else would want the username Algeh - I use it as a nickname because it's what I got when a non-native speaker of English misunderstood and tried to write down my initials "L.J." as a name once. I'd just decided to go by my initials instead of my name because I was tired of the "Linnea. L - I - N - N - E - A. Thank you. No, it's not Hawaiian. It's Swedish and traditional in my family." speech that I have to give pretty much every time I introduce myself. Unfortunately, the first person I tried "L.J." on was a native German speaker, and I went back to the Linnea Speech after that debacle.)

Right now, I'm planning to import my tweets daily into LJ and then make those entries private a day or so later when I get around to it. I'd prefer to make them private immediately (I'm importing them for back-up reasons), but LJ doesn't seem to let you set a minimum security just for those posts. I am not impressed, but I suppose if LJ were being impressive I wouldn't have needed to get a twitter in the first place.

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I used to like computers, I remember liking computers, now I just want to give up on the whole thing

algeh — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:50:13 GMT

Argh. All I ever post here any more is whiny complaints about how the world doesn't work the way I want it to. This is pretty much the state of my life the past few years, so I guess that's not that surprising. So anyway, me whining. Again. Dammit.

I'm trying to set up a new, professional domain for my math tutoring and petsitting businesses (which I should probably post about here at some point). I figure that a nice feature for the pet business would be if I kept a daily, password-protected blog for each overnight client so they could check on their pets while on vacation. Because I want to get this set up soon and don't want to spend a lot of time learning about various blog/CMS choices I was going to do this with Moodle, which is kind of like killing a spider with a 30-volume encyclopedia set. (Plus, I could then set up practice quizzes and such for my tutoring clients, and easily re-purpose the whole thing if I got a teaching job, as Moodle is a great platform for things like online math homework assignments.) However, the host that's my current first-choice (for reasons mostly having to do with a good customer service track record) will only support up through Moodle 1.9 on their cheap hosting, and the more expensive hosting needed to run Moodle 2.x is a big enough cost differential that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to spend that much more when what I actually need right now is, in fact, less than 100 password-protected blogs rather than a full-fledged learning management system. (Moodle 1.9 will lose even security-fix support next summer, so I'm not going go with that.) Of course, I don't know anything about the various blog-hosting systems. Wordpress is what everyone seems to use for blogging, but doesn't seem to offer much in the way of intrinsic privacy levels, so it looks like I'd have to spend a lot of time messing around with plugins. There are a lot of other blogging/CMS systems out there, but I have no idea where to even start researching which don't suck.

Am now tempted just to make html pages in emacs rather than use a blogging platform and assign each client their own password-protected folder on my domain. I already know how to do that, and it just sounds way easier. I'm pretty sure that's the Wrong Way To Do It, though. I keep wanting the 90s back, which is not the way to make websites not suck.

I wish I were wealthy enough to just hire someone to deal with all of this crap for me, but if I had that kind of money I wouldn't be petsitting in the first place. Computer stuff just changes too fast for me to ever understand what the hell is going on anymore, and I'm just so tired of trying to even find the right way to frame my questions.

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Semi-disappearing

algeh — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:59:43 GMT

This is just a note that I haven't been online much lately or doing a good job of keeping up with LJ communities and such. I'm currently caught up on personal journals on my LJ friendslist (but not yet on anything DW-only) but otherwise I just haven't been paying attention for about 2 weeks now. For now, assume I'm running at least a week behind on anything posted in a personal LJ and that I won't see it if it's in a community. If it's something I actually need to know in a timely fashion, call me. If it's something in a community I run and it needs dealing with, that goes double.

This is mostly because I finally let myself start playing Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, which I bought on sale back in December but hadn't been letting myself start because I knew I'd play it constantly for a while before losing interest. I'll probably resurface in a month or so when it's less fun, but in the meantime my recreational screen-time is being spent there instead of here. It's a game where wild monkeys like hugs. How can I not play it all day long?

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Dear Kohls

algeh — Fri, 13 May 2011 04:35:52 GMT

Dear Kohls,

Thank you for actually carrying, in stock, the bra I wanted. This puts you one up on JC Penney, who wasted a bunch of my time only to ultimately try to hand-hold me through ordering it online via the roundabout process of talking out loud to a salesclerk (pretty much the worst of both worlds as far as my shopping preferences go).

However, I would like to clue you in to something about the bra-buying public: many of us have a pre-existing opinion about either the bra size we wear or the bra style we like. Some of us even have opinions about both! Thus, sticking all of the bagged bras of a certain brand into a two-sided display with a total of sixteen shelves to explore and doing so, as near as I can tell, with no organizing principle whatsoever, is pretty much not awesome. Many stores choose to organize their similar displays by style, then band size, then cup size, which makes it fairly easy to trial-and-error your way to a bra that fits within any given style by grabbing the one you think you need and several adjacent ones before going in the fitting room. I could also see an argument that organizing first by band size, then cup size, then style might encourage women to explore a variety of styles in the size that they already know fits them and that this might be more convenient for them. Organizing by some other principle, such as color or cup size first would be odd but at least let me know the shape of my search space and let me skip searching some sections of the display.

I came in knowing my cup size, band size, and the exact model number I wanted. To put this into perspective, if I could buy bras at Napa Auto Parts (and I'd probably buy them nowhere else if I could), I could have walked right up to the counter with this amount of information and been out of there in five minutes with either my bra or an explanation of which store it was at and how long it would take them to get it in from there on the truck.

Back in reality (and at Kohls), after poking at several shelves, I found a bra in the style I wanted but a size very different from my own, which gave me the incentive to go on. Eventually, after searching all 16 shelves, I found two bras in the size and style I wanted and an empty package that indicated it once contained a third (I found this first, on about the 5th shelf I searched, and it gave me motivation to keep going). Neither were anywhere near each other. One was on the top shelf on one side of the display, and one was as far away as possible on the bottom shelf of the diagonally opposite unit. Neither were surrounded by other items that were of similar size or style (aside from all being bagged bras of this particular brand, since that was true of the entire display). For all I know, my inattention to detail means that I missed the Holy Grail of bras, the One That Isn't White, Yet Is My Size and Style, in the process of trying to examine each package individually to see if it was the one I was looking for.

I might note that at no point during the time I am shelf-reading this entire display do I see a sales associate of any kind, a level of being left alone I'd previously associated only with used book stores. (This is fitting, because the level of disorganization was also something I'd only seen previously in used book stores, and not often there.)

I was going to share all of this with you in the survey that my receipt kindly invited me to take, but there were no long-form comment opportunities provided, only a bunch of vague questions with Likert-scale-type answers and a few yes/nos. It is times like these that I miss paper forms, for they had margins in which I could provide commentary.

Thank you for providing a minimally adequate shopping experience.

Sincerely,

Me

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You know, I have a birthday coming up

algeh — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:37:28 GMT

I just heard about a small-press publisher who is having a hard time of it. Now, a lot of people are having a hard time right now and I am pretty broke, so I often don't even read these things anymore. I happened to read this one, and it turns out that this particular publisher has been re-printing some of my very favorite Tanith Lee books (which I noticed because I happened to see the title of one of them on a tiny image on their blog and was persistent enough to figure out that they'd hid them under an imprint of their own rather than the first several places I looked - I didn't find it particularly easy to browse their catalog for stuff by a particular author in general).

Anyway, there are maybe two or three of you who read this and also tend to buy me birthday presents. If you're one of those people, haven't already figured out what to get me this year, and can afford it, I'd like one of these, please. I'd particularly like the short story collection Sounds and Furies because I don't already have it in another edition and it contains one of my favorite short stories (Crying in the Rain) and otherwise seems to contain stories that I don't already have copies of. Death's Master was also one of my favorite novels as a teen and I read the crap out of it, so I really wouldn't mind a new edition of either it or Night's Master, but I do already have copies of both of those from the 70s DAW paperback run. I wouldn't mind a new copy of The Birthgrave either (which I also have a copy or two of from the DAW paperback run in the 70s), but that book didn't get read as much as the other ones when I was a teen.

If you're not someone who generally buys me birthday presents, don't buy me books as a result of this post! Do, however, consider buying yourself some of these books if they look like your kind of thing. I don't feel comfortable recommending them to everyone because they are pretty weird and dark books (I wouldn't loan one to my mother, for example, or keep any of the ones from this publisher in my classroom library), but I really enjoyed them when I read them. (Note: while I started reading them as a pre-teen, these are not YA books. I don't recommend buying them for children without reading them yourself first.)

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It's my 10-year LiveJournalversary!

algeh — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 06:10:04 GMT

It's been 10 years of using LiveJournal, which is pretty much the most recent site I've joined that I use regularly (if you don't count cross-posting to Dreamwidth, in which case I guess LiveJournal is the second most recent). I don't even want to think about how long that means I've been on the internet now.

All of you Web 2.0 kids need to get off my e-lawn.

(I was going to do a meaningful post on how my life, LiveJournal, and the larger internet have changed in the time I've been using LiveJournal, how that's been reflected in my changing posting habits, and blar blar blar introspection, but I seem to have stopped being introspective in public. Also the Blazers are down TWO GODDAMN GAMES in the playoffs and that's all I actually want to talk about, but I doubt any of my readers are interested in sports blogging.)

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Status change

algeh — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:10:28 GMT

two_star and I broke up this weekend. We are still friends, and feel free to invite us both to events that you think we'd both like. Of course, feel free to invite only one of us to events that you think only one of us would like, and to invite neither of us to events that we'd both hate.

Also, my new goal is to make enough money to move someplace where I can get a dog. Dogs are fuzzy. I probably want a Black and Tan Coonhound, so I need to make enough money to live someplace appropriate for a big dog. Am tempted to move to a rural area in the south to accomplish this, except that I'd hate the weather there and also I doubt that my neighbors would be thrilled to see a queer pagan vegetarian move in next door no matter how many hound dogs I had. Perhaps I should look into fishing villages in Alaska again, although then I'd get a different kind of dog since that'd be a cruel place to ship a hound but a great place to have a local husky-type.

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Attn Trivia People

algeh — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:02:18 GMT

Trivia people: I meant this Game of Life, not this Game of Life. (Neither was a helpful thing to be thinking of at the time, but at least the one I thought of had something to do with math.)

The rest of you: I have become completely terrible at reading email. I am sorry, and I will try to fix that sometime next week. I think I last read personal (non job-hunting or tutoring) email just before Halloween. So if I'm ignoring you, it's not you personally and if it's important you might want to call me.

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Educational Computer System, Inc: not "serving me better" even a little bit

algeh — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:34:01 GMT

So, The University of Oregon has decided to "serve me better" by outsourcing my student loan to Educational Computer Systems, Inc. This is, as always in these cases, couched as a move to serve me better. I dispute this strongly.

Counter-example #1: They charge a fee for paying online, whereas it was free before. So, right, fuck 'em, I'll pay by check, and a human will have to actually handle my mail in the process rather than having my computer talk to theirs. This is stupid of them, and quite possibly costs them more money, but I'll live. I resent that I was informed of this change after it happened, as I would have been tempted to pay off my remaining loan balance (of less than $800) in September online had I known.

Counter-example #2: They just sent me a letter (received today, dated the 18th) telling me that I had a bill, sent on November 16th, due December 1st. Historically, I've been on quarterly billing, due the last day of the month in March, June, September, and December. This would be moving my due date up from the 31st to the 1st and informing me less than two weeks in advance.

Counter-example #3: As a result, of #2, I decided to spend some time talking to them today, as I still hadn't received this Surprise Early Bill they just sent me. They "helpfully" printed an 888 number on the letter. It would have been substantially more helpful had this been THEIR 888 number, however, instead of the disco'd one referring me to a $4 per call directory service line actually printed on their letter.

In conclusion, serving me better my ass.

(I did actually get all of this resolved, eventually. I called the UO admissions line and had them figure out the proper 888 number, then called ESCI, the least competent company I've had the misfortune to try to give money to, to discover that they've actually moved my billing due date to January 1st, which is an acceptably small change in date and also explains why they haven't sent me a bill yet.)

Once I can write the non-profanity-laden equivalent of this blog post, I'm writing a letter to UO, including a photocopy of the letter from ESCI with red-pen corrections, a grade of D--, and a comment of "see me!". I'm tempted to also write further letters, if anyone can help me brainstorm who else might possibly care about this galloping display of incompetence I now get to deal with, presumably every 3 months since I don't actually trust this company to be able to find their ass with both hands and a guide dog, let alone correctly process my loan payments.

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I suppose I'm a real Linux user now...

algeh — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 04:35:34 GMT

...because I'm pretty sure the easiest way to solve my current problem is to learn Python.

Blargh. I was really looking for the "half an hour" level of solution rather than the "several weeks, but you'll feel really accomplished when you finally get it working" level of solution.

(I'm trying to design a custom day planner for myself. Since I tutor on evenings and weekends but am also trying to sub this year, I really need one that runs from about 7 am to 10 pm all seven days of the week. It appears that nobody makes a nice application for Linux where I can design the layout I want in a WYSIWYG fashion and then have it autofill the dates from now until sometime next summer using some kind of code fields. Real Linux Users™ probably write a script that outputs LaTeX and also can be auto-updated to include new appointments by sending a text message to certain email address that they have forwarded to be read by some script they're running on their home servers. I am a fake Linux user because I haven't done much serious programming since my first attempt at grad school, just sloppy code for one-off projects.)

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Moving hell: entropy and clutter elves

algeh — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:08:13 GMT

So, I threw another load of miscellaneous Things I Own into the van tonight. In the process, I found several things that I didn't realize I owned but are kind of useful, such as a leatherman tool. I also FINALLY managed to find the missing 2 DVD sleeve for one of my box sets and was able to pack it intact, increasing the odds of my being able to watch that season of 90210 straight through at some point in the future should I choose to do so.

However, in the battle against entropy and the clutter elves, there are always casualties. As I was unloading the van, I noticed two small cards on the floor, clearly from a memory game. This is slightly odd as I remember packing my memory game with the rest of my childhood games that are not actually fun to play as an adult back when I was packing things for the storage unit. (I plan to get them out again when I have children someday - most of what I have are Ravensburger games that still have all of their pieces and are in good condition. This is what happens when you are an only child and only get to play board games with adults.)

Upon closer inspection, here are the cards:

As a child, I did not own LOTR memory. I read the trilogy in 4th grade (tip for enjoying reading LOTR before age 10: read Little Women directly beforehand - if you can get through that, your attention span will be more than trained to find LOTR fast-paced and exciting), so I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered it if I'd had cards with the characters on them. I am pretty sure I did not buy it as an adult either.

I have no idea which box they came from.

I have no idea if there might be more related cards in that box.

I don't want to recycle these two cards if I do, in fact, have a complete LOTR memory game somewhere because that's the kind of thing that someone out there probably wants. I'm not convinced that I want to hang on to two random cards for all time, though.

I give up.

The clutter elves win again.

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Moving hell: almost finished!

algeh — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:35:48 GMT

I've been offline for a week or so in Moving Hell. I just got my computer set back up today.

Done:

Caught up on LJ friends page
Caught up on two other blogs
Caught up on webmaster, tutoring, and job-hunt email accounts
Caught up on Ubuntu updates (which is SO MUCH FASTER with broadband internet - it is a whole new kind of thing to be doing now)

Not Done:

Check personal email
Check DW friends page
Check DamnPortlanders
Change address with post office
Pay student loan
Make DW/LJ flocked posts updating address and phone numbers
Change address with dial-up ISP
Change address with college I do not have loans with
Change address with whatever other online places I've told where I live for some reason
Check other blogs I read
Get Flash working now that I have broadband
Find new time wasting things to do on the internet that involve images and/or videos
Play FreeCiv for weeks on end while forgetting to shower, let alone job hunt

Some of those things might not get done. We'll see which!

(Now I have to go throw more random possessions in the van and hope that the Carpet Vacuuming Elves will visit in the night.)

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