Speaker for the Diodes

05:26 am - QotD

From a conversation regarding the reasons some people use multiple question marks (locked entry, May 2008, quoted with the permission of each speaker):

hematopoetic:	Why??????????????? is the equivalent of WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY? Would you rather people use lots of extra letters?
sabotabby:	Well, if they must. The extra letters mimic the sound, while the extra punctuation marks do nothing.
marnanel:	I see them as wild hopeless gesticulations of increasing despair.
beeblefish:	See, I also see them as this, but there is a matter of degree, and the combination ?! need mentioning [too]. For example: wtf? -- a question as to what, indeed, the fuck is going on wtf?? -- a question, but with added confussion wtf?! -- a question, but with some anger behind, maybe incredulity wtf!? -- similar, but with anger in the front seat maybe, this might also be bad form, I'll have to ask Lynn Truss... wtf??!! -- this is, I think, total exasperation, bewilderment and probably also a lot of disappointment. (anything beyond this, of course, and the person needs to be shot...)

[When I saw "wild hopeless gesticulations of increasing despair," I knew I needed to quote the thread.]

07:44 pm - Figure and Ground

Well, I just got a bit of a start. The weather has been raining, not raining, pretending to be about to rain, threatening downpour, delivering soft showers off and on, blowing this way and that at varying speeds with or without the rain, and generally feeling cool and damp and turbulent. But not, y'know, perilous.</p>

A few minutes ago I got up to go to the bathroom, and as I passed the stair landing I noticed that some of the clouds had been painted brownish by the setting sun, and that the cloud deck was doing funny things near the horizon (as often happens here). But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a peculiar repeating pattern. "Wait, did I just see a nipply sky?? It didn't feel like Big Storm Weather ...

A closer look revealed a different situation: a closer and lower layer of cloud had been whipped into sharp peaks with round valleys between them -- sort of meringue-ish really -- and that cloud was lighter in colour and closer to the background pale-grey of the sky near the horizon in that direction, so what I was seeing was not teat-shaped brown clouds, but a wave-shaped mask in front of a reasonably boringish brown cloud (not that a cloud that colour is ever all that boring). *whew* So my ears and skin were right and it was just my eyes that were fooled. Bit of a moment there, between the two glances, though.

Since seeing that, I notice that the clouds closer to overhead are moving lower at the same time as they draw nearer (or rather, as they slide past), which may foretell a different sort of interestingness. The expected slate, poofy white, and slightly gold-tinged (right over where the sun just set) are visible in various directions as well, and just to confuse the issue, a patch of barely-veiled Blue Sky nearly straight up, with just enough light to show its daytime colour and the merest wisp of cirrus spiderwebbing it, visible through a hole in the lower cloud decks.

Baltimore has interesting skies.

05:26 am - QotD

"I hate hate hate the way that people equate 'anything we can legally do to discourage abortion, no matter how much it treats women as The Enemy and basically nonpersons' with 'respect for life'.

"Because, I'm sorry, NO. If you *actually* have respect for life, that doesn't end at birth. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for women. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for Iraqis. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for the poor. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for the victims of torture. If you pass laws against abortion, all that proves is that you can pass laws against abortion. Well, good for fucking you."

-- lydiabell, 2008-04-18

05:26 am - QotD

"Frequently, trolls are unaware of the damage they're causing. A cornered mongoose doesn't really want to rip you to pieces; it just wants to get away. So too, a destructive person will usually deny wanting to cause pain. Such people really want something else, usually the things which all people want and need: self-fulfillment, validation, a feeling of security, and so on. It's just that trolls have extremely unhealthy ways to go about getting these things. And when they do get them, their insecurity convinces them it won't last, so they'd better get more. This is the key in a nutshell: trolls are not healthy people, so they can't be expected to act in mature and healthy ways. And treating them as if they were mature and healthy is like treating a cornered mongoose as if it was a beloved housecat. The results are not pretty." -- David Petterson, "How to Keep Your Coven from Being Destroyed" (2002) [I should probably note that 'trolls' in this context refers to a larger category of which Internet trolls are just one subclass, rather than Internet trolls in particular being the main subject here.]

( Thanks to </a></b></a>shamangirl, by way of whose journal I saw it.)

05:26 am - QotD

"We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel." -- Golda Meir

08:30 am - Inking Thinking

Sleep-deprivation due to ill-timed leg-cramps/twitches/tickles especially bad last night/this morning (and those "somebody is tickling the inside of that muscles" ones are the most absofuckinglutely annoying sensations when trying to fall asleep) ... which may account for my having woken just now after finally getting nearly two hours of sleep all night, with the thought in my head that I have at long last decided what tattoo I want if I ever get around to getting inked: I want the phrase "Most Interestingly" (or maybe just the word "Interestingly") repeated enough times to guarantee me a place in the record books as one of the "most interestingly-tattoed people" on the planet. :-þ

And if that thought upsets you, distract yourself with the uplifting design features of the new logo for the UK Office of Government Commerce [link by way of the Pentax-Discuss Mailing List].

05:26 am - QotD

"But being sexually selfish turned out to be much harder than I'd anticipated. I hadn't quite realized this before, but apparently a lot of what I get off on as a top is feedback: the admiration of my wonderful skill and sensitivity and general toppy hotness. It was extremely difficult to not care about whether Rachel thought I was hot." -- Greta Christina, "Buying Obedience", part 3 (blogged 2008-04-24; previously published in Other, and in Best Sex Writing 2008)

08:01 pm - Oops

Poor sleep last night/this morning, pain this afternoon, didn't realize early enough how quickly pain was draining spoons and what pain meds I should've taken to get to 3LF tonight. Took meds late; may get there late, may not. Will see.

Roofer has not yet answered message I left at 5:40AM; will try again.

Not willing to work on my tab-reading skillz enough to get through a piece I need to learn, so am attempting to code a tab-to-abc converter to make standard-notation sheets out of it. Converter I ound on web lost too much info (like representing a tune with everything from whole notes to 32nds as a long string of quarter notes) and existing tab2abc converter I found looks like it's just for lute tab, not Usenet-style ASCII guitar tabs.

Two-dimensional parsing. Whee *mumble* hah.

Dayum, my muscles hurt. Don't want to even think of picking up bass to carry it out the door until meds start working.

Oops.

05:28 am - Roof

drip

drip

Damn.

It's only a tiny bit, but it shouldn't be any. Feh.

05:26 am - QotD

"Recently a 13 year old boy, Lawrence King, was shot in the head at point blank range, in school, by a 14 year old school mate. Normally you would think the press would be all over it, but there has been a conspicuous silence after a few short stories that omit a large portion of the facts. Lawrence was possibly gay and/or transgendered and was being bullied; one of the bullies finally killed him. Another school shooting, but this time it wasn't the 'freak' or 'outcast' that opened up a hail of bullets, it was the 'normal' one. This type of story just doesn't work--doesn't need to be told--as it doesn't support the theory that if you are different, if you don't conform to the accepted norms of society, you are more inclined to violent acts. So the press is either silent or censored." -- DoomTart, 2008-03-28

10:05 am - Scheduling

Rain date for event is on, but we're not -- another group is taking our place. Might go up to check out event as audience member though.

05:26 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-05:

"I've been waist-deep in a dead hippopotamus, and I'd rather do that than change diapers." -- Eric Humphries, production manager at Skulls Unlimited International, on getting used to his line of work. The company claims to be the world's leading supplier of bones, both human and animal, which they clean and process at their Oklahoma City facility.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15486395/page/2/

(submitted to the mailing list by Sid Sidner)

08:37 am - Oregon Ridge Rained Out

Just got phone call from fidhle, who had spoken to event organizers: rained out. Rain date is tomorrow, but since tomorrow's forecast is even worse ...

I'm gonna try to get back to sleep.

05:26 am - QotD

"I try to be gleeful when going off the deep end. Going off the deep end somberly would be no fun." -- madfilkentist, 2008-03-12

05:26 am - QotD

"The important thing that I have learned today is that when something must be dealt with, we should never send the one most resiliant and resistant to the something, but the one who will enjoy the dealing. Even if that one does not seem the choice most likely to survive or succeed on the surface. A survivor focuses on surviving. One who can find joy in a task can have the task done with a happy whistle and no worries about the consequences of failure.

"She who is too focused on the possible fall will not be able to rleax enough to maintain balance on the high wire. She who is enjoying dancing on the wire will be relaxed and concentrating on her center of balance and where she places her feet.

"This is not to say that disregard for danger or hazard is the desired attitude, but the ability to focus on the needed skill with happy intensity will keep the available energy on target."

-- dicea, 2008-04-12

04:20 pm - HCB @ Music Festival North Of Baltimore, Saturday at 13:40

This coming Saturday, 10 May 2008, at the Oregon Ridge Nature Center, will be the Music in the Woods Traditional Music Fest. (Rain date is Sunday, 11 May 2008.) Free admission to the festival.

The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be performing a twenty-minute set at 1:40 PM. So if you come to the festival because you want to see us, make sure you don't lose track of time and miss our short set. (I've never been to this event before, and have no idea whether their stages tend to run early, late, or on time.)

Oregon Ridge is a little north of Baltimore (exit 20B off of I-83)

05:26 am - QotD

"We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright." -- Jack Valenti, testifyng before Congress 1982-04-12

[Sorry, but I can't resist adding an editorial comment to this one. Y'all -- except for the young'uns -- remember when we still had broadcast television and big-budget movies, right? Before The VCR-induced collapse of those two industries later in the 1980s? Back when we had a whopping three major broadcast networks instead of the measly five we have now (I'm ignoring PBS for now since it's non-commercial, whether it counts as major or not, and I honestly have no idea how many cable networks there are). Gosh, it's such a shame that we didn't implement legally-mandated Digital Restrictions Management systems on VCRs when we had the chance, or outlaw home recording outright, so we could still have profitable broadcast television to watch!]

04:49 pm - I'm alive. Have a meme.

I know I've been quiet lately. The weekend (gig in WV then back to MD to shoot the wedding of two friends) took a lot out of me. I'm still alive. Here, have a meme ...

Also: here, go have some retrocomputing fun.

05:26 am - QotD

"Does anyone imagine that this incident [ Microsoft terminating support for MSN Music store DRM] makes the public sympathetic to the music industry's DRM demands? In a stroke, the music industry has taught another few million users that DRM means 'Do Rip Me Off,' because these customers are not getting what they paid for AND, in no small part because of the music industry's insane demands, are losing another legal source of music. This is a base of people who have demonstrated that they prefer to buy legally licensed music and abide by DRM than illegally download music for free. And their reward? They get ripped off and treated like garbage." -- osewalrus, 2008-04-30

"I can't tell you how many CDs and DVDs that I have bought over the years that were lost to a molten-hot car interior or scratched beyond repair. Digital content should be more secure from loss, since it can be saved to several different places if need be. Yet DRM proponents seem intent on making it easier to lose the content, to the benefit of everyone but the consumer." -- Dave Methvin, 2008-04-23

05:26 am - QotD

"The thing is, that what we call a 'university' in the usa today is actually many trade schools pulled together onto the same campus. And yes, a person in her or his early years at college is required to take classes in all the different trades.

"The things that you bring up here, are not things which are specific to any trade, and thus they are never taught.

"I would love to see a new kind of college education - where perhaps the philosophy department could expand to become the overall auspices of the school. This would be a school for folks who want to learn how to think critically, and reason independently. Woven into the curriculum, there would be training in all the tools a person needs in this modern world, to start her own business. Computer programming, web design, introductory economics and business courses would be important. This would be a school for both thinkers, and for entrepreneurs."

-- Christopher vanDyck, , 2008-04-03, responding to a Things I Wish They Had Taught Me In School essay (which was pointed out by siderea.)