Intersection Logs

I'm officially not-sick today, but still rather tired, so I'm not going to attempt a book roundup post.

The latest lj release actually has some nice things. LJ Mobile is nifty, and works on my Palm -- it doesn't actually require a phone. And comment editing! ( gratuitous snark )

I watched a lot of DVDs yesterday -- well, three episodes of SG-1 and one of Voyage, anyway. I think I still have whiplash from going from the goofy self-referential fun of "200" to the high drama of "Counterstrike." I do have to wonder, though, how all those planets with populations measured in the thousands -- all living in one village within walking distance of the Gate -- managed to stay that way for centuries. (No, this is not the first time I have wondered this.)

It also occurs to me that with two -- well, three, but one of them is not in the room with the TV -- DVD-capable computers and a DVD player, I could do 3-way frame-by-frame comparisons to try to unravel the layers of recycled footage in Voyage episodes like "No Escape from Death." (If they proclaimed that one as "All New" when it was first aired, they were skirting pretty close to false advertising.)

A bit feeble, but at least I got them upstairs.



The mysterious peripatetic ache seems to have settled back in my left shoulder where it belongs, and also seems to be easing up, possibly because we're back to semi-civilized temperatures.

Also deleted my first-ever bit of livejournal spam today, on a comment from last month. This is why I screen anonymous comments.

I was rather fond of my customized Opal layout, but the friends view seems to be fragile these days in ways that the newer layouts aren't, so I thought I'd try something different. (Now, if I could just get my picture of the week to display in a custom sidebar module, I'd be happy; also, I'd really rather anglicize my date display, but that's a minor annoyance.)

Then I messed around some more, and thanks to a post by sbisson in s2expressive I found exactly what I wanted. The blue flower background was an accidental default, but I like it.

Also, I had to give up on the old Xcolibur site view because it suddenly started not working in the photo album managment area.

I'm on vacation at home for the next couple of weeks -- hence, limited bandwidth. Possibly less than that, if I didn't succeed in fixing the dialup by my maneuvers with MS patches the other night.

I'll be using the low-bandwidth style, and there will be no photos for the duration -- but probably lots shortly after I have broadband access again!

http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/21475.html

http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/21475.html

(It looks complicated, but I may give it a try later.)

I just noticed that now, when I log in from the bar at the top of the page, I stay at the page where I was rather than going off to some stupid welcome page.

This is, I think, a change for the better, and I hope it persists.

I saw the first installment of "Bleak House" on PBS last night. I read the book several times in my teens; it was one of the old dark-red volumes, four orphans of a uniform edition, that my grandmother passed on to me when I was slightly too young for them, and I have it still, though it's been a while since I reread it. In my youth, I've been realizing lately, I read Victorian fiction almost entirely without twentieth-century filters; I suspect they'd read differently today. I remember I loved Esther, tiresomely obtuse though she could be at times; I was fascinated by the mystery aspects of the plot, and enthralled by the atmospheric descriptions of poor inner-city life.

The TV version is very dark, in the literal sense, and moves briskly and convincingly through the labyrinths of the story; I'm not sure how much sense it would have made to me, in my fried post-Phoenix state, if I hadn't been familiar with the book beforehand. The only jarring note was when Caddy referred to old Mr. Turveydrop as Prince's 'Dad', which I'm fairly sure was completely out of period. ETA or at least out of character for a middle-class young woman of the time. The usual cast of British character actors was nicely deployed, and Gillian Anderson made a fine Lady Dedlock, though the plot-required striking resemblance between her and the actress playing Esther wasn't very evident.

In other TV news, I'll miss The West Wing, but maybe its time had come. And Surface is ramping up nicely to a conclusion, for sufficiently corny values of nice. I'm a little surprised that it airs on NBC rather than as a Sci-Fi Channel Original, really.

Has anyone else noticed that the 'Recent Entries' view now goes back to 400 entries? It used to be 75.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my LiveJournal, and I was feeling lazy and didn't post. Oh well.

More retrospection later, maybe. First order of business today is to go remind the office that I put in a request for furnace lighting last Thursday.

To spare my mother's bandwidth, I've switched to a simpler style for now, and the Friday photo will be suspended for at least the next three Fridays. Updates may also be rather sparse for the next couple of weeks.

Packing continues.

I've been hankering after the Nebula style ever since the contest results came out, so as soon as I saw it was available I had to try it. Alas, after hours of fiddling to incorporate my own custom elements, I ended up with something that looked OK in Firefox but not in IE unless the window was maximized. It looks as though the tables-free way of doing things interacts in slightly non-predictable ways with images, and stirring my own table into the mix to try to force the header appearance I wanted didn't help matters.

Then I flirted briefly with 'A Sturdy Gesture', which I did manage to customize to my satisfaction a while back -- until I realized it doesn't have an 'edit entry' link (ETA: in a sensible place) and there's no obvious way to put one in.

So I'm back to my messed-about Opal, for now.

My HTML book is dated 1998. If I'm going to get serious about this, I probably should get a new one.