Intersection Logs

( Tedious minutiae, mostly electronic. )

Oh, one amusing thing. One of the sorority houses down the street from work has a couple of gilded concrete lions outside. At least, they're usually gilded, but they get prank-repainted on a fairly regular basis -- black for hallowe'en, green for St. Patrick's, pink for Valentines and so forth.The inhabitants must spend a fortune on gold paint; they're nearly always back to normal by the next day. Today, for some reason, one was white with a little filmy veil and the other was mostly black with a white shirtfront.

I'll try to be more interesting tomorrow, but I'm sleepy now.

It's been a day of small annoyances with inanimate objects and cyber-constructs. (For instance, I wasted an hour rediscovering how to log on to a certain site, only to find that Firefox on the desktop had the login details all along and that the official materials I was supposed to get there weren't yet available.)

The latest trainwreck over in news is making me wonder whether I should be finding a different online home, but as long as most of the people I like to read are here, and as long as I don't suddenly find ads plastered on my permanent account, I don't have any immediate plans to go anywhere.

On the other hand, it's supposed to warm up tomorrow, and there's a three day weekend coming, and I finally disposed of one small but long-standing worry yesterday, so things could be worse.

Now I need to find something to read that isn't horrific fantasy -- even good horrific fantasy. Three of those more or less in a row is a little much.

The DVD player achieved its third strike last night, so today I sallied forth and picked up a new one -- for about a third of the price of the original. It occupies about the same volume as the old one, too, but with a different aspect ratio that necessitated some rearrangement and a great deal of plugging and unplugging and untangling of the insane rats-nest of cables in that corner of the living room, but it's all squared away now.

In the course of wandering around the home-theater department of BestBuy, I noticed that most of the TVs on display are now HD flat-panel models. I also noticed that if I wanted to replace my basic 19" CRT (not that I do) I'd have to go up to a 26" to get the same size picture.


Edit:

I meant to put Stargate in the music, not the location -- but clicking on the location link will actually get you to Cheyenne Mountain.

Also, my computer is Scrabble-enabled again! The version I had didn't work on XP; the new one is billed as XP-compatible, but also runs on Vista just fine.

Huh. Something seems to be going on with my cable: half the TV channels are missing (including, bizarrely, the sound but not the picture from Fox News, which I don't want to watch in any case) and the internet is working in fits and starts. Fortunately CBS still seems to work ...

Edit: Looks like a fairly widespread problem; one suspects major trouble at the cable-co local headquarters. It's very frustrating; all my equipment is working fine, but it feels like sharing a dialup connection with a dozen people. There were comments I wanted to make, but they'll have to wait.

I started writing an earlier entry this evening about how I'd broken my cable box by glitching its power supply, but after several minutes of muttering and counting to itself in hexadecimal it recovered. I persist in thinking that American power outlets and most plugs are badly designed; the British ones may be oversized and clumsy, but the plugs don't fall out of the sockets if you look at them wrong. (The particular problem in this instance involves stiff cords that stick straight out from the wall, exerting undue leverage even on the fairly solid plugs, and rather old, loose outlets inconveniently placed with respect to a table, in combination with a cable box that really doesn't like to lose power even for half a second.)

I continue to have fun with the Palm, having now loaded it with a variety of reading material, mostly by way of Plucker and the Baen free library. Using the stylus to write extended fiction keeps bringing to mind, inappropriately, that Jane Austen quote about working on a small slip of ivory. For stream-of-consciousness first draft, it actually works quite nicely, but it's odd to have such a small window on the text, and to have to think about the input letter by letter. (Yes, I know I'm a few years late to the party on this one. Non-phone-enabled handhelds are probably an endangered species, but I'll enjoy this one while it lasts.)

Ambassador is past 25,000 words, with most of today's input done in the old-fashioned way. Tense negotiations are going on, but I have no clue what the enemy is doing in the meantime. Hovering? Boarding and fighting hand-to-hand towards the conference room? Sending observers? Also, in spite of Harry's best efforts, Louise has just been presented with a choice that looks a lot like an ultimatum.

OK, I got 244 words in Graffiti last night, and more this morning when I resurrected the Palm keyboard by installing an updated driver. (Maybe it was the accompanying reset that did the trick, I dunno.) Graffiti may actually be an input method slower than my thought process, which takes some doing. Many ideas this morning, and I don't feel any worse than I did yesterday, so I'm more hopeful about the weekend.

Well, now I've been and gone and done it -- ordered a Palm TX and folding keyboard from Amazon, that is, for delivery Thursday. We shall see how useful this turns out to be.

It feels like Spring -- which is to say, it was cool and blustery this morning, but with sunshine and fluffy clouds, which pushes most of my British Spring buttons, while yesterday was warm, and there were Painted Ladies all over the new display of pansies in front of the Arizona State Museum.

It might be a good idea to cut back on the coffee a bit. I haven't noticed any particular ill-effects, but I seem to have drifted into consuming about two pints of the hard stuff over the course of work day, (not to mention the instant decaf that's my major source of liquids otherwise) which is probably too much.

As tends to happen when I get into writing, I'm hankering after writing tools. In my younger days, that used to mean obsessively accumulating pens and notebooks; these days it's a more high-tech yearning. Specifically, I'm pondering the possibility of using a high-end PDA and one of those folding keyboards as an on-the-go writing solution for when I don't want to carry the laptop around. Those things have almost as much computing power as Old Laptop, if not as much storage. It does seem a lot of money to accomplish a purpose that would be almost as well served by the composition book and pencil, though.

It's cold. Cold by Tucson standards, anyway, with freezing nights and highs maybe in the 50s, but the skies have cleared. Last night's local news was urging people to wrap up well if they drove up the mountains to play in the snow.

The cable people were busy outside this morning, digging a trench and exhuming the fat cable that failed a few weeks ago. I didn't inspect it when I got home tonight, so I'm not sure if I'm still running on the temporary one, or not. The signal and signal/noise levels on the modem don't seem to have changed much, anyway.

Our office floor is being cleaned tonight -- an annual event that we opted out of last year. We shut down our workstations and put them up on the desks -- they're big noisy boxes, not really ideal for office use, and not livable-with unless they're sitting on the floor while running. It was uncannily quiet in the office with them off; the faint rumble of the heating is barely audible.

So I have this CD, one of the set of two I bought to fill the gap in my Mozart collection that I suddenly discovered last month.

It plays fine on my elderly and sometimes crochety boombox, but neither computer likes the last two tracks (about the last five minutes of an 80-minute disk). Butterfly won't rip them without inserting bursts of static, and Behemoth just hung iTunes, froze the CD driver, and had to be rebooted without the CD in the drive before it would behave.

I guess I don't get to listen to those tracks except in the old-fashioned way.

Meanwhile, we had a mild and humid day after early rain. The local news is getting excited about floods in one of the popular mountain canyons, that washed out the road and caused a lot of destruction. It's been raining, on and off, since Thursday, I think, which is more water than the watersheds around here can really handle.