ah, technology
May. 19th, 2013 06:39 amthe bad part of etc: having to wait for the lenses for the new glasses to be manufactured, since they don't keep my prescriptions in stock :D
i also got a box of contact lenses for the first time in ages; the eye doc i had as a child put me in lenses at a pretty-much-unheard-of-at-the-time age 10 or 11, since my eyes were degenerating so rapidly he thought that maybe the lenses would keep them from continuing to degrade. (and it mostly worked! my eyes kept getting bad after that, but nowhere near as quickly.) i wore contacts for about 18 or 19 years until i got too lazy to keep up with them, and i was a little afraid that having gone back to the glasses would start the downslide back up again, but nope, still correctable to 20/15, in glasses at least. (i could get better correction with the contacts if i were going to wear them more often and thus could justify spending more money on the more expensive ones that will also correct the astigmatism, but since the contacts are only going to be for occasional use, it's definitely not worth it.) although the eye doc says that i've probably only got another few years before i'll need bifocals, whee.
i'm trying the new "high definition" lenses they've developed, for the new pair of glasses. i am very interested, since i've always had refraction problems and they're supposed to be good for staring at computer screens for long periods. i will report back.
i've also finally bitten the bullet and admitted that my damn arms are not getting better from rest/ice/steroid shots/etc, so i dropped a bunch of money on technology that's hopefully going to make things better. including giving up and admitting it's time to try to work with dictation software, despite the fact that is the exact fucking opposite of how my brain works and is probably going to be a fucking nightmare. i'm hoping that just using the voice controls for things like page down when reading long documents, dictating short bursts of things, making my notes-to-self, doing a few emails, etc, will be enough to address the problem, especially when combined with the new two-piece, super-split keyboard i ordered so i can stop reaching inward to type and exaggerating the pronation and deviation, will help enough that i don't have to use the dictation software for extended bursts of composition or creative writing, since i absolutely cannot do that verbally. (i've tried before, but at least one of the meds i'm on gives me minor-but-significant verbal aphasia and that is no place to go for a good time.)
on the bright (?) side, at least the new adaptive tech means a new laptop to go with it. this one i'm using now isn't that old, not old enough to have a ton of problems running the software or whatever, but a faster laptop will help, and i'm getting a 13" MacBook Pro instead of the 15" i have now; i'm hoping the smaller, lighter laptop will help, and it will mean i can just put the two pieces of the split keyboard on either side of the laptop more easily.
(plus, i ordered the retina display model. i mean, why not, right?)
4/18 May I present the Nightmare Lord, most terrifying of all...
May. 19th, 2013 06:00 am
4/18 May I present the Nightmare Lord, most terrifying of all chorus frogs? She was lurking under the milk bucket, and I just about died of fright when she jumped at me. (The Nightmare Lord is about a centimeter long.)
The Blue Haired Girlfriend weeded one of the gardens by the goat pasture. The goats helped! She definitely needed someone to stand square in the middle of the garden and bite the cultivator, and I wasn’t going to do it! That cultivator tastes terrible.
Ducks flew up to the barn today. Time to clip their wings, before they go back to landing in the road and watching oncoming cars.
Dork dork dooork is my cry
May. 19th, 2013 12:07 amAnyway, tonight I felt like taking a related frolic through my school's databases.
Two articles I have full-text access to:
"Undercover agent assessment centers: Crafting vice and virtue for impostors" by M. Girodo, 1997, in Social Behavior and Personality volume 12 issue 5 pages 237-260.
The government agent's personality is one of the principal instruments of an undercover operation. This paper provides an overview of long standing problems in assessing essential job-related abilities in undercover agents, and some solutions which have been implemented over the last 20 years. ( Read more... ).
"Dissociative-type identity disturbances in undercover agents: Socio-cognitive factors behind false-identity appearances and reenactments" by M. Girodo, T. Deck, and M. Morrison, 2002, in Social Behavior and Personality volume 30 issue 7 pages 631-644.
The uncontrolled dissociative-type reappearance of a fabricated false identity in undercover agents was investigated in 48 federal police officers (male and female; aged 26-41 yrs old) undergoing 3 wks of undercover field exercises in 2 separate classes. ( Read more... )
Two articles I do not have access to, aside from abstracts:
"World War II Never Ended in My House: Interviews of 12 Office of Strategic Services Veterans of Wartime Espionage on the 50th Anniversary of WW II" by C. Susan, in Psychobiology of posttraumatic stress disorders: A decade of progress edited by R. Yehuda, 463-471, Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
The author conducted sociological interviews of 12 OSS spies (7 male, 5 female) who were operatives in France during World War II ( Read more... )
"Illuminating feminine cultural shadow with women espionage agents and the dark Goddess" by D. E. Rickards (dissertation abstract, 2006)
This research is an exploration into western feminine cultural shadow through the interviews of eight women from Belgium, France, Holland, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, and United States, who volunteered for espionage work such as couriers, weapons specialists, and saboteurs in the Second World War. ( Read more... )
24 tweets for 2013-5-18
May. 18th, 2013 11:55 pm- Saturday, 0105: My fitbit #Fitstats for 5/17/2013: 5,088 steps and 2.2 miles traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/23LLYD
- Saturday, 0120: @gypsyjr @afullmargin That's *impressive*.
- Saturday, 0120: @vassl Best of luck on the restore.
- Saturday, 0123: @alarmallama @lazulisong sounds like an amazing party
- Saturday, 0123: DW entry: Blinkin' Colors http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/7047
249.html ( read the other 19 )
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4/17 Happy National Misbehavin’ Poultry day! This...
May. 18th, 2013 06:01 pm
4/17 Happy National Misbehavin’ Poultry day!
This year’s festivities include:
- Angry Peacock Fighting!
- The Shell-less Egg Laying Competition! Splat!
- Small Smug Green Ducks In Large Green Swamp Hunt! The Winner receives a Decorative Duck Poop Ribbon affixed their shirt!
I’m gonna run away to the big city and become a car salesman.
[links]
May. 18th, 2013 06:31 pm(no subject)
May. 18th, 2013 08:45 amI'm up early and have completed all my Internet browsing. Now I actually need to find the get-up-and-go to clean, or cook, or write, or shop, or research, or something.
Blinkin' Colors
May. 18th, 2013 01:13 amIf I'm not focusing, I will notice when someone shows up at my cube. If I am focusing, and I'm dwelling within the Headphones of Oblivion, anything that succeeds in getting my attention will probably also make me startle.
My co-workers always seem chagrined at disturbing me, but that is in fact my job, to be disturbed to do random things, on basically every other day but the 2nd Thursday of the month.
I've been wanting to rig up something, because the best way of getting my attention is visual (even though that can fail if I'm really in the zone). I'd been poking around, but most of the cubicle doorbells I'd seen (no, fingers, not "doorbees") had been too noisy to be neighborly.
Then I was at Fry's the other night looking for a slightly exotic battery, and wandered into the security section, and they had wireless doorbells. One of them lit up. It was inexpensive enough, and claimed its volume was adjustable enough, that I thought it might be worth a try.
Turned out that the volume had two settings, loud and louder. That's all right for a doorbell. I started thinking of how I could fuck up the speaker enough to be cubicle-friendly, then chided myself for not thinking like an engineer. I unscrewed the unit, and discovered to my delight that the speaker wire plugged in. When unplugged, it just blinked.
My cube now has a doorbell button, and the blinking unit is set right below my monitor, where I'll probably see it. I showed it off to the Stage Manager, who has been running around like the proverbial chicken in the past few days. He has been delightedly using it. I'm not sure if I've missed it yet, but I've found myself turning around without really realizing why I just decided to turn around, and then seeing the flashing light out of the corner of my eye, finally coming to my notice.
One of those times, he asked: "Do you have a highlighter color in something ... other than yellow?" and brandished his yellow highlighter with some disdain.
"What color do you want?" I asked, digging through my desk. (The recent ZOMGAAAAAAUGH has resulted in complete confusion on every available surface of my cube except the keyboard, my syrup rack, and Beyoncé Jr.'s place of pride.)
"Any color, really," he said. "It could be pink, or ... what colors do you have?"
I located the packet, under a notebook and three boxes of badge fixin's. "Every color," I said, and whipped it out.
"Those are highlighters?" the Stage Manager said in covetous disbelief, and went into what I can only describe as "ferret shock", fingers twitching towards one marker, then towards another, making little incoherent sounds.
"Or if you want you could borrow the whole packet," I said. It's not that I'm against watching my managers in a state of twitching indecision, but it's unfair to take advantage of a guy who's clearly in no fit condition to make unnecessary decisions.
This was the right answer, as he snagged the packet and ran back off to his office, clearly planning to color-code the ever-living daylights out of next week's schedule.
Flipping Tables
May. 18th, 2013 12:30 amToday was not a good day for me vs. the mail merge. ( Read more... )
12 tweets for 2013-5-17
May. 17th, 2013 11:55 pm- Friday, 0101: My fitbit #Fitstats for 5/16/2013: 3,583 steps and 1.5 miles traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/23LLYD
- Friday, 0231: @nadyne I see the Entries queue is still standing at 3. http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbr
owse?faqid=186 has the Common Stuff; xmlrpc failure = lj b0rked, retry - Friday, 0233: http://archiveofourown.org/works/44
8050/chapters/767262 she blinded me with political science - thingswithteeth - The Avengers Darcy fixes the Avengers' PR. Darcy is a... - Friday, 0235: Maybe Uhura has magnetic implants so her headset doesn't fall out of her ear. Or maybe there's bioglue. Hope it has adequate anti-moisture.
- Friday, 0240: @semanticist You can have a lot more fun with materials on two mated inanimate surfaces. But maybe that gecko-foot microvelcro. ( read the other 7 )
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(no subject)
May. 17th, 2013 07:55 pmSTEEEEEVE. ♥
Thought for the Day
May. 17th, 2013 05:06 pmHere’s the thing: People fucking despise trans women. Often the nicest thing they can thing of to say to trans woman is “gosh, you are so little like a trans woman!” Being trans is something to avoid, to exclude, to escape, at worst to nobly bare up under.
But I’m done with it. You can be trans or cis. You can be super femme, you can be ultra butch. You can be straight or queer. You can have people saying you’re a transcendent beauty who just stepped off a Renaissance canvas, you can have people saying you’re a stomach turning monster. You can be a light in the world who every person you meet loves and devotes themselves to, you can be an awkward storm cloud who drives everyone away.
– Vivian Taylor, I’m A Trans Woman And I’m Not Interested In Being One of the “Good Ones”
Mirrored from Under the Beret.
THANK YOU ROYAL MAIL
May. 17th, 2013 06:49 pmThis is a screenshot of the Contact Us form to which you are directed if you tell them that you have a problem with a Redelivery or paying a fee. Again, title is an obligatory field. It offers ten options, which are given (in order) as: Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Mx, Dr, Lady, Rev, Lord, Sir.
I. CANNOT. EVEN.
(no subject)
May. 17th, 2013 09:36 amI voted pitch, but, I would support the purchase of new ones (World Book still produces printed editions). Getting kids used to the idea that there is a marvellous world of informative books, not all of which have been digitized, is a good idea. But for the new generation, we'd need a new set. I was born in 1987, so I grew up with those encyclopedias. I loved them, but was infuriated by their insistence that the USSR was still a thing, or their inability to explain how the Internet worked.
We used those books a lot. At least once a week, dinner conversation would discover a point of argument that could only be resolved by sending a kid running for the appropriate encyclopedia volume. I remember roaming the house on rainy days in a state of utter boredom, until I'd pick a volume up and browse through it for entries that caught my eye.
I'm already building a shelf of my library with books more acceptable to children, since if I host my nieces or nephews I'd like for my place not to be the arid wasteland of uptight furniture and nothing fun to do.
Did anyone else read encyclopedias for fun? Using myself as a reference point for normal childhood is always tenuous, since I also read the dictionary front to back, and I know not many other children did that.
Geological Hazard Mapping
May. 17th, 2013 01:02 amHere There Be Dragons.
Nothing about rocks or terrain
Nor even the sort of vegetation.
Just dragons.
In these times, it can be a comfort
to possess a guidebook containing
Dragons.
Length, markings, wings;
fire or no fire?
These things help
when walking through dragon country.
(no subject)
May. 16th, 2013 10:43 pmBert, meanwhile, has just finished his second round of anti-nauseants, so we'll see if he starts puking again.
We are a fun, fun household right now. But we're cute.
( ADORABLE CAT PICTURES )
36 tweets for 2013-5-16
May. 16th, 2013 11:55 pm- Thursday, 0019: @PigRescuer @ifonlyella Oh, omg, SATs are like the LEAST BAD of all the standardized tests. THE LEAST BAD. The rest are WORSE.
- Thursday, 0038: @PigRescuer @ifonlyella The continuous assessment is meant to include low-value checks so the teacher knows if they're fucking up early.
- Thursday, 0040: @PigRescuer @ifonlyella and then large point value midterms/final exams/final projects; in some you can actually blow off homework & pass.
- Thursday, 0046: @ifonlyella @PigRescuer Less so than finals. Though midterms are often cumulative from the beginning of the year, and then finals 2nd half.
- Thursday, 0046: @ifonlyella @PigRescuer But the problem is, *in addition* to continuous assessment, there are standardized tests that don't affect grade. ( read the other 31 )
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TMI: external crates: lost and found
May. 16th, 2013 06:06 pmThe problem is that the visitor wants an @-closure, which can't use borrowed pointers, so accumulating a mutable vector of found extern mod thing seems... hard. I eventually gave up and worked around it with massive amounts of copying.
Once I get some tidy stuff cleaned up, and figure out the copy issue, I'll be ready to check that in and close #5681.
If I can finish #6407 (allowing extern mod directives to name remote packages) and #5683 (the test runner for rustpkg, which I've already started a rudimentary version of) tomorrow, then I'll be on-schedule so far. It might happen.