Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Had a good weekend (well, from Saturday night on) but a pretty bad week so far. Stayed too late at the Venusian's birthday party (good party, by the way), had a really pleasant Sunday morning/afternoon, but Sunday evening kind of fell apart for my physically. Crashed at 18:00, woke again at 22:30, fell asleep again 03:00 Monday and slept until pain woke me up at 09:00. Felt sleepy all day but didn't actually manage to crash again until 00:30 this morning, then pain woke me at 01:30; made it back to sleep around 02:30 but leg cramps woke me at 03:30; got past those and back to sleep at 04:00 and woke up from nausea -- acid reflux, no doubt, despite the drugs I take for that -- at 06:00 this morning. Fell asleep at 06:30 and back pain woke me again at 09:00. This does not count as "good sleep". My stomach felt wonky all day yesterday and I didn't manage to get a damned thing done (except for practicing a couple of tunes for an upcoming Homespun Ceilidh Band performance this coming Saturday).

As long as I'm already whining: my VCR glitched (actually I think it was the fault of the tape I was using) and I didn't get last week's episode of ER (anyone near Baltimore got a copy to lend me?). Then I ran out of tape for Saturday night, a friend gave me a used blank tape, and my VCR refused to record on that tape. I got six hours of static. I tested it on Sunday and simply could not get anything recorded on that cassette. The shows I missed Saturday night weren't all that important -- most are shows that can be watched out of order just fine and will come around in repeats, one was a movie that I'm sure I'll get another shot at eventually, and I'm already out of viewing order watching Red Dwarf (and there's a 40% chance that I'd seen it already), so it was mostly just annoying. I do wonder whether Starhunter was a repeat or not.

I'm a few days behind on reading LiveJournal, not just on writing. I've got a couple of things mostly-finished that I'll post today (certainly this week's "link sausage," since that's pretty much ready to transmit), and if I start feeling better and get caught up on Way Overdue stuff then I'll try to write something about the party. And read goodness-knows how many entries my friends have made since Saturday afternoon. (That includes friends whom I track via the Susboid community as well as all the ones directly on my friends list. I got halfway through the task of adding everyone to my friends list and then making a "not on other lists" filter a couple of months ago, but got sidetracked.)

• I'm not really quite sure what to make of this set of cheesecake photos
• A haiku battle seems to have started on LiveJournal...
• A satirical job posting by redheadedmuse. "BA in liberal arts or equivalent experience in intellectual circle jerks required."
• Someone as twisted as I am (be very afraid) but with more resources, put together a Striped RAID system using USB floppy disk drives under MacOS X.
• (I mentioned this in a Quote-of-the-Day entry recently) A "product review" of a kitten as a datacenter accessory. Note that this includes a whole bunch of links to other pages worth peering at. Among those are some far-infrared (in the "heat" range rather than the reflected IR components of sunlight range) photos of cats, the famous CAT 'man' page, and, of course, the infamous Bonsai Kitten site. Wait until you have some time to kill chasing all the other fun links before you go here.
• Yes, I know that at least one atheist friend of mine feels that all of the faithful are suckers, but here are some real religious suckers. Not sure whether to consider this a cool way to mix candy and religious imagery or a trivialization of a religious symbol bordering on sacrilege. Fortunately my personal take on religion allows for a large degree of mocking of my own faith, which makes the question less urgent for me.
• In a non-LiveJournal blog, "Riba Rambles", a Norn word, "Bismaak" is mentioned: "to talk and talk and talk about something without ever doing anything". Okay, it's dangerous for me to spread knowledge of a word for that, but it does look like a useful word. (Gee, should I look up Norn verb conjugation or just muse about the fact that I ought to do so and hope that somebody else does it...?)
• I haven't followed most of the links on this list of GBLT education resources, but it looks like an interesting list, and I want to remember to get back to it, so here it is.
• darxus posted a quote from a 230-year-old book about cycles in history, that seems eerily apropriate lately.
• "Now Your Vote Is The Property Of A Private Corporation" raises alarms that others have been trying to draw attention to for a while now, about electronic voting machines that can't be properly audited because their innards are trade secrets. This article leans a bit more toward the malicious intent side of things than the others I've seen -- most focus on the risk of such machines being corrupted sometime in the future. (It also raises a point about the personhood-status of corporations that I'm not lawyerly enough to evaluate their take on.)
• I like Ozy & Millie in general, but this strip was particularly worth linking to. The context is that they're in a spelling bee.
• Clicking on either of these should take you to the page that describes how to add it to your own web pages, if you're so inclined -- current Terror Threat Level icons:
• Pride and Extreme Prejudice, or, what happens when a bunch of people start wondering about Terminator - Jane Austen crossovers. (From rec.arts.sf.written)
• An excellent and insightful (i.e. worth the length) essay by yesthattom about honesty to oneself and others in polyamory. I haven't read all the followup comments yet, but the essay if worth the read and makes points that extend to all relationships, not just polyamorous ones.

From Jon Carroll on SFGate.com:

"Cats are the bureaucrats of the animal kingdom; they blandly deny responsibility and point to a memo they sent in 1999 explaining the whole thing."