Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Every so often I notice how incredibly silly-looking humans are.

(Don't worry; tomorrow I'll be back to thinking human faces and bodies are all about beauty, as usual. All sorts of different shapes of beauty. But tonight ... just really dorky, fake-looking doll/robot things. Makes looking in a mirror kind of jarring.)

Woke up this morning after not enough sleep; fell back asleep within half an hour; woke again two hours after that, still not having slept enough; was briefly actually alert, but that slowly faded (in such a way that I wasn't really aware of the change until I was until I eventually noticed that I was really pretty out-of-it). Crashed again around 18:00; woke at 22:00, having absolutely no feel of what time it was -- I couldn't tell whether it was 20:00, midnight, 04:00, or what, until I slapped the keyboard of the Mac to kill the screen saver. (Ow. Screen was kind of bright to my eyes then.) Getting a little frustrated here: I'd really like to manage to sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and I'd really like to be able to feel really awake for more than two hours at a time. Oh well, at least I feel better than a couple of weeks ago...

The ESC key on the Mac died this ... morning? afternoon? A nuisance, especially since I use 'vi' as my main editor. I was starting to retrain my fingers to reach for ^[ instead, when it was pointed out to me on Elbows that ^3 also works. I hadn't known that. It's much easier -- more convenient-seeming -- to me than ^[, but I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's an easy all-left-hand reach, which makes it sortakinda similar to reaching for the ESC key in the upper left area of the keyboard? Now the question is: do I like everything else about this keyboard enough to keep using it despite the bad ESC key, or do I swap it for one of the smaller (and in some cases differently-broken) spare Mac keyboards downstairs? This one has the cursor keys, separate numeric keypad, and function keys.

Hey, could be worse. Could've been a key without a convenient alternative, or some other problem. Or I could not have any spare keyboards to swap in. This is a little thing.

Still got ideas burbling regarding the annotations/highlights thing. The stickynotes things I'd known about were just things to stick to "the screen", or comments specific to an app (such as comments in a word processor. I'll look around to see whether any "stickynotes" tools do what I want. In the meantime, I've got some half-formed notions about how to store the notes and what to do about web pages that change slightly. Web pages that change radically (such as the front page of a daily or weekly news site) may just have to be declared "out of scope".

I'm also trying to sort out what aspects of, uh, tighter coupling between my Windows boxes and the Mac, I want to put on my wish list.

• BlockDeath, a Lego museum of horrors. Very slow to load, very quick to page through.
• Eeeeeeee! Predator's view of a cat! Yet another adorable (and in this case also rather dramatic) photo of Preia, the cat of emmett_the_sane and cyan_blue. Impressive.
• Results of the annual human vs. horse race
• Teen in trouble over $3.16 tax return
• I wonder a) how loud one of these is and b) whether anyone could a working model up and running between now and Pennsic: the HumCooler, refrigeration with no moving parts and no electricity. [EDIT 2004-05-06: stale link replaced with current address of that page.]
• Thanks to speaker2animals for this link to something that I think Fred had told me about in conversation before: The Messerschmidt ME-163 Komet, a rocket powered interceptor aircraft. Fascinating aircraft, harrowing test-flight stories, looks and sounds like cheese 1950s science fiction movie fighters, not real-life 1940s aircraft. And the things were tiny.
• speaker2animals also pointed out that our government has basically performed a real-life version of the famous "Schroedinger's Cat" thought-exercise, Schroedinger's Despot. "You've got this somewhat feared ruler of a nation of several million people, and he's sitting in a bunker somewhere in Iraq [...]"
• And merde pointed out this fascinating article about Pykrete. Battleships and aircraft carriers made of a funky ice that takes forever to melt and is nearly bulletproof. Floating islands. More WWII tech that sounds like science fiction. Now I want an ice boat. "Pyke envisioned ships as vast and solid as icebergs. You could make the sides of your boat tens of feet thick, hundreds if you felt like it, and bullets or torpedoes would bounce away or knock off pathetically ineffectual chunks. And when a torpedo did knock a chunk away, so? You were floating in a sea of raw repair material. Given how long it took pykrete to melt, and the minimal onboard refrigeration equipment needed to stay frozen and afloat, it would be months or years before the boats exhausted their usefulness."
• Fred pointed out this article about giant electromagnets for mooring ships instead of using ropes. "If it works, they say the system could save them around 5 million Euro a year in labour costs, and speed ships' average turnaround times by 40 minutes." And, "Docking magnets have always been ruled out in the past because of the risk of damaging sensitive cargo or on-board equipment [...] Now Martin Verweij and Erik Fiktorie of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands claim to have developed an electromagnet that generates a magnetic field that does not penetrate too far into the ship."
• bikergeek posted geek installation instructions for love, clever enough to not be cloying while making its points. Worth the time it takes to read.

"Ironically, American lesbian and gay activists didn't choose marriage as an issue; marriage was thrust upon them. Although isolated same-sex couples sought to marry as far back as 1970, the organized lesbian- and gay-rights movement opposed pushing for marriage; some thought it too conventional a goal, while others thought it dangerously out of reach.

"Evan Wolfson, executive director of the organization Freedom to Marry, recalls simply trying to secure health insurance for the same-sex partners of New York City workers in the 1980s-and being attacked by conservatives for making incursions into the sacred territory of marriage. ''There was a backlash before we ever lashed,'' Wolfson says. Across the country, any time an employer, court, or government considered such straightforward measures as hospital visitation, shared tenancy, or bereavement leave, anti-gay forces escalated the discussion into a fight over marriage."

(E.J. Graff, in The Boston Globe, 8 June 2003)

This afternoon I went out back to toss something in the garbage can, and surprised a small grey tabby, who spooked. She retreated to the bottom of the stairs leading down from the deck, would not heed my invitations to come closer, but kept meowing. Faint, short mews with question marks embedded in them. (I did crouch, then sit, to make myself look less imposing.) When I went back indoors and watched through the peephole, she came back up on the deck and nosed around, but when she heard the doorknob turn, she fled to the stair again. I put out a small amount of milk in a bowl to see whether she'd take it -- she ignored that. So I left her alone for twenty minutes. When I went out there again, she was still on the stair. This time I tried advancing one her, hand outstretched. Oddly, my approaching her seemed to be what she wanted. She met me partway, and as soon as my hand was within reach of that "arch the neck and back like a sea serpent to be pettted" maneuver, that's what she did, making sure the side of her head and the back of her neck met my fingers.

*Presto!* she turned from skittish kitty to attention-sponge. Started getting upset every time I stood up and took my hands out of petting distance. Drank half the milk, very hungrily. I noticed that a) she is wearing a pink collar with a bell, but no tags; and b) I can feel her ribs. She's very small, so I'm not sure whether she's just a rather tiny adult or is not quite grown up. When I was able to handle her front paws, I wasn't able to make her claws come out, but I'm not sure yet whether that means she's declawed or just that I didn't have time to hold her paws the right way. (She doesn't seem to like having her paws touched.)

When I went back inside, she scooted for the door and went in as well. Uh oh. This is how Gherhardt wound up with Jezebel. (Okay, she jumped in through a bedroom window, but still...) Thing is, she's got a collar, so I figure she's got humans somewhere. (And I can't afford to take care of a cat right now anyhow -- otherwise I'd probably already have one. But boy could I use a halfway-decent mouser.) I'm wondering whether she's an indoor/outdoor cat who just had a growth spurt and used up all her fat reserves, or an indoor cat who somehow got out and got lost (and got hungry). Like Jezebel when she lived here, this one follows me from room to room, and follows me outside when I go back out (but insists on coming back in when I do). And if I'm not paying enough attention, she cries softly.

Now she's trying to pet herself against my hands while I type, and getting in the way. Of course. But she sure is pretty. And cute. (I'm typing this downstairs, where there's a little bit of room on the desk.)

First to find out whether maybe Jezebel is missing. (It's been a long time since I've seen her, and I'm not sure I'd recognizer her on sight and out of context.) Then, I guess, to put up "found cat" posters. But I'll have to put her out when I go run errands, 'cause there's no litter box here.

Whoops, she just tried to roll over on her back and rub herself against my hands, and slid off the desk. Okay, an answer to one question: she's not declawed. (Just caught my thigh, a tiny bit.)