Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Swiped wholesale from a QotD entry by siderea: "If the government truly wanted to 'defend my marriage' it would hire us a maid and a cook and prevent another massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) from ever working on my husband's computer. " -- Kelly Henley, in a Letter to the Editor of salon.com

Got this from renefrost, but a bunch of other folks on my friends list have also done it in the time it's taken me to get around to it.

[Edit a few minutes after proofreading: Looking back over the list, I just realized that whoever tries to get a feel for who I am by looking at the contents of the box is still going to be surprised when they meet me and see how I dress. Hmm...]

Sometimes one sentence just jumps out at you...

"The researchers found bacteria growing in the disinfectant."

First, I'll get the whining about my body and my social life out of the way so that I won't feel a need to mix it in with the more interesting parts...

Yesterday I was slow getting started and then had to stick around anyhow waiting for the FedEx delivery that wound up going awry, so I missed the birthday brunch of one of my LJ friends. But dmk and bill_in_germany phoned to say that they were hanging out at the Inner Harbour and to ask how I felt about their dropping by with pizza. So I put chunks of yesterday's to-do list on hold for a while to hang out with friends and eat pizza, both of which were quite pleasant activities. There were two different parties last night that I'd been aware of and wanted to go it if I'd felt well enough and wasn't too far behind on stuff, so I tried to get back to my to-do list. But my body's afternoon supply of energy was starting to wind down. anusara called to ask whether I was going to a third party, and I said I wasn't sure whether I was going to make it to any of the parties or not, but I'd try to get somewhere. Then came the "am I too tired to drive / if I sit and rest for half an hour will I stop being too tired to drive / if I nap for an hour will I wake up feeling okay to drive / do I feel energetic enough to enjoy interacting with people?" session of internal dialogue. Quite often if I'm tired enough to have to think about it, I'm too tired to go out. This is annoying, as I already have way too little social life and there are people I really did want to see last night, but at least I did get to see two friends yesterday afternoon.

But I've got this unhelpful pattern I fall into, that I do recognize (but only after it's too late): I get stubborn and think, "I should just be able to push myself to get there; I know I'll enjoy seeing people if I do; I just need a little more alertness/energy, or a smidgen less pain," and then I spend so much time and energy trying to figure out whether i need rest first, that I never get the rest that might make the difference.

If I had a housemate who got invited to the same parties and outings, who could drive when I'm feeling marginal road-wise, and nudge me in the direction of getting ready when my time sense goes away, that might help. Maybe.

After all of that, and still too tired, I couldn't get to sleep when I gave up on trying to go out. And when I did eventually crash, I woke up again an hour later and couldn't get back to sleep, so I'm in a really foggy mental state today, with poor time sense, difficulty concentrating, and a curious pressure at my eyes and temples. And I still have that to-do list. Feh.

But hey, I did see two friends for a spell, which is better than a lot of days. And the news of impending pizza gave me enough incentive to shovel off the kitchen table, which had gotten rather out of hand. And I found some interesting reading while failing to sleep (though I had a browser crash which the "resume browsing where I was last time" only recovered a third of the windows from, so once again a bunch of "link sausage" and quote-of-the-day candidates went away (along with some pages I just hadn't finished reading yet) ... frustratingly, this happened as I was in the process of copying links to the link sausage entry in progress and to the quotes queue so I could close some of those windows, when it crashed, so as I was reducing the strain on the computing resources, that's when it decided to bite me in the ass. Go figure.).

While we were eating pizza, my guests were amused watching Perrine jump into the oven to hunt mice. Then Bill made a comment about how Perrine had turned herself one-dimensional and vanished into a crack. I mis-heard him and thought he'd said she squashed herself flat, thinking she was under the oven again, but he pointed out where she'd gone and what he'd actually said finally sank in...

There's a corner under the counter next to the stove which looks like it ought to be a cabinet except that the stove is where most of the door would have to be, so it's this open space that's really awkward to store anything in. (That's where I thought Bill was pointing at one point, but not quite.) Under the cabinets there's a recessed kick-board, a pretty standard shape for kitchen cabinets. The front lip of the floor of the cabinet-oid space meets the side of the stove, but there's a toe-deep channel underneath that where the kick board runs parallel to the side of the stove.

That was where Bill was pointing.

I bent down to look into the crack, expecting to see a tail, or some back fur, or maybe an ear. I saw nothing. There was no cat. It was suggested that perhaps after turning herself into a line, she had proceeded to collapse herself all the way to a point. I remarked that she is, after all, a singular cat.

Eventually I noticed that the far wall of the space-that-would-be-cabinet was slightly closer than the wall of the kitchen (judging distances while squinting into a shadow with one eye doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in one's depth perception, but I finally decided it probably wasn't an illusion). So apparently Perrine had managed to turn the corner back there. My first thought was, "At least that means she'll have room to turn around." I decided not to worry about her getting stuck until I heard her cry. We returned to conversation and calories.

Some time later Perrine emerged, while I was facing the right direction to see. I thought watching her re-inflate from a plane looked surreal, but this ... shapes looked funny for a few minutes after watching her do that; I think I bent an eyeball. Or maybe it just bent my brain. (Maybe she's not a toon after all; maybe she's a ferret wearing a cat-suit.) I know some of the visual space she takes up is fur, but I pet her, I pick her up, I hold her; I know that she's not a stick-figure drawing of a cat with a hologram projector strapped to her; she has mass, she has size in all three dimensions ... except when for a few minutes at a time, she doesn't. Watching her ooze (I cannot say "crawl", that's not what she did) ooze out of that space, it did not look comfortable, but neither did she exactly look distressed.

I just know she's trying to figure out how to get behind the fridge. I see her staring at that opening, and I know the mice run there.

I had a few other things I'd planned to write about in this entry, but I got so caught up in remembering Perrine's kitchen spelunking that I've forgotten what else I was going to say. So I'll stop here for now. But someday I'll have to write a story about a mathemagician whose familiar is a topologically talented tabby.

Remembering part of what I'd wanted to include in the previous entry before it got so long...

While hanging out in my kitchen, we got to talking about, among other things, how dmk knew me before I grew my beard, when I was still a beginner on guitar. Somehow this resulted in my having to tell bill_in_germany a couple of stories about Ray, my second roommate, the paranoid one. (Not to be confused with Joe, my first roommate and roommate of shortest duration, or Roger, my third and fuzziest roommate (aka "Rogest", 'cause there was nobody more Rog than him)). Entertaining memories of the University of Dallas.

And last night and this morning I spent a little more time on the piano. Between attention-span problems and just not wanting any more frustration at the time, I decided to just play tunes I know instead of working on getting that thumb cross-under smooth. (Hey, any student needs some time to work on fun tunes as well as the disciplined practice time learning the next bit of technique -- gotta keep it fresh and keep the enthusiasm up.) But I did decide to brave a simple left-hand part -- I picked the first "two parts on one guitar" tune I'd ever learned (and still the only one I do halfway decently [Edit 17:15 -- I just remembered, I can also do the first half of J.S. Bach's "Bourée" on guitar.]), for the same reason I'd picked it on guitar so many years ago: the bass part is bog simple, so it's just coordination rather than split attention plus coordination. It's a German lute piece called "Tanz" (which I'm sure isn't a unique title), and the left had part just goes D-A-d over and over. (I think of it as "the thumb part" on guitar. And it's just the bottom three open strings in dropped-D tuning.)

Three notes, rythmically simple, it was still enough to cross me up, but not impossible. So call it a confidence-builder. But it's an interesting brain-sensation to play it so far ... Like "Norwegian Dance From Hungary #1", I'm remembering the physical sensation of how my left hand moves on guitar, translating that to a fret-and-string combination, converting that to a note, and finally making my right hand move to play that note on the piano. But when I do it for "Tanz", my left hand is actually moving in completely different ways than the left-hand sensations I'm remembering to pull the melody out of my brain. This will, of course, get easier as I practice the tune so that I'm just remembering how to play it on piano instead of remembering it on guitar and translating nerve signals on the fly. And it'll get easier when I get better at going directly from hearing an interval in my head to knowing where to put the next finger without thinking about the guitar equivalent first. But I confess that I'm dreading the learning curve for reading for piano, turning dots into muscle movements for both hands at the same time.

Playing the tune that started this current round of piano interest is different, because even though I composed it on a guitar, I wrote it down recently enough that I can still see the dots in my head if I want to. And playing the ubiquitous saltarello or "Lamento di Tristano" are different because I've attempted each of those on harp before (and I think I tried the lament on hammered dulcimer once), so they're not bound to guitar proprioception in my brain any more. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when I try "Rights of Man" or "Swallowtail", and mandolin muscle memory enters the mix. Hmm. And I should try a tune I know entirely on recorder, just to see what that's like. Ooh, brain experiments and music at the same time, what fun. As long as I'm not being graded on my lab notebook.

Annnnnd ... there goes the attention span again. Time to step away from the keyboard.

Gee, maybe enough people have learned not to open .com, .exe, .pif, or .scr attachments they get in email, or maybe it's just that enough gateways are automagically stripping those now. I've started getting them with .zip payloads instead (three today, I think). Out of curiosity I went ahead and saved one of the attachments and ran "unzip -l" on a UNIX machine to see what was inside (that translates to "list the contents of the zip file but don't actually unpack any of them). Sure enough, it was an executable (with a double extension, just in case a Windows user bothered to look but didn't have whatever the name of the option is that means "show the whole filename, not just what you think end-users need to see" turned on).

If any of you have friends or family members who might double-click a .zip attachment because "it's not one of the extensions I was warned about", you might want to mention it. (Of course two weeks from now we'll be hearing that all .zip files are poison, because somebody didn't quite understand the warning...) But the main reason I'm mentioning is simply my having my attention caught by the latest round of the worms-vs.-filters arms race and finding it interesting.

(If this is old news, please excuse me. It's the first time I've noticed it showing up in my own mailbox.)

I guess the next step is filters that know how to check the contents of zipped attachments ... so the step after that would likely be encrypted zips, which makes me wonder: could a script embedded in an HTML email supply the encryption key to WinZip, or would the worm have to include instructions and a Trojan horse to convince the user to follow the instructions?

Sometimes I'm really glad I don't use a Windows application to read my mail. (That's not the reason I use Berkeley mail, just a side effect. The reason is that I find the user interfaces annoying on the more modern clients I've tried so far, and that I like being able to read my mail anywhere I can get a telnet connection or a dumb-terminal dialup.)