Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I've noticed I have a disproportionately high percentage of icons which relate to being cranky, make of that what you will." -- geekchick, 2003-12-30

The headache isn't completely gone, but drugs helped a lot. It got to the "so much pain I think I'm going to throw up" stage before I realized I needed to give in and take the damned drugs, so it was an uncomfortable wait for them to take effect. Midrin would have been better than codeine (and I would be asleep now), but obtaining Midrin requires having access to a doctor for a prescription. I would have preferred to use the correct tool, but without health insurance I'll go with the nearest thing I can get.

Another language nit: I heard an advert for some snack/diet/energy bar that included the line, "Only one net carb!"

One what? First, is there some subtractive phenomenon here so that the snack has more gross carbs than net carbs? Although I've heard that the "negative Calories" thing is largely a bogon, I could see using "It takes this many calories to chew something with this texture" as an excuse to report "net Calories" different from the total caloric content, but how do you subtract carbohydrates? Are they in the form of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) which are technically present in the package but evaporate between the time the wrapper is opened and the time the food reaches your mouth? Or are they looking at how the particular carbohydrates in question are metabolized? "By the time you've finished digesting this, the carbs have been converted to energy and fat by your body."

Secondly, ah, units please? Maybe the preceeding paragraph is irrelevant because they really did mean "one carbohydrate" -- i.e. whatever the quantity, only one substance in the carbohydrate category is present. But assuming they're not being that sneaky, my guess is that they meant one gram of carbohydrates -- but they didn't say that, so it could just as easily be one ounce, or one millislug (ew ew ew, metric prefix on an English unit, but I wasn't sure how else to scale that unit to a reasonable size), or even one cubic inch, as long as it's "one" of something.

So in the end, I've got an idea of what they might have meant, but they actually said nothing (or at least nothing meaningful). My guess of what they probably meant could be way off, and if I complained they could simply say, "Well we didn't say that."

Sorry; I'm too out of it to write something deep, too tired to do more important tasks, and too cranky to be cute, so I'm falling back on nitpicky language/science peeves. But as long as I'm playing that game: how many of y'all recognize the unit "slug" and know what it is? It's not a commonly used one, but it seems my friends include a disproportionately high number of people likely to know it.

Finally, I figured I'd have a shot at a meme swiped from ame_chan, the ( mix CD meme )

One sign I had a bad day yesterday: I lost my phone again.
A sign that I haven't fully recovered: I keep forgetting what I'd just gotten up to do when I get up to look for it, and when I remember that, I forget where I've already looked.

Time to send myself an SMS message to make it beep.

USPS rang my doorbell very, very gently, with a box from Israel. A lens on long-term loan. I expected pretty, but this ... the only way I can tell it's ever been out of its original box is that it didn't arrive in its original box (and it already has a UV filter screwed on). It's too slow to become my favourite lens (I shoot too much in the dark -- "available gloom" photography, as one friend called it) but it's going to be extremely useful. Since most of my equipment was stolen in November, there's been a gap in my range of available focal lengths. This zoom covers that gap.

I still need filters and decent flashes. More than that, I need a gig. I'm going to be a few hundred dollars short on my electric bill, and the cut-off date will be while my mother is still in Cyprus. Anybody desperate for portraits or petraits this week?