Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"My job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" -- susiebeeca, 2004-08-01

As of right now, I'm caught up to 25 hours ago on my LJ friends list, and I got that far by skipping most of the cut-tagged parts and skimping on comments and polls. My body still seems to be on a 48-hour sleep cycle (but a much shorter alertness cycle), but I think I'm headed sleepwards now. If I turn out not to be, then maybe I'll read the most recent day of my friends page this morning.

Shallow cheap-thrill confession: Grinder Girl in that red holiday outfit.

I'm betting that "because my car was completely boxed in by fire engines and police cars" is a valid excuse for not moving it across the street before street cleaning hours start, right?

(Was woken by sirens, many sirens, pulling up nearby, and that particular combinations of smells that means a Baltimore row-house is burning. 50 Fulton Ave. is burning, and the wind is blowing my direction. So if my clothes smell like a house fire the next time you see me, it's because my house is drafty even with all the windows closed.)

I need to put a computer in the kitchen to use on cold days. I can have one warm room in the house easily enough by heating a frozen pizza and making a cup of tea. I should run Ethernet cable there so I can check my mail without leaving the warm room.

The house that burned and the house next to it each have their front doors boarded up and big red stickers on 'em. I haven't gone to look at the writing, but I'm betting the red stickers mean there was enough damage that the houses had to be condemned.

I replied to a "computer-age old-timers poll" earlier, and one of the questions --well, more the replies to it -- surprised me: "What was the first programming language you learned? Can you still program in it?" I found it odd that folks might forget their first programming language, and even more odd when the language was BASIC. I haven't used old Microsoft BASIC in quite some time, but it's all still there. (If you count my first programming language as the one for the Litton desktop calculator with nixie tubes at my high school, I'd need a few minutes with the calculator in front of me for it to come back. But I'm pretty sure I haven't forgotten much of Hewlett Packard pocket calculator programming.) But now I'm wondering whether that notion is really as strange as it seems to me.

The first two questions are for pretty much anybody; the rest are for people who have learned at least one programming language.

And if people want to suggest what languages ought to be listed in a "what was your first programming language" poll, feel free.

[*] "Run away!" and "Enough" represent the same magnitude for Skraelings (and possibly Bardoomen(sp?)), but they're not exactly synonyms. "Run away!" is used for a large number of bad things, such as skunks, foes, or survey questions, and "Enough" is a quantity, usually consisdered mythical or hypothetical, of Pop-Tarts, Goldfish crackers, or other yummies.

Looks like I'm not getting to 3LF rehearsal tonight. :-( I started feeling crashy and sat down to see whether it would pass (well, to see whether the feeling would recede enough to feel like I ought to drive), and it's now a quarter to twenty-one, which means I wouldn't get there until half-past if I very suddenly felt a lot better right now, and rehearsal ends at twenty-two o'clock. (It started at twenty.) Time to face reality and switch from "how close before I decide to go ahead and push myself" to "okay, plans have changed and my body is saying to rest, dammit". Argh. In addition to feeling that I ought to be there for rehearsals between now and our January gig, there were people I wanted to talk to afterwards and an errand I'd planned to deal with on the way home. The smoky and siren-y sleep interruption this morning has caught up with me. Time to regroup and turn my efforts to making sure I get to HCB rehearsal tomorrow night.

Silver lining: this means I'll be home to watch the program I was interested in that made one more simultaneous show than I have working VCRs. Except that I don't think I'm going to see it anyhow, 'cause I think I am going to fall asleep. Okay, the silver lining is rather tarnished. I tried.

Second try at a silver lining: not going to rehearsal saves me about four and a half bucks worth of gas ...