Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A twofer 'cause I'm looking forward to the concert tonight:

I discover whiskers of a cat in a timeless zone
And I put them on my face
In a moment I become a sweet little cat
And I dance on a flying saucer

-- Shonen Knife, "I Am A Cat"

Think about it sometimes
Do we need the media?
I don't need it anymore
My body is so alive
I can feel everything
So I don't need anything else

-- Shonen Knife, "Watchin' Girl". Both songs from the Let's Knife album.

The demolition crew is back. Working outdoors this time, so I heard them stomping around on the roof (but they didn't make enough noise to bother me until 8:30 and didn't get really loud until 9:00). I heard gleeful shouts and the groaning of wood pulling free of nails, and a crash, and when I looked up the view out my window had changed. The rickety wooden fire escape that scared a police officer who came to investigate one of my reports of people going into that house, when he put his hand on the railing and it nearly dropped him three floors, is gone. At least the part of it I could see from my bed is gone.

I won't miss it aesthetically, unlike the tree out front that blew over in a storm a while back, but the simple fact that the view has changed a little will take getting used to. I'm used to quickly eyeballing snowfall depths there, and watching stray cats (and occasionally dogs) visit and depart the roofs that way. And I guess I should put curtains on this window, 'cause the morning sun has a much clearer path into my bedroom for now, and eventually I'll have neighbours again ... Though if they're going to leave that house chopped up into three apartments, as it is now, then they'll need to replace the fire escape before they rent it out. I wonder whether they'll build another bulky wooken one or install a metal one.

The other change I've had to get used to since I moved here is more gradual and also basically pretty despite taking away something kind of cool -- each summer I can see a little less of the neon Domino Sugar sign across the harbour as the trees at various distances between here and downtown get taller. I can still see it in autumn and winter, when the leaves are gone.

Remember last year when a bunch of us were being very vocal about electronic voting machines, complaining about the lack of an audit trail (on some models) and really stupid security mistakes? Remember how some of us pointed out that these problems were known to be solvable, because they'd been solved for bank automatic teller machines (ATMs)?

Perhaps we spoke too soon. Here's a story about a Diebold ATM that crashed, rebooted, exposed the WinXP interface, and became a toy for CMU students. So if you ever wondered whether an ATM can run Windows Media Player, the answer is that some do.

And as was pointed out on That Mailing List recently,the newest ATMs installed by Wells Fargo will be "web-enabled" as well as running Windows. (It's not clear from the article whether "web-enabled" means "use HTTP and a variant of XML but are connected only to a private network" or really does mean "communicate over the Internet". The way it's written strongly suggests the latter, but there's room for ambiguity.)

Last night I got clobbered by a headache -- didn't even manage to deal with the litter box and the trash before I crashed (this morning was trash day). Today I'm doing better than that, but still a bit "off my game" -- it's not going to stop me from going to the concert tonight, but I don't seem to be getting much done beforehand. Anyhow, several days ago I popped open a bunch of browser windows with views of my friends-page back to skip=980 (as far as that type of view goes, since I view 20 entries per page), figuring I'd read forward and get caught up. Except that because I've been alternating tired and busy, it's taken me so long to get up to Friday, 2005-02-25 (at skip=700) that by the time I finish reading these open windows and open another set, I'll have missed some entries that are more than 1000 back. So I'm officially punting on catching up on the end of February / start of March, and will just accept that there will be gems I've missed (until some hypothetical future date when I become super-organized and do away with the need to sleep, and read all my friends' journals from their first entries to the present and comment on each one ... but don't hold your breath).

The workers next door have stacked all the wood from the demolished fire escape in the back yard, and noisily scooped, shovelled, and carried the rather impressive mound of trash that had been behind/under the fire escape to someplace else in some unknown number of garbage bags. I'm impressed by how much can be moved by enough people who know what they're doing. Every so often I hear power tools, but I haven't seen what they're using when I do. Just now I heard some comments along the lines of, "That's holding it up," followed by, "Dude, that's a load-bearing vine!" (The vine in question might be morning glory, but is most likely wild grape. The grape vines back there are quite robust.) I think I'm going to have to go take a peek and see what they're working on now.

In the editor I use most often, vi, the '~' key will toggle the character under the cursor from uppercase to lowercase or vice versa. I just caught myself trying to use it to change a doublequote (") to a singlequote/apostrophe ('). Huh.

(Yes, I know there's a difference between singlequote, apostrophe, and tick; what I meant was "apostrophe-where-I-really-wanted-singlequote-but-I'm-typing-ASCII".)