Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

You know those little thingies that attach to keychain laser pointers to make them throw a pointing hand or an arrow or a heart or a star instead of just a dot? Do any of y'all have the means to make me one that shows the words "TOO LOUD"? I really want to be able to project that phrase onto the windows of the subwoofer-equipped cars that stop at the traffic light.

My weekend was a matter of repeatedly lowering expectations / plans to try to match what my body was up for, and never getting the bar low enough. To explain in more detail, and especially to describe how I feel about it, would constitute whining, so I'll just type

#include <whines/fibro.h>

When I was younger and thinking about "when I grow up", I took it for granted that by the time I reached my current age I'd be married and have children -- after all, that's how it went for my nearest role-models, my parents. A little older, I started really thinking about it instead of just assuming that was How Life Worked, and realized that was something that I honestly did want. Several years ago I realized that a knack for falling in love with women who didn't want children, combined with rather bleak long-term financial prospects and having let a decade or so more time go by without paying attention to how quickly the years were moving, meant that it's unlikely that I'll ever have children of my own after all. (And let's see, I'd be how old when they reached high school ...) Sometimes I'm okay with that; sometimes thinking about it really sucks.

Tonight a thought struck me that made me wonder whether hypothetical children would be better off not having me as a parent anyhow ... when I realized that I wouldn't be able to resist teaching them the Alphabet Song to the tune of Horses Bransle instead of the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. But I wonder whether I can still inflict that on one of my nephews ... <laugh style="evil" genre="melodrama">

(This thought came from thinking about some experts on the telly talking about insufficient hand-washing, and how humming the Alphabet Song twice through took the right amount of time to be safely sanitary ... and then thinking that there are tunes the right number of beats that are more fun to have going through one's head while washing one's hands.)

A couple of days ago a bucket truck and a pickup with a big stepladder (really really big stepladder) and the name of a lighting contractor on the side pulled up on either side of the intersection near my house and set out orange cones. There was some yelling back and forth, and boxes in the bed of the pickup being sliced open, and somebody holding the ladder steady for someone else, and then I went and practiced the drums for a little while. Now the 'walk' signals and the green lights are OHMIGODPAINFULLYBRIGHTBRIGHTBRIGHT and the green lights seem to be a different colour than they used to be. So I'm wondering whether this means they switched out incandescents or halogens or whatever had been in there, for high intensity LEDs. (Odd that the green lights seem so much brighter and the red lights not so much; I'd expect them to worry more about making the red lights more obvious. Maybe the red lights are brighter as well and I'm just not noticing because the greens got a bigger boost?)

If they did switch to LEDs, I wonder how much that cost to do, and how long it takes for the LEDs to pay for themselves in reduced electricity and reduced maintenance. I wonder, but not quite enough to crawl through Google searching for the answer.

Blood test tomorrow. A fasting one (cholesterol). I think I ate enough at dinner to avoid being really uncomfortable twelve hours later, without really pigging out.

Hmm. Schlock Mercenary has been loading for several minutes and hasn't finished yet. Time to reboot Windows. (It's not a connection problem, 'cause the Linux machine in the other bedroom still acts like it's on broadband, and an FTP download was going at faster than the speed my ISP is billing me for. So the problem must be that I'm using more than 250M of (virtual) memory (the machine has 96M of physical RAM), which seems to be the point at which Opera starts to crawl. When it gets like this, closing windows doesn't seem to help much but rebooting and reloading the same set of pages does make it snappy again for a while; this suggests a memory leak. (Quitting and restarting Opera helps, but not as much as rebooting the machine does.) Memory leaks annoy me, because gosh darn it, they really Just Shouldn't Happen. Oh well, it's been several days since the last reboot. (If I can restrain myself from having so much open at once, performance remains acceptable a lot longer. Lately I've got a bunch of "gee, I really want to think about this a lot more carefully and respond / quote / link to it later" pages open that I keep not getting around to Dealing With. If I bookmark 'em & close 'em, "out of sight, out of mind" takes over and I never get back to them. I need to update the scheduler for my brain's OS -- that's probably a big download; maybe I should install Bittorrent.)

"It is time to say that gay bashing is not only wrong, it is unchristian. If Christianity is grace, then judgment is the ultimate apostasy. If Christianity is love, then cruelty is the ultimate heresy." -- Rev. Jim Rigby, "Real Christians Don't Gay Bash", 2006-07-12