Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Came home to find I have power on 2/3 of 1st floor, 1 room of 2nd floor, & dark in rest of house. Fridge not running.

Of course power supply for broadband antenna is plugged in on 3rd floor so no Internet even tho servers in living room

"The worst thing about conservatives qua conservatives is the same as the worst thing about liberals qua liberals. These are in-groups, they define themseleves primarily in terms of being different from members of other in-groups; they recognize and declare each other in the language of buzzwords and stock phrases. Principles and actual deep beliefs are secondary at best. The strongest signs of this unfortunate behavior in 'Give War a Chance' are the frequent pot-shots that O'Rourke takes at various people and groups.

"One particularly telling target is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Now in fact Ben & Jerry's is a private-sector entrepreneurial company, selling the public a politically-incorrect good (extra-fat ice cream) for which there is a large demand, making sums of money at this, and voluntarily giving some of that money to various charities. If there were actual principles involved here, conservatives should like this, as it is exactly the picture of How People Should Live and How Charity Should Work that they always paint when trying to cut government aid programs. But since Ben & Jerry's wear liberal-looking clothes, and give their donations to groups with liberal buzzwords ('Peace', 'Community' and so on) in their names, they are on the conservative OK-to-attack list; and O'Rourke attacks them at random several times, just to remind us that he's a conservative."

-- David Chess, in a review of P. J. O'Rourke's Give War a Chance

Appointment at the clinic this afternoon, which is something that tends to wear me out, especially in this weather. Doc wasn't amused about the lab results I was there to discuss not having come back yet (some tests came back, some didn't) -- I'm supposed to phone tomorrow or the next day. Currently waiting to see whether I get a second wind so I can accomplish any of the things it would be good to do tonight. The temptation, of course, is to fill up the time with 'tiny' things that I just barely have the energy for, but if I do that, I won't ever feel well enough to tackle the larger tasks, and will have only made miniscule progress on the stuff I do try to do. "The thing on my to-do list that I need to be doing right now is resting," is a meme I continue to have a lot of trouble with. I manage it sometimes, but too often I fail to stop the "I should be doing _____ instead" chorus in my skull, or manage to get sucked into "just one quick thing" that "should only take a moment" before I close my eyes ... like, ah, er, composing a LiveJournal entry trying to catch up on a bunch of recent stuff-in-my-head at once. Whoops.

The clinic always seems to leave me feeling terribly tired. I think it's mostly the waiting room. Today I did think to put in my earplugs before the always-too-loud television started to feel physically painful. (The television starts too loud and stays there, it doesn't keep getting louder. But as I tire or as the fibromyalgia messes with me more, my hearing gets more sensitive, like someone keeps turning up the gain somewhere in my nervous system.) And when the last patient who seemed to be paying attention to Guiding Light was called back to an examining room, I asked the staff if I could turn it down. I turned it waaaaay down. But I could still understand what they were saying when the news came on just before I was seen (an hour after I got there, which is to say 45 minutes after the time my appointment was scheduled for). There's the price of going to a free clinic, and one where they're not trying to average five minutes per patient like in an HMO: they frequently get backlogged and I have to wait. Considering the price and the value, there's a limit to how much I get to complain about the waiting. But it still wears me down, whether I have "grounds for a complaint" or not, so I'll whine here instead.

Someday I need to get more comfortable (and more effective in the frequencies that bother me most) earplugs. They'll probably cost a bundle though. These make a big difference, but some ranges seem to cut through (I notice attenuation there, but not as much as I'd like), and they get uncomfortable if I leave them in more than fifteen minutes or so (though at those times not having them is even more uncomfortable). They seem to be decent earplugs ("Sonic II"), but what I probably want is something custom-fit, which is a whole different price range, I think.

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So before going to the clinic, I got most of my LAN back up after the power came back on, not counting the Windows machine in the green room that I haven't gotten around to yet ... and the blue room Mac, which seems not to be aware that it has a hard disk.     :-(     Little floppy icon with a question mark, blinking in the middle of the screen.

Maybe I'll get lucky and this will just be a "sticktion" problem that can be cured by giving the drive a mild spanking. But the Mac is, of course, at the very bottom of a stack of other devices (VCRs (one that works, one that I just use as a tuner if I want to watch something other than what's being recorded on the working one), DVD, monitor, etc.) that I'll have to move. Feh. And it was serving as my television monitor (it has a composite-video input on the back, and a vid-playback program on the aforementioned not-talking-to-us hard disk that defaults to showing what's on that input; the ancient green-screen composite computer monitor (remember when home computers spit out NTSC as their main video?) with the vertical-deflection Issues got bad enough to be unuseable).

I'm sure I have MacOS boot floppies around here somewhere (at least one copy of OS 8.something and probably a set of OS 9.mumble), if I can only find them. They're not where I thought they were, so they're probably in the server room living room. Whether they do me any good or not is another question. Maybe I can transplant the video-input card to another Mac and download another video-player someplace? Anyhow, it looks like I'm not taping what I'd planned to tape on this VCR tonight, as I doubt I'll get it up and running by then. I just hope I'm able to see the menus to program the working VCR in that stack, before I leave for Pennsic.

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I found what I think is a bug (unless there's a reason it's supposed to work this way) in my phone's SMS handling. SMS messages are limited to [mumble] characters (the number 160 sticks in my head, but I'd have to go look it up -- point is, the first 'S' does stand for "short"). My previous phones would stop registering keystrokes for an SMS message when the limit was reached, and the more helpful of them would count down how many bytes I had left. This one, like a bunch of other non-ancient phones I've seen, lets you go past that limit and just breaks up the too-long message into a series of legal-size messages to send -- there's a number on the screen that probably tells me how many bytes I have left in the current chunk, but I wasn't paying attention last night when I was posting to LJ from my phone during that strange 2/3 power outage, so I didn't notice when it rolled over (and I wasn't counting in my head because I lost that habit after getting this phone, since it hasn't mattered as much). I did wonder whether LJ would get one reassembled message or present an oversize SMS posting as a series of separate message-chunks.

Now I know: it did neither. I got error messages back from the cellular network that gave the impression that neither entry I tried to post got through at all, somplaining about a missing SMTP header. As far as I can tell, what happened was that the first chunk of each message -- the first [max size of SMS message] characters -- was delivered via the cellular network to the SMS->email gateway, delivered via the Internet to LiveJournal, and posted to my journal here, but successive chunks didn't get copies of the email address that was in the first chunk, so they got as far as the SMS->email gateway and bounced back to the phone from there because the gateway had no idea where to pass them along to.

Actually, I don't know whether this is a phone bug, a Cingular network bug, a gateway bug, Officially Not A Bug (in which case I'd like a warning message before hitting 'send'), or what -- I have guesses, but I don't know all the details about how SMS is implemented, how multi-chunk messages are conventionally handled (I think some phones automagically reassemble them on receipt but others don't ...? or am I thinking of how MMS works?), and what the design parameters of the email gateway are, so I'm not entirely sure I've assigned fault in the correct place.

Considering that we're talking about a cute hack on top of a kludge extending a clever minimalist convenience, some inconsistencies and peculiar behaviour are to be expected, I suppose.

But now I'm trying to decide whether to go back to last night's posts and tack on the missing text in square brackets after what did get through. I've still got the originals stored in my phone to refer to if I forget what I'd been trying to say.

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Perrine was being a pest, wanting to flop down next to the keyboard in such a way that she gradually rolls onto the keys. So I'm resting one end of the keyboard on her butt instead. Looks like she's going to let me get away with it all the way to the end of this journal entry. I think she's falling asleep despite the jiggling with each keystroke, and once I proofread this I'll do the same.