Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up." -- Andrew Sullivan, 2010-01-01

I keep starting journal entries in my head and never getting around to typing them in. This'n will be random snippets mostly unconnected with any of the still-in-my-head ones ...

I've been distractable and easily frustrated lately, so I've got a lot of random stuff I'm in the middle of that I'm not getting finished. I'm also feeling especially frustrated by not having My Tools handy, since the hard drive in the Mac died. I'm trying to get by on a slow Windows Vista machine and an even slower Windows XP machine, and even with Cygwin installed, they're very much Not Unix; one of my Linux boxes at home has spontaneously decided it wants to have a different IP address, another Linux box is quite busy trying to locate it again, the slowness of the Windows machines here is bad enough to affect the useability of SSH/telnet, and I never got X to work properly through an SSH tunnel anyhow.

Not sure how much of my distractability and irritability can be attributed to Not My Tools frustration, and how much my just being especially frustrated lately is making me feel the Not My Tools issue more acutely. Or it may just be frequent low-grade headaches contributing to both.

Replacement hard drive for the Mac (birthday gift from Mom) is supposed to arrive tomorrow. Still need to pick up a Torx screwdriver (and arrange to get my hands on OS X installation media). As far as I could discover, buying a replacement drive the same size as the original would've cost nearly as much as getting one three or four times larger.

For some reason, I had "Jimmy Jazz" (by The Clash) stuck in my head all of yesterday. For a less mysterious but still kinda odd reason, I've had "You've Got A Friend" (by James Taylor) stuck in my head today.

Rain washed away rather a lot of snow last night, but there's still more left behind than melted in the rain. There's a strip of pavement between what's left of the snow-berm left by a plow, and the curb, showing just how much of the street was never scraped. The birds are spending more time flitting about high in the trees and less time huddled on low branches, but the juncos have discovered the seed that had been put out for them a couple weeks ago now that the snow that had covered it has melted. The hawk has been by a few times; no more sign of that fox though.

I had a really odd problem on the Vista machine two days ago: no matter how much I turned down the volume on the guitar or the mixer -- or Audacity's input-level slider -- my guitar was getting distorted. It sounded like regular clipping overdrive. When I magnified the waveform, the clipping wasn't at the peaks! It was square-looking bits in the middle. I was all set to post here asking "WTF?", but then my brother declared that he thought the computer was failing to shut itself down when overheating, powered it off for several hours ... and last night the guitar recorded cleanly. Well, a clean tone anyhow; I was really tired, and my playing wasn't very clean. Whoops.

(There was an also-mysterious very-low-frequency oscillation in there as well.)

I had a few realy bad fibro days last week. Wednesday and Thursday were especially bad. Friday I was doing a little better and hoped to make it to Silmaril's, but I wasn't doing quite better enough. Probably well enough to enjoy myself, but not well enough to feel safe driving, and I stupidly overlooked the option of calling around to try to arrange a ride with someone else until much too late. I wasn't really feeling well enough to go anywhere on my birthday, either, so I've decided that I'll just celebrate it the next day that I do feel well enough (not counting tomorrow, since I have to save tomorrow's spoons for rehearsal).

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes here and on Facebook. I do see the Facebook notifications, but don't get around to logging in there more often than once every couple months (and usually can't find my way around on the site when I do so) -- I'll try that new "reply to the notification email to post a reply on the Wall" feature later, when I have some of my attention span back.

Random factoid I stumbled across recently: according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources web site, Southern Flying Squirrels outnumber Grey Squirrels in some parts of the state, but most people never notice because the flying squirrels are only active at night and hard to see. (Apparently, Southern Flying Squirrels live everywhere in the state. I didn't see any info on distribution of the slightly larger Northern Flying Squirrel.)

Also, most web sites that talk about squirrels include a link to where the Squirrel Almanac web site used to be (now a 404 error) I did not find even one that linked to the current site, but fortunately some of the other sites included the author's name, and I was able to find her current personal page and get to the Squirrel Almanac from there. (It just covers North American tree squirrels, in case anyone reading this is looking for more. But that was enough for my purposes.)

And after waiting twenty minutes for XP to increase the virtual memory pool size, I've forgotten what else I was about to say. I should really be doing something else now anyhow.