My Archives: December 2004

Friday, December 31, 2004

A LiveJournal community site (what's an LJ community?) : Hip Domestics. People ask questions and share tips about household stuff. I'm not clear on the "hip" part yet, but it's entertaining reading. Current topics include knife care, Greenies (dog biscuits that freshen up doggy breath), and compromise techniques for people who prefer different sleep temperatures than their bed partners. Via Absolute Piffle.

Posted by Anita @ 06:48 AM PST [Link]

Thursday, December 30, 2004

Chris "Lockergnome" Pirillo asked me about a local webloggers' email list and I didn't know of one. So now he's started a list, but it's not just for webloggers -- Seattlist (list info here). I've subscribed. Chris says, "For Seattlites, Redmonders, and Bellvueans - or anybody else in the area. This list was set up to keep us in touch with one another, as well as to provide a resource for personal and professional recommendations."

I mostly depend on NWR for local news, chat, recommendations, and opinions, and I would have told Chris about it right off the bat, but his blogger reference threw me off. It's a list that started as a Not Web Related or Not Work Related list back in Webgrrls days. To subscribe, send mail to majordomo@divalists.com. The body of message should read: subscribe nwr-list

Posted by Anita @ 03:40 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Get the new year off to a good start, at the East Side Weblog Meetup!

You don't have to be a meetup.com member to attend, but if you join (it's free) I'll be able to keep you posted about any last-minute changes (these are rare). RSVPing encourages other folks to come along too!

Posted by Anita @ 12:50 PM PST [Link]

Great dialog between Mig of Metamorphosism and his daughter!

Mig: You want to what?
Beta: Poke you in the ear with a skewer and you tell me where you feel it.
Mig: Okay.
Beta: [Pokes her father in the ear with shish-kebab skewer]
Mig: My left shin. Interesting.
Beta: [Pokes father in other ear]
Mig: My right arm. Where'd you get the idea to do this?

Posted by Anita @ 04:52 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Mitch Ratcliffe looks at how U.S. media has been covering the earthquake and tsunamis, and compares them unfavorably with the BBC. "For several hours after the waves struck Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia and Bangladesh, the lead news on U.S. media was a combination of the inevitable end-of-the-year retrospective reports and Reggie White's sudden death at 43, certainly a tragic story, but by comparison to an event that would lead to the death of tens of thousands of people, pretty small stuff. Meanwhile, Canadian and British television was talking through what was known, sans pictures and relying on a few still images while describing the scope of the devastation in terms that made clear something of massive import had happened. It was serious coverage that commanded attention."

Posted by Anita @ 01:50 PM PST [Link]

Monday, December 27, 2004

Of the various blog entries I've read talking about how the author spent the holiday, Jacqueline Passey's was the funniest for me. "My stepmother managed to make both her youngest daughter cry *and* her second youngest daughter scream in response to a Christmas gift this year! Good job! Suellen (my stepmother) handed Zoya (the youngest, age 14) the components of her gift one at a time to unwrap. First, a rock. Then, another rock. Then, a piece of astroturf. Zoya is looking perturbed. A thermometer. Confusion. A container of mealworms. More confusion. Suellen opened the mealworms and put one on the coffee table and tried to convince Zoya they were pets to play with. Zoya starts to freak out a little. Then, the jar of crickets."

Posted by Anita @ 04:51 AM PST [Link]

Saturday, December 25, 2004

We've had a fun time this Christmas morning. My best present was a total surprise in my stocking! I'd lost my cell phone a few days ago and we hadn't been able to find it, despite looking in every room, asking at the last place I'd been, and calling the number on our other phone. We were bummed, especially when we found out that the Cingular store woman hadn't added that number to our insurance after we'd specifically asked her to! (We knew from experience how handy that insurance can be.) But Jack found the phone in the garage last night after I'd gone to bed (no wonder we didn't hear it ringing), so he wrapped it up and put it in my stocking along with cans of sardines (protein, low-carb snack that I like and he doesn't) and the traditional tangerine.

Our grandson has been playing for hours with the Take Along Truck Case, a toy truck that holds twelve small die-cast cars and comes with six.

Jack cooked us eggs and bacon, then smoked a cigar out on the patio. We have a fire in the fireplace. There's a jam session and open house at a friend's place this afternoon. A relaxing, fun day, and I hope yours is the same!

Posted by Anita @ 09:35 AM PST [Link]

Friday, December 24, 2004

I kept reading on the knitlist about a scarf called Clapotis (mostly people asking for yarn substitution ideas since the yarn specified in the pattern is rather expensive). I finally checked out some URLs posted with pictures of scarf examples made with different yarn, and found Thirteen Ways of Looking at Clapotis, poetry about knitting by Cari Luna! The poems are patterned after a group by Wallace Stevens. Nice pictures of the scarf, also.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of Noro
Or the beauty of dropped stitches,
The casting off
Or just after.

Posted by Anita @ 04:46 AM PST [Link]

Thursday, December 23, 2004

I really like scented candles, scented oils (on a light-bulb ring), or pot pourri. I'm not a fan of inscense, though; I think the smoke bugs my nose. So I was mildly interested in the Scent Stories gadget being marketed this year, but not enough to buy one. Fred of Fragments From Floyd imagined his own scent story from an earlier time in his life: "And thus, my first supplemental InDeScent Story was born. I think I will call it 'Overnight in Dorm C'. Eventually, I'll model my new disk on one like, oh, 'Mountain Trail' that you can see demonstrated here. (You really must view the demo to understand my new disk!) I'll have sound effects just like the ones on the demo link to go along with each of the five aroma selections. Some day, my disk will be on the clickable menu between 'Wandering along the Shore' and 'Strolling Through the Garden.' Just you wait. For now, here are the selected fragrances for 'Dorm Room', first new disk: Aroma One: A Hundred Dirty Socks. After all, how can you expect freshmen to spend time doing laundry when there are frat parties every night except Tuesday? Let'em pile up. There are better ways to do laundry! This aroma will connect you via olfactory memory to another fragrance: Locker Room, coming on a future disk!"

Posted by Anita @ 04:52 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Via Language Hat, a weblog hosted on LiveJournal that explicates Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy. Instead of an FAQ, there's FIQ -- Frequently Imagined Questions.

  1. Q: What is this site?
    A: This is a center or clearinghouse of sorts for news in English about Chinese language science fiction.
  2. Q: Why? Is there such a pressing need?
    A: Chinese science fiction seldom appears in English, so awareness of it among people who do not speak Chinese is minimal. In light of this situation, this site attempts to illuminate the state of Chinese science fiction by reporting on the latest news, translating commentary and criticism, and issuing reviews and recommendations.

    Of course there are personal reasons in addition to this; the author recently accepted a translation job and discovered to his surprise and disappointment that his years in China had dulled his English language skills; he found he had difficulting in phrasing a natural, fluent English sentence from a Chinese translation. So as an exercise in English writing and practice in Chinese translation, this site allows him at the same time to accomplish something that perhaps is independently worthwhile.

The index of articles gives a general idea of what the site contains.

Posted by Anita @ 05:27 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Now that it's winter in the northern hemisphere, time to review Paghat's list of garden-related things to do at this time of year. These may not be in the garden but they are for the garden.


Posted by Anita @ 06:40 AM PST [Link]

Monday, December 20, 2004

D'oh! The PC I use had a hardware problem (bad video board? problem with the motherboard? Jack hasn't had a chance to figure it out yet) so I'm using one of our other computers. I can update this weblog just fine, and I don't have a stock of weblog fodder links right now that I can't get to (usually I bookmark possible weblog links and have a bunch that I'm going to post). But I'm accessing mail via my shell account, which doesn't have the spam bully filtering I use. And I'm ashamed to say that I hadn't backed up my SharpReader OPML list recently so the many blogs I follow there aren't readily available. I hope we'll be able to get this fixed soon -- not a good time for hassles like this. When would be a good time? Never!

Posted by Anita @ 04:25 AM PST [Link]

Friday, December 17, 2004

I've added links to various meetup reports on my December meetup report. Check it out! My title here comes from Addy Santos' blog entry.

Update: Walt Ritscher posted his report also: Blogger Mecca in my Backyard. "The room was crowded and warm. Everywhere I looked someone was sharing technology, showing new devices or cool applications. One section, at a table near the windows, was the tablet arena - with all the tablet-heads (including tablet evangelist Scoble) comparing their tablet-toys. Over in the lounge area was the cell phone cabal. Mingled amongst all the laptops were the gamers. The game device of the evening apparently was the new Nintendo DS."

Posted by Anita @ 06:38 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

We had a great time tonight at the Seattle Weblog Meetup! Jack was tired after a day of interviews, and it was past our grandson's bedtime, but we had fun anyway. Ralph's Grocery was looking seasonally festive with poinsettias scattered about. I'd asked folks to bring their white elephants, and most people got something odd or cool out of the grab bag. My favorite was when Jeannie handed me a package and told me to just give it to someone. I presented it to Jake: a book called How to Satisfy any Woman on Five Dollars a Day and a country Christmas CD, plus some cookie cutters tied to the package. I took home a tiny garden gnome, and R------ took home the clock radio with cassette player that I brought to the meetup! Jacqueline got the tablet advice she needed from Robert Scoble, TDavid, and Andyed, plus other guys with tablets.

Other kids there beside R-----: Annabel with Dylan, and Jon's two children. The list of those present:

Posted by Anita @ 09:00 PM PST [Link]

The Christmas CD I would like this year is A John Waters Christmas (oddly listed at Amazon.com as Xmas, though the cover clearly says Christmas on it). I've long enjoyed Waters' work (his movies and his writing and speaking). Says Waters, "Have a merry, rotten, scary, sexy, biracial, ludicrous, happy little Christmas!" He was on Fresh Air yesterday promoting the CD (the first I'd heard about it!) in a good interview. Samples from every song on the Amazon page; "Santa Claus is a Black Man" is a must-hear!

Posted by Anita @ 05:02 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

I made some adjustments to our birdfeeder setup on our back patio. First, I added a dome-baffle to the Duncraft globe feeder to discourage squirrels. Then, to encourage the squirrels to other parts of the yard, I bought a Squngee! This is a bungee cord feeder that makes the rodents work for their food, leaping up or over and hanging on while corn cobs bob and bounce. We hung it a few days ago, and they caught on quickly. Fun to watch! And they say the squirrels actually prefer dried corn to bird seed.

I have pictures of the birds feeding at the globe feeder a few years ago, at our West Seattle house.

Posted by Anita @ 08:13 AM PST [Link]

Monday, December 13, 2004

Jen of Going Jesus (she works at a church and is studying to be a deacon) has been collecting some of the scariest creches ever!

Posted by Anita @ 04:24 AM PST [Link]

Saturday, December 11, 2004

My sister B---- who lives in Delaware is making a short-notice visit to Seattle, so last night she, my sister M--- who lives in Seattle, and I all went to see the Nutcracker by the Pacific Northwest Ballet as a girls' night out. What fun! This is the production with set designs by Maurice Sendak (Sendak's take on the ballet -- warning, music on page), so it's not too sugary-sweet. There's a dark side to the E.T.A. Hoffman original story (more music).

The ballet is well worth seeing and moves along at a brisk pace. I did not find myself, like one young boy I heard about at another Nutcracker, exclaiming aloud in the second act, "Oh no, not another dance!"

Posted by Anita @ 04:40 AM PST [Link]

Friday, December 10, 2004

Next Wednesday, it's the Seattle Weblog Meetup for December! When: Weds December 15, 7 pm. Where: Ralph's Grocery and Deli, 2035 4th Ave in Seattle, across from the Cinerama. There's food and drink available -- you can even buy a beer and drink it in the deli area where we are. Free WiFi, too! (I'll bring an extension cord since the plug-ins are across the room from where we usually sit.) Special holiday note: bring your white elephants, wrapped or in bags, or just bring yourself! We have new faces every month along with a friendly regular crowd. You can still attend even if you aren't a member of Meetup.com (but joining is free).

Posted by Anita @ 04:10 AM PST [Link]

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Truepenny had bats in her attic, and it wasn't easy finding out what to do about it. "When he opened the attic door, he found two bats lying on the floor at the foot of the stairs, rather like Whatsisface in the Paths of the Dead. The way is shut. We assumed they were ex-bats, because, hello, lying there not moving rather than hanging from something, so, having corralled various enterprising quadrupeds who would've liked to help, Mirrorthaw gets the gloves, the bucket, and the piece of cardboard and goes up to deal with them. I lurk in the hallway. 'Oh,' he says. 'They're not dead.'"

Batworld was the site that finally helped her.

Posted by Anita @ 04:26 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, December 8, 2004

My fannish and weblog universes collided last night, when Robert Scoble and Greg Bear met at a dinner. Greg is local; he does a lot for Clarion West, and he's the chair of the Advisory Board for the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Scoble has good radar for noticing cool people! (Times I've mentioned Greg.)

Robert said, "One of his answers during dinner let it slip that he was an experienced author. Had written several books. I still didn't know his name, but by the end of the night I had transfered all the trust/love/adoration that the rest of the table had for my dinner mate to him too. I found myself becoming a fan and I didn't even know what kinds of things he wrote. I just knew it had to be good the way my already-trusted friends were treating him. When I left the dinner I still had no clue who this guy was. I had shared a dinner with him and only knew him as 'Greg the author that my friends really loved.' So, I rushed home, opened up my search engine, and searched on his name."

Greg's advice to Robert about writing a book: "He told me to write about what scares me. Then write about what I love. And if I'm really lucky, he told me, they'll both be the same thing. I told him it sounded like blogging about Microsoft."

Robert, come with me to Vanguard (our monthly fannish get-together -- what is fandom?) and meet more of the great folks in the local SF community!

Posted by Anita @ 04:34 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

When Jack, our grandson, and I first entered Crossroads mall tonight, we were stunned and alarmed by loud electronic klezmer music. Yeow! They had a Hannukah thing happening in the main part of the food court, right where I'd intended to have the meetup! So Jack started updating this site and the meetup.com site, while I moved R---- to a new location, in front of the Compleat Cook store close to the library. This was a lot quieter! I turned some nametags into stickers with our new location and put them up at the mall entrances.

Richard Sprague (his MSDN weblog) found us after he went online and noticed the new location. We all had dinner and shared cookies (I'd promised holiday treats), and talked about pinging, why people blog, and possible futures in blogging. Wesner Moise chanced to see us and stopped to talk for a few minutes -- he lamented that he'd been too busy to blog for the past several weeks.

After Wes and Richard took off, I walked with R---- around the mall to find anyone who might have missed us. Sure enough, we found Dave Winer! So we all talked about the benefits of spicy soup and the intersection of blogging and newspapers. But R---- was past his bedtime and had certainly had a sufficiency of cookies, so we had to go.

I hope to get better turnout in future months. There must be east-side webloggers that haven't heard about meetups yet. What would convince you to try attending such a gathering?

Posted by Anita @ 08:45 PM PST [Link]

Rands interviews Joshua Schachter, creator of Del.icio.us.

RANDS: From looking at del.icio.us from the outside, it appears you first design an architecture, throw it out in the wild, and then continue iteratively developing based off community feedback. Is this a correct observation? If so, how do you know when you've got enough of a product to throw it into the wild? Is it a conscious choice?

JOSHUA: I develop in the live system directly. I get pretty much immediate feedback about what works and what doesn't, and I'm not above backing out a change I've made if it ends up working badly. Usually I stay up really late hacking, and then as soon as I think I'm done implementing (but not debugging) I fall asleep. Then in the morning I fix all the damage.

Rands is one of the guys involved with Jerk City. Jack has a del.icio.us page.

Posted by Anita @ 04:50 AM PST [Link]

Sunday, December 5, 2004

Microsoft blogger John Montgomery shares some of his expertise, not in the software area but in the painting-walls area: "Someone today asked me how to paint a room. About once a month, someone asks me how to paint a room because they think I'm 'handy.' I'm not a professional painter. I don't even like painting much. But I have gotten pretty fast at it over the years. I've ignored lots of rules and found lots of others that work. And I've made a huge number of mistakes. Even after 12 years of painting things, I still can't make my paint jobs look as good as the ones that pros do, but I can do it for less. That said, when the work requires more than 5 days of effort on my part, I look to hire it out -- pros can generally do that sort of thing in a lot less time and do it better."

John has also been talking about his Maytag Neptune washing machine and what home-repair tools you should have in your toolkit.

Posted by Anita @ 06:29 AM PST [Link]

Friday, December 3, 2004

I've bought a lot on eBay this year -- mostly yarn, with a few books and a vacuum coffee maker thrown in for good measure. So I was tickled to find out about eBay Pulse! The most popular searches and the most watched items (the highest auctions seem to have disappeared this morning, probably because most of them didn't have any real bids -- they just had high opening prices which isn't that interesting). EBay explains about eBay pulse. You can refine the search by using the drop-down category list; the most-watched yarn item right now is fifteen skeins of Noro Silk Garden, a very nice yarn with looong color changes that make gorgeous patterns in your knitting. Thanks to Anil Dash for the link!

Reminds me of Google Zeitgeist and Lycos 50 (where free crochet and knitting patterns are high on the search lists this week).

Posted by Anita @ 04:39 AM PST [Link]

Thursday, December 2, 2004

I was surprised when Jack told me that he hasn't been reading the jobs blog at Microsoft, since he's had a few phone interviews lately. Gretchen and Zoe are great at explaining the mysterious job application process at MS (their new visitor category).

Also, Heather Leigh blogs about being a recruiter for marketers at Microsoft.

Posted by Anita @ 04:41 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Vonda McIntyre is starting a new (cable access for now) television show: Science Fiction Conversations. It will premiere December 9, 2004 at 9:30 pm, on SCAN-TV, the cable access channel for Seattle (try 77 or 29 in the Seattle area). The first episode features my friends Nisi Shawl and Eileen Gunn, but I don't yet know if they are interviewing each other or if Vonda will be on camera with them -- she's the producer and director. The second episode will be Ursula K. Le Guin with Eileen Gunn and Nisi Shawl (unknown air date). I must tell Vonda about BitTorrent!

Posted by Anita @ 06:56 AM PST [Link]

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