aleatory contract

2009-04-27T14:11:00.001-06:00

So my powerbook is dying. I can’t complain; it’s five years old now. I’ve had it for four of those years, and I haven’t been easy on it. It’s been eaten over, spilled on, dented, knocked over, scratched, dropped, shed upon and clawed by malevolent cats. I’ve taken it into the bathtub with me, used it in the rain. It’s been the novel I curl up in bed with. It’s been my boombox. It’s been my shop manual. It’s been my cookbook, which is a particularly bad idea when baking, since sifted flour and electronics don’t really get along. It’s had a hard life, and the battery is gone, the screen has been going for a year or so, the fan’s been dicky since last fall. In the past few days, I’ve been getting more and more beachballs, and even Firefox is a challenge to run. So it’s time to think about replacing it. My little powerbook has been good to me, and I’ve been happy to own it. Never gave me a moment’s trouble in its long life.

The thing is, I don’t particularly like any of the current configurations Apple is offering. The macbook is pretty, but expensive, and it seems underpowered. $1200 is a lot to spend. The white macbook seems like just as much power, for less, which is closer to my price range, but even at $1000, it’s a bit spendy, and it seems like the macbook line has had more than its share of problems, everything from hinges to chipsets, and the thing I liked most about my old mac was its indestructibility.

Speed and power aren’t immediately important to me, although I do want something fast enough to stay useful for a few years. I’ve switched jobs, so I don’t need to run design software, and while I might want something for music editing and mixing, I’m not likely to need that any time soon, and can probably borrow what I do need. For the next two years, and probably past that, I’ll be using internet apps and a word processor and probably iTunes, and that’s about it. A netbook, then, is looking pretty attractive. I prefer OSX to Windows, but I am given to understand a netbook could be made to run OSX. There’s also linux, but my limited experience with it (using scott's partitioned machine) has been a bit off-putting; it seems like there's always a driver missing, or some damn thing. Customisability would be a fun diversion, but it's not something I particularly need. Mostly I just want something that will work whenever I turn it on.

It's a choice, then, I think, between dropping $1000 on a white macbook, or dropping $400 on a netbook, probably the Asus eee 1000H. Thoughts?

2009-01-21T18:31:00.002-07:00

this, among other things for which i presently lack the time.

2008-08-18T11:54:00.002-06:00

though i'm going to be out of town during the convention -- and, indeed, will be going in quite the opposite direction from denver -- i'm probably more likely to watch parts of it, since i will be in a hotel room which will probably have a TV. i wouldn't have watched otherwise. i have a feeling i'll try to avoid watching, if i can.

but seriously, though. biden? BIDEN? mr joe my-life's-work-fucked-up-the-lending-sector-and-the-US-economy-just-for-some-constituents biden?

i've refrained from talking much on my blog at all, and i've tried to refrain from talking politics. i know most everyone who reads this is at least sorta-kinda pro-obama. i'm wondering, though, if people are still so into him. you don't have to respond, of course. but i'd be curious, either way.

2008-07-17T21:21:00.002-06:00

so i got a tattoo.

on my forearm.

it's odd, but i'm actually thinking the possibility of employment difficulties may actually be a net benefit. plus it looks really good. like, really good.

i've wanted a tattoo for more than a decade now. now that i have one, though, i feel like i may want more. i designed this one myself. it's quite simple and fairly small. i think i might design a bigger one for the future. the artist i had was quite sweet, and if (or when) i do get another, i'd definitely go to him again.

i'm tired of these motherfucking obama emails in my motherfucking mailbox!

2008-07-14T08:04:00.003-06:00

seriously, it shouldn't take three fucking attempts to unsubscribe to a mailing list that i never asked to join in the first place. i realise that my email's collected every time i try to contact the obama campaign. i realise that they've got my email and my contact information from the clinton campaign, and that they've got greg's contact information from the DNC, but jesus! stop with the fucking emails already, or at least make it opt-in! this is the third time since i contacted them about FISA that i've tried, unsuccessfully, to unsubscribe.

at least they don't have my phone number anymore, since i changed it when we switched to CREDO. i changed numbers mostly because someone in town's been using my old one as a fake to pass out to dudes at bars, at least going by the voicemails i get. the digits were also just slightly off those of an opthamologist's office, and i was at the point where i recieved more calls for a dr. isaac than i did for myself. so far, reception seems pretty decent, they're like twenty bucks cheaper for the same plan, and in a week or so we'll get to vote for the organisations they'll be donating to.

i will miss the slightly scandalised reactions i'd been getting from obama callers, though. declining rally invitations, even politely, seems to be somewhere past loudly farting at a dinner party on the scale of Things One Just Does Not Do.

good thing nobody listened

2008-07-04T09:34:00.002-06:00

told you so.

told you so.

ahem.

will probably get to say"told you so".

happy damn fourth.

2008-07-01T16:24:00.002-06:00

so tell me about Realities of misty eras past. what were your favourite themes? what themes sucked hard? i want to hear stories.

because verizon sucks anyway

2008-06-21T12:29:00.003-06:00

does anyone have (or know someone who has) CREDO mobile?

2008-06-20T22:55:00.003-06:00

it's hard to feel empowered for change when contacting the obama campaign nets me nothing but a form letter from a mailbot, the text of which hasn't been updated since february and consists mostly of appeals for money and/or volunteer work.

(and yes, i was polite, and i didn't say 'fuck' or 'damn' or anything remotely curse-like, not even once!)

2008-06-20T18:23:00.003-06:00

it's a bit weird for me to consider my switch to an iBook G4 an upgrade, i guess, but this one's seen much less abuse than my PowerBook G4, and is much less broken. it has a functional screen AND a functional keyboard! plus, although both of them have wonky batteries, at least this one can have its battery swapped for a working one. the PowerBook's so banged up that i can't remove the battery cover anymore.

i didn't think i'd like iBooks, and i was dreading the day i'd have to say goodbye to my aluminium. i just thought the plastic would feel cheap and horrible. it's not so bad, though: the keyboard feels pretty good, and the plastic case feels somehow sturdier than the metal. it also seems to run a bit cooler, though that could be due to the fact that the PowerBook is a bit more fried, and i think still has the prone-to-explode battery model.

at least i'll feel better about switching to plastic when the time for a MacBook comes, though i think that time is quite some distance in the future. alas.

transformative!

2008-06-20T17:00:00.004-06:00

Change We Can Believe In. somehow i didn't think The New Politics would look quite so much like the old politics. i guess that's where the hope part of 'hope and change' comes in? you hope the change materialises?

2008-06-15T21:05:00.001-06:00

hey, is it possible to check out the search terms that have caused hits on a given blog in blogger?

inspired by liz

2008-06-15T11:06:00.003-06:00

i was born and raised in the democratic party. my great-grandmother worked for the party before she even had the vote, and continued working for it through the roosevelt years*. i remember my grandmother weeping for joy when clinton was elected back in 1992, because she'd lived through the hell of reagan and didn't know if she'd live to see the causes of the democrats ever recover. on my birthday that year following, which always falls on inauguration day, she gave me a teddy bear she'd named billy, and told me that 'something very important is happening, something you shouldn't ever forget'.

i didn't fully understand what that 'something' was, yet, but i remembered the election of 1988. i remember my elementary school holding a mock-election, after showing us the debates and having us study the platforms -- all of us, from the kindergarteners up. i remember that we elected dukakis in a landslide, and i remember how disturbed we were to learn that in the real election, the one that counted, reagan won.

that mock election, of course, had no bearing on the outcome of the actual election, but i remember how miserable i felt afterward, when i learned that. i hadn't quite grasped, i don't think, that our election was just a mock-election, and the feeling of disenfranchisement was strong. i remember students asking, the day after the real election, 'but didn't they count our votes?'

i was paying attention, even back in 1988. i remember coming home from daycare every night and watching McNeil/Leher News Hour as my mother made dinner. to this day, i get hungry every time i hear that intro music. i watched with her as iran-contra played out, as the anita hill scandal played out, as we went to war with iraq. i wasn't quite understanding yet what i was watching, but i remembered being upset about them, particularly about clarence thomas, and i knew that my grandmother was speaking about those things when she told me to remember.

i've been paying attention to primaries all my life. i've watched every convention for the past twenty years, and i've gone from colouring pictures of flags and donkeys during the speeches to yelling at the TV in frustration. i've read, and i've listened, and i've watched. i know what the democratic party has tried to do, and what it has failed to do, and what it doesn't care to do. i've watched it fail to live up to its promises.

i have a little donkey pin, given to me by my mother years ago. it lived in my little box of treasures all the years i was growing up. it's quite old. it may have been my grandmother's, or even my great-grandmother's. i have no desire to wear it anymore. the party has an ugly history, but i feel like the party itself has forgotten that history, and has made too many mistakes to be trusted.

i understand what it is to be a democrat. i've been one all my life. i, too, am tired of those who've only just started paying attention trying to explain to me what it means to be A Good Democrat, and i know very well that it doesn't mean 'doing whatever we tell you to do'. i've wanted to stay and fight, to try to help the party change from the inside, but my voice has less value, i think, than these newborn democrats who've wandered in and started telling me to remember my place, to make the coffee and earn the money and get out the vote while they do all the Big Important Idea Stuff. i'm tired of my own party telling me to shut up. i'm tired of being bullied by the very people who, in the same breath, insist that they're the only ones who care enough to protect me.

that's why i'm not voting for obama. that's why i'm changing my party registration, after being a D all my voting days. that's why my vote is going to mckinney, provided she gets the green nomination next month. i know that a third party can't really thrive in our political system, but i can't support the democrats any more, and they're not getting a dime from me until they bother to acknowledge my existence. if the democratic party has decided that courting moderates and conservatives while threatening everyone else is the way they want to go, fine. they can do it without me. since the democrats have stood by while roe's been rendered largely moot, and since they stood by as republicans appointed the raging crazies who sit on the Supreme Court today, i'm not likely to break down under repeated beatings with the 'OMG BUT BUT SCOTUS!' stick. please do not even try. please extend that courtesy to those who might still, or will still, vote obama.

i've also come to realise, through this process, what an outrageous jerk i was to those who didn't vote for gore in 2000. to those i might have blamed in any way for gore's loss, i offer my apology. it wasn't your duty to blindly vote for gore, and if he didn't earn your vote, he didn't deserve it. i sure as hell do blame the media, for making it unduly difficult for people to trust gore; if their presentation of his character and history influenced the votes of those who didn't support him, i'd be disappointed, but not surprised. i blame the media, in large part, for where we are today, too. the media isn't the one driving me out of the party, though. the party itself's done that.

(*and she lived in pittsburgh, and she was part of that famed machine. i know the history well. frankly, i wish we had a bit more of that populism-driven machine today.)

2008-06-14T12:01:00.003-06:00

i am getting just fucking murdered by pollen. i've never had summer allergies before, but they're worse than the ones i had through spring. my new juniper allergies now kick in when i have a gin and tonic. in addition, i'm apparently developing an allergy to sagebrush. given how much damn sagebrush i'm surrounded by, this is not good, but also not very surprising. agh.

attention 1337 haxx0rz

2008-06-13T09:25:00.001-06:00

exercise your skillz! how often do the googlebots crawl over the SJC website?

2008-06-12T12:10:00.003-06:00

so i have a hardcore geek-crush on the college nurse praticioner. i just stopped by her office to beg some antihistamine samples, and got them (a whole fistful, along with decongestants and ibuprofen enough for a week), but also got both an explanation for my sudden allergy flareup (she tracks regional pollen counts, and today saw an unexpected spike in tree pollens, particularly scrub oak) and a side-by-side comparison of different OTC eyedrop formulations, focussing on mast cell inhibition and vasoconstriction. she is so awesome. if i didn't feel like someone had stuck a caulking gun into my right sinus cavity, i would totally have stayed for more pharmocogeekery. every time i go in, i learn something new, and usually she prints me out abstracts from journals to take and read at leisure if i'm interested.

bear in mind that i also like peanut chews

2008-06-11T23:34:00.001-06:00

Bit O Honey: great candy, or greatest candy?

2008-06-07T10:58:00.000-06:00

still ain't feelin' the unity. and sure as hell ain't giving the obama campaign my email.

2008-06-06T10:51:00.002-06:00

further job-hate: next month, i have to tend bar at a function being held at pat oliphant's house. pat oliphant is the dude who drew this, which appeared in the washington post last february. it's fairly reflective of the rest of his work, i'd say, in that he trades heavily in gender jokes, gaybashing, and the occasional racist caricature.

maybe i can do something unpleasant to his glass of chardonnay.

how to make your graphic designer cry

2008-06-06T09:21:00.002-06:00

they're making me work in MS OFFICE. it's too cruel. i've been expressly forbidden from doing anything in adobe! and i'm doing layout! not only am i having to use Paint... it's the paint inside of Word.

wah.

2008-06-05T12:37:00.002-06:00

if i weren't in a closed primary state, i think i'd shift my registration. i may well shift it anyway.

2008-06-04T18:03:00.001-06:00

well.

so much for that little dream.

2008-06-04T12:37:00.003-06:00

i don't have energy or time for a post at the moment, but while i work on something to say:

i am glad clinton did not concede yesterday. i watched her speech in a hotel conference room full of democrats, a watch-party for our local primary we'd been invited to after volunteering for a campaign, and i stood in a room, and heard people i'd stupidly considered allies say some of the foulest, most sexist, most classist, most bigoted bullshit i've heard come out of peoples' mouths in person. and i listened to her speech, all the way through to the end, and at the end of it, i applauded. just quietly, just a few claps. i was the only one. but, goddamnit, i felt inspired to clap, and fuck all the "creative class" haters who gave me snotty glares, i clapped. and i want her to take it to denver. i want her to make the shortsighted dipshits currently making a trainwreck of a party i once considered mine to make her fucking leave. with force, if they're so damn keen to make her leave. fucking take her down, you bastards. try. and i want her to use that refusal to concede as leverage, to force the party and its shiny new candidate, obama, to adopt a platform that is actually progressive. a platform that features real healthcare reform, healthcare reform that will do people like me any good at all - which, hey, obama's sure as fuck doesn't. and while she's making demands, i want her to demand economic policy that doesn't rely on fucking Chicago School thinking, and non-right-wing framing of social security's "crisis", and domestic policy which recognises that net wealth is not a defining factor of citizenship, and does more than pay lip service to the rights of EVERYONE (yes, even women).

you know, a democratic platform that's actually progressive. what a fucking concept.

and if she can do all that, or even just a little of that, i will know that she's won. won in perhaps the only way she could. won a victory more important than a presidential race: bringing the dead soul of her party back to life. if she can even start trying to do that, i'll think about calling the democratic party my own, again. and if she can do any of that, i'll consider voting for obama - and that's a damn sight more than i was willing to consider before last night. but he has a lot of fucking work to do before november, and so do his more thuggish supporters.

2008-06-04T12:26:00.003-06:00

i built a little empire out of
some crazy garbage called
the blood of the exploited working class
but they've overcome their shyness
now they're calling me 'Your Highness'
and a world screams, 'kiss me, Son of God!'

2008-05-22T17:07:00.000-06:00

unexpected adventure time! what are some things to do in denver when you're not dead?