Speaker for the Diodes

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

"The word 'Internet' has been officially changed to 'Cat Video Delivery System.' CVDS is fine on second reference." -- FakeAPStyleBook on Twitter, 2009-11-09

[Thanks to geekchick for pointing out this usesr.]

Recycling a line that got a chuckle on the phone

dglenn@panix.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:14:05 GMT

That scratchy feeling in my throat tells me that it's time to refill my bladder from the tea-kettle.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

[Today is the eleventh annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. It's a long list.]

"In an interview with Edge News, Lt. Brett Persons, LGBT liaison for the Metropolitan Police Department, denied that the nation's capital has seen an increase in antitransgender violence, but added that trans individuals 'tend to be a community at risk for victimization all the time -- and that's a sad statement.'" -- from "Trans Violence Up in Nation's Capital?", The Advocate, 2009-09-17

Last night on Twitter, Lila Kittleman pointed out, "Every three days, someone is murdered for being transgendered. That's a sickening statistic," and vos-latina clarified that a bit with, "actually, its more than one murder of a trans woman every two days. that we know about. That somebody even noticed."

"Underreporting from official statistics leaves the issue in the hands of media outlets, which have historically been known for problems identifying victims' genders through using incorrect names and pronouns." -- Joseph Erbentraut, "Violence Against the Transgendered Only Getting Worse", 2009-09-29</a> [An example: in the first case Erbentraut mentioned, the broad-daylight murder of Ty'lia Mack and wounding of another trans woman (not named by the police to protect her as a witness), the victims were initially described in news reports as "transgender men", and Ms. Mack was referred to mostly by her (male) birth name, the opposite of what the AP Style Guide dictates. One news outlet, after being criticized for this, claimed that they had simply copied the wording the police had used; the police emphatically denied that they had ever described the victims that way.]

"As in the case of Paulina Ibarra, the lives of transgender victims are often ignored until a more culturally sensational aspect of the crime surfaces, as it did in the August stabbing death of the East Los Angeles Latina transwoman when a known parole jumper surfaced as a 'person of interest' in the investigation. Until then, Ibarra's brutal murder was largely neglected, even by the LGBT press, and her life has been reduced to a string of seamy innuendoes and a few glam photos." -- De Sube, 2009-11-18

"The victims are often viewed as not worthy of the level of attention that they deserve, and that's where activism needs to come in." -- Michael Silverman, quoted in "How the Gay Community Is Complicit in Trans Violence", by Joseph Erbentraut, 2009-10-05

Taking all of this out of the abstract, statistical, legal, sociological, and political spheres, to look at it in a more personal way, here are two tweets from Allyson Robinson, 2009-11-19:

"Waiting for flight, guy chats me up. Asks me to call him. Undeterred when I say I'm married; tells me he is too.

"...and all the while I'm thinking, 'This is how so many anti-trans hate crimes start.'"

And finally:

"Stop killing us. Hate us if you must, ignore us, don't talk to us--look the other way. Just stop killing us." -- Matt Kailey, Tranifesto, 2009-11-19

Checking In, with Randomnes

dglenn@panix.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:36:18 GMT

Not dead yet, though apparently I sound a little scary on the phone. ~~(Breathing uncomfortably poorly in general, yes, but it's worse when I try to talk. Which is, of course, frustrating when I'd like some conversation.)~~ uh, doing worse since I started writing this (which was last night, when I was trying to decide whether I was being a wimp or properly cautious by not going out). Major coughing problem, and can't even get albuterol into my lungs except by squirting it inside a plastic bag so I can rebreathe what I just coughed away from me (which in turn meant having to take care not to rebreathe my own exhalations so much that the CO₂ concentration triggered the take-deeper-breaths reflex, which makes the coughing snowball painfully. Unfun. Lips not turning blue yet, so postponing calling 911, but will beg local friends to bring cough suppressant (no decongestant!) and lemon juice (and either more whisky or Chloraseptic -- the former is a bit more effective but the latter has the advantage of not making me feel ~~<strike>~~stupid~~</strike>~~ ah, drunk ... uh, okay, one kind of comes along with the other, doesn't it?). Thinking I should've tried to make a quick drug-store run last night when I was feeling sortakinda capable. Damn. This symptom-rollercoaster vexeð me greatly. I keep thinking I'm almost better.

A browser feature I'd find useful: the ability to attach a "sticky" window title to a window in which all the tabs relate to a particular task or recreation (as opposed to the normal behaviour, where the window title changes to the page title of the currently selected tab). This'd make it easier to keep straight which windows are which when I've got a bunch stacked so I mostly just see title bars of all but the frontmost, or when I'm control-tabbing or command-apostropheing through a set of windows quickly. Oh my, I just verbed 'apostrophe' and I don't even feel guilty about it. This feeling is either depravity or liberation.

The New york Times really doesn't want me to read its content or the ads that come along with the content, does it? I mean, first there's the stupid registration requirement even for (some of) the articles and columns they give away for free, which would be a minor annoyance if it meant logging in each time I reboot, change browsers, or change computers; but the "remember me on this computer" tickybox doesn't even work, in at least three different browsers on the Mac, two browsers on WinXP, and two browsers on Linux (I don't remember whether I tried it in iCab on the Mac, or in Konqueror on Linux. The number may be higher. I haven't gotten around to trying with Lynx or Links yet, either.) So every time somebody links to a NYT editorial and I click "open in background tab" because it looks interesting, when I get around to that tab I see the "we really don't want your eyeballs" login screen again. So 90% of the time I just say "fuck it, my friends must've been wrong about what a must-read this was," and close the window. Occasionally I bother to open another tab to visit BugMeNot¹ or hit Google to find somebody who infringed NYT's copyright conveniently-for-me, depending on my mood, but mostly I just take that login screen as a "we wrote this for our health, not to have other people read it" label and assume somebody will eventually excerpt or summarize any important points hidden beyond. And that means that I'm not going to see the ads on that page, which means they don't get the fraction of a cent they're counting on from my seeing those ads displayed (of course, if they're pay-per-click ads, then my eyeballs would be a waste to them anyhow ...). Because they're telling me to take my eyeballs elsewhere.

Also, since a major part of the reason for using "open in background tab" is so that the page will have already finished loading by the time I get around to looking at it, even if I do decide the item is worth the bother of logging in for, they've wasted my time and prevented me from using my tools to organize my reading experience the way I prefer (the same goes for Salon's watch-this-ad-first thingies). And since friends linking to the NYT seems to happen in bursts, I sometimes wind up with four or five copies of the login screen in different tabs all at once.

Hey, Times: make your stuff convenient for me to read the way I like to surf, and you get those ad pennies and probably even get more inbound links. Make it inconvenient or just plain annoying, and I'll either get your stuff from somebody who stole it or simply do without. Simple, no?

[1] I've created my own registrations a bunch of times, and they don't work any better -- or stay valid any longer -- than identities glommed from BugMeNot. So playing the game the way the NYT wants me to play it doesn't work either. I don't know why this doesn't work, but given that my problems with nytimes.com span several versions of a bunch of different browsers on multiple operating systems, I figure I'm not alone.

Eyelids drooping -- unsurprising since I only slept an hour last night before a coughing fit woke me (yesterday it was two hours of sleep then waking up choking) -- so I'll add the rest of what I was going to write to the folder of unfinished entries to get back to. Maybe I can sleep now, but I'm not holding my breath ... uh, so to speak.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

"The personal is the political. Even if some people born with transsexualism or transgenderism can hide it and stay in the closet at great emotional cost and in doing so amass a lot of male privilege there is very little in this world to compare with coming out trans for hitting the down button on the mobility elevator." -- Suzan, 2009-07-09

[Yes, I realize this quote by itself glosses over the existence of trans men. The essay it was taken from is specifically about women.]

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:25:03 GMT

"I always felt like no one understood me and when I ran away to Hollywood I found other [trans] kids who were like me and faced many of the issues and hardships that I was dealing with, A lot of us had to do sex work to put a roof over our heads and food in or bellies. In this cycle, I met a few people who later became good friends of mine.

"So imagine how traumatic it was for me to hear one of my friends screaming for help as someone chased her down and brutally slashed her throat and killed her. Imagine how saddened I was to hear years later that another one of my girlfriends who was so kind and childlike was shot in the head and dumped on the side of the road like garbage."

-- Stefanie Rivera, 2009-11-17

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

"Let's make the record clear: there is virtually no women's space extant today. Michfest is not women's space, nor would it be even if trans women were allowed -- it's cis, white, middle class, able women's space. When one group controls a space or institution, when only its members' voices, concerns, and perspectives are relevant to the determination and organization of that space -- that is to say, when that group 'owns' the space -- it is their space, regardless of who else may enter. So when allies to trans women demand our inclusion without simultaneously demanding that that space be accountable to us -- including that trans & cis women be equally in charge of what constitutes women's space and feminism -- they are not demanding fundamental change, only a softer supremacy." -- Cedar, abstract of "Beyond Inclusion", Taking Up Too Much Space, 2008

Checking In

dglenn@panix.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:06:25 GMT

In the wee hours the throat pain and coughing diminished enough that I could stop gargling with spirits and just use very hot, very lemony tea to sooth it. (Basically piping hot strong lemonade with a token trace of other flavours, really.) Today I'm in much less pain but still breathing very shallowly and trying not to yawn lest I start a coughing fit, and cannot lie on my back. So I guess I'm back to about where I was late Saturday. Might manage to drag myself out for more cough syrup (and lemon juice!) later, depending on how I feel about standing/walking/driving.

One thing about sugar substitutes is that they don't seem to have any throat-soothing effects -- sugar-free cough syrup works well enough anyhow because of the drugs in it (and since the regular stuff tastes so vile to begin with, I don't see making it taste a little worse as being a big deal), but sugar-free Ricola cough drops don't work quite as well as the with-sugar ones, and the hot-lemonade trick works better with sugar or honey (though when it comes to flavour alone, I make lemonade sweetened half with stevia and half with sucralose). So between sucking on a lot of cough drops, sugary hot homemade throat-soothers, and consuming about as much whisky yesterday as would normally last me a month, month and a half (more than 400 ml I think, looking at what's left in the bottle), my blood sugar is staying a bit high. At the moment I'm considering being able to breathe a higher priority, but I'll be happier when I can breathe and swallow comfortably and bring those blood glucose numbers down, all at the same time.

I haven't heard Perrine sneeze today, so maybe yesterday was just random after all. *whew*

I'm used to having strength available but at the cost of pain if I use it: I can lift that but it's going to hurt; I can carry all of these but I won't be able to move tomorrow or the day after; that sort of thing. Being really weak, not being able to exert force no matter how hard I push, even when I decide it's worth the pain, is awfully frustrating. Looking forward to that symptom going away, as well.

Still absolutely no clue what the shooting was about on Friday, whether anybody was hurt, or whether the police have a suspect. Took a closer look at the bullet hole in my neighbour's fender, and had the urge to mount funky lighting in it so it'd look like a peephole into a furnace ... or a laser diode so on foggy days it'd look like a gun port for an energy weapon. Pretty sure that neighbour would think I was nuts, so not going to mention these ideas to her.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

[Because of what's coming up on Friday, I'm going to lean on a theme this week.]

"Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex are natural persons irrespective of their masculine and feminine gender and they have the right to exercise their rights and live an independent life in society." -- the Supreme Court of Nepal, ordering that country's government to enact laws to guarantee the rights of gay LBGT people, 2007-12-21

[And yes, I'll permit myself the obvious editorial comment here. That's the entire 'agenda' right there in a nutshell: that we're people and deserve to enjoy the same protections of our human rights as other people do, and to not have governments or societies sanction discrimination against us merely for being or appearing G, B, L, T, I, or Q.]

Chapter N+1, in which I complain about still being ill

dglenn@panix.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:20:49 GMT

Thought I was doing better yesterday; am doing much worse today. Didn't see downturn coming, and bought too little cough syrup. Cough is somewhat 'productive' but feels like course-sandpaper-coated-with-Tabasco dry cough. Whisky somewhat effective as throat-anaesthetic, a little less effective as cough-suppressant; drunk-dizzy every bit as uncomfortable and unwelcome as flu-dizzy. %bleah% *pout* [Typing sucks; backspacing a whole lot; wonder how many typos will slip past anyhow. YUCK. Don't like feeling like this.] Worried about Perrine: multiple sneezing fits between 15:00 and 19:00; know H1N1 is transmissible to cats ... not convinced that's what I have (timetable matches but a bunch of symptoms missing), but worried I may have given her whatever I do have. Hoping very hard that that's not the case -- no clue what to do about it if so, short of asking someone to driver to the vet and begging for donations to cover the bill; really really want this to just be winter-dryness related random sneeziness and not a serious kitty infection. No sneezing since 19:00, therefore hopefull.

Frustrated as all hell. Got stuff I want to do and other stuff I need to have done. Between sick-dizzy and whisky-dizzy, most ain't happening. And since drunk-dizzy feels just like fever-dizzy to me, this is a seriously unfun sensation. (No fever apparent on very-well-washed darkroom thermometer, but dizinness appeared well before application of spirits and temperature sensation has been intermittently wonky.) And can't just retreat into sleep, as coughing keeps waking me. Not expecting solutions, nor a big pity-party, but did feel a need wto whine to an audience with a larger English vocabulary and understadingof Grammar than my darling kitty Perriner can muster.

Anybody nearby feel like dropping off a care package? Priorities are cough syrup (with dextromethorphan, without pseudoephederine, don't care one way or the other about guifenesin), cat food (Nutro indoor preferred), Chloraseptic (or store-brand equiv.) throat spray, lemon juice, whisky (medicinal use, so this is not the time for wish-I-could-afford-it stuff like Balvenie or Oban; go for Canadian Mist), vegetable bouillon (is there any other brand than Knorr locally?), Tic-Tacs (wintergreen best original-flavour okay; they seem to help open my windpipe a little and my sinuses a little more), and Zone bars, from most to least urgent. If so, I've got about $40 in my checking account to repay you with. (I'm okay for tonight; tomorrow night is when things start looking a little iffy. Though the cough syrup would come in handy whenever.)

Perrine is currently stretched out on my waist, left hip, and left thigh, not sneezing. This is a good thing. Except that I need to get up soon to pee.

And then, to make another cup of cofee, tea, or broth (ain't decided which yet). And see whether that calms the soreness in my throat enough to let me fall asleep instead of feeling like I'm choking.

Does this small right?

dglenn@panix.com — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:39:58 GMT

A question that came to mind this morning: if Federal authorities tried to subpoena a newspaper's subscriber list and all records of newsstand sales for a particular day, would that be considered legit? Would it kick up a storm of "WTFingF?" reactions? Would it be treated as a fairly ordinary event? Or would it be calmly fought in a barrage of motions and countermotions as folks tried to pin down exactly where the line of reasonableness is?

(I honestly don't know the answer. I was going to start out by using that question as a rhetorical device, but then I realized that I don't actually know what the response would be if the Washington Post were ordered to turn over the names, addresses, SSNs, and bank account numbers of everyone who'd bought a copy of yesterday's paper or so much as checked the headlines on washingtonpost.com. Clues, please?)

The reason I'm wondering:

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

[...]

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

Is it just me, or does the idea of shipping every single packet by way of the onion router and using anonymized payment methods wherever possible and pseudonymous email accounts, seem just a bit more reasonable than it did a week ago? Maybe not because I expect my own government to find anything they'd bother to use against me in this kind of fishing expedition, but just to frustrate such attempts in the future (uh, assuming a large majority of other Internet users adopted the same habits, that is).

Maybe all of this will look very different to me after I've slept (or after my body finally vanquishes this damned virus and I can breathe properly again). Or maybe not. At the moment I'm finding the idea of serving a news site such a broad subpoena somewhat disconcerting.

I should probably disclose that I haven't read that PDF yet and am going on the description of it at the site I linked to.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-16:

"Il y a plus affaire a interpreter les interpretations, qu'a interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres, que sur autre subject: nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. Tout fourmille de commentaires : d'autheurs, il en est grand cherte." -- Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 13 (published in 1588)

[The submitter's translation: "There's more activity interpreting interpretations than interpreting facts, and more books about books than on any other subject: all we do is footnote one another. Everything is teeming with commentaries: there's a great shortage of authors."]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

"Kids are so incredibly resiliant, and they are willing to be pushed if you can figure out the right strategies, and you know your content well -- because you can't [...] kids know a phony. But when you're real with them, and when you push them to be the best they can be, and when they get it, it is the most satisfying professional moment in life. When you see that -- when you see a sparkle in a kid's eye, when you see one of your kids making that connection, there's nothing better. And that's what I loved about teaching." -- Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, interviewed on the PBS television program, In The Life, episode, "Lifesavers" (aired, at least in my area, in the wee hours of 2008-11-10).

A Few Minutes After Thirteen O'Clock

dglenn@panix.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:46:47 GMT

I was asleep. Then suddenly I wasn't. I was unasleep in a distinctively "did I just hear a loud *bang* or did I dream it?" manner. Which was quickly resolved as I heard s succession of additional *bangs*^[1], a pause, and then several more, with curious !tinks!^[2] between some pairs of *bangs*.

I wasn't sure what I'd heard, but I knew it wasn't an empty semi going #boom!# over the dip in the intersection. And was -- am -- a bit disconcerted that ... well, I haven't spent much time around firearms and haven't heard many spent cartridges hitting the ground, but my musician's ear says that if I wanted to reproduce that particular !tink! in a recording studio, I'd start by dropping hollow brass cylinders about a quarter inch by an inch, onto concrete, and then start varying the size and material based on how close that first attempt was.

Unsure of whether what I heard was gunfire or some other explosipercussive sound, I was concerned enough to decide that the police ought to figure it out, and called 911. A few minutes later, there was a police car stopped slantwise in front of a mobility-services van; a few minutes after that, an ambulance appeared, and a minute farther on, folks bunched up on the sidewalk at the corner, watching. I don't see any brass from my window -- if it was spent casings making the !tink! sound, would I have heard those from around the corner? They sounded much closer than that.

Anyhow, I'm awake now (far too soon, since breathing difficulty kept me awake until three hours ago). I need to fetch more cough syrup and a few other things, but I don't think I'll try to get moving just yet. Maybe after the police/medical vehicles are out of the way. (Not that I really want to get dressed and go out at all.)

This particular kind of excitement, I really don't need any day.

[1] Well, more of a *po'angp* or maybe a *pANGop*.

[2] Most definitely !tink!, about halfway between !tik! and !tingk!.

ETA @ 13:50 -- Removing any lingering uncertainty as to what I heard ... now yellow tape surrounds the whole intersection, a police car blocks my street at the far end of the block as well, and a bunch of uniformed officers are walking up and down in the street and on the sidewalk, staring at the ground. So I guess the !tink! sounds I heard were from my street, not around the corner, after all. (*Bangs* echo too much to really be sure anyhow, in the city.) I guess the brass just isn't shiny enough for me to spot it from a second-floor window on an overcast day.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

"[...] what happens very frequently, our goals change during a war. The one goal which, George Kennan I quote saying in the book. The reason that we go in is often forgotten, and suddenly the goals become something like maintaining our dignity. Keeping up our international authority. Preventing a loss and the damage such a loss will do to our international profile. In other words, they all become I think what rhetoricians call heuristic. They're about the mission itself, not achieving anything else." -- Mark Danner, on the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

"[...] And when I got to reading the Constitution of the United States of America, which Texas is still a part of, I was never more sure of just how much you and I are the very same and how important it is that that Constitution protect you, because if it doesn't protect you, then it doesn't protect me, and I want it to protect me." -- Judge Tena Callahan, 2009-10-20 [thanks to stoneself fo pointing it out]

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-11-11:

"Then there was Ninette--petite, just five feet two inches of radiant happiness and as pretty as a picture. She was an air-raid warden.

"She was off duty that night. We danced in a Soho dungeon, and were lucky to find a taxi to take us home while the raid was still on. It was a particularly loud one and, around midnight, I phoned to make sure she was safe, as she lived alone.

"There was no reply. The line was dead.

"Anxiously I walked the mile to her house.

"It was no longer there.

"We had been dancing a few hours earlier. I could still smell the scent of her hair, and Ella Fitzgerald with the Ink Spots had sung, "Into each life some rain must fall."

"It echoed still in my mind, and I went back to work."

-- George Rodger, photographer, who covered the Blitz in London, [qotd commemorates Remembrance Day today. -eds.] recalling the outcome of a German bombing raid</a>. Rodger's photos are collected in the book, The Blitz: The Photography of George Rodger.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)</p>

Gotta Verify These Things Experimentally After All

dglenn@panix.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:04:41 GMT

Just confirmed what I had already guessed: cannot effectively use my PDA as a stethescope.

Hoping This Is Less Than It Feels Like

dglenn@panix.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:46:15 GMT

Ugh. Woke up with a head cold, but otherwise not feeling as achy and wrecked as yesterday. Decided that even though I only felt coldy, not fluish, I shouldn't try to attend a social event this evening -- I figure folks are being more careful than usual about respiratory illnesses, and for good reason.

When I get a cold, I try to beat it back quickly enough to prevent it from developing into a cough. The first several days are all about snot and sneezing and headaches, and then I either get better or I get a cough that annoys the $#%@ out of me for a couple of weeks. (Or months.)

This one has turned into a rather-more-than-just-annoying lung-and-windpipe issue less than eight hours after the first nasal symptoms showed up. I've not been vaccinated against either H1N1 or the seasonal flu, so I really hope this is just a randomly atypical cold, not a flu that my athsma and diabetes have me at risk for. So far I'm still not feeling fluish, just having trouble breathing, so that hope is still alive and maybe I can deal with this with menthol, horehound, dextromethorphan, garlic, orange juice, and albuterol. Wish me luck.

Tomorrow night: HCB rehearsal, getting ready for Darkover; something more important than watching a movie with friends. Gotta weigh how much risk I think I'll be to my bandmates, contagion-wise, versus the importance of going through some extra stuff not in our usual repertoire (and, of course, the whole do-I-feel-well-enough-to-drive thing).

I did get out this afternoon for cough drops and OJ (but didn't realize I'd need to stock up on cough syrup -- I'll have to take inventory and see how much I've got on hand). The can't-breathe-lying-down and breathing-tickles-and-then-coughing-hurts stuff started after I got home from the supermarket. (And wow, if you get beets at the salad bar and then wind up with an inexperienced checkout clerk, things can get really inconvenient when you get home. *pout*)

I guess the one good thing about having athsma is that I already have albuterol in the house when something else, such as a virus, attacks my airway. But damn, I'd like to be able to lie down w/o that making me feel like I'm having a severe athsma attack. I can breathe w/o coughing as long as I keep it really shallow. I do not want to develop other flu symptoms on top of this. I really do not want this to turn into what others have described H1N1 being like (pleaseletitjustbeastrangecoldnotswineflu). And I don't want this breathing difficulty to get any worse -- I don't want to rack up yet another four-digit emergency-room bill I can't pay, and if it gets bad enough that dextromethorphan and my albuterol inhaler can't keep me breathing at least as well as I am now, that'd be the next step. That my symptoms have progressed this quickly worries me because it's unusual. If I were having this much trouble breathing on the fourth day of a flu, I'd be cautious but not freaked-out. I'd be thinking that I'd be turning the corner soon and just had to make it through one last worst-bit. Feeling like this on the first day has me a little concerned.

But maybe I'll get really lucky and this will turn out to be a fast-forward type of cold, with all the bad stuff happening in one day, and tomorrow I'll feel great ... right? [knock wood] Better to wake up tomorrow feeling foolishly melodramatic for having been so concerned tonight, than to wake up tomorrow trying to decide whether I'm breathing poorly enough to warrant a call to 911.

(And since I know some of my friends will worry, I'll try to remember to post some "still breathing" tweets tomorrow afternoon on Twitter. But hey, if you don't hear from me for a while please remember that I may be merely sleeping, okay?)

Hmm. I should've picked up more vegetable bouillon when I was out. Oof.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

Madeleine Albright:	I'll tell you about American exceptionalism. I was not born in this country, and I really do think that the US is an exceptional country in many different ways -- in terms of our diversity, our capabilities. What I have argued against, is that exceptions cannot be made for us. And that is what is --
Charlie Rose:	Exceptions?
Madeleine Albright:	Right. I think that we are exceptional, but we can't ask that we are above the law, or that our behaviour is different in terms of human rights issues or in terms of torture, or things like that ...

-- on the PBS television program, Charlie Rose, 2009-10-20

Virtualizing Traffic, Old MacDonald Explained, and Other Randomness

dglenn@panix.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:35:35 GMT

I managed, after multiple tries, to get all the way to Herndon (previous attempts stymied by not feeling well enough to drive that far, and by traffic problems bad enough to make the trip not feasible at the hour I was on the road), and now the Mac boots again. *whew*.

Amazed at traffic that really, really looked like rush hour on I-95, the Capitol Beltway, I-66, and US-50, on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon. Near as I could figure, somebody must have extended the concept of virtual memory to virtual roadway capacity, and all those other cars were either from Friday or today, having overflowed their actual rush-hours and been swapped out to weekend-bandwidth.^[1][2] I'm not sure how the time-travel aspect of this is implemented, or whether other cities are doing this too; just that as a mostly off-peak driver I found being unexpectedly in rush-hour a bit startling.

Today, between muscle pain and headache, I'm not doing so well. But I've got the Mac back, and my Internet connection seems to have recovered from its flakiness last week, and I can hunker down in my bed and try not to move very much.

An LJ entry and subsequent comments that have a rewritten song lyric stuck in my brain:

ironychan:	If you use, say, the 3rd person singular optative form of the verb eimi, "to go", you get a word that means "I wish Soenso would go away." One word! It's not even a long word - it's four letters. [ ιοιη ] That's four vowels in a row! Stupid Greeks, no wonder they got conquered. You don't see the Romans lining up four vowels and calling it a word. How the hell do you even pronounce that? "ee-oi-yay"? That's not a word, that's the chorus of Old MacDonald.

siderea:	...Which now suddenly makes much more sense.

porysski:	Great, now "Old MacDonald had a farm. I wish he'd go away!" will be stuck in my head for days :)

Until porysski's comment, I was safe. But now it's stuck in my head too.

[ By way of metaquotes, which in turn I was reading thanks to silmaril]

I think there was some interesting stuff on this morning's (or last night's^[3]) Charlie Rose, but alas by the time I got around to trying to watch it, local rush hour had started, and I couldn't really hear the television. I'll try again later, after both my headache and traffic noise recede a bit.

And just so I remember it later, a phrase that came out of a telephone conversation with realinterrobang regarding so-called ergonomic features that aren't adjustable to fit different users: Procrustean ergonomics.

[1] If flextime were more broadly applied, it could be considered a less fanciful application of the virtualization of roadway carrying capacity: one of the trumpeted benefits of flextime when it was being talked about more, was that if enough people shifted their work schedules around, traffic load could be smoothed out and the horrendous peaks of rush hour would be smaller. (And yes, I'm aware of the mix of good and bad reasons flextime doesn't wind up being such a silver bullet.)

[2] While crawling along I-495 at about 20 MPH (about 30 KPH), I had some time to start wondering about the bandwidth of the Beltway. If you measure the capacity in people, then the bandwidth depends on, among other things, the packet size: if you fill the road with single-occupant SUVs you get a lower bandwidth than if each vehicle on the road is a standing-room-only cowded bus. Of course, speed matters as well, in that we can fit more pedestrians onto the road than people in vehicles, at the cost of delivering each person to hir destination much more slowly. When I got to the point of imagining all those pedestrians naked, to squeeze out all the space otherwise taken up by clothing and thus wedge several more people in, and concluded that that might cause an additional complication as additional people got made en route as a side effect, I finally decided I'd reached a point of silliness⁴.

[3] My local PBS station shows it at 09:00 and 12:30, so I think of it as a morning show, but I think the dates on the episodes in the archives and in the schedule of upcoming shows are for the night before the morning when I see it.

[4] Okay, it'd need to be a much longer road than that for gestation to take less time than the travel time, and feeding and watering all those people in transit would have to be worked out. And we'd need a model for estimating the odds that two fertile individuals attracted enough to each other (or bored enough) would wind up pressed against each other, to figure out the magnitude of this effect.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:25:02 GMT

"And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the 'conservative media' consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the 'mainstream press' is considered 'liberal' even as it 'leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right.'

That's some range, isn't it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation."

-- Jamison Foser, "The media's Glenn Beck problem", 2009-10-16

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-24:

"I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." -- David Foster Wallace, from his article E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.

(submitted to the mailing list by Reg Harbeck)

Using OpenID To Answer Polls

dglenn@panix.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:20:08 GMT

Huh. DW says non-DW users can respond to polls using OpenID. Only one person has responded (using the poll buttons) to my poll from yesterday, and one complained about not being able to do so. This tells me that (a) there's a hiccup in the process of filling out DW polls using OpenID, (b) how to do so is confusing, (c) both, or (d) it works right but filling out poll answers isn't important enough to be worth clicking through the extra steps for, for many people.

I think (d) seems likely -- it's more steps than using OpenID to leave a comment, and it's really not a very compelling or entertaining poll -- (and feel free to simply respond in a comment, of course), but just in case it's (a) or (b), I went and found out what the steps are. It's a little more annoying than I'd expected, but it did work for me. (Note that there are a few people for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work in general, for reasons that so far remain mysterious. And debugging somebody else's problem on a site I don't admin, when I can't replicate the problem myself, is not going to get very far, alas.)

I logged out of DW, and tried to fill in the poll. It looked like I simply could not do so. Then I went to the main page, http://www.dreamwidth.org/, which (if you're not currently logged in) has a login button with username/password text entry fields next to it up in the upper-right corner. There's small text up there, "Log in with OpenID", which links to http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid. (The "Log in with OpenID" link next to the login button on http://www.dreamwidth.org/login also takes you there.)

(In what follows, assume we're currently logged in on LJ ...)

I told LJ months ago to automatically accept OpenID credential requests from DW, so I just typed "dglennlivejournal.com" into the box on http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid, and was immdiately logged into DW as my LJ identity, and could fill in the poll. If you've used OpenID to leave a comment on DW recently, and checked the leave-me-logged-in tickybox, you should already be able to fill in the poll.

If I hadn't told LJ to grant future DW OpenID requests, then I would've gotten a page from LJ telling me that DW was asking LJ to confirm that this user claiming to be me-at-LJ is really me. Telling LJ "yes, I triggered that request, it's really me," allows LJ to tell DW, "yeah, it's her," and at that point I'm logged into DW not as me-the-DW-user, but as me-the-LJ/OpenID-user, and can fill in the poll (or leave comments under my LJ identity, or customize DW viewing options under that OpenID login, even attach a user icon IIRC, etc.) I went into more detail on this process in the context of leaving comments, a few months ago and a few months before that.

This process is rather less of an obstacle when leaving comments (except for the folks for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work, which I wish I was in a position to figure out), and I expect most folks are a bit more motivated when they've already decided to leave a comment and just need to choose between OpenID and anonymous, than when they're still deciding whether it's worth the trouble to fill in a poll. Having "use OpenID" as a visible option on the comment form makes it a lot easier than having to remember, "Oh yeah, I can go to the login page (or directly to the OpenID login page) and log in first, if I want to fill this out" ...

... but if any of you are inspired to experiment a bit with OpenID this afternoon, then hey, I get more poll answers as a side effect. And in the future, if somebody posts a poll where you really, really want to make your voice heard, now you'll know how.

QotD

dglenn@panix.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:25:01 GMT

"My wardrobe is threefold: Things I wear during sex, Things I wear to have more sex and most importantly, 'I don't give a shit.'" -- Twitter user VaginaDrum, 2009-10-26