decorative image

None of the Above

by Marble

Forcrying out loud we have debate about solid scientific models in this country, how can those percieving bias on the other side be considered in any way legitimate? I agree with Machiavelli, perception is reality. But that is only in politics because politics is artifice. It aims at misrepresenting the world. If you take that as the basis of your reality, then of course there is no objective perspective. What then is the point of communication? Solely bending others to your will?
-Smedleyman, at metafilter

« May 2002
Main
July 2002 »
[ good ] 2002-06-28
Rock on! I have a job! :) Like, officially and stuff.

I start on Monday, as a CNA on a rehab floor at the hospital. Coolness! I'm nervous, but excited to rejoin the ranks of the gainfully employed.

Now I gotta get crackin' and make myself some suitable scrub pants to wear... I managed to grow out of my other ones that used to fit. Doh!

Time to queue up some good viewing on the TiVo to have going on in the background while I sew, and get started. I'm in a very good mood, and I think it's going to be a good weekend.

Wheee!

p.s. I saw the coolest playground I've ever seen in my life (maybe) while we were out doing errands. I'll take Elena there real soon one of these days - she'll *love* it. Yes, I will take pix.

[ body rants ] 2002-06-24
Owie! Several minutes ago, I was letting Swiss (the larger of our two Great Pyrenees dogs) back into the house.

His rear foot collided with my right big toe in exactly the wrong fashion, somehow causing my toenail to partially be rudely ripped from the nailbed. (Perhaps one of his big claws acted as a wedge against it? I dunno).

After some very loud yelps of pain and not a little cursing, I finally looked at it and saw blood everywhere. Damn!

Now that the endorphins have rushed in, it really doesn't hurt at all (plus, I've got it soaking in some cold water). Of course, later on they'll wear off. I've taken a couple Advil in anticipation.

Sigh. Maybe I'll take pictures. Wouldn't that just be lurid. :)

Anyway, I'm okay, but damn, I'd rather not have had this happen. At least it's not broken, I suppose.

[ animals beauty ] 2002-06-23
If I were a gozillionaire: I would buy this horse and learn to ride him, and treat him well all of his days.

Dang, I'd better hurry up and become a gozillionaire, so I can afford such things. Alas, someone else will probably buy him first. I hope they treat him well.

[ random thoughts ] 2002-06-22
Dear IBM: You had me. You lost me. It was both our faults.

You can regain me, in a way, if you promise not to suck. If you had been a bit less like borg and a bit more like starfleet, then I would have stayed.

I want you to win in the Great Battle Against Microsoft. Because Microsoft is arrogant and they don't play fair. I believe that you play fair. I would like to play fair with you.

And to that end...

I want a job.

I need a job.

I'll work for IBM if they offer me a job. And I'll do what they ask me to do to the best of my abilities, with a reasonable accomodation for the fact that the products of my mind on my own time belong to me.

Because when I work for IBM I can't un-think what I thought at work. I can't un-dream what I dreamt at work. And because employees are not slaves.

IBM, if you want me to work for you, then have your minion Steve White of the IBM Research Group in New York contact me, and I'll do it. We'll negotiate terms. But we'll do it.

Why am I writing this, you ask?

Because I once had a dream that I could create an artificial intelligence with a computer.

And I believe I've learned enough and suffered enough and earned enough and clawed enough and hurt enough and made enough and enoughed enough to do it.

Do you want to play a game? The kind of ai I envision would be the ultimate game-player...

This is getting too long. Sorry.

Strange night. Strange girl. Strange planet. Strange mind.

:)

[ my site random thoughts ] 2002-06-22
New categories: I'm going to add a few new ones. If you have requests, dear readers, now's the time to convey them to me. I don't want my list of categories to grow too huge (cuz then it would be too darn cumbersome to use).

You'll notice what the new categories are when I post things and attribute those categories to them. So it'll be a gradual thing.

This is just an FYI, I s'pose.

[ design family ] 2002-06-22
Help me find something! I'm looking for a (hopefully cheap) watch which has something known as a sweep second hand. What this means is that the hand on the watch that indicates what second it is moves smoothly around the circle.

That is, it doesn't jerk forward, pause, jerk forward, pause, etc. It just flows smoothly around.

The reason for this is that it's much easier to take a person's pulse with such a watch than with the other kind. So I need one, since pulse-taking will surely be part of my job.

I remember my grandmother, Loujean, telling me about how a watch with a sweep second hand was a requirement for the nursing students in the training she underwent as a young woman. I also remember that I didn't get what she meant at the time. Now I do.

Heh, ain't that always the way? Anyway, thanks, Grandma, for having told me that. I finally understand what you mean. :)

I've looked for such watches in a few places, such as Walmart, but apparently no one makes them that way anymore (too expensive? I hope not...). Maybe I'll have to keep my eyes open at Ebay to get ahold of one.

Any clues that any of my readers could give me would be much appreciated. Feel free to email me, leave a comment, or send an anonymous clue via the box o doom.

Thanks in advance...

[ random thoughts ] 2002-06-22
Getting stuff done: I'm as ready as I can be to start working. Unfortunately, I still have to wait because I have to have a doctor's note that I'm not carrying any communicable diseases and so on.

The earliest my (new) doctor could get me in is this coming Wednesday, then I have to come back and have my TB test read on Friday. That should be the last hurdle until I am fully employable as a CNA by the health care agency.

It's a good thing, too - we're uh... almost out of money. Quite literally. It's not pretty. We'll get through it somehow - I mean, we're not going to starve to death or anything. But it's getting rather desperate. We'll have to see what happens. Bankruptcy may be involved. Eeuuugh. Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that.

So that's my priority right now. I'll get back to more frequent witty and entertaining (*) postings here later on. For now, I've got other issues and I hope that y'all can understand. I just can't afford the time spent playing on the computer right now. I'm figuring out what I can sell to buy us a couple more weeks, that kind of thing.

And if any of my readers are, like, zillionaires or something, and want to give me a short-term no-interest loan (or gift) or something so that I can de-stress and write more, well, I just want you to know that this is your opportunity. Ahem.

But I'm not at the point of begging (yet). I really hope we don't end up at that point. For one thing, all the prime locations for people to hold up "Will work for food" signs in this town seem to be taken.

Enough about all that. Time for me to organize my papers - there's stuff I have to find, and it's something I've been putting off for a long time.

If anyone knows of any good job leads for a programmer in the Austin area, please let me know - David is quite skilled and a very good worker, and is itching to do something productive...

That's it for now.

* your mileage may vary.

[ ] 2002-06-21
Yes, I'm fine: Just busy. I know, I sound like a broken record. More details later. Just wanted everyone to know that I'm doing ok, and not to worry, and all that.

I'm feeling pretty good, actually. :)

[ random thoughts ] 2002-06-15
Still busy: Even more busy, really. Sorry, my head is sorta swimmy from caffeine withdrawal, so this entry may not be as coherent or well-formed as I would like.

More on that: we ran out of Pepsi, so my several-a-day habit hit the skids pretty hard. I mean, I've been trying to reduce my dependence on the Elixir Of Life [tm]. Sorta. I mean, I had the goal (and still do), but I wasn't really pushing myself all that hard in that direction.

But the point is, and I do have one, that instead of slowly and carefully reducing by one Pepsi per week or so, I kinda went from about four or five to about zero (this morning) in the span of several days. Ouch. (Yes, my head hurts. Yes, I've done this before and should know better. Doh!).

So I have had one Pepsi today, and I shall have more, since we finally bought some more.

On other fronts...

I took a great CPR class yesterday, so that I can work with a health care agency as a nurse assistant-type person. I'll go the orientation on Tuesday and see what kind of assignments they've got.

Uh, what else? I can't think of much for the moment, sorry. I have tons of stuff that I've got to do, but first I have to make sure my head feels better. Oh, and I had to take some Benadryl because I was sneezing uncontrollably earlier, so a huge nap is probably going to hit me like a bus in an hour or two.

[ random thoughts ] 2002-06-12
Busybusybusy: I am *so* tired. Today was pretty much nonstop busyness. We got a lot done though.

I had my eye appointment in the morning, then we went down to the DMV so that David could renew the license on the flatbed trailer. Then we headed up to Round Rock to get lunch before our appointment to have a hitch installed on the Aztek.

Then it was time to pick up Elena, who kept me busy during her visit. And finally, we just got back from dropping her off. We even managed to get gas on the way.

Anyway, I'm pooped. I haven't been on the computer all day. I suppose I'll catch up on stuff more tomorrow.

Eek, time to get Swiss out of the barn! He's done eating and is whining like a scared puppy. Later...

[ the net typography ] 2002-06-11
No, 65,000 characters are *not* enough: This remarkable paper explores why current (and proposed) systems for rendering characters on computers are just Not Going To Work, when you consider the vast numbers of unique characters required by China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

There's a whole lot more to it. Go read, it's good. [via baylink]

[ design music ] 2002-06-11
Vacuum tube motherboard: Whoa, wicked cool. Read the article, it explains. I'm adding this to the "when I'm a gozillionaire I'll buy this" list. [via David Chess]

[ rants the net ] 2002-06-11
A nice piece on web accessibility: This one's also via the NYTimes, and like the previous entry, also via my better half, David (forgot to credit him on the last entry, sorry!).

The article on some common barriers to web access makes a lot of good points, quite cogently. It's a good one.

Screen-reader software reads sequentially, starting at the top of the page. This means that blind people must listen to the advertisements and navigation before reaching the main content, and they must do this on every page of the site.

Can you imagine how painful the web would be if you couldn't skip over ads? Good golly.

As it is, most visually impaired readers must deal with websites that are designed for the majority, that is, sighted people. So of course companies are letting them fall through the cracks, essentially ignoring them.

How utterly stupid. I mean, I understand the cost-benefit analyses involved - I'm not an idiot. But the point is, it should be *really* easy to come up with software that distills the content down to an easily-readable text-only version.

I mean, really. All these big news houses and such are using custom-designed content management systems, right? How many man-hours would it take to be able to render a copy of their articles such that people with screen readers could absorb their content non-painfully?

I'm guessing very few. Sigh.

Perhaps this is just yet another issue that will have to be addressed at the user's end, with better browsing tools. If not built into the browser, then built into a personal proxy or something, capable of (at least mostly) telling the difference between ads and navigation and article content.

This would be a cool project for me to work on, if I had the time. Damn, I wish I had a rich patron who would recognize my brilliance and just pay my living expenses while I worked on problems like this.

If you know of any, prod them and ask them to contact me. :)

[ weblogs ] 2002-06-11
Interesting NYTimes piece: They write about a so-called "rift" in the blogging world, heh.

I've hardly been reading any weblogs lately, since I've been so busy with real-world stuff, but this piece seemed quite interesting.

Ya know, the usual backbiting and infighting when something new is deemed to be "cool", and people argue over who is most responsible for its rise. Goodness gracious me, everyone's so quick to claim credit, aren't they?

Silly people.

[ random thoughts the net ] 2002-06-11
Visually impaired links: That is, mostly blind links. And some links which are genuinely relating to the field of visual impairment and blindness. I'll just make an unordered list, and add to it throughout the day.

My apologies for the lack of structure and such (and for the delay in posting the mermaid vomit pictures, yes I took a couple), but I'm truly swamped lately and absolutely MUST find a job as soon as possible.

My head is still full of wonderful things to write about, and provided that everything settles out before I die or lose the ability to post entries, you will eventually get to read them. I promise.

For the moment, I'm just spewing forth a list of places I've been lately, that I think are (at least barely) worth noting. Further commentary will have to wait, I'm sorry.

So here goes:

[ animals family ] 2002-06-06
Very sad news: When I was in Colorado, something really unfortunate happened to one of my mother's horses. Well, that's putting it mildly.

Her 8-yr-old Arabian mare, Silhoette (yes, the 'u' is absent on purpose), who was in training down in Colorado Springs, had some kind of spontaneous internal brain injury, probably an aneurysm. She reacted strangely, breaking her halter and throwing herself to the ground. She walked as though she were punch-drunk, they said.

The vet came, they finally calmed her down, and then she seemed to be doing a bit better. Silhoette was put in a pasture with a gentle gelding to keep her company.

A little while after that, she collapsed and died.

:(

I'm so very sad about the whole situation - especially for my mother, who had lost another beloved horse to a totally unexpected accident some years ago. I tried to do what I could to comfort my mom, but I am not all that good at such things, I'm afraid.

I just did my best, reminding her of what a great mom she has always been to all of us, her children (both two-footed and four-footed). I told that I knew her sweet princess of a filly was very well-loved all her days, and that she had done the very best she could for her.

I know it will take a long time for the pain to lessen, for the happy memories to outweigh the pain of loss.

She was a very special horse, and we will miss her. She'll always be in our hearts.

[ random thoughts ] 2002-06-06
Mermaid vomit: that's the term I coined to describe the half-inch-thick carpet of algae & other gooshiness that covered about 2/3 of the bottom of the pool. David and I spent a couple hours this evening attempting to remove as much of it as possible.

First, we tried to use the filter-and-hose-attachment thingie, but it quickly got stuffed with algae. We tried a couple of other things, then just decided to get in the pool and get down to business.

David wielded the big butterfly net looking thing, scooping out huge globs of orange and greenish glop. I used the more traditional pool sifting net thing, which is flatter and has a much smaller capacity.

It was actually quite nice, very zen-like and peaceful, as we slowly worked our way around the pool. The rhythm was gentle: sink, scrape, lift, twist (*splop!*).

Eventually we got most of the bigger chunks and the water became too cloudy, so we got out. The sheer mass of mermaid vomit on the ground around the pool was a wonder to behold.

We hosed off and came in, then took a shower, and now I'm all nice and clean and ready to make a few more log entries.

If y'all ask nicely, I'll take some pix of the mermaid vomit tomorrow if you want :). Vote with your comments.

[ my site ] 2002-06-03
On hiatus: Beth is away in Colorado. None of the Above will return when she does.

administrative interface