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Oh, Dinosaur Comics...
Feb. 4th, 2017 11:27 amOh god, if only I lived in this better world. (no overt political content, btw.)
( comic after the cut )
( comic after the cut )
new year's eve afternoon
Jan. 1st, 2017 10:51 pmI was worried that 2016 was going to throw one last log on the fire, but my round trip to cape cod yesterday afternoon turned out to be just a chance to drive someone home from the ER and not having to rescue the dog because her owner had been admitted out of the ER.
But it's not that surprising that after that fire drill I ended up just opting to stay in and sleep early.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clauclauclaudia woke me up to say "happy new year" and then I went back to sleep and started the new year with a big solid night's sleep which is not a bad way to begin.
But it's not that surprising that after that fire drill I ended up just opting to stay in and sleep early.
clauclauclaudia woke me up to say "happy new year" and then I went back to sleep and started the new year with a big solid night's sleep which is not a bad way to begin.Actually setting a price on the truck
Nov. 21st, 2016 12:18 pmI forgot to note that I'd actually picked a friends/community price for the truck - I'd like to get $600, but I am open to price adjustments in exchange for barter of some sort. (A quick glance around shows trucks like this with higher mileage and no cap selling for around $600.)
I'm looking to sell my pickup truck, seen in this userpic lurking in front of Devil's Tower. It's a 1996 Chevy S-10 LS with a cap on the back. The LS has a slightly longer cab (there are fold-down jumpseats on the side behind the split bench seats) and a slightly shorter bed (I want to say 6 feel long). It does not have A/C. Manual transmission. It has a tow hitch. It's got 133000 miles on it, and no major problems that I know of. It's in (I think) impressively good shape for a 20 year old truck, partly because it's spent most of the past 10 or so years as a spare truck only used occasionally. Now that I have swapped the Mini for a Honda Fit, I expect fewer occasions, so it's time to send the truck off to other adventures. Edmunds.com seems to think it's worth about $2K but that seems remarkably optimistic.
George Takei's musical, Allegiance, a fictional story set among the real events of the Japanese internment camps during WWII, will be doing a movie-theatrical presentation of a recorded session on 13 Dec. details here.
clauclauclaudia and I saw it on Broadway last February, about a week before it closed, and enjoyed it.
clauclauclaudia and I saw it on Broadway last February, about a week before it closed, and enjoyed it.Well, crap
Nov. 9th, 2016 02:34 pmWell, crap. So, I guess for now we hang on til the midterm elections. And I continue to hope that my marriage remains legally recognized at a federal level until then. (And, you know, after.)
Okay, that's a pretty great ad.
Oct. 29th, 2016 06:21 pmSecret Deodorant has a commercial - starring a trans actress - about a trans woman in a women's room. video here. Well done, consumer marketing company!
Fascinating article in the Guardian talking to a guy who's written a book about drugs in Nazi Germany, because apparently there was a whole lot of oxycodone and methamphetamines going around there. (I am suddenly reminded of the Val Kilmer movie, "Salton Sea", where there's an expository montage about meth that includes noting how it was heavily used in WWII.)
A post to remind me to post
Sep. 19th, 2016 01:56 pmI'm still reading LJ very regularly, but I keep spacing on posting. I want to do more posting, so this is a very trivial post that's mostly here to remind me to post.
Quick life update: Things are good. Yay married life. Getting pretty used to the new car. I'll be looking to sell the pickup truck soon, I hope. Still two cats, although Nikita is having a harder time jumping up to places where she wants to be. She had a bad day last week and I thought it might be That Time, but she was fine after a day or so. She's enjoying being a cat, still, as far as we can tell. Bonaparte continues to be the low-maintenance cat except she likes to aggressively head-butt me in the middle of the night.
Quick life update: Things are good. Yay married life. Getting pretty used to the new car. I'll be looking to sell the pickup truck soon, I hope. Still two cats, although Nikita is having a harder time jumping up to places where she wants to be. She had a bad day last week and I thought it might be That Time, but she was fine after a day or so. She's enjoying being a cat, still, as far as we can tell. Bonaparte continues to be the low-maintenance cat except she likes to aggressively head-butt me in the middle of the night.
City Slicker replacement?
Aug. 29th, 2016 08:20 amCity Slicker has been my go-to pizza choice for a while in Somerville for years. Except they seem to have changed their recipes in the past couple of weeks for both pizza and fries and while I'm mostly okay with the new fries, clauclauclaudia doesn't like them nearly as much, although the roasted garlic dipping sauce is still about the same, but we are both really underwhelmed by the changes in pizza crust, They're not doing the pan-baking thing, and instead it's just mediocre and I think they've changed something about the cheese and sauce, too. (I think? hard to tell with the huge change in crust)
Suggestions on who makes a good white pizza with pepperoni and garlic around here and will bring it to my house in the Winter Hill area?
clauclauclaudia doesn't like them nearly as much, although the roasted garlic dipping sauce is still about the same, but we are both really underwhelmed by the changes in pizza crust, They're not doing the pan-baking thing, and instead it's just mediocre and I think they've changed something about the cheese and sauce, too. (I think? hard to tell with the huge change in crust) Suggestions on who makes a good white pizza with pepperoni and garlic around here and will bring it to my house in the Winter Hill area?
Picked up the Fit. Between being more spacious, less zippy, and having a much mellower suspension, it's a bit like driving a couch in comparison to the Mini Cooper S. A friend of mine is buying the Mini, so that works out well. Now I need to work on getting rid of the truck in the next few months. (I want to get rid of it before the sticker needs to be replaced, in September)
But, my goodness. Car electronics got complicated. My stepmother bought a new Toyota Corolla recently, so I was aware of some of the touch-screen interface stuff and how cars have rear view cameras sometimes, but wow. Rear view camera is cool, but the right lane camera is a new bit of cool for me (particularly for driving around town - anything that makes it easier to track bicycles near my car is a good thing, and this should make a good addition to the right side mirror)
That said... WHAT JACKASS DECIDED THAT A FUCKING TOUCH SCREEN WOULD BE A GOOD INTERFACE FOR A CAR? Most of everything is doable with steering wheel controls, but still.
And the interior layout is so different. I don't know where everything goes yet! There's only one hardware design peeve and one easily-worked-around software peeve I have so far. The hardware peeve is that the "open gas cap" pull lever is next to my left ankle, which is out of reach without me opening the driver's door. Not a problem if I'm doing self-serve gas, but the station near my house is a full serve so this is a slight inconvenience. The software peeve is that it starts playing music (not necessarily any particular playlist) when it bluetooth pairs with my phone. Since I was already in the habit of leaving the volume way down when I shut down the car, that's no big deal to work around, and 'pause' is easy.
I guess I need a Honda Fit userpic.
But, my goodness. Car electronics got complicated. My stepmother bought a new Toyota Corolla recently, so I was aware of some of the touch-screen interface stuff and how cars have rear view cameras sometimes, but wow. Rear view camera is cool, but the right lane camera is a new bit of cool for me (particularly for driving around town - anything that makes it easier to track bicycles near my car is a good thing, and this should make a good addition to the right side mirror)
That said... WHAT JACKASS DECIDED THAT A FUCKING TOUCH SCREEN WOULD BE A GOOD INTERFACE FOR A CAR? Most of everything is doable with steering wheel controls, but still.
And the interior layout is so different. I don't know where everything goes yet! There's only one hardware design peeve and one easily-worked-around software peeve I have so far. The hardware peeve is that the "open gas cap" pull lever is next to my left ankle, which is out of reach without me opening the driver's door. Not a problem if I'm doing self-serve gas, but the station near my house is a full serve so this is a slight inconvenience. The software peeve is that it starts playing music (not necessarily any particular playlist) when it bluetooth pairs with my phone. Since I was already in the habit of leaving the volume way down when I shut down the car, that's no big deal to work around, and 'pause' is easy.
I guess I need a Honda Fit userpic.
Vehicles in motion
Jun. 23rd, 2016 10:01 amWell, it's time. My beloved MINI is getting a bit long in the tooth and it seems like it's getting ready to go live on a farm in the country where it can frolic with the other parts cars. So I figured that I'd stay ahead of the game and start figuring out what to replace it with. I opted for a Honda Fit, and then the July 4th sale incentives hit, so I'm going to be picking up a new Fit next week.
They offered me kind of crap value for trade-in on the mini (to be fair, they think they'll just send it to auction), so I'll probably swing by one of the used car places in Somerville and see if they'll do better. If not, I'll see if the dealership will go for slightly less cash and throw in a bunch of accessories. I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the annoyance and work to do a private sale via CL or ebay or something. I suspect not.
Since the Fit is more spacious than the MINI, I figure if I get a set of roof racks for that, it'll cover 95% of what I do with the truck, so I can get rid of the truck as well.
They offered me kind of crap value for trade-in on the mini (to be fair, they think they'll just send it to auction), so I'll probably swing by one of the used car places in Somerville and see if they'll do better. If not, I'll see if the dealership will go for slightly less cash and throw in a bunch of accessories. I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the annoyance and work to do a private sale via CL or ebay or something. I suspect not.
Since the Fit is more spacious than the MINI, I figure if I get a set of roof racks for that, it'll cover 95% of what I do with the truck, so I can get rid of the truck as well.
gotta say...
Jun. 7th, 2016 10:49 amnever felt the desire to have amex platinum before...
(platinum customers get access to Hamilton presale tix for several days before the rest of the hoi polloi get access on Sunday night. Of course, presumably the hoi polloi will be preceded by the ticket-buying bots, but I'll give it a try... Hopefully with Miranda leaving the main cast in July, tickets will get slightly less stratospheric.)
(platinum customers get access to Hamilton presale tix for several days before the rest of the hoi polloi get access on Sunday night. Of course, presumably the hoi polloi will be preceded by the ticket-buying bots, but I'll give it a try... Hopefully with Miranda leaving the main cast in July, tickets will get slightly less stratospheric.)
damned magic smoke
Jun. 5th, 2016 09:44 amFirst off, anyone local got a SATA->USB adapter frob I could borrow for a while that would let me convert an internal HD as an external USB drive? (The old PC had an externally-facing SATA hookup, so some of my backups are on an internal type HD.)
I let the magic smoke out of the power supply on my home desktop computer week before last - poked around and saw that a capacitor had exploded. Oops. I eventually picked up a new power supply and some extension cables (because the case is kind of huge) and while I think it's cabled up right, it's not working. I hear a little relay click in the power supply but nothing happens besides that, so I'm guessing something is stupid. I'm feeling a bit annoyingly stupid mostly because the state of the art has progressed a bit since the last time I built a PC from scratch (it was this century, but not very far into it, as I recall), and I'm having the frustrating experience of feeling stupid for something that I feel *should* be well inside my sphere of general clue.
Due to various other annoyances, this has all exceeded my ability to deal in the short term, and I have some deadlines for having a comfortable desktop environment (web-based training that I'd rather do from home starting Monday and I had some maintenance window work to do this morning). I decided that I didn't want to do that stuff on my laptop and since the old desktop machine was a few years old, I used it as an excuse to pick up a new desktop. And a new monitor because, hey, dual-monitor setup is fun. (Over/under, here, which is a bit different than the side/side I'm used to at work). My choices were a bit limited because I didn't want Win10 (I'd tried upgrading the previous machine and rolled back because it had some hardware incompatibilities), but I found something at microcenter that was sufficient unto the task. I spent part of yesterday downloadingALL MANY OF THE THINGS and checked that I had everything to be able to do my maintenance window this morning and the training class tomorrow. I considered dragging the new chassis to work yesterday to use giant firehose network bandwidth there to download everything, but this box only has DVI and HDMI and all the monitors at my desk are VGA and if I had to go home to pick up the DVI/VGA adapter, I may as well just hang out at home anyways because it really was too nice a day to sit in a basement room.
I let the magic smoke out of the power supply on my home desktop computer week before last - poked around and saw that a capacitor had exploded. Oops. I eventually picked up a new power supply and some extension cables (because the case is kind of huge) and while I think it's cabled up right, it's not working. I hear a little relay click in the power supply but nothing happens besides that, so I'm guessing something is stupid. I'm feeling a bit annoyingly stupid mostly because the state of the art has progressed a bit since the last time I built a PC from scratch (it was this century, but not very far into it, as I recall), and I'm having the frustrating experience of feeling stupid for something that I feel *should* be well inside my sphere of general clue.
Due to various other annoyances, this has all exceeded my ability to deal in the short term, and I have some deadlines for having a comfortable desktop environment (web-based training that I'd rather do from home starting Monday and I had some maintenance window work to do this morning). I decided that I didn't want to do that stuff on my laptop and since the old desktop machine was a few years old, I used it as an excuse to pick up a new desktop. And a new monitor because, hey, dual-monitor setup is fun. (Over/under, here, which is a bit different than the side/side I'm used to at work). My choices were a bit limited because I didn't want Win10 (I'd tried upgrading the previous machine and rolled back because it had some hardware incompatibilities), but I found something at microcenter that was sufficient unto the task. I spent part of yesterday downloading
Idle thought: anyone on my friendslist potentially interested in doing a bit of Call of Cthulhu gaming? The stars weirdly aligned for Chaosium and I got my hardcopy 7th edition books recently. They do have 'quick-start' documentation, and if anyone is interested in running rather than playing, I've got at least one scenario that came with the docs.
I saw a lot of movies.
Feb. 23rd, 2016 12:30 pmSo, the 41st annual Science Fiction Film Festival and Marathon happened the other week, and so Claudia and I saw a whole lot of movies.
( moviesmoviesmovies - many blurbs and opinions below the cut )
They announced the awards for the Fest and I agree with them all or, at least, can find no fault with any of the choices at first glance. A pretty solid lineup and a good time.
( moviesmoviesmovies - many blurbs and opinions below the cut )
They announced the awards for the Fest and I agree with them all or, at least, can find no fault with any of the choices at first glance. A pretty solid lineup and a good time.
