| Brooklyn fashion |
[07 Mar 2008|11:27am] |
David has spent much time the past few months, in conjunction with the talented ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) karawynn, designing a Brooklyn pride t-shirt. It's now available for ordering at Zazzle ... stop by and show some borough pride :)
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| things you do not want to see when you go to log in and check your bank account |
[28 Sep 2007|08:51pm] |
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no access to your money and a notice saying "oops, we just got shut down by the FDIC".
I am CURSED when it comes to bank accounts.
edit: yes, I'm insured and will get my money back, and yeah, I even kinda knew this was coming, or at least that something nasty was likely to happen to Netbank. I won't lose any cash. It's just going to be a hassle.
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| when my spelling thing really comes back to bite |
[09 Aug 2007|10:22pm] |
As mentioned earlier, I'm an atrocious speller, a fact carefully disguised in my professional life with spellcheck. (Before I changed it, I had "atrotious" and "disgused.") Tonight, I ran again into my nemesis word, a word I not only can't spell, I so thoroughly can't spell it I can't use Google, m-w.com, dictionary.com or any other source I could think of to correct my attempts and guide me to the right word: verisimilitude.
I was trying variations on "vermilisitude." Even now, looking at the right spelling, I can hardly get my brain around it. My brain does not want that initial "s" to be where it is.
Thank god for late-night ifmudders. Rescued by those who are better at using the English language, I go off now to finish the article verisimilitude wants to be part of.
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| Rhysling votes |
[24 Jun 2007|11:25pm] |
I'll be scooting my envelope in at the last minute (the voting deadline is tomorrow's postmark), but I just finished reading through the Rhysling anthology and figuring out my votes. (The Rhyslings are the annual award for the best science fiction/fantasy/horror poetry. Kind of the poetry version of a combined Hugo and Nebula.)
Since I figure SF poetry can always use more discussion and exposure, I'm posting up my votes.
In the short poem category (0-49 lines, and yes, someone has written a zero line poem), I voted for:
1) Jamie Lee Moyer's "Sir Once Forgotten" (first published in Star*Line)
2) Joe Haldeman's "god is dead short live god" (Mythic #1)
3) William Sanders' "The Last Madman" (Helix #2)
( commentary ahead )
My long form choices were:
1) Samantha Henderson's "Sleepers" (Dreams & Nightmares)
2) Catherynne Valente's "The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider (Mythic #1)
3) Gregory Benford's "Isaac from the Outside" (Star*Line)
( more commentary )
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| Day 9: Dallas, part 2 (the end) |
[17 Sep 2006|10:40pm] |
Tomorrow at Ungodly Early AM we fly back to NYC. Our last day in Dallas dawned drizzly, killing off our plans to go explore. Instead, we ordered breakfast in and lazed around.
Our main plan for the day was baseball. David fretted muchly about the weather forecast, but the Rangers did go on as scheduled at 1pm -- and even managed a complete game, despite intermittent downpours. On our way to the stadium, we braved the rain for a quick walk around the area near our hotel. We're right near the famed Pegasus sign. (I can't find the Big D sign, though! I am sad the weather was too foul for us to go up Reunion Tower and check out the skyline.)
( baseball below )
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| Day 8: Dallas |
[17 Sep 2006|10:24am] |
Saturday dawned on a disagreement on our morning itinerary. This week turns out to be the opening of the Oklahoma State Fair, and it's located just a few minutes from the hotel where we were staying. I wanted to go for a few hours -- we never went to state fairs when I was a kid. This is exciting new stuff! David, who went to the Shepparton Show and Melbourne Show every year, wanted to get on the road and reach Dallas earlier in the day.
We finally compromised: We'd set off for Dallas, but also make a special weekend-long trip next year to The Big E, the northeastern states' expo. So, local-area residents: put the dates on your calendar. We'd love to descend en masse on the fair.
On the way our of OKC, we passed a particularly amusing religious sign. The further south we've gone on this trip, the more Jesus Billboards we've seen.
( futbawl and weaponry )
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| Day 7: Oklahoma City |
[16 Sep 2006|10:11am] |
Friday was our longest day of planned driving -- six hours -- so we got up early, had another excellent breakfast, and hit the car to leave the B&B and Kansas City and head to Oklahoma City. The drive was uneventful except for the rest stop in Kansas. It was in the middle of nothing. Long, flat plains everywhere, with a few building plunked in the middle for the rest stop. The wind was intense; I've never felt gusts like that outside a storm. I'd heard of prairie winds, but wow. Prairies are wacky places.
David also admired the entire large row of jerky products. Truly, it rivaled Minnesota's gas-stop pork selection.
( OKC explorations ahead )
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| Day Six: Kansas City, Pt. 2 |
[15 Sep 2006|01:10am] |
Vegetables. I need vegetables. Other than the occasional lettuce leaf on a sandwich, I don't think I've had anything green in days. Since crossing the Kansas state line I've only eaten barbeque and starch.
We started off with a great breakfast at our B&B (waffles for me, french toast for David, yum), then set off for the Negro League Baseball Museum. David says it was wonderful to see the history preserved, and that he wishes more had been. I had fun reading old newspaper stories, like the accounts of the local team's "fine deportment" and astonishing eating binges.
( fireworks and wild kittens )
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| Day 5: Kansas City |
[13 Sep 2006|10:30pm] |
Before departing Omaha, I had a special tea errand to run. We headed off into the land of chain malls in search of The Tea Trove, where I encountered owner and ex-NYC dweller Kori Miller. We loaded up on breakfast scones, drinks (genmaicha for me, iced chocolate for David) and loose tea ...
... then herded ourselves back to I-29 again.
( tales of Jesus and bbq )
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| Day 4: Omaha |
[13 Sep 2006|05:44pm] |
I will never again refer to the Midwest as a barren gulch bereft of civilization. Iowa has wifi at roadside rest stops.
Tuesday dawned foggy again, slowing our hurtling down I-29 to a mere 70mph.
( ahead: corn! )
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| Day 3: Sioux Falls, SD |
[12 Sep 2006|01:15am] |
The Dakotas have brought me an unexpected, happy surprise: the highest legal speed limit I've ever encountered, 75 mph. We expected to have about four hours of driving this morning to get from Fargo to Sioux Falls. The high interstate speeds cut that to three.
Of course, going zoom zoom superfast has problems -- especially when a fog bank descends, as it did over one thirty-mile stretch.
( cows and cars in fog ... )
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| Day 2: Fargo |
[11 Sep 2006|12:35am] |
This entry brought to you by the unexpected -- and free! -- Net access at Fargo's C'mon Inn. I (heart) wired hotels.
The impetus for this roadtrip was David's desire to cross more states off his list of those he's visited (I think he's down to six or seven left). If we're driving all this way, though, we're sure as hell going to stop at whatever odd bits of Americana we can find along the way. So, Sunday's route from Minneapolis to Fargo was planned with a particular pausing point in mind: Darwin, Minn.'s "world's largest ball of twine." (Technically, it's not the world's very largest, just the largest done by only one person.)
I was slightly worried about finding the ball of twine in Darwin -- we didn't have specific directions. Ha. Darwin, pop. 230, is basically one street. Turn left off the highway, and bang -- ye giant ball of twine. It is indeed large. And stinky.
( photos ahead )
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| Day 1: Minneapolis |
[11 Sep 2006|12:20am] |
Our Fargo-to-Dallas roadtrip is actually starting in Minneapolis, since David pointed out that it would be a) way cheaper to fly to there than Fargo, b) a chance to catch a Twins game and add another stadium to his life list, and c) an opportunity to catch up with our local friends. So, Saturday found us in the Twin Cities picking up our rental car for our voyage.
(Ok, technically, we started in Boston, for a batch of convoluted logistical reasons. Boston is not at all Midwestern or roadtrippy, though, so I'm not counting it for narrative purposes. Plus I was working. But it did give us a chance to see David's best friend from high school in Melbourne and isquiesque, so that was most awesome. After two days in Boston, we flew to Minneapolis Saturday morning and started the trip proper.)
The flying part of our trip was fraught with delays -- SwampJet managed to have staffing problems in both Boston and Atlanta -- and we got to Minneapolis with just enough time to bolt for our rental car, race to the Raddison, fling our bags in the room, and grab a taxi to Sixth-and-Chicago to meet lno, elenfair and fmi_agent. David and I laid a bet about whether we'd make it by the 5:15 meeting time. I won by 1 minute. Woo!
( click for Minneapolis tales )
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| in which I kill my chances of ever working at Forbes.com |
[24 Aug 2006|12:07pm] |
The Web is full of stupidity, and fulminating against all of it would take more time and effort than I care to expand for so little consequence. However, every once in a while something manages to really hit my buttons and get me frothing. Forbes.com's rapidly-becoming-infamous "Don't Marry Career Women" piece did it. While the page there now includes a "rebuttal" and frames the nonsense as a "debate," the piece originally stood alone.
I usually like Jack Shafer's media analysis, so I was initially happy to see him taking on the Forbes piece. But his story is also problematic, willfully ignoring the article's misogynist tone. I got cranky enough to send him a reply (cc'd to Romenesko).
The sad part of all this, as I said toward the end of my reply letter, is that Forbes is probably quite happy to run this offensive drivel because of the traffic it generates.
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| Pulitzer-winning fanfic |
[18 Apr 2006|02:00pm] |
I penned a few fanfic stories years ago and have read through some of the occasional heated word-wars that break out over the legitimacy of fanfic, like the flare-ups that raged in the blogs earlier this year over Robin Hobb's rant. My own personal stance has always been that many great works are derivative, and that noncommercial use of worlds and characters created by others is fair game. (David and I have heated fights about the 'noncommercial' part of that. Copyright law may be flawed, but it does exist for good reason and I think it needs to be honored.)
So I was rather amused to find out what yesterday's fiction Pulitzer Prize winner, Geraldine Brooks' March, is about. Here's the first line of the Publishers' Weekly review: "Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women."
Now that fanfic has won the Pulitzer, can we please declare the fight about its moral legitimacy over?
EDIT: Further discussion about this pointed out that it has happened before. Previous winners The Hours (1999) and A Thousand Acres (1992), and probably others I'm not immediately picking up on, riff off earlier works. But those don't directly take place in the world of another fictional story, as March does.
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| David's weekend project |
[18 Apr 2006|12:27pm] |
David & preysz are both big geekfans of baseball and Brooklyn history. This weekend, they combined those interests by tromping around the borough snapping photos of every site they could confirm once hosted professional baseball. The results are up now at BrooklynBallParks.com.
(David's still off lj, but is reachable anytime at dsdyte[insert usual symbol here]gmail.com)
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| because this is driving me nuts |
[25 Jan 2006|08:49pm] |
Is anyone else seeing these weird google bar graphs in their search results? I know I'm not the absolute only one, because my friend mamster is hitting the same thing, but I'm kinda surprised that we're the only news outlet reporting this so far. Now that we have our stake in the ground on being all leading-edge and scoopy with it, I'd like to see the story turn up elsewhere, just so the news coverage starts smoking out some info on how widespread this is. (Google, of course, isn't commenting. They never do.) I can't even find any blog posts about this, which seems odd.
I know Google tests UIs out often, but this thing is a pretty big display change, and it's persistent -- it's been more than a day and it's still happening on the one browser of mine that's infected by it. I can't disable the change, and I don't like it. Arugh. This is the first time the Google "arrogance" has actively bothered me. If you're going to make a big UI change, explain to me what's happening, please. Put a link somewhere telling me what those bar graphs do (I mean, I can infer, but data please!) and telling me if it's possible to disable the change and revert to Google classic.
This is forcing me to use IE. (The results look normal there, for me.) Ug.
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| for David's friends |
[09 Jan 2006|12:35am] |
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I know aussie_nyc has some people on his friends' list who aren't on mine. I've been posting locked entries about his status; if you are a friend of his who would like access and don't already have it, leave me a comment here.
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| today just gets better and better |
[01 Jan 2006|05:20pm] |
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I just learned by experience, for the first time since living in this apartment, that Kea is a mouser. And my attempts to extricate and relocate the mouse ended with it jumping from its bowl (mice can jump?) somewhere in the front hallway.
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| a tale of two airlines |
[09 Dec 2005|11:29pm] |
So, as anyone in the Northeast knows, today the weather was a massive blizzard of suck. I spent my Friday off at JFK, futilely attempting to defy the weather deities and get to Boston. the 10am flight David & I had booked became an 11:30 flight, then a 1:20 flight, then a 4:50 flight, then a 7:30 flight, at which point we abandoned all hope of making our 8pm dinner and decided to scrap the trip.
The Boston flight was JetBlue. despite the immense frustration of being stuck with an endlessly delayed flight, the JetBlue people at least impressed me by trying to keep the crowd up to date on the info they were getting. at 3:30, hoping to load the plane and bolt as soon as they got clearence, they herded us all on and started coming around with drinks & snacks for the restless herds. when the last delay hit two hours later, and we along with a bunch of others gave up and decided to scrap our travels, they asked us to check with the gate agent to free up our seats so others trying to rebook could grab them.
This was the only real JetBlue hitch all day -- the gate agent sent us to the service desk, which was swamped with complicated rebooking requests, and we waited half an hour just to try to release our seats. Finally we got through and explained; the agent scribbled our names on a sheet of paper and said to call Jet Blue's 800 # about a credit or refund.
I just did. They systems showed us still logged in as boarded. "Oh *crap*," I thought. Obviously, in the confusion, the gate desk agent didn't realise we were trying to cancel flights after we'd already technically boarded. I had no idea how I could go about proving that we really did get off and not fly, short of explaining my story. Which I did. The phone agent said her supervisor would ring me back in 15 minutes.
Ha ha ha, thought I. I have never actually had any customer service agent ring me back when they claim they will.
Ten minutes later, I got a call. They'd sorted it out and requested a refund with Amex of our full ticket cost. Wow. I expected to be told "non-refundable ticket, you lose." At best, I'd hoped for a credit. Full refund = yay.
Meanwhile, I hopped back on the phone to deal with the next travel headache -- David was supposed to fly out of Boston tomorrow to another city, and fly back from there Monday. Two one-way tickets, both with United, but booked as one reservation. I called United and explained the situation, and that I wanted to cancel just the Boston leg and retain the Monday back-to-NYC leg. Their answer? "Non-refundable ticket, you lose." No cancelling one leg without the other. But if I want to scrap the whole ticket and pay an additional $100 plus service fees to rebook only a one-way ticket, why, they'd be happy to do that ...
Guess which airline I will be flying in the future. And which one I will not.
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