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Monday, September 14th, 2009
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1:59 pm - Knitting! (A rambling phone post that has very little to do with knitting)
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So I sit here in my library's break room, munching on my lunch (Smoked almonds!) and wondering what to blog about.
One of my friends from work taught me how to knit this year, and so I've been having great fun watching DVDs and knitting. I just finished one sock and the fourth season of House recently, and I've decided to work on an afghan (and the next season of House) before doing the second sock. Knitting is a lot of fun, but I can see why textiles factories really took off during the Industrial Revolution. I just spent $60 on yarn for one afghan that I probably could've bought for 20 bucks at the store. (Not to mention the cost of my own time.) This is fine with me, of course, because as I said before, knitting is fun. I think I'm really starting to understand the plight of the 19th century woman, though. I've been learning how to make cheese too, and it takes a lot of work, y'all. (If anyone knows where to find Junket Rennet in Houston, lemme know.) I can't imagine having to do things like cheesemaking and knitting because my family depends on my efforts to keep them fed and clothed.
current mood: content
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| Monday, August 3rd, 2009
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9:41 pm - AHAHAHA! Poor babies
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So I got some new, finer gravel to put in my Amazon biotope tank, to hopefully encourage the plants to root better, and I took all the features out, so I could mix it in. In the course of doing so, I churned up a lot of mulm, so I'm letting that filter out before I continue. As it stands right now, there is nothing in the tank but gravel and fish, and the tetras are swimming back and forth across the tank like "Where's my favorite piece of wood? What happened to that one little plant? IT WAS HERE JUST A MINUTE AGO!" and the corys are sitting in a sullen little circle in the middle of the tank as if to say "We refuse to move from this spot until you return our habitat to us, vile grabbing thing from above!"
I am a horrible person for deriving such amusement from my pets' confusion.
current mood:  amused
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| Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
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9:54 pm - Ludicroussalmon
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So as I posted my last entry, I must have been tagged by a salmonbot. They are fairly amusing little creatures, it seems. They go around hooking up random IM users who have posted recently in LJ and the like. Each user sees the other posting as XXXsalmon, where XXX is some adjective. (I got ludicroussalmon, clearly.) I'm afraid I accused the person at the other end of being a real bot, before I knew what was going on. So, Max and Cap, where ever you are, I am sorry!
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8:36 pm - My Life According to Babylon 5
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Ganked from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) agilebrit
Using only EPISODE names from ONE SCI FI TV SHOW, cleverly answer these questions.
Try not to repeat an episode title. It’s a lot harder than you think!
Repost as “My life according to (Sci Fi TV show)” (or just reply in my LJ so I can see it.) Or not. Whatever. :P
Pick your SciFi Genre Show:
Babylon 5
Are you a male or female?
Whatever Happened to Mr Garabaldi?
Describe yourself:
Between the Darkness and the Light
How do you feel:
All Alone in the Night
Describe where you currently live:
In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum
If you could go anywhere where would you go?
The Parliament of Dreams
Your favorite form of transportation:
Racing Mars
Your best friend is:
A Late Delivery From Avalon
What’s the weather like:
And the Sky Full of Stars
Favorite time of day:
Midnight on the Firing Line
If your life was a TV show, it would be called:
Strange Relations
What is life to you:
Moments of Transition
Your fear:
And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder
What is the best advice you have to give:
The Exercise of Vital Powers
Thought for the Day:
And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place
How I would like to die:
Sleeping In Light
My soul’s present condition:
There All Honor Lies
My motto:
No Surrender, No Retreat
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| Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
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3:38 pm - Notes From Work
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Just had kid try to come in without a shirt. Told him no. Last spotted trying to bilk hapless younger kid out of shirt. Suspect he was successful.
Perhaps I need a Twitter. Or a telegraph.
current mood: amused
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| Monday, July 13th, 2009
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4:56 pm - The Great Snail Escape of 2009 and other stuff
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So I'm posting this from my phone, which is pretty spiffy keen, in my opinion. I'm also considering going friends-only, since I've locked more stuff than I've unlocked recently.
Anyway, I have four apple snails, two per tank. (And a large collection of pest snails, but I'd rather not have them.) Bismarck and Trafalgar are with the goldfish, and I just got Pippin and Kosh (again), who could totally fit in a goldfish mouth, so they are living in the Amazon tank right now. Trafalgar is this lovely gold color, and he's roughly the size of a ping-pong ball now. Bismarck is black with brown and gray stripes, and just a bit smaller. The other day, he decided it would be a really awesome idea to see what lay outside the tank. I found him laying behind the tank, pulled as far into his shell as possible, being menaced by a roach. So I rescued him from that, and he lay at the bottom of the tank being traumatized for awhile. Finally, he poked a single antenna out, and decided that his current roach-free environment was acceptable. He doesn't seem to be any worse for the wear, except for a small crack on his shell.
Okay, so I'm not sure if I've posted this recipe before, but I'm going to make it for my lunches for the rest of the week, so I thought I'd share it.
( Salmon Dip/Salad )
current mood: hungry
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| Thursday, July 9th, 2009
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6:39 pm - Welcome to the Doldrums
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So it's been really hot around here lately. Jury is still out, I believe, on whether it's the hottest summer in the past 11 years, or the past 29, but nevertheless, it has been icki. I live in hope of a small tropical depression coming this way, but I'm afraid we would get a large hurricane instead. Normally I hold out and don't turn on my car's AC for as long as possible, because it eats gas like there's no tomorrow, but I've had to run it every day for the past month, just about. Our low for the day is 78 and they promise rain, but I think they lie. Thank God for central air conditioning is all I can say.
current mood:  hot
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
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6:15 pm - So I've been kinda busy...
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What with work and stuff lately, but I just got a shiny new phone that connects to the Webbernets, so I might be able to post more. Plus the fact that I'm attempting to convince myself that not every post has to be epic. The flist is kinda daunting at the moment, but I have a day off to plow through it. Onwards!
current mood:  bouncy
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| Friday, June 12th, 2009
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12:03 pm - Writer's Block: Teen Time Machine
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I actually hit this button by mistake, while trying to get to the mobile site, but it's a good question, so I'm keeping it. Some members of my flist might think I'm crazy, but I think I would like to have been a teen during the 60's. There was cool music, but mostly the space race is what appeals to me. I am really jealous of all those people that got to see all of that live, or even better, work for NASA during that era. Sorry, but Low Earth Orbit, while nifty, is just not as awesome as creating a moonship from scratch.
Since regular LJ doesn't work too well with my tiny screen, I shall just leave it at that.
current mood:  geeky
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| Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
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12:19 am - Further Adventures in Fishkeeping
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Not as traumatic as the last time, I promise!
So I cleaned up the fish tank and got new hoods, as there was something electrically wrong with the old ones, and added two new fish, and some snails. Unfortunately, I forgot about the under gravel filter, which is an evil, evil thing, as it was concealing fish poop underneath, and doing bad things to my water chemistry, so one of my new fish, Shriner, ended up dying. My two snails, Bismarck and Trafalgar, also died, and I would like to report that dead snails smell absolutely vile. So I fixed the water chemistry, and it's right this time, and introduced Morgenstern to the tank, along with Bismarck and Trafalgar II, and Kosh, a third snail. They seem to be getting along just fine with Joe and Lord Fishington, the Shubunkin I got with Shriner. (Morgenstern (and Shriner) is a Sarasa Comet, and Joe is a Common Goldfish.)
In recent developments, one of my Java Ferns has created a spore, Joe takes great pleasure in knocking Kosh off the glass, and I think Lord Fishington is, in fact, a girl. They delight in ripping up any plants that aren't tied down. In fact, I was planting a plant, and Joe swam up, ripped it out of my hand, and swam off, chewing on it. I kid you not. I was like... Fine, you can have it. It'll grow too fast for you to eat it all, and you need your leafy greens anyway.
I also started work on a new, smaller aquarium. It is ten gallons, and I intend for it to be a biotope, which only has plants and animals from one part of the world, in this case, the Amazon River Basin. It's pretty much planted, and I have five Corys in there, which are just about the most adorable little catfish ever. They blink at you!* You may recall my poor little cory from my earlier adventure in fishkeeping, but Joe will have no opportunity to eat these, accidentally or otherwise. The old corys we had resembled Jar Jar Binks a little, they had that same sort of pattern, but these new corys have little bandit masks over their eyes and a black spot by their dorsal fin, and all but one have speckles. They're really very pretty. I was hoping to add some Cardinal Tetras today, but the fish store was out, so I have to wait til next week. I think my biggest challenge with this tank will be keeping the plants alive. I should have taken more care over my gravel, but I put a CO2 reactor (SCIENCE!) in there, so we'll see what results that has before attempting to mix fertilizer into the gravel. I hope to post pictures at some point, but aquariums can be kinda tricky to photograph, I hear.
*Actually, what they're doing is rolling their eyes, but it looks for all the world like they are blinking. With the Goldfish Brigade, it's clear they're rolling their eyes at you.
current mood: excited
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| Thursday, January 8th, 2009
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8:56 pm - Nom!
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So I have discovered a new awesome snack, and it is this: Triscuits dipped in melted butter and Parmesan cheese.
In other news, I made my own butter this weekend. It was really easy. Most of the recipes on the web involve shaking heavy cream in a jar for long periods of time, but these are mostly for enthusiastic children just starting to cook, or perhaps doing a westward expansion unit study. Since I am a lazy adult cook, and my parents didn't go the unit study route anyway, I cheated and used a blender. Results were awesome. It's basically like doing whipped cream, except you whip it for longer. The most involved part was washing all the buttermilk out. I had a brief blonde moment disguised as a moment of genius* when I decided to use a strainer to rinse the buttermilk out, but fortunately, fresh butter can be scraped off the bottom of a screen strainer fairly easily. I'm not actually sure if it's any cheaper than buying butter from the store, but it sure is fun, and it tastes really good.
*Is it not said: "You're so sharp you'll cut yourself"?
current mood: full
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| Sunday, January 4th, 2009
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7:46 pm - Adventures in fishkeeping
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So I wandered down to our living room this evening and noticed that our goldfish Joe's mouth looked kinda weird. So I took a closer look, and it turned out that our cory was stuck in it. Yes folks, that's right. He ate our cory. I was of course compelled to admonish him for being a Very Bad Fish. This was especially weird because we've kept goldfish and corys together for almost 10 years without incident. It turns out this sort of situation is fairly common, and since corys have toxic spines on their fins, it's tricky to deal with. The recommended course of action is to cut the cory's fins and gently pull it out, the assumption being, of course, that the cory is already dead. This was not the case. The really rotten part about it is, we would have had to do the same thing even if we knew he was alive. (Though if that had been the case, we probably would have waited for a little bit.) So we put the little guy in alcohol, which prompted a horrified reaction from one of my friends, but we couldn't leave him like that, all finless. It would have been cruel.
Meanwhile, Joe was definitely an unhappy camper. He was more or less fine with being netted (insofar as fish are ever fine with that sort of thing), but he really didn't like being on the coffee table, which we had covered in a towel for the occasion. He calmed down and stopped flopping once we wrapped him a towel soaked in tank water, though. My longsuffering younger brother with steadier hands than I performed the surgery, for which I was most grateful. So Joe is more or less okay now, though he's acting very traumatized and lurking at the bottom of the tank with his fins all pulled in. I think his mouth is swollen a bit, too, so we dropped some Melafix in, which will hopefully speed the healing process. We might get him another goldfish (one that he unequivocally can't fit in his mouth) after he's done with the Melafix, since goldfish tend to sulk without company. Hopefully we won't run into any complications, as he is a very nice fish, when he's not being bad.
Note on sizes: Our dearly departed cory was about 1.5 inches long and perhaps 3/4 of an inch in diameter. Joe is probably about 8 inches long without his tail, which split down the middle in his bids for freedom from the coffee table. It should heal up pretty quick, though.
This has not been a fun evening.
current mood: sad
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| Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
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9:09 pm - In which Hitchhiker_42 squeals like a small child
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| Friday, September 12th, 2008
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12:39 am - *Yawn*
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Just staying up a few more minutes to see the latest Ike forecast. My family has decided that we are going to hunker down shelter-in-place. We'll be boarding up our windows and taking down the satellite dish tomorrow, as well as some other stuff. (Like putting away all my books that I've been cataloging this past week.) As my dad pointed out during Rita, it's amazing the weather technology we have now. At this same point before the 1900 Storm, the residents of Galveston had NO IDEA what was bearing down on them.* I don't expect the hurricane itself will be too bad, as they are only predicting a Cat 2. The main thing to worry about as it passes over would be tornadoes, (We're talking tiny little things, though, not your typical Tornado Alley tornado, thankfully.) as I don't live in a storm surge area, or a flood plain, despite my proximity to a bayou. Anyway, keep Texas/Louisiana in your prayers, as this thing is huge, and it's going to affect a lot of people no matter where it makes landfall.
*Actually, Cuban meteorologists predicted the landfall at Galveston, and that it would be very bad, but the American meteorologists didn't believe that it was even possible for a storm that powerful to enter the Gulf, and so dismissed them. The 1900 Storm remains the single deadliest US natural disaster of all time. Galveston never truly recovered from its impact.
current mood: tired
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| Thursday, June 12th, 2008
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7:02 pm - Recipes!
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So I'm making this crock-pot jambalaya for dinner, which smells awesome, but it's not done cooking yet, so I'm not go to post the recipe this time. Incidentally, it calls for shrimp, and guess what I should find on the bag of shrimp but this message: "Allergen Warning: Contains shrimp" The mind, it boggles.
Anyway, some of my favorite recipes.
( Those Hot Pocket Things )
( My Cabbages! )
current mood: hungry
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| Sunday, May 11th, 2008
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8:26 pm - And there was much rejoicing
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School's out! Got an "A" in accounting, don't know about Visual Basic yet. I no longer have any excuse to put off enrolling in UH, so with any luck, I'll be going there in the fall. Now! I've been off of LJ for awhile, so I'm going to attempt to catch up on my flist now.
current mood: bouncy
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 7th, 2008
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4:52 pm - *points and mocks*
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To my left-leaning Texas friends, I have only one thing to say to you: BWAHAHAHA!!!
To everyone else, I'd like to point out that only the Democrat Party of Texas engages in needlessly complicated shenanigans involving Cacumaries (or Pricuses, whichever you prefer). The Republican Party of Texas has a fairly straightforward method that assigns delegates to candidates based on their percentage of the vote. Now doesn't that sound so much easier?
Now that I got that out of my system...
This election cycle's Democrat race is turning out to be really interesting. Obama took a big gamble running for President with not even one term's experience at the Federal level, and it's really paid off for him, big time. We all thought any other Democrat would be a fool to attempt to stand up to the Clinton juggernaut. However, now that it is numerically impossible to win the Dem nomination on pledged delegates alone, it looks like Hillary's strategy of courting the superdelegates might be crucial. There's also the matter of the Michigan and Florida delegates. They both went for Clinton, but they held their primaries too early, so their delegates won't be seated at the convention. (The Reps only stripped their rebellious states of half their delegates.) FL and MI might be holding their primaries for a second time in June, which seems like a huge waste of money to me, but whatever.
So! Ought to be an interesting Democrat National Convention. More interesting than ours, for sure.
current mood: chipper
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| Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
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11:08 pm - Meme!
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84% Mike Huckabee
84% Mitt Romney
84% Fred Thompson
82% John McCain
77% Tom Tancredo
62% Ron Paul
60% Rudy Giuliani
42% Bill Richardson
36% Hillary Clinton
32% John Edwards
31% Barack Obama
29% Joe Biden
27% Chris Dodd
20% Mike Gravel
15% Dennis Kucinich
2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz
Anyone really surprised here? Yeah, didn't think so. Huckabee and Romney being so high up surprised me a bit, but not Thompson, as I'm planning to vote for him anyway. He's a solid conservative candidate, and he shares almost every facet of my political views.* If only he could run a better campaign....
*Half of my flist: o_O A conservative in fandom? (Like the bisexual girl gamer English majors, I don't actually exist, you see.)
I'm also a bit surprised that McCain is as high up as he is, as he's really quite liberal for a Republican. However, I would love to see him with Joe Lieberman as a running mate. Watching the Dems scramble for their traditional Jewish voting bloc would amuse me almost as much as watching the Dems have to scramble for their traditional black voting bloc if Condi ran. *Crosses fingers that Condi will run in '12, because she'd make an awesome President.*
Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the race, so I'm not sure why he's still on the list. Ron Paul has some good stuff to say, but he is, quite frankly, unelectable. He is also surrounded by nutjob supporters, and dubious campaign contributors. Note to Dr. Paul: Taking money from White Supremacists is a bad, bad thing. You do not need the money badly enough to sink to accepting it from racists. Give it back, and publicly distance yourself from them, or suffer the political consequences (from your own side, even). You are hurting your Libertarian message by taking money from these idiots.
Rudy Giuliani is a combination of McCain and Paul, in my opinion. He is really liberal, and he cannot seem to distance himself from undesirable supporters, in his case, a child-molesting priest.
Not going to do commentary on the Dems, because I haven't bothered to do any research, as I'm not voting for them. I'm sure one of y'all on my flist who is a liberal could do a far better job of commentary on them anyway. I would be interested on hearing y'all's thoughts on Obama vs. Hillary, though. Most of what I hear about them is from conservatives, mainly speculating about who'd be easier to beat. Tragically, most of my Democrat friends don't really care for politics, and so can't really give me an in-depth analysis from the point of view of someone who might actually vote for these people.
Wow, this post turned out quite a bit longer than I expected. I really only meant to post the quiz results. I wonder if anyone has gotten mixed results, instead of one or the other. Perhaps I should get my mom to take the quiz. She's rather apathetic about politics, but she'd be the most likely of anyone in my family to get a mixed bag.
current mood: excited
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| Saturday, January 5th, 2008
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8:55 pm - I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar
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So I believe PTerry said something in his writings about how a person isn't actually dead until everything they've accomplished and influenced is gone. If that's the case, the internet is the key to immortality that we've been searching for all this time.
I've been quite blessed, because by the grace of God, I haven't had many people close to me die, and I haven't felt the tangible influence of a dead person in person, as it were, if that makes any sense whatsoever. But on the internet, particularly with the rise of blogging, it's easy to see the influence of everyday people. And with the rise of blogging, they now have a much bigger sphere of influence.
Consider the inspiration for this post, one Andrew Olmsted, American soldier deployed in Iraq, and his message from beyond the grave. Go on, middle-click the link, open it in a new tab. Your flist will be right here when you get done reading it. It's amazing how much more personal a blog post is than a news article. So many people have died in Iraq, but this funny, amazing, smart guy wrote about it himself, and now I am grieving for him and his family, even though I've never met him, or even heard of him until this morning, two days after he died.
This isn't the first time I've been influenced by someone after their untimely death. Back when I was an internet noob, I discovered the wonderful kellilla, her artwork, and her sadly defunct message board, Watch Out For Snakes. Well, about a year back, I was reading her blog, in which she mentioned that someone named kielle had died. I followed the link, come to find out that she was hugely influential in most of my usual fandom haunts, including FW, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) metaquotes, and several others I'm probably forgetting. This person has had a major influence on my life on the internet, and I never even knew until after she died. I continue to find interesting corners of fandom that with a little digging reveal themselves to be brainchildren of Kielle's.
It's really quite nifty to think that, because of the internet, the influence an ordinary person can have will never end, even in death.
current mood: contemplative
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| Monday, September 17th, 2007
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7:29 pm - Calling Home
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Okay, so I'm talking to my mom, who saw a news report on SpiralFrog*, which I had been talking to my dad about earlier this evening. So she was asking me about how it works, (note that she knows next to nothing about computers) and so I tried to explain to her about DRM, and how I was initially a bit leery about installing it on our computers and letting it call home, until I realized that Overdrive** does something very similar:
Me: So "Let It Be" goes to SpiralFrog and says "Do I have permission to play?" and SpiralFrog is like "Lemme check. Yup, you have permission." So "Let It Be" plays for you.
Mom: So are these real people talking back and forth?
Me: No mom, it's all code. The file on your computer asks the site if it has permission to play, and the site responds back. *Repeat above explanation, except with our library's Overdrive site and The Iliad as examples.*
Mom: This is really creepy. If they're talking to each other now, are they going to start going out with each other?
Me: oO
Mom: Firefox and Overdrive are going to have little code babies!
Me: oO?!?!?!
Needless to say, I didn't even get around to explaining how a program could call home with malicious intent, I was so busy laughing.
ETA: Further gems from my mom:
Mom: Code talking to each other is just so weird. What do they say to each other?
Me: getFunction(oldInt)? return newInt;?
Mom: *ignores* Do they get married and set up their new home in a corner of the hard drive or what?
Me: *dies and iz ded* Compters talk to each other all the time. How do you think the Internet works?
Mom: It's like that tech wizard from Shoe. He just waves a wand and it works.
Me: ...
*Down for the moment, probably getting flooded with traffic on its first day.
**Shameless Plug: Possibly available at your library. Check it out!
current mood: giggly
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