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Via Metafilter.
California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban (LA Times)
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I think the post-house-inspection part of selling and buying a house is the most incredibly stressful part for me. Perhaps some alcohol. Yes. I think so.
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Google’s apps improvements are seeming almost telepathic to me. Yesterday I was thinking (and didn’t write it down anywhere) “Gee, it would be cool if I could annotate shared items so folks knew why I was sharing them.” and suddenly today you can.
Let me just say that it would also be cool if I could add a tag set to each shared item so I can share stuff for work and stuff for friends from the same reader account.
Update: Okay uh… nevermind, the tag thing is already available. Wow.
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ESPN has a thorough article about Eight Belles. It captures the audience reaction and goes into more detail about what happened and is reassuing about one thing - that no one thinks she suffered more than a few seconds.
They say you ran hard, ran fast, ran the run of your life. So long, girl. Catch you on the flip side.
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We had a bet riding on Eight Belles, the filly who placed second at the Kentucky Derby. I was rooting for her and she was beautiful. She broke both front ankles at some point during or possibly after the race (details are unclear right now) and was euthanized on the track.
I thought she was one of the most beautiful horse. Sometimes I believe in reincarnation. I hope she starts again as whatever creature she wants to be.
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My last surviving uncle on my Chinese side, Leon Pon has had Alzheimer’s for years/decades. He died with friends and family in attendance yesterday afternoon around 2:00 p.m. in Oakland, California.
I hope my Chinese family over there is doing well. I hear some of my younger first cousins once removed are freaking out a little bit - those who were his grandchildren - but I figure they’re young - they will be resilient, even though they probably don’t know it yet.
I’ll check in on them in a few days.
Mostly I need to figure out if Dad’s still coming to visit! (I assume so, but don’t know 100% for sure.)
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What happens when a senior at Western Oregon scores her first home run and then collapses shortly after passing first base? Something extraordinary.
Brought tears to my eyes.
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Seal has done a great many good things. They are one of the few remaining feminist identified publishers in the US. They’re no longer independent and are owned by a much larger publisher, but I think they are still capable of doing good things. Because of the things I’m about to mention about them it should be clear they are receiving a very special ass-whuppin’ over their editorial standards and how they are or could be construed to be racist.
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This is via Making Light, who in turn got it from Warren Ellis.
Clay Shirky argues (I think wisely) for the idea that we are growing as an international (first world?) society is growing into one where we will stop just watching media, and will expect to be interactive with our media. He thinks the wave’s about to break.
Video and transcript behind the cut.
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(assuming you have a domain you can control/create subdomains on)
I just set it up. Took about 30 geeky minutes, including a 20 minute call in which I was attempted to be recruited about a job in Northern Virginia.
It’s two php scripts, a very little console work, and if you’re hosting on Dreamhost and running PHP as CGI, some additional cruft in the .htaccess file.
The scripts are in a package called phpMyID.
The console work is in that package’s readme (basically hashing your ID, your PHP realm and your chosen password and sticking it in the configuration file - one of the two php scripts).
The .htaccess file work is described here. A note about the .htaccess stuff: If you’re running csh or tcsh, take the stuff out of single quotes and put them directly in the .htaccess file with a text editor or else the shell will misinterpret the ! and other punctuation and screw it up for you.
Apparently you can host multiple IDs if you want with various intelligent file clonings and tweakings, but the system’s really designed for individual IDs per subdomains/domains.
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In the tradition of Jonathan Swift:
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I admire what this guy’s got to say. Like me, he uses the privilege he’s given to get his message to folks who would normally reflexively dismiss folks with similar knowledge and creds who don’t have pink skin.
So far I’ve only been able to read the PDF transcript, but I will include links to YouTube videos.
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wise
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/timjwise
Website: http://timwise.org/
Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
On White Privilege (transcript)
http://www.mediaed.org/handouts
Tim Wise: White Like Me - Parts 1-8 (audio)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
Let me know what you think!
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Totally for my own reference.
Yesterday at our company all-hands meeting, we all got a pretty cool rollerball pen with a Hauser 707sf refill in it.
Upon Googling (gerund!), I found out that Schmidt 888 refills are compatible and that the “International Standard Size” is very likely also compatible.
Links I found for representative refills:
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I posted rather a long comment (as kalessin) there.
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Most of the rest of the symptoms are now gone, two days after the main draught of sickness is gone. But I am left with a huge, yawning fatigue.
I can do simple things, like get myself a meal reheated or a sandwich made, or put the case back on a couch cushion after washing it. I can write a post, or play part of a video game level. The effort here isn’t just physical effort, but possibly emotional (though I haven’t had to suppress any strong urges), but definitely includes thinking effort.
But then I need to sit and rest. Sometimes for an hour or more.
It’s galling.
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About two and a half years ago, I created and ran a game of Lexicon, based on a fictional account of the decipherment of the Voynich Manuscript. The game got to letters O & P before we stopped playing due to player unavailability and lack of interest. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed both playing and running the game. This morning I told H that I was interested in playing/running a similar game again. She said she’d be interested in playing again too.
As I start to get better from this plague, I think I’d like to take a look at trying to run another game. Not the same one, but a different one.
I want to start with no opening statements and no opening direction. I will create a new blank Wiki for the purpose (since I know a lot more about how to set up and run Wikis now). I understand from others who have played this way that convergence of storyline generally happens within 3 turns.
So, are you interested? What you would be committing to:
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We went to southern California to visit H’s Mom and husband, and to see the lay of the land.
It was a good trip, I thought. I did get an extra bonus plague for a homecoming gift, though. I only managed to make it into work 1 day this week (Wednesday). Thankfully I didn’t have the flu that made me throw up a lot, but I did get every other symptom I can think of.
Today I finally am able to drag myself up to a sitting position for more than 5 minutes, but I’m still home, and I still need to reschedule an appointment with a realtor for this weekend, because even though H doesn’t have it as bad, she does have it.
We are subsisting on lots of sleep and chicken soup (H made it before she fell ill too). And EmergenC and ginger ale. Thankfully, my appetite has been pretty much nil, so I haven’t really missed variety.
Hopefully we’ll be up and at ‘em again by Monday.
It’s been pretty bad, but the end is in sight.
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A co-worker asked me for recommendations on math/physics books/resources for her gifted and talented son, who is in the 7th grade and starting to study calculus and physics.
Here was the off the top of my head answer (though I had to look up URLs and prices):
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As you may know, the our border agents have started to require various travelers (i.e. the shifty-looking ones that try to cross borders) who happen to have tech gadgets with them to turn those gadgets on, login, mount encrypted drives, etc., so that those agents can make copies. I’m not planning to leave the country, but I’m also not interested in taking chances here.
Normally while the gross invasion of privacy of others bothers me, the actual fact of this sort of behavior does not, because I usually don’t travel with my various vitally private files (usually to do with cryptography) with me.
This has changed since I started using a USB key and portable applications to do what of my personal business I do at work. Until this morning, I had GPG, GPGShell and my GPG/PGP keys on my USB key that I use for portable computing. Now I don’t. The alternative was to keep that stuff on my USB key but put them in a hidden cryptography volume. I decided that was probably too fiddly and I didn’t need that stuff with me that badly.
But why would I think about it at all?
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This one’s a bit more advanced than the others. Not only does it merge a couple of feeds (Metafilter and Ask Metafilter), make sure there are no dupes, and filter based on keyword (it’s a permit policy, so you have to add more keywords to let more posts through), but it also does some basic string handling to get the posting domain (i.e. Ask or Main) into the post title on the feed, so you can tell what general feel the feed article will have (hopefully).
I quite enjoy thinking in these ways. They’re not precisely new ways for me as I do it in programming when I get to program, but you have to factor in the entire set of data and then set up your pipe to deal sanely with all possible/probable values. It’s an expansive way of thinking that makes me feel smart. 
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