Note To Organ Donor Program: You'll Probably Want To Leave The Left Cornea.

OK, last eye update for a while, I promise. Because I know I probably wouldn't be reading this stuff if I didn't have to live it.

Anyway, I did get hold of the optometrist first thing this morning. He sent me to a different optometrist, whether because the other guy knows more about this stuff or just because he had an open slot in his schedule today, I don't know. Eye Doctor #2 told me that Eye Doctor #1's diagnosis and initial treatment had been completely correct, and was exactly what he would have done. Not that I doubted the man, but, hey, that sort of independent confirmation is always good to hear. So, yes, I have a shiny happy case of recurrent corneal erosion. In case you missed the ever-so-appetizing description the first time around, this occurs when the outer layer of your cornea doesn't want to stay attached to your eye. It's apparently not all that uncommon after an eye injury. It's not really dangerous as such, but it can be painful as hell, and it can come back repeatedly for years (hence the "recurrent").

Anyway, the main treatment is to keep the eye lubricated, because the slicker your eye is, the less likely your cornea is to decide it wants to stick to your eyelid. (And, geez, you think I'd be used to it by now, but I still feel all nauseated just typing that. Ick.) So I've got to apply eye drops every hour or two at least until the current bout clears up (something the doctor couldn't even give me a time estimate on, as it's just too variable), and ointment every night before bed for, I dunno, forever maybe.

He recommended that I use ointment (and perhaps also drops) that, in addition to the regular lubricant, also contains a medicine that's supposed to dry the area under the cornea to help it stick better. This stuff is over-the-counter, but it's also pretty hard to find. I literally had to ask at every pharmacy in town before I found the ointment, and the one I eventually got it from said they only had a tube because there was one person they regularly special-order it for and they usually order an extra. I'm supposed to call them when I start running out so they can order more. Great. One more thing to keep track of in my life. To add insult to eye injury, this stuff is expensive... Eighteen dollars for a tube the size of my pinky! And to add pain to insult, well, the eye doctor warned me that the medicated drops would sting a little. I forgot that, translated from doctorese, "this might sting a little" equates to "this will hurt like burning for several seconds during which you must resist the urge to claw out your own eye." Eek. I think I'm going to be using those rather sparingly...

I'll tell ya, I'm about ready to kill that damned cat. I took him in, raised him from the day he was born, got up at 3 AM to feed him, nurtured and sacrificed and fretted and worried, and this is the way he repays me. Bastard animal. Then again, the optometrist says a lot of people with this condition got their initial injury at the flailing hands of their sharp-fingernailed offspring, so at least it's not just me going, "I raise you from birth and you maim me for life! There's gratitude for ya!"

Anyway, I have no idea how long it's going to take to get better. Wish me luck. I really need to pull it together, whether the eye improves quickly or not. I've already missed several hours of work over this damned thing, but going home every time it starts to bother me too much really isn't an option, especially if it's going to be a frequent occurrence or take a long time to heal when it happens.

Ugh. Where are the nanorobots who are supposed to be repairing my eye?

Eye Update. Because If I Have To Suffer, You Have To Suffer With Me.

I ended up going home early last night. Which I feel pretty bad about; it seems as if circumstances have been conspiring mightily to eat into our productivity lately. People are sick, people are on vacation... Earlier in the week, the power was out for something like five hours and nobody could do anything. And later in the month we're going to be shut down for a week while they replace the A/C. Eek. But the pain was getting really, well, painful, and the fluorescent lights weren't doing kind things for me, either.

That's a new development as of yesterday, by the way, that light-sensitivity. I had it for a while right after the original accident, but it was gone by the time the patch came off. Welcome back, photophobia, old friend! At least the symptom's got a cool name. "Photophobia" makes me sound vaguely vampiric or something.

Anyway. I came home, got a few hours of sleep, then got up and called the optometrist's office... And got his answering machine, because he's not in on Thursdays. Aargh! Pardon me while I distract myself from the pain in my eye by banging my head.

I briefly considered going to the regular doctor, instead -- the one I usually go to does take walk-ins -- but I think I'm probably better off waiting for the eye doctor. There is not, as I understand it, any permanent damage being done to my eye, just the same temporary damage being done over and over again. So it's just a question of enduring the unpleasantness... Which I am mostly able to do by, say, imagining myself lying on a battlefield suffering the excruciating pain of broken bones and ripped-out intestines, and thinking how happy I'd be going from that condition to just having an ouchy eye. Hey, don't knock it. It works.

The thing that's really worrying me right now is how the heck I'm going to coordinate my need for medical care with my need for sleep. I've had about 5 hours of sleep today, from 5-10 AM. I'm scheduled to work tonight from midnight to 8 AM, the eye doctor's office opens at 9 AM, and I have no idea if they'll even be able to fit me in tomorrow, but if they do it'll be some time during the day and I'm probably not going to have a lot of choice as to when. Even if I leave work early again, I'm not going to have time to get much sleep, and if I work the full shift and stay awake to call the eye doctor at 9:00, I'm probably going to be too incoherent to speak.

I suppose the sensible thing to do would be to call in sick, go to bed at midnight, and be up to call at 9:00. But I feel terribly guilty about the thought of doing that, especially if it turns out I can't get in to have it looked at tomorrow, anyway. Aaargh! Why must life be so full of decisions?

Also, I am worried that the next step in the process, if the ointment's not helping, is going to be a contact lens. From what I've read, they'll sometimes give you a soft contact to act as a "bandage" for the eye. And, oh, man... There are reasons why I'm still wearing glasses, you know. Eye drops and ointments are bad enough, but the thought of touching a lens to my eye makes me want to go all fetal-position.

Gaaah. I'm such a gigantic wussy baby. I hate it.

Waah. I Am A Small, Pitiful Thing.

Why is it that as soon as I get into work, my eye starts hurting six times worse? Isn't just having to be at work bad enough? Maybe it's something about the air in here...

*whimper*

I think I'm gonna call the eye doctor when I get home.

Of Course, I'm Pretty Sure I Would Have Remembered It Anyway.

So, last night -- well, this afternoon, technically -- I dreamed I was part of a group that was unearthing this ancient artifact from a cave. When we pulled it out, it turned out to be a book made of thin slabs of wood, bound together into pages. It looked like there were probably only a dozen of them at most, but it must have been magic or something because when I opened it up, each page was dated, and the dates went from the 1600s or so up to the present day. All of them were otherwise blank, until I turned to the one for today's date... At which point I saw a note reminding me to take the garbage out. Which, sure enough, I do need to do tonight.

I guess it's kind of cool that my subconscious is actually telling me useful things.

Whimpering and Random Links

Aargh, my eye is getting worse rather than better. Now it's all... itchy. *whimper* I shall attempt to distract myself by offering up yet another batch of random links:

Scifipedia: An SF-themed wiki hosted by the Sci Fi Channel.

Cosmographica: A gallery of space art by Don Dixon, who's illustrated lots of magazines and book covers and such. Some very cool stuff.

Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read: This is from a blog whose author reads through self-published print-on-demand books at Amazon, sorts through the drek, and recommends the ones that are actually worth reading. Which is interesting in itself. This particular post, though, discusses what kind of openings cause said books to be abandoned instantly and with prejudice. Some of the examples are screamingly bad.

Numb3rs Blog: A mathematician explains and expands on the math featured in the show Numb3rs. Particularly interesting are things like the link to this article in which a different mathematician describes how the case in the pilot episode was based very, very closely on a real-life case that was solved essentially the same way.

Book Sale Finder: An online guide to "used book events." I'm still cursing the person who sent me this one. It's like giving an alcoholic a map to bars.

The Neddiad: Daniel Pinkwater -- who is in my opinion the best writer of kids' books that are equally fun for adults since Roald Dahl -- is putting his newest book up on the web chapter by chapter as he writes it. Chapter One is now online, and I'm debating whether the pleasure of getting to read it in advance for free is worth the pain of having to keep stopping and waiting for find out what happens next.

If I Can Read This, I'm Too Close.

Not at all to my surprise, I find I'm having considerable difficulty properly applying my eye goop. I have not always succeeded on the first try at getting the stuff into my eye instead of onto my face, it always seems to come out in big old globs instead of in a nice uniform ribbon the way it's supposed to. And I've already managed to poke myself in the eye with the tube twice, which cannot possibly be conducive to healing.

I've figured out what a large portion of the problem is, though. If I get close enough to the mirror that I can clearly see what I'm doing, I'm too close to have hardly any room to maneuver between the mirror and my eye. You know, I don't usually think about it much, because I've had it since I was six, but extreme myopia really kind of sucks.

What Betty's Watching, Installment #57

Currently active in the DVD rotation: Numb3rs, in which a heartbreakingly cute geek fights crime using the Power of Math. Dude! I have no idea how this show ever got made, but when I am Ruler of the Universe there will be much more of this sort of thing on TV.

Double Vision Always Seems To Get The Best Of Me.

Well, it appears the saga of my cat-and-book-induced eye injury is not quite over, after all. As reported here earlier, the injury itself seemed to heal up nicely in a few days, but recently I've started noticing that when I look at a bright light against a dark background, I'm getting some mildly disturbing blurring effects, and, in certain circumstances, a sort of faint second image of the bright object, just with that one eye. So, like the conscientious patient I occasionally am, I went in to see the optometrist. He didn't confirm any of my paranoid hypochondriac worries, thank goodness. (Yes, I will admit that part of my brain kept going, "Aaargh, I'm developing a cataract! Maybe it's glaucoma! Help, my retina is detaching!") He said the cornea looks nice and healed up, but there is some "degradation in the epithelium" and that I am at risk for something called recurrent corneal erosion. Which means, basically, that your eyeball sticks to your eyelid, especially when you're asleep, and then when you open your eyes or blink, it tears a bit of the outer layer off. Ewww. It does seem to fit, though; I've actually noticed a bit of a "sticking eyelid" feeling lately. So he told me to use some over-the-counter eye lube stuff and call back in a week to let him know if it's any better. I'm really not looking forward to squirting gunk into my eye, but all in all it could have been a heck of a lot worse

One annoying thing, though, is that, because the guy is an optometrist and not an opthamologist (and therefore does not have an MD), I'm pretty sure my insurance won't cover the visits, even though they're injury-related. But it's totally not worth it to me to drive 80 miles into Albuquerque to find an opthamologist, when this guy is perfectly competent. And I'm quite sure he is competent for this kind of thing. The doctor at the emergency room even told me he frequently does followups on eye injuries and that he was someone I could see if I needed to.

Unproductivity

You ever have one of those weeks where you've got so many things you really ought to be doing that you just can't seem to work up enough motivation to pick any one of them and mainly end up sitting around playing mindless computer games instead?

I really need to stop having weeks like that.

Nothing Interesting Is Happening In My Life. Thus, Another Pointless Meme.

Stolen from someplace on the internet...

1. When you look at yourself in the mirror, what's the first thing you look at?

I don't know. Possibly the hair, to see that if it's long enough that I need to think about getting it cut. Which I do. Or, lately, my left eye, as I paranoidly search for signs that the blow I took to it, although it feels quite healed, is concealing some deep, lurking damage that will lead to it rotting out of the socket or something.

2. How much cash do you have on you right now?

On my actual person, none. In my wallet, let's see... $0.99.

3. What's a word that rhymes with "TEST"?

"Best?"

4. Favourite plant?

Willow trees.

5. Who is the 4th person on your missed call list on your cell phone?

Like I know. I never turn the damned thing on if I can help it, and I almost never look at it. Hmm. A friend of mine did say she tried to call me on it, weeks ago, and I never played her message back. Maybe I should see if she had anything interesting to say... ... Nope. She said exactly the same thing that she said when I called her about an hour later. And the only person on my "missed calls" list was my mother. Though there were about six thousand calls in my voicemail looking for someone named "Jessica."

6. What is your main ring tone on your phone?

It makes a ringing phone noise. I'd get a cute ringtone for it, but since I never turn it on, it hardly seems worth the effort.

7. What shirt are you wearing?

A light green t-shirt with the words "I hiked the Grand Canyon" on the front, and a rather murky picture of the Canyon itself. The back says "I'm lying!," though that itself is not really true, as I did hike at least part of the Canyon (though certainly not all of it), several years after I acquired the shirt. It's a very old shirt. Probably it's only lasted this long because I hardly ever wear it.

8. Do you "label" yourself?

I'll happily accept the label of "geek," but otherwise, no.

9. Name brand of your shoes currently wearing?

I'm not wearing shoes. I took them off as soon as I got home. My feet were hot.

10. Do you prefer a bright or dark room?

Um... Neither? Bright enough to read, dark enough not to go blind.

11. What did you have for breakfast?

Banana-flavored oatmeal and toast.

12. Since question 12 is weirdly missing, make some shit up.

Urga urble burble bloo.

13. What were you doing at midnight last night?

Sleeping. Sigh. I hate day shifts.

14. What did your last text message you received on your cell phone say?

I've never had one in my life. Even if I used the damned thing, a telephone is a crappy tool for sending text.

15. Do you ever click on "Pop Ups" or Banners?

Not if I can help it, though sometimes it's too easy to click on the thrice-damned things by accident. For some reason, my pop-up blocker never quite gets them all. (I'm talking ad pop-ups of course. Things like blog comments are a different matter...)

16. What's an expression that you say a lot?

"Actually..."

17. Who told you they loved you last?

Probably my mother.

18. Last furry thing you touched?

Vir the cat.

19. How many hours a week do you work?

41.

20. How many rolls of film do you need to get developed?

None. Not because I've gone digital like the rest of the world, but because I haven't taken any pictures of anything lately. (And how odd is this set of questions, with its obsession with cell phones and its bizarre assumption that people use film cameras?)

21. Favourite age you have been so far?

25 is good. I wanted to just stop at 25, but it didn't work.

22. Your worst enemy?

Entropy.

23. What is your current desk top picture?

This picture of unusually glowy post-sunset clouds over Sweden.

24. What was the last thing you said to someone?

Depends on how you define "someone." If animals count, it was, "Viiiirr!," because he was lying on top of my mouse while I was trying to write this and causing strange things to happen to my scrolling. If they don't but fictional people do, it was "Wouldn't you have his DNA?" to the FBI agents on Numb3rs. If only actual human beings count, it was something like, "Do we expect to have them?" spoken to my boss about some new equipment we'll need to have if we're going to do a certain project later in the year. (I basically got a "maybe.")

25. If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to go back in time and fix all your mistakes which would you choose?

I'll take the money. My mistakes haven't been that bad, and I've read more than enough science fiction to know better than to go mucking about with timelines.

Revenge Of The Return Of The Son Of Random Links

Eventually I will post something resembling actual content. But, for the moment:

Vader Sessions: Scenes from Star Wars with Darth Vader's voice overdubbed with dialog from James Earl Jones' other movies. Goofy, but amusing.

The Fortnight Shop: A Cafepress store run by an artist friend of mine, featuring her nifty designs on t-shirts and coffee mugs and such. The gimmick here is that every two weeks the featured design changes, so if you keep going back, you'll keep finding new stuff. Or you can sign up for the shop's newsletter and get notifications when there's new material.

Knights of the Star Trek Table: If the Cybermen version was amusing, this one is a work of brilliance.

And A Music Meme...

OK, the idea behind this one is that you open up iTunes, or whatever you've got that'll list your music alphabetically for you, and write down the first track that shows up for each letter of the alphabet. Here's my resulting list (having skipped the tracks that start with numbers or symbols, of which there were more than a few):

A Bizaar Ending - The Great Luke Ski
Baa! - The Great Luke Ski
C'etait Toi (You Were the One) - Billy Joel
D.J. - David Bowie
E-V-I-L, Tardis - Big Finish Productions (from the audio play Doctor Who: Zagreus)
Face Up - Rush
Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad #16 Blues - Arlo Guthrie
Hail to Thee, Kamp Krusty - The Simpsons
I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me (Than a Frontal Lobotomy) - Randy Hanzlick, M.D.
Jack-a-Lynn - Jethro Tull
Kai Collapse - Marty Simon
L'Arena - Ennio Morricone
M.I.B. Closing Theme - Danny Elfman
Na Laetha Geal Moige - Enya
O Bebe Waltz - BeauSoleil
Pace Verde - Andreas Vollenweider
Qu'est Ce Que J'ai Fait - Anthony Stewart Head
Race Against Time - U2
S-E-X-X-Y - They Might Be Giants
Tacoma Trailer - Leonard Cohen
Uakuza Oren 1 - RZA
V the Series Theme
Wait - The Beatles
Xanadu - Rush
Y.O.D.A. - The Great Luke Ski
Zagreus, Take The Blade And Cut These Three Strays Out Of Time. - from the same Doctor Who audio

I'm not sure what that says about my listening habits, but it probably says something. The only two things I really get from it are 1) that Luke Ski guy really hogs the alphabet, and 2) I have a surprising number of songs in languages that I don't actually speak. (I think French is significantly over-represented here, though, due to its fondness for apostrophes.)

Follow-Up To The Last Post

I have just exploded. Possibly forming a black hole.

The Cat-Vomit Omen Has Proven Correct.

I generally try to avoid bitching about work on here, but I have to say this Project From Hell that I am currently working on -- again -- is seriously pissing me off. I'll tell ya, this had better be the most interesting fucking supernova remnant in the history of the universe. Considering the amount of grief and headache it has caused, this data ought to earn someone a fucking Nobel Prize. And if it comes across my desk again, I am going to go nova, myself. Aaargh.

You Know It's Going To Be One Of Those Days When...

...practically the first thing you discover on waking is that one or more of your cats has made it a personal project to vomit a little in every room in the house.

Random Links: The Video Edition

I've suddenly accumulated a lot of links to random interesting videos, so here ya go:

The Amazing Screw-On Head: The Sci Fi Channel has this pilot episode for a new animated series, and apparently they're not sure whether they want to pick the show up or not, so they've made the episode available for free on their website and are inviting people to watch it and fill out a survey to give them feedback. I think this is the best idea ever. As for the show itself, I didn't know quite what to make of it at first, but by the end... well, I still didn't know quite what to make of it, but I wanted more. It's surreal sort of humor that might not be for everybody, but if it's the sort of thing you like, I think you'll be as intrigued as I was. Go and check it out for yourself! (And let me know if you were able to complete the survey. I got an error message at the end when I tried it, but it might have been a temporary glitch or something. I sent them an e-mail about it.)

Where the Hell Is Matt?: Matt goes to different places all around the world and films himself dancing. Badly. It's more entertaining than it sounds, really. And he made a stop at the VLA!

Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders: A game of Space Invaders re-created using stop motion animation of people sitting in theater seats. This works a lot better than you'd expect.

Doctor Who Rides the Train, Part 1 and Part 2: "I travel in time and space... and trains." The Fourth Doctor takes a train trip, much to the bemusement of his fellow passengers. Warning: contains some mildly naughty humor.

Because You Know I Can Never Resist A Book Meme...

Currently Reading: Wizard by Trade by Jim Butcher (aka The Book That Hit Me in the Eye). Actually, it's an omnibus volume consisting of two of Butcher's "Dresden Files" novels: Summer Knight and Death Masks. I'm about halfway through the latter. The Dresden books are a fun fantasy/detective/action series; I'm enjoying them, when they're not doing me physical injury. I understand there's a TV series based on them coming out soon. This seems like a good idea to me. I've frequently thought while reading them that they'd translate very nicely to film, and on reflection I think there is enough substance in the premise to support a weekly series fairly easily.

Next Reading: I'm figuring on some non-fiction next. Possibly Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer by Doron Swade or Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy.

Last Read: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons by Terrance Dicks. I've got a ton of these old Doctor Who novelizations. They're about as far from substantial reading as you can get, short of The Cat in the Hat, but you can read 'em in an hour or two, and they're perfect for when you want something quick and undemanding, or as a sort of palate cleanser between heavier books. "Terror of the Autons" is kind of a fun episode, too. There's just way too much goofy entertainment value to be had out of the concept of evil alien-possessed plastic.

Last Book Bought: A few days ago I took some money I got for my birthday -- thanks, Dad! -- and bought books on Amazon: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor by John Allen Paulos, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig and Lieutenant Hornblower by C.S. Forester.

Longest Book Owned: I think that'd have to be Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, at 3,067 pages. Although the edition I own is incredibly dated; I've had it since I was a teenager.

Shortest Book Owned: Apparently it's When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs, at 40 whole pages.

Favorite Book: Don't have one. Can't pick.

Book Read Most Times: I honestly don't know... Despite my obsessive tendency to hoard books and never, ever let them go, I don't actually re-read much. There are too many books out there that I haven't read once yet! Probably a favorite book from my childhood qualifies, as there were a few books I read over and over and over as a kid. Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time might be a good guess.

Least Favorite Book: There are far too many bad books in the world to single any one of them out, but, well, there was that horrible Buffy novel about which I found myself thinking that if the world ended tomorrow, the only thing I'd regret is having wasted the last week of my life reading the wretched thing.

Favorite "Serious" Fiction: I don't know what "serious" even means in this context. I like Jorge Luis Borges, does he count? Although the only book of his that I own is Labyrinths. And he might not count, anyway. And there are doubtless lots of other perfectly "serious" books I like every bit as much.

Favorite Comedy: Again, I can't really pick a favorite anything. I suppose I should mention The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in here somewhere, though. Actually, that might possibly qualify as "Book Read Most Times," based on high school alone.

Favorite Classic: Well, I'll mention Hamlet in the next category, so maybe Huckleberry Finn? Man, I'm getting a sudden urge to re-read that right now. Twain rocks.

Favorite Shakespeare: Yup, definitely Hamlet.

Favorite Poetry Collection/Poet: Robert Frost. I have a volume of his collected works that gets picked up off the shelf surprisingly often.

Favorite Fantasy: Oh, I suppose I'll have to be dreadfully conventional and say The Lord of the Rings. Justifiable criticism can be leveled at Tolkien's prose, but I really do view the story itself as one of humanity's great tales, and I think there's an essential quality to it that not even a thousand second-rate imitators can detract from.

Favorite Sci-Fi: No, really, I just can't do it. Can't pick.

Favorite Non-Fiction: I can't pick any one thing for this category, either, but I'll mention that Carl Sagan's Cosmos holds a special place in my heart, due to having influenced me profoundly at an early age.

Favorite Historical Fiction: I dunno. I, Claudius is quite wonderful. I'm in the middle of watching the TV series right now, in fact, and it's also quite wonderful.

Favorite Chick Lit/Lad Lit: Well, I'm sure I've read something in my life that's qualified, but I'm drawing a blank.

Favorite Horror: Again, I can't pick a favorite, but I can name a horror novel that left a great impression on me recently: Stephen King's Thinner. I think it's easily one of his best, not least because it's one of the sadly rare examples where he doesn't sort of fall apart at the ending. And there's something about the basic premise that is just deeply, perfectly disturbing.

Favorite YA: Um... Again, there are lots, but I have deeply fond childhood memories of The Wizard of Oz and sequels. Having recently re-read the original book as an adult, I can say that it holds up pretty well, too.

Favorite Manga/Graphic Novel/Comic: Alan Moore's Watchmen, which is quite simply a work of literary genius. Also Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, ditto.

Favorite "Other" Genre: I'm afraid I just really don't have any "other" genres that leap to mind.

Favorite Series: Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The level of quality Pratchett has managed to maintain over the course of dozens of books is astonishing.

Favorite Short Story: Roger Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry."

Favorite Play: Hamlet, but since I've already mentioned that twice, I'll supplement it here with Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Best Book Read This Year: It's a tough call, but I think I'm going to give the nod to The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.

Worst Book Read This Year: The Other Extreme by T.J. MacGregor, which I have mocked here before.

Enough About My Eyeballs. Have Some Random Links.

Lostpedia: A wiki for the show Lost, with tons of cool and interesting stuff, some of it compiled by fans with decidedly too much time on their hands (not that I'm one to talk). My personal favorite thing: a hideously complicated chart of all the characters' inter-connections. (Warning: the site is rife with spoilers for all the episodes that have aired to date.)

Speaking of fans with too much time on their hands, check out this article a friend in New Zealand sent me about a Star Trek corn maze made by a fan in the UK. (OK, after three edits, I've finally got the location of this thing right. I think!)

Cyberspamalot!: Monty Python and Cybermen! What more could you possibly ask for? (Warning: contains images that are spoilery through the end of the second season of the new Doctor Who.)

Eye, Eye, Eye!

For all those who have asked or may be wondering, yes, my eye is much better today. Thanks!

Actually, it was still kind of scratchy this morning, enough so that I called the doctor, since they'd asked me to come back for a followup visit if it wasn't healed within a day or so, but apparently the only doctor on duty today was the pediatrician. And while I suppose kids' eyes can't be that different from adult eyes, I think the pediatrician's probably got better things to do with his time. Given that it was improving, I decided not to worry about it too much. Based on the info I've looked up, it's not unusual for these things to take three days to heal if they're bad. (Which actually seemed remarkably fast to me, but as one of the medical websites I looked at pointed out, if corneas didn't heal quickly and without scarring, we'd probably all end up blind. It's nice to know that evolution does get things right!) Anyway, yeah, it didn't seem worth bothering a pediatrician about, and certainly not worth another visit to the emergency room, so I let it go. And I'm glad I did, because it feels a lot better tonight than it did this morning. Yay, healing powers of the human body! Mostly, I'm not even really feeling much in the way of pain or irritation even when I blink now. The main thing I'm still noticing is that if a gust of air or something catches me in the eye, it's a lot more sensitive than usual, but I expect even that will be gone soon.

So, again, yeah, it could have been a heck of a lot worse. Rather embarrassingly, the worst part of the whole thing has been the psychological aspect. Because I'm absolutely fine as long as I don't actually think about the fact that AAARGH, I SCRAPED MY EYEBALL! But when I do... Who knew the symptoms of corneal abrasion included nausea, faintness and difficulty breathing? I'm a little disturbed by quite how close I seem to be to an actual full-blown phobia. Fortunately, I'm also very easy distracted, and apparently surprisingly capable of listening when I tell myself to stop being such a big baby and just calm down.

I'm still a little disappointed that there was no piratical patch at any point, though. Not that that would have made the experience worthwhile, but it might at least have made it a little more fun.

The Complete Story of the Worst Birthday Ever

I should have known that my dangerous cats-and-books lifestyle would catch up with me eventually. Here's what happened: Yesterday morning, I was awakened by the sound of a cat up on the headboard of my bed doing... something. I don't know what, exactly; it sounded like he was chewing on some papers up there. After a minute or two, I muzzily raised my face to see what the hell he was up to and yell at him to cut it out... And at the exact instant I did so, the large, heavy book I'd left there after last night's bedtime reading came plummeting down at me, and one corner hit me, hard, in the left eye. May I just say: Ow.

Once the initial surge of agonizing pain had passed and I was able to note with relief that at least I could still see, I stumbled into the bathroom to assess the damage. This was not as easy as you might think. To begin with, my eyes are bad enough, even without having suffered major trauma, that in order to examine my own eye without the distorting effect of my glasses in the way, I have to be within about two inches of the mirror. This can make it slightly difficult to answer big-picture questions like, "Is there any swelling?" (I won't keep you in suspense: there wasn't.) Things were further complicated by the fact that the light in there seemed uncomfortably bright, long after I would have expected my eyes to adapt after emerging from the dimness of the bedroom... which in itself should have been a clue that something was wrong. Adding to all of this was the fact that I happen to have the world's biggest eye squick. Even thinking the words "eye" and "injury" in the same sentence makes me feel kind of woozy, and I had an interesting moment where I realized that, no, those little black dots moving in my visual field were not symptoms of injury, they were signs that I was in immediate danger of fainting and should really go and lie down for a moment.

Then, just to add injury to injury, when I got up again without taking the time to dress and staggered into the computer room to google on "eye injury" (as one does), I walked directly into a bookcase -- doubtless due to the fact that I had a hand over my injured eye -- and bruised a sensitive part of my anatomy. Sigh.

Anyway, the visual inspection (pun semi-intended) was actually pretty reassuring: I could still see as well as usual, not that that's saying much, and there wasn't any blood gushing out of my eye or anything. But both google and the sundry medical books I happen to own were pretty insistent about the fact that eye injuries ought not to be shrugged off, which certainly tallied with the urgings of common sense. Plus, even though I was not blind, gushing blood, or still in terrible pain, the light sensitivity, the bloodshot spots in my eyeball, and the fact that I did have this annoying feeling of the kind you get when there's something stuck under your eyelid all convinced me that I hadn't exactly escaped without injury. So I went to the emergency room.

The folks in the emergency room, of course, told me that, yep, I'd scratched the shit out of my eye. Well, that's the translation into layman's terms. What the guy actually said was, "Holy cow, that's a lot of corneal abrasion!" Which made me feel all kinds of reassured. Anwyay, between long periods of apparently forgetting I existed, they gave me all kinds of eye drops, and flashed lights in my face, and gave me an eye-chart test (which I don't think I exactly passed, given that my vision doesn't quite correct to 20-20, but I guess I did well enough). Then they told me they were going to give me an eyepatch, which I thought might be cool and piratical, but which turned out to be a dorky-looking white pad, with an optional (but useful) Ace bandage over it which covered half my head and made me look as if I'd just gone nine rounds with a rhinoceros. Then they told me to go home and go to bed.

"But I just got up!" I said. "And I'm supposed to go to work at--"

"No. We'll write you a note." And, I'll tell ya, that was a serious "no." I haven't heard a "no" like that since I moved out of my mother's house. "Go home and go to bed," she said. And then, almost offhandedly, "Don't read or watch TV. It'll make the eye move." What? NOOOOOOOO! Talk about my own personal hell! But she was right... For once, pain was behaving itself and performing exactly the function it's supposed to perform: if I didn't move the eye, it didn't hurt. If I did, boy did I feel it. And as it generally did start fluttering if I tried to read for more than a minute or two at most, I actually found it reasonably easy to obey medical advice.

So, that's what I did on my 35th birthday. I got poked in the eye, I went to the emergency room, then I lay in a darkened room all day with my eyes shut. And may I just say: thank all that is good in the universe that I had a shedload of podcasts on my iPod that I hadn't gotten around to listening to yet. Remind me to go and make a donation to Escape Pod. I'm fairly certain it was responsible for saving my sanity.

Anyway, they told me these things usually heal up in 24 hours, that I could take the eye patch off then, and to see a doctor if it wasn't better. Fortunately, it was, indeed, noticeably better when I woke up this morning. The pain-on-movement had been replaced with a mildly annoying itching, and I was actually having trouble keeping the eye closed under the patch when the night before it had wanted nothing more than to stay happily shut.

So, I now have my depth perception back. Yay! As well as the pain, the light-sensitivity thing is also gone. There is still a slight something-in-my-eye feeling, but it's definitely better than it was, so unless it gets worse for some reason, I think I'm going to go in to work today, rather than to the doctor.

Thanks to all who sent "Happy Birthday"s and other good wishes, and here's hoping all of you had a better day than I did!

A Brief Cryptic Note

OK, this is officially the Worst Birthday Ever. Details will have to wait until tomorrow, when hopefully it will no longer be painful to use the computer. Stay tuned. It may actually be kind of an amusing story, if you're not me.

I Was Fine Until We Got To The Celebrities And Sports.

I won...



You won $16,000!

Do you want to be a millionaire?

Take Other Caffeine Nebula Quizzes

I think the astronomy question is suspect, by the way, as there are two Magellanic Clouds.

Not Quite What I Would Have Expected That To Mean...

I'm Dikephobia!



You're Dikephobia, the fear of justice!

What's your obscure phobia?

Take Other Caffeine Nebula Quizzes

Here, Have Some More Random Links

Neil Gaiman's "I, Cthulhu": Read the ancient lurking horror's true autobiography, directly from its own lips! Or tentacles, or something. Neil Gaiman is a brilliant, twisted man, but you probably already knew that.

At last, the Japanese have answered the burning eternal question: How many kilograms of fish can a housecat carry? This is the funniest, most bizarrely fascinating thing I've seen in ages. And it's perfectly comprehensible whether you speak Japanese or not. Well, OK, maybe "comprehensible" really isn't the word...

Journey to a Black Hole: A nifty little interactive thingy that lets you take a virtual visit to a black hole. Well-presented and fun to play around with, with lots of interesting facts on black holes offered both on the "journey" and on other parts of the website.

Keel-Haul That Scoundrel!

So, I went out to see Pirates of the Caribbean. Fun movie. Maybe not quite as good as the first one, but a lot of fun, anyway. Unfortunately, the movie-going experience itself was not fun.

See, here's the thing. I watched the first movie on DVD, and the entire way through I kept thinking, "Oh, man, I wish I'd caught this in the theater. This would have looked so cool on a big screen." So I made a point of seeing the second one in a theater. But it was damned hard to enjoy those scenes of nifty big-screen action, given how distracted I was by my feelings of seething hatred for the guy down the row from me who seemed to think that a movie theater was a perfectly acceptable place to hold a cell phone conversation.

Honestly, every time I go to the movies these days, there always seems to be a jerk with a cell phone, or a noisy kid, or, more often, both. This time there were both, plus I swear I could hear what sounded like someone popping bubble gum. And you know what? Screw it. Just... screw it. Size isn't everything. From now on, it's DVD all the way for me, I think. Because I just can't enjoy a movie, no matter how good it is or how impressive it looks, if I have to sit in a room with assholes to watch it.

It's Memey Time!

Current clothes: Blue denim shorts. Black belt. Gray VLBA t-shirt with a short-sleeved light-blue denim shirt unbuttoned over it. White ankle socks.

Current mood: Tired. I woke up too early today, largely thanks to a certain pesky cat.

Current music: The Muppets' 25th Anniversary Collection.

Current annoyance: The disc o' Lost episodes mentioned below seems to have a bit of a glitch, because the last one I was watching cut off ten minutes before the end. *sniff* Thank the Internet Gods for Television Without Pity's recaps.

Current thing: My social life still consists almost entirely of getting together with various people to watch Doctor Who. We're doing another marathon this afternoon.

Current desktop picture: Speaking of Doctor Who -- like, when am I not? -- it's this picture of a Cyberman attempting to break through my monitor.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment, actually. My internal radio is too tired to play.

Current book: I'm still reading Allen Steele's Coyote. Which I said in the comments for the last post isn't actually all that bad, tense problems aside. I dunno, though. I'm about 200 pages or so into it now, and while Steele finally seems to have (mostly) settled down into a nice simple past tense, he's currently using it to go into really boring discussions about farming and calendars. Although the calendar thing wouldn't be as annoying if the character putting together the calendar system hadn't chosen the stupidest names ever for the months and the days of the week. The fact that the other characters seem to have accepted them rather than laughing the guy out of their colony doesn't earn them a lot of respect from me, either.

Current video in player: A tape with last week's 4400 -- thanks again to those who pointed out that there was a repeat showing! -- and Venture Bros.

Current DVD in player: As alluded to above, a disk full of season 2 episodes of Lost, which was sent to me by a friend. (Thanks again, Nico! Have I mentioned lately how much you rock?) Also, disc 1 of the first season of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, which, at least in places, is absolutely freakin' hysterical.

Current refreshment: Nothing at the moment. I'm getting hungry, though.

Current worry: I'm a little worried about my computer. It's been kind of slow of late, off and on, and every so often it just hangs up completely for a few seconds for no obvious reason. And it seems to be happening increasingly often. Virus scans don't show anything, and spyware scans haven't revealed anything unusual. I've even removed some of the stuff that might have been taking up memory and bogging things down (e.g. Google Desktop, which I wasn't really using, anyway), but it doesn't seem to have helped. Eep.

Current thought: I need to buy milk.

An Open Letter From A Reader

Dear Allen Steele,

I don't really have a problem with your choice to write your novel in present tense. Even though my personal opinion is that present tense really works best for very short pieces with a tight focus on character and a strong emotional tone, and feels slightly out of place for your bog-standard saga-of-intrepid-interstellar-settlers SF story. However, when you manage to lose track of which tense you're actually in in the middle of a scene, for absolutely no reason, I lose a great deal of respect for you. And when, on the next page, you appear to lose track of what POV you're in in the middle of a paragraph, I more or less lose the ability to take you seriously.

Please, do not ever do this again, or I shall track you down and beat you about the head and shoulders with a hardback copy of your stupid book.

Not a whole lot of love,
Me

Today There Are Fireworks.

Here's wishing a happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans, a happy 4th of July to everybody, and a good flight to the crew of the shuttle Discovery!

4400 to Zero in Half an Hour

Oh, god damn it. See, this is why I don't watch TV shows as they air any more.

I recently caught the first two seasons of The 4400 on DVD. It's a decent show -- not brilliant, but decent, with an interesting premise and a good unfolding plot, and I was enjoying it. As it happens, just as I was finishing up with the newly-released season 2 discs, season 3 started up on the USA network, and I said, hey, great! I won't have to wait for the next DVD set! So I watched, I dunno, three or four episodes, and some interesting stuff happened, and eventually we got to a fairly intriguing cliffhanger.

And today, of course, I was puttering around, living my life, and I suddenly realized that it was 7:30, and part 2 had already been on for half an hour. It doesn't look like they're re-running it, either, at least not tonight.

Well, screw it. I guess I can wait a year or so to see how it comes out. I've long since passed the point, apparently, where I'm willing to make myself a slave to TV schedules, even to the extent that it means remembering to set the VCR. (And I'm definitely not getting a Tivo for the two or three shows at most that I actually care that much about. I can barely justify the fact that I'm still paying for cable.)

It kind of amazes me how much this concept of a show only being available at a particular time rather than being obtainable whenever you might decide you want it already strikes me as clunky and antiquated. I think this means that my brain is now very firmly in the 21st century.

Well, maybe I'll at least remember to watch Venture Bros. tonight. Maybe.

It's Time Once Again For Random Links! Yay.

Now you, too, can be Jackson Pollock! Or at least, you can throw some virtual paint around and make interesting splashy patterns.

The trailer for Spider-Man 3 is out! Looks pretty cool.

The Size of Our World: Very pretty to-scale pictures showing you how our planet's size compares with other stuff in the universe. (And just in case you were wondering, there is a good reason why red giants are called that.)

Animated Doctor Who: Nine all-new seasons of Doctor Who (plus six episodes of the spinoff series CyberDOG and Company), presented as crude .gif animations. Way more entertaining than it has any right to be.

I've Always Said Broccoli Was Evil.

Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Betty's Disease
Cause:	improperly prepared broccoli
Symptoms:	temporary invisibility, drooping eyelids, mild fear of the number thirteen
Cure:	click heels together three times
Enter your name, for your own diagnosis:

Meme From Magnus

I think I've done this one, or one very much like it, sometime in the past. But what the heck. Because he tagged me, and because I've got lots of stuff I should be doing and wish to procrastinate on:

1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn on page 18 and find line 4. "F- and C-lines are the chosen wavelengths. See Fraunhofer Lines." That's line 4, by the way, not sentence 4, just in case that was actually the intent. The book is Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.
2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What can you reach? A shelf on my computer desk and a bunch of papers thereon.
3. What is the last thing you watched on TV? If DVDs count, then an episode of The West Wing. If DVDs don't count, but stuff taped off the TV does, then the season premiere of Venture Bros. If only stuff being watched as it's broadcast counts then, um... I think an episode of The 4400 a couple of weeks ago.
4. Without looking, guess what time it is? 5:25 PM.
5. Now look at the clock, what is the actual time? 5:16 PM. I thought I was probably overestimating.
6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear? The air cleaner that's supposed to remove some of the dust and cat hair from my house and render me less miserably sneezy.
7. When did you last step outside? About 8:00 AM yesterday, when I came home from work.
8. Before you started this survey, what did you look at? Um... The computer screen?
9. What are you wearing? A towel. I just got out of the shower.
10. Did you dream last night? Yeah, I had a dream featuring characters from The Sopranos. It was kind of strange.
11. When did you last laugh? I dunno. I laugh out loud to myself often enough that I don't even notice when I'm doing it. Is that disturbing behavior, do you think?
12. What is on the walls of the room you are in? My college diploma, a framed certificate honoring me for having lasted ten years at my job, a calendar featuring cartoons of kitty cats, and several pictures of Farscape characters.
13. Seen anything weird lately? Every day in the mirror, my friend.
14. What do you think of this quiz? I've had worse.
15. What is the last film you saw? X-Men 3. Didn't hold a candle to the first two, but it was watchable.
16. If you became a multimillionaire overnight, what would you buy? Breakfast.
17. Tell me something about you that I dunno. I can curl my tongue.
18. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do? I'd rig every cell phone in the world so that if it rings in a movie theater, it delivers its user a large electric shock.
19. Do you like to dance? No.
20. George Bush.#43. What?
21. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her? Alexandria.
22. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him? Kyle.
23. Would you ever consider living abroad? I dunno, maybe. If offered a lot of incentive.
24. What do you want GOD to say to you when you reach the pearly gates? "I can explain everything..."
25. Five (5) people who must also do this meme in their journal. No one must do anything. You are all free. Be free!

Fixing And Splicing, Splicing And Fixing...

Okey-dokey! I seem to have fixed the problem with the archive links... It looks like the issue was due to an out-of-date tag in my template, just in case anybody is actually interested in the technical details. The old code apparently worked just fine everywhere except on the individual post pages, which probably explains why they changed it (presumably when they set up the ability to do individual post pages) and why I never noticed it until I enabled said pages in order to allow comments.

The other thing I've just done is played around with font sizes a bit more, so that comments don't appear in much bigger text than the actual post they way they did before.

I think I'm done fiddling for the moment. Again, let me know if you find anything that looks broken.

West Wing Addendum

OK, despite my earlier comments about not being terribly impressed with season 5 of The West Wing, I have to mention, having just seen it, that the episode where they're picking Supreme Court justices is probably one of the best of the entire series. It's witty and delightful, and all the characters are perfectly back on form. This is what the entire season should have been like. Please tell me they got the person who wrote this one back again. Frequently.

Ahem. All right, I'll shut up about this show now, really. Probably I'll go back to talking about Doctor Who or something soon.

Blog Admin Post

As you may have noticed (unless you're strictly reading this via RSS feed or LiveJournal syndication or just surfed in here looking for naked pictures of Wil Wheaton), I've been fiddling around with my blog template again. I've been trying to fix a few things, with varying degrees of success. I did -- I think! -- eliminate the problem some of you have complained about where large amounts of white space appear at the top of the blog, particularly on the individual post pages. Basically, what appeared to be happening is that if the length of the posts was smaller than the height of the (rather substantial) sidebar, it'd come out vertically centered with the text of the sidebar. I did get it to stop doing that, finally. (Hey, my HTML skills are kind of rudimentary. It takes me a lot of flailing around to fix things.) One of the temporary measures I used to make it look better while I was figuring out the problem was to reduce the text in the links list, which I think makes it a bit tidier, so I left it like that. But if anybody has any objections, thinks the print's too tiny to read now, or whatever, let me know. That's if anybody but me actually cares, of course, which isn't really something I'd be prepared to bet money on.

One thing that hasn't been fixed is that if you click on one of the archive links from one of the individual posts pages, you get a "page not found" error because the URL is wrong. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on there, and may have to go crying to one of the Blogger message boards for help. (Unless any of my Loyal Readers have a clue? *looks around hopefully*) In the meantime, I've added a "Home" link to the sidebar under the archive links, which will take you back to the main page of the blog, from which all the links will work.

I'll probably do a bit more poking around on it tonight, so if you come by later and things look a bit different or anything else looks broken (temporarily, I hope), that's probably why.

And I'm open to suggestions about the blog format, etc., so if there's anything about it that's annoying you at the moment, or that you'd like to see, or whatever, feel free to comment. Unless it involves lobbying me to switch to Haloscan, 'cause that's still not gonna happen.

Followup Report From The White House

Well, I'm now six episodes from the end of The West Wing season five, and I think I have sort of changed my opinion. I'm not especially inclined to jump up and wave my arms around and start shouting "Worst! Episode! Ever!" or to make sweeping allegations about sharks, and I'm still intending to watch the rest of the series, but... Yeah, it's lost a bit of its zing. More than that, I kind of get the feeling that the writers read somewhere that good drama involves conflict, so they decided to create some by making all the characters like each other a bit less and resent each other a bit more, and to turn up their general bitchiness and nastiness levels a couple of notches. And since, really, the relationships have always been the heart of the show, and the fact that these people have been able to survive in the harsh realities of the political landscape while still keeping a tiny spark of idealism has been its soul, the result is that the show's lost a little bit of its heart and a little bit of its soul. *sniff*

Hey, It's Been A While Since I Posted Any Random Links! I Wouldn't Want People To Feel Deprived...

So, here ya go:

Hubble Site image gallery: Lots and lots of very pretty astronomical pictures.

Geeks in Love: A music video dedicated to "all Geeks and all lovers of Geeks everywhere."

Joss Whedon accepts an award from the feminist organization Equality Now and gives his answers to the question "Why do you always write these strong female characters?" I heart Joss Whedon.

3 Lines: An online puzzle game similar to that other thing you play with Mah Jongg tiles.

Time Keeps On Slippin'. Also, I Hang Out At The White House.

I have no idea where the heck this week went. See, this is what happens when I go back to work after being off. The days suddenly lose their sweet, freestyle individuality and start disappearing on me into a vague haze of work/sleep/do-uninteresting-random-stuff/work. This probably isn't helped by the fact that I've once again fallen into this weirdly common (for me) night-shift pattern of averaging eight hours of sleep a day by alternately sleeping twelve and four. This actually sort of works, but it's far from ideal. On days when I'm wide-awake I've got no time to do much, and on days when I've got lots of time I have little energy.

Anyway, yeah, I can't think of much I've been doing that's at all interesting. On the entertainment front, I've made it up through season 5 of The West Wing, which apparently is where Aaron Sorkin bailed and people seem to think it quickly becomes not worth watching. I dunno, though. Ten episodes in and I'm not seeing any obvious signs of shark-jumping, even if they haven't been the most memorable episodes of the series. The main thing I'm noticing is that the characters seem, on the whole, to have gotten pissier. But I'd probably be pretty pissy if I had their jobs, too, so, hey.

Jan Was Considered A Babe?

You Are Jan Brady

Brainy and a little introverted, you tend to think life is a lot worse than it actually is. And while you may think you're a little goofy looking, most people consider you to be a major babe.

What Brady Are You?

Hang On...

I've changed my mind. I don't want to go back to work.

Waaaah!

Mental Health Week Draws To A Close

Well, my vacation is now officially over, alas, as I have to go back in to work tonight. But the time off definitely accomplished what it was meant to. I feel much, much more relaxed, and much less inclined to get irritable or to bite people's heads off. My house is decidedly cleaner... Not that you'd necessarily know to look at it, but, trust me, it is. And I did a lot of low-key fun stuff, some of which actually got me out of the house.

I'm even feeling reasonably good about going back in to work, which is a heartening sign.

Hooray!

You Must Now Prove To Me That You Are Human.

OK, as I more than half expected, the amount of comment spam I've been getting here has quickly tipped over from "annoying" to "too annoying," so from now on when you go to leave a comment here you'll be asked why you're not helping the turtle... er, I mean, you'll be asked to type some random letters. Sorry about that.

Good Housekeeping

So, if you shampoo your carpet and, when you're done, there's a zillion giant dust bunnies all over it, is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Only In New Mexico...

Apparently for this evening they're predicting "thunderstorms with little or no rain." I think this sort of thing is a really, really unfair trick on the part of Mother Nature and should be stopped.

Nature Girl

So, for Day Two of Do Anything Other Than Go to Work Week, I headed out to the Bosque del Apache, which is a big nature reserve that, by New Mexico's standards, at least, is right around the corner from me, but which I never actually seem to get to in the normal course of things. Of course, I was there in the middle of the day in the middle of June, which is pretty much the least ideal time to see any wildlife, as the migratory birds have all long since gone north and most of the remaining critters tend to sit out the hottest parts of the day (which is to say, basically any time the sun's up). So it was pretty dead, but it's a nice drive, anyway. I did at least see a bunch of quail, including one momma bird who was surrounded by a fuzzy cloud of baby quailets (in the parking lot of the visitors' center, surprisingly enough). Also possibly more roadrunners than I've ever seen before in my life.

Then I hiked for a couple of miles across loose sand, with no shade, in 95-degree heat. Because I have far less common sense than the wildlife.

Vroom!

In keeping with my "do anything and everything except go in to work" plan for this week, I went out to the crappy local movie theater to catch Cars. Which, I must admit, I initially thought might have been a mistake, as the first ten minutes or so are basically one long racing scene, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with a list of things that are more boring to me than auto racing. But once they got off the track, it engaged me pretty quickly. It's funny and cute and very technically impressive, with a good story that has a lot of family-movie heart without ever going too far and descending into schmaltz. In other words, pretty much what you expect from a Pixar movie. And, man, it's amazing how far computer animation has come in recent years. Back in the days of Toy Story, it was very much a gimmick, even if what Toy Story did with it was anything but gimmicky. But now it seems to me that we're looking at something that's starting to feel very much like a mature technology. There is nothing remotely visually crude about this movie anywhere.

I do have one complaint, though, which is that I deliberately chose a 9 PM showing to avoid having to sit in a theater full of little kids, and it didn't work. For crying out loud, don't children have bedtimes any more? Seems to me this must be Reason #103 why people increasingly prefer staying home and watching a DVD to going out to the movies.

Alas, Poor Me, Born Too Late

You Belong in 1965

If you scored... 1950 - 1959: You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in! 1960 - 1969: You are a free spirit with a huge heart. Love, peace, and happiness rule - oh, and drugs too. 1970 - 1979: Bold and brash, you take life by the horns. Whether you're partying or protesting, you give it your all! 1980 - 1989: Wild, over the top, and just a little bit cheesy. You're colorful at night - and successful during the day. 1990 - 1999: With you anything goes! You're grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It's all good!

What Year Do You Belong In?

Perhaps the Ways Haven't Parted Completely, After All.

So, as of tonight viewers in the United States have at last had the chance to see all of the first season of the new Doctor Who on their cable TV. I'm curious to hear what people who have been watching it on Sci Fi think about the season as a whole, particularly those who are new to the whole crazy thing.

I also wanted to mention, as a sort of science fictional public service announcement, that the show will be on next Friday: Sci Fi is having a marathon, starting at 8 PM Eastern Time, in which they're going to show four episodes, then repeat the first three immediately afterward. They haven't exactly selected the episodes I would have picked, but if you happen to have missed any of those the first time, you're in luck!

Another Month, Another Meme

Yeah, I think most of you know to expect this by now...

Current clothes: Gray shorts. Black t-shirt that says "I'm blogging this." (And, hey, whaddaya know? I am!) White ankle socks. No shoes.

Current mood: I'm incredibly happy to be off work for a while now. I really did desperately need the break. I think I'm only just starting to relax into it, though. I keep finding myself thinking: aargh, I've got this to do, that do, all kinds of other stuff to do... And I have to actively remind myself that, really, I don't have to feel all time-crunched this week.

Current music: They Might Be Giants' Flood to make the household chores more fun, and Jimmy Buffett's Banana Wind to put me into the vacation spirit.

Current annoyance: Crazy fans on the internet who seem to think that holding a different opinion about some stupid TV show is roughly equivalent in personal injury to coming over to their house and beating their family up with a baseball bat. *rolls eyes*

Current thing: Not working!

Current desktop picture: This lovely piece of Doctor Who fan art by Kathryn Andersen, featuring the TARDIS.

Current song in head: They Might Be Giants' "Dead" is now floating in and out of my brain.

Current book: I just finished Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. And, oh, man, I'd forgotten how dull Verne could be. This one's about a handful of men marooned on an island, and I swear, every rock, tree, animal and mineral on that island got its own paragraph. And I'm not talking about lively lectures in natural history, either. I'm talking stultifyingly dry lists of names and properties. The main thing that's interesting about this book is the glimpses it gives at certain worldviews that existed a century and a half ago and have changed or faded since, in particular the idea that nature exists solely for the use of Man, and that humanity has a manifest destiny to tame and civilize it.

Current video in player: I don't think there's been anything in there for quite a while. Probably the last thing was an episode of the weird Doctor Who not-quite-a-knock-off, The Stranger, which a friend lent me some time ago.

Current DVD in player: The Doctor Who episode "The Aztecs", definitely one of the best of the very early episodes. Sure, it's kind of stilted and the camera work is shaky, but when you know the conditions under which they filmed it, it's actually quite amazing that it looks as good as it does. But it's got a good plot and an interesting setting, it's very well researched, and it provides an unusually strong and meaty part for one of the companions, Barbara. Actually, I find going back to these old episodes and seeing Babara and Ian again is very much like greeting a couple of old friends. They were great, those two. And given the show's later tendency to go with very young and immature companions, it's nice to see people travelling with the Doctor who are mature adults and act like it. Oh, and, just for the record, anybody who thinks the Doctor being flirtatious is a new thing should be required to watch this one.

Current refreshment: I just had some dried cherries. I didn't actually mean to buy dried cherries; I was aiming for the dried tropical fruits next to them and must have got the wrong bag by mistake. But they're pretty yummy, anyway.

Current worry: I feel surprisingly worry-free at the moment.

Current thought: I must remember to mail my dad his Father's Day card next week. Actually, as I recall, one of the things I was thinking about posting yesterday was a rant about greeting cards, but I think I'll either skip that or save it for later.

And in Other "People I Know Who Are Blogging" News...

I'd like to welcome my good old friend "Captain Chlorophyll" (friend to plants everywhere and my self-styled Satanic Brother From Hell) to the blogosphere! The good Captain's new blog is Anhydrous Wit, and I'd say that describes his style pretty well.

It's good to see him joining the bloggish ranks. Here's hoping he sticks around for a good, long while!

Local Blogger Makes Good!

Damn it. Yesterday, for the first time in ages, I kept having all kinds of thoughts about things I wanted to talk about here... and Blogger was broken for most of the day, so I couldn't. Well, probably most of them weren't all that interesting, anyway, so maybe you guys should consider yourselves lucky.

I did want to say "congratulations" to my buddy JK Parkin, though. JK's the guy who got me into blogging in the first place, way back when. He's also had a small comics-oriented group blog he's been heading up for a while, and he recently announced that said blog has been "adopted" by Newsarama, which I'm told is the largest comic book news site on the web. Go, JK and friends! You can find their newly relocated blog at blog@newsarama. Not the world's catchiest title, I guess, but very easy to remember. It looks pretty spiffy, too. And I must say, I'm not a big comics fan, but even I found some of the stuff over there interesting. So go and check it out!

iPod, Take Me Away!

After all that bitching and moaning yesterday, I have to say, my iPod is absolutely saving my sanity while I desperately wait to start my vacation. I've been downloading a lot of podcasts lately, and having a good science fiction story and some fanboys geeking entertainingly about Doctor Who to listen to today while I was working really helped the time pass relatively painlessly.

Working for the Weekend

My god, I need a vacation.

Really, my job is easy enough. I go in, hang out for eight hours interacting with a few computers in the name of Science, and come home. If there isn't some kind of crisis, anyway, which most of the time there isn't. It's sort of boring work, except for the periods where it's not, but it's laid-back, and I like that. But lately... I just hate the thought of having to drag my ass in. And it keeps getting worse.

I'm taking some time off next week, actually. Call it a mental health break. I would have done it earlier, in fact, but I wanted to time it so I'd be skipping my second week of day shifts. Because it'd get me out of a week of day shifts, which I loathe, and it'd also mean I wouldn't have to worry about shifting on to days while I'm gone, which is difficult for me.

So I only have four more days, but the wait is killing me. Gaaah. I do not want to go in today. See, the problem with day shifts (in addition to the fact that they muck up my sleeping patterns) is that a) they involve mornings, and b) they involve being around people. Neither of these is my favorite thing, individually, but the two in combination... Ugh.

I Have The Weird Feeling I've Taken This Quiz Before.

After you die... Reincarnated as Yourself After death, you will be reborn again as yourself. You will live the same life, unbeknownst to you. However, you will have vivid moments of deja vu, as you probably have now.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Well, that seems kind of pointless and silly. Unless it's actually a profound statement about the cyclical nature of time.

...Nah.

Reason Why I Love the Internet, #963

Reading along in a book, discovering that due to a printer's error there's a page worth of story missing, doing a quick google, finding a site with the text of the missing page on it, and being able to read on as if nothing much had happened.

The Information Age is a good time to live in.

I Haven't Really Done Any Gaming in Ages, But...

You scored as Horror Gamer. You like a game that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Your character might get killed, but that doesn't matter as long as the game is run well. You'll probably like: Call of Cthulu, , Kult World of Darkness, Chill or even Pie Shop Horror Gamer 75% Cyberpunk Gamer 60% Comedy Gamer 55% Beer & Prezels Gamer 30% Fantasy Gamer 25% What sort of Gamer are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Hmm. You know, I've never actually played Call of Cthulhu. And, come to that, the various Vampire games I've played in have always sort of fallen apart sooner or later. So I don't know that my experience of horror gaming has been all that positive, on the whole, even if there were some darned good individual moments.

I think I got this result mainly because I said I didn't have a problem with character death. I think, however, that this has less to do with a desire for gritty realism, or for operating under the real danger of having something eat my character's face, than it does with my odd weakness for a good death scene. I've been known to kill off a beloved character just so I could give him a kickass exit. I can't help myself.

I also said I didn't mind an evil GM. But, hey, I've had enough of those that I think I'd better have learned not to mind them. Much.

Honestly, the kinds of games I always liked best were either science fictional games -- everything is better if you set it IN SPACE! -- or multigenre games like Torg. Any game where you can have a party consisting of a plate-mail-clad paladin, a 1940's mad scientist, an alien, and a guy with a bandolier full of grenades is totally up my alley.

Nothing to See Here. Move Along.

This is a test post. This is only a test post. Had this been an actual post, I like to think it would have been at least slightly more interesting.

An Administrative Announcement

After much grief and frustration and bitching and moaning, I've finally done it. I've finally given my old commenting system the boot.

The thing is, Enetation seemed like a good choice way back when. I signed up for it when comment systems on blogs were a new thing and available only from independent providers like Enetation... most of whom were utterly swamped with demand for their services and had severely limited signups to the point where they were practically impossible to get into. Enetation had no such restrictions, and it offered some nice features, especially if you paid the $14 "pro user" fee. It looked like a great bet. Sadly, its service got crappier and crappier as time went on... The comment counter became unreliable to the point where I'd frequently needed to go to their website and run a program that would force it to update. Then it quit working without intervention altogether. As of today, even running the program wasn't working any more, and that, my friends, was the proverbial last straw. Because this is on top of a gazillion other problems, including: not updating the comment window after people hit "post," thus leaving them to wonder if their comment had gotten through; comments occasionally not getting through; fairly frequent error messages which might or might not indicate that the comment hadn't actually posted; not letting me see the comments at all while I was actually logged into my user account, thus rendering useless all the nifty features only logged-in users have access to (and meaning I had to keep logging in and logging out again when I did need to fix things); and a complete and total lack of technical support. The forums, which is where support requests were supposed to be made, were hacked into a while back, and instead of being fixed, they were simply removed. Not that it mattered, as there had been no official presence on them for the last year or so, anyway, and posts there requesting help were simply ignored.

So, yeah, Enetation is gone. History. Good frickin' riddance. The sad thing, however, is that this means that every comment that's been made on this blog since its inception is now gone. I'm not happy about this; it's the main reason I was resisting making a changeover for so long. And I do apologize to everyone who ever commented here for consigning your responses to oblivion. But, man, it had to be done.

In place of the old system, I've activated Blogger's own commenting system. For those of you who have Blogger accounts, it should use your information automatically. The rest of you can still leave comments by posting as "anonymous" (do please sign your names, though, so I know who you are!). Comments will still open in a popup window, so you'll need to make sure you have popups enabled for this site. Feel free to comment on this post to test it out, and do please let me know if you encounter any problems. I think I've got everything set up correctly, but I'm not 100% sure. Oh, and for the moment, I've got verification turned off, which means you won't have to type in random letters to prove you're a human being. I find those things incredibly annoying, but I'm afraid that if I start getting major amounts of spam I might very well have to turn it on. We'll see how it goes.

I'm also probably going to be playing around with my template just a little bit more today, so if you stop by and things look strange, wait a few minutes and refresh, and hopefully I'll have fixed whatever boneheaded thing I've just done.

This Is My Social Life.

Honestly, it's not really my intention to do a Doctor Who marathon every weekend. But it does seem to be working out that way...

I'm back!

My broadband is working again! And the guy thinks he knows why the antenna was having problems in the wind before and that it probably won't do it again. Yay!

Except I can't really enjoy it right now, because I'm late for work...

Yet Another Catch-22

You know what's annoying? Annoying is when your broadband is down, and you can't dial in to the internet because you're waiting for your ISP to call you about fixing things so you don't have to dial in to the internet.

Obviously, seeing as I'm here, I've kind of given up on that. I don't think they are going to call me back today, the bastards. Especially as they were supposed to do it yesterday. I'll have to call and bug them again. Tomorrow.

And things were finally working so well there for a week or so...

I've Got the Fricken' Feline Houdini Here.

Today's entertainment: Vir (who for various health and safety reasons is an indoor cat and who has never shown any dissatisfaction with this state of affairs) discovered a means of egress by tearing the corner of a screen on the living room window out of its frame. I noticed it was loose, went over to look at it, glanced out the window, and saw him calmly sitting on the outside looking in at me. So I went out to get him, but by the time I got there, he'd completely vanished. I spent a couple of minutes looking around for him and trying not to panic, then I happened to glance at the window again, and there he was, sitting on the inside, looking calmly back at me. He must have jumped back in in the time it took me to get to the door.

I think he thinks he's funny.

(And, yes, the screen has now been fixed, thanks to the nice man at the hardware store. I'm hoping the stupid cat has gotten his entertainment value out of the situation and we won't see a repeat.)

Doctor, Doctor!

I've been neglecting to update this thing for a few days again, haven't I? Tsk. I know how you all hang on my every word and wait breathlessly for my next entry.

I haven't been doing anything terribly interesting, though. The most exciting thing I did this week, in fact, was getting together with some friends yesterday for a barbecue/Doctor Who marathon. It's kind of surprising to me just how much my social life currently revolves around Doctor Who...

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? It's actually not remotely surprising at all.

I am a bit surprised, though (as well as highly gratified) by how successful the show's revival has been, and not just in the UK but now in the US as well. I don't think the ratings have exactly been stellar here, but it does seem to have penetrated the US consciousness in interesting ways. A friend of mine bought a toy Dalek in Hastings the other day. For some reason, this just sort of blows me away. I'm used to having to mail-order my Doctor Who toys.

And I know lots of people who are watching it, including people who were never huge fans of the original series and whose interest I find mildly surprising. Heck, my dad called me up a couple of days ago lamenting that, because he'd been in the process of moving, he'd missed the end of the last 2-parter that aired on Sci-Fi and was desperate to know how it ended. (Hey, Dad, if you're reading this -- which you probably aren't if your DSL still isn't hooked up -- a disc will be making its way to you tomorrow. Let no one say I am not a good and dutiful daughter!)

By the way, you people watching on Sci-Fi in the US, hold on to your hats. You've got some very cool stuff coming up in the next couple of weeks!

The episodes I've been watching lately, though, are the current episodes obtained from the UK. I have no idea when and if Sci-Fi is planning on showing them, but I really hope they do.

In the meantime, I present my own brief opinions -- I hesitate to call them "reviews" -- of the season 2 (aka season 28) episodes thus far. (Note: non-spoilery for anything not given away in the scenes-from-next-week trailers.)

"The Christmas Invasion" (which is not technically part of the 2nd season, but I don't care): I love David Tennant more every second that he's on the screen. Rose annoys me a bit, but on repeated viewings I mostly forgive her. I'm not sure if the plot makes more or less sense the more you think about it, so mostly I don't. And I have something of a love-hate relationship with the ending. Bonus points to the whole thing for traumatizing small children on Christmas.

"New Earth": The plot is painfully nonsensical, but the humor and the entertaining quality of the acting goes quite a way towards making up for it.

"Tooth and Claw": The plot makes, well, slightly more sense than the previous week, but that isn't saying very much. The FX are cool, the werewolf is creepy, and Queen Victoria kind of rocks, but somehow the whole thing never adds up to much. Also, the interaction between Rose and the Doctor is definitely starting to annoy me by this point.

"School Reunion": Now that's more like it. It's wonderful to see old friends again, and they're very well-served by the story. Anthony Stewart Head makes a nicely malevolent bad guy. Some good emotional moments and some good humorous ones. Admittedly, Rose is being annoying again, but if I make an effort to see things from her perspective, I can sort of understand why.

"The Girl in the Fireplace": This episode has everything. I mean it. Every freaking thing. It's funny, it's sad, it's creepy, it's exciting. It's SF, it's horror, it's historical fiction, it's romance. It's caused huge amounts of fannish controversy, which is always entertaining. And it's pretty. I've seen it, like, five times now and I'm still not tired of it.

"Rise of the Cybermen"/"Age of Steel": A very, very Old School-style two-parter. Which is actually kind of fun to see after the serious New-School character drama stuff of the last couple of episodes, but, eh. Mickey is lovely and the new Cyberman look pretty cool when they're marching around, but for what was clearly intended as a fairly important episode it failed to make a great deal of an impression on me. I was entertained while I was watching it, but found myself forgetting most of it as soon as it was over.

And that's as far as we've gotten. I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the season, though. And lest some of those comments seem a bit too critical, I should mention that despite any and all flaws, I am enjoying the hell out of this show, and am loving it with the deep fannish love. I'm seriously hoping we can go another 25 years before it goes off the air again.

It's Random Link Time Again!

Let's see what we have for you today...

Joss Whedon pretending to be some guy dressed up as Joss Whedon. That man is a nut. But the good kind of nut.

The 50 best Marvel Comics characters. Not being much of a comics geek, I only know about half of these people, but by the time we'd counted down to #46 on this incredibly funny list ("there's just one thing you need to know about Swarm: He's a Nazi made of radioactive bees"), it became clear to me that I've been seriously missing out.

Falling Sand. I was warned that this game (or web toy, or whatever it is) was addictive, but did I listen? Nooooo. Now it keeps nearly making me late for work.

Dead Ringers spoofs House. A brilliantly spot-on parody of the show. Bwah!

Fire/Bug

I went into work for some fire extinguisher safety training today, during which I got to practice putting out an actual fire. I think this would make me feel safer, if it weren't for the fact that now nearly every fire extinguisher in the building is empty. The Fire Department guys did let me shoot the big hose from the truck, though, and that was cool. Let me tell ya, those things pack a kick.

In other news, I've discovered something more disgusting than cat vomit: cat vomit with pieces of half-digested bug in it. Ewww. I've been keeping an eye on the cat in question in case he goes into convulsions from eating poisoned bug, but so far he just seems to be his normal spastic self.

Never a dull moment around here, I tell ya.

It's Raining!

Rain! Beautiful, beautiful rain! I'm wet and my shoes are full of water, and I'm happy.

I'm sure people on the East Coast are glaring or rolling their eyes at me right now, but I don't care.

Rain!

WTF, WF?

I hold in my hand two letters from my mortgage company. One is dated April 6 and says, "Our records indicate that the flood insurance coverage for your property has been updated and now provides the flood coverage required for your loan." Because after they complained to me that it needed to be raised, and after I went to the insurance agent and had her do it, and after she assured me that she would send proof of this to my mortgage company, I also wrote them a letter, just to be absolutely double-dog certain they'd gotten it and to be reassured of this fact by them personally.

The second letter is dated May 8 and says, in with a lot of other bureaucratese: "Our records indicate that we have not received evidence of adequate flood insurance for your property[...] Therefore, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage has secured additional temporary flood insurance..." With a notice to tell me exactly how much they're charging me for this coverage they've told me I don't need. Aaargh! And, of course, I always get goddamn notices like this a) on a Saturday and b) when I'm on night shift, meaning that despite the fact that the impatient part of my brain (which is getting more and more dominant the older I get) is jumping up and down screaming "Aaargh, FIX THIS NOW!", I cannot fix it now and, moreover, will end up having to talk to them at some time when I'm half-asleep.

I hate bureaucracy. I hate paperwork. I hate financial shit, and I hate dealing with corporations. I want to be a hermit and live in a cave. A cave with no flood insurance.

I'm Sure You're All Absolutely Stunned.

I got a 100% on the Farscape Primer test!

Click here! to take it


I don't know about some of those questions, though. There are arguably two right answers to #5. I'm sure Chiana would think so, anyway...

Sleep-Deprived Linkage

I don't know why I'm awake right now. I don't want to be. But since I am, have some links:

A fascinating (and disturbing) article about Scientology.

It's a Wonderful Internet. Life without the internet doesn't bear thinking about, as this little bedtime story demonstrates. Pull the tabs for interactive fun! Or at least some mild time-killing entertainment.

Reviews of House episodes by an actual doctor, with discussions of how realistic or otherwise the medical science is.

Star Wars in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies. Possibly the cutest 30-second bunny re-enactment yet.

In Other Strange News

My wireless connection appears to have miraculously fixed itself. It's the damnedest thing. After a week or two of being intermittently flaky and another week or so of pretty much not staying up long enough to be of any use at all, it just suddenly got... better. When I got up yesterday, it was fine. It even stayed fine all through a huge-ass windstorm, which seems to knock over my theory that the problem was due to the antenna shaking about in the wind. The only time it actually went out was when the electricity went down for a little while, and I can hardly hold that against it.

I was half expecting it to be frelled again today, but, nope, it's still fine. I feel like I ought to download something now, just because I can.

While I Was Sleeping

There was a hell of a lot of noise outside this morning while I was trying to get to sleep, with sirens and horns blaring and loud equipment of some sort. (That last might have been the garbage truck, I suppose, but seemed to hang around far too long.) Being as I was trying to get to sleep, I just got up and closed the window and eventually it stopped, but now I'm really curious as to what that was all about.