This journal has primarily moved to http://www.wyrmis.com, where it called Dickens of a Blog (if you are more inclined to follow feeds than webpages, here is the Dickens of a Blog feed). I say "primarily", because this Livejournal is still active. I still post things here (mostly reposts, though) and I still comment to other journals and take comments and respond to them, here.

I repost about 60% of the stuff from there to here, mostly the stuff of a more general or personal nature. More than that, sometimes. However, not all of the formatting or images and stuff port over easy so the full posts are more readily viewable at the above address.

There are a number of topics that this LJ (and the above journal) talks about: but the sort of average-center would be books, geekiness, information science musings, and life in and around Huntsville, AL. News commentary is overall down, but snarky reposting of faux graphics is sometimes up. Feel free to add or request an add if you would like to see these posts. I've decided to return the Journal to it's original, publicly viewable state.

Thanks!

UPDATE: As a general rule, I try to keep older posts friends only, for a number of reasons. As for right now, everything August 1, 2011 and before is friends only. If there is a post you think you would like to see, see the Wyrmis.com link above, since nearly all the posts originated there anyhow.

Let's start with an odd pairing of words from an article about something tragic: "Police...are investigating the death of an 8-year-old girl...found hanging from a rope attached to a tree." + "[The coroner] describes the death...as suspicious.". I wonder how a person found drained of blood and covered in dark sigils would be described? Heart Failure?¹.

Now, on to the news of the hour. Well, past 96 hours or whichever. Sarah was out of town last week and came back in for the weekend. Then we went down to Auburn to see Alicia's graduation [she was wrapping up a German degree, summa cum laude style, congrats to her and good luck!] and because Sarah and Alicia were heading back out of town, this time to Boston, the very next morning at a very early time, we had to make the trip down to Auburn, sit through the graduation, and then come immediately back to Huntsville in one extended go. By the time we got back in time, I was exhausted and Sarah moreso...

...and because the fob on my set of the car keys kept setting off the alarm in my pocket, I took them out and put them in the door's side pocket to keep them safe...

...so when we got home I forgot to get the keys out of the car. Sarah got a ride to the airport around 0545. I got up around 0600. By 0700, I was going to start my walk to work and this is when I realized that my keys were locked in a car and the only other set of keys were on their way to Boston. A car that was maybe 10m from the front door. I had two rough options³, I could leave the apartment door unlocked all day while I was at work or I could lock myself out of my own apartment and then, when I got home around 1730, call emergency services and have them let me in since the apartment office would be closed at that time. I choose the second and then texted Sarah to let her know. When I eventually talked to the apartments that afternoon via phone, they were able to make a duplicate key and get it to me so that I could get in when I got off work.

Except, this only put one issue caused by the lost key chain to bed. My mail key was locked up, and it had already been a couple of days since I had checked the box. I had a storage key locked up. All the other keys. Anyone breaking into the car would have a nice set of keys to aid in their larceny. Etc. The solution ended up being both fairly easy and kind of costly: Sarah FedExed me her key fob and I used it to open the door and get my keys out. Technically we have roadside assistance as well, but it's one of those things that if we use it a couple of times, we have to start paying for it and it is possible that one day in the future we will need it a lot more than we needed the FedEx postage.

Well, that's all said and done. Sarah is off to Boston with Alicia and they have been cutting up a right rug except now Sarah is apparently sick [and no doubt exhausted after two weeks of traveling] so their carpet incising might regress to "having a nice lie down on a Friday night". I'll let her yabber about her trip so if you see her around, poke her for details.

And hate to sound like a boring ass but that just about wraps up everything of significance that has happened to me in the past week. I got to eat at a Milo's (i.e. the burger place that made the tea that became the "famous" one, if you live around here anyhow. They have good burgers and even better fries, but that might be the exhaustion talking. The very fresh Milo's Sweet Tea is one of the best sweet teas you can find, though, so give them a try if you are down B'ham way (the one we ate at was in the Inverness area). I'm sure there have been other fun things, I just don't know how much fun I can make it sound. Heh.

I'm brain-tired, World. Lots of "let's look at lots of little URLs to see if the pattern matched link.pattern.one/etc/soforth or if they were an erroneous pattern.two/link/etc/soforth" and there are only so many hundreds of links a man can read off a screen before his eyes cease to function as eyes and start of function as portals to the deep, dark, entropic voice awaiting all of existence at the end of time. In other words, I'm having to take a break.

Sarah's due back in town tomorrow night. And she will probably sleep the whole of Sunday away. Monday we are both off and will do something, which might be "recover".

1: From Laird Barron's The Croning: "So much for the story about a coronary conclusion, though some wit said long ago that the ultimate cause of all death was heart failure."²

2: I'm not sure to who/what the quote refers, so it might be made up or it might be some famous quote paraphrased. Not clicking anything in my brain nor my Google searches.

3: An even rougher one possibly involving breaking into Sarah's car and the calling in an insurance claim.

If you don't care about CSS or getting rid of comments while you casually browse, only look at this first picture and then feel free to bail. It comes from this version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Found when I did a "get album artwork" on a completely different version of that album, but kept because why not. Yes, some of you might notice, she is Asian, because nothing says "violin playing child" like "Asian female". But also note that her facial expression indicates that she is pretty sure she can kick your ass.

On with the show...

I have mentioned, before, my dislike of internet comments. I sometimes feel guilty that I hate them so much, but hate them I do. A bunch of people whose only qualification to talk on a subject is that they know enough, or know people who know enough, to get them briefly online and to hit a device in a controlled enough manner to both type out a "message" [not always stooping to such lowest common denominators as "words" or "syntax" or "meaning" or "cohesion"] and then to hit some sort of "submit" key. Commenting doesn't require reading an article or previous comments. It doesn't require understanding ideas like "jokes" or "references".

How do we make sure we never see comments again? Well, one way to do this is to get up, disconnect yourself from the Internet, and then never log back on. Let's say that is hasty and a bit, but just a bit, overblown.

Another way, and the way I'm about to use, is taking Stylish [an extension I know works for Chrome and Firefox, see: http://www.userstyles.org] and then applying a CSS override [it is what Stylish does] so that we can manipulate and alter the display of a page.

CSS [don't quite have time to go into CSS, but there are some good basic pages on it just a search away] has a built in methods for selecting entire classes of things, so that a paragraph (i.e. p) of class "indented" can be referred to as "p.indented" but you can also use just ".indented" to specify everything marked as of the "indented" class (including divs and uls and such) or you can say just "p" to mark everything in a paragraph tag (including p.monkey and p.bold).

CSS also allows you to use some wildcards. For instance, if you make a Stylish override that just says (sans quotes) "* {color: black !important; background-color: white;}" it will turn every page into just black and white text. Which might be useful if you have an issue with various colors and such.^{1, 2}

One particular set of wildcards is setting up attribute matching. Without going into too much detail, one can set up so that a div of any class containing the string "spoiler" to be set to the background color, or hidden, or some similar. it takes on the form "div[class*="spoiler"]". In this way, div.spoilers and div.spoiler are both affected by the rule, since "spoilers" also contains the string "spoiler".

You probably see where this is going, but a pair of matches along the lines of div[id*="comment"] and div[class*="comment"] will impact any div that has either an id or a class attribute containing the string "comment" (e.g. comment, comments, commentary, userComment, reader-commetns, fb-comments, etc). And you don't have to stop at "div", you can wildcard that into "*" and make a pair along the lines of *[class*="comment"] and *[id*="comment"] to get rid of every span, image, link and and so forth that has the string "comment" in it by setting it to "display:none;". This makes a tool that might be a bit too powerful, in that it is non-discriminating, but if you make a Stylish style, and enter it exactly as below with URL or regexp matching, it will apply to everything:

*[class*="comment"],
*[class*="disqus"],
*[class*="facebook"],
*[class*="thread"],
*[id*="comment"],
*[id*="disqus"],
*[id*="facebook"],
*[id*="thread"]
{display: none !important;}

Some notes. You might be better off to specify "div" and "span" instead of just the wildcard (I use "div" in my own style override). I included "facebook" and "thread" but you can probably leave those out and still get most comments (and if you use Facebook a lot, you might want to leave it out just in case). There are going to some that it doesn't catch (if a page calls them "feedback", for instance) that might be good to add in on a little bit more case-by-case basis. Finally, this is looking for the word "comment", for instance, so it can include other words like "commentary" or "editor-comment" that aren't actually comments. Use carefully and maybe opt for a few not-quite-so-Ultimate solutions if you find it causing collateral damage.

1: Perhaps a more entertaining version would be:
* {color: green !important; background-color: black !important; font-family: courier !important;}
which would roughly turn every page into an approximation of an old terminal shell.

2: Though overarching "*" might be a bit much, there are ways to make them useful. If you wanted a style that show all the links on a page at a glance, setting the "*" to {visibility: hidden !important;} and then "a" back to {visibility: visible !important;} you get a page that is almost entirely blank except for the links. This can have some strange side-effects, but might be fun for the sort who just want to see which links a log is using and such.

Originally posted at http://wyrmis.com/b-03t

Take a look at this, and make note:

That is the worst "meatloaf" I have ever eaten. It was $2.89 at my local market, which means that a big-box store would sell it, the "family size", for about $2.50. Let that be a warning. Avoid. The number one ingredient is water, followed by machine separated meat from a small menagerie of different animals, followed by soy, followed by a list of ingredients longer than the one on your average multi-vitamin. It emits a smell not unlike a trash can when fully cooked, a heady aroma of poverty and poor life decisions, and it has a texture somewhere between cheap bologna and over-firm tofu. Except worse. Sarah and did the best we could with a couple of servings and tossed the rest.

This was made all the more diabolical in that I have a burn on the roof of my mouth—earned from over-nuking a burrito—that is (a) possibly the worst I have ever had in that it covers half the roof and requires about half-hourly doses of pain killer to keep it from aching and (b) so bad that it had made me depressed about life. Just sitting here, on the edge of pain, for eight hours now has made me feel like an utter screw-up. I do not think I can explain it better than that. I've thought about crying to just get out of the way, but mostly I sit and try to ignore the constant reminder that mistakes were made. Out of the day's pluses and minuses, the meatloaf and mouth burn predominate, making this a poor Sunday, indeed.

Luckily, most of the weekend was better. Friday night, I was Sarah's personal roadie and carried a large drum for her, along with other sundries, as she was on her way to a performance that night at Panoply. Carrying said equipment led me to tweet this, which speaks truth:

The next day, we went back as mere spectators, which was both fun and entertaining. Also, the only time in my life I have ever seen Tahitian dancers forced off a stage by the rules—they were part of a group that had went over in time while getting costumes on and the stage-handlers wouldn't let them finish the last dance, which probably took more time than just letting them do the dance but at least this way a protocol was what wasted time instead of, you know, arts and stuff. After about two or so hours of surfing the Panopliac wave, the heat was getting to us, and the crowd was increasingly filled with people who looked really angry at finding themselves there, and too many baby strollers were being manned by people who were either agoraphobes or stricken with some strange blindness that stopped them from seeing all the people they were shoving against and through. So, we bailed. But, we did buy a couple of pieces of art, one of which looks like this:

Which is going to join my wide mix of art hung up in my library.

And that just about catches us up...

Original Posted at http://wyrmis.com/b-03s

It is no surprise, I am sure, that I am a staunch opponent of the dry county regulation. I fully support people's right to never touch a drop of alcohol and any store who could sell beer or wine or liquor but choose not to sell? That's fine by me. Tossing aside alcoholic beverages as a course of legally imposed welfare? Maybe I just like beer a gin a bit too much, but "Eh". I am sure every county that has voted to make itself dry has done so with passionate pleas about the women and children and broken homes it could save except, well, I'll get to that. And they all must of have had massive balls to declare Jesus turning water into wine as an intolerable, illegal act.

Looking at the chart, gotten from the website of the official alabama alcoholic beverage control board, two things strike me. First, I would have guessed even distribution across the state but it looks like the North part of the state is the heaviest in the dry side. In fact, only two counties—Madison and Colbert—are fully wet. And only one of those is marked as allowing draft sales (HURRAH for Madison County!). Secondly, it's all a big bunch of hooey because effectively every city/town of even the slightest significant size in that wide swath of dry-and-yellow is a wet city. Which means your average drink-craver is probably about 20 minutes from satisfying their craving. Just to put this in perspective, if I was to want a drink, it would take me about 15 minutes here, in my wet county, to muster up the energy and get my butt into a bar, which means that people in Jackson county have roughly the same trouble getting to a drink that I do, despite the holy-rollers keeping the devil's spit down. In the end, about the only difference is they have about 5x the reason to buy booze and drink it on the way back home (and Scottsboro's liquor stores probably do a mint). Think of all the tax those non-wet cities hand over to wet-cities. Give unto Caeser, I suppose...

Getting curious about some correlations, I decided to try a few other googly searches. One was to try and find dry counties in neighboring states, and that got frustrating, but I did find this. I was entirely unsurprised, though, to use this map of Alabama universities and colleges, and to find that only a couple of universities are in dry counties, and essentially all dry-county universities are in a wet city.

Ah well, time to go home and make a nice and relaxing gin and tonic, turn on some Doctor Who, and enjoy my Friday night.

Originally posted at http://wyrmis.com/b-03p

I no longer have any, but back when I did, it was Sexy Librarians. Mostly just librarians talking about how to make the best of cliche library aesthetics (e.g. how to make glasses hot). There were a few actual racy photos (nips and the peen did occasionally make a visit) but overall that didn't seem to be it's thing, just could have been, I suppose.

It's been about 2 years since ANY post has been made, and probably 3 or more since a post fitting the core idea of the group. Ah, well.

Some of you know this, I would wager that most do not: I used to work at Subway. Down in Evergreen. circa 1998 (or was it 1997?). One summer only. My first job. I was, for the first time since I had graduated high school a couple of years previous, thrust back out into the public eye. I was living, effectively, on my own [sharing a house with my brother Danny, who at that time was spending many of his days off-shore]. Did not have a car, but Evergreen is a tiny enough town that you can walk from one end to the other and back again within a couple of hours, so I was at most a half-hour walk from work if I chose to dawdle.

I grew a bit that summer. Not any of the standard Boy-Becomes-Manboy stuff of novels and sappy fall-release-schedule movies, I just found out important life lessons: (a) my sense of humor does not go over well with your average person, (b) I tend to be really good with customers despite this, and (c) sometimes people, knowing that it is petty, will still act really petty if they perceive themselves as having a slight bit of power over you. Never forget. I also learned a bonus lesson that is mostly a corollary of "c": (c.1) Subway costumers can be dicks.

Like most people, 90% of Subway costumers are well-behaved and nice and polite, or at least feel guilty enough about social interactions to play at being these three things. A full 8% are snotty, but in a way that any deft handling of the human mind can overcome. Maybe give them a little more, or show them you won't budge no matter what, and they will be at least willing to work with you.

That last 2%? That's the person that makes people hate retail and food service and working circulation desks at libraries. That's the customer that "Customers Suck" blogs show up around, that horror stories are told about. About 1 in 50, but will account for at least half of the memories, and some of these people have a massive hardon for Subway. Because they get to dictate, in no small way, their food. They do not respect the person behind the counter, neither in a social way nor even in an sympathetic way. They merely see that person as an object to get what they want, and what they want is a satisfaction that only comes from feeling like they have won. I assume, with a degree of educated guess, that they even brag about some of the horrible things they have wrought.

Examples run rampant, from people demanding corporate phone numbers because they feel you "played with their lettuce" to those testing the waters to see if they can demand, and usually they couldn't unless factors were just right, that you bake fresh bread to serve them. Some would regularly demand that sandwiches be thrown away and started over, that vegetables be tossed at a new batch brought in, that samples be given before they trust the quality of the food, that coupons be given [or discounts] because they felt like something was missing in their service. Others would just say random, hateful things. One of my coworkers was told something along the lines of, "Just shut up and make my sandwich, bitch." And while there might have been extenuating circumstances, I am going to guess there weren't many.

On Thursday night, Sarah and I went out and ate at the Subway over at the corner of Sparkman and University, the one close to Papa John's and Casual Male XL and I guess now the Aldi's. Across from what used to be Yoo-neek (or however that was spelled) Carwash. We go there a lot because it was of the few [only? in this area?] Subways that still has the Seafood Sensation, which is our most ordered sandwich. At any rate, we got in and there had been an obvious run because a lot of the bins were getting low and one worker was out front trying to clean up a little and get things organized and then another was in the back running back and forth. After we get our food, I order a soup but they tell me that it has about 2-3 more minutes before it will be finished so we sit down and start eating.

Keep in mind, 2-3 minutes.

Guy walks in and starts to order. Tall, wearing the uniform of the Alabama businessman: polo shirt, faux-dress pants, cell phone clipped to waist. The guy behind the counter cleans a moment more, then starts preparing the man's subs, including toasting them like the guy wants. About this time, the soup gets done. It has only been about 3, maybe 4, minutes since we have sat down. The guy has been in for a portion of this. The worker goes, "Oh, your soup is ready," and then hands me my soup. Yes, he stopped fixing the guy's subs while doing this and yes they were out of the toaster oven and "cooling off" on the counter, but we are talking about maybe an entire 30-second transaction. I sit back down and when I look up, the after-us customer has walked out of the door. Did not say a word to the guy behind the counter, who was back in the process of getting gloves back on to put the "fixings" on. Just walked out, got into his oversized truck, and drove off kind of slowly, to make sure people saw him.

Man had waited 2 minutes or so, maybe 2.5, for his food. Including a half minute bake time. He was about a minute, maybe 1.5, from getting the two subs. Depending on his pickiness, let's say that he could have dictated ingredients for up to 5 minutes, but still, driving anywhere else will only add a significant amount of time to his quest for ready-go eats. The toasted subs allowed to sit on the counter for half a minute could not be a problem, because the man wasn't eating there.

My primary assumption is that he either (1) was teaching Subway "a lesson" that if he doesn't get what he wants immediately then he will go elsewhere [and like most of the ones who should be smart enough to no better, feels the best way to send the message is to take it out on people who will only remember him as a huge colossal dick], (2) was a very poor judge of time and felt it had been a lot longer than it had actually been, or, and possibly most likely, (3) felt that Subway completing my order before they completed his, even though I had already paid, was somehow a sign of disrespect.

And so what are the results? A slightly uncomfortable Sarah and myself. Mostly me because Sarah missed it until I pointed it out. A dude who now will at least quadruple his time to get food, if not more, and will probably never stop at that Subway again and will have to work out a lie, in his head, about how the service had been really poor and how he was fighting for the "little man". A dude who, nevertheless, might have told his wife about how he stormed out and that showed them. Possibly even did the thing that people do where they suggest there was a dialogue, who make up words in which they cleanly and incisively slice down their offenders. And a couple of workers, obviously going at full-tilt to do the numerous things, not knowing why a guy just wasted two three-quarter complete subs since said non-customer did not say anything to them.

Whenever I see someone make such a weird decision, not even going, "Look, I don't want them anymore, I don't have time," I wonder what their own work ethic must be like.

I mean, there are obvious cases of disrespect and workers screwing up orders and so forth, and I could see had it been in double digits worth of minutes or if the person was ignoring you behind the counter, or if it was a higher end restaurant where you are paying an hour or two's wages for a single meal, but they are $5 footlongs, dude, in about 5 minutes total time. For two of them. Whose a little princess, then?

(originally posted @ http://wyrmis.com/b-03m)

I used to think of myself as a Donkey Kong person. For some reason, that was always the one that I *thought* I wanted to play. To be honest, I was much better (used to get the top score at my local arcades) and spent longer playing Galaga. I don't know if I would ever want to really play Galaga again [my old man hands would probably twitch up pretty bad trying to flail on the keys] but I have definitely gotten my money's worth over the years.

I am a geek, and like the title of this post says we do not really need any more evidence, but just in case, here is probably a veritable final nail in the coffin.

That song [lyrics are posted at the video, or see below] is the final one from Music With Rocks In, in the animated version of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music. The band has come back from tour—in which their sound went from proto-rock to Brit rock to psychedelic to blues rock to arena rock—and they are playing as all the forces out to kill the band [more than one] are finally coming together. As far as cartoons [and Discworld novels] go, it is fairly emotional in that Buddy knows it is going to kill him but plays it anyhow. Made me kind of misty eyed...

...even though the only time I came close to really crying was when Death was talking about why he had to let Susan's parents die: "WITHOUT DUTY, WHAT AM I? THERE HAS TO BE A LAW,"¹...

...at any rate, I've now listened to the soundtrack to that series² a couple of times and that final song about four or five times³. And that's proof #78526 that I am a geek. That I buy—$9.99 on iTunes, possibly cheaper to get the physical media off of eBay, haven't looked—and non-ironically listen to soundtracks written for animated adaptations of cult fantasy novels. Really enjoy them.

Hell, doing some math and the fact that I've listened to it an average of once or twice a year since about the first time I heard it around 1990, Stan Bush's "The Touch" [both from showing it to people, hearing it referenced and having to hear it, from watching the Transformers movie, or from just having it show up in my playlist] is going to be one of my most listened to songs of all time. And that's just insane.

1: For those worried that I'm shouting, that's just how Death talks in Discworld: all-caps.

2: The series is available on Netflix if you are interested. It is low-budget and 90s British animation but once you get used to the style, it is kind of endearing.

3: One theory I have for my draw towards synth-and-sax style arena rock is because I became truly aware of music around the late 80s. Though the early 90s alternative was my scene, the arena rock stylings that were thing dying out would have also been in my musical DNA. Rush's Hold Your Fire has a particularly exalted place in the back of mind, for instance.

Lyrics:
[note, transcribed by person who posted the Youtube video, and not me, just wanted to send a thanks out to Erikjust, who has a number of other fantasy music and genre music related posts you might want to check out]

Title: The Messenger

CHORUS:
From the broken dreams
Of a restless mind
In a world spinning out of control
This is the last goodbye
You are the hero now
I am the music
I'm driving your soul!

Reach out to the messenger tonight
Feel the heartbeat
Sing out
Pass the message on
Call out for the captain of the night
Take a back seat
A new dawn, now that yesterday has gone
It's in the future you belong
Kick away the doors
Find the way beyond

CHORUS

Stay close to the messenger tonight
He is the back beat
Sing out
Pass the message on
It's in the future you belong
Kick away the doors
Find the way beyond

Way back when, I gave a middlin' review to Quarantine 2: Terminal [the sequel to the [Rec] remake that looks nothing like sequel to [Rec]] and while writing that review, which apparently is long by even my standards considering the source material, I was trying to find out what sort of small plane was featured. I did various Google searches for stuff like "small aircraft" and "medium sized plane" and so forth. One of those searches, who knows which one now¹ because I don't, brought this picture up near the very top as results...

If you are like me, your eye is going to parse the outfit wrong and assume that, for some reason, she is wearing an orangey-tan top that covers her neck and arms but leaves the rest of her nude until your eye adjusts and you realize that the skin tone is sort of tan in orange lights and you go: "OOOOhhhh". Still. Stands out [like nipples in a ballet outfit, apparently] in a sea of results, especially when Google Image Search is all, "This is really relevant to your interests".

1: The answer of course is...Google knows...