hermionesviolin: (self)
[personal profile] hermionesviolin
elliptical, interval program:
1mi @ 11:50min
2mi @ 23:51min
2.49mi @ 30min

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Morning news included a 7-alarm fire in Philly.  I didn't know the scale went beyond four or five alarms.

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I feel like I had such a lazy weekend that I was actually kind of glad to come in to work and Do Stuff.  And I knew there would be stuff that would need taking care of and while it could wait until Tuesday it would make my Tuesday more stressful to be starting off behind.  And yeah, not gonna lie, I also have an ego complex and always feel a little like my portion of the office would fall apart in my absence.  [For those of you who are not local: today's a sort of holiday, and on Friday Prof.B. had said I could take today off if I wanted -- provided I got the okay of the other prof I support.]

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I still have mixed feelings about my haircut, but I got another flurry of compliments on it today, which helps.

Greg said there things one says in Hebrew that don't really translate -- one translates as something like "enjoy the newness," for example; and there's one that's like "wear it in good health" but for hair.

Peter said, "The shorter the better."  I said I agreed -- but that I didn't think I would be getting mine cut quite as short as his :)

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In class tonight we talked about Social Darwinism, which ended up being a lot about economics -- e.g., Microsoft bundling (you can only run browsers other than IE on a Microsoft OS due to a court ruling? I did not know that), Standard Oil buying up city trolley systems to dismantle them and drive up demand for cars (which the prof pointed out couldn't happen if it were a public utility), the concentration of wealth and the power that gives those wealthy people.  I was going to post thoughts, but apparently I don't so much have thoughts.

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Remix rec:
[Good Omens] "Unconscious, as some human lovers are (Sympathetic Resonance)" by [anon].  Original: "Messenger of Sympathies" by [livejournal.com profile] vulgarweed, which I read and enjoyed some time back.
    In this Remix, DEATH comes for Percy Bysshe Shelley, and they go visit Shelley's friend "Ezra Fell" and Ezra's acquaintance Crowley.  It's pretty hysterical -- and thoughtful, too.

Date: 2008-04-22 02:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hedy.livejournal.com
Have I requested hair pictures yet?

Date: 2008-04-24 01:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hermionesviolin.livejournal.com
You hadn't, but I sort of assumed the Internet would be interested. Taking decent pictures of myself is hard, so I may enlist my friend Tracy when we hang out on Saturday.

Date: 2008-04-22 03:17 am (UTC)
marginaliana: Buddy the dog carries Bobo the toy (Default)
From: [personal profile] marginaliana
Ooooh, great rec, thank you!

Date: 2008-04-23 12:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] laynamarya.livejournal.com
Okay, so, I had a dream about you.

You had invited me to a party at your house, and sent a paper invitation. My sisters Liz and Christine were around, and you'd invited Anthony too, so we all decided to go together. Only when the time came I was feeling really ill and it was POURING RAIN like you would not believe so I told them to go without me.

Christine and Anthony went out to do just that, but they came back inside after a couple minutes, saying it was raining too hard and that they'd wait for Liz to get back with the car (I had not realized before this that Liz had even LEFT with the car).

So Liz gets back, the rain has miraculously stopped and all the puddles evaporated, and I still don't feel good, so the three of them set off, bringing the print invitation, which has four paragraphs of instructions and a googlemaps street level screenshot of your house.

Fifteen minutes pass, and they get lost and come back. I'm like, it's just on North Street, how could you get lost? (Come to think of it, I don't even know if you love on North Street, I think you just live near it.) But then they show me the screenshot. There are four houses in the shot, and all of them have COMPLETELY different numbers, and most of them are really high. It's like house numbers 456706, 280523, 280478, and 203B. And your invitation, for some reason, does not give an exact address anywhere in the four paragraphs of directions.

They also say they saw a small crowd somewhere on North Street but they didn't recognize anyone as you. I'm sort of annoyed that they didn't even check to see if it might be the right party, but whatever.

I'm feeling better by then, so I say I'll go on ahead and see if I can find it, and then call them and give voice directions. After all, I've been there before. My sisters and Anthony for some reason have gone off somewhere with my mom, so I am by myself.

I leave my house and maybe thirty seconds later I see you, and this wandering group of friends. "You couldn't find us, so we decided to come find you," you say. So I walk back to the party with you guys, call my sisters, and then wander around the party. Your house has suddenly become HUGE, with a different kind of very eclectic music in each room, along with one bowl of chips per room. (There is more food somewhere, I just can't find it.) Also, since the house is so huge, what would normally be a pretty big party (30-40 people) seems very small, because there are only 2-3 people per room.

But somehow I don't stay at the party very long. My mom shows up in the room where I am (the kitchen, where there is steel-drum rock music playing and Baked Lays on the table), and says, "I just signed you, me, and Liz up for a really interesting project, it's totally anonymous." And I'm like, whatever this is, I hope it's good enough to take me away from this party that it's take almost an hour to get to even though it's only ten minutes away. "They want people to take surveys on their opinion of Iran, and since you just watched that movie, I think you should do it."

I am sort of annoyed, but I agree. And then I wake up.

In conclusion, watch out for big houses and googlemaps street-level views, and watch Persepolis, cause it's a pretty good movie.

Date: 2008-04-24 01:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hermionesviolin.livejournal.com
Wow, that is a fantastic story.

Date: 2008-04-24 12:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] onwingsofeagles.livejournal.com
Why are some professors such ignoramuses?

When cars became common, trolley systems cut back and/or switched over to buses everywhere, whether Standard Oil or General Motors or anyone else had bought an interest in the system or not. Paying customers disappeared into cars, and all those cars interfered with the trolleys, slowing them down and making them even less desirable to people who now had alternatives. The "big capitalist auto-related companies killed what would have been great public transportation" story is a wonderful morality play but crappy history.

Okay, he's probably not an ignoramus. I suspect the story fits his ideological priors and he's learned just enough to feel comfortably confirmed in his priors.

Maybe you just garbled the other, but by court order Microsoft is supposed to let other browsers work on Windows, and not make them work any worse. As far as I know, no court has made any ruling about other operating systems. Obviously, Safari runs on Apple's Mac OS. Firefox runs on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux: http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

RAS

Date: 2008-04-24 01:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hermionesviolin.livejournal.com
[Should I generate you your own account so you don't keep using Mom's? :)]

A student brought up the Standard Oil thing, but the prof didn't disagree.

Wikipedia says:

The Great American Streetcar Scandal, also known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy or the National City Lines conspiracy, was the sequence of events in which General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum formed the National City Lines (NCL) holding company, which acquired most streetcar systems throughout the United States, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses in the early 20th century. It is alleged that NCL's companies had an ulterior motive to forcibly gain mass use of the automobile among the U.S. population by buying up easy-to-use mass light rail transportation countrywide and dismantling it, leaving populations with little choice but to drive.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

I hadn't thought about your point about trolleys-interfering-with-cars issue and the corollary that one could still do less interferent public transit (subway or elevated) if one were so inclined.


The court order is the point of the other one -- that it's only because of a court order that other browsers will work on Windows. I had just assumed that other browsers had always been able to work on Windows. I guess it makes sense that Microsoft would have wanted a proprietary monopoly, but I was always used to having Netscape and IE both on a computer and then later Firefox and hadn't realized that there was any pressure around allowing that to happen.

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hermionesviolin: an image of Alyson Hannigan (who plays Willow Rosenberg) with animated text "you think you know / what you are / what's to come / you haven't even / BEGUN" (Default)
Elizabeth (the delinquent, ecumenical)

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