I'm to start work as a Ruby on Rails developer for Zynga on Thursday, assuming that contract details work out.

It's 30-day-contract-to-hire - i.e. the first month is under a temp contract, so we know if we're good for each other.

Hopefully it goes well; looks like it will. I'm pretty excited. ^^


(I'll still be doing my Medtronic work part-time [yay flexible telecommute gig], and of course I've got a half-dozen projects of my own, not to mention the LCS and such, and moving to Berkely next month or so... looks like I'm going to be pretty damn busy. o.o)

So, my laptop was out of commission.

We tried a first pass at fixing the issue - it didn't get power from the plug - without success.

Today... I took the thing apart completely. All the little (and big) pieces on the table, a boxtop full of tiny screws, the motherboard completely removed from all three pieces of the frame.

Ryan re-soldered the power leads. I put it back together (oy what a pain). And only six screws left over!

And now it works. I was facing having to replace the laptop otherwise.

About as well as ever - slightly better, actually, 'cause we found a massive amount of gunk in the CPU cooler whose current nonexistence will hopefully make things cooler and thus faster. My RAM still gets really hot, but ohwell.

Yay for EE-capable boyfriends & ability to work together to solve a problem. ^^


Ryan comments: FYI it was reading ~5.8V at a couple spots before I reflowed it, and afterwards was reading 19V... no idea why, but whatever.

Dr. Sidney M Schwab's Cutting Remarks.

All I know is he's got an excellent blog which I've mentioned before. Hopefully the book should be interesting (though I currently have no intention of going into surgery...)

And I have no idea whom it's from. The username 'sucinen' is on the receipt, and while I'm fairly sure I've seen that before, I can't remember any context at all, nor do I see any relevant logs / emails / accounts. A new WP account that doesn't overlap with my edits at all, an inactive OKC account, and that's it.

So, whoever you are, thanks. :) I'll post my thoughts about the book once I've read it.

Via sedesdraconis's comment to banjomensch's (beautiful) post about subcreation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDOUpCR0_tc




I'm actually very pleased with how it turned out. Video and sound quality good, hardly any framerate stutter, and I think my interpretation came out well.

And it only took four takes not to mess up somewhere. ^^

( Lyrics in Russian, English, & ASL transcription )
Translations by me.

I just found a site with scans of vol 1-20 of Mangajin. Huzzah! Too bad it's not all of them though. :-(

For those of you who don't know it, Mangajin is a magazine made up 'till 1996 (it went broke), that consists mostly of Japanese manga... but with extensive linguistic and cultural analysis side-by-side, articles on pop culture and random bits about Japan, etc.

The linguistic side-by-side is IMO particularly useful; it gives up to an actual original/phonetic/morphemic/smooth interlinear (!), or sometimes just the smooth, plus vocab notes on each frame & politeness level estimates. Very helpful for learning stuff.

I remember borrowing all of 'em from Berkeley library at one point and not having gotten through a third of them before I had to return them 'cause my library card had expired. (And I was the only one to have borrowed them in a decade. Sad.)

I don't normally read manga (my Japanese isn't good enough :( for one, and I don't like most of 'em for two), but most of Mangajin's are pretty good. E.g. オバタリアン、大東京ビンボー生活マニュアル、What's Michael, サラリくん、田中くん... those I liked.

I think I've read all the issues it has though. :-/

I've been using Winamp for a long time. I resisted iTunes for... various reasons. Denis persuaded me to try it.

So I did. It took a whole day (literally) to process my admittedly fairly large music library (a lot of that was on figuring out 'gapless playback'), very slow for all of that. Not quite sure how fast it will operate now.

But in the meantime I browsed to podcasts... education... higher education... omg score!

I realize it's extremely geeky of me to want to listen to law lectures and Christian apologists and random philosophy classes and the like in my spare time. That's without even touching the foreign language stuff (well, maybe some ASL vidcasts...). But still, score. Plus my usual npr/pri shows, skeptic shows, etc, which I am now using Google Reader to listen to.

I guess I'll find out how many of them are worth it as audio-only; probably it'll suffer attrition since I don't have the visual or the textbook or whatever else supplementals are supposed to go with it.


I should find out how to get a place in it, to distribute the LCC videos...

Speaking of which, the revised current estimate is that LCC2 will be June 7-8 @ UCB (maybe May 26-27), and LCC3 will be April @ URochester. So mark your calendars now etc.

My interpretation of Bette Midler's "The Rose", in ASL.

The harp music is by Sally Fletcher, from heavenlyharpist.com. Go to her website to download a copy: http://www.heavenlyharpist.com/mp3/the-rose.htm

Yay it came out well. Harp music FTW. ^^

... is very fun.

It resonates neatly. Try doing an aum with bathwater-resonance. :-)

I am very very pleased. And relaxed. Mrrrrr.

May write more later (though probably not public ^^), but yaaay.

*shows off* It's finished! Well, more or less. But it's wearably finished!

First pic is "right side out", second is "inside out" to show off the lining. The haori (the outer jacket thing) has five crests on the outside - left and right breast, left and right back-of-sleeve, and back center seam line.

Now it just needs ironing, maybe starching, and maybe adding two more loops to the right side.

So, yes. Go me.

Was walking back to my car after getting Ki his rabies shots today.

I had just reached my car (as in, turned off the sidewalk) when the parking enforcement guy was *just* getting out of his little gocart to start writing me a ticket. (I was about 5 minutes expired; it took just over an hour. $1/hr metered, yeesh.)

Nice timing.

Have I mentioned how good it is to be Alive?

Slept in my hammock outside last night. It was quite comfortable, really; I draped my bathrobe & blanket (pretty thin one, which is more than enough around here) over the piece of rope connecting the two ends.

(I have it hung with one uncut rope - one end tied to a fencepost, the other to one of the posts of the back porch.)

I brought a book and my little book-light. It was comfy. Comfortable weather when not dressed up. Been really hot lately - 90s plus humidity meaning a heat index (opposite version of 'wind chill') of ~105F+. Regular heat advisories recently from the weather service.

I think I'll continue this. Slept better than I usually do. Will need to bring my vibrating alarm clock next time, thouogh; waking up to a gray sky and medium lightning makes it hard to tell what time it is...

Claire recommended this play to me (thanks!) - yesterday was the second day of the run, and the first two days of "pay as you can". I gave 'em $5; normal prices are ~$30-60 ($10 student, $15 rush). Theater is the Wooly Mammmoth theater company, at about 600 D St. NW.

Play: The Clean House, by Sarah Ruhl
Run: July 11 - Aug 14, 2005
Director: Rebbeca Byla Taichman
Cast: Matilde (Guenia Lemos), Lane (Naomi Jacobson), Virginia (Sarah Marshall), Charles (Mitchell Hebeert), Ana (Franca Barchiesi)

It was awesome. Strongly recommend if you're able to go see it, do so.

It's basically a romantic comedy / tragedy. Very funny - probably funnier if you know Portugese (my Spanish wasn't good enough to understand the "untranslatable" jokes; there's not that much, but there is a significant amount of stuff in untranslated Portugese). I was laughing out loud for most of it. Very well acted - particularly Virginia, though just because I suspect it's hard to really pull off the "a little bit crazy" thing that well (the rest were very good also, no complaints at all).

I'll summarize the plot on request, but not here. Suffice it to say that it is very much worth admission; if I had $40 for seeing a show I'd have paid it and been well satisfied.

I'm not really a theater reviewer (sorry, Mike), but there you go. Props as deserved.

beauseizure is so awesome, he wrote me a song.

Rock on, brother.

1. My books just came. In two boxes, rather than the one that I shipped 'em in. As long as they're all there intact, I don't care; yay for USPS for repackaging 'em.

2. I saw FIREFLIES! A couple nights ago, on the way home from the metro, there were dozens flying around and lighting up and pretty and I caught a couple and whee fireflies. Hadn't seen any in at least ten years now. I suppose the swamp does have *some* redeeming features. :-P

And it's been fairly not-humid lately too. Decent temperature even. Yay respite, though I suspect it won't last very long...

So yes. Squee.