cooking with fire now!

D. has made me a new computer. Or, at least, he has done a staggeringly good job of cobbling together what we have, fine tuning it carefully and setting it up immaculately - he can squeeze more power out of a motherboard than I thought possible! I'm not going at light speed, but I am going substantially faster than I was before - no more waiting on graphics to chew....

And Filezilla rocks my socks!

I have spent a regrettably large part of this holiday weekend doing web work - this grieves me, but the hours sitting at my desk managed to spawn 1) some pretty good fic, if I do say so myself, and 2) the urge to move around motivated me to clean up the kitchen and stovetop (Greased Lightning also rocks my socks) and even some of my sewing area - I can see part of my cutting table again (!). So all is not lost.

I also managed to steal some reading time for myself. I finished "The Night Watch" - EXCELLENT book - not as merry or sexy perhaps as Waters' previous books, but written so well that it practically breathes, leaving you wishing you were there, even if it's in the middle of London during the Blitz.

Also still reading (or rather, skimming - it's not exactly an action-packed thriller) Henry VIII's inventories. Despite the archaic spellings most of it makes sense, and there are little things that are somehow so human - in the middle of the section on jewels and plate there are listed the contents of a small coffer that contained hoods and medicines for Henry's hawks. Sure, he wasn't the one medicating them, but it's nice to know that someone cared enough to do that, even if it was just to keep the hawks in hunting condition.

I do have some vocabulary questions I might post later for the historians reading, if I can't find the answers on my own.

And because I can't leave y'all without a clicky thing, here it is courtesy betnoir: Serenity: The MST3K Version ("THE OPERATIVE: I’ve seen your war record.
TOM: It had a nice beat and you could dance to it.")

education foo

So, I signed up for an overview of Operating Systems for the summer. I didn't want to lose my academic momentum, yet the next math class (precalc) wasn't offered online during summer session, and my grad advisor recommended this class because it came with no prerequisites.

It was a quick decision - quicker than I like, being of the inclination to want to weigh every concievable possibility before making a choice, but I was cutting it really close (class starts tomorrow) and it was "either sh*t or get off the pot". I guess I was hoping for something "light" (as in, no reams of practice problems) over the summer.

Nah. This is a grad level course complete with a paper. The first paper I've written since...oh, I don't know when - undergrad, over 10(!) years ago? With style and footnote requirements and all the attendant paranoia over crappy writing/flawed arguments/inadvertent plagiarism/the fact that my liberal arts background didn't prepare me to write on technical subjects...

I fear I may be in way over my head.

Yep - nervous now.

more flavors of wrong

Well, I don't know if they come in flavors, but, from tinynibbles : Battling Seizure Robot Condoms. The graphic is subtle yet really really obvious. Be careful about clicking the above if you don't want "slashdong.org" showing up in your browser history :P

These would be a nice companion piece to the pirate-themed tampons I've mused over earlier - except these condoms already exist(!)

Condoms aimed specifically at the robot-gamer market. This place has everything</bluesbrothers>