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02 December 2009 @ 02:43 pm
3060+ words so far today.

It occurred to me that the difficulty with the battle scene was not coming into it at the beginning (because the POV character I was using didn't arrive until later), and thus the use of a different POV character might help. Boy, did it. I did spend a terrifying bit of time submerged in cold water in a ditch, but at least I wasn't having to take care of the slow match for a matchlock (that bit is from the movie Alatriste.)

Also found out something very...interesting...and unsettling...about the taig in Lyonya. But it would be spoilers to explain more.
 
 
Current Mood: accomplished
 
 
02 December 2009 @ 03:21 pm
I don't think anyone is going to like what I'm about to say. Tim suggested I write it here anyway. I have to suspect his motives--does he want me to stop talking about this stuff at home? Not that I do, very often, because it distresses him. He can't bear to hear of people under subjugation when he can't actually do anything to help them. But sometimes the topic comes up, such as when the national dialog goes screeching off into the territory of the Afghani War and Obama's recent announcement that he will be committing 30,000 more troops to the battle, bringing the current total on the ground to 100,000 or so. Everyone's talking about it. Tim's against it, of course. Coming from a military family and having military friends, he's against anything that puts our people at risk. I pointed out that we still don't have jobs and post-war care properly arranged for all of our people who are already in service, and it would be good to bring them home when the Veteran's Administration and the economy are cleaned up enough that veterans to come won't be getting the shit deal they've had so far. (I too have military family and friends.)

He finally noticed, though, that I hadn't said anything about the President's announcement, and asked me flat out what I thought. I reminded him that Obama had said he was going to prosecute the Afghani war more thoroughly when he campaigned, and I disagreed with him then, but I also understood from the way Obama talked about it that he was actually going to do what he promised. I explained to Tim that I didn't understand how people were so shocked by his intentions now when he'd told them that this was his plan a year ago. Tim recognized that, while true, this wasn't an answer, and he leaned on me again.

So I told him.

I am not at all unhappy there will be more Americans on the ground in Afghanistan. The more pairs of non-male-Islamist eyes there are in Afghanistan, the happier I will be. I cannot imagine American soldiers standing by while (this link not safe for work) women are publicly beaten. It is my hope that the malfeasance in public office will undergo a clean-up with an increased American (and international, with an increase in NATO troops) presence in Afghanistan. With any kind of Western military rule, I hope there will be a cut-down in public whipping and stonings, as well as child rape.

More follows )
Every day this most extreme interpretation of Islam gains more and more followers throughout the world, and more and more women and girls are brought into its grip. What can we do? How can we help? Funding for shelters and organizations helps, but we're talking about entire nations of women here whose well-being and lives are at risk at the hands of men who claim the rights of ownership, yet will treat their cars better than their female relatives. We'd like for the women to help themselves, but how can you help yourself if you don't even know that you have a right to do so? That you have as much value as your tormentors? That there are opportunities in the greater world for you, if only you can find them?

I know our soldiers can't stay forever. Maybe they can stay long enough to teach the women--and the men--of Afghanistan that women have value and purpose. That women can even hit, and kick, and shoot.
 
 
Current Location: home
Current Mood: angry
Current Music: "Kaharwa/Dadra," Aziz Herawi
 
 
02 December 2009 @ 10:15 am
So my Birthday/Christmas gift arrived--as thoughtfully chosen by me with my parents credit card--Windows 7 and 4 more gigs of ram. Additionally I added a 1/2 TB drive to the system. Windows installed with no problems. But afterword I seemed to have developed a with the video card over heating.

Turns out the power cable that I had to run down to the new drive was looping back into the video card fan. I figured that out about 2 AM. I think the system is good now, but I haven't really tested it hard.

I do know that Windows crashed when I went to shut down (and hung once on loading WoW from my old, installed XP drive). I am willing to give Win7 the benefit of doubt right. Mostly I seem to be reinstalling software under Win7 rather than pulling from the old (still connected and bootable)) XP drive.

I think I like the new task bar/alt tabbing stuff, but I think I will have to put in some effort to become a power user.

And I still need to see if the setup can handle both WOW and EVE at the same time.
 
 
02 December 2009 @ 10:14 am
...I am slogging away at QUEEN'S HUNT revisions before my new job starts next Monday. Fig is playing mind games with Octavia, sometimes grooming her and sometimes whacking her upside the head. And I can hardly wait until my new Macbook Pro gets here. The current estimated delivery date is Friday morning.
 
 
 
02 December 2009 @ 03:01 am

  • 11:25:38: Rain started again about 20 minutes ago. I guess the 100% probability was right.
  • 17:52:26: Battle plan expanding. Cold rain here--perfect campaign weather to keep writer indoors and at work.
  • 17:52:57: Supper: lamb stew and homemade brown bread.

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01 December 2009 @ 07:34 pm
Texas has two Senators, neither of whom represents me or my views on anything, but right now the one in my sights is the blonde female one, she whose ad on TV I just saw, proclaiming her firm opposition to what she calls "the government takeover of medicine."

This is the usual Republican approach, covering up a large gaping hole empty of any concern for the people of Texas, a state where one quarter of the population has no health insurance. That's 25.6% uninsured, compared to 15.2% for the rest of the country, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services figures.

That quarter does not, of course, include John Cornyn or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or any of Texas' U.S. Congresspersons, all of whom get their health care free, courtesy of the rest of us, in the juiciest bit of employer (read, "taxpayer") provided health care in the country. 100% of those folks are covered.

But wait--it gets better. The site referenced above does not give an estimate of the number of uninsured children in the state, but looking at the by-age-group and by-race figures strongly suggests that a lot of children--probably more than 25%--are not covered by health insurance. (CHIP in this state is always underfunded and doesn't begin to cover all low-income children.)

18-29: 41.5% uninsured. White 13.3
30-44 29.9% uninsured. Black 27.3
45-64 20.8% uninsured Hispanic 45.4
65+ 2.5% uninsured (the effect of Medicare. Which, of course, is an example of the government funding medical care--something Hutchinson opposes. She wants the elderly to be just as uninsured as everyone else.)

When do most people start their families and in what age range are they most likely to have small children? 18-29

Do they have medical-care needs in this period? Yeah, unless you don't think women need prenatal care, and their newborns and young children don't have any medical care needs. This is also the age range in which people have the most trauma.

And when are people raising the kids they had between 18 and 29? And maybe having still more kids?
30-44.

Do they have medical needs in this period? And in the next (not to bore you with the details)? Yes, of course they do. Very few people make it from 18 to 64 without needing any medical care (and very few children make it from birth to 18 without needing some medical care.)

And look at the race numbers. Basically almost half of Hispanics have no medical insurance. Over a quarter of blacks. And sufficient number of whites that every one of us knows a white person without medical insurance.

Senator Hutchinson is worried about socialism and government takeover of medicine, she says. She's utterly opposed to it.

She's bragging, in other words, that she's in favor of sickness, injury, and death. As more and more people slide under the economic waves, as the ERs are ever more crowded and overwhelmed, as rural counties lose their hospitals and their medical care providers, as people have to go farther and wait longer for care--if they have insurance and enough money for what insurance doesn't cover--she's up there on her safe little throne, smug as any of the slick blond cheerleaders you see on TV..."I've got mine; I'm in the in crowd; who cares about the rest of you?"

Here's a clue: don't elect cheerleaders (she was one), frat boys, mean girls, or mean boys. They're just as arrogant and selfish and mean in Congress and the White House as they were in high school and college.
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Current Mood: angry
 
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 10:27 pm
ok folks I thought I had a problem but maybe its gone now but I wanted to ask if anyone else has had this.

Basically my iPhone 3GS home button was activating when not being touched at all. It would be sitting on my desk and act like I'm tipping the home button lots of times going to the search mode, to camera and then voice control sometimes. I had to turn it off cause it started making phone calls whenever it heard anything. Has anyone else seen this before?

I jailbroke it about 2 weeks after I got it back in July with redsn0w and then when I updated to 3.1.2 then I blackra1n broke it and it had been working perfectly till this week. Since I have restored it to re synced it it appears to be behaving itself, no sign of the sticky home button as yet.

--
~ B ~
 
 
Current Location: Leyton, London
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 02:42 pm
Hey, friends--

Reminder to nominate your fave stories for the Year's Best Lesbian Fiction, 2009, published by Bedazzled Ink and edited by Fran Walker.

Here's the link for all the info,

but most before you go there, consider whether the story you want to nominate is eligible. Here's the scoop for that:

Eligibility: Short stories with a lesbian character or theme, FIRST PUBLISHED IN AN EDITED MARKET IN 2009, including stories from e-presses, print presses, journals, and zines. No unpublished submissions or submissions published outside of 2009.

Restrictions: No fan-fic. No unpublished, self-published, or vanity-published fiction. No stories that are strictly romance or erotica. Stories with erotic or romantic components are acceptable, but this collection is intended to complement rather than overlap with the Year’s Best Lesbian Erotica and Year’s Best Lesbian Romance anthologies.

Hope that's helpful!

And my third New Mexico mystery, The Ties that Bind, is finally available in most places. And as a reminder, I'll be at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Saturday December 5th at noon to sign that and whatever else you wanna bring. Within reason, my friends. Just sayin'.

Peace out!

 
 
Current Location: over the underworld
Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Graphite: "Seagulls Singing Your Name." Seriously.
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 04:19 pm
My sister Nora once sent me the Atlas of True Names, a wonderful little world atlas that translates all the place-names into rough English equivalents, at once reducing and increasing the mystery and interest of them (Paris on the Seine becomes "City of the Boatmen" on "The Gentlewater." Now she's sent me this update:

John, I got an email today from the people who made the Atlas of True Names that I sent you last year, announcing a new item, called "United States of the Home Ruler" which applies the same treatment to many of the place names in the US. On their website they have some closeups of various parts of the map. This one stood out to me:



I believe this means that "Massachusetts" means "Land at the Little Big Hills". Did you know that? I'm thinking you must have, but if not, what a lovely, delicious coicidence. Is it?
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 12:23 pm
[info]backpacking
Want to embrace your wanderlust on the cheap? If you're high on adventurous spirit, but low on funds, this community can help you plan a trip to anywhere. Offering plentiful tips on how to travel light, you can post about inexpensive hotels and youth hostels if you're into urban exploration or discuss camping gear and mosquito netting for the great outdoors. Hitch your backpack, pitch your tent, and carpe diem!
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 11:52 am
iPhone photo, Portland Or.

 
 
01 December 2009 @ 03:01 am

  • 11:49:11: Note to bicyclists at night: dark clothes without reflective stripes mean I can't see you!!! No, your puny taillight is not enough.

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01 December 2009 @ 07:23 pm
More details on Trademe but feel free to ask me anything you want about it here.
 
 
I've been having problems using Ventrilo on my mac. I'm currently running Snow Leopard (I upgraded all of two days ago), but I had these problems for a good six-eight months, so they aren't new. Basically after 10-30 minutes, any noise I make into the microphone of my USB headset comes out sounding robotic or full of static. I thought it was my headset, but after a bit of googling I found out that it might be a problem with the Ventrilo software - and that there was a supposed fix to the issue by messing with some .kext files.

This is what I followed, down to the letter. The java thing didn't help - I had no settings to change. But I attempted to downgrade, did exactly what I was instructed to do, and after a restart .. I can't get my computer to recognize the USB headset when it's plugged in. There's nothing but the default options in my sound system options. Since I was a good girl and backed up the original file, I tried to reinstall the current file, and when I went to repair I got an error saying it had been installed wrong. I repaired permissions anyway, rebooted, and nothing changed. Basically, tl;dr, I'm dumb and need a hand undoing my own stupidity. :P
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 04:38 pm
hello all, I just wanted to share with you all, my new community,NZFetish )

If such a thing interests you, please come join! discuss, share, come play! also if you have other community suggestions or sugesstions at all, please come share!


thank you!
 
 
Current Mood: excited
 
 
30 November 2009 @ 10:10 pm
I really think Snow Leopard was Apple's attempt to out-do Microsoft's Vista in most bugs released in a single Operating System.

I'm just blown away by all the weird brokenness.

1- Two freshly installed instances of Snow Leopard. One on a brand new Mac Mini and the other on a MacBook Pro. The Macbook had a harddrive icon on the desktop. The Mac Mini had _no harddrive_ icon on the desktop. (Had to go google how to fix it: Finder>Preferences> click Harddrive under "Show these items on Desktop)

2- Migration Assistant would not allow me to move an account from an old Mac Mini to the new Mac Mini because both accounts shared the same name.... Which was the whole point. I wanted to move over the old account onto the new machine, and that was the _only_ account on the new machine. I had to rename account and then manually go and cp -R files over to the new machine... which completely defeats the point of having Migration Assistant in the first place.

3- Whenever I would click on the Finder icon in the dock, I would get a Finder window that was empty for the current users home directory. But the home directory WAS NOT EMPTY. If I clicked on the username on the left side of the Finder File Browser window under "Places" I'd see all the folders in the user's directory. But again, whenever I click on the Finder icon in the dock I'd get an empty window in Finder for the users home directory which was NOT empty.

4- Problem of not being able to find windows have always been a problem in MacosX since day one. Which is why Apple came up with Expose as a means to combat not being able to find windows buried under other windows. Which is odd given that Apple actually has a feature called "Single Application Mode" buried in the UI. You can activate it by holding down Option + Apple and clicking an icon in the dock. What that does is Auto-Hides All Other Applications. Problem is, if you don't know that trick good luck finding anything in the UI. I was buying and registering games and time and time again the registration window was buried under a window and unseen to me, waiting for me type in information to register the game. Again, this has always been a problem in MacOSX.

5- As stated before, many preference windows for things like Firefox and Thunderbird do not render correctly under Snow Leopard. You get strange graphical artifacts as you flip through the preferences windows.

----Now onto hardware ------

Mac Mini now ships with Mini-DVI and Firewire 800. Yet I have a iSight Camera (firewire 400) that's connected to my Apple flat screen monitor which WAS connected to old Mac Mini with the Apple only Apple Display Connector. Problem is the new Mac Mini's are Firewire 400 and Mini-DVI... so I'll no longer be able to connect my iSight DIRECTLY into the back of my Monitor. I'll instead have to go buy a Firewire 400 to 800 cable and run it down from the iSight camera directly to the Mac Mini... Which negates having the firewire port on the back of the Apple Display. Grrr!

And don't get me started on the Mini-DVI port. The Mini-DVI port needs screws... badly... to hold in the Mini DVI to DVI adapter which falls out all the time on its own.
 
 
01 December 2009 @ 12:01 pm
A day of Tweetin' with Mangee )Automatically shipped from Twitter by LoudTwitter
 
 
30 November 2009 @ 11:07 pm
This will end up in my DVD collection in a matter of days... I really hope the Spam sketch's in it... cause *that* has me laughing like an idiot over and over again.

The next preys will be the Fawlty Towers DVD collection and I gotta check if the whole Michelangelo vs. the Pope sketch is available anywhere...
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Current Location: Home
Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: Pigstar - Kimi hana