ramblinations

seasonal technicalities

2007-03-25T20:06:00.000-05:00

the calendar says it's spring.

i'm skeptical, and if i weren't lazy i'd show you pictures of the snowstorm we got right after my last post to reinforce my skepticism. on the other hand, we went biking this afternoon. it was great. movement, outdoors, that didn't require brushing snow off anything first! granted, i couldn't really feel my fingers by the end, but the snow was mostly hidden under mud and the sun was shining.

let's just leave it at "spring-like" and hope for the best, shall we?

in other news, i'm still sick. this is going on record as the most persistent cold i've had--coming up on four weeks, i think. had to miss yet another day of work on friday. (in my own defense, i argued with my supervisor for ten minutes before giving up and staying home. seems he doesn't want support techs who can't...well, support.)

linkage:

picnik: picasa-worthy photo retouching and enhancing, online. very, very cool.
my tiddlywiki: seemed the most convenient way to document my adventures with xgl. handy.
i'm productive! reuters says so!
thank you, npr, for showing the recording industry a little backbone.

spring tease

2007-03-14T22:53:00.000-05:00

the snow melted this weekend, grass appeared, and we all stopped wearing winter coats.

benjamin and i even took a walk at the cobbs hill reservoir (along with half the city), because it was just so darn pretty outside. (we saw all the "oh, it's winter, no one will notice" dog leavings, too!)

but--and this is important--it's not spring. it's march 14th today, which means it's most definitely still winter in rochester. it's critical that no one start thinking, "hurrah, no more snow!" because we will have more snow, probably lots, before the real spring starts. raising one's hopes for warmth in the middle of march is never a good idea in upstate new york.

even so, it's awfully nice while it lasts. it's a little strange to drive home from work in broad daylight, but you won't find me complaining. it's nice to just get in the car and drive on monday morning, instead of spending ten minutes warming up the car and brushing the snow off and kicking yourself for not leaving early, again. it's even nicer to not have to shove the car out of its snowbank. and to be able to drive the speed limit in residential areas and know the car will, in fact, stop at the next stop sign.

i like snow. ask anyone. i like to ski, i like to build snow forts, i like to walk during snowfalls. but spring--once it arrives for good--will be very nice.

me and my eye-candy

2007-03-10T02:58:00.000-05:00

readers, i give you beryl.

that's an XFCE4 terminal being minimized. my cube is transparent, so you can see a corner between two desktops in the background.

for the record, i'm running the january 5th build of XGL, the SVN beryl ebuilds from the xeffects overlay, and XFCE 4.4. my graphics card is an ATI mobility radeon X300, running with ATI's fglrx driver. took me roughly a day to get it all together, but it's running beautifully.

i'm going to back to burning up my windows now.

the heavens tell the glory

2007-03-02T21:07:00.000-05:00

watch this, immediately.

[UPDATE: i had originally embedded the video here, but got some funny display issues, thanks to my *cough* unorthodox page design. just visit the link.]

that's our moon, crossing in front of our sun.

from the source:

On Feb. 25, 2007 there was a transit of the Moon across the face of the Sun - but it could not be seen from Earth. This sight was visible only from the STEREO-B spacecraft in its orbit about the sun, trailing behind the Earth. NASA's STEREO mission consists of two spacecraft launched in October, 2006 to study solar storms. The transit starts at 1:56 am EST and continued for 12 hours until 1:57 pm EST. STEREO-B is currently about 1 million miles from the Earth, 4.4 times farther away from the Moon than we are on Earth. As the result, the Moon will appear 4.4 times smaller than what we are used to. This is still, however, much larger than, say, the planet Venus appeared when it transited the Sun as seen from Earth in 2004.

there are high resolution versions available at the site.

on a related note, pray really hard for clear skies tomorrow evening. it'd be a shame to miss the moon show.

quest

2007-02-20T22:31:00.000-05:00

I'd had too much sleep the night before. In bed by 9:30? A waste, made more wretched by the headache I'd been nursing all day. I always get a headache if I sleep too long. I'd resolved not to repeat the incident.

So it was that Benjamin found me at 3:10am, spread out on the couch, glued to the sixth season of The West Wing. He stumbled over in his pajama pants, tufts of hair akimbo.

"Why are you up at three in the morning?" he squinted at me in confusion.

"You did it last night!" I countered brilliantly. (Which was true: He'd been playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a fantasy role-playing game.)

He ignored my retort. "Here, you'll need these for your quest," he mumbled, handing me a pair of used earplugs.

I looked at the earplugs, then at his face. It was scrunched up, as if to keep the rest of the world around the edges. "Earplugs?" Maybe he was hinting that I should turn down the volume.

"Yeah. For your quest."

"What quest?" I started to giggle.

He made a face and tried to hand the styrofoam slugs to me again. "Come on, don't laugh at me, you know what I mean!"

The giggling was getting worse. He sighed and started to turn away, and I grabbed his hand to keep him in place. "Why do I need earplugs for my quest?" I had a hard time getting the words out, this time.

He wrestled away, smiling confidently. "You need them. And you should stop laughing at me." He shuffled back to the bedroom, leaving the earplugs on the coffee table.

I should mention that Benjamin does have a history of sleepwalking. His favorite episode took place many years ago, when he left his shoes on a neighbor's doorstep. It was a secret mission.

The West Wing was still paused. I closed it down and made my way to the bedroom, leaving the earplugs behind. Benjamin lay flat on his stomach. I sidled alongside.

"Benjamin!"

He twitched.

"Benjamin, why did you give me the earplugs?"

A mutter rose from the pillow: "I was returning them to you. You knew what I meant!"

I spent the rest of my waking moments that evening laughing hysterically.

a real holiday day

2007-01-05T19:37:00.000-05:00

[the following was written this past saturday. thanks for the pictures, daniel!]

had a spectacular afternoon.

started around about 12:30, when benjamin and i fled the indoors. cold and rain notwithstanding, staying inside for the entire christmas break would be a little much for either of us to stomach. so we left. in the cold. (benjamin made sure i bundled in gloves, a hat, and christian's ski silks, so i'd be warm.) we met up with daniel and kylie for a romp around fall creek. only benjamin and i had done the trail before, and i hadn't been for a couple years. it's something like a bigger six mile creek.

started out a little rough, no mistake. the trail opens for a while into cornell land, a few big fields they use for, among other things, cross-country eventing. it's been a wet christmas here in the land of the three hills, so the ground was on the soggy side. the very soggy side. we spent a good while picking our way through mounds of less-wet grass, avoiding horse-influenced puddle pockets as far as the eye could see....on the other hand, benjamin and daniel got some great photos taking pictures of each other flying over the cross-country jumps. they each took five or six shots before they had one they liked. i got it one, naturally. (but theirs make great fake time-lapse sets!)

once we'd entered the woods again, we were greeted by a large, nearly-motionless raccoon. we crept around it, carefully--rabies is not uncommon in upstate new york. it was curled in a little cocoon, one paw over its nose, whimpering and shaking as it breathed. it couldn't move; it tried to crawl off in the opposite direction a few times, but was unable to lift itself. it was heartbreaking. i don't know if it was rabid, or shot, or pregnant...no idea, but definitely in distress. and we were helpless. at any rate, we called the local animal service, so with any luck, it won't be there long.

after we'd been walking about an hour or two, benjamin mentioned it'd be another five miles to get back. we'd cross the river at the next road, far off, and come back down the other side. well, folks, it was cold, so we explored other options. ended up at a fallen tree spanning the creek. benjamin skipped across with no difficulty, of course, and declared it an ideal crossing spot. the tree was about four feet short of the opposite bank, so benjamin found another branch to make up the difference. daniel managed to convince kylie, and off we went.

now, understand, i'm not afraid of heights. on the contrary, i love them. tall buildings, roller coasts, planes, the works. however, i get a little skittish at the prospect of crossing said heights, particularly on something skinny. i am tall, i am not sanguine about my sense of balance, and i have an overactive, vivid imagination.

i always forget all that until i actually have to do something like cross a river on a fallen tree. kylie made it across without incident, slid down benjamin's extra branch like a pro. didn't even get her feet wet. i was next. did fine for the first few milliseconds, until i looked down and forgot which way was up. oh yes, thunk i. i remember this. nonetheless, i ooched my way along the main trunk to the fork, and shimmied down from there, holding on for dear life and trying desperately to ignore the ice-cold river water inches below. (which, in retrospect, was actually pretty cool. if i hadn't had a death grip on the trunk, i might have really enjoyed the experience. or if it had been july, instead of december.) by that time i was highly skeptical of benjamin's branch, which i now noticed was wet, stretching four feet from an already precarious tree-top to the slippery rocks of the bank. "you'll be fine!" he assured me. "kylie did it!"

there was nothing for it. i couldn't very well turn around and go back. i slid--roughly three inches, before i lost balance and soaked myself to the knees. (kudos to benjamin for pulling me out before i fell in completely. also for making me wear silks, which kept me warm inside the sopping cargo pants.)

daniel fared better on the walk across the tree, but the tree-top broke off entirely when he tried benjamin's branch. he soaked one leg. on the whole, not a bad casualty count.

the rest of the adventure was downhill from that river crossing. we climbed a hill to find the trail again, and stepped through a second lorien. barren trees over a bed of brown-orange leaves right before twilight, sun passing between branches and glancing through old snowflakes, slowing in the evening fog. the trail opened onto yet another cornell field (agricultural research, this time?), and led to the outskirts of fall creek. one resident, loathe to let us trespass on the sanctity of his driveway gravel, helpfully pointed us to a connected trail. we crossed a bridge, met a small golden retriever, and were nearly back to the car when i realized i'd lost my phone.

that's right, folks. i'd been using it to take pictures and video all afternoon, and had unbuttoned a pants pocket to make for easier access. it was gone. $250 worth of gone, no less. benjamin was the only one who really knew where we were, at that point, so he and kylie went ahead to get the car. daniel and i backtracked. i thought i knew where i'd lost it: after we crossed the tree and climbed the hill, daniel took a picture of us all sitting on a cliff, looking toward the river we'd just conquered. i sat with my knees up; the phone must have slid from my cargo pocket.

benjamin found a road into the field, so he met us at its middle. we'd skirted it earlier, a route at least 300ft away in all directions. benjamin ran up to the ledge where we'd been sitting (600ft away from the car), calling the phone the whole way. didn't find anything; however, i thought i heard something ringing. (understand, i couldn't possibly have heard something ringing, because there's no way the phone could have been anywhere near the car, and its volume was turned low.) benjamin kept calling, and daniel and kylie heard it, as well. we found it not forty feet away from the car, in the middle of the field. where we hadn't been. where we hadn't even been near. it wasn't scratched or damaged, but the speakerphone had been turned on.

i know.
i KNOW.

i have no idea how any of that happened. it could have been carried, very gently, by some animal, which dropped it as soon as it started ringing. no explanation for the speakerphone, in that case. perhaps i turned it on earlier without realizing it? i was wearing gloves. it could have been taken by a person, who turned on the speakerphone and left it in a likely place when it started ringing. no, that doesn't make any sense to me, either.

in any case, we all arrived back at home in one piece, and in time for dinner. life is good.

the great adventure
thank you, god, for giving my phone back.

auld lang syne

2007-01-01T00:53:00.000-05:00

welcome, gentle reader, to 2007!

those are the ithaca college towers. they light up every december and january for a few weeks to broadcast the changing digits. benjamin and i have been watching them together since...well, at least since 2000, because i remember 99 -> 00.

had a great adventure on friday. waiting on daniel to get his pictures up before i explain. it's just not the same without photos. stay tuned.

in other news, i put my pajama pants on inside-out tonight. by mistake.

roasted chestnuts and jack frost

2006-12-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

my very favorite christmas song, i think.

happy christmas, gentle reader! to those of you who actually got snow this year: sod off. i hope your stockings were full of coal, and you all had an allergic reaction to your plum pudding. (honestly, we live in upstate new york. this business of not having snow at the end of december is ridiculous. i remember having inches, back in the day.)

daniel got a snazzy new camera under the tree this year, and put it to use immediately. hence:

christmas 2006

(completely irrelevant side note: i really, really miss the days of <center> tags. there is no good alternative for centering block-level elements. drives me nuts. i know, i know, separate style from structure, yadda, yadda.)

you may notice the presence of my little sister-in-law, marie. christian was having bloodwork and a ct scan done that morning, so he and barb were at the hospital. on christmas. at the hospital. *cough* their christmas morning took place (with the addition of katia!) the previous evening, after venison steaks and roasted vegetables. even so, we had a lovely time with them, and with my family. marie got some fantastic fairy stuff, which she brought along with her christmas morning to keep herself occupied. and it turned out the tiredness and confusion christian had been experiencing were results of steroid withdrawal, not elevated fluid levels or a brain tumor, so life was pretty good all around. benjamin and i got two christmas dinners out of the deal, so i really have no call to whine.

since then, i've done an all-night warlords marathon with benjamin and the brothers, followed by the post-christmas mall survey with mum. got a great pair of leather gloves, plus various items from the bath & body sale. o, and we went skating with marie, which was nearly as much fun as i remember. i do miss it. i think one of my new year's resolutions will be to get a rink pass somewhere in rochester and learn to run. (after having converted to hockey skates over ten years ago, i still can't run in a straight line. only around corners.)

in other news, i'm at it again:

grown-up stuff

2006-12-16T21:45:00.000-05:00

benjamin and i are buying a car.

nono, we're really buying a car this time. that's right, ladies and gents. those of you who've spoken with me in the last month have probably heard me whining about the little old saturn and its finicky engine. well, its inspection is up this month, and we young, inexperienced folks are not even remotely sanguine about its ability to pass. we're also looking to break the "it's december, we need another car!" trend that's been developing, so we're getting a new one, with a nice warranty and great reviews (for a poor-person car, anyway), that should last us a while. even my anti-foreign-and-particularly-korean-car grandfather likes our pick; who can argue with that?

it's a 2006 kia rio5 hatchback: 1.6L 4-cylinder twin-cam engine, manual transmission (of course), 110hp (at 6000rpm), 15-in alloy wheels (i admit, i'm psyched about the wheels), 5 doors including the hatch, 6 airbags (both sides, front and back), and so on. we test drove it this morning. it's a peppy little thing--it was nice to actually merge properly into highway traffic without fear of being rear-ended by the latest dodge monster truck. handled very nicely, good suspension, solid feel on the road. on the other hand, the saturn doesn't exactly have a shining driving experience, so maybe my perceptions are warped. either way, benjamin and i both really liked it. hard to go wrong with red hatchbacks, really. (it'll even fit our skis!)

incidentally, this is the fourth car purchase chronicled in this blog. in three and a half years. that's pathetic, folks.

again incidentally, yes, the new car does mean we're traversing the treacherous auto loan territory. (and if you've spoken with me in the past day or so, you've heard me whining about that, too.) advice: do it online. do it all online, so you can walk into the dealership with a check and completely skip the "how high can your monthly payment be?" debate.

i won't forget the news you've all been waiting for: benjamin's dad. he's home, again. there were a scary few days last week when the tissue around his liver stent got infected, but the antibiotics cleared everything up, and there were no other complications. so he's home. he is heavily medicated (it's very painful condition), so having a conversation with him is simultaneously terrifying and desperately sad and hysterical. benjamin and i will be spending christmas with them, so we're looking forward to seeing him soon.

i can't thank you enough for your prayers.

parting thought for the day, courtesy of john howard yoder:

....One of these songs [from the beginning of Luke's Gospel] is found on the lips of the maiden Mary. Catholic tradition knows it by its opening word Magnificat, "My soul doth magnify the Lord." But what it says is the language, not of sweet maidens, but of Maccabees: it speaks of dethroning the mighty and exalting the lowly, of filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty. Mary's praise to God is a revolutionary battle cry.

...

If we are ever to rescue God's good news from all the justifiable but secondary meanings it has taken on, perhaps the best way to do it is to say that the root meaning of the term evangelion would today best be translated "revolution". Originally it is not a religious or a personal term at all, but a secular one: "good news". But evangelion is not just any welcome piece of information, it is news which impinges upon the fate of the community. "Good news" is the report brought by a runner to a Greek city, that a distant battle has been won, preserving their freedom; or that a son has been born to the king, assuring a generation of political stability.

...

The need [in our time] is not for consolation or acceptance but for a new order in which men may live together in love. In his time, therefore, as in ours, the judgment of God upon the present order and the imminent promise of another one, is the language in which the gospel must speak....

whoops, wrote a book again. well, congratulations for getting this far! now go find something worthwhile to do!

violation of privacy

2006-12-01T18:16:00.000-05:00

take a look at these images.

no, really look. yes, this is, for all intents and purposes, a nude female.

welcome to the 21st-century airport security checkpoint.

another, for good measure.

The technology, called backscatter, has been around for several years but has not been widely used in the U.S. as an anti-terrorism tool because of privacy concerns.
...
[T]he TSA said the X-rays will be set up so that the image can be viewed only by a security officer in a remote location. Other passengers, and even the agent at the checkpoint, will not have access to the picture.

o, well if it's only the security officer, that's ok then. i hold my local airport security men in the same regard i hold my husband, absolutely.

they're implementing this in phoenix, folks. call your congressmen.

image credit: the associated press, cbs news

a hair-ying tale

2006-11-25T22:03:00.000-05:00

the shameless commerce division

2006-11-20T01:22:00.000-05:00

this year, i decided to head off the inevitable "so, what do you want for christmas?" questions: i now have a wishlist. so go there if, by some bizarre miracle, that question occurs to you. unless you'd prefer human contact, in which case don't go there, call me.

i've been putting off going to bed, because benjamin is not here. good night, gentle reader.

patriots, and other news

2006-11-17T00:10:00.000-05:00

i keep finding things to mention and then not mentioning them, so here's a short list:

thank you, patriot act. no really, thank you. i feel so much more secure now, knowing the evil iranian students lay prone before your awesome might. thanks.
benjamin's father has cancer. terminal. he's out of the hospital, back with his family. please keep praying.
i'm still upset about item 1.
the engine in our little saturn is really dying this time. it's still driveable, but not for much longer. new car! again! yippee!
with any luck, i'll be transitioning off the beta blogger very soon. it's not friendly to my beautiful custom template, and i don't see the point in learning a new templating language if i won't be using it for long.
Rumsfeld resigned!
my brothers have started publishing their favorite pastime. watch and enjoy!

just one more comment about item 1. if you watch the video, it's obvious the student was not treating the officers with respect. shouting expletives at them, not jumping at their command, etc. folks, that's not admirable behavior, but neither is it a crime. threatening an innocent bystander with a taser, on the other hand, is. it's the responsibility of people given power to enforce the law to not use it, unless absolutely necessary. if they don't have the patience to exhaust all other options before they pull out the tasers, they need to be removed. maybe that's too jedi for you, but this is absurd.

there was another recent incident in los angeles, featuring a cop beating a contained suspect's face, without provocation and for no apparent reason. the guy's on the ground, immobilized by two cops, and one of them shifts position to get a better angle and bashes the suspect's face in. blood and everything. come on, folks. a woman commented to me after i saw that last video that i shouldn't be too harsh in my opinions, because some day i might need an officer to come running to my protection.

i'm skeptical.

civic irresponsibility

2006-11-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

i voted.

i've not been closely following the campaigns, i didn't watch or hear the debates, and i'm not well-versed in the issues--particularly those of relevance to my state. i have a couple strong opinions (e.g., "Why elect a senator who'll only be around for a year and a half, and is brazenly using this state as a stepping-stone to her presidential candidacy?"), but only a couple. i didn't even know there were three state supreme court justices up for election. i have friends who'd be ashamed of me.

i've been mulling it over all day. one of my elections decisions happened in the voting booth: "hey, this guy is endorsed by the democrats and the independents? he must be really bipartisan, i'll vote for him." seriously.

i think i'm a civic failure. ah, well: i hereby resolve to make knowledge a prerequisite to having an opinion.

in other news, i'm thinking of cutting my hair. short.

hosting, and updates

2006-11-05T22:37:00.000-05:00

yesterday was an historic occasion for benjamin and i: we had people over for dinner. we spent the entire day cleaning and dusting and such-what, and then i made this amazing coconut chicken soup and people came over to eat it with us. benjamin got some great bread, and the people brought salad--this woman makes the most incredible salads, buffalo mozzerella and avocado anything and almonds and gourmet olive oil and vinegar with figs. anyway, it was exciting. we've never done that before--hosted a meal for people who serve their meals in a dining room with a chandelier and a mahogany dining set. (which is not to say these people are in any way snobbish, they're great, but they're...well, in a different stage of life than benjamin and i.) it was fun. the soup was a big hit. *grin grin* and then karen and i were soundly trounced by ken and benjamin at canasta. ah well.

we went up to see benjamin's dad again this afternoon. he's still yellow, but much more awake than last week. it was a real treat to see him, even if the pain medication does send him flying. he did fade in and out a few times, usually in mid-sentence. (which, to be perfectly honest, was hysterical. he'd be talking along, telling us about the book he's reading, and all of a sudden his eyelids would drop and he'd trail off to a mumble. we all cracked up several times.) the doctors have ruled out tuberculosis, and have been testing everything they could get their hands on. nothing conclusive so far, but they still think cancer best explains all the symptoms, so please keep praying. he and barb are in pretty good spirits, and his sister-in-law came down to help with marie. their support network is going strong.

in other news, i charged the batteries for my camera today!

sickness in the family

2006-10-29T20:14:00.000-05:00

benjamin's father is yellow.

well, it's not exactly yellow, it's more of an olive-ish goldenrod, but for all intents and purposes, "yellow" will suffice.

he was diagnosed on wednesday with stage four pancreatic cancer (non-treatable). we all got as many people praying as humanly possible, and on friday the doctors decided it looked more like tuberculosis. maybe. christian (benjamin's father) was moved to a different hospital, and is currently in the middle of lots and lots of testing. he's in enormous amounts of pain, and his visitors have to wear masks (in case the tuberculosis is airborne).

we went down on friday, to get benjamin to his family and help in any way possible. benjamin's rallying well, as is his eleven-year-old sister. the whole thing was so sudden, i've a suspicion everyone's still in shock. i am, at least. christian's not even 50--jeez, not only does this happen to "other people", it happens to "older people". not christian, not this family that's already been through the ringer several times.

we spent most of the weekend with marie, while barb stayed with christian at the hospital. it's a university facility, and the whole experience has been chaotic for them. and dehumanizing. no one seems to be in charge, no one knows where the right reports are, no one knows why these tests are being run. and no one's been taking the time to find out, so these people can have some grasp of their own situation and retain their flipping dignity instead of being shuffled around mindlessly like so much cattle.

jeez.

on a brighter note, the church family has formed an incredible line of support. people are making meals so barb doesn't have to cook, taking marie for a few hours here and there so barb can be in syracuse, organizing yard work crews to get the house ready for winter without christian, praying nonstop. and through them, god is present, comforting and healing.

had an impromptu chat with marie this morning:

marie
i hope daddy has tuberculosis instead of cancer, because then he won't die.
gemma (completely out of her league)
well, there's always hope either way. god's the one who makes those kinds of decisions--who'll live and how long, who'll die and when. no matter what the doctors say, he's in charge.
marie
i think he makes the wrong decision sometimes.

what do you say to that? how do you tell an eleven-year-old, "no, sweetie, if god wants to take your dad away from you, it's the right thing to do"?

i can't imagine that christian's illness would end in his death. (it took me a couple tries just to type that sentence.) he has one of the strongest presences i've ever known, for all his meekness and quiet nature. the idea that he could suddenly cease to be--well, the words make sense on the page, but my gut just rejects them out of hand. and i'm just the daughter-in-law. pray, folks. please pray.

antonin scalia is my new favorite person

2006-10-23T14:15:00.000-05:00

i'd like to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank justice scalia for understanding the purpose and limitations of the u.s. constitution:

Deeply controversial issues such as abortion and suicide rights have nothing to do with the Constitution, and unelected judges too often choose to find new rights at the expense of the democratic process, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia, during a panel Saturday on the judiciary sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation, dismissed the idea of judicial independence as an absolute virtue. He noted that dozens of states, since the mid-1800s, have chosen to let citizens elect their judges.

"You talk about independence as though it is unquestionably and unqualifiably a good thing," Scalia said. "It may not be. It depends on what your courts are doing."

He added, "The more your courts become policymakers, the less sense it makes to have them entirely independent."

Scalia, a leading conservative voice after 20 years on the court, said people naturally get upset with the growing number of cases in which a federal court intrudes on social issues better handled by the political process.

"Take the abortion issue," he said. "Whichever side wins, in the courts, the other side feels cheated. I mean, you know, there's something to be said for both sides."

"The court could have said, 'No, thank you.' The court could have said, you know, 'There is nothing in the Constitution on the abortion issue for either side,' " Scalia said. "It could have said the same thing about suicide, it could have said the same thing about . . . all the social issues the courts are now taking."

Scalia said that in the past, courts did not decide social issues. "It is part of the new philosophy of the Constitution," he said. "And when you push the courts into that, and when they leap into it, they make themselves politically controversial. And that's what places their independence at risk."

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the newest member of the Supreme Court, agreed that "the same thing exists, but to a lesser degree, with the lower courts."

[source]

(emphasis added)

thank you, sir.

the 'p' word

2006-10-20T22:19:00.000-05:00

apparently, the preacher on sunday discussed predestination.

i wasn't there, but those of you who know me know that's one of my things. (going back ten-ish years or so, when my family started attending a reformed church.) and since the small group benjamin and i attend takes sunday's sermon as its topic, we discussed predestination tonight.

i was dreading the experience, to be honest. i've spent a lot of time with predestination--thinking and discussing and debating. i once wrote an enormous paper dissecting predestination and arminianism. followed to their respective logical conclusions, both (opposing) viewpoints end in very uncomfortable places, and i always end up crawling desperately back to romans 9:

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honored use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory....

anyway, the discussion concluded far less painfully than i'd anticipated (with the exception of one episode involving a gentleman who completely misunderstood one of my comments and now thinks i'm wallowing in disbelief and doubt), coming to the only conclusion you can really have: we can't fully understand. period. we can theorize and extrapolate and stress, but we won't find a definitive answer. salvation is a mystery; we have to accept the mystery, believe the gospel, and get on with the work of the kingdom.

(i also remembered something really cool about limited atonement, but that's a discussion ill-suited to a blog.)

adventures with the gimp

2006-10-20T09:58:00.000-05:00

i like the gimp.

i admit it, i do. a lot of people don't. they find the interface clunky. (translation: they want photoshop.) i like the interface. i can move things around and tear off menus and arrange things. it's great.

but that's neither here nor there. i noticed a photoshop tutorial yesterday and decided, since it was a slow work day, to figure it out in the gimp. to the right is my result. pretty, eh? (benjamin thinks it looks like the planets in spore. *grin grin*)

wow! people!

2006-10-18T19:42:00.000-05:00

i'm home this evening, waiting for benjamin to get home so we can watch an episode of star trek (that i acquired through PURELY LEGITIMATE means, REALLY). i was playing with the ol' blog earlier, so thought i'd take another look and see if anything could be improved.

ladies and gentlemen, my links are horrendously out of date.

so i picked one (dan h) and discovered bexx has a blog! i wasn't even sure she was still in the same hemisphere! she could have been married with triplets by now! i would never have known! heavens, thunk i, who else could be out there?!

that's right, my gentle readers. i spent the evening channeling my inner stalker.

some people i already knew about, in the back of my head: brian d, brett greene, msafiri kate (who has the most words in her full name of anyone i know) and her husband paul, mark, dan w, and dan p, for example. but i FOUND people like africanstealth, who's launching his musical career, and jolene, who's in the adirondacks teaching music to kids (i think).

and because i'm a geek, the exciting part wasn't that they're all blogging. no, i was excited that, well, they (almost) all have rss feeds, and i can syndicate them in my reader.

that's all. one of these days i'll have something interesting to say, i swear.

first snow, and other wonders

2006-10-18T16:02:00.000-05:00

ladies and gentlemen, i give you the first snow of the season, courtesy of my cameraphone! that was the early morning of october 13, same date as the buffalo snowstorm. since we only got a centimeter or so, hurrah! snow! bring on the ski season!

i finally fixed something on this site that's been bugging me for a while. when i transferred the site to its new home, i set up an 'oldblog' directory for it, fully intending to set up my homegrown, non-blogger system in short order.

obviously, that hasn't happened yet, and the hackish redirects i used (so ramblinations.com/blog/ woudn't be lost for eternity) are...well, hackish. so today i fixed it! thanks to the magic of apache's mod_rewrite, 'oldblog' has been replaced, in all instances, with 'blog'! and the beauty of it is, when i finally do set up my blogging system, 'blog' can point that instead! hurrah! life is good!

in other news, i used flickr for that image. nifty, and it doesn't use up my bandwidth. (i could use picasa as well, but they're not as well set up for random, individual images. here's hoping they move in that direction!)

gemma, darling!

2006-10-09T17:45:00.000-05:00

as some of you may know, i was named after a character on a british sitcom that my parents loved in the early eighties, when they lived in england. they found the series on vhs somewhere, and a nameless kind soul put the entire thing on dvd for them. hence, when i went to ithaca this past weekend, i met gemma palmer, my namesake. (or am i her namesake? *looks up "namesake"* well, i'll use the princeton definition and say we are namesakes of each other...)

favorite scene: gemma, in the process of remaking herself after her long-term boyfriend proves himself a complete imbecile, walks into a library and confronts the librarian, who once exhibited a lack of understanding toward gemma and a girlfriend. after setting said librarian straight about the state of her face ("crumpled newspaper"), gemma smiles sweetly, pulls a bicycle horn from her bag, and saunters from the library as a one-man band.

my father's comment: "did we name you well, or what?"

thanks for keeping things clear

2006-10-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

i've been accepted to the schulich school (say that a couple times, it's fun) of music at mcgill university for winter 2007.

you remember mcgill. i was accepted for fall 2005 and didn't go because there was this wedding i had to do, and then i was waitlisted this spring because my audition was mendelssohn-from-hell. thus thunk i, spectacular: benjamin can do his thing, i'll play in community orchestras and do local gigs, and the M.Mus. will wait until 2008. i'd planned to only take a year off, not three, but this could work.

then i got a call last week from a schulich admissions clerk: "hi gemma, you can come here in january if you want. you can even defer if january's not good. where should i send your acceptance package?"

i feel a little frozen--i'm being pulled, hard, in two opposing directions, and it's rendering me motionless. benjamin hasn't finished his degree yet; it wouldn't be fair to make him pull out to accomodate my obsession with a graduate degree that i may or may not put to good use. i have a fabulous job. getting into quebec to study is absurdly expensive. i'm not sure if benjamin would be allowed to work. i don't speak french.

on the other hand, it's mcgill. it's montreal. i love the city, i love the school, i love the practice rooms, i love the program (orchestral training), i love the campus. i'm not practicing hours a day; who knows if i'd even be able to get in again?

so at this point, if it occurs to you to pray, please do so. i don't know what god's telling us with this big present he dropped in our laps, and i don't know where he's taking us. trust is all well and good; what do you do when god points at you and says, "do something!"?

(interestingly, what frightens me isn't how benjamin and i will live once we've decided on whatever it is we're going to do. i know god cares for his people, etc. i'm frightened at what could happen to us, to our relationship--which is actually equally ridiculous, because *ahem* god cares for his people.)

in other news, i joined facebook, because i discovered almost everyone i know, including most of my family, is signed up. i'm lame that way.

gentoo, netgear, and dhcpcd

2006-09-26T06:47:00.000-05:00

i love fixing things in linux. it's so much more satisfying than fixing things in windows. my latest: flushing the dhcp client cache!

i use a netgear wgr614 wireless router and dhcp server for our home lan. hadn't had any problem with it, except that one of my port forwarding rules mysteriously disappeared. (it still existed, i just couldn't see that the port was open--or close it, for that matter.) not a huge deal, it wasn't a critical port. i'd been happily netgearing along until yesterday, when my gentoo box started receiving the wrong ip address. (the router does serve as a dhcp server, but i've got reserved ips for all our home machines.)

i'm sure a real geek would just shrugged, restarted the router, flushed the dhcp client cache, grumbled a bit over netgear's ineptitude, and gone on her merry way. i'm a networking ninny, so my first thought was to force the ip. worked half-way: i got the ip i wanted, and i could access the lan, but couldn't get outside the router. (i'm still a networking ninny; anyone want to explain why that is?) couldn't find any relevant info online--just lots of people from 2004 with no solution. took a look at the router again, and discovered it had reset ALL my port forwards to a completely bizarre destination ip. that's it,, thunk i. i reset the router to its factory defaults and re-configured it.

short interlude here; benjamin and i watched an episode of star trek (next generation). while in windows (i haven't set up xvid in gentoo yet), i noticed the ip address was correct! hurrah! it's fixed!

alas, 'twas not so in gentooland. i tried all kinds of things--setting the reserved ips to outside the dhcp server range, on both sides; changing dns settings and gateways (not that that should make any kind of difference); etc. finally, it occurred to me to check the mahvelous little dhcpcd tool, to see if it might have a solution built in. it's linux, after all.

i discovered -k: "Sends SIGHUP signal to the dhcpcd process associated with the specified interface if one is currently running. If dhcpcd receives SIGHUP it will send DHCP_RELEASE message to the server and destroy dhcpcd cache."

$ sudo dhcpcd -k eth1
$ sudo /etc/init.d/net.eth1 restart
$ sudo wpa_cli reassociate

bingo.

so now i feel a little ridiculous that it was such an easy fix, and that i wrote a book about it, but it was so satisfying!

rfc: buildage!

2006-09-17T17:45:00.000-05:00

i'm working on a redesign, thought i'd send a skeleton. it's mostly put together layout-wise, but i have (as usual) a couple quandries:

i really like the columns-on-the-right thing--you should see it at 1680x1050, it's awesome--but i don't know what to do with the rest of the content. you can't tell in the picture, but that little list on the left is a fixed-position mouse-over (pure css, naturally). it's ok there, but i know it'd be better elsewhere. just haven't figured out where, exactly.
i'm currently sending it as xhtml 1.1. trouble is, internet explorer--even ie 7--doesn't support it. i don't really need it, since i'm not building/using xhtml modules, so i could kick it back to xhtml 1.0. ie doesn't support that either, but it can be sent as regular html and still validate. naturally, there's a whole host of problems associated with sending xhtml as html, so at that point it'd almost make sense to just go back to html 4.01. interestingly, the w3c sends xhtml 1.1 for standards-compliant browsers and html 4.01 for everything else, which means they're actually changing the page code for different browsers. i could do that, but it'd be a lot of effort that i'm not sure i'm willing to put in for a browser that has absolutely no excuse for its noncompliance.

and why bother with xhtml at all you ask?

because i'm a geek
because i like my languages to make as much sense as possible
because i'm lazy, and making sure my xhtml validates keeps me honest

so much for my web adventures. i'm also playing with sqlite triggers and views, which is all kinds of crazy.

in other news, kylie was up for the weekend, so we all went to the beach this afternoon and played frisbee--probably one of the last opportunities we'll have, really.