Those who were reading this blog weeks ago a couple of months ago will remember the leak in our previous apartment, which culminated in our moving upstairs. I still have a key — I haven’t gotten around to moving the air-conditioner upstairs, though I surely will by the time holidays come — and I ended up going downstairs to search for the humidifier, which I figure will help with my cold. Guess what still hasn’t been fixed — not in nearly two months!?!? Yup, it’s been leaking, unaddressed, since we moved out. What method of maintenance is that? The, “Let …
Month: November 2008
General Stuffings
Been blindingly sick, but only off-and-on, for a few weeks, which explains why I have posted so very little here. But it has not been a slow few weeks, at all: I am finished with the albatross. No, Ringo and Paul, I did not declare, “I am the albatross” — I am no more albatross than I am walrus — I declared that I am finished with the albatross. The albatross being a project I should never have talked anyone else into, but I did, and thank heaven it’s over, and no, it was not worth it. In any sense. …
Best Morning Music
Manu Dibango, Wakafrica. 1994 album, but it feels like 1973. Which, in music anyway, can be a glorious thing! Wakafrica – Manu Dibango
I’m Sorry, and Who Are You Again?
Apologies for any typos you see: I’m still adjusting to the itty bitty keyboard on my Asus Eee and, well, you know… Someone I know recently told me how she has learned to take pleasure in refusing requests that make no sense. There will always be some people who will ask you to do something — often some work for them often unpaid. It’s all in how they ask, though. Sometimes I’m willing to do a favour for a friend, sometimes I’m glad to pitch in on a project for a good cause. When someone who is neither a friend …
Rewrite?
When the first written comment on your essay reads, “This borders on completely unreadable,” and the professor stops writing editorial marks a few pages in after complaining of the paper’s incomprehensibility having given him a headache, then you should not be surprised — let alone shocked — when he expects you to redraft the thing completely when you resubmit it for as a final draft.
Asus Eee, Ubuntu’d
Lime and I decided to get ourselves a couple of Asus Eee PCs. The way the won is doing, the prices are comparable enough that we stopped hesitating, especially since Lime needs something for studying and I need someone I can haul to class or to my office. (I got tired of carrying my HP Pavilion laptop in one back, and the class stuff in the other; this way, it all goes into one shoulder bag.) Mine is green, Lime’s is white. It took me a few hours to research how to install Ubuntu on it — someone’s remixed Ubuntu …
False Alarm
My last post involved muttering grumbles about proofreading. Well, good news and bad news: the bad news is that it wasn’t even for a project I’m connected to — it was for something else altogether, and nobody made that clear. It was just, “We need you to do X, we’ll renumerate as Y, the [ridiculous] deadline is Z.” Or at least, that was what I gathered from the phone call (in Korean) and the follow-up email (in English). I guess someone forgot to actually ask me if I had time/was willing to take on an extra proofreading gig. The good …
Grrr.
Note to all proofreaders: One sometimes must just say no. One such time is when all the begging, money offers, and other wiles are, you are fully aware, not going to incline you to once again drop all your bloody weekend plans at the last minute, without any warning, and fix typos and gunk that you’ve already marked as needing revision three times before. Because if you politely point out that the time constraints are just impossible, then what you’ll get is a promise that the thing will be sent to you Friday afternoon, and not Friday night. And no, …
Photo ID?
I was just getting my papers together to send off for my Criminal Record Check and I came across a ton of expired old ID cards. My student/faculty cards from undergrad and grad school (I was issued a student card and then, as a TA, soon after got a faculty card at Concordia); my old S.I.N. card (Social Insurance Number, for you non-Canadians); my Quebec Health Insurance card; and a few more odd cards. Not among them was my long-ago destroyed learner’s license, which even after it expired was useful for ID for a while, and as soon as it …
Gecko Tape? Oil-Defecating Bacteria? Spider Silk Construction Materials?
These are the kinds of things that end up in 8th grade conversational English textbooks when you let an SF writer do some of the content. (The spider silk was actually suggested to me: I just riffed on the theme of biotech.) It also happens to say a lot that anyone besides an SF writer could look at content like that for such a textbook and say, “Yeah, sure, why not?” Heck of a world we’re in, folks! But you know, biotech is at least more interesting than, “This is my sister. She is five years old.” Or some of …