Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
"Comfortingly geometric" came out "comforting ligament Rick".
_
respond?
(2)
03:55:31 PM,Thursday 9 April 2009
"Some of you see shellac" came out "Some of you seashell lack".
_
respond?
(1)
02:02:28 PM,Thursday 9 April 2009
Hal and Selegiline embraced passionately in the pergolide, to which they had repaired after surreptitiously slipping away from the hustle and bustle of Chiral Center. "O! O, Halothane," cried Selegiline, savoring the way his full name felt as it slipped past her pouting red lips, "How handsome and brave you are! But I fear that this can never be." "Why, whatever do you mean, Selegiline?" asked Hal, his chiseled brows knotting and unknotting in their perplexity. "You know I am promised to another. I wear his ring -- his... oh, I can hardly speak of it. His benzene ring! He bestowed it upon me last night. I didn't want to tell you, for I feared you would never forgive me." "Ha!" laughed Hal dismissively. "Speak you of that lipophilic tyramine Tolcapone? I spit on his name." "But he is the master criminal of Chiral Center!" "Master criminal? Ha!" Hal laughed again. "Back where I come from, when people hear the name Tolcapone, they don't quiver in their boots. They hiss, they scoff, they catechol. Do you know what his nickname was among my folk? El Dopa! The only man too stupid to cross the blood-brain barrier. Methohexital, woman, don't you understand? He's just trying to etomidate you! Now stand back and let midazolam. I'll make sure he takes a propofol."
_
respond?
(1)
12:39:28 AM,Wednesday 8 April 2009
For someone who, in the last 24 hours, has had to deal with:
* Food poisoning
* Disposing of a dead mouse
* The cat making a ridiculous amount of noise for about 10 hours in a row last night
(We're not sure whether or not the latter had anything to do with the former, but we're hoping it did and that he'll actually let us sleep tonight)
* Transcribing an interview about a form of eczema that makes people go blind
* Captioning Samuel Beckett
Man, I freaking love Il Giardino Armonico. I know I've mentioned this before. But they truly can do no wrong by me. I love that they play on priceless period instruments like they're made of springs, spit, and sawdust. I love that their director is a sopranino recorder virtuoso:
And I love that they came out with an album called The House of the Devil. Tonight I downloaded it off of eMusic and shook my booty 'til the roof came down. Just a truckload of heartynge all round.
_
respond?
11:45:39 PM,Friday 27 March 2009
Just to see what would happen, I just did a 180 WPM CRR readiness test on Realtime Coach using my old steno machine while sitting on the couch. I got an 89%. Then I moved to my desk chair and tried again with the same dictation on my new (and newly recalibrated, after getting it back from the shop last week) steno machine. I got 96%, which is the minimum passing score for the CRR. (The CRR is the skills portion of the CCP. I've already passed the written portion.) This is promising.
_
respond?
10:35:05 PM,Monday 23 March 2009
Dude, why have I never heard of Giorgione before? What a fantastic picture. (Linked rather than embedded because I guess breastfeeding could be considered NSFW.)
_
respond?
03:11:22 PM,Monday 23 March 2009
I just used my cell phone to look up "telephone keypad" on Wikipedia in order to figure out the numbers that corresponded to the first three letters of my last name so I could postpone my term of jury duty. The qwerty keypad giveth and the qwerty keypad taketh away.
_
respond?
01:23:06 PM,Monday 23 March 2009
And just for the hell of it, here's another. This is not exactly a mix; it's a renaming and rearrangement of tracks from a single album. I found Julian Curwin's Tango Saloon shortly after reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and as I listened to it, my fevered brain heard every single track on the album reverberating eerily with some element of those books. It was uncanny but weirdly compelling, so I went with it. Song titles may contain mild spoilers for the series, so I'm linking to it rather than embedding it.
I felt guilty about not having burned the blogswap CDs yet, so here's an online preview:
I'll still burn them and send them out, though. Soon. I swear.
_
respond?
05:40:43 PM,Saturday 21 March 2009
Mock Turtle Soup: For all of your early '90s screensaver nostalgia needs.
So yeah, I just installed After Dark's Starry Night on my XP machine, and it's making me absurdly happy. It feels pretty silly to say such a thing, but I used to sit watching this screensaver for hours, imagining myself living in a huge faceless city, sitting up high in the darkness and watching the lights go on one by one. Now I do live here, and I love it like crazy. Not that I can see skyscrapers from my window; in Washington Heights most of the buildings top out at about six floors. Also, our view is pretty much just the building across the alley, with occasional cameos by the bleach-blond photographer guy and the hot boys in cutoffs he likes to shoot on his roof. But the screensaver captures the feeling of the city, and I love it.
_
respond?
10:56:39 PM,Thursday 19 March 2009
What should my brain even do with something like this?!
_
respond?
(9)
06:13:38 PM,Thursday 19 March 2009
"Binds to beta", due to a key sensitivity error plus a stacking error (the steno machine is currently in the shop), came out "bind tosspot".
_
respond?
11:59:42 PM,Friday 13 March 2009
In 10 years, will .com, .org, et cetera have gone the way of Pennsylvania 65000? How about five years?
_
respond?
(5)
08:58:34 PM,Thursday 12 March 2009
Update on my perpetual war against slackitude:
I've been using Manic Time, which is like Visual Time Analyzer but prettier, more useful, and free. The support is also pretty fantastic; I emailed them about a problem I was having with the program counting my time spent in Total Eclipse as idle, because for whatever reason steno strokes don't count as keystrokes, and the next day they actually sent me an alternative version of the program (which they'd developed at the request of a previous user) that didn't go idle unless the screensaver was engaged. Seriously impressive. I turn it on whenever I'm using my computer for anything other than realtime CART or captioning, so the blue work line up there only measures work done on my own time, not any of the 23 hours a week I spend CARTing or the ~14 hours per month I spend previewing and captioning theater shows. So work primarily consists of editing class transcripts, transcribing ophthalmology interviews, and prepping or editing scripts to be captioned. Web work (the dark blue line at the bottom) measures when I use Firefox for non-slacky purposes like work email or filling in invoices, though I'm less rigorous about tagging it than I could be.
I've also been using Procrastination Killer and Temptation Blocker, with relatively good success. The latter is particularly useful for long stretches of script editing, because I don't need the internet for that, and the former is great for transcription work, where I can work for ten minutes, break for two, and then look up all the words I need to double-check at the end, after I'm done typing up the interview. What they're not good for is class transcript editing, because that work is almost all spell-checking, and so cutting off my access to Firefox isn't practical. I've got Leechblocker set to cut me off from my three top time wasters (BLT, LJ, and Google Reader) after two hours, but I almost never exceed that amount, since so much of what I read on there sends me off to other websites that can't be blocked categorically; according to Manic Time, I've been on the internet for four hours today, but Leechblocker says I've still got almost half an hour left. Also, I've found that getting recreational internet as a reward for a sufficient interval of labor is more effective than cutting me off after I've reached a specified quota of slack, because it means I'm more likely to start working right away and sprint to my first reward interval, rather than using up my whole quota of slack before I even get down to work and then finding myself even more bound by inertia than when I first turned on the computer.
I wish there were a browser that only allowed me to access Google and pages linked from it with a depth of a single page -- excluding certain specified pages like my timewasters above; being able to hit the reader tab or type in "askeladden.livejournal.com/friends" would rather defeat the purpose. That would be enough for me to do the research I needed, without letting me get sucked into my habitual braintraps. Then I could use that browser whenever I needed to work, and lock up Firefox for rationed leisure use. Or I could grow some self-control already, but we've heard that tune before. Anyway, next week is spring break, so I'm going to try to be on the computer as little as possible and instead spend time cleaning the apartment and finally getting my blogswap mixes burned and sent out. Trudge, trudge.
_
respond?
(7)
03:51:57 PM,Thursday 12 March 2009
"An unabridged dictionary? Is that really on the top of our list of necessary household items? Then again, if we get one, we won't really need a food processor; we can just pulverize all our food by hand. Wham! Wham!"
_
respond?
(2)
09:16:59 PM,Tuesday 10 March 2009
"Red states and blue states" came out "Red sedates bluetits".
Ay, ay, ay. Beginning to think I really need to send my steno machine off for servicing. The stacking, clicking, and key sensitivity errors are driving me meshugga.
_
respond?
11:49:01 PM,Friday 6 March 2009
Reposted from a Facebook thread on Augustine-themed limericks:
An orchardman cried in despair,
"Augustine, I hope you're aware:
This cowardly stealing
is far from appealing --
so why don't you just grow a pear?"
Slightly dirtier (though textually supported) one under rot13:
