Both poem and proof. Bloody brilliant. Via Maradydd.
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(2)
05:53:07 PM,Thursday 14 May 2009
Temptation Blocker has changed my life. Seriously. A long day of play editing, which would normally have taken me eight to ten hours -- factoring in the constant alt-tabbing to Firefox and getting stuck in RSS-holes, and which I most likely would not have finished until three in the morning -- I managed to get done in a cool four and a half hours, before midnight, with a minimum of tooth-gnashing. Nothing short of miraculous. But the real test is coming up. My schoolyear CART work went a week and two days longer than I expected it to, which is nice, but as of Wednesday I'm freelance-only. I've decided that I get a pass on weekends, but every weekday I turn on my computer, I will immediately set Temptation Blocker to block Firefox for three hours. What I do with those hours is up to me. Hopefully I'll have some theater or transcription work to do. If not, I'll look for jobs, try to solve my brother's kickass Python puzzles, put on some music and clean the apartment -- whatever. But I'm going to start each weekday with three hours of non-slack. We'll see what happens.
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(3)
12:37:34 AM,Saturday 9 May 2009
Today my dad is 82. Since I'm 28, you can put our ages together and get a palindrome. I just think that's kind of cool. Also, my dad. Kind of really seriously damn cool. Love you, dad.
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(2)
11:38:24 PM,Wednesday 6 May 2009
Huh. Just found out about this, though it came out last summer. Haven't seen it yet, so am posting to remember it later. Apologies if it winds up sucking:
N., my favorite of the stories in Stephen King's most recent collection Just After Midnight, as an animated webcomic. I hope it lives up to the story, which was inspired by The Great God Pan, something I've been meaning to read for ages.
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04:55:00 PM,Wednesday 6 May 2009
Is it just me, or are the lyrics to this song rather more... hallucinatory than your typical 17th century bawdy ballad?
I mean, not even discussing the Dear Penthouse Letters thing in the beginning...
Dancing babies in the sky?
"The sun, moon, and stars are got all in my belly"?
And what the hell is he doing in the last two lines there?
I am baffled.
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(1)
09:42:03 PM,Tuesday 5 May 2009
Gorgeous Vivaldi aria over at The Rest is Noise. Definitely buying that album when my eMusic credits re-up.
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12:41:44 PM,Monday 4 May 2009
Hey, opera fans -- it's free Met Player Weekend. Good stuff.
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06:07:30 PM,Saturday 2 May 2009
CCP Adventure, Part the Fourth:
Well, I can definitely say I'm getting better at this damn test. It was a particularly good dictation -- nice and even, with simple words -- and I managed not to panic or shake or freak out. I felt pretty good all through the test, but then when it was over and I looked at the screen I saw seven errors in the last paragraph alone, so the outcome is by no means certain. I'm allowed 36 errors for the five-minute dictation. The first two times I took the test, I got over 60 errors, so they didn't even bother tabulating them. The third time, I estimate that I got fewer than 60, but there was that stupid double-spacing fiasco, which resulted in an instant fail, so I don't know how I actually did. This time I'm relatively confident that I got fewer than 60, but beyond that, I can't say. Maybe the seven errors in the last paragraph were a fluke, and the rest of the test was as clean as I thought it was when writing it. Maybe the whole thing is sloppy, in which case I'll be going back next November. Sigh. In my CART work, I look at the screen and correct whatever errors I make, then catch back up to the speaker in the pauses between words and at the ends of sentences. In tests, all the words are evenly spaced, so if I make an error, there's very little time to correct it. What usually happens when I look at the screen during a test is that I'll be word-perfect for the first minute or two, and then the second I see that I've made an error I start freaking out and my accuracy starts plunging. Keeping my eyes away from the screen works pretty well for that problem, but it may be that I'll just have to train myself to look at the screen and correct the errors I have time for while not allowing myself to spaz out over the ones I don't manage to fix. Tricky business. Anyway, I'll know in two months. I'm so ready to be done with this thing. But if not this time, the next.
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(1)
03:59:46 PM,Saturday 2 May 2009
Why speech recognition can't do my job:
"You would rather use an atypical antipsychotic, rather than a typical
neuroleptic. You're okay with that, right? What would you use for
bipolar? A typical or atypical? Atypical. Right."
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(8)
01:17:29 PM,Monday 27 April 2009
I'm almost done reading Learning to Program, having gone through it about a chapter per weekday (or, in long chapters, a section per weekday). I'm realizing more and more that I'm not going to be able to do what my friends and brothers did and just teach myself how to program. It's not something for which my brain is naturally configured. I read the narrative and understand the sentences, but when I get to the code, my eye just jumps down to the next block of narrative and I have to wrestle it back up and go through each line over and over, with excruciating deliberation. And then, as soon as I navigate away from the page, the code is wiped from my memory. I've memorized plenty of facts about Python. I can tell you what dictionaries and lists and lambda expressions and Tkinter are. I know lots of rules and trivia about the language and its components. I've read five or six Python handbooks by now, so it would be really pathetic if I couldn't do that much. But I still can't apply it to anything useful. I haven't internalized the syntax, much less the higher order stuff. It's like when I'm trying to find my way in a strange part of town. I can read a map just fine. I can orient myself and navigate to wherever I need to be, no problem. But I've got a horrid sense of direction, and the second I take my eyes off the map, I'm lost. So I can follow the steps of a simple program, nod my head at each one, say, "That makes sense" with perfect sincerity, and then as soon as I'm called upon to write something similar on my own, I blank. I'm not giving up, though. Unfortunately, this is my last week of work coming up, and it'll be living off savings for the summer, plus hustling for transcription jobs and whatever else I can dig up until fall, so it's not the right time to hire a private Python tutor. But I think it'll have to come to that, when I do have the money to spare. LIU is right near NYC Resistor, so maybe I can find someone to give me lessons there. I'm not giving up on this. All my life when something hasn't come easily I've dropped it. But I'm not going to let myself off the hook this time. I want to learn how to do this. It's just gonna take some mental grunt work.
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(7)
08:56:01 PM,Sunday 26 April 2009
I just saw that the drugstore is selling non-prescription colored contact lenses off the shelf for $20. And I'm telling this to my friends in a dozen different states by typing on my phone as I walk back to my apartment. I wish I could draw so I could have conversations with my Younger Self, Kate Beaton style, because all this would blow her mind.
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(1)
06:29:46 PM,Saturday 25 April 2009
Here, have a picture of William Burroughs standing next to a Sphinx.
"I was very embarrassed to admit to myself" came out "I was very embarrassed to add millet to myself".
Misstroke, not boundary error, but oy.
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11:39:13 PM,Friday 24 April 2009
Utterly lovely day. Walked around in the sunshine, transcribed an entire ophthalmology interview while in line for the Shake Shack, then got a fantastic cheeseburger and strawberry-rhubarb-toffee sundae. Shopped at Garden of Eden (was tempted to pick up more miracle berries, but resisted the urge), then came home to girl and cat. We've been making hummus and kolokithokeftedes while listening to Radio Dismuke. Then we'll eat our dinner and watch ourstories and be perfectly content. What a life this is!
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(1)
08:49:59 PM,Friday 24 April 2009
My brain, upon hearing that there's an enzyme known as 2d6:
"Huh-huh-huh! Can you buy it from THACO Research Corporation?"
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(2)
04:18:42 PM,Thursday 23 April 2009
Just hit 97% on a 180 Realtime Coach dictation, which is more syllabically dense and less evened-out than the actual CCP will be. Admittedly, it's on a dictation I'd done several times before, but it still feels good.
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(2)
12:13:28 AM,Tuesday 21 April 2009
"Popliteal": A) Baked Good, B) Pokemon, or C) Anatomical Term Signifying The Back of the Knee?
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(2)
11:16:52 PM,Wednesday 15 April 2009
This day has been as productive as a greased stoat in a sausage factory. I've done the following:
* Prepped the script of an Ionesco play
* CARTed three classes
* Edited three transcripts
* Transcribed an interview about Deform-Your-Cornea-While-U-Sleep contact lenses
* Sent in my taxes (I'd done my State and Federal 2008 taxes a while ago, but couldn't do my 2009 Estimated taxes until a particular check cleared, which happened today)
* Helped make dinner
* Did my badger dance while doing dishes
* Engaged the cat in many corrective bouts of Corporal Cuddling
I have 179 unread items on my Google Reader, but I feel accomplished.
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(13)
12:50:09 AM,Wednesday 15 April 2009
I like to play the Three Weirdest Things in a Drugstore game sometimes. Now, traditionally, that involves picking up a box of condoms and then two other things, with the intention of making the clerk eye you with wary revulsion, but I decided to play the condom-free version the other day. So I picked up (among a few other necessaries) braces wax, a corncob pipe, and a set of bath crayons. The braces wax and corncob pipe we haven't yet found a use for, but we've been putting the bath crayons to good use, leaving soppy notes to each other in the shower and decorating the bathroom tiles with flowering vines, columns, beets, and illustrations from Bryan and Pereene. Best impulse purchase in ages.
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(6)
09:44:26 PM,Sunday 12 April 2009
The company I do open captioning work for, C2, has a simple website with a mission statement, calendar, and links to theaters where they're captioning shows. Google has blocked it, saying it hosts malicious software. My boss has contacted his hosting company, and they swear it's Google's fault, not theirs. What's going on, and what can they do to get their website working again?
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(3)
11:23:39 PM,Thursday 9 April 2009
