Amy

http://victorialocal.blogspot.com/2009/12/dickens-exception.html

Some of you may recall that I really don't like Charles Dickens (or most of his contemporaries) but there is one notable exception and that is his novella, A Christmas Carol. Earlier this year, I did go to see the filmed-for-3D version starring Jim Carrey. I was expecting utter crap (like, say, Jim Carrey as the Grinch) but was pleasantly surprised -- aside from one ridiculous sequence, it kept close to the original text. Very close, actually. I would recommend seeing it (3D is not necessary to the experience, though.)

Tonight, we've been watching the George C. Scott version (from 1984) and to answer a question (how specific Dickens was in his description of the Ghost of Christmas Past), I looked up the original text on the internet archive (here's a very nice Putnam edition you can read online). Kiddo was reading it over my shoulder and asked to read the whole thing -- so I found a Project Gutenberg edition through Stanza and downloaded it to my iPod. She's now curled up on her bed reading Dickens. How awesome is that?

Of course, my favourite version is probably the Muppet Christmas Carol ("Light the lamp, not the rat!!") which I will watch sometime before the 25th.

Details back at this post:

http://ehintz.livejournal.com/606476.html

http://victorialocal.blogspot.com/2009/12/furniture-and-appliance-compromises.html

Sigh.

Our washing machine is on its last legs; mid-week I was pretty sure it was pining for the fjords. Before springing for a new washer, we decided to try a small load. Hubby used the perma-press setting and to my surprise, it made it through. We tried another, and another, and decided that this was the way to go. So, for now we just have to compromise and do more smaller loads until we can afford to replace it (and likely the dryer, too). I'm not too concerned, of course; the appliances were all included in the house purchase and the washer dryer were old and beat up when we inherited them.

Sigh #2

Ever since Kiddo was wee, and we bought a non-standard size crib (which she outgrew almost immediately), we seem to have made consistently questionable choices in beds for her. The only really good bed we had for her (well, we still have it, up in the attic) was the captain's bed but in her tiny room here, we felt like she needed more space so we bought the Tromsö loft bed from IKEA. But the clearance from the ceiling once the mattress was in place made it mostly useless. Still, she slept there until she came down with the flu (and flu+ladder=disaster). For whatever reason, we never put the mattress back up on the loft, letting her play up there with the padding of a couple of blankets.

So, when friends of ours let us know they had to get rid of an almost new twin bed because they are moving, we decided to buy it. Today, I manhandled it home (tied it to the top of the van and hoped that we would beat the rain -- we did) and into the house. I shoved things around in her room and heaved her mattress back up to the loft then started to move the new bed into place and wouldn't you know it? it didn't fit under the loft! I was ready to blame it on IKEA and their non-standard sizings (at least not standard in North America) but when I measured it then did a web search for "standard mattress sizes" I discovered that the new bed is an "extra long " twin. Huh. Never knew such a thing existed.

So, we have turned the new bed 90° under her loft -- it'll do for now but there is less than a 12 inches of clearance between the foot of the bed and the wall so it's far from ideal. Like the washer and dryer, we're just going to live with the compromise until after Christmas.

One of the projects I have running is a temperature monitor. I built a QK145 temperature monitor kit a few years ago and have been monitoring local temperature data for a few years now. However, the process I have monitoring and logging the temperature occasionally crashes with a bus error or illegal instruction or some other weird error. I don't know whether it's related to the old version of FreeBSD running the server, or dodgy hardware (memory?), a broken driver, or what. It doesn't happen often enough to get concerned about (yet).

Anyway, I got annoyed with having to restart the monitor if it happened to fall over. The result is relight, a small Python script that automatically restarts a process that crashes occasionally. Here's the usage:

Usage: ./relight.py [options] command args ...

        -n restarts
            number of restarts within a minute before we give up (default 5)
        -l logfile
            name of log file (default relight.log)
        -w wait
            seconds to wait between restarts (default 5)

Relight also comes with complete unit tests! It was a bit tricky to write automated tests that deliberately killed a process spawned by a child process (a "grandchild" process). But by having the grandchild process echo its own pid, the test code was able to read that and send a SIGKILL to the correct process.

i:

• am addicted to warmth and coziness
  
• am that i am
  
• am not pregnant
  
• am not yet excited for my trip to texas next week, but will concede that i am looking forward to it
  
• am not usually into expectations
  
• am definitely going to need new rain pants
  
• am happy to know you
  
• am going out to the bar at 10:20pm
  

  
  

• wonder what you're up to at this exact moment
  

Hodiaŭ mi miras vidi komentojn en diversaj blogoj de usonaj dekstremuloj plendantaj pri tio, ke hodiaŭ google montras Esperantan flagon pro la 150a datreveno de la naskiĝo de Zamenhof. Ili asertas, ke devas esti ia bildo pri la 218a datreveno de la usona "Bill of Rights". Ho ve. Ili verŝajne pretas interpreti ion ajn kiel atakon kontraŭ Usono. Mi (erare) supozis ke ĉiuj komprenas ke tiuj fojfoje unutagaj montroj de google estas nur amuzaj kapricaj aferoj, kiuj estas influitaj de proponoj de la publiko, kaj krome, ke 150a datreveno de io estas iom pli trafa ol la 218a por tiaj montroj. Sed por iuj konservativuloj, tia simpla montro verŝajne estas usona-malamanta survango...



Today I'm boggled to see comments in various blogs by US right-wingers complaining that today google is showing an Esperanto flag for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Zamenhof (who initiated Esperanto). They assert that there should be some image about the 218th anniversary of the US bill of rights. Sheesh. They are apparently ready to interpret anything at all as an attack on America. I (erroneously) supposed that everyone understands that those occasionally appearing one-day doodles by google are just amusing capricious things, which are influenced by proposals by the public, not to mention that the 150th anniversary of something is somewhat more eye-catching than the 218th for such displays. But for some conservatives, such a simply display is apparently an America-hating slap in the face...

My favorite such anti-Esperanto pro-USA comment is from here:

Hey all you ACLU, pro-leftists, anti-American, commie-loving, homo-marriage loving, pot smoking idiots: TODAY IS BILL OF RIGHTS DAY!!! WTF is wrong with you people???? Who gives a crap about a guy who wants a one-world language outside of English, really?! Oh yeah, that would be the PETA loving, vegan eating, no-bra-wearing, Al Franken-loving, George Bush took-down-the-towers, "I live my life by using one square of toilet paper and everyone else should be forced to do the same by Obama", idiots like you.....that's who! Choke on your Esperanto and your hatred for America!!

Me? I'll have the Bill of Rights and especially the First & Second ones, please!!!

i'm so thrilled to see the rain again. the cold, cold rain, getting colder in the darkness, harder to ride through with glasses on, the real portland winter. i was kind of wondering when the other shoe would drop, when our strange week of dry would evaporate.

yeah, i wasn't feeling too bad about the cold, all things considered. i'm gonna have to go all consumerist and buy some expensive rain pants because these cheap ones just aren't working even after the resealing. sigh.

i don't understand why they call it seasonal affective disorder. it seems more like a disaffected disorder.

strangely i'm not really one to suffer unduly in the dark months--i like the gloom just fine. the cold is tolerable, as is the wet--i commented to obsqurity this evening that i wasn't more of an all-weather cyclist here than i was in texas when i was similarly carless, in fact i do ride a bit less. however, i am more effective--i ride happier and i arrive in a better state; i don't stink & require a shower before i do anything else. but i still don't miss winter when it goes.

and hey, we totally get longer days in the summertime. the sweet, sweet summertime. suddenly i want lemonade and ice cream and a sun lamp after all. anyone wanna sail this city south to the tropics? if we take the whole thing, we don't even have to stop being awesome together. yeah?

I need the music, gimme some more (insert hairflip here)

Here's broadcast info for Radio NZ's recording of last year's Messiah at Town Hall:

Music Alive

Monday, 21 December

8:00 pm
Handel’s Messiah

Music Alive features a Wellington performance of Handel’s Messiah from Madeleine Pierard (soprano), Nicola Hooper (mezzo), Edmund Hintz (tenor), Hadleigh Adams (baritone), Tudor Consort, Wellington Orchestra conducted by Michael Stewart.

This programme was recorded in the Wellington Town Hall by Radio New Zealand

I just sent a resignation email to the Canterbury Gliding Club. I haven't been flying in something over a year, and I couldn't justify the continued membership expense if I'm not even going to fly.

Flying with Fault Line Flyers in Texas was pretty much a no-brainer for me at the time. It was about US$23 for a tow, and time in the air (glider rental) was a flat $3 or so per flight. I was living by myself and had plenty of time and enough money to spend on a weekend activity.

Here, a similar tow is about NZ$50, and glider rental is just under $1 per minute of flying time. As you can imagine, that adds up extremely quickly and the reality is it exceeds what I can justify for a weekend activity today. Especially since I like to spend weekend time with my wife (as one or both of us often seem to be busy during weeknights).

Coming to this conclusion was tough because I truly enjoy flying, but was always conscious of how much it cost. Naturally, that dampened the enjoyment somewhat. I realised that there are two types of leisure activities: those that have a marginal cost, and those that don't. Activities with a marginal cost are those where you have to shell out some amount of cash every time you do whatever it is. Gliding is definitely one of these activities; skiing, skydiving, and golfing are other examples. On the other hand, activities without a marginal cost usually require you to purchase equipment of some kind, but doing the activity just once doesn't cost anything. There are many examples of this: cycling, surfing, hiking, fishing, diving, even things like sailing or motorcycling (where the initial cost might be substantial). I have discovered that I'm a no-marginal-cost kind of guy. (Having said that, I'll still go skiing!)

Speaking of gliding, congratulations to Terry Delore who just yesterday broke the world distance gliding record with a 2501 km flight!

i've gotten my xmas shopping down to about 3 hours a year, discounting online "shopping" which is pretty instantaneous and done when i'm already on the computer for some other reason anyway. though i am a bit of an efficiency nut (see http://xkcd.com/85/), it doesn't actually make sense to optimize this further (i would spend more time educating someone who would shop for me, or spend more in iterations of "no, that's not it, try again")...and to be frank i do have that much stamina (not much more though--i sure hate shopping)--possibly accrued by a tolerance generated in trips to the grocery store, which is about the only place i spend more than 20 minutes shopping anytime during the rest of the year that isn't the bookstore, where i will gladly spend hours, because i love books, if not stores.

every year i wish i could spend more time making presents and less time shopping, but i just don't have more time. it's become clear to me this month that i have a hard time making time to create: these blog posts are working out ok but i did miss a couple days and i rarely spend more than 30 minutes on them anyway (dark_knightly probably disagrees with that time estimate, since she often awaits my completion, but it doesn't feel like it takes that much time to me.). i've been trying to craft some stuff for my secret santa (hmm, i am her secret santa, which makes her, what, my secret santa-ee? secret giftee? there needs to be a non-awkward indirect object form of that term. quick, someone come up with something clever!) and when i'm not busy, i'm drained or needing quality girlfriend time. i guess having a girlfriend is a huge time sink, but the love is worth that and more, so, phooey. back to needing more hours in a day! (the story of my life). or i need to work less.

i wonder if i worked less, if i'd purchase less. i feel like if i had an extra 10 hours a week, maybe i would be brewing my own beer, making my own pasta from flour (but would i buy a pasta-making tool? i guess i'd need one...), and maybe fixing more stuff or doing things the hard way (handsaw instead of jigsaw? i don't feel like i'm careful enough to make do without some of the advanced technology and get any level of polish on anything i make that isn't written). so i'd just be more squeezed for money (i'm not now, but i would be if i kept my current lifestyle with a third less salary). it might be an interesting experiment if ever i feel like the economy is reasonable for job-quitting-without-having-replacement-lined-up to take a month where i have nothing but time and see what my consumption habits are. i'd certainly eat out less--at the moment it's at about 1x/day since unless i make an effort to take lunch i'll just grab something from a restaurant, but it's clear that i don't spend that much on lunches compared to what i spend cooking at home--i eat better at home, and thus spend at least as much on my orange juice and fancy bacon, bread, and butter than i do on a cheap burrito.

the real dent in my pocketbook from consuming is food and drink. and mostly drink, at that. i probably spend a few hundred bucks a month at bars, sometimes more (if i go out i usually buy drinks for someone else, or several someones in addition to myself). but i also spend several hundred bucks a month on food/drink for home, for me and dark_knightly. and i don't think i'd want to eat less well, or start clipping coupons. but maybe it'd be worth suffering a bit on eating fancy & clipping coupons--a worthwhile price of doing everything i want (not working, and making time for all the things i want to do, like painting my house, crafting, organizing my garage, personal computing/programming projects which i have stacked about 10 high and never spend a lick of time on, doing stuff outside that isn't biking, doing yoga/stretching, reading, writing...sigh.) as you can see from my list i don't even have a ton of variety in there, and none of the things i feel i'm not getting enough of are totally frivolous (except maybe reading? that was always escapism for me. but i mean things like playing video games or watching videos/movies.)

when i didn't work for almost a year i got bored and i didn't create more, or do more really, though i did spend more time outdoors (rollerbladed probably a hundred miles a week, hiked a fair amount). i guess now i have a little more motivation. or perhaps broader interests than i did in 2001? in the end i'm just not sure i would do more "productive" stuff than i do now. or that i'd feel better for doing it, if i did. nah, i guess i would feel better. stupid protestant work ethic. why do i even have that, as a recovering catholic? bah.

this post lacks a stunning conclusion. what do you make of it?

http://victorialocal.blogspot.com/2009/12/vancouver-embargo-begins.html

A while back, we earned a free night with our "usual" hotel chain and we had to use it before Dec 25th or lose it. We chose to use it in order to facilitate one last shopping spree in Vancouver before the International Sporting Event That Shall Not Be Named (ISETSNBN) descends, bringing with it all manner of neo-fascist f**kery¹.

We rolled out on a 9 am ferry, dining in style in the Pacific Buffet. After a brief stop to fuel up, we headed for Aberdeen Mall -- Hubby hung with Kiddo in the play zone while I did some damage in Daiso. As luck would have it, Friday turned out to be Midnight Madness at IKEA -- specials every hour and crowds to go with it, but we got two new cabinets and more media storage for the living room plus a few other bits and pieces.

After all that, we returned to the hotel exhausted. Sunday we picked up my Mother in Law from the ferries and ventured into DressSew Supplies downtown -- frustrating to get there but we left with two bags of fabric, trim, notions and costume pieces. Next stop was T, then lunch and a few stores in the Kits neighbourhood. Our last stop was to stock up on some Asian imports at Yaohan Centre in Richmond before it was back to the ferries and another trip to the buffet.

Today was planned to be a quiet day but turned out to be a lot of work as we built and installed new IKEA purchases, sorted and reorganized our crap (why? to make room for MORE crap, of course! Sigh.) and swept up two or three rabbits worth of dust bunnies from the corners. That was followed by an attempted computer rescue for my Mom (her machine froze and she had no way to get past the blue error screen without a rescue disk). Unfortunately, there was to be no rescue -- it's still in limbo. Once home, there was still filing and laundry waiting. Ugh.

This week will be busy: five days of work and Hubby has meeting-palooza this week plus Kiddo has two evening performances of her Holiday Concert. At least Friday is my last workday and Kiddo's last school day until January.


¹Yeah, I'm more than a little bitter after actually trying to navigate through the "transportation improvements" -- slowly crawling past the many signs stating No Stopping Feb-Mar.

I recently started working for The Planet at their headquarters in downtown Houston. As a result of being downtown parking is limited. Most of us have to pay for car parking (motorcycle parking is freely available under the building and there's a bike rack available). However, the company will pay for a bus pass for employees. So I can either pay to park my car, pay for gas, pay for more frequent maintenance, pay for more tires/brakes/etc, or I can take the bus for free.

Yes, believe it or not, even car-enthusiast me has gone for the bus.

I'm not entirely happy with this. I dislike the lack of autonomy. I don't particularly need autonomy. My work is flexible enough to generally allow me to leave when I need to for the bus. We pass off tasks between each other regularly, so, "I need to catch the bus, here's what's going on with this..." is fine. I have a lot of options for busses to take home, so if my schedule does need to vary somewhat, I can adjust for it. The only "valid" (not selfish?) reasons I have for not liking the bus are the time I spend sitting outside, waiting on busses, in the cold, and the added time the bus takes over driving (both because the bus moves slower than a car and because the bus runs on their schedule, not mine).

What other alternatives do I have? Well, I have a bicycle. Work is less than 5 miles, on the street, from home. I could absolutely bike that. There are a few problems, though. First, there aren't showers at work. While that's not much of a problem this time of year, it will be one. Second, my schedule currently has me going home in the dark. My current bicycle is not equipped for riding in the dark. I've had bikes equipped for riding in the dark in the past, though, and I'm just not comfortable with that. Drivers do not see me, even with lights, and I'm not comfortable riding in the dark through some of the neighborhoods I'd go through.

So... Remember that free motorcycle parking I mentioned? I've wanted a motorcycle for some time, and that would give me the autonomy I want. It'd probably cost me more than just paying for car parking, if you ascribe all the motorcycle costs to the commute. But since I want a motorcycle anyway, just for fun, I don't think that's fair (in the same way I wouldn't assign all the costs for my fun MX-5 to a commute). Yes, I know, commuting on a motorcycle is dangerous. I have a route selected that I think is relatively low risk. I'll still have to watch for those idiots in cars who don't look at anything outside their vehicle (see my crash in the car earlier this year), but the route offers good escape routes, roads in good condition (for Houston), and relatively low congestion. Commuting on a motorcycle in the rain also sucks for a lot of reasons. I'll keep the bus pass and be using that in the rain, at least at first. I'll see how things go on the motorcycle and decide if I want to get some rain gear or not later.

Does this long, rambling post have a point? I suppose it does. I have to admit, I'm a selfish American. I've tried riding the bus, and I find it acceptable. Functional, tolerable, only occasionally frustrating. Even so, I find myself wanting autonomous transportation, and being American, yet again, I'm turning to the internal combustion engine. And I'm not even looking at a small little scooter that'd meet my needs well. Noooo, I want a big 500cc sportbike!

At least 500cc is a lot less than the 6.2L of a Corvette engine? *hides*

today i bought art! this is where i should show you a picture of it but i am lame and have no such picture. rest assured it's adorkable--donkey kong fan art titled "i'm getting rescued by a plumber?" for one. but it was a neat art show--all works $30, all 8" square (some cheated a little and were 2x 8x8, or were cut into interesting shapes, but at least a thousand of them where on display and most were the little squares. there was some fabulous stuff, most of which i didn't really want on my walls though it was really interesting to look at, but the space had hundreds of people in (after all--guaranteed $30 art? kinda cool, right? i thought so, at least), so i grabbed and dashed to places less agoraphobic/firehazardriffic.

today i bought chicken! i contemplate once again but do not particularly seek fulfillment in the knowledge quest, where do they get all those tiny wings and legs to make the buffalo chicken bits? and whose idea was it anyway to make them so hot as to be reminiscent of nucleartacos? anyway, i loved and hated that person as i coasted through the afternoon on an endorphin buzz/afterglow, but now my colon is hanging out making "wtf?" type faces at me and gesticulating kind of wildly. you know, as colons do. not that i'm planning to stop the heated self-abuse anytime soon...

today i woke up at 6:20 am to entertain and feed very chilly bikers on one of the major bike thoroughfares here, as we do monthly. november and december are hard, not merely because of the guaranteeably cruddy weather but also because we usually do it on the last friday of every month and nobody bikes to work the day after thanksgiving (us volunteers included) nor the one after xmas. so instead in december we celebrate the feast of santa lucia for some reason which i've never quite grasped, other than it being mid-december for easier access. today, i dressed up as the virgen de guadalupe--red dress, blue mantle, because her feast day is tomorrow and we thought ol santa lucia needed some competition. nothing quite as breezy as wind chill of 13 in a dress. ok, i was wearing clothes underneath, including a jacket and windbreaking pants. but my toesies and fingersies were quite cold, i assure you. fortunately the sun rise was totally worth getting up for, and theta444 made awesome hot chocolate, so there's that.

right now in my bike bag i have one of those chemical-infused burns-anywhere firelogs despite not having a working fireplace (more on that later, though the short version is that's how i bought it), but i'm about to go on a bike ride, in the 80% likely freezing rain. so we'll want a fire when we arrive, because, brr! won't be no 13-feeling though. this evening was warm enough to eschew jackets and doublegloves and hats and scarf on the way home, so i have high hopes for this evening not getting miserable. but it should be fun to bike out to some remote location, start a bonfire and quaff some beer and even warm bevs from people smart enough to have pre-purchased same. i just bought one today from amazon but it'll get here days too late to be of use right now. oh, internet shopping, how good you usually are to me and how sad it is when you're not.

so there's a bag-ful of misc. enjoy it, or don't!

http://verydemotivational.com/2009/12/09/everywhere-the-deaf-are-befuddled/

http://www.videosift.com/video/Conan-asks-Harrison-Ford-about-the-Star-Wars-Holiday-Special

t-minus 10 days until i arrive in texas--more or less on the nose from when i'm composing this. it will be interesting to see how it looks and feels as a now-committed resident of portland--a landowner. (hey, i own like 2% of my house now! and 2% of my yard is enough to pitch a tent on. so yay?) i'll be in austin from the evening of the 19th til the morning of the 24th and i encourage you to invite me out to your event that will serendipitously be happening during those days, or just speak up if you want to see me and i'll make sure you're appraised of happy hours or we can try to corner some one-on-one time. i'll no doubt have mornings and afternoons to fill, and will be squeezing in a lot of stuff to make the most of my time with the people i miss, so try me. you know how i roll--i can sleep when i'm dead (ok, i'm still a sleep slut but i could afford tn miss a little since i won't be suffering the energy drain of sitting in my half-cubicle all day.

it's funny--i know that my life is like a stream, always changed by what has already happened, never the same stream twice. but i often feel like a return to austin or fort worth is a return to a different time in my life: an earlier, alternate-reality-feeling, different me. it feels as though time has stood still in my absence, for no new memories based in that environment have been created, so that new building seems to have sprung into existence overnight, and how did my favorite bike shop move across town in the blink of an eye? fortunately i'm a slut for nostalgia (today is apparently slut day as well as hump day, i've been overusing that term all damn slutty day) so it's almost always a pleasant experience, if a big cognitively-dissonant. it's also a good time to reflect on how different i feel than the last time i made a memory, say on UT campus, or at Chuy's incredible tex-mex or even just at shaynabelle's home, so i'm sure you'll hear some more from me on that note while i'm down there.

i wonder when i'll spend my first entire year in portland. (i've never spent an entire year apart from the family, at most just xmas->xmas (i think)) i'm really tired of plane travel and it's bad for the environment (kind of nullifies the not-driving-a-car worth of pollution saved, as i understand it), but i still trek back to my old stomping ground on this annual pilgrimmage. my family is delighted to reunite and i am too, i just wish there were a way to do it without the travel. or that i had enough time and gumption to make it on my own power or in some less objectionable fashion (amtrak?), then i might enjoy my trip with no reservations. except for the ones for my tickets on the train...

ah well, for now i'll just bask in the fact that it at least fits several of my life goals: having fun, having meaningful communication, and facilitating joy.

I've only had a bit of time to work on the Psil compiler, but it's coming along well. The compiler now generates Python AST code for many kinds of examples.

As mentioned previously, I've tried annotating the AST with line and column information to help locate Python runtime errors. The representation of lists that I'm currently using (just a Python list) doesn't leave a lot of room to store the extra annotation information. For example, the code:

(print (+ foo 5))

is represented as the following Python lists:

[Symbol("print"), [Symbol("+"), Symbol("foo"), 5]]

There's not a lot of room in this representation to store source line annotations. The first thing I tried was to declare a global DebugInfo dictionary, indexed by the id() of the list (Python's id() represents a unique identifier such as a machine address). So for example, the above debug info might be:

DebugInfo[123456] = [(1, 2), (1, 8)]
DebugInfo[123460] = [(1, 9), (1, 11), (1, 15)]

The first DebugInfo[123456] represents the starting line and column of each element in the first (outer) list. The second DebugInfo[123460] represents the same for the three elements of the inner list. This seemed like a great idea, and it was poised to work well for small examples. However, after some more complex examples particularly including macro expansion (very common in a Lisp language), the original code was garbage collected and the addresses of lists were re-used, causing the DebugInfo addresses to align with different source lists! This was tricky to track down.

I've moved that code to another branch until I figure out what to do with it. I may be able to manage it by not letting the original code as read from the source be garbage collected (by keeping a reference somewhere else), that could work. The information only needs to be kept during the compile phase, as soon as it's embedded in the AST it doesn't need to hang around any longer.

Anyway, more work needed. Just writing this post helped me sort out some ideas. Source on GitHub.

allow me to rail for a moment. i wish that i was still alight with the passion and fury that i had earlier today when i twittered about the pain that ticketmaster had caused me, but really, i feel quite better, which is what this post is about.

first, the background, because i do still feel that ticketmaster is evil, and want to put it to you that this is a service organization that fails in the primary goal of being helpful. now, as a business, its primary goal is to make money and to be certain it succeeds handily there, by charging exorbitant rates for the privilege of handling your transaction---seriously, last time i tried to buy tickets through them the inconvenience charge was over 50% of the actual ticket cost. fortunately my primary ticketmaster-served venue has a physical box office a few blocks from my office so i trundle over there and save 50% of the ticket price as a result. i pay my $1 service fee, which handily compensates the ticketperson for their time, and i walk away with a physical ticket, which would have solved all the problems from the episode that had me aflame. said flameage occurred because i bought a ticket online for a venue whose location i did not know (turns out it's effectively on my way home from anywhere, but i was unaware at the time), but all of the delivery options cost a ton of money so i decided to do "outlet pickup" which still cost a buck (outrage! you already charged me SO MUCH! and now you're charging me to go somewhere other than the venue and get the thing i already bought, which i will not use except for 1 second at the doorway to this venue?!). turns out that outlet pickup only works up til 48 hours before the show (nowhere on their website does it say that it will NO LONGER work to walk into an outlet at that point), and also, they want the credit card you used to buy the ticket. unfortunately, not only had that credit card literally broken in half, but my bank had failed and been bailed out and "bought" by chase. so, yeah, i don't have that card anymore--it had been replaced and re-homed to a new institution, despite being a debit card attached to the same account. today ticketbastard told me definitively that i won't be getting my money back from them. how i would be thrilled to take them to court and recover my $31.55. yeah, at this point it's totally not worth my time, i've already lost more time in the pursuit than the money would pay for. but i hate to give this corporation my money for services not rendered.

however, the mere act of pursuing the chase to its end, whining about it on twitter, and writing a letter to the venue, and the only other venue i've been to in town that uses the bastard's services really made me feel fine. at peace, even. i've discharged my duty and i can't allow them to own me enough to bring the poison of anger into my mind. i'm smiling now, happy that i chased the rabbit down the hole, but not willing to spend the rest of the afternoon chasing it, despite the adventures it might lead to.

so today i ponder the amazing power of catharsis--a purging of emotional tensions, as webster has it, to bring balance back to emotions, happiness back to this psyche, and allow me to go on with my life without resentment.

but fear not, i shall never give ticketmaster another cent. that will mean missing some shows, and getting lesser seats to others, and that will be ok. because i'll be speaking my mind with my money, and i'll be pursuing the course i deem right. and that'll keep me feeling good.

what catharsis have you experienced that moved you?

it's cold here, about as cold as i remember it getting in texas. ok, not that cold to be fair, but between the rather cold actual temperature, the extreme wetness of the air (ice forms spontaneously on the outside of glass, the grass, etc), and a 12 mph wind, it feels colder than colorado felt at 5 degrees, even though the wind chill temp isn't really that low.

still, biking today was rather intense and left me feeling worse than i have in awhile, even when skiing, hiking, or rollerblading in worse temperatures in colorado. perhaps it was due to being somewhat undergeared in the hand/foot department, leading to very cold fingers and toes. i did learn in a couple tries a good way to kind of mummify my head with a scarf using the helmet to hold it in place so that i felt pretty ok over most of the face, which was my only exposed flesh, and then only in a small zone, since between glasses and improvised balaclava, hat/gloves/jacket/pants/socks/shoes i was pretty well covered. but i could have used extra socks, and my ski gloves + wool gloves only kept the hands warm for about an hour in the cold before fingers started getting complainy.

i guess part of the problem with biking in the extreme cold is that you add to the wind chill. and i looked up why wettish cold air feels colder, and there are a lot of contributing physics factors.

we rode out to the portland version of the trail of lights and it was very meh. there is more excitement in a quarter mile of the trail of lights in austin, and the stuff is WAY denser. i'll have to go check it out while i'm down there to see if my memory is lying to me, but being able to spin around under that what, 100' tall tree-o-lights in zilker is amazing...also, the portland version costs $5 and still has ads. wtf?

tomorrow will be just as cold as this morning. i'm gonna wear the ski gloves again. and maybe the ski goggles--saw a dude doing that on the way home and said "wow, that's smart." hope you're staying warm, wherever you are.

http://victorialocal.blogspot.com/2009/12/contrary-logicand-random-thoughts.html

Apparently, I had PeGeStuDoMo all wrong. I shouldn't have told anyone what I was doing and that is why I failed. (Actually, I figure I failed because I am a gold medalist** in procrastination)

Kiddo has requested all vegetarian meals this week --perfectly doable but it's making me crave steak and click on every link that mentions food -- which meant I found this curiosity (that would be great if I liked peppermint lattes) and this wonderful tale of determination not to waste food.

Finally, just for fun, here's a great ad from LG -- more or less a PSA asking people to think before they text, "Give it a ponder." There is a whole series of these. They make me smile.



**hey, here's hoping VanOC doesn't come after me for saying "gold medalist."