Biscuit of the Day - Bluetooth Political Expression

Today's Biscuit of the Day is expressing one's political ideas through the use of Bluetooth. Normally, being a Lindsaytarian, I tend to stay out of the political fray. Being a party of only oneself tends to let you do that.

However, I can't help but point out this bit of silliness from the Kerry side of the voting population.

Bluetooth Users Against Bush

Basically, the site tells you how to use cellular phones and bluetooth enabled PDAs to make political statements.

Unfortunately, I cannot locate a bluetoothusersagainstnader.com or bluetoothusersagainstkerry.com site, otherwise I would post those too for objectivity's sake.

However, according to this source, they have inspired another site, Blueroots.org where you can start your own bluetooth campaign for your personal pet issues.

-- Aeryth

Biscuit of the Day - Ibn Jakh

The biscuit of the day is a poem by an Arabic poet, Ibn Jakh. I've been really interested in the culture of the Middle East (particularly Morocco), and thought I would include a contribution from this area of the world.

Many thanks to this source for posting and providing samples and a nice analysis of the themes in such beautiful poetry.

-- Aeryth

FAREWELL, by Ibn Jakh (11th century, Andalusian) translated by Emilio Garcia Gomez & Cola Franzen.

On the morning they left
we said goodbye
filled with sadness
for the absence to come.
 
 
Inside the palanquins
on the camels' backs
I saw their faces beautiful as moons
behind veils of golden cloth.
 
 
Beneath the veils
tears crept like scorpions
over the fragrant roses
of their cheeks.
 
 
These scorpions do not harm
the cheek they mark.
They save their sting
for the heart of the sorrowful lover.

Biscuit of the Day - Eudora Welty

Today's Biscuit of the Day features the well-beloved Southern author, Eudora Welty. Unfortunately, I am not able to link to her short stories, as they appear to be still under copyright.

However, here is an article containing excerpts of her writing, so you can get a taste of her writing style. Her books are treasures and good reads, as she does an excellent job of crystallizing people's characters in words, as well as capturing the essence, both genteel and less refined, of the Deep South.

-- Aeryth

Biscuit of the Day - Frank Stockton

Today's Biscuit of the Day is The Tiger, or the Lady by Frank Stockton. This featured story is from a collection of shorts located at this short story site (no specific title provided).

-- Aeryth

Biscuit of the Day - Guy de Maupassant

Today's Biscuit of the Day features the French author, Guy de Maupassant. It's a charming short story called:

The Jewels of M. Lantin

I would like to thank The Short Story Classics: The Best From the Masters of the Genre for providing and organizing such an excellent collection of literature.

-- Aeryth

Coming Soon....

I am restructuring this blog to hopefully bring in some more focus to my entries and provide some organization since blogger doesn't support doing categories like LiveJournal does. My current blog will be split into 3:

A Day In My iLife - My personal journal of events happening in my life. This will also contain thoughts on computer stuff and that sort of thing.

The Daily Tea Biscuit - An eclectic collection of tea reviews, short stories that go well with tea, interesting news articles, and other things relevant to the tea drinker's lifestyle.

And finally, The Munchkin Review - (This is named as such because I am so short). I plan to review the movies I watch from my Netflix queue as well as dissect popular movies currently in the theater.

As I get everything together, I will put up the links to the new bloglets.

-- Aeryth

British Invasion

Went and saw the movie I, Robot this weekend. Overall, I really enjoyed it and would definitely go to see it again if I had time. I hope to do a more in-depth dissection of it sometime in the future, once my big exam is over with on Monday.

My mom bought and brought into the house a new culinary addiction for me: the chocolate covered British digestive biscuit! After tasting this little bit of heaven on earth, I'm convinced this little biscuit is a British plot of revenge for our American revolution by enslaving us with an addiction to yummy oval crackers. Either way, I think I'm going to have to stop by the store to get some more tomorrow. I guess the best way to describe these little guys is Brit-style Cadbury's chocolate on a semi sweet cracker base.

Diet killer biscuit

Review of different tea biscuits and digestive biscuits


I can't say much about their other food though. Some of my coworkers have gone over there and lost weight because the normal food is not too edible. I've heard descriptions of their salsa as lumpy ketchup. Bleh! I've also been chewed out on the phone by Britlanders for being an American and having dates formatted different from everywhere else in the world. My response was that we kicked their butts in the American Revolution and thus earned rights to format dates anyway we like. Oh well.

-- Aeryth

More Blogs

Added a new blog to my list of links. It's a blog by the "Incredible Hulk" of comic book origin. I like this part:

"Hulk saw movie about bug-man and it was good but needed more smashing.

AND HULK DID NOT GET SNIFFLY DURING ROMANTIC SCENES SO IF YOU HEAR IRON MAN OR THOR TALKING ABOUT IT THEY ARE LIARS."

I wonder how long it will be before Corporate America starts suing the pants off of these people? :( Too bad, because this is way better than anything coming out of the Hollywood scene.

-- Aeryth

Firefox trumps IE, according to Microsoft

According to Slate *cough* Microsoft, users should use Firefox (a stripped down Mozilla browser), rather than Internet Exploder (did I say that??) ;-)

See the article for yourself --

Firefox over Mozilla, sez MS child company.

-- Speedy browsing,

Aeryth

College transfer joy

One less day to graduation... Spent the day running back and forth getting ready to transfer credits to the new college I'm going to. I've decided for right now that since I'm working on getting my nursing degree, I'm going to get a 2 yr associate's degree, get some experience under my belt, then head back to university to get a 4 year degree with the RN to BSN program. As a result, since my university doesn't offer 2 year associate's, I'm having to transfer to community college.

I went to the local college and was pleasantly surprised. My current university is showing its age (most buildings on campus were built in the 70s, when the giant box with no windows academic building look was in). The science labs are even more dated (asbestos, the 1960s product of the Future! *cough shredded lung up*). The community college was probably built in the early 90s, has a nice airy feel, and I'm sure the labs are considerably more updated.

Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I know it's no Ivy League education, but after being out of school for so long and having to pay bills on my own, I'm just grateful for the opportunity to be able to go to school anywhere that is compatible with my full time work now. My mom is really being supportive of me retiring to become a nurse, and she's actually offered me information on classes relevant to allied health (medical coding and other items of interest to med techs). My dad is proud too, mostly because he knows it's not easy going back to school after being out 5, 6 years.

Keep on truckin',

-- Aeryth

Kaffeklatch or Fun With Legal Stimulants

TGIF! Right now, I'm enjoying some really yummy dessert coffee, Millstone's Chocolate Velvet. Mom got me this nifty little device from Melitta that lets you brew a single cup. All you have to do is boil water, put in a #2 filter in this cone that fits on a cup, and slowly pour in the water (basically being your own coffee maker).

It's not too shabby. I've messed with it a couple of times, and the only alteration I would make is to put in 3 tsps of coffee, instead of the 2 on the label. It's fun for trying out different flavored coffees, that way you can make one cup without forcing the whole household to drink or having to throw a pot out.

My heart is very near and dear to tea, however. I probably have like 15 types of tea between my house and work. Tea is a much more gentle and subtle stimulant than coffee, and also the whole brewing thing is relaxing. You drop in a tea bag, and the water around slowly blooms with color until it fully develops like a picture. The different teas also have distinct layers and an intricacy to their taste you don't find in coffee.

I remember going to Whole Foods one time, and picking up some Taylor's and Harrogate's, an imported tea from the UK. All of a sudden, I felt a tapping on my shoulder and I turned around and there was a tiny, wizened elderly couple. With very distinct British accents and a homesick tone to their voice, they asked me if I was from the UK. Unfortunately, I had to tell them I was from the States, but as I work for a company based in the UK, I was able to talk to them about their county, Yorkshire. They recommended that I go to Betty's, a traditional tea room that hasn't changed much since the early 1900s. Anyways, tea brought us together, and I was happy to bring back memories of their homeland.

Happy drinking,

-- Aeryth

Obsession, or What Separates the Ladies from the Girls

Day 3 on the Loraine project. She and my 1ghz G4 successfully see each other now, although the G4 software is too new for the poor old SE to mount any shares on the newer machine. I have an NT box that is getting updated so it can run a system 7 style server so hopefully the SE will see that.

I watched the first disc of Serial Experiment: Lain last night. It wasn't exactly the best anime I've seen, but it still ranks up there as pretty good. In it, a young girl seemingly communicates with the dead inadvertently through her computer, aka the Navi. The plot was pretty twisty, but Lain's character metamorphosis from young, popular schoolgirl to obsessive computer geek was pretty gripping and amusing to watch. The movie was filled with Apple and BeOS references. Lain's Navi was from a Japanese company whose name translates to "Orange". :) She had a portable Newton-inspired hand held Navi. There are small computers in the series that look like a sharp-edged iMac.

Lain's dilemma of finding out why she could talk with the dead struck a chord with me as a software engineer. I realized in our field, you cannot survive or do well without an ample dose of obsession. Mostly because the majority of people would find the long hours sitting behind a console typing, testing, compiling over and over to perfection boring or repetitive. However, I've watched my colleagues and myself play siege against a particularly nasty bug for hours on end. Even when the bug is in the OS, the challenge to our programming honor is enough that it genuinely bothers us to have let something go broken or unsolved.

I think this generalization applies to all the creative fields. Artists will take the most mundane things normal humans see no potential in, such as small tiles. They repeat actions over and over to make a beautiful work of art, such as a mosaic. Steve Jobs is notoriously obsessive over his company's products, which are famous worldwide for their beauty and design. The Woz, when he still did work for Apple, was as obsessive over the beauty of the Apple's internal design of motherboards. Lain obsesses over her problems until she transcends them entirely and enters a more beautiful realm of existence.

Well, enough heavy thought for now. I will probably continue obsessing over my herd of Macs until Loraine is online. However, to celebrate me deciphering Localtalk and the version compatibility problems, I have added more movies to the Netflix queue. New on the list are some classic Woody Allen (Purple Rose of Cairo, Sleeper) and Romeo + Juliet.

-- Aeryth

Loraine

Right now, I'm kicking back with a cuppa spearmint tea! It really quenches the thirst and is cooling, so I can sort of see why Southerners are so fond of their mint juleps. Slowly but surely making progress on the old SE. I found out that its/her name is Loraine. :) No files on the filesystem have been changed later than 1998, so it's kind of like a time capsule and sort of ghostly to see hints of the previous users' lives. I think about all the things that have changed since 1998.

* I graduated high school (class o' 98)
* The rise and fall of the dot com industry
* teeny tiny cell phones everywhere (my nokia from the time is like a brick now)
* looming y2k fears are gone
* broadband everywhere (it was a big deal to have ISDN back then)
* a new president
* teeny tiny laptops
* rise of the SUVs
* lowering of pants' waistbands
* IPO fashionability
* the metamorphosis of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears (remember how they used to be cute?)

Most of these things revolve around developments in the tech field. I consider myself blessed to have been able to work with and watch some incredible technology rise, become dominant (and sometimes fall). It doesn't seem like it's been 6 years though... Amazing how time flies, huh?

-- Aeryth

Progress on Macintosh SE

A status update on my Macintosh SE. It's now connected to my ethernet router through a bunch of localtalk boxes and a localtalk-ethernet bridge. The bridge appears to be running fine. I see the old SE trying to ping AppleShare servers out across the network.

The only problem that I'm running into now is transferring files to/from my modern G4s. I have a USB floppy disk, but apparently those don't support the SE's old 800k floppy format (hey, it's a 17 year old standard, what do you expect?). Also, AppleShare, the file server protocol, doesn't come with the consumer edition of OS X, only the server.

However, I may have a solution for that. Microsoft released their own AppleShare program called Microsoft Services for Macintosh. I'm hoping to be able to install that on a Virtual PC so I can get the SE to talk to the Virtual PC and snag files needed to update the SE.

Once the SE is updated to run MacTCP, it will be able to communicate with its grandbabies, the G4s, in a much more normal way. I'm not sure what I will do with it once this is done, but I think it will make a cool unix terminal for administering and controlling the G4s via telnet.

-- Aeryth

Elderly Macs on the Internet

Finally took my last test yesterday! It feels so great to have everything done. I have today to enjoy as "vacation", then I'm back at school tomorrow for the second summer semester, Developmental Psychology. This should be a pretty cool class, learning about how little kids and adolescents work. I know enough people who are still mentally teenager(s), that some of the concepts will apply to adults as well. ;-)

I have a fun little sideproject going right now that is keeping me entertained. I have adopted an elderly circa 1987 Macintosh SE. It is currently in the process of being connected to the internet. One might ask why you would want to put a 17 year old machine on the internet, but I say why not? I love the style of the Classic Macintoshes (the "cute" Macs most of us probably remember), and it makes me sad to see old computers abandoned.

-- Aeryth

Modern Rebels

Taking a brief break from studying... Saw today that Marlon Brando passed away at the age of 80. God bless the Godfather, and hope he is safely in the arms of God the father. In homage, I've added a ton of his movies to my Netflix queue. I loved A Streetcar Named Desire. I actually read the book before I saw the movie. Gritty and emotional pretty much sums up the tone of the book, and passion and impulse is faithfully translated into the movie as well. Considering this movie was released in the 50s (era of the Beav, Disney, rigid conformity, and the Hayes code), the emotional frankness and Brando's burly, unkempt character performance is even more striking.

Also added James Dean, the other quintessential 50s rebel. He just had one really major movie, but I felt it wasn't fair to put Brando in the queue by himself.

My SO and I watched 50 First Dates yesterday. For an Adam Sandler vehicle, it really shined! Normally, I'm not that much into his movies. Sandler tends to concentrate on isolated humorous situations to the point the plot is disjointed and simply becomes a weak attempt to join multiple SNL skits into a movie. However, his romance with Drew Barrymore was sweet without being syrupy and his situational humor was funny without overpowering the story. Bravo!

Well, back to the grind of studying for this test......

New iMac?

It looks like Apple should be releasing new iMacs this upcoming September. Maybe with shiny new G5s?

http://news.com.com/Apple+delays+new+iMac/2100-1041_3-5255095.html?tag=st_lh

-- Aeryth