I have some tea that I'm looking to swap/give away, is anyone interested? There's nothing wrong with any of them, I'm just interested in buying new teas and I have limited cupboard space. These are teas that other people have bought for me and while they're not really appealing to me, I'm sure others would like them!

This is what I have:

Lipton's Cinnamon Apple tea bags (17)
Bigelow's Vanilla Caramel tea bags (2)
Bigelow's Mint Medley tea bags (7)
Tazo's Calm loose tea (The canister lists a weight of 1.4 oz, and I've only brewed about two cups worth from it. No infuser.)

Feel free to request only part of what's offered (e.g. 6 of the Cinnamon Apple). I'm willing to mail to US and Canada.

Let me know if you want to do a swap, I have a few allergies/dietary restrictions but otherwise, I try to be adventurous.

1. I might have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with Glee. I watched Glee all day. LOVE Hulu.

1.1. Glee thoughts to come later, when I can be as giggly as I want without alcohol and without waking mom. But Kurt.<3 And his Dad! And Sue! And Puck.! I don't even like Puck but I still love him to bits.

2. Proof went up on Tuesday and closed on Tuesday. I could see some major errors. I only got called on 2 of them. (Namely, the transitions and the transition music. Will freely admit those were Bad.)

3. I wanted to get trashed out of my mind Tuesday night. I did not. I had 3 virgin margaritas and an entire pack of Twizzlers. And I totally didn't get hung over. :D

4. It's a bit weird not having to worry about evening rehearsals, props, sets, costumes, actors, techies...yeah. All that.

5. Omitted for a public entry.

6. I'm going to NCTC next weekend. Still debating on whether to use the X monologue from "Proof" or the Mother monologue from 1-900-Desperate.

7. Finals are rapidly approaching. It makes me wonder what happened to my semester.

8. This has been an amazing semester. I can legitimately say I have no true regrets from this semester. A bit sorry I didn't go out for Halloween, but that's okay. There's always next year.

9. Tomorrow night I'm going to see Avenue Q. Jerm is taking me to that and the Act 1 dinner preceding it. I'm really excited. I need more excuses to dress up.

10. By rights I should be furious with someone. It amazes me that I'm not.

11. While considering this, I think I decided that this person isn't worth the stress and everything else I put my body through by being angry. It at least feels right.

12. Oh! I was at Cracker Barrel on Thursday and I ordered off the kids menu. 3 chicken tenderloins, 1 side of mac and cheese and one cornbread muffin later, i was ready for a nap. And for less than 5 dollars!

13. And with that, I do believe I'll call it a night. I love you.

I have a Qt application I need to run on Mac OS X. It's going to be a "portable" application, as in, download the .app bundle inside a ZIP file and run it. No installs, no admin privileges assumed. Due to the way Mac OS X works, it is possible to take a regular, dynamically-linked executable that is linked to Qt and put the .dylib binaries (libQtCore.4.dylib, etc.) inside the bundle and the linker will find them.

This is pretty expensive in terms of application size, however, considering I am download the app from my home server which only has a 1Mbps uplink. If I split the Universal binaries into separate bundles and compress them in ZIP files, a single (i386 or ppc) download weighs in at about 6MB. This is not bad, but I wondered if I could go one better by using static linking to include Qt.

My question is this—is static linking intelligent enough to jettison functions of Qt that I don't touch at all, thus potentially further reducing the size of the resultant binary? I tried static linking on Linux and came up with a binary that was about 6MB, or around 3MB compressed using gzip or ZIP.

I can also configure out things I don't need (e.g. WebKit, SQL support, Qt3 compatibility) since I have to self-compile Qt anyway to get statically-linkable binaries on Mac OS X.

Thoughts?

Note to self: Tonight, after papers have been proofed, write about "Proof"!

Today in the News: ( At a time when political imbalance could have brought about real progress -- lobbyist corruption at the heart of the US government system is causing in-fighting in both parties that threaten to make the right-wing factions more radicalized than the Taliban, and the left-wing factions more corrupt than certain leaders in Africa... )

Take a Break is a magazine for old ladies about a dogs that rescue people from fires, crosswords, and how to clean stuborn stains with household objects. My mam showed me this weeks magazine as it had a 2 page article about how games were evil. It was a typical gish gallop (google it) with all the arguments and BS you've heard a million times before with single mothers sitting around the game tutting. It's odd they chose GTA though, kind of a bit late for that.

So, my mam has asked for my help in writing a letter to the magazine (yes, they still use those) complaining about it. Problem is because it's a gish gallop if I were to attack every lie, wrong, fallacy and half truth I'd end up with something like a noval. So I will try to get it to 3 paragraphs or less, I have to pick carefully. I also thought it would be interesting to see what others would have put.

I think I'd open by stating I don't really like GTA. Then move to the games being less violent then films argument. (against the genral idea that all games are evil.)

Go into games as an abstraction in the middle. (Pressing Y is as far removed from actual theft and murder as you can get)

I think I'd end with the games before sport argument. (the idea that games have never hurt anyone, whereas football is full of broken legs and hooliganism, and if games came first they would be trying to encourage games.)

You?

Thoughts on this?

http://www.citizenlink.org/CLtopstories/A000011452.cfm

Maine Churches Threatened Over Marriage Support

by Nima Reza, reporter

Opponents of Question 1 call on activists to turn churches in to the IRS in an attempt to revoke tax-exempt status.

Gay activists are encouraging people to report churches to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for supporting the effort to restore one man, one woman marriage in the recent election. According to the Maine Marriage Equality Web site, churches should be singled out for IRS investigation and possible revocation of the tax-exempt status.

The site provides information on how to file a complaint with the IRS, complaint forms, and address and fax information for the government entity.

Ken Graves, senior pastor at Calvary Chapel in Bangor, said they welcome the challenge.

"We know what the law is, what we're allowed to do," he said. "We've acted within the context of the law. We've directly consulted the ethics commission here in the state of Maine with regard to our political involvement."

Graves said they must stand up for biblical values.

"We just refuse to be held hostage, and held silent with the threat of the removal of our tax-exempt status," he said. "It's not the most important thing."

Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), said his group is offering free legal assistance to any church that becomes a target of the IRS.

"Churches and pastors have a right to support or oppose legislative efforts directly," he said, "as long it constitutes an insubstantial part of what they do overall."

He said the threat by homosexual activists is baseless.

"The IRS has established very clear guidelines and procedures on this issue," he said. "Supporting traditional marriage through a ballot initiative never even comes close to the threshold under the IRS rules."

this made me happy in ten different ways.

wonderful shit.

meanwhile:
I have insurnace, and tomorrow I am going to try to make an appointment with a doctor so they can make sure that my T-cells aren't attacking my thyroids in some sort of internal biologicla civil war that will one make my organs stop working
sweet!
plus: more work on gradschool apps! I shall be writing some personal statements! mmyeah. Then maybe even a trip to the library to pick up some plays i need to read to write about them for grad school apps and interviews.
this, my good friends, is called progress

I want to throw an epic fucking party.

I feel lost

My father is currently in the hospital. Not because of injury but because he was feeling deeply, crushingly depressed.
Before harming himself he had the good sense to check himself in for the next three days.

I don't know what to do, I love him to death but I feel powerless.

Any prayers you can offer would be enormously appreciated

Anyone else catch Glee last night? Specifically, the first 20 seconds?



Hot. Watching it reminded me of...



No wonder I date cheerleaders...

...time enough to start weighing in on what happened?

............

My opinion: Nidal Hasan was a 'damaged' person, disconnected from reality -- who happened to also be Muslim. Anti-Muslim sentiment in the US probably did not help Nidal's mental state, though it doesn't look like Fort Hood's social atmosphere carries much, if any, blame.

This tragedy could have been prevented. Nidal's job performance was suffering from his declining mental state. The armed forces, as well as the university classes Nidal attended, were negligent in detecting Nidal's mental issues. They both tolerated Nidal's problems, and tried to work through them, but that's not the same as dealing with them. The problems with the armed forces being able (or willing) to deal with metal difficulties within the ranks has been, and always will be, an ever developing issue.

Nidal's deployment orders were probably just the final straw, not the only reason. His reaction to his orders probably had little to do with any anti-war or religious war sentimentality - even if he believes it did. Nidal could also have snapped if they had simply given him orders to transfer to another location in the US that he was unfamiliar with.

None of this can rule out the possibility that some things may have pushed Nidal a bit, or that someone around or over Nidal's head had something against him.

Open ended:
I am concerned that Nidal got hold of a weapon many classify as a "cop-killer"...
I am not surprised by the right-wing's bigoted reactions to this incident; neo-con pundits have characteristically taken advantage of public fears, and bigotry is a reflection of fear. But mainly, bigotry is a human issue, not just a political one...
I wish that the armed forces might also take this chance to address the openly neo-nazi soldiers serving in their ranks. I want the army to squash any sentimentality they detect that hints to soldiers the current wars are religious wars. I would not want to see the armed forces crack down, or even over-scrutinize any soldiers that happen to be Muslim...
I detest the notion that dying in service automatically makes you a hero, but the reactions of those around the fallen were certainly heroic -- and that suggests they were all very heroic in nature. The actions of the living, reflect very well on the character of the fallen...
This isn't the first time a US Muslim soldier has killed other US soldiers, but it is the first time that seems mostly unrelated to anti-Muslim tensions, and that probably isn't just coincidental with it having the highest casualty rate of such an incident...
Nidal's e-mail contacts with a pro-jihad cleric are probably in line with Nidal's mental collapse, not the result of communicating and conspiring, though the conflict of giving a pro-jihad cleric access to soldiers really does test the First Amendment. That should be discussed...
It says a lot that the pro-jihad cleric called Nidal a hero, when it looks more as though Nidal was just a man who had brain waves crashing just short of the beach.

Sorry for the untimely nature of this post. Between recovery, work and MFF fun I've been far from LJ-inclined.

Friday was my official birthday. I'm an old(er) fart now. Since I have an amazing and understanding boyfriend, he said I could go out and be a deviant Friday night and have my birthday party Saturday night. So Friday, after work, I met up with folks to attend MIR (Mr. Intl Rubber for those of pure mind and body) events in the city. Ended up grabbing dinner with friends and then heading to Cell Block. Had an absolutely amazing time. Thanks jet_der_hundfor giving crash space to the drunk, old mutt!

Saturday morning I woke up relatively early, rode back to the burbs, said hello to my AMAZING boyfriend (who was already starting to cook for the evening's party), showered, changed and then headed back into the city after changing out the battery in the moto. I toured MIR's market for some time, resisting blowing the paycheck on hotness and instead finding a pretty awesome used Orca wetsuit that was in pristine shape. I feel better spending on things that serve a dual purpose (at least that helps me sleep at night). Eventually I made it back home, cleaned the house as wuf was passed out in bed, and got everything ready for the party. The party was atypically awesome. For some reason or another everything seemed to flow quite nicely throughout the night. We had plenty of food, beer, fire and "fuk u dolphins!!!". Thanks to everyone who showed up, thanks for all the fantastic booze and gifts (except for Street - your 40oz sucked :P) and thanks to my wonderful wufwuf for all the cooking and hard work you put into the fiesta!

Sunday we reluctantly woke up early to prep for a group ride with folks. 65F and sun IN NOVEMBER?? It was crazy nice and we got in a really good ride before the ground turns white. We went straight from the group ride to the last MFF meeting before the con :X The finish line is in sight. So after meeting fun, wuf and I headed downtown to meet up with the MIR crew again. Wuf was exhausted from the weekend's activities and worried about Chaos getting into post-party goodies, so he ended up calling it a night early. I decided to say in town and eventually made it to Sidetracks for Rubber + Showtunes night. Still sporting my 1-piece leathers, I kinda stood out like a sore thumb, but it's funny how many guys put moves on you if your bike is rockstar parked in front of the club. I got hit on a ton, told people I was already taken a ton and refused to take people on rides a ton :P It was a very flattering night and I had fun watching all my pervy friends get absolutely blasted on purples, reds and oranges. 

Because I am old and crap, it took me a bit to recover from all the fun. However, I've been joining wuf at Bally's now and digging into a pretty serious routine; much moreso than in workouts past. I'm even tracking my routines on my superior phone product! As much as working out at home was fine for minor things, I am glad he encouraged me to go ahead and take a plunge back into gym work. It's been touch and go finding machines that don't aggravate my back issues, but there should be plenty for me to break myself on :)

Thanks again everyone for all the bday wishes!

Several years ago, my parents discovered a nice little Italian restaurant that was kind of tucked away in the back of a strip mall. This is when I was living in San Francisco, and I only ate there once. It was a suprise birthday party for my brother. It was a pretty nice place. A well stocked bar, nice wine list, cloth napkins, and a big pizza oven in the middle.

A couple of years later, the pizza oven apparently caused a big fire, and the restaurant closed for many years, with signs appearing every now and then promising its return.

Last year, a house on the corner went on the market, and an old lady moved in. She proceeded to build a high wooden (back yard type) fence across her front entry. Then she removed the lawn and replaced it with sand and slate paving stones. This was followed by silk flowers stuck in the ground, crepe myrtle trees, a bamboo plant, canna lilies, some thorny palms... It's just hideous. A few weeks back she added a blue neon sign displaying the house's address number.

What does this have to do with the restaurant? Well, for a while one of those free-standing roadside pointy arrow sides appeared on her roof with the name "Mangola's" on the side. It looked as if the place had new owners.

The sign disappeared, and construction on the burned out wreck began. It eventually opened around the time the blue neon sign appeared. Could there be a connection?

Yes. Yes there is. You see, I recently dined at Mangola's. I have to say, it was the most surreal experience I've had that did not involve drugs.

The first sign of trouble was at the front door. One of those stupid 'animatronic' Halloween things came to life, scaring the bejeezus out of me. Another waited in the main entry. I hate those stupid things. Even more than that, I hate those Hallmark commercials featuring idiots who find them so clever and funny. Morons.

I don't know where to begin. The cute but shy young waiter sat us (Mother and I) down at a small table. I just sat there, mouth agape. There were neon signs up everywhere, with generic messages like, 'WINE' and 'ITALIAN FOOD.' Every conceivable kitchy electronic device hung from the walls or appeared on shelves. Blinking and flashing LEDs, neon signs, spinny things. A lava lamp sat next to the tip jar on an old school electric piano.

A piano being played by an old, balding gentleman. It was one of those that featued a number of different voices, drum machines, etc. He played many of the italian standards, like 'That's Amore' and 'Non piú andrai' from Mozart's Marraige of Figaro, along with a selection of bizarre tunes like 'Thus Spake Zarathustra,' complete with grandiose orchestral instrumentation. A rather eccentric middle aged woman sat at a table nearby watching him play. Later in the evening when he finished his set, he sat down with the lady, tucked a napkin into his shirt and ate spaghetti and meatballs, twirling the spaghetti on a spoon. I called my brother. "You have to see this."

This restaurant belonged in a Coen Brothers movie. I sat there for several minutes taking it all in. Was this place ironic, or did it take this all seriously? As the evening went on, it became more and more apparent that the proprieters were quite sincere. The place was practically deserted. A cheerful couple came in, were seated, and left five minutes later, laughing. I also saw a lot of wait staff standing around, which is a pretty common sight in restaurants now...

The food itself was actually pretty good, despite the huge, confusing menu. I guess they kept some of the old staff, or at least got the recipes. The bread sucked, though. Totally store bought. The coffee came with those little flavored creamers in the foil topped plastic thimbles.

As we left, we were greeted by the disturbing manager. Think Don Vito of Jackass fame, only balder. Crappy electronic halloween decorations screamed at us as we left.

The horror... the horror...

My brother and I decided it's some kind of mafia front business.

Not in today's market. Free home? I'd murder someone for it.

UGANDA: Helping Hand For Homophobia From U.S. Christians

I find it very interesting that one of the Ugandan bill's consultants, Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, equates Nazism and homosexuality. Yet, it's obvious to Pieter Oberholzer, who heads Inclusive and Affirming Ministries that the Ugandan bill reminds one of the ethnic cleansing of the Holocaust.

Any parent who does not denounce their lesbian daughter or gay son to the authorities face fines of 2,650 dollars or three years' imprisonment. Certain instances of "homosexual" activity carry a death sentence. Straight people who "enable" LGBT are prosecuted, organizations or ministries geared toward helping LGBT people are outlawed.

It's mahvelous that a group of "Christian" organizations and ministries all gave their input to make this bill what it is. It was all sparked by the fundamentalist Christians from the U.S. who identified homosexuality as a threat to "family values".

( Read more... )

Two days since surgery. Still too difficult to chew food, but I'm no longer groggy/nauseous and was able to return to work.

Well. Mostly. The nausea returned in the afternoon—seemingly triggered by REST-ful implementation of PUSH/DELETE at the office.

I'm no longer taking Vicodin. It's not meshing with me very well. Whatever pain relief it gives me is quickly accompanied by terrible itchiness, blurry vision and trouble breathing? Meh! Acetaminophen works just fine without the crazy side effects.

Xpost from my own journal, but thought I'd share what's been floating my Linux boat of late. This is all on a Mint 7 laptop, for reference.

> Midori - super speedy Webkit browser that gets better with each release. Scores 100/100 on Acid3. Currently locked in an arms race with Epiphany on my machine (for Chromium backup), and winning. Need to figure a few little niggles out (PDFs won't load via Mozplugger/Evince, for example), but it's still being developed and is looking really promising already.

> Totem - has YouTube support again, so I can search and play YouTube video direct in the player. Think it's done this for a while, but it's still a nice feature.

> Gnome-Do - Found a blog detailing how to install Do without Evolution dependencies by using a dummy libevolution. I've got an OCD about unused packages, so this was handy, as I use Claws for mail and didn't want half a tonne of Evolution sat around doing nothing.

> MiroTV - doing double duty as audio and videa aggregator.

> Chromium - YouTube5 extension to watch videos using HTML5 cleverness that I don't understand, but rather like from a standards point of view.

Gnome-Do really is epic. I know the iPeople will say they've had docks for an age, and they're right, but my God you can do EVERYTHING through Do - launch things, search for things, Tweet and Dent, edit files, the whole shebang. Wasn't convinced when I first tried it, but I'm rapidly becoming a fan.

All I need to do now is resist trying Karmic. Weird how when I was using Windows, I was spending ages trying to fix things, now I'm deliberately trying to break stuff!

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

By ee cummings - "I sing of Olaf glad and big"

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

Today in the News: ( Obama wants progress, but won't fight for it; many neo-cons still can't tell that Colbert is satirical; there are 237 millionaires in congress; there is a difference between the DFL and the DCCC... )

For those of you that have played the game on DS, you'll know what this is when it starts. All I can say is, I'm speechless :)