I have been freeloading, I must confess, on our neighbors’ WiFi connection. However, it doesn’t entirely work… I can use any internet program on it that I wish to, with the exception of a web browser. It is the same on both of my computers. (And there shall be no silly questions as to why I take two computers with me on vacation.)
So I sit here outside the (closed) library, freeloading off of them. And all that I have to talk about is my freeloading ways.
I think the universe is trying to tell me something.
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by Patti on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
in Ephemera
by Patti on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
in Ephemera
Sometimes I contemplate, in idle moments, getting a tattoo. My friend Sally then reminds me how bad tattoos look on sagging older skin. Then I see something like this, and now won’t be thinking of getting a tattoo ever again.
Posted via web from Patti’s posterous
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by Patti on Monday, June 29th, 2009
in Humor
Here’s a new iPhone app idea that I hope the programmers implement soon ;)
The shopping list you keep in Notes will be amended — “milk, eggs, deliver my eternal soul from nothingness.” Horizon One™ will send you e-mails from a you that is apparently drifting in a void, asking for help. They will become increasingly desperate, and frenzied. You will receive these e-mails until you realize that the void is life, and you are caught in its grip. Upon this epiphany, Horizon One™ will brick your phone, allowing you to see only the lock screen. The wallpaper has changed — a picture of you, in chains, forever screaming. Slide to unlock. Slide to unlock.
via AveryEdison.com: PROPOSAL — THE FIRST NIHILIST IPHONE APP.
by Patti on Friday, June 26th, 2009
in Ephemera
by Patti on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
in Ephemera
And they wonder why the print media are dying out…
And from the print-publisher-in-utter-denial file comes news that the Newport, RI Daily News is changing its pricing structure to punish people who want to read their news only online.
The Daily News will now charge $145 annually to a newspaper subscriber, $245 if a subscriber wants the paper and access to the paper’s Web site—and, if you can believe it, $345 if the subscriber only wants the Web site.
Yep, The Daily News is charging subscribers more than twice for its content online than for its printed edition.
Via Newspaper Death Watch: They’re Charging What?!
by Patti on Sunday, June 21st, 2009
in Ephemera
We were all in Hyannis Port this weekend to celebrate the wedding of our niece. I’ve got a few good pictures from it (and many of mediocre quality, alas). Here is our niece at the Sunday brunch, just before she and her new husband left for their honeymoon.
Buck, Kelly & Nick
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by Patti on Saturday, June 20th, 2009
in Ephemera
by Patti on Saturday, June 20th, 2009
in Ephemera
In 1979, somewhere in Dartmoor, a butterfly died. That would hardly have been an exceptional event, but this individual was a Large Blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) and it was the last of its kind in the United Kingdom. Over more than a century, the Large Blue’s population had been declining and it was finally declared nationally extinct 30 years ago.
Now, it’s back. A bold conservation effort managed to work out the factors behind the butterfly’s decline, and resurrect this vanished species. The Large Blue’s reintroduction has been one of conservation’s flagship successes and it was the first time that efforts to save a declining butterfly had actually paid off.
via How research saved the Large Blue butterfly : Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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by Patti on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
in Science
Even having gone through the gamut of researching strange-sounding healing methods when I was first diagnosed with cancer, I am still astonished at how resistant many people are to proper science and how it is done both in the medical field and in other areas. Here is one example.
Unfortunately, a frequent topic on SBM has been the anti-vaccine movement, personified these days by celebrity spokesmodel for Generation Rescue Jenny McCarthy and her dimmer than dim boyfriend comedian and actor Jim Carrey. Unfortunately, it is a topic that is unlikely to go away. We’ve all speculated why the anti-scientific emotion-based notion that vaccines somehow must cause autism persists in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, but I think the question goes much deeper than that because it’s not just about vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement is but one of the most visible components of a much deeper problem in our public discourse, a problem that values feelings and personal experience over evidence, compelling stories and anecdotes over science.
I’m referring to the Oprah-fication of medicine in America.
via Science-Based Medicine » The Oprah-fication of medicine.
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by Patti on Monday, June 15th, 2009
in music
I have, a couple of days ago, upgraded the WordPress here to version 2.8, which has been named Baker in honor of Chet Baker, an excellent jazz trumpet player and singer. I’ve loved his stuff ever since Let’s Get Lost was released, with its soundtrack. [WordPress releases always are nick-named after great jazz musicians.]
And, since it’s still Music Monday, here’s a bit for you.
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by Patti on Monday, June 15th, 2009
in music
Wow, another Music Monday (according to Twitter), just seven days since the last one.
This morning, I have already run into Bob Dylan, who has incidentally become a favorite of my son. My son misses the Sixties and the Seventies, which is very puzzling to me, since he wasn’t born until 1986. But hey, at least I brought him up to appreciate good music.
Well, when I was in the Seventies, I was a DJ at my university’s radio station, which I have told you all before. In the midst of it all came Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album, which is one of my favorite, though it is hardly as well known as his work from the Sixties. Grooveshark does not have the full album, but it has this song, rather haunting…
So continuing a previous thread, started when the allegations of torture were brought to the fore by the New York Times, we have this story…
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – A convicted terrorist can sue a former Bush administration lawyer for drafting the legal theories that led to his alleged torture, ruled a federal judge who said he was trying to balance a clash between war and the defense of personal freedoms.
[From Terrorist can sue over torture memos - Terrorism- msnbc.com]
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by Patti on Saturday, June 13th, 2009
in Ephemera
In 1797, Thomas Cadell made one of the greatest mistakes in publishing history. A Hampshire clergyman had written to him, offering a three-volume novel for publication by a first-time author. Without a word of encouragement, Cadell declined the book, manuscript unseen, by return of post.
Unfortunately for Cadell, the clergyman was the Revd George Austen, soliciting publication on his daughter Jane’s behalf, and the novel in question was an early version of Pride and Prejudice, recently voted the one book that the British nation can’t do without.
Posted via web from Patti’s posterous
So now not only did my logic board fry itself on Monday afternoon, the local Apple store — the only one in a two hour driving radius — was closed until today for remodeling.
When I arrived there shortly before opening time, I joined an actual crowd of us geeks hanging around the front of the store. The employees streamed out of the back rooms on the dot of 10:00 and greeted us with applause.
And so, I am now happy with the next incarnation of my computer on my lap. One lesson I have learned from this is: always back up your system to an external source!
I have been backing up my laptop with Time Machine to an external, portable disk drive. That is what saved me. I could rebuild my system with all of my programs and documents intact. If I had backed the thing up to another sector of my hard disk, like I think a lot of people do, it would still have required several more days and several more hundred dollars to retrieve the data from the old disk drive.
So I finish out the week, happy and self-righteous. I have to quit that latter emotion…
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by Patti on Friday, June 12th, 2009
in qotd
by Patti on Thursday, June 11th, 2009
in Ephemera
“It’s laughing with your friend at a time when you shouldn’t. It’s the sweat in your palms wanting to know someone you see and the pit in your stomach when they actually see you. It’s being touched by hands that aren’t your own. It’s the thrill of an escape that almost wasn’t. It’s the embarrassment you feel, naked for the first time. It’s helping a friend find something they lost. It’s a smile, a joke, a song. It’s what someone does that they like doing. It’s what someone does that they like remembering. It’s the thinking of things you may never do and the doing of things you may never have thought. It’s the road ahead and the road behind. It’s the first step and the last and every one in between, because they all make up the good life.“
— The Good Life
Posted via web from Patti’s posterous
This is the meaning of a Jew and Judaism, the very meaning of the word: To live in a state of sustained wonder. To know that there are things beyond human grasp. That the very existence of anything at all is beyond knowing. And then to strive to know.
— Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe
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