Because I'm fickle

Gone to WordPress.com

Please consider clicking through to read the new blog, Because That Would Be Nice Of You, Reader.

Bye now,

D.

Twitter favourite

"I have decided to become a tiny woman from the Philippines."

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Stopped for the night on a gravel road surrounded by spinnifex, cooked tea on a fire and used my shower bag for the 1st time."

- twocrowsdown, Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Rode my bike on a 25 mile loop over lunch. Bicycle broke down at mile 12.555555555555555. Yep."

- matthewbaldwin (Matthew Baldwin), Twitter

Cold dark winter morning

I'm sitting here at the computer, 05:06 am in a cold dark winter morning, and apparently I'm awake.

My phone got a message from Twitter/EQTW at 04:23 am and it said this:

EQTW: {EQ&TW} Loc
al Tsunami Informatio
n:
TSUNAMI INFORMA
TION STATEMENT N
UMBER 1
NWS PACIFIC TSUN
AMI WARNIN..
http://tinyurl.com/5nx7
3x

I don't know how to make the phone stop doing the line breaks like that.

I only noticed this tweet because I was already awake and hadn't gone back to sleep. My phone rings on silent/vibrate because all the available ringtones are so hideous, and the sound of the vibration is so loud I can hear any call from hundreds of kilometres away anyway, though usually that's not enough to wake me from sleep.

Anyway. Tsunami Information Statement. I didn't want to get out of bed to check the information online because:
(a) it's cold;
(b) last time I got out of bed to check a tsunami information tweet online it was about nothing and said no action was required;
(c) there had been no earlier tweets about earthquakes (except this objection was easy to overrule - Twitter is so unreliable there could have been 50 earthquakes and it might not have told anybody);
(d) it was only 04:23 am and it's a cold dark winter morning.

Finally I did get out of bed because:
(a) maybe there was a real tsunami;
(b) if there was a real tsunami and everybody on low-lying areas (e.g. my sister and her family, or my parents) were killed, that'd make for a pretty bad day later on;
(c) maybe there was a real tsunami.

But there wasn't a real tsunami. The relevant earthquake was only a magnitude of 3.0 (3.0?!) off the coast of Hawaii, and presumably tsunami notification peoples there were being hyper-vigilant about letting folks know there's NO ACTION REQUIRED.

That's good. Of course.

And now it's 05:23 am and outside it's dark dark dark and inside it's cold cold cold. And I will now have another cup of tea.

This has been my morning. Welcome to it.

(Brought to you by 22 minutes of rewriting and editing. Should it have taken that long? Why, no! Now where's that cup of tea, then?)

Twitter favourite

"Up at 4:45 to watch the meteor shower, I carry a folding chair out on to the driveway and look up: nothing. Clouds. A raindrop hits my face."

- Morning_Porch (Dave Bonta), Twitter

quote

[Aunt Dahlia] "Have you ever heard of Market Snodsbury Grammar School?"

[Bertram Wooster, narrator] "Never."

"It's a grammar school at Market Snodsbury."

I told her a little frigidly that I had divined as much.

"Well, how was I to know that a man with a mind like yours would grasp it so quickly?" she protested.

- P. G. Wodehouse, Right ho, Jeeves, Project Gutenberg e-book

Twitter favourite

"I'm not a native speaker and it snows."

- ttseco (Theo Tsecouras), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Four priests at the Requiem Mass yesterday and none of them spotted my heathen soul. I'm calling bullshit on their magic superpowers."

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"sad to read on Facebook that 'George Orwell has no recent activity'"

- cpev (Charlie Peverett), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"OMG, I wrote a derogatory tweet about some random person I heard on the radio and it turns out he follows me. This is my finest hour."

- matthewbaldwin (Matthew Baldwin), Twitter

Twitter favourite

Me, to the two wild turkeys wandering the Oakland Rose Garden: "Hey, jive turkeys!"
Turkeys "Wobwobwob."
Bystander: Quickly looks away.

- evany, Twitter

vi.sualize.us

This morning I saw ReadWriteWeb's 3 cool sites to bookmark your favorite images on the Web, and now I'm trying one of the sites: vi.sualize.us (my account).

As the article says, "You can think of it as the Delicious for images", and vi.sualize.us really is very Delicious-like, complete with a Firefox extension, tags, and a history page for each item.

When you see an image you'd like to bookmark (and provided you have the Firefox extension - I don't know how it works with other browsers), you just right-click it and then fill in the details on a little pop-up window. Each saved image links back to the original, and vi.sualize.us does encourage people to look for the author's name - which is more than can be said for any other site I've seen. (Take a look at some Delicious links, for example; hardly any of them name the author.)

There are probably hideous and horrible copyright implications, but bah phooey. Cite your sources. Share your work. Cross your fingers.

Twitter favourite

From Splendour in the Grass, a music festival at Byron Bay:

"Disappointed with BlueJuice. prob better before singer broke arm and leg."

- jxe520 (Ed), Twitter

discovery

Notice anything unusual about those tins?

Answer: both labels use the same blue. I was absurdly proud of myself for discovering that.

And in further news, did you know that "WD-40" (the name of the product on the right-hand side) means "Water Displacement, 40th formula"? It was invented by Norman B. Larsen in 1953. See Wikipedia: WD-40 and Norm Larsen

UPDATE
From its own website, WD-40 was created by the Rocket Chemical Company and its staff of three (two of them unnamed). Plus if you want to get technical about it, the name WD-40 actually stands for "Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try".

Twitter favourite

"On Twitter, one must be pithy, succinct and concise. Brevity counts, too. Avoid verbosity, loquaciousness and redundancy. Get to the point."

- howardowens (Howard Owens), Twitter

Twitter favourite

'I love ending bedtime stories for my nieces and nephews with "..and they haven't caught the killer to this day. Well, goodnight!" [CLICK]'

- Tony_D (Tony Delgrosso), Twitter

quote

"That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold."

- Moby Dick by Herman Melville, installment 51 of 260 from DailyLit

Twitter favourite

Salon for haircut. Lady nxt to me is in love w/ my hair & asked her stylist to give her my color. They're holding my head up to color charts.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Twitter favourites

me: is it plugged in?
lady: yes.
me: is it plugged into the right thing?
lady: oh...no.

- jaredvenezia, Twitter

- - -

zach: the comp. doesnt work
me: did u turn it on
zach: yea ass
me: even the switch on back
zach: (sound of switch) shut the hell up

- slinetty, Twitter

- - -

guy: can you come fix my pc?
me: fine. (walks over)
guy: uh...it's working now that you're here.
me: go in peace. your faith has healed you.

- jaredvenezia, Twitter

Brown Cuckoo-Dove

Brown Cuckoo-Dove (Macropygia amboinensis)
(And I do so hope "macropygia" is pronounced macro-pig-ia.)

The book** says these birds live along most of Australia's east coast and are generally quite common, but I've never seen any before. There were three of them here, but I think these photos probably show just the same one in each shot.

I feel like I should apologise for the above-average crappiness of the photos, but no, let's not.

** Jim Flegg & N. Longmore, Birds of Australia, Surry Hills: Reader's Digest, 1994, ISBN 0864384262, p. 168.

Twitter favourite

"Officially 100 days until Election Day. If you're not already outraged about something please contact the campaign for your assignment."

- jdickerson (John Dickerson), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, 'FAIL.'"

- hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Food-shopping for our 2-day car trip. How many packets of cashews to get me across the Balkans?"

- sgazzetti, Twitter

A blogging project: x365

An interesting idea:

"Dan Waber turned 40 on January 12th, 2006, and wanted to mark the occasion in some positive fashion. So he got this crazy idea (not an unusual event) to write 40 words (no more, no less) every day for a year, and each day he'd write about a different person (in no particular order) who touched his life. But not just anyone, it has to be someone he's actually met in person, someone whose name he still remembers."

- How x365 got started

I'm kinda sorta maybe interested in trying it myself, except that right now even trying to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the introductions to these quotes is proving to be SOMEWHAT LESS THAN ENJOYABLE.

Here's some nice work from Nathan at Okay City: x365, who - being 27 at the time - had only 27 words per post to work with:

- - -

18 August 2007
300 - B.

"She came bounding up the first day of summer, dressed head to toe in lime-green, exclaiming brightly, 'Wake up! It's Monday!' My dislike was misplaced, but deep."

- - -

26 September 2007
339 - H.

"A fabulous Texas woman, with a heart as big as her purse, and hair as big as her heart, both as big as that huge Texas sky."

- - -

18 October 2007
361 - Dr. H.

"My college advisor was a great Old Testament scholar and biblical archaeologist with a sunny disposition and bright blue eyes that never, ever blinked. Like, never ever."

- - -

UPDATE
I've read a bit more of some x365 work and think it would be better if participants didn't name the people they're talking about. Some of the stuff I've seen is so breathtakingly mean, it's hard to believe the writer would put his/her own name to it, let alone name the person they're trashing.

Twitter favourite

"I don't like food-scented bubble baths. I feel like I'm being marinated. It's unsettling."

- shoesonwrong (Annie), Twitter

Twitter favourite

Mom: "You were telling inappropriate stories?"
Kid: [too quiet]
Mom: "Well, isn't that what inappropriate means?"
Kid: "But it was FUNNY!"

- fedge (Jeff Barszcz), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"I am so sore. My new media coach has me working my douche area. Sent out 500 unsolicited invites and friended 400 people I don't know."

- Moltz (John Moltz), Twitter

(In American Twitter-speak, douche = idiot.)

Twitter favourite

"Doctor, after finding out Grandpa's age: 'Wow, you look really great for 94!'
Grandpa: 'You're not so bad yourself.'"

- ginatrapani (Gina Trapani), Twitter

quote

"'What are you jabbering about, shipmate?' said I."

- Ishmael to a stranger, Moby Dick, instalment 43 of 260 from DailyLit.

Shipmate. I just like it.

Twitter favourite

"Man, I couldn't go a block on my bike ride home without running over some old lady in a sun hat. It was like a biblical plague."

- matthewbaldwin (Matthew Baldwin), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Interesting cause-effect: When you offer the plumber a cookie he then feels comfortable enough to sing while he works."

- phillygirl, Twitter

e-book

Interesting (and I thought funny) Google ad on the page I was just reading - next to an article called The introvert's personality traits: introversion as a personality type - shy, quiet, and tentative?

Introvert = Loser
Being Yourself is Not the Solution It's the Problem. Learn to Change.
www.PopularPrick.com

For $29.95 (presumably USD) you can download an e-book which will teach you how to use manipulative psychology to Make People Like, Respect, and Follow You. And if you're a "sad, irrelevant person" like myself, in a "lonely, wasted existence", even past the point where you "look into the mirror and realize you're old and your dreams have passed you by" - well, gee, reader! Popular Prick might appeal to you.

quote

"People who possess loads of information in a particular field have historically been in hot demand and able to charge high fees for access to their stuffed, fact-filled brains. This was so because the facts used to be difficult to access. Not any more. In an era where information about seemingly anything is only a mouse click away, just possessing information alone is hardly the differentiator it used to be. What is more important today than ever before is the ability to synthesize the facts and give them context and perspective. Picasso once said that “computers are useless for they can only give answers.” Computers and Google can indeed give us the routine information and facts that we need. What we want from people who stand before us and give a talk is to give us that which data and information alone cannot: meaning."

- Garr Reynolds, "Make presentations that people will remember", from page 2 of 5, Peachpit

(He's talking about the benefits of telling a story in business talks specifically, but the idea is applicable to other areas of communication too.)

Twitter favourite

"Everytime I go to the restroom I'm scared a horde of women will bust into their reclaimed territory #blogher08"

- paullyoung (Paull Young), Twitter

(He's braving the corridors of the BlogHer annual conference, San Francisco 18-20 July 2008.)

quote

"And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.

- Captain Peleg speaking to Ishmael about the moody good Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, instalment 37 of 260 from DailyLit

Twitter favourite

"All of my fellow bus riders this morning were sent from the future to spy on me. I could tell by their nonchalance."

- apelad (Adam Koford), Twitter

Titles

I haven't found a way to avoid writing titles here in Blogger. And I really hate writing titles. Yes, yes, obviously: "What's the big deal? Just call it something, fool!" But there's something about having to sum up a post in a title that turns it into something other than I want it to be. Sometimes I just want to write a long Twitter - not "A Post About Something", but just me saying whatever-not-much.

But Blogger uses a title as the page address, so if you don't provide a title yourself, it snags the first words from your post and uses them instead - which looks stupid in the archives. And my former method of using date and number (eg. 15Jul08-1) now looks stupid in Swurl.

So that's it, you see? Whatever I do it's going to look stupid.

It's nice to have that going for me, yes.

Quote

"Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance."

- Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, instalment 34 of 260 from DailyLit

(I put the whole paragraph in for context but really all I wanted to show you was the last sentence. And while I'm here, said last sentence appears in both large AND bold text because I don't know how Swurl will deal with either; it doesn't reproduce quotation blocks, which is why I now use quotation marks too... making it look pretty stupid, yes.) UPDATE: Swurl does indeed reproduce both bold text and changes in font size.

(And by the way, the problem with testing things in Swurl is that - currently, anyway - you can't delete updates. But apart from that, I really like it. Swurl Is Good.)

Coincidence

I signed into Flickr to post this photo of vapour trails (contrails) in the shape of a cross...


- 13Jul08 by me, Flickr

... and on the homepage in Everybody's Uploads (a constant stream of new additions just posted to Flickr) was this photo of vapour trails (contrails) in the shape of a cross:


(detail snipped from the original photo so I can exaggerate the coincidence)

- DSC_0274 by lcwtw, Flickr

Distributed Proofreaders

I've joined the happy band of volunteer nitpickers at Distributed Proofreaders, which is where most of Project Gutenberg's e-books are prepared.

I thought the proofreading task would involve looking for spelling mistakes and typos, but no! Or not exactly. You don't need to be able to spell, you just need to be able to spot visual differences:

"Mostly your job is to fix mistakes left by the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Compare the text carefully to the scanned image of the page, line by line (or word by word, or letter by letter)."

Here's a screen shot of a page being edited (scanned image at the top, text at the bottom):

(click on the image if you want a slighter larger version)

I signed up this afternoon and since then have checked seven pages. It doesn't take long to get through each page, and there's no commitment in terms of the number of pages finished. You can sign in whenever you want and do as many pages as you like.

It was quite confusing to start off with, and (as I Twittered yesterday) when I did the proofreading quiz I got only one out of five pages proofed correctly, so I guess there'll be a bit to learn.

The beauty of the process is that there are three stages of proofreading and then two of formatting - if beginners in the first stage miss seeing a page's mistakes or make some sort of proofreading mistake of their own, experienced volunteers working at stages 2 to 5 will fix things. It's a team effort. Apparently there are 71,820+ users and 19,395 of them have proofread at least one first-stage page. (I don't know what this means, though; have 50,000+ users signed up but not proofread any pages at all?)

More volunteers = more free Project Gutenberg e-books, so if you're interested, please take a look at the site. As the introductory email says:

"Remember, every page you do helps make these books available to the world, for free, forever, more rapidly. [...] each page we proofread is another small step closer to building the greatest library in history!"

Fri 11th - 1

"Putting sparkle unicorn stickers on my (Nokia) cell phone and (Sansa) mp3 player. Updated, motherfuckers."

- EffingBoring (Rachel), Twitter

(In case you're not aware of it, see Favrd for many many tweets about an iPhone update.)

Spangled Drongo

Spangled Drongo (Dicrurus bracteatus) (probably)
- photo by me

Welcome Swallow

Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena)
- photo by me

Wed 9th - 2

Here's an interesting idea:

New Muxtape project! Songs from every year I've been alive.
- Austin Kleon (who has just landed a HarperCollins book deal for his newspaper blackout poems)

I might try to do my own project somehow, maybe here in blog posts. It's a really timely idea: in the last few days I've been hyper-nostalgic about music after realising I could use YouTube and DownloadHelper + Applian FLV Player to collect old songs for free. This probably seems like a clunky way to find music but I still have a dial-up connection, so can't use sites such as Last.FM or Muxtape. And the sound quality isn't important. I don't have a portable music thingie-whatsit, so only ever listen while at the computer, using the computer's kinda crappy speaker; music sounds about as good coming from a video as it does from an audio track.

Classic old songs-on-video collected so far include The Beatles' "Let it be" and Jackson Browne's "The load out / Stay".

Harvey 1 - 2

This involves talk of death and the means of death and if that will upset you, please don't read further.

Harvey 1 was a little bull - I wrote a post when he died and since then haven't felt the need or desire to say anything else (which is strange - so many big things involved: life, death, what it all means).

But then the vet's bill arrived. I thought the cost would probably be more than I expected, but it's more than I expected to expect.

First, though, thank God there was a vet to call, and he was available, and he had chemicals which allowed an apparently painless death. All of that goes without saying, I hope, but I'll say it anyway in case it's not obvious.

As it turned out, I should have called him earlier. But I didn't know what was wrong with Harvey; he'd been fine the day before. I couldn't decide whether he was sick, or in pain, or stiff in the joints because of the cold night, or what. He was just lying there, not even mooing, just kicking his legs in spasms now and then. I kept hoping he'd sit up. Cattle seem to lose all motivation when they're lying down, but as soon as they sit up again, they often recover very quickly. (By "lying down" I mean being flat on their sides on the ground. It's quite unusual; they generally sleep sitting up.) Harvey just lay there and struggled all day and got increasingly frustrated and tired. The vet said he probably had a virus which is common in "runts" - I hate that word, but that's what he said - and it was unusual that Harvey had lived as long as he had. (I'm still not sure it was right to have saved his life in the first place, so hearing that he'd lived longer than physically forecast was not the good news you might think.)

Anyway, there were a number of options for killing him:
1. Euthanasia by vet.
2. Death by shooting - there is a pet food manufacturer in the district which sends people out to kill and dismember cattle, but I was afraid they wouldn't come out on a weekend, and I was scared Harvey wouldn't be quite dead when they started cutting him up. Also, a gun shot would scare most of the neighbours.
3. Death by shooting - asking one of the unscared neighbours to do it. Dangerous, though, because the bullet might ricochet off the skull and kill the neighbour. Also, it would have been very hard to ask something so awful of said neighbour, who loves animals.
4. I tried to find a means of suffocation on the Web, and couldn't. I was okay about doing this at first, steeled to be practical and focused, but after a while the horror of even the search terms started to sink in and I gave up. People who assist in cases of human euthanasia must be made of really really strong stuff (known as "love", I think).

Option 1 / vet was the right choice. I'm not questioning that now, just whingeing about the price of it:

- euthanasia: $40
- travel: (about 40 kilometres/40 minutes in total) $92
- after hours visit (4pm Saturday afternoon, 2 hours after I rang) $152

Total cost = $284

Wed 9th - 1

"The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for 'fluffy'." - Captain Blackadder

- twitterquote, Twitter

Tue 8th - 3

Attacked by my own computer
- photo by me.

This is a re-enactment of the time I opened my new computer (the first laptop I've ever had) and managed to let go of the spring-hinged lid, which gleefully smashed back down upon my poor unsuspecting thumb.

Oww.

I did the same thing yesterday. You'd think once would be enough, wouldn't you? Yes, you would.

And now that I'm looking at the photo, I can see dust all over the floor (top left-hand corner, between the cupboard and the desk). And the floor mat looks like some sort of freakish animal skin. And my arm looks huge.

Oww.

Tue 8th - 2

"Things that are better than an iPhone:
No.3. Pyjamas.
No.4. Lego.
No.5. Judi Dench"

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Tue 8th - 1

"Back from camping on that river, wherever it was. Now my back hurts. I am one thousand years old."

- sgazzetti, Twitter

Mon 7th - 1

Look at the size of this baby's feet!

Elephant caught in snare, Mara Triangle blog.

I expect you wouldn't want to get between a recently-sedated animal and the ground.

The KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) website has information about elephants - including a press release for the 2008 census of elephant numbers in the Tsavo/Mkomazi conservation area in Kenya/Tanzania.**

Numbers have been increasing since the lows of the 1980s, presumably thanks in large part to the activities of rangers who protect the animals from poachers and snares. An increase in elephant numbers is important, not only for the elephants (who are probably pretty pleased) but also because an elephant is "a large charismatic mammal" which appeals to tourists (see Stimulating Tourism) and probably helps provide support for smaller less charismatic creatures too.

---

** In Tanzania: the Mkomazi Game Reserve. In Kenya: Tsavo East & Tsavo West National Parks, Chyullu Hills National Park, South Kitui National Reserve, plus parts of Taita, Galana, Kulalu, Dokota, and Kwale ranches, plus parts of Kwale district.

That's a pretty long rollcall! 90 people, 10 aircraft, and 40,000 square kilometres.

Straw-necked Ibis

Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis)(probably)
- photo by me.

Thu 3rd - 3

[Casual Carpool Dispatch] CCD: Bouncing down the highway in a shittkicker truck with sprung seats, cracked dash, and a chatty man in pinstriped pants named "Monty."

- evany, Twitter

Thu 3rd - 2

The Swurl timeline is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I am mesmerized by my own life. http://tim846.swurl.com/timeline

- tim846 (Tim Bailey), Twitter

Thu 3rd - 1

The wildebeest are coming...

- maratriangle (Joseph Kimojino), Twitter

Scarlet Honeyeater

Scarlet Honeyeater (Myzomela sanguinolenta)
- photo by me, and showing an adult male, apparently (so says The Book); immature males and females don't have that lovely scarlet colour.

Wed 2nd - 1

Free idea for Hollywood: Australian gangster movie. American audiences are ready for boomerang massacres.

- apelad (Adam Koford), Twitter

Galah

Galah (Cacatua roseicapilla)
- photo by me. Click image for a slighter larger version (35 KB).

Four galahs. They were sipping water from the trough - quite a hazardous undertaking, really, because the water level was so far below where they were sitting. (See the bird on the left? Imagine it leaning down into the trough from that position to the water about 20 cm below.)

We don't see many galahs here - a rare flock overhead, and sometimes a couple or a small group will feed on the ground. This is the first time I've had the chance to get a photo.

Tue 1st - 1

I miss the days of Web 1.0, when it was okay for a geek to be an introvert.

- kariume (Kari), Twitter

Was it ever "okay" to be an introvert in Western culture? I doubt it. Geeks and artists and writers (creative types) can probably get away with it when they're working, but for the rest of us, introversion means we appear to be antisocial and in this society that is regarded as suspect.

I don't know, though - I keep meaning to look into it further. Probably everybody is a bit of an introvert sometimes - it's probably a sliding scale between extremes of extroversion and introversion. And it's not the same thing as being shy or socially anxious.

From a great article by Jonathan Rauch, Caring for your introvert:

What is introversion?

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

And if you like that article, be sure to see the follow-up conversation between Sage Stossel and Jonathan Rauch, Introverts of the world, unite!

Grey Butcherbird

Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus)
- photo by me.

The book (Jim Flegg & N. Longmore, Reader's Digest Photographic Field Guide: Birds of Australia, 1994) says there should be a "conspicuous white crescentic patch behind ear", but I can't see one. And I've never thought about a bird's ear before. I knew they could hear, but never wondered how.

Sun 29th - 1

Still persevering with Moby Dick (the start was back here). The man hasn't even left shore yet.

I love this part - Ishmael visits Whaleman's Chapel, a favourite of sailors and supporters:

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.

- installment 18 of 260, Moby Dick by Hermann Melville

Sat 28th - 2

My mother is a good woman--a very good woman--and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.

She wondered why I did not cry and beg forgiveness, and thereby give evidence of being human. I was too wrought up for tears. Ah, that tears might have come to relieve my overburdened heart! I took up the home-made tallow candle in its tin stick and looked at my pretty sleeping sister Gertie (she and I shared the one bed). It was as mother had said. If Gertie was scolded for any of her shortcomings, she immediately took refuge in tears, said she was sorry, obtained forgiveness, and straightaway forgot the whole matter. She came within the range of mother's understanding, I did not; she had feelings, mother thought, I had none. Did my mother understand me, she would know that I am capable of more depths of agony and more exquisite heights of joy in one day than Gertie will experience in her whole life.

- the narrator, Sybylla, in My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Sat 28th - 1

Saw a man lift a lawnmower over his head and angrily throw it over a fence to the curb. Looked like a crime of passion.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Fri 27th - 5

I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl.

- Henry Lawson, 1901, preface, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Fri 27th - 4

Poachers just been found on Narok side of river. Rangers currently in pursuit.

- maratriangle (Joseph Kimojino), Twitter

Wow! Live action! Twitter's great when people use it like this.

I'm wondering how the rangers are doing the pursuing - on foot? by vehicle? How well-equipped are the poachers? (They might have guns. A ranger was recently shot by cattle rustlers).

Fri 27th - 3

This is what I love about the Web: from LibraryThing's blog, Thingology:

If you're at ALA in Anaheim, have nothing to do Sunday morning and are interested in the future of cataloging—and who isn't?—you might be interested in [...]

I'm not interested in the future of cataloguing and I don't know anybody who is. But I can see there's a whole world of people who are, and that makes my world bigger and better too.

...Actually, maybe it makes my world smaller, or it puts it into larger context, with the effect of making it smaller. But what's not in dispute: it makes it better.

I'm thinking of the place my grandparents lived: physically similar to where I live now (they both grew up within 5 kilometres of where I'm writing) but so different in other ways. The people they knew and the things those people did dictated what could and should be done, and what could and should be hoped for. It was a small world with few options, but the people in it saw it as the whole universe.

Now we have so many options it's bewildering, and each person's world is so small in comparison to things going on beyond it, that... I've lost the plot of this post. That's a shame.
:)

But go those cataloguers. Rock on.

Fri 27th - 2

Fairly sure the news just announced we can expect a chance of morning clowns.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Fri 27th - 1

Man just came in to the gallery and asked me if I thought someone was controlling everything. Me and the whale mate, me and the whale.

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Pied Butcherbird

Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)
- photo by me.

Wed 25th - 2

54°F. A cranefly clings to my elbow, landing gear spread wide as its clear wings flutter in the breeze, flags for the kingdom of water.

- Morning_Porch (Dave Bonta), Twitter

..."flags for the kingdom of water."
I love that part.

Wed 25th - 1

If God wants me to stop blaspheming, he should stop being such an asshole.

- gknauss (Greg Knauss), Twitter

Tue 24th - 4

[Hercule Poirot] "Yes, [the murderer] is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all."

[The somewhat dopey narrator, Mr Hastings] I acquiesced.

"There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me."

I was pleased with the compliment.

- The mysterious affair at Styles, Agatha Christie

:)

Tue 24th - 3

What have I always told you? Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory - let the theory go.

- Hercule Poirot in The mysterious affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Tue 24th - 2

Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

- Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, in The mysterious affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Tue 24th - 1

Just noticed on a bottle of Jif household cleaner:

Jif has the power to solve really tough cleaning problems [...blah blah blah...]

I love this "everything is a problem" approach very much. Currently I'm trying to solve a tough hunger problem by administering food.

Mon 23rd - 3

Just took the dogs out into the cold starry night for a toilet break, and for the second night in a row the younger dog, Lucy, went off exploring instead of coming back into the house. Trying to nip this in the bud (because I don't want to stand at the door waiting for her), when she ran back inside I ignored her and praised Abbie: "Good dog, Abbie!

Abbie's reaction was so amusing - a big smirk, and she was almost strutting: "Oh, yeah! I'm G-O-O-D!"

Mon 23rd - 2

On e-books: it's only recently occurred to me to copy and paste plain-text e-books (from Project Gutenberg, say) into Word** files for more comfortable reading. Now I can choose the font and font size, and centre the text on the page. And it's no longer necessary to make a note of the right place to resume reading later; now I just highlight it.

Easy-peasy and obvious. It only took me 500 years to think of it.

**Or equivalent. I use Open Office now, but don't know what to call it. OO?

UPDATE

On bookmarking a place in the ebook: I've abandoned the highlight-as-bookmark idea. It's quicker to search instead. I copy+paste text from the relevant place into the top of the file, then when I come back later to restart reading, cut+paste it into the search field of ctrl+f.

Mon 23rd - 1

Strange things are happening in my DailyLit consumption. Last week I hated Melville's Moby Dick (specifically: "Moby Dick is a pain") and loved Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. Since then the situation has reversed. Now I like Moby Dick and CAN'T STAND Notes... (specifically: "It's just some man going on and on and on about nothing!").

Rethinking my "if I don't like it in the first 50 pages, quit" rule.

Harvey 1 - 1

Harvey 1 died yesterday. He was a little bull, only the size of a big calf, and years ago (5, 6, 7, 10? I can't remember) I raised him from birth after his mother died, feeding him with a bottle every day, and then later, when he was older and wouldn't take to feed right away, he got to eat nice neat little squares of cold solid rolled oats (which he loved).

He'd been looking a bit listless over the last week, but not enough to worry about. But then yesterday morning he was lying on his side, all four legs stuck straight out along the ground, and he couldn't get up. Cutting to the chase, he got worse during the day and I called a vet and Harvey got a needle of something (anaesthetic, I think?) into his neck and was dead in seconds.

It's not that I'm trying to understand it - there's nothing to understand: he was sick, now he's dead. And I'm not upset - the decision to kill him was not hard: he was suffering, now he's not. It was his suffering that was hard, not his death; or, it was watching his suffering and being unable to do anything about it that was hard, and as soon as he died that was over.

Needless to say, all of it was hard for Harvey. I keep forgetting it was actually about him, not me. If only cattle had blogs.

Anyway, I might write about this in instalments. There are so many big things in it and I don't want to struggle over trying to turn them into something that all fits together. I don't know though; I can't decide whether I want to write about anything at all. Maybe just saying this much will have been enough. It feels like I've had too much to eat and can't digest things, if you know what I mean, and this has been an attempt to chew more thoroughly.

Fri 20th - 1

Got a "letter" from the Commonwealth Bank today, inviting me to increase my credit card limit. I've got two whinges about it:

(a) They address me as Miss. What am I, 12?! If they're going to preface names with references to marital status (and why are they?), I'd rather be called Master.

(b) They're offering to increase my credit card limit, but they have absolutely no idea about my present financial situation. They don't ask about income or ability to handle debt, and instead say:

Simply sign and date the request form below and return it by 16 July 2008. We'll then send you a letter confirming your new limit.

There is a caution, though:

Please note: if your personal circumstances have changed or are likely to (due to, for example a loss of employment or an increase in your expenses, such as a new loan), please do not accept this invitation.

I think they're being irresponsible.

Thu 19th - 2

I love it when people in other parts of the world post pictures of the moon photographed on the same day I noticed it: "Oh! I saw that too!" It's one of the good things about us all living on the same planet - looking out (if you can do) and seeing the same moon.

Moon rising into the clouds by Joseph Kimojino in Kenya, Flickr**

And here's a lovely daytime view which is even better if you click on the "all sizes" link above it to see the larger version:

Elephants and the cloud

If you're not a regular there already, check Joseph's blog, Mara Triangle. In the latest update, poachers have been killing hippos.

**Just noticed these photos are all-rights-reserved, so I'd better stop pinching them.

Thu 19th - 1

I can neither confirm nor deny that the Fail Whale has formed an exploratory committee or that he will make a run for US President in 2008.

- failwhale (Fail Whale Cares), Twitter

A typical error page featuring the mighty Fail Whale and hangers-on:

(click on the image for a slightly larger version - 23kB)
Text: "Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."

UPDATE

The artist who created the Fail Whale is Yiying Lu and the Fail Whale illustration is called Lifting a Dreamer.
Via Fail Whale Cares update 1 and update 2.

Wed 18th - 2

Winston Churchill's response to the suggestion by an editor of The Times that he should retire:

Mr Editor, I leave when the pub closes.

- Quotes and stories, The Churchill Centre (the direct link doesn't work, sorry, or at least not as I'm trying it; you'll need to scroll down the page).

Wed 18th - 1

This photo is from the Mara Triangle blog and a post by Joseph Kimojino about the frustrations of building road blocks which are then ignored: Will Mara drivers ever be responsible?

It sure is beautiful country, hey? Look at that sky. And all that space. Lovely.

Tue 17th - 1

[1] - - - - -

I've decided to describe my day in haiku form.

[2] - - - - -

10:30 a.m.: "No, she don't live here," / Sighed the trailer's occupant. / "Stole my husband, though."

- tweet 1 and tweet 2, Malekovic (Lucas Malekovic), Twitter

Be sure to see his website, dontpoke.com, keeping in mind that "poke" means "click on that cute little yellow thing".

Mon 16th - 2

Just saw a little girl (about 3 years old) kick off her pink flowered shoes and try to outrun the babysitter.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Mon 16th - 1

The family ring on this guy in the airport lounge is so big I want to hand him a treaty so that he can afix the seal.

- John Dickerson, Twitter

Sun 15th - 3

I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.

- the narrator in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, instalment 2 of 51 from DailyLit.

True enough.
;)

Sun 15th - 2

You know you're getting older when you have to look the "hot" items up to see what they are.

- mrfixit64857, Twitter

Sun 15th - 1

Oh, man. Moby Dick is a pain. I get to the end of a sentence and can't remember (and don't care) what he was talking about. Look at this:

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Bloody hell. Today was instalment #3. I'm now wondering how many to make myself read before quitting.

I signed up for Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground yesterday, too. First instalment was great. After the intro, this is the first paragraph:

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

Sat 14th - 3

I keep trying to make pastry! And this is what happens!

(UPDATE: I just realised you need to know this first: what follows is an empty pastry case, not a pie with a lid. There's no filling in the thing, it's just pastry in a baking dish which should be filled later when cold.)


IT LOOKED JUST FINE WHEN I PUT IT IN THE OVEN!

I hoped the spoon would help show the dimensions a little better, but it doesn't. I fear you'll miss the fact that on one side of the dish the pastry is 3cm thick, leaving space for a filling of just 1cm.

In retrospect, using a recipe for rough puff instead of shortcrust was not sensible, particularly in light of the fact that I couldn't be bothered baking it blind (ie. covered with baking paper weighed down to mimic the dampening effect of a filling).

And this post has taken exactly 1 hour 3 minutes to write because I can't think of a way to finish it. So let's just do it like this:

Sat 14th - 2

I've been trying to reduce the page-loading time for this blog but so far haven't had much success. Some site somewhere said that ideally page-size should be under 200K, but this page is over that and presumably for anyone with a slower connection it will take ages to load. I tried reducing the number of widgets, reducing the number of posts, reducing the size of images, and all of that helped a bit - but not enough to make much difference, so I put them all back again.

The biggest size-hogs are not images but JavaScript files. Here is a list of my pages ranked in size (K) from largest to smallest, total size first and JavaScript size second.

Flickr .... 1058 .... 533
Twitter .... 341 .... 248
Blogger .... 248 .... 158
CiteULike .... 245 .... 146
LibraryThing .... 191 .... 133
del.icio.us .... 143 .... 63

If you're interested in page size/load time and you use the Firefox browser, two add-ons are useful:

Firebug

YSlow

YSlow does the size checking but it's an extension of Firebug and won't work on its own, so you need to have Firebug installed too.

Sat 14th - 1

So the first update for Moby Dick didn't arrive this morning. Scheduled for 0700 AEST, the time is now 1000+, and it's not here. I just checked the subscription details and am now wondering who the idiot was who clicked "on weekdays" instead of "daily" when I signed up.

Fri 13th - 2

I'm now also reading L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz via RSS from DailyLit. There are 51 instalments, and the first starts with the author's introduction - he says the book "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out".

The story's first paragraph:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar--except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

Fri 13th - 1

Yesterday while mowing I had the sudden thought that by now I should have read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Ages ago I downloaded the ebook from Project Gutenberg, but my enthusiasm dropped off after about 20 minutes and later I just forgot to go back and start reading again.

In other words, I still haven't read Moby Dick.

This isn't a huge problem as far as world problems go. And anyway, I decided this year that if I don't like a book in the first 50 pages I'll just stop reading it. Life's too short.

And in fact life is too short for me to keep dithering about how to write this blog post, too. (I've been floundering around here for half an hour.) Does it matter why I've decided to read Moby Dick through DailyLit? No.

In summary: DailyLit - allows you to read books by instalment via RSS (feed reader) or email. Each instalment takes an average reader less than 5 minutes to read, and if you want more instalments, you can get them. It looks like many or most of the books are free, and there's a large range of categories.

I'm trying it. Moby Dick in 260 parts, starting like this:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Serenity prayer

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971)

Mon 9th - 1

Today I saw these wedge-tailed eagles:



And they saw this (and presumably everything else, with their - yes - eagle eyes):

Sun 8th - 4

Haha! Look how relaxed this lion is:


- Lion enjoying the humid heat by Joseph Kimojino, Flickr

More: Lions create a roadblock

Sun 8th - 3

J.K. Rowling, delivering a commencement address, The fringe benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination, to the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association:

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

That's the amusing start, but the whole thing is quite deep and wonderful.

Via LibraryThing's Thingology Blog.

Sun 8th - 2

- Cheetah cub by Stood in the Congo, Flickr

Another view of a similar animal and vehicle: Cheetah uses Serena vehicle as a vantage point by Joseph Kimojino, head of tourism and anti-animal harassment for the Mara Conservancy in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Joseph has a blog which is well worth a read: Mara Triangle.

Sun 8th - 1

My old creative writing teacher used to tell me that a poet 'thinks in images' and a fiction writer thinks in terms of 'character and plot'.

- Poems = Word Comics, Austin Kleon

Sat 7th - 2

Almost everyone is convinced they are not like other people.

- 4 ways we fail to choose happiness, PsyBlog

Sat 7th - 1

This is the first time I've been able to get a photo showing the relative size of a wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax).




The cow in the left-hand bottom corner of the large photo is about as far away from the camera as the eagle sitting on the post (framed by the black square), so she makes a good comparison size-wise. And you can't see the base of the fence post the eagle is sitting on, but there's not much of it hiding behind the grass there. These birds are BIG.

Thu 5th - 1

Click on the image if you want a larger version (99 KB; opens in the same window):


Comic by Lynda Barry in her new book, What It Is. Image snipped from page 2 of the PDF available from Drawn and Quarterly (1.4 MB, 13 pages, free. Go to Artists >> Lynda Barry >> Previews).

Text description

Profile

My online things:

Identi.ca
Delicious
Flickr
Vi.sualize.us
LibraryThing
Friendfeed (combines updates from those four accounts listed above, but I'm thinking about deleting it)
CiteULike (hasn't been updated in centuries)
Blogger (the blog you're looking at; I haven't really written anything here for... - well, ever, yet, but I'm telling myself that's because I've been diverted by all these other newish things and trying to find an aggregator and my feeble brain baulks at handling more than one thing at a time.)