Plaidophile

I'll be turning 31 in a couple weeks (eek!) and I need ideas for what to do. Right now the top contenders are:

• Have another lame little gathering at my place
• Invite friends to go out to karaoke at either Nap's or The Mint (preferably Nap's since they're in stumbling distance of my home and not as popular, although The Mint serves sushi)
• Try to ignore the relentless march of time
• Go see a movie? I've been wanting to see both Up and Terminator Salvation.

Let me preface this by saying that I have absolutely no problem with jury duty, and I actually look forward to serving. I'd like to think that if I were implicated in a crime or a lawsuit I'd want the decision to be made by people who care about justice being served, and so it's only fair that I be an agent of serving that justice myself. So when I got a jury duty summons for this week I was actually a bit excited at the prospect.

Apparently, in most of California (and in most states in general), jury summons work by them saying exactly what day and time you'll be reporting on, and you may or may not go before a selection committee. San Francisco works a bit differently, however; you are given a summons for a particular week and a group number, and the night before every business day there is a lottery for which groups must report the next day, so potential jurors have to check a website or call in to find out if their group has been called for the next day.

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Lately I've been drinking coffee a lot more, and experimenting with different brewing techniques. The ones I like the best are a French press, and (my current at-work favorite) a Teeli brew basket, as they do a much better job of extraction than paper filters (not to mention are easier to deal with and a bit more environmentally-friendly). The problem, of course, is that with a mill grinder, either my grind is too coarse (and so it doesn't extract properly), or there's enough powder that I end up with a thick layer of sludge at the bottom, and so drinking my cup of coffee becomes like a game of chicken.

Supposedly a burr grinder eliminates this problem because it crushes the beans down to an exact size (in a manner not dissimilar from rock-crushing equipment) rather than pulverizing it randomly, but burr grinders start at $80 for extremely basic (and not very trustworthy) models.

There are apparently some hand-cranked burr grinders out there, and I wouldn't be opposed to trying one of those, but finding specific ones seems to be a bit of a challenge. The two I found on Amazon seem decent but they come from third-party merchants and so I'd like to be sure I'm getting something worth the inevitable hassle. REI sells one of them that's intended to be portable (always a plus) and supposedly pretty good, so I could probably just swing by REI on my way home someday. Has anyone used that one?

Wolfram|Alpha is a terrible psychologist.

Wolfram|Alpha does not understand what we humans call "love."

Wolfram|Alpha has high hopes for its future.

Just a brief followup to my "review" last night. Don't read it if you are still looking forward to seeing the movie unspoiled.

I got a bit skittish about having all of my important day-to-day data hosted by Google (especially since they've been so bad about fixing problems with certain things and frankly I have a bit of problem with their attitude lately), so I've moved back to using Dreamhost's IMAP for email and my own installation of FeedOnFeeds for RSS reading.

Well, that was certainly a movie.

Last night I dreamt that I was completely unprepared for my Japanese class final next week, and that I'd completely forgotten to go all semester. This was a dream I would often have in the time running up to finals in college and grad school, probably as a way for my subconscious to remind me not to miss a final exam.

Of course, the stupid thing is I'm not even taking a Japanese class — many of my coworkers are, though, and their final is of course next week.

I have had this song stuck in my head since last Friday make it stop make it stop make it stop

DDR 4th Mix: The 7 Jump

My condo has a parking space as part of the property. The parking space is in a shared garage, which only building tenants are supposed to have access to. Every now and then I'll go down to the garage (such as to take out the trash) to find that someone has parked in my space. I don't mind other people using my space, as long as they have the decency to ask first, but it's my property. On a couple of occasions, I've promised my space to a friend or family member who needs to park there for a bit only to find someone else has taken it without my knowledge or permission. It's very annoying.

At the very least I should put up a sign in my space, like, "Please call [my phone number] for permission to park here; violators may be towed." I'd put up a fare collection box but that's a bit intrusive and is just another thing for people to scoff at, and it would also give the parkers a justifiable reason to stick around.

What I have to wonder is how these people are even getting into the garage to begin with. I have a feeling that one of my neighbors is letting them in and saying, "Oh, just park in #7, that spot's never in use." I guess it's time to send another bitchy message to the other HOA members.

1. Hm, Juni has gotten into a situation where it's finally talking to Kali again. I guess it should do a recap. It would be a good way to explain some of what's going on to the readers anyway.
2. Okay, this dialog seems okay but it's not really going anywhere, and what the hell do I draw? Juni, Chandra, and Kali talking to each other with Juni thinking of past events?
3. Meh, this is really annoyingly boring. Maybe I'll just write it as a chapter of a short story to post over the weekend.
4. Okay, since this is just text I can be a bit more verbose. I'll expand this dialog a bit. No need to be cryptic, words are cheap.
5. Okay, what was one boring strip has become a dozen paragraphs of boring dialog. And I'm still stuck with where the dialog goes from here and how this moves the story forward.
6. REWRITE TIME

So, on both my netbook and my work system I've updated to Ubuntu 9.04 as of a few days ago, and I have a few gripes about some of the changed packages. Actually, I think all of my gripes are about the current version of xfce:

• I really don't like the new window menu. The old one was nice and tiny and concise, with one- and two-word options like "stick" and "shade" and "send to." The new one is very wordy and verbose with a HUGE list of options, and the aforementioned ones have become "always on visible workspace" and "roll window up" and "move to another workspace." Who the hell thought this was a good idea, and more importantly, is there any way to change it back?
• Why do new windows always pop up underneath existing windows? I always end up having to look at my taskbar to see if something actually happened as a result of my action (like opening the settings manager) and then click on it there to make it visible. Apparently the devs have a hard time understanding the issue, too.
• Why can't it be consistent about new windows getting focus? If I press ^N in Thunderbird, the new message window pops up right under my cursor but the window isn't focused, and my typing still goes to the main Thunderbird window (which, by the way, does not handle random typing very well, since apparently every unmodified key is a shortcut in it). If I do ^X-5-f in Xemacs to open a file in a new window, the new window gets focused (and of course pops up beneath everything else). Basically, between the focus behavior and the window layering, I get a very inconsistent and annoying experience.
• The xfce-panel notification area only allows square (in the "1:1 aspect" sense, not the "non-curved" sense) icons. Workrave uses a rectangular "icon" for its timer. So it breaks badly.
• Of course I gave Gnome another shot but I still don't like it.