Plaidophile

I used to have a pretty good ear for languages, but I can't really tell what this is. My gut says it's either Hebrew or Farsi but I'm probably way off.

Hopefully this doesn't turn into the Somalian thing all over again (although since this call originated from the US I can at least expect it to not happen in the wee hours of the night).

While I was there I wandered around the exhibit a bit (very briefly, since it was getting crowded due to the signing — I will definitely go back later to actually explore the museum in the future, possibly this weekend), and on my way out I ended up chatting a bit with Andrew Farago. Unfortunately, all I could really think to talk about was his wife's comics, and also hamfistedly thanked him for accepting my stuff into the exhibit. (I think I come across as a bit of a jerk and/or creepy weirdo when I'm overcompensating for nervousness due to my whole "uncomfortable when not with at least one friend" thing.)

Anyway, Andrew did mention thinking about having some sort of group thing for local web cartoonists, so hopefully that will give me another avenue for my social life.

So a month later (i.e. just now), I thought it would be nice if I could find my noise-canceling headphones, which have similarly been rather hard to find for quite some time. I started looking for them, and thought, "Wait, I shouldn't do that, because the law of irony states that if I do, I will immediately come across my missing right wrist brace."

But I thought that was silly, so I started rooting around for the noise-canceling headphones...

and immediately found my missing right wrist brace.

• 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.

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.

anyway i am definitely dumping the juice (except I would hope that they'd have wanted to test it for botulism toxin or something)

so if you do't see me post to twitter for a while you'll probably know why (i hope this isn't my last entry)

The higher CO₂ levels make the grass grow longer, faster, so the people who insist on having lawns run their lawnmowers more, which generates heat and uses more fuel and puts even more CO₂ in the atmosphere (as well as other nasty emissions because lawnmower engines aren't at all clean).

The more we struggle to keep comfortable, the harder it will become.

Anyway, this led me to find an online test (made by actual real prosopagnosia researchers so it's not like a Myspace WHAT COLOR IS YOUR INNER FURRY thing or whatever), which I scored 67% on (65% is their threshold for "you are almost certainly faceblind"), and there's probably enough of a margin of error that I am comfortable saying that this shows I'm probably faceblind. Hooray.

So, of course, while I was waiting for the numbing agent to kick in, I had "Be A Dentist" from Little Shop of Horrors stuck in my head. And then a little bit later, a photo came up of some weird plant which looked rather a lot like Audrey II.

I actually kind of look forward to it. I see it more as a civic duty and a responsibility, not something to get out of. The timing could of course be better, seeing as how we're on a tight schedule at work for the next couple of months, so I probably need to postpone it anyway (fortunately, the state of California makes that easy to do, and you're allowed to postpone it up to 6 months).

Then today I saw that on Amazon it's only $199, with no sales tax, plus I would get more cash-back from my Amazon Visa.

Usually I remember to shop around, even for things I get a discount on. Oh well.

Also, Obama's victory speech did a lot to soothe my anger. I still feel like it was very bittersweet, though.

There are three silver linings, though:

1. The vote was close. Gay rights have obviously made huge strides.
2. There are already several attempts to challenge Prop 8 in court, mostly attacking it from different angles.
3. There are, by some accounts, as many as 3 million uncounted absentee ballots, which could easily swing the final count in either direction. I know that most of my coworkers voted absentee and I know that all of them voted no on 8. For example.

It's a bit annoying that the FTC's rules on what constitutes a telemarketing call are so narrow, and don't cover political campaigning and the like. I mean, just because I agree with the message doesn't mean I want to be bothered on my cellphone. So, on to the FCC.

• The only computer visible is a MacBook Air, which is probably running OSX (although he never displays it running anything at all). Stephen never says he actually uses GNU, he just prattles on about how wonderful it is, but seemingly (per his comments regarding OSX's EULA) doesn't realize that, at an OS level, OSX is essentially GNU with a non-GNU UI running on top of it.
• The music at the end is built entirely out of commercial, royalty-free, but non-redistributable piano loops which are part of GarageBand (which is commercial software), and somehow the credits list it as being some song that was ostensibly composed by someone (apparently stringing loops together in more or less exactly the order they are provided is composition now?) but of course this is a long-running pet peeve of mine.
• While it's nice that they used an Ogg video, they use a Java-bytecode-based player to play it, so it's not like it's end-to-end Free there either.

I enjoy making and reading comics, and I enjoy making and listening to music, and the Internet generally makes all four of those activities better and more accessible. Maybe I'll just stick to those things.