Month: March 2009

Victory!

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2009-03-31

2:17 am

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Geekery

On with the quo­ta­tions obses­sion project. I swear, it’ll be use­ful for some­thing oth­er than keep­ing me busy. Some­day!

Any­body know php/MySQL well enough to help me do that?

Any­way, one rea­son that I keep going is lit­tle suc­cess­es like the one I just expe­ri­enced.

I love research, and I’m attempt­ing to find infor­ma­tion on every sin­gle author (8,353 at this very moment) and some kind cita­tion, prefer­ably orig­i­nal, for every quo­ta­tion (34,444 of them). Yes, that will keep me busy for awhile. The fact that many peo­ple cut-and-paste bits of text from all man­ner of sources, then lump them all togeth­er with lit­tle or no attri­bu­tion, makes me crazy—especially since it seems that vast num­bers of peo­ple con­flate Oliv­er Wen­dell Holmes Junior and Senior, or Alexan­dre Dumas père et fils.

Any­way, there’s one quo­ta­tion cred­it­ed to “Mil­ton Acor­da” all over the inter­net and in many books: “With­out free­dom, no one real­ly has a name.”

Oth­er than the one sen­tence, the man does­n’t exist. I’ve looked for him sev­er­al times, to no avail.

I don’t know if the book I found in Google Books was­n’t there before or what, but tonight I hap­pened to search on the quo­ta­tion itself again, and voilà! It’s the last line of a poem, “Pro­posed Ded­i­ca­tion for a Mon­u­ment to Lount and Matthews,” pub­lished in the book More Poems for Peo­ple by Mil­ton Acorn.

No, my work isn’t going to end world hunger or any­thing like that, but I find it sat­is­fy­ing. And every lit­tle win helps my over­all atti­tude, which isn’t real­ly pos­i­tive most of the time late­ly. Now if only some­one would pay me to do this sort of thing!

Who is/was Vascavus?

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2009-03-18

5:44 pm

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Geekery

,

I’m still play­ing with my quo­ta­tions data­base. I have a per­fect­ly love­ly item that I’d like to include, but I can’t find any infor­ma­tion at all about the author, “Vas­cav­us.” I’ve Googled and searched oth­er­wise. The only place I find that name is in one guy’s quo­ta­tions file and as a .sig line anoth­er guy uses in a web forum. It does­n’t appear in any book dig­i­tized by Google or list­ed by Ama­zon. It isn’t in any­thing indexed by Google schol­ar or any of the oth­er search engines I’ve tried. Wikipedia does­n’t know him.

Oh — the quo­ta­tion is: “His­to­ry shows us that when reli­gion and sci­ence have a scuf­fle, reli­gion either is rein­ter­pret­ed, backs down, or is destroyed.”

Any clues? Pret­ty please?

Tired Now

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2009-03-12

10:26 pm

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Health, Kvetching, Reading

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I had a pain doc­tor appoint­ment last week, but was­n’t up to going. So Sam resched­uled it for me, and I head­ed across town today.

Appar­ent­ly this was the day for “fit­ting in” every­body who has can­celed an appoint­ment in the last God­dess-knows-how-long, because I arrived to find no park­ing (even on the street in front of the prac­tice). Patience was reward­ed, and I got a spot that opened up as some­one left, and was still 20 min­utes ear­ly for my appoint­ment.

I was seen short­ly before the woman who came in after me, after stop­ping to glare at me from her street­side park­ing space (hey, it was­n’t as if she had been in the lot wait­ing or any­thing!). Her appoint­ment was actu­al­ly 15 min­utes before mine, so I have no idea why they saw me first.

Still, I was very glad to have my a back-up ebook on my PDA, because it took over 2 hours to get out of there. They usu­al­ly run absolute­ly on-time, so I only had one “nor­mal” book with me, and I fin­ished it.1 That office is always so over­heat­ed, so I was real­ly dozy by the time I left.

Sam and I agreed that I had no busi­ness dri­ving very far, so I got some fruit and water and went to his work­place. I had a brief nap, then he was off work and we were off to fill my pre­scrip­tions. We com­mit­ted naugh­ti­ness by grab­bing piz­za for din­ner, but it was yum­my naugh­ti­ness.

This is the man’s “Old Farts” gam­ing night, when he meets up with some of his bud­dies and they play what­ev­er they can agree on. The girl is going out with friends to see Watch­men (again), so I think I may be going to bed ear­ly.

First, I need to close some tabs in my brows­er, but I want­ed to share the links with you! (You’re SO lucky!)

Elf Detec­tion 101: How to find the hid­den folk of Ice­land.
Read the sto­ries on the Neb­u­la bal­lot!
It’s Read An eBook Week! So cel­e­brate by down­load­ing some of the free eBooks list­ed on their site 🙂

1 And then gift­ed it to some­one who had been wait­ing before me and was still unseen when I left, who kept moan­ing about hav­ing for­got­ten to bring a book.

I missed what?

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2009-03-05

12:43 am

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Geekery, News, Reading, RPGs

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It was Nation­al Gram­mar Day AND Gamemas­ter’s Day, and I did­n’t real­ize either until the day was almost over!

It was date night, though, and my favorite GM and I did play, so at least there’s that. I’ll have to get him a make-up present, though.

You know all those dif­fer­ent click-to-give sites? I very geek­i­ly gath­ered up all the ones that I know about and stuck the links on one page so I don’t have to try to remem­ber them, or install short­cuts or tool­bars or what-have-you. It isn’t gor­geous, but it is con­ve­nient.

I final­ly got start­ed on Sea­son 1 of Shad­ow Unit, now that Sea­son 2 has start­ed. Good stuff!

And final­ly, just so I can close the tab that’s been open for a cou­ple of days, a new wrin­kle in that whole nature/nurture debate: Child Abuse Alters Stress-Fight­ing Gene.

Mortality and Spring

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2009-03-01

3:37 pm

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Family

I’ve had an odd mix of thoughts today.

Mom called last night (Fri­day), and I learned that Dad­dy has had sev­er­al bad falls recent­ly. He was out of town for a busi­ness trip most of this week and end­ed up spend­ing a night in the hos­pi­tal while there, after a fall in the show­er. The week before that, he fell at home and hit his head on the hearth. Both times, he was­n’t wear­ing his foot brace. After some of his neck and back prob­lems in the last few years, he has a “foot drop” prob­lem. Of course, Mr. Marine does­n’t want to use a cane. That’s wor­ri­some.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Mor­tal­i­ty and Spring” →