mataichi

Eeee, in Yuletide Madness I got a perfect little Fennish double drabble: A Tight Fit, that squeezes a lot of innuendo into a very small space! Thank you, manly mystery writer! ♥

Star Trek 2009. The trailers didn't exactly inspire enough anticipation to make spending $8.50 plus snacks seem worth it (especially when I did pay $8.50 plus snacks to see the fail of Insurrection and the epic failure that was Nemesis), so I just put it on my SAVE queue on Netflix. I've finally seen it.

( And seriously: what the Hell? (SPOILERS) )

DragonLady

So here's a question.

My 82-year-old father is utterly dependent on his computer for managing household finances, sending email, tracking prescriptions and so forth. His Dell laptop is about four years old and had slowed down so much he hired somebody to fix it, who instead screwed it up so badly now it no longer works at all. He reportedly can't even get Windows to boot.

Happily, he had an auto-backup in place, so I don't think he's lost anything.

The question then is, do we try to revive this laptop, by wiping it & reinstalling Windows XP? Or talk him into another machine, and if so, what machine?

I'm tempted to try to sell him on a Macintosh because of the limited maintenance, but I suspect he'd kick at the price tag.

Thoughts? And please remember: 82. Do not tell me to build a custom machine and install Ubuntu on it. It's gotta be fairly simple.

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.

Slush blizzard! Possibly the most revolting weather ever. It's UG's birthday today, and we had planned on dropping the Spawn at the MIL's and seeing Avatar, but that's looking less likely. He got a lot of DVDs for Christmas and his his birthday, so maybe Star Trek and a curry?

Seriously - slush blizzard - WTF?

( Unwrap something fun! )

I do love it when UG arranges things with his mother without telling me, then says "Oh, I thought I told/asked you." once it's too late for me to make an objection.

Spent the night at the MIL's house so that UG could get drunk. Lovely. One of the SILs was rat-arsed by the time we arrived, and she's a really horrible drunk. The loud shouty 'I'm just having a laugh, don't you have a sense of humour' type of drunk.

Lovely.

Still... I'm home now, I have a big box of Turkish Delight I don't have to share with anyone, and don't have to be back at work until the 5th.

Simmering - Earth's Children - magnificent crack which takes on the books' unlikely coincidences and produces a story in which Ayla and Jondalar are even more inventive than usual.

De Amicitia - Roman History, Marcus Tullius Cicero/Titus Pomponius Atticus - their friendship as young men.

This Sweet and Bitter Orange Mood - Inspector Chen series - Inari deals with her in-laws, and finds a job.

And a Merry Yuletide too!

Yay, I got a RH Plus story, Patterns of Laughter: The last time Michitaka saw Kiyoi, he was 13 years old and his grandfather lay dying inside. Ten years later, the vampire returns and Michitaka wants to know why.

Thank you, dear Yuletide Writer! I love it!

Bread is done, and although I'd love to spend the evening attempted Yuletide treats, the truth is that now I have to go to the grocery store (no, seriously!) and do dinner with family.

Maybe someday I'll have the time one needs to actually contribute to the last-minute YT stories.

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.

Christmas is ROOONED!

... okay, not really. But I was too busy surfing the Yuletide madness requests and tracking Santa, and I burned my maple-walnut pie.

Oh, the humanity!

Ah, well. I'll try it again tonight. Right now is time for foccacia.

... I need a baking icon, don't I.

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.

Reason 14,590 why I have a crush on Jay Smooth.



So--happy holidays, or not, but either way: you are not alone. :) :)

So... on top of the foot of snow we got yesterday, we got another inch or so overnight. Then, about 10am huge big snowflakes started drifting down. Then the flakes got bigger and fatter and faster.

At 11am, my head of department came in and said, "Okay, I live in the Borders, and I have to drive over Soutra Hill to get home. Everyone is leaving at 11.30 - you can fill in your time cards that you stayed to 12.30."

So! Hurrah! Christmas has started!

:)

I don't think it's a big surprise, but just in case you were wondering: linkspam will be returning after the Christmas holiday.

Which doesn't mean I won't be posting (I am not traveling this year), but it's the holidays, and there is bread to be baked and pie crusts to be rolled out and people to be picked up from the airport and all that.

I will leave you with The Big Picture's snowy scenes.

Oh, and Barkley's lovely and sniffle-inducing new Friday Night Lights vid.

I spent last night rereading Yahtzee's Phoenix Burning, which I read as a WIP when it was being written, the summer after season 5 of Buffy, and hadn't looked at since. It holds up quite well, I think.

And to make up for all the links I've been providing to bad reviews of Avatar, here is a positive one. AVATAR is a cinematic Mustang, a big-engine hunk of Hollywood filmmaking that handles best on the straights but responsive enough that would won't spin out on the curves. AVATAR may not be a good movie but it's the most freaking awesome film I've ever seen.

Have a good day, y'all.

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.

I burst out laughing when I opened the front door this morning. A foot of snow in the courtyard - thank God I'd decided to wear my Skechers Grand Jams today.

Total number of staff employed by my organisation - 34

Number who made it into work today - 10

And of those ten, five live within walking distance of the office, two spent over two hours commuting what is normally a 15-20 minute journey, and the last three all came together in one large four wheel drive thing.

We have tenants trapped in their homes, which are now gigantic snow drifts, and short of us calling for volunteers with shovels, we have no way of getting them out.

WTF?

Still... it is pretty.

Very slowly updating AO3 with my older stuff.

Tonight I uploaded:

The Money-Changer's Tale (Farscape, AU/Futurefic, 7,300 words);
Bellum Interruptum (Farscape, AU futurefic, 27,000 words);
Written on a Thumbnail (Farscape, AU, 30,000 words);
Chivas (Farscape, episode tag, 1,000 words); and
Tuscany (Stargate SG-1, episode tag, 900 words).

And now I'm on vacation for the next five days, yay! So I'm going to eat a quesadilla and drink some wine.

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.

Hi! I'm leaving for Michigan on a train tomorrow, and I won't be back until the wee hours of the 27th. I most likely will not have internet access during this time (oh, dial-up), but I've taken the 28th off work to read yuletide stories!

The wireless on my new Windows 7 PC mysteriously stopped working over the weekend. I may have just fixed it. Sort of? This is good because I have a pinch-hit to write. And also laundry to do, dinner to make and eat, luggage to pack, and Christmas presents that also have to fit into my luggage somehow.

Laundry's in, electronics are charging, I have red wine, and now I must stop surfing the internet and write like the wind.

-for the next week and a half anyway. Wonder how much art I can get done. Hmm...

-Previously Posted (but finally scanned and cleaned properly!)-

Shin'ichi gets a clue
For Wren-chan, who wanted Heiji/Shin'ichi/Ran, which we still need to write. Warning for file size if you click full view, I left it big in case of wallpaper.

Heiji Halloween 09
Still not sure if he's a werewolf or a vamp, but the blood splatter was dang fun to draw.

Conan Halloween 09
Still the cutest scary little bloodsucker.

Thanksgiving 09
aka 'Pilgrim's Panties'. Thank you, Conan and Ran.

-Previously Unposted-

Kaitou Kid Halloween 09

Aoko & Akako Halloween 09
Brought to you by the question "What is the difference between a Witch and a Sorceress?" one night in chat.

Saguru Halloween 09
He had me in stitches. XD

Icka's Halloween 09
Passed out with a kitty making sure I stay on the ground. Vertigo sucks. But the art style was fun.

Invader Zim - Irony
View from Right to Left. Thinking doodles from our Invader Zim fic 'Irony'. Dib's growing up and turning all alien and stuff.

And just think, this is just the completed stuff from the sketchbook we started in late Sept. There's more in that book I've been dragging my heels on finishing. And there's another sketchbook and a half-dozen other loose sketches not with me that are ready and waiting to be scanned and posted. ^______________________^ My backlog is HUGE! \o/

Yet the bill that Dean so casually dismisses would spend, according to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly $200 billion annually once it is fully phased in to help subsidize insurance coverage for over 30 million Americans now without it. That's real money--the most ambitious and generous expansion of the public safety net since the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson. And that money, based on the Census results, would flow most into minority and working-class white communities. Ronald Brownstein on progressive opposition to the health care bill. After all, the perfect is the enemy of the good, isn't it? (Link by way of TNC)

EFF has an E-Book buyer's guide to privacy, tracking how much information the various venders keep on you.

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In honor of the season: Baby penguin! Awwwww.

Black Christmas trees belong to Satan. Who knew?

Phil Nugent on the five sexiest apocalypse movies.

Also from Nugent: the biggest disappointments of the decade (among which find Colin Farrell and Vin Diesel) and the happiest surprises of the decade (NPH! Yay!).

Apparently Cory Doctorow is self-effacing. Who knew? (Certainly not anyone who actually reads BoingBoing.)

Jonquil also has a discussion today about the class issues associated with various crafts.

*

I recently left a comment for sartorias, who just started watching Farscape. So here's my cheater's guide to Farscape for someone who mostly wants the good arc-driven stuff: ( why so difficult! )

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments; comment here or there.