a bit silent yes -

a bit silent yes – it’s been a lot of activity. I’ll be coming out with a full report soon, but in the meantime, i must share this excellent radio piece that was recommended to me by smarty pants’ across the board!

Americans in Paris

July 28, 2000

Episode 165

… really good.

oh – and ick:

U.S. Will Not Pursue a Microsoft Breakup

Brian Knowlton International Herald Tribune

Friday, September 7, 2001

  • Sep 7
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So i was just reading

So i was just reading Jami’s latest, i don’t pretend to know what i’m doing. And woosh! a wave of homesickness washed over me! I was just as surprised as you folks. It is becoming fall here, and fall is my favorite time of year. Even though I crave warm and sun, I love the newness and freshness of fall. It must be remnants of school, but I always feel like fall is time to be reborn and start fresh. Big things always start for me in the fall and winter. Whomever pegged spring for this got it mixed up. Maybe it’s cause i’m a capricorn. Also i’m really into the layering look so…

Anyway, I have a lot of memories of sitting in parks (well really benches in between streets) in new york in fall. Dressed in a bunch of layers, keeping my hands warm with a cup of bakery coffee, smoking parliament lights while talking seriously, stupidly, ironically with a friend. I realized a huge gaping hole in my life here is that certain to-the-point conversation. The one where you don’t tell stories, or compare opinions, but really talk about things. The kind that comes sometimes from the length of the friendship or sometimes just from that certain quality you recognize in someone, the “friend” quality. You know what i mean.

My friend Jeff is supposed to come today. I’m really looking forward it. Mostly for some to-the-point conversations over coffee. Actually, I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time now. I know a decent mount of people here, some really cool ones too, but not the-park-and-coffee-in-the-fall sort of friends. Not yet anyway. I’ve got some lovely pictures from the past few days. I’ll post them once i get home. Ciao bellas!

  • Sep 4
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So i’ve been working on

So i’ve been working on a super-duper redesign for awhile now. I’m got about 80% ready to go. [note: i've been using a lot percentages lately.. why? dunno. Is this good? dunno] I wanted to take some preliminary lanch steps today but it seems blogger’s template modifying page is fuzucked and has been all weekend. So then i decided to make the switch to greymatter, having wanted to do some things outside of the scope of blogger anyway, but 75% of it is that i am quite impatient about having to wait to do things when they are down. I’m become even more of an instant-gratification-girl if possible. I think the new digital camera has something to do with that. When i’m ready to go, it’s like, let’s get it on.

But lo and behold my hosting service, Softcom in canada, who i’ve recommended to everyone cause it’s $10 a month for 50 MB and a trillion e-mail accounts and they always answer my support e-mails promptly and friendily, as if they give a crap. I like that. But they don’t support perl which nixes greymatter off the bat. So anyone wanna recommend a cheap and friendly hosting service that supports perl? Let me know. I really need the niceness factor, tho. If they’re not nice forget it.

Other than that, another delicious lunch at the mexican place ’round the corner. Had tea with my aunt, uncle and cousins this afternoon. And we actually had tea and cake at about 5pm. This place is like a movie!! By the time i got home round 19:00 (7pm) I wasn’t hungry at all. But then a few hours later (after putting another shade of red in my hair) i was kinda hungry. But i was all showered and pj-ed and my neighborhood is really hip so it’s annoying to go out lookin dumpy. Doing laundry on saturday night i was gawked at by all the trendy 18 year olds on their big night out. I was like, one day dears you *might* be cool enough to do your laundry at midnight on saturday, ok!?! Anyhoo – since i have no fridge yet (arg) i have very little to choose from in what’s supposed to be the cupboard, but is really housing all sorts of random computer cables, a keyboard, a screwdriver, and some nails. But i did have a can of ravs that was a sentimental present from colleen on my last brooklyn trip. Read on:

Ravs:

Pronunciation: ‘ravs

Function: noun

Etymology: American : from Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli

Date: August 1999

Evolved into ravs in the desert at burning man. Ravs were of the only meals successfully cooked, consumed and digested by the group. Coined first by darleen in a streak of linguistic briliance while emerging from a port-o-potty: “Woah, those ravs went right through me!” They also inspired the term “spags”, referring to Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs.

They since became a staple of desert meals. After the second, i stopped using a bowl. After the third, i stopped using a pot and cooked ‘em straight in the can. After the forth, i stopped cooking them. Actual eaten portion only got to about 15% anyway. I mean what was the point of all that trouble.

Anyway, in a gesture of solidarity with the burn i’m missing (actually it was pretty much a gesture of hunger, but whatever) i ate them tonight. I did cook ‘em, in a pot even. But i did not use a bowl.

I think i may be the only person in history to have consumed Chef Boyardee on French soil.

Note to self: Best time

Note to self:

Best time to paint your only bright lamp? Not at dusk.

So – waited all morining

So – waited all morining and still no fridge. This is becoming ridiculous..

BUT let’s look on the brightside, good things about today:

1. I came accross a cheap frame for the etching i bought below at a flea market, and went ahead and bought it without any measurements and the thing fit!

2. DSL is allowing me to listen to All Things Considered from yesterday, and even better, streaming NPR on quicktime, even. Learning about the genetics of aging at the moment.

3. I have figured out a (mostly) homemade set of implements that will successfully clean my floors if used in the correct order. I will elaborate on this later because the knowledge of accumulated on french floor-cleaning should not be kept from the masses.

4. I have discovered a really good and authentic mexican restaurant down the street (yeah – pretty damn amazing). I haven’t tried the margaritas yet, but the mexican cabernet they had was darn tasty.

I still don’t know what went wrong with my template in the post yesterday, but it seems to be a unique mutation so i’m going to let it slide. In the meantime everyobody’s off being trippy hippies in the desert. Screw ‘em, ok!

Alright off to carry a ladder across the city…

  • Sep 1
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So last night i managed

So last night i managed to be really stupid. Really really stupid. You know when you wake up in the morning, you wipe the sleep from your eyes and then you remember what happened? Then you grab the alarm clock, pull it out of the wall socket, slide it to the other side of the room, wrap yourself completely in your comforter, and try to sink your head so far down in the pillow that it swallows you whole with no one being the wiser?

Ok, only happens to me? Great.

Well let’s have the good news first. My DSL connection is officially up and running – yee haw! At some point my french bank account will run out of money and they’ll pull the plug, but until that sad day i’ll be downloadin’ mpegs like a god-damn 13 year-old boy.

Speaking of 13 year old boys, i am pretty positive my whole stupidity disease stems from the fact that i haven’t got any action in basically forever. It is beginning to affect my brain. Now, if the only goal were to find a willing and warm body with a woody, things would be pretty simple. But unfortunately we chicks don’t work that way, at least not the ones i know. There’s gotta be some sort of emotional or cerebral attraction. Not necessarily relationship material, but some sort of somethin. So yes i have entirely too much in common with a 13 year old boy right now. I’ve got sex on the brain. Yet when a french guy starts to flirt with me i get really embarrassed and freeze up. See, 13 year old boy.

I can’t express myself in french with any confidence; i just feel naked without my amazing wit and charm (heh heh). I’m ignorant of this whole “language of love” thing. I mean how you gonna like someone without exchanging fiery remarks? This whole alone thing was fine in brooklyn where i was cynical enough to know how everything with anyone would end up. And if i was feeling real needy in that way i could either flirt with abandon and calm myself down, or check in with an old standby somewhere. Here it is so damn romantic, everyone seems to be on their goddamn honeymoon. And i have 0 standby’s.

So me stupid last night. Slightly sauced up and started shit with the ex, aka guy-i-used-to-date-who-doesn’t-like-to-be-called-an-ex-because-it’s-more-complicated-than-that. (I’m gonna get reamed for that comment, oh screw it). So yeah i started shit, as i always do. Probably because i was lonely, or frustrated with our interminable daily aim flirting, or just because i have this 13 year old boy disease i’ve been telling you about. I crave stability and boundries, yet i move continents every other second and i have not a single “definable” relationship with any male outside my family.

I woke up, after dreaming about cuddling with a really scrawny sys admin guy in the office (wtf?), with the pieces of the evening’s AIM session puting themselves back together in a horrifying way. At some point les asked to continue when i was more sober. Me proud (and drunk, of course) said “i am not drunk and i mean everything i am saying.” Funny, i meant it at the time. I really did.

This time i’m legitamately stumped. Am i too weak or too stubborn? Will it hurt more later if i let things go like now? Will things find a stasis naturally? All of this would be a lot easier to swallow if there was a scrawny sys admin guy cuddling with me, i think…

and what the hell is wrong with my template?!?!?

** New pics y’all -

** New pics y’all – check it. **

Just an ordinary two days in Paris…

Right now i’ve got the

Right now i’ve got the MS Word help contents on the right and this incredibly long and complicated User Manual i’m trying to format on my left. Me, my head is on my desk, trying to focus on my breathing so i don’t have a brain-frustration implosion. I must take a moment put of my extremely frustrating day to shout into the great beyond – I HATE MS WORD.

Dear Ms Word et al,

Ms. Word you are an overbearing bitch. I just want my bullets to look a certain way, ok? I want them to be nice and strong and black, not a light grey circle with white on the inside so that it looks like a speck of dust on the monitor. And i want the text to be near the strong black bullet, not 4 miles down the road like it’s embarrassed to be seen with it.

Why does this need to be such a struggle between us? We can work together. Just stop autoformatting every letter i type, ok? Let me tell you what i want instead of trying to guess what i want before i’ve even decided. You are not a good at reading my mind Ms. Word. In fact, you are piss poor. In fact, not once have you ever correctly guessed what i have wanted. In fact, I hate you.

I put a curse on you and all your progeny,

n!l

In contradiction to this nyt

In contradiction to this nyt article, i still surf, thank you very much. I would say ms.harmon’s conclusion is a bit superficial. I like to “browse” through life so to speak, walk on streets i’ve never been to, look through racks of clothes at a flea market. I do the same on the web. There are others like me. There are many more others who have to sit their ass on the couch in their-ass-shaped-hole at 8pm to watch that hour-drama. They know what it’s like, they’ve been there before, they could probably make a scarily accurate prediction on the next episode if pressed hard enough. Those people never did surf, and they still don’t. They just searched for their-ass-shaped-hole on the web, and they’ve either found it or given up.

anyway – good things i’ve noticed today:

Ftrain.com: smarty pants

Textism: another smarty pants

but i think smarty pants are where it’s at. maybe that’s my-ass-shaped-hole. Rock On.

You can’t get any geekier

You can’t get any geekier than this:

geekstyle.co.ok

Notable Quotable: “31337″ design

A Cobra Mk III swoops majestically into view, as an unsuspecting Orbital Transporter falls victim to your front mining laser, jettisoning fragments in the shape of the letters ‘N’, ‘T’ and ‘K’. Plus “WWW.NTK.NET: IN-JOKES FOR OUTCASTS” at the bottom, in BBC Micro-writing.

  • Aug 29
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