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January 31, 2007
know your biofuel provenance
Mainstream Media Discovers that Palm Oil no Panacea
Just another reminder that the entire process of fuel production has to be accounted for to accurately calculate impact.
Posted by lisa at 07:59 PM
moses galore
i developed a hella sore throat while at work this afternoon, and i feel the familiar heavy tiredness now. it's time for my next cold. i think i would like to request a bubble to live in. maybe i should seal myself into my house with duct tape, after a visit to Costco. If i plan it right, i could probably stay in the house for the rest of winter.
in other news, i have decided that my cat's designation is One of One. This is related to the fact that i circumvented Netflix's insistence on sending me things other than Voyager by moving the "long wait" disc to the bottom of my queue. I also took a break from sending movies back for about a week, and I seem to be less throttled now.
Posted by lisa at 07:06 PM
January 30, 2007
don't. take. the bait.
i've got a new phrase for myself: tear bait.
so many stories of deaths that are heartbreaking, yet do not directly affect me, have come my way in the last week that i have to force myself not to cry. don't do it, self. the only connection you have to that cat's owner is that a former friend once fancied himself her boyfriend, fifteen years ago. you've never even met her. don't cry.
Posted by lisa at 09:59 PM
January 28, 2007
oldest and highest mileage VW diesels sought
http://www.vwvortex.com/artman/publish/volkswagen_news/article_1907.shtml
SWEET! I can't wait to see the winners. I know 9Westy isn't a contender, she only has 120k and is a 1982. I am sure they'll find something from the first model year sold here, 1977, and diesels are famous for going 300k plus miles on a single engine.
From my experience on the VW diesel message boards, i'm not sure the typical VW diesel aficianado, especially one who drives a 30 year old vehicle, is really going to enjoy driving a Toe-Rag, but hey. The recognition will be great.
Posted by lisa at 11:51 PM
January 27, 2007
news junkie
i've been paying a lot more attention to the news. i think it might have to do with the fading of republican control on capitol hill. anyway.
two things read recently that I find disturbing:
'Hate Crime' of Beatings Divides a Campus
I went to Guilford. It's a Quaker school. During my brief tenure there, as part of certain required courses that all freshman take, I listened to South African refugees speak about their experiences of being brought to America by the Quakers, and had tea with a Montenyard family whom the Quakers had helped get out of Vietnam. A part of school orientation was to visit an underground railroad stop in Greensboro.
Most Guilford students come to the school seeking an education that includes content about human rights, justice, and activisim. Why else go to what is, frankly, a small liberal arts hippie school?
Apparently the student body isn't as self-selected as I thought. This incident makes me very sad. I am sure many professors at Guilford are doing some soul-searching right now. That's just because of the violence. If this actually turns out to be a hate crime? This will shake the college to its core.
Coal-To-Liquid Diesel Fuel: A Bipartisan Issue That Unites Environmentalists With Farmers
I know very little about liquid coal fuel, and I'd like to get a more balanced view, but it does not sound like such a hot idea. While I'm glad there are legislators putting forth specific legislation to increase domestic alternative fuel output, this stuff sounds like a bad idea. I know so little about coal, however, so I could be swayed.
I hope that Obama isn't involved in this because of pressure from coal interests in his state.
Posted by lisa at 10:59 AM
January 24, 2007
BPAL: The Phantom Calliope
"Ghostly, glowing, sweet and dark: black cherry, patchouli, cassis, cardamom and verbena."
Cherry. Yuck. If it weren't for the cherry this would be pretty fantastic, but cherry either doesn't agree with my nose or with my skin chemistry. J patiently inhaled my wrist after I tried it, but he agreed: not one of my best. I've put the whole bottle up for sale.
Posted by lisa at 10:55 PM
January 21, 2007
j meets the family
it went pretty well. we brought home mad leftovers.
a short time ago, we had this conversation:
l: do you want something more to eat?
j: i was going to have a meat and cheese plate, but you don't have any meat.
l: ham.
j: i didn't see any ham in there.
l: the ham we brought home from my mom's.
j: oh. well i wasn't going to eat that now because if i eat some now, i won't want to take any home with me. is that ok with you?
l: sure, that's fine. i'll eat it, or make soup or something.
j: now what would be really nice is if she had put some of those little rolls in there too.
l: she did.
j: your mom is a real nice lady.
Posted by lisa at 10:51 PM
January 19, 2007
throttling the icy death falling from above
so apparently over the weekend we'll be experiencing icy death falling from above, or frozen white death from above as some prefer to call it. i've warned J, but i think he's going to come visit anyway. in preparation i went to the farmer's market at lunch and obtained a small pile of nice looking firewood, as well as an obscene number of calories from the seafood restaurant. their hush puppies are really quite remarkable.
i told a co-worker about this adventure later in the day and he said, "you can't fit a pile of firewood in your car!!" ah, the wonders of the beetle. i believe its curved design fools the eye, and it appears smaller than it actually is. the pile of wood used maybe one-third of the available space in the hatch, and would keep my fireplace going for at least a few days if the worst happens and we lose power.
as for the evil masterminds at netflix and their machiavellian strategies to keep me away from Voyager, well, i have now put other things at the top of my queue. i might as well.
i also called easily a dozen local video stores; none had Voyager for rent. i checked out two other online services, greencine and intelliflix. both have voyager, but greencine is based in california, so shipping time would be a little long, and intelliflix has a slightly scary website, a kind of, "we're trying way too hard to get your credit card number" sort of site.
so i decided to give sui_generis' suggestion to use bittorrent further consideration. it appears that i have the hardware to burn a dvd; i've also got a copy of osx tiger sitting, un-installed, on my shelf. maybe dvd burning software comes with it? i guess there's one way to find out.
Posted by lisa at 09:30 PM
January 18, 2007
Throttled!
Ah yes, it has finally happened. Except the way it's happening is kind of... weird.
I'd heard of the infamous Netflix throttle-- it made the news. If you go through a lot of movies in a month, you'll have far more new releases marked "Very Long Wait" than you did when you were a new user. If you turn your movies in too quickly, the turnaround time starts slowing down.
Over the winter break, I decided to embark on a a Star Trek: Voyager marathon. With seven complete seasons to the show, that's a lot of hours of tv to watch. I was dismayed to find that my favorite local video store did not have Voyager. Neither does the iTunes music store. And the discs are wildly over-priced (which might explain why the video store doesn't carry it).
So I turned to Netflix. I loaded my queue with all of the Voyager discs, in order, at the top of the line. I even increased my subscription so I could work through them faster.
This worked great for about a month. Now the turnaround time has slowed down-- not a surprise, I guess. But what's weirding me out is that they keep sending me movies in my queue that are not Voyager. As far as I can tell, they're going to the movies that are placed right after Voyager, and sending those in order. I've got four of these non-Voyager discs in my posession right now, and I'm betting I'll have a fifth before long.
Obviously, increasing my subscription to five at a time has backfired completely; it just put me on the throttle list that much faster. So i'll be bumping my subscription back down.
You know, if they want to limit the number of movies I get a month, yes, I wish they'd be more honest about it. I get that they need to make money to stay in business. Why not let me throw scads of money at them for a month or two if I want to rent 24 disc in 30 days? It would still be cheaper than my one other option, buying Voyager.
But it's absolutely infuriating that they're sending me movies, just not the ones I've said I want. It's so... lame. What the hell are they accomplishing by doing this? I guess it's some weird almost passive-agressive way of sending me a message. C'mon guys.
So, I dunno what I'm going to do. I might remove everything but Voyager from my queue. I can save a record of it and reproduce it if I want to later. If I had a second mailing address, I could open a completely separate Netflix account and they'd be none the wiser. I could experiment with dividing my queue into two different queues.
Or check with other video stores..
Or decide to stop watching so much tv...
Posted by lisa at 07:44 PM
snow!
omg, actual snow fell! and covered things! not, however, the roads, and it appears that i'll be spending this snow day in my office :(
wow, actual snow. how cool is that?
Posted by lisa at 09:03 AM
January 15, 2007
firefly going out of business
thanks to badger for posting that apparently, firefly is going out of business. everything is on sale and i had noticed that she was posting a lot of stuff to ebay.
well. that sucks.
Posted by lisa at 07:33 PM
January 13, 2007
light dawns...
i drove in to work yesterday on auto-pilot after another four hour night. decided to make the best of it by visiting our health care center.
five minutes with the doc resulted in my chest being pronounced "pretty clear" and two scrips: narcotic cough syrup, and a z-pack, just in case things didn't clear up in a couple of days, in which case i may have strayed out of viral territory and into bacterial (bronchitis, walking pneumonia, fun stuff like that).
i'm going to take this opportunity to note that i really need to find a new pharmacy. my experience yesteday was reminiscent of a driver's license office, complete with grumpy, inarticulate personnel, being sent from line to line, and small children with runny noses wiping their hands on my pants. oh, and the lady with penumonia who kept standing in my personal space, making groaning sounds as she labored to breathe. i mean, poor lady, but back off, eh?
so after all that, when it came time for bed, i decided to try it without the chemical assistance, first. natural sleep is better than drugged, right? and i hadn't had any drugs all day.
and it worked. i slept for something like eight hours and woke up this morning feeling close to normal. which means that shortly, i'll be headed to virginia. yay!
Posted by lisa at 10:16 AM
January 11, 2007
the neverending illness
i've been sick for eleven days. i got about four fitful hours of sleep last night.
this bites.
Posted by lisa at 09:19 AM
January 09, 2007
a bright little iphone
due to a punishing work schedule today-- punishing to someone who feels like she's developing whooping cough, anyway-- i remained only dimly aware that apple was announcing the iphone today. so many thanks to steph for a nice thorough blog entry on the iphone that i caught in my usual blog rounds this evening after work.
i haven't been this excited about a piece of geek bling in many years. maybe not since the first ipods and ibooks. or the cube. the iphone looks like a very sweet and sexy piece of technology. the hardest part will be waiting... the six months until it first comes out, the month or three until all the initial flaws are sorted, and then however long until i can work up the desire to spend that kind of cash on a tiny little sliver of plastic and metal.
but... you know me. i'm going to get one.
Posted by lisa at 09:41 PM
January 08, 2007
auto mechanics and little miss sunshine
i finally saw this movie the other night. i downloaded the soundtrack while the end credits were rolling, and i can't stop listening to it. i loved the movie itself; the humor is dark, but not bleak, and in the end it's sweet and heartwarming in a completely non-gross way.
but here's a question for any car nerds who may be reading this: if a manual transmission vehicle-- a vw bus, for instance-- loses first and second, would you really need to be rolling to start it? i mean, you could start it, and you could probably get moving in third if you really tried. i know, because i couldn't find first in my van when first got it, and i started in third several times.
i mean the whole device of having everyone push the van is great for the story and provides a very charming visual, but methinks the, er, physics of the situation is a little inaccurate.
Posted by lisa at 12:57 AM
January 07, 2007
conflicted
like 99 squintillion other people, i think that january is a good time to improve my eating habits (among other things). i don't usually make resolutions, so i haven't resolved anything in particular. but this is a logical time to reduce after the excesses of december.
eating lots of fresh produce is key, of course.
i also want to reduce my footprint in another way: i want to eat more locally grown foods.
this is tricky.
i went to the grocery store today with local in mind. fortunately, we've got a store that labels the origins of all the fresh foods (or most of them). i wanted snow peas for a stir-fry and for salad, but they were from peru so i didn't get them. i found local hydroponic lettuce and compromised on a carrot and a cucumber from california. did you know that a lot of mushrooms come from pennsylvania? and from oregon.
sigh. i'm a spoiled, modern westerner. not only do i have enough to eat, my biggest problem is choosing things that are good for me and for the environment.
yeah, i'll go cry into my soba noodle stir-fry.
Posted by lisa at 08:07 PM
January 06, 2007
it's a beautiful day to sell off huge parts of my BPAL collection
it's a lovely day. i unexpectedly find myself free, and i have no problem taking it easy, since i've been sick all week, it is a lovely day. maybe later i will take the convertible for a spin.
anyway. so i have all of this perfume from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. well, not perfume exactly, but essential oil perfume blends.
i have too much-- i'm a very light BPAL user. essential oils are volatile and eventually, they will fade away.
so i've decided to decant from my favorite bottles. the things i want to keep, but don't need a whole 5ml bottle of.
i've posted these to the forums, and am also cross-posting here.
MORE...Posted by lisa at 01:50 PM
death march of the damned
ok, that's a little dramatic. i woke myself up this morning coughing and felt like total crap. j has been having horrible back problems all week that are still ongoing. i was supposed to go visit him but we decided to postpone until next week.
i'm kind of worried about him and i wish i could just pop over there and help him. if i weren't also sick i'd probably still go up there.
even though i shouldn't be contagious any more, i would be mortified if i gave him my cold, because coughing and sneezing are intensely painful for him right now.
this is one of those times when the distance thing is not so good.
Posted by lisa at 10:56 AM
January 05, 2007
weather trending
a weather chart:
today's balmy weather-- 70 degrees and humid when i came home-- inspired me to curiosity. is this a normal weather trend or a result of global warming? if i inspected the high temp on this day for every year of my life, would i see a neat and obvious trend toward higher temperatures?
as you can see-- more clearly if you click through-- this isn't the case. it's not unprecendented for us to enjoy a temperature of 70 or greater on january 5th, here in central north carolina.
i guess this wasn't very scientific. i could look at the mean temperature for january for the last thirty-um years, but it's a manual process and i don't feel like it.
i guess the lesson here, though, is that although the global warming situation is clearly dire, warm weather in january isn't necessarily a problem.
Posted by lisa at 07:54 PM
free of the tyranny of the pager
my final day of oncall duty commenced 50 minutes ago. for something close to a decade i've been part of the intranet oncall rotation. usually it's not too onerous of a duty, although for the last year it has certainly made it challenging to see my long-distance boyfriend once every two weeks.
i imagine it will pass without fanfare. it will mean that i make less this year than last year, or maybe break even if i get a raise and/or bonus, but it will also mean a little bit of freedom, which is good. my weekends are entirely my own.
i have also decided to start taking the morning off after returning from virginia. i always carry over vacation, and at most it's six vacation days, six days i probably wouldn't use anyway. probably a lot less. why not make things a little saner? give myself a few more daylight hours at home? let the goodbye linger and not worry about it?
and i went for a walk this morning even though it meant i was late. because i'd rather walk and be late on a day when no one is going to miss me than keep skipping the walk.
:|:
yes. i realize i am quite boring.
Posted by lisa at 12:49 AM
January 02, 2007
ringing in the new year with a cold
went to bed early on the 1st with a sore throat. it has dug in its heels. i am staying home from work today.
i thought i was done with this mess. dammit.
Posted by lisa at 08:46 AM