What a strange thing a sudden loss is. Spirit died yesterday, and I can't get over it. When I left this morning for work, Spirit's bowl was still there, with food in it I think. Her bed's still in the living room, and it just looks like she's out for a walk. As Becky put it, Spirit was such a presence in our house....

It happened so fast. It wasn' ( Read more... )

My interest in social bookmarks has led me to a new technical term: folksonomy. Basically, taxonomy by a bunch of folks. Or, for the techies, "a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace". Wow, I haven't had this much fun with technical lingo since my college math days, when I translated a German article on "Non ( Read more... )

As I struggle through a job with no positives for me (other than the obvious paycheck, benefits, etc.) and a good many negatives, I long for a job that I find interesting and satisfying, where I feel well-respected and appreciated, and one in which I feel I'm making a positive contribution to the world and my own well-being ( Read more... )

After spending most of Saturday and Sunday in bed, and feeling a little better yesterday, I decided to go to work today, but then by 10 I had concluded that that was a bad idea, so I came home ( Read more... )

I just finished Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. It's about a hermaphrodite and about her/his Greek family. I was initially intrigued by the book because of the subject of hermaphrodism, but it actually doesn't even get into that until the latter part of the book ( Read more... )

Happy New Year. So far I've been sick the whole year, but this is the first day, so I have hope for the future ( Read more... )

I've been using del.icio.us bookmarks for a few weeks now. Basically they're 'social bookmarks', available to others to see and use. The social aspect is not what initially attracted me, by the way. I was looking for ways to synchronize web-based bookmarks with my local browser bookmarks, and ran into Foxylicious, and that led me to del.icio.us. ( Read more... )

I just found out while reading an article that Thunderbird supports reading AOL mail. Wow, I didn't know it could, because AOL's interface used to be proprietary (very close to IMAP, but not quite). So I had the family using Netscape 7.2 as browser/email, even though I use Firefox and Thunderbird (I don't actively use AOL myself, though I still ( Read more... )

Friday night, all six of us in the family got together to celebrate Gail's birthday. I'm so glad everyone was able to make it. I was almost late myself, since I left late from my day-of-hell at work. I managed to get home just as we were leaving to go to the restaurant (Glory). Afterwards, we went (except for Alie, too tired) to see a 3-D movie, ( Read more... )

Our family computer is sick. When people get sick, sometimes they vomit. When Windows computers get sick, they pop up dozens of Internet Explorer windows. Luckily it's not porn, just ads for who knows what (I don't actually read  the ads, since any IE screen popping up is not welcome). I know at least one of the ads is telling us that we have ( Read more... )