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oedipus' online complexes

a compendium of truth which is stranger than fiction

Posts tagged with "me"

a third of the way to nowhere...

Friday, 4. May 2007, 01:53:30

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when visiting in late january, chaals enthusiastically explained how he was dedicated to reading at least a book a week this year.

at that point, i had just overcome a nasty blow to the head, which required me to remain horizontal for a couple of weeks, during which i had an opportunity to get quite a bit of reading done. as i thought of it, i realized that if i kept my current pace, i too could read at least 52 books this year.

so, i set myself some ground rules: all audio books must be listened to at normal, rather than at a quickened speed; a book must be unabridged in order to qualify; and i must finish it in its entirety before listing it.

what i had read so far, not only fit these requirements, but gave me a head-start on the endeavor:

  1. Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer (RFB&D: DT-HC454)
  2. The Cabala, by Thornton Wilder (NLS: 17679)
  3. The Eighth Day, by Thornton Wilder (NLS: RC 37676)
  4. An Honest President, a biography of Grover Cleveland by H.Paul Jeffers
  5. Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell (RFB&D: DT-HJ907)
  6. My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey
  7. The Ides of March, by Thornton Wilder (NLS: RC 61139)
  8. Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (RFB&D: DT-HM597)
  9. The Devil & the White City, by Eric Larsen
  10. Of Time, Fire and the River, by Norman F. Brydon (NLS: C2896)
  11. The Jonestown Flood, by David McCullough
  12. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Luana, by Umberto Eco

and then, in February 2007, i joined MyOpera, and was asked, whilst setting up my profile, what was the latest book i had read? to this, i could only answer: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, for i had made the decision 6 hours into the 53 hours and 34 minutes it would take me to complete the book, that i was suspending my regular habit of reading several books simultaneously, until i finished Against the Day, so i listed it as the last book i read, attempting to keep current the progress i was making in completing the 53 hours and 34 minutes...

here is a partial (off-the-top-of-my-head) list of books i suspended reading until i finish Against the Day:

  1. Julius Ceasar: A Military Biography, by J.F.C. Fuller
  2. The Roman Way, by Edith Hamilton
  3. The Iraq Study Group Report
  4. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick
  5. Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell
  6. The Chronicles of Clovis, by Saki (HH Munro)
  7. Fables for the Frivolous, by Guy Wetmore Carryl
  8. Many Masks: The Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Brendan Gill (NLS: 27227)
  9. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach

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something that i said?

Saturday, 28. April 2007, 15:08:26

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not so long ago, i was trying to address a billing SNAFU with a credit card company, and the customer rep asked for some obscure information which resided in another file, whose name i could not quite remember, in another directory... as usual, i had about a dozen programs running at the time, and switching between them was giving JAWS a problem, so it took me a while to find the document i needed... apparently, during my search i had muttered to myself "where is that damn thing?!?!"

thinking that i had only thunk that thought, but apparently, having enunciated it, the customer rep suddenly said: "i will have to terminate this call if you continue to use profanity"

not having realized that i had muttered to myself outloud and been over-heard, i reflexively asked her: "what the hell did i say?"

of course, she hung up...

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my fifteen minutes of fame

Friday, 27. April 2007, 03:28:03

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the year i was born, in a catalog for an exhibition of his art in stockholm, sweeden, andy warhol famously wrote, and has been misquoted ever since: In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.

well, andy's future is now -- i dare you to contradict that - he's dead, i'm not -- and, so, today, unto me was delivered my fifteen minutes, when i, or rather, my photographs, had the honor of being featured on the front page of MyOpera.

as an internet whore (a.k.a. a webmaster) i am grateful for anyone or anything that drives visitors my way, especially if we can barter: a broken link report for an operational link; a comment or inquiry that leads to a response that leads to a new webpage, sub-site, or concrete action; the give and take of the web that makes it simultaneously humankind's greatest collaborative effort and cause for optomism, as well as the world's largest vanity press and red-light district...

perhaps i expressed it more coherently on april 19, 2007 -- patriot's day, one of my most holy of holidays -- when i spent over four hours, looking at my surroundings through other people's eyes... it gave me a better gestalt mind's eye view of my surroundings, as i tend only to concentrate upon -- and hence, remember -- that with which i come into constant, consistent or regular contact,.. but i became so impressed at the acuity of my fellow operators, that i neglected to finish writing, and, hence, posting about the experience, until today...

MyOpera offered me an opportunity to do -- and took away my excuse not to do -- something i've wanted to do ever since i first heard of digital cameras -- mount pictures, taken by myself and others, on the web, and ask for descriptions; actually 2 descriptions: a single sentence descriptor, as one would expect to find in ALT text) and an unbounded text-entry field for as full a description as the viewer deemed appropriate...

i have created an album named Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words?, but have yet to populate it with images... i intend to collect the most iconic pictures of human and natural events that the majority of us take for granted, myself included, until 1989; a topic upon which i ruminated in a comment on a comment (and some of whose text is alarmingly similar to that which preceded this aside)

in any event, i am extremely grateful to all who have visited, and to all who may visit in the future, especially to those who took time to post comments that gave me a much greater cognizance of my surroundings than i have had in quite a long time... all too often, out of sight, out of mind, is not just a cliché -- it's part of life that i simply took for granted until it faded from view, and, which seems much less important, albeit annoying, in that if i don't come into contact with something on a regular basis, it may as well not exist... i am especially thankful to chaals, for getting me to join MyOpera, and for sowing the seeds for others to water; the entire MyOpera team, for being so reactive and proactive to usability and accessibility concerns; to DanteSoft, whose analytic and descriptive powers amaze me; SmithW, who not only commented on, described and refined previous descriptions, he joined the MyOpera community; to Espen, for writing about what i'm up to; and, as always, to Helen Shapiro, for the eels...

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snakes in the house

Tuesday, 24. April 2007, 02:14:30

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this saturday, i was reminded of the downside of using software synthesized speech -- today's laptops and computers don't have any COM ports to which to connect the hardware speech synthesizers i already own (and which, in their time and relative to my circumstances, cost a pretty penny) -- i suppose i'll have to get a cheap USB TTS hardware device...

what brought this to mind was that my laptop had crashed mid-afternoon on saturday, and as had happened once on my main tower, when i rebooted everything was irreversibly silent... i knew from the last time it happened on the tower that it was most probably due to something having reset the volume down to 0% -- but i had to wait once again until jorge came over to check the sound and volume settings, which was a bonus, for he had really come over to help me catch a snake...

oh, i haven't mentioned the snakes, yet? my felines have, this year, developed a decided taste for catching and tormenting garter snakes... at least, i tell myself they are only garter snakes, the only other possibility being a timber rattlesnake

so far, the first two snakes were relatively small, and one was definitely dead, but today, one of the cats caught an adult, who survived my inadvertantly stepping on it while wearing my boots... my assistant, who normally comes but once a week was here, having driven me to a doctor's appointment and then to a diagnostics lab to get 4 vials' worth of blood drawn... she saw the snake and made haste to inform me that it was headed for my bedroom...

alas, i was to slow and uncoordinated to catch the snake before it slithered into my room, under the bookshelf next to the bed, and, finally, under the bed itself...

i figured that, since there was nothing anyone could do, the cats would take care of the snake in the morning, when it moved towards a source of light and heat, snakes being cold-blooded creatures...

no such luck... and my assistant, who is the only one who actually had a clear view of the snake, said that it was tan and "diamond-backed", which would eliminate it from being a garter snake, and put it in the "potentially poisonous" class... but then, i came to my senses -- if it had been an infant timber rattler (they are born live and ready to release venom), it would probably have bitten and poisoned one of the cats... besides, the presence of a timber rattler in one's house raises an ethical dilemma, as timber rattlers are an endangered species...

i have nothing against snakes, and no fear of being bit... i will admit that i don't much cotton to keeping snakes as pets, but that is solely because i once had a white lab mouse as a pet, and many domestic snakes live on a diet of crickets and mice...

so, the snake remains, supposedly, under my bed... if he is still there, he must be in hibernation, or possibly dead, through a combination of cat-inflicted wounds and its inability to keep its body temperature high enough to sustain life...

i really don't know... all i know is, according to all the sighted people who've investigated the situation, there's a snake under my bed...

i wonder what samuel l. jackson would do?

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