• 10:39 @sgthotpants How long is the heater running for before it dies? I had a heat shield out of place that tripped a sensor when I moved in. #
• 10:41 @sgthotpants I'm convinced that the heat shield was moved out of place by Ameren during inspections, and the PO' didn't know about it. #
• 10:43 @sgthotpants It's just a metal panel with two holes that fits on two pins, hangs between burner and the electrics inside the service panel. #

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• 09:01 I took it and so should you—The Survey For People Who Make Websites, 2009: aneventapart.com/survey2009 #
• 12:35 I just used the coolest feature of Chrome, it's task manager, to kill a bum shockwave flash plugin w/out killing the rest of my tabs/browser #
• 13:44 StumbledUpon this great site of a $6,000 mud/straw/wood home...Want: www.simondale.net/house/ #

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Falling in love and all the emotions that come with it can be SUCH a distraction from the mundane necessities of life. It'd be funny if it weren't also frustrating. :) More in locked posts.

In other news, after 3 weeks of me being sick, and finally recovering from strep plus the side effects of related meds, the very next day my kitties came down with colds. Sniffling, sneezing, stuffed up. Poor babies. They're clearing it and healing up well though.

A part of me can't believe it's mid December already. And a part of me saw every week passing, and knows that December is, of course, what happens after November finishes. Another part of me desperately wants to skip Jan/Feb and jump ahead to when Spring comes in March. It's COLD out there, people! I hate being cold!! Oh well.

• 11:26 @SgtHotpants omg, dark chocolate and ancho would be awesome...maybe with a tiny bit of cayenne for a kick. #

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I need to make myself write. It feels like this has been a longer gap than I usually let go by between instances of satisfying writing - in the past I've at least posted stupid stuff in the interim, just to keep my head in the game a tiny bit. I have not even been recording my dull-as-dishwater daily goings-on lately, and it's all starting to press outward from the inside of my brain. Since I don't really want to get all Scanners, I decided to pick just something, anything to restart myself, and I landed on webcomics reviews/descriptions/recommendations, since it's something I've been meaning to do for ages anyway. In fact, this isn't my first attempt, but I never came close to finishing last time I tried - and wow, my list looks very very different now than it did the last time I tried this. I have no idea if I'll be any more motivated on this attempt, but if I drop this project in favor of writing about the things that are making me itchy-brained, I will consider that no less a win than if I actually do manage to write something about every webcomic I've ever read.

Below is the whole list, taken from the five relevant tabs on my spreadsheet. Yeah, there's a spreadsheet. Should you click through, be aware that this is one of the main ways I get my geek on these days. I've treated webcomic reading as a dedicated hobby since 2003, and it shows in the number of strips with which I am familar to varying extents. It's a little overwhelming even to me, and I'm the one who did all this reading (FYI, the time spent has averaged out to roughly one whole weekend a month, at least until this whole unemployment thing started). One could certainly see why I think I might fall away from this exercise.

Oh, also, I've had people ask me to mark NSFW stuff in the past, so I went through and tagged the ones that I know to be so - or am pretty sure, at least; I'm not a ratings person and I am just going by memory, so take that as you will. The majority are fine - no one filters for subversive materials, right? - but there may be a few others in there that I missed, especially on the Reading/To Read section, since some of those I haven't looked at yet.

My default assumption is that no one but me will care about this list or the writing I plan to do. If I am incorrect to the extent that anyone wishes to:

• know my opinion about a particular webcomic


• give me a recommendation


• get a recommendation from me


• point out a broken link (used a formula to do the HTML and haven't checked them all yet)


• point out a typo


• point out that one of the strips I have listed as being on hiatus is updating again


• have me add or remove an NSFW note


• bitch at me for something I say

or has some other interest or question than those that have occurred to me, please let me know; I'll be very interested.

I'll try to aggregate them in some convenient manner (again, just in case someone cares), but I'm not sure just how yet - I'll figure that part out as I go. I had better not project any farther into the future than that, or I'll fail before I even start!

( Current )

( Infrequent or Accumulated )

( Reading/To Read )

( Hiatus )

( Archive )

( No Longer Reading )

I don't know if this fix attempt will work in the long term, but I feel a little better right now, so that's a start.

• 09:40 @el_dickman Congrats on the 5 year. Coming up on mine Jan 24 at ADP. This is definitely the longest single job I've ever had. Most were 2-3. #

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This was a good weekend. I had expected it to be miserably hard, but it was good.

A friend from out of town came in Friday night. Saturday a small group of us went to lunch to celebrate the gainful employment of one (ie, he got to pick up the tab. :)) We had the restaurant to ourselves until shortly before we left. Yum.

Game day pot luck. Much smaller than normal potluck game day, but everyone seemed to have a good time. I keeled in the middle--I get overwhelmed a couple weeks before solstice normally and retreat into myself, it's been happening this year since before Thanksgiving--but I recovered enough to rejoin at the end.

Today was Kamakura for lunch, then we picked up our new foster--little black 8 month old kitten named, I kid you not, Darth Vader. Sounds like his namesake as well, given his cold.

Finally had someone show up and take a file cabinet I've been trying to sell. Folks keep flaking out, but it's gone! Progress is being made on the garage.

FINALLY got presents and wrapping stuff upstairs. I want to do that right after Thanksgiving but our main room has been in use until now. It has helped considerably my state of mind to get moving on the holidays again. Have a good idea for what we need to still buy, and will finish that off this week. Just getting the stuff up and looking at it has helped my mind considerably.

Sunday night was dinner with a couple friends, as normal, then off to a Cookies and Cocoa open house. Yum. Nice people, good cookies hot out of the oven, good cocoa (and blueberry mead.) I was worried I was going to be disconnected & overwhelmed, but I wasn't--I was there, I enjoyed myself, it was good.

I crashed on the way home, but s'what the ride home is for. I like not being the driver anymore.

I am used to a week or two before the solstice being hard on me. It always is. I'm always frazzled and overwhelmed. Having it start the week before Thanksgiving is new, and it's been rough. Next week, though. Next week I reset my internal self and rejoin the world in general. I don't know why it works, but it does. It was nice to have a brief reconnectedness tonight. Gives me a bit of a push to make getting to next week a little easier, given how muffled I've been for a lot longer than normal.

Now, I am going to bed.

• 10:57 Joy! :-P I get to squash an open-source bug in pam_ldap from PADL. Hopefully it will make it back into the trees at PADL and SuSE. #

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In the study of stellar evolution, there is this concept called the main sequence, a well-defined band that you see whenever you survey all the stars in the sky and plot their color on one axis and their brightness on the other. Not all stars fall into the main sequence, but the vast majority do; there's even a lovely image of the graph here.

It seems the same is true of relationships. Stellar evolution and stellar nucleosynthesis map with remarkable fidelity onto relationships, I've observed, with a plot of "intensity of relationship" (as a function of emotional investment and expectation of continuity) vs. "sexual boundaries" showing patterns startlingly similar to the main sequence. At least to me.

So for example if you plot sexual boundaries horizontally and relationship intensity vertically, you might see something like this:



The sexual boundaries increase from left to right, with the classifications as:

A: Anything goes. Unbarriered, unprotected, full-on squishy fluid-bonded sex.
B: Barriers for anal and PIV sex
O: Unbarriered oral; no penetrative sex.
F: Fisting and/or fingering without barriers; barriers for anything else.
G: Gloves for fingering; no wet and squishy contact, even manual, without them.
P: Pants stay on; above-the-pants contact allows.
M: Makeout partners--no removing of clothing.

Now, not all the partners one can have fall in the main sequence. Along the top of the graph, we see partners distributed in Type Ia and Type Ib classifications: these are people you will schedule regular orgies with or a regular BDSM play relationship with, which may or may not involve sex (directly) but do involve a high level of emotional investment and commitment. Some of these folks might even be considered "family."

If you're part of the sex-positive community, you might go to orgies or play parties on a regular basis, and see the same folks over and over. These are folks you don't necessarily have squishy sex with, but you might have some sort of irregular or semi-regular play/makeout relationship with. There's not necessarily a high level of emotional investment, but you notice when you show up to a party and they aren't there.

Type IV partners are most commonly found in poly relationships. These are the "Too Complicated To Explain" partners--they're not necessarily partner partners, and they're not necessarily part of the family, but they're not not partners either...

A branch from the main sequence sometimes occurs for metamours, who a person might have some sort of sexual relationship with, but might not continue if that person's partner breaks up with that person, but then again, sometimes these relationships do continue on their own, and...yeah, it's complicated. Past a certain point, it's not always clear from a single partner whether that person is main sequence or metamour.

A scattering of partners exist with a high level of sexual contact but a low level of relationship investment. These partners tend to scatter along the Friends with Benefits and One-Night Stand axes.

Come out of my house to walk to the bus stop (across the street). There's cop cars blocking the roads north and south of the bus route. A TV camera is pointed at one of the cop cars, then the TV car drives off. An SUV comes by asking if I'm "waiting for a bus or a ride to a warm bus". Well, that's most odd, but he looks happy I'm waiting for the bus and drives on.

I ask the cop next to the bus stop what's going on. He's "not at liberty to say" but it's on "the block over there" and I should be "safe standing here". Well, I never before considered if I wasn't safe at the bus stop!

When the bus comes I find out they have the entire couple blocks across from our house cordoned off with cop cars sitting in the cross roads. (From Silver to Brighton, the focus seems to be on Mitchem in the middle, for those familiar with the area). Also, the shopping center near where we are? Yeah, caution tape, 3 MTD buses (which I find out from the driver are called out if they are expecting evacuations or similar--ie, a warm bus is a warm place to go), at least one SWAT vehicle and supposedly 2, and a couple ambulances.

I didn't see anyone near the vehicles, so my guess is they're over in the block across from my house. The only thing the web has is an "apparent standoff", but it's been going on for 3+ hours now, since the bus driver first saw it a bit before 7.


What a way to start the morning!

Update 1: Chatting with Jon from work, as he's home sick, he thinks he saw another law enforcement van go by. A black unmarked van w/lots of radio antennae looking like folks with badges inside that was let into the area. One of the cops also peered in a car trying to leave the area.

Update 2: Sunnycrest looks to just be a staging area, and it's a domestic disturbance call where someone might be armed. http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2009/12/11/police_block_streets_in_urbana_on_report_of_domestic_incident

Update 3: 10:30 Jon reports the cops are gone.

• 13:18 @El_Dickman Try Graybar (573-2000) (Bel-Ridge) or Grainger (655-3000) (brentwood) for those parts you need. Or, of course, Radio-shack. #
• 15:28 @dayo_ sounds like a naval commander. #

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I had a job interview on Monday for the giant telecom with an office right down the street. It's been a pretty lengthy process: early last week I spent about an hour filling out an online application, then I had a phone interview on Friday for about 45 minutes, then I went in person for an on-site assessment test that took another hour, followed by an in-person interview. The latter didn't take that long, but there was a long wait for the interviewer to be available. I didn't mind the wait, though, as it was better than dressing up in my suit just to take a glorified typing test. Plus, I was there with another interviewee for company, and we kept each other company (she was nervous) and got to spend much of our wait time asking Antoine, the guy who administering the phone interview and conducting the whole process, a whole lot of questions about the company.

Funny story: I was there before the other woman who went through the process with me - I was early but I think she was running late. Antoine came out and shook hands, and noted that the other woman wasn't there yet, so he went off into some other room. While I waited, I was messing with my phone, and then it rang. I answered, and it was Antoine, calling from the back room. I thought for a moment that I'd somehow called him, but then he asked where I was and I said, "I'm right out here, in the lobby," at which point I realized he must have been trying to call the woman who hadn't yet arrived, and HE realized that he'd accidentally called the wrong one. He came back out and we laughed past his embarrassment, and the other woman turned up right about then so all was well.

I think I did well, and, obviously didn't wash out at least up until the last step. Still, I could have sworn he said I'd hear back by the end of the day, and that didn't happen. It was 4:20 when I left on Monday, so I wasn't surprised not to get a call, but I kinda expected to hear yesterday. They were going to do a background check, though, and those usually take quite some time, so that does seem like an awfully quick response, and I'm thinking I possibly misunderstood what he was saying. I think it'd be making me nervous regardless, except that at this point I'm feeling largely numb to the whole job hunting process.

Meanwhile, I got a call from yet another temp agency regarding a different job for which I applied online, so I'll be heading over to Oakbrook Terrace tomorrow afternoon. I just want this to be over.

I think Aeth is in full swing this winter, and has unleashed his fury in the eastern part of the country...

I was checking out the Storm Prediction Centers watch/warning/advisory map just to see what the rest of the country is dealing with...and I come upon THIS!

Just for the uninformed, the SPC uses dots to indicate warnings.

• Green dots are flash flood warnings
• Blue dots are severe thunderstorm warnings
• Red dots.....are tornado warnings!

The ones down in GA/FL, yeah, not too big a surprise for that region. It's always the first and last to get to do any chasing....but that one in western NY..what the hell? It's sitting on the border of a blizzard watch! It just seems so bizarre!

Still wanna throw a jealousy beam at the east coast. Snow irritates me, and I'm quite sick of it. Totally want a piece of the eastern regions!