From Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow:

In truth, Art has mourned and buried his mother. He was raised just fine by his Gran, and when he remembers his mother, he is more sad about not being sad than sad about her.

My family has been discussing what to do with our cat, Henry. He's about 16 years old, and we've had him for most of that time. Of late he has started moving more slowly, and having trouble with stairs and beds and things. Even more than usual he is exhibiting stupidity and passivity about the world around him (he's never been a very active or intelligent cat).

It's his end of life, he's going to die and then we're going to find another cat. My mother brought this up on Friday — should we let him die on his own, or should we have him euthanised? We've had this conversation several times, but nobody really seems to want to come to a decision.

The alternatives were discussed:

1. Pros of Euthanasia
   1. Cleaner; apparently dying is messy.
   2. He won't suffer any longer; apparently dying is painful, but much less so with the addition of barbiturates.
2. Pros of Natural Death
   1. It's very cheap.
   2. We don't have to go to the trouble of finding someone to kill him for us.

People get very attached to their pets, to the point that finding a veterinarian to euthanize them is difficult. I don't know; due probably in part to my AS (about which I've learned much in recent years) I find many parts of daily life difficult. It usually takes me a month or more to get myself sitting in a barber's chair. I think that such an act (finding a vet to kill their pet) would be as hard for most people as working myself up to do periodic maintenance tasks such as buying clothing or cutting my hair is for me. But these things are hard for me not because they are almost emotionally unattainable, but because I have to make decisions whose outputs matter to other people (with inscrutable opinions) and I have little to no opinion myself.

Back to the topic at hand. My cat. I, following the logic which my mother put forth, advocated euthanising Henry soon. He's suffering from dementia and probably arthritis, and he's not getting better. Why suffer?

Interestingly, when I used her logic to try to convince her to do the right thing, she turned on me (though not in the traitorious sense; she simply changed position). She claimed, partially in jest and completely in other words, that I was being heartless. Perhaps it's because I've never seen anyone die, any dead person, or even a dead animal that I was particularly attached to. (I don't tend to get attached to animals; they're just animals. Sometimes I think I like computers better. But I digress.)

In fact, I don't know where I'm headed with this. But it's good to write.

Back to the quote at the beginning. I tend to dispatch emotions faster than other people, and the only thing remaining is a vague regret that I don't have what's expected of me. (What is it that gives Society the power to say what I ought to feel?) Most of the time I subsist (?) on joy and a sort of numbness. Occasionally I'll have a burst of fury. It feels great to be angry, but I wouldn't want to have it every day or even as much as every week.

From mercurychaos

• Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
• Turn to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post that sentence along with these instructions on your LJ.
• Don't dig for your favourite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Sometimes this is natural and clear; at other times it can be cryptic.

(From The White Bible, second edition.)

This book is a classic. I have an unusual edition; mine was printed for the Indian market. The publisher listed is Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, and the cover has the an “Eastern Economy Edition” logo. There's also a price tag printed with “YIP 940”. I can't find any information about what sort of currency code YIP might be.

Mood: sick

While real-time seismographs for your region are always cool to have, google maps overlays are always cooler, being easier to read for laymen and all.

Look what I made today! A project, and a webpage to match. I should do this more often.

At work today, the Educational Media Collection had been shut down. A division of the school's A/V unit, which I work for, they basically were a library of 16mm films. The films were transferred to the libraries (for several reasons it made more sense to let them take care of it). The upshot is that the films came out of their mailing boxes, and went elsewhere. This left the mailing boxes in a big pile on the loading dock. I grabbed several:

I plan to line the largest one (on the bottom) with closed-cell polyethylene foam and turn it into a box for my laptop. I love the steampunk aesthetic.

The smaller box is about 2cm too small for my laptop to fit in. I can't wait to get a smaller laptop, because it's a much cooler box, despite having plastic clips rather than metal clasps, and nylon webbing rather than cotton.

Mood: pleased

Before I go to bed, entirely too late (2:30am!), I must share Telescopic Text.

None of the “Mood” choices match my actual mood. But then I can't really describe it anyway. Sort of ignored/abandoned because everyone's asleep. Tired because, well, it's late. I've got plans which have been partly thrown awry by staying up so late. Hopeful about certain things, pensive about others. I suppose I'll put down “composite”.

(Has anyone ever noticed that Myspace has the exact same list of moods as LiveJournal originally came up with?)

I saw this message in my Facebook inbox just now:

hi my friend and i were messing around and by accident her facebook got deleted her name is payitavi baskaralingam and email is payitavib1596@portal.middlesexcc.edu can we get it back ?

My reply?

I'm sorry, due to a new feature of Facebook, her profile is permanently gone. We designed this feature to automatically disable the profiles of people detected using Facebook while drunk or high. In addition, we report such use to the three major credit-scoring bureaus (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) and to your insurance company.

We feel that this change will make Facebook better for everyone, and safer for anyone who is no longer in a relationship.

Shortly thereafter another breathless missive appeared

we didnt use facebook while being drunk or high we were actually in school we just used the same email twice which caused the first one to delete and shes had it for 3 years is there anyway she can get it back?

I really can't help them get the account back, so I told the truth:

I'm afraid not; the deletion is permanent. Attempting to register a new account with the existing email address is a common sign of intoxication. Is there anything else I can help you with?

The moral of the story? I don't know, but I'm still laughing.

Mood: amused

I'm rather pleased with myself for asserting that

<chronomex> tribbles are a biological forkbomb

This is awesome. Can I have one?

This entry is about keyboards. Skip it if you don't wish to hear what I have to say about typing.

On Monday, Josh and I went to Re-PC in Tukwila. I've been going to their store in the industrial district of Seattle since I was sixteen or so, but I'd never been to Tukwila since it's entirely too far to bike. I ran across an XT keyboard while browsing the bins, and quickly fell in love with it. It's of the old 83-key variety.

There are several things awesome about it. First, it weighs about five pounds. This should never be underestimated. It's a sign that a keyboard has a substantial backing, and won't fall of your lap when typing. It also won't move around on the desk unless you intend for it to move, which is rather important.

Second, it has buckling-spring keyswitches. These are the best keyswitches, like, ever. Before I had ever felt one, I thought that they were rather overhyped. Even after I started, I wasn't completely convinced. I kept bottoming out the keys because I've grown up on membrane keyboards, where the press registers somewhere between the snap and when the key bottoms out. This has conditioned me to type rather harder than is necessary. Buckling spring keyswitches are different in that they positively register when the spring buckles, which also produces the keysnap feel and the sound. (Buckling-spring keyboards aren't exactly quiet, which is why I think my family will start to hate me sooner or later.)

Third, the XT keyboard has a borderline weird layout from the perspective of the AT-derived keyboards that we're conditioned to here in the 21st century. It has no directional (arrows, home/end, pgup/pgdn) keypad; you're supposed to use the arrows on the numpad, which is right where we're used to seeing the directional keys. Also, the control key is where we're used to seeing the capslock key, and capslock is off in a corner. This makes sense for anyone who's used to using control more than capslock, and I suppose that's many people. I really don't understand why capslock has such a primo spot in AT keyboards whereas control is off in the corner.

Josh also got me an IBM Model M keyboard, which is a standard AT keyboard with buckling-spring keycaps. It's awesome as well, but rather less so because of the substandard layout. ;) As soon as I can persuade Linux to grok the XT keyboard's signals, I'll be using it instead.

I probably ought to stop falling in love with keyboards. I have at least seven in my bedroom: one USB Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 which was my birthday present last year, one Teletype (with a delightful keyfeel but an unknown interface), one Sun Type 6 (icky, feels like typing on meat), two Wyse Terminal (one sort of sticky, the other with no snap at all), one XT, one AT, and one ADB (also sort of icky but not as much as the Type 6).

I turned 21 on Monday. Now I can do most anything permitted by law. It's an interesting feeling. All my life (recently at least) social events have been punctuated by "we can't go there, some of us aren't old enough." But now that won't be a problem, at least not due to me. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Tuesday my father took me out for dinner. We went to a fairly fancy restaurant a few blocks from home. I had a drink (my first drink that I've downed all by myself! ever! and it was the day after my birthday!) called a "Festivus Sidecar" which I suppose was good. It was tasty, at least. I'm no judge of this sort of thing, as I'm approximately the only person who has stayed sober right up to his 21st. Even my father assumed that I would know what drink I fancied. My mother also has asked a couple of times that I've really been sober all my life. I don't think either of them believe that it's plausible, though it certainly is possible given how singularly weird I am.

My mother recently took up professional bartending. Before she met my father, she started out as a cocktail waitress after dropping out of college. So she's been in the alcohol industry since approximately forever.

I woke up at 5am today. According to the dream I was in at the time, I had to remove my bedding entirely or else the world economy would collapse, or something. So I did. Hooray for patriotism? Anyway, I'm getting up early because it's too cold to sleep without sheets.

Well you can't say I did the wrong thing, because how do you know that it's not true?

Mood: cold

I got a new pair of shoes yesterday. I've been fed up with my feet getting wet (and cold) for a while. The thing is, I have flat feet and so need lots of arch support, which is for some reason hard to find. So I've gone from choosing only shoes that make me feel good, to choosing shoes that both don't hurt me and keep me dry. It feels so wrong to compromise.

Facebook's being irritable, like a small child, and won't let me post this.

From the Wikipedia article about MC Hammer's album U Can't Touch This:

On AMD K8-based microprocessors such as Athlon64 and Opteron, CPUID function 0x8FFFFFFF returns the string "IT'S HAMMER TIME" in registers EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX. The K8 project was codenamed "Hammer" when in development at AMD.

Then supersat confirmed:

21:39:18 < supersat> lulz
21:39:19 < supersat> it works
21:40:19 < supersat> C:\...>hammertest.exe
21:40:19 < supersat> IT'S HAMMER TIME
21:40:19 < supersat> C:\...>

Mood: amused

I guess I oughtn't pollute your friends page or feed or whatever, but I have to share this as well.

Today my church had a groundbreaking ceremony for the new building. It was pretty boring. The mayor was there, and I got a picture of me with him mostly to irritate my mother.

Unfortunately my camera/phone was set on crappy mode, so it's a really lousy picture.

Mood: amused

I ought to write about something from my own life, but I'd rather share this anecdote that my father told this evening.

My grandfather was a bank teller to rather rich people during the Great Depression. Banks were collapsing for reasons similar to now; people were taking out more money than they were putting in.

Customers came to his bank in particular, asking for their money back. Typical practice was to give the customer a cashier's check for the full sum if it was over a certain amount, in order that they not be mugged on the street. Al (my grampa) was a perceptive man, and saw that his bank could end badly if every customer closed their account. He asked his boss what to do.

His boss said, "Give them their money. In cash."

So he did. He saw the wisdom of this plan shortly. The customers would take their money, say, $50,000. That's a lot of cash to carry; several pounds worth even in hundred dollar bills. The customer would walk across the lobby and get to the door, where he would see hungry people outside who probably wouldn't mind having a load of cash in their pocket.

At this point they would usually have second thoughts about carrying so much money about in such an economic climate, and re-open their accounts.

Mood: amused

He's speaking this evening.

Your Facebook account has been deactivated.

To reactivate your account, simply log in as you normally would, and we'll send you a reactivation email.

Come back soon,

The Facebook Team

I didn't do the hardcore way, where you delete it permanently. Maybe sometime later.

Mood: depressed

Contrary to popular belief, I am neither interested in nor willing to experiment with dating or having sex with anyone very far from what I consider to be a heterosexual woman. I just thought it would be good to state that in public before anything untoward happens.