Random Bullets of Cancer

• I expect that being the support person for an ill family member is probably a lot easier when it's someone who doesn't irritate the crap out of you. It's amazing the conflicting feelings caused by constantly feeling pissed off with and sorry for someone all at the same time. (Ultimately, though, I do realise that the things Mum does that make me feel uncomfortable are probably more about me than about her.)
• For instance, today I overheard her telling a (not especially close) friend on the phone, "I haven't opened my bowels since the operation, but I'm starting to feel it maybe coming on." Is that really something that other people need to know?*
• She keeps telling people I don't know that I will call them, meet them for coffee etc. I just won't. I can't imagine how anyone can do that with strangers. And some of her friends kept insisting a few days ago that I would be terribly upset and anxious during Mum's operation, and that I should come to their house to wait. If I am upset and anxious, the LAST thing I want to do is be with strangers and have to make polite conversation or (worse) turn into a mental wreck in front of them. Ugh. In the end I switched off the phone for a couple of hours and took a long, relaxing bath. When I switched it back on again, there were 13 messages waiting from people I don't know wanting me to call them back. Which I did. But it kind of negated the relaxing effect of the bubble bath.
• Today she railed from her hospital bed against Americans ("Those awful Americans are as subtle as a screaming red light, and their idea of humour is to hit you over the head with a laugh soundtrack. Not like us British**; we understand delicacy and tact"); against Australians ("Must be awfully hard to teach linguistics. To Australians, I mean. What with the way they mangle the English language. In fact, it must be hard to teach anything to Australians. A bit dense, the lot of them, aren't they?") and against Asians ("So horribly driven. They don't know how to have fun".) When I don't look appropriately amused by these sentiments she tells me I've been "infected by that nasty political correctness" and that I need to learn to relax.
• Mum is totally convinced she is going to die. She is writing letters to be given to people in case. Has updated her will. Took me out to show me her solicitor's office. Told me what sort of funeral she wants. If I suspected I was dying, I think I would make arrangements too, but secretively, because I would be worried people would think I was an obsessive pessimist.
  
• I am hemorrhaging money like a big money-hemorrhaging thing. Here a dollar, there a dollar, everywhere a dollar fifty. Yesterday alone I paid $14 for parking, and I've used up $35 worth of petrol in less than a week. If it was down to me I'd take the bus everywhere, or walk, but I'm ferrying other relatives and Mum's friends around everywhere too: picking up my brother from the airport, driving Mum to appointments, driving her friends to visit her in hospital, driving my grandfather around... I don't know how anyone affords to use a car for their main means of transport.
• Then I'm spending at least $5 dollars a day on fetching Mum cakes and cokes from the hospital cafeteria, since she is convinced that now she has cancer she will waste away to nothing if she just lives on hospital food. And then there's groceries and bills and "Could you buy me a new kettle?" or "I really meant to repot the plants on the front porch before all this happened. Be a dear and pop down to the shop for some new pots. And don't get those awful plastic ones. They are so cheap and nasty."
• Her welfare payments have been finalised, and although they will now pay for extras like a gardener, a cleaner, petrol for trips to the hospital and doctor, all her prescriptions and other illness-related expenses, Mum's total income now that she won't be working at all will be $100 a week less than her current budget (which she has trouble sticking to anyway). I've suggested getting rid of her cellphone, which easily costs her $20 a week, and that she maybe stop using things like her colour printer (she prints out all her photos and emails in full colour), try going just a month or two without buying new clothes, and if I were her, I'd get rid of the car. (She lives half a block from a major bus-stop that connects everywhere, and is within a short walk of a supermarket, or a half-hour walk of the centre city). But she has never lived without a car, and I can understand that she feels now that she is ill that she won't have the energy to use public transport. It just bothers me that she spends more than I do on discretionary expenses like new clothes, fancy brands of household items, a flash car, top quality insurance, home repairs, entertainment, etc, and then constantly complains about being short of money. Especially when I am subsidising her like I am at the moment, it frustrates me to know that she is spending my money on things I wouldn't buy for myself.
• If you are going to get a nasty disease, you might as well do it in New Zealand. As well as Mum's welfare payments covering the extras mentioned above, she has received a $600 voucher from the Cancer Society to cover a prosthesis and new bras, and will get another $600 for this every four years for the rest of her life. She also gets a free wig and hats, as well as various small things like cushions and face creams and wotnot. And in a few weeks she is booked in to have a free makeover and massage. My grandmother has had six hats and a lovely wig all free from the Cancer Society. And the Cancer Society are paying for my grandfather and aunt and uncle to stay in a motel near the hospital, since they decided Granddad was too elderly to cope well with the usual shared accommodation they provide. On the other hand, this makes me feel bad for people who have less well-publicised diseases and presumably don't get any of these compensations.
• Mum came home from the hospital this afternoon, though. So hopefully the next week or so will be a bit less frantic.

___________

* I do see the irony in complaining about someone over-sharing like this when I spill out all the details of my life to complete strangers on the internet. It just feels different, somehow. And at least I don't tell you about my bowels.

** She is British when it makes her feel appropriately superior; but counts herself as a New Zealander when it is time to complain about the "whinging Poms".

I'm such a hedonist

(As seen at Sea Change.)

Haymaker

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.

You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.

Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

Tactlessness or the height of efficiency?

When Grandma got her diagnosis (stomach cancer with incurable secondary tumors in her brain) about two weeks ago, the very next morning she received a courier package delivery from the local undertaker with forms for her to specify her funeral wishes and details of their "very reasonable" pricing schemes.

(Weirdly, the undertaker's forms want the most bizarre details, like her mother's maiden name, and Granddad's number from when he was in the army in WW2.)

I heart my brother

I was going to write a long post about the past week here, and I might still do it later on, but for now I think the following anecdote sums things up quite well.

I picked up my brother from the airport today. He could only get one day off work, despite explaining to his boss that both his mother and his grandmother are down here in the hospital with cancer. But at least he is here until Monday.

My brother and I have never been close. In fact, years go by when we have almost no contact with each other. We don't really have anything in common. Mum was a little bit worried about him coming down at all, since he tends to need looking after rather than being any help around the place himself. As far as I can tell, his main hobbies are spending money, breaking things, and losing his job.

So anyway, I picked him up at the airport. He got into the car and asked me, "How long have you been over here?"
"Since Sunday," I replied.
"Aaah, good times," he said ironically. Then, with concern, "Have you had any good times lately?"
"Not exactly," I said, and started to cry.
"We'll have to do something about that, then!" he said. He took me to the shops, bought chocolate and sweets and all the ingredients for pancakes, drove me to the movies and made me watch Pan's Labyrinth and eat chocolate, and tomorrow he is cooking me pancakes for breakfast. (I think my no-sugar thing is on hold.)

And I'm off!

Posting will probably be lighter than usual over the next few weeks, as my mother only has a dial-up connection and a crappy computer.

How to get more exercise

I decided to take a slightly different route cycling home yesterday from the library and got totally and utterly lost.

So of course the first thing I did upon getting home* was to Google Map myself and work out where I had been.



I have no excuse.

____________

* Which, in case scary internet people are trying to stalk me, is not the end point on this map, but rather a couple of blocks further away in an unspecified direction.

I have a little list

My mother has given me a list of all the things that she would like me to do while I am visiting.

Apparently I will be:

• Painting the front of the house
• Sorting out her welfare payments
• Pruning her garden
• Walking her dog and training it not to bite bicycles
• Driving her to the hospital for a 7 am appointment on the morning after I arrive (which, given the time difference, is going to feel like 5 am for me)
• Finding a way to get rid of her compost heap, which has "gone off" and which the council won't take away for her
• Getting her computer to "do that thing. You know, that thing it's meant to do."

At least I won't get bored!

Two little dickie birds, sitting on a wall

Argh.

I don't think I've written about this here yet, but I've mentioned it in various comments other places, so some of you probably already know.

For the one-year anniversary of my father leaving her for another woman, her life falling apart and her ending up moving house, going on welfare, and being a (understandly) miserable wreck, this year my mother got cancer. It's a Nasty Sort (official medical terminology) that I don't want to go into detail about in case my mother googles the specifics of her situation, flips through to page 98 of the search results, and accidentally ends up here. (I know, I'm paranoid.)

As an extra bonus, my grandmother's (my mother's mother's) cancer, which was in remission, has returned with a vengeance, ensconced itself in her brain, and her doctor says she has about six weeks. The one good thing (for me, and of course it is all about me) is that she has been moved from her hometown 400 km away to the same hospital as my mother will be in, so I can visit them both at once. (They really ought to have shopper reward points for this sort of thing: have two or more family members treated for cancer in the same hospital and get a free upgrade to a private room. Ha. Ha. Ha. See me make inappropriate jokes.)

So yes, the visit. That was the point of this entry. When my mother's cancer was first diagnosed a couple of weeks ago, they said they would be operating within two weeks, so I geared up for a quick trip over there. Then the operation was postponed until the 30th of May. So my new plan was to get my dissertation finished in the next few weeks, hop on a plane, and spend a work-free three weeks with my mother while I waited for feedback from my committee.

An hour ago I got an email from my (rather frantic) mother, saying they are operating on Tuesday and I should get my arse on a plane as soon as possible. Which is Sunday, apparently, since that's the only flight between now and then that has reasonably priced tickets still available.

Would anyone like to take bets on whether I can finish my thesis within the next two days? Cos I'm guessing not.

I could make an awesome pun here, but it would use my real name

Here's me as a manga character:



And this is what I'd look like if I hadn't got around to evolving:



Try the face transformer yourself.

Someone needs to practise negotiation skills

(And I think it's both of us.)

On his morning rambling-round-the-department-with-coffee-cup-in-hand, the HOD dropped by my office. As usual, he took up a position just inside the door, but facing the wall 90 degrees away from me, which means eye contact—and hence interruptions—are impossible.

Then he talked solidly for twenty minutes about his favourite brand of tea and his plans for an upcoming holiday. Followed by, "So, anyway, I'm really glad you'll be teaching [Supervisor]'s classes next semester. Of course, I want to keep the cost of covering for her sabbatical as low as possible, so I'm thinking we could pay you by the hour as a casual lecturer. I'm pretty sure that would work out cheapest."

He paused. I realised I was probably meant to say something here, but, "Fuck that! I want lots of money!" didn't strike me as quite appropriate. Fortunately, HOD is not one to leave a silence verbally unmolested.

"The budget I actually have for filling the position is $X, though, so, if pressed, we could afford to go that high."

I would have inserted, "Yes! Let's do that!" at this point, but I wasn't fast enough.

Leaving the room, he muttered to the door frame, "but maybe I won't have to and then we can use that money to fund something else."

Fortunately, I "just happened" to mention this conversation to my supervisor later in the day, and then sat back and watched her approach him at afternoon tea time. I only heard her opening remark before their voices got too low for eavesdropping, but "I want you to think very carefully about your plans for paying StyleyGeek. It's just not fair to—" strikes me as rather hopeful.

It's always nice to have someone in your corner.

Manners

Flappy seems to have learned to eat like a gentleman.

He* still isn't interested in any food other than birdseed, but has made the connection that if he takes a chunk of my hand in his mouth, I'm going to go away and take the seed with me. So now he is being very careful to take one seed gently at a time, and if the pointy bit of his beak accidentally catches my hand, he freezes and then quickly looks up, aghast, to see if I have taken offense.

This just in: Cockatoo tongues are all tickly.

_____________

* I have no idea what sex Flappy is, but I'm going to make him masculine here, just to save me having to do weird shit with my pronouns. (Masculine rather than feminine because he's slightly bigger than his mate, which might—who knows?—be significant in birdie sex determination.)

If the academic blogs I read got together and created their own university

• English literature would be the largest and most powerful field.
• Available courses would also include such exotic offerings as "musical basket-weaving" and "complexification theory as applied to hairdressing".
• Some professors, despite having an office and students, would nonetheless manage to keep their real name and what they worked on completely secret.
• There would be a ratio of approximately 50 grad students to each tenured professor. And no one would ever finish their dissertation.
• Most science lecturers would talk about hard science... but the humanities professors would spend at least 30 percent of the lecture time discussing their cats.
• Reviews and evaluations would mostly read, "You rock! What you say is so true!" with the occasional disgruntled, "OMG U SUCK LOL!1!!1"
• Committees and informal discussions would consist of a mixture of professors, grad students, undergrads, members of the general public, and random people who hid under the table causing trouble and wouldn't tell you their names.
• Everyone would install top-of-the-range spy cameras outside their offices so they could track how many people had dropped by while they were out.
• People would spend hours painting their office doors elaborate colour schemes in order to attract the maximum number of visitors, and would then hide behind the locked door to see whether or not it worked.
• There would be some awesome end-of-semester parties.

That's right, worship me!

Dear StyleyGeek,

Re: your email of 8 May 2007, I am revering your request and our IT manager will get back to you as soon as possible.

Regards,
[Online shop that I asked a question of]

Do you think maybe he meant "referring"?

Neanderthal alert, category orange

RussianViolets' students write the best* sentences EVER.

My favourite is: "Since the beginning of time, the US has been fighting terrorists and other exterminators."

_______

* By which, obviously, I mean "the worst".

Search engines that don't suck

So since Google has gone to the Dark Side, I have been experimenting the last few days with different search engines. (Thanks, incidentally, to Mentor, Gnome, Geeka, and Rebecca, who all left comments with suggestions of search engines to try out.) I am sure you will be deeply excited to know that I am now ready to share my hard-won wisdom with teh internets.

For the benefit of those of you with reading comprehension difficulties, I have helpfully divided the list below into three sections: Search engines that suck, search engines that don't suck, and search engines with extra awesomeness. I am not going to review any of them in depth, but will annotate each with a brief, yet somehow still incredibly helpful and witty comment. I won't pretend this list is at all objective,* but maybe it will give you some ideas if you too are planning to abandon the Evil One.


Search engines that suck

Ms Dewey has possibly the most irritating interface I have ever come across. Make sure you have your speakers set to low or turned off if you try out this page at work.

Metacrawler sprinkles ads surreptitiously throughout the search results.

Grokker broke my browser. Ten seconds to load, my arse. Maybe for those of you in the lands of infinite bandwidth.


Search engines that don't suck

Alltheweb is like an ugly version of Google. Yes, I know I can skin it. But I can't be bothered. And the fact that it too automatically detects the Danish setting of my browser makes me fear for the future.

Ask.com reminds me of a butler. Reviews suggest it works pretty well, though.

Accoona seems pretty average. Cluttered. Gets averagely relevant results. A bit like Google but not as good. (Although the "target your search" dropdown boxes are kind of cool.)

Yahoo! is okay, but kind of ordinary. And looks a bit unprofessional up on your screen. Google displaying on screen is something you can get away with when your boss walks into the office unexpectedly. Yahoo! not so much.

Exalead has a nice "narrow your search" bar on the right-hand side. The results don't seem very relevant, though, and apparently it's nowhere near the size of Google, nor has it updated its index in the past two years.

Aftervote is fun. And you can pretend you are part of the elite by cluttering your screen with all sorts of "advanced settings" that the plebs don't know about. It seemed to return relevant results, too.


Search engines with extra awesomeness

Zuula searches across Google, Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast and Exalead and returns the results in tabbed form. Even though Google has cruelly betrayed me, I would be prepared to keep using it via Zuula, since that way I get the Google goodness without the personalised experience.

Dogpile, irritatingly, includes hits from ads among its results, but it seems to return a much lower ratio of ads to real sites compared to Metacrawler. (Did it just wag its tail at me?) Like Zuula, it uses the major search engines, including Google (and thankfully NOT the personalised version, even when I am logged into my gmail account). (And it did just wag its tail at me.)

Goodsearch gives a penny per search to a charity of your choice. It's powered by Yahoo!, so the search results are good, too.

Vivissimo is Clusty with a different interface. But I saw Clusty first.

Clusty is my new boyfriend. Oh. my. god. I honest-to-goodness(ly) felt shivers down my spine when I saw my first search results all grouped so nicely into clusters. I felt only a small twinge of regret as I deleted Google from my bookmarks toolbar, and it was more than balanced out by anticipation and intellectual superiority I felt when adding Clusty in its place. The only downside is that it doesn't search the major engines like Google and Yahoo! but only smaller, free ones. Even so, the quality of the results it is returning is astoundingly good.


In Summary

I think I will be relying on Clusty and Zuula from now on. Maybe with some Goodsearch thrown in. Take that, Evil Empire!

________________

* I did perform the same three tests on all of them initially, though. First I did two searches related to my dissertation, each of which on Google turns up a few thousand results with some extremely useful stuff in the first few pages. Then (completely arbitrarily and unfairly), I searched for the acronym for an upcoming conference, for which Google USED TO return the conference website as the top hit. I then bookmarked the search engines that turned up useful results on all three of those searches, and continued to play with them for a couple of days to decide which would be The One.

I don't need your stinking logic

Me: "Flappy. That's a good name for a cockatoo. Flappy the Bush Cockatoo."

Geekman: "You're naming the cockatoo?"

Me: "Uh huh. Maybe I'll even teach it to come when I call it."

Geekman: "Which one are you naming?"

Me: "The one from yesterday. The one that wouldn't eat my apple."

Geekman: "How can you tell them apart?"

Me: "I can't. But it doesn't matter. They can all be called Flappy."

Geekman: "But then won't they get each other confused?"

Me: "Well, they don't exactly call each other by name, do they?"

Geekman: "I mean, how will they know which one should come when you call them?"

Me: "They can all come. It will be AWESOME."

The internet really is broken

It is a bad technology day all round.

Once more, with pathos

I'm not sure I accurately conveyed how devastated I am by Google's treachery. (I'm not trying to be funny here.) It's like I had the wonderfulness that was Google's ability to find out everything for me whenever I wanted: all the information in the world at my fingertips. And then they took it away and replaced it with some crappy search engine that feels like it was designed by Microsoft on a bad day. And they've stopped answering my calls (figuratively speaking).

Google has broken up with me, and it feels like the whole internet's stopped working.

What do I do?

Google is the evilest evil

I am NOT happy with Google. Even a little bit.

The effing effers have gone and "personalised" my search results and there isn't an off switch. This means, when yesterday a search for the national linguistics society, via its initials, returned a link to the national linguistics society, NOW Google helpfully detects that my browser language is Danish, and returns pages of results to various European companies with the same acronym. Worse, in my other browser, which is set to English, pretty much any search result returns lots of Australian sites (even when it is not set to search for Australian pages only), and these are pretty much NEVER what I am searching for. Who cares if I am physically located in Australia? The internet should be beyond petty regional distinctions.

I have just spent a long time scouring the Google help pages for a solution. Google, which less than a year ago, had a helpful email address to send questions to, and which responded to queries within less than a week, now has NO information on how to contact them for issues like this.

But they do kindly provide an answer to the relevant FAQ:

How do I turn off personalization?

Just sign out of your Google Account. When you want to personalize your results again, just sign in again.

Yeah, well that sounds like fun. I only recently discovered a way to circumvent the necessity of signing in and out every five minutes to switch between my blog gmail account and my private one. And now I am supposed to sign in and out again every time I want to search for something?

Well FAQ you, Google.

Anyone have a good recommendation for an alternative search engine?

Success! (Of a sort)

Dear university,

Please excuse StyleyGeek from working on her dissertation this afternoon. She is having difficult typing with her right hand after an unfortunate incident with an overly enthusiastic cockatoo.

PS: Hand-feeding wild birds is overrated.

Foot in the door

My supervisor has just offered me a job filling in for her when she is on sabbatical next semester! Not only does that mean real! live! money!, but, more excitingly, real! live! teaching!, i.e. full responsibility for her classes. (You can tell how happy I am about this from the amount of punctuation in the previous sentence.)

Dork that I am, this meant I lay awake all night planning syllabi and assignments and coming up with clever ways to mess with the little studentses' minds. And when I've achieved my dissertation-related goals for the day, I'm going to reward myself by going online and comparing textbooks.

Extra dorkily, the first thing I thought when she offered me the job was not, "Money!" or "That will look good on my CV," but rather, "That will pretty much guarantee a steady supply of entertaining anecdotes for blog posts." (Followed by, "Maybe I can encourage her to go somewhere wonderful on her sabbatical, so that she decides not to come back...")

StyleyGeek gets trigger happy with the camera and the captions

We're in your treez, waiting for our dinnerz.


Wotcha eating? Can I have some? Can I? Can I?


Pufferfish Parrot is not amused.


Oh nos! Now how does I get my dinnerz?


Thass how I gets my dinnerz.


What YOU looking at? We jus' good friendses.


My dinnerz, I hypnotizes thems.


Pufferfish parrot say, time for say goodbye.

Hah, what a surprise!

What English Speaking Country Are You?

You Belong in New Zealand

Good on ya, mate You're the best looking one of the bunch Though you're often forgotten... You're quite proud of who you are

You know what sucks?

When you are having a stressful conversation with someone, and you suddenly get something in your eye, and have to wipe away tears, and then no matter what you do or say, they are always going to think you were getting upset and that "something in your eye" was a really lame cover story.

Bad joke of the day

Me, untangling a mess of electrical cords: "This is a bit Gordian."

Geekman: "No it's knot."

Oh baby, you can diagram my sentences

My supervisor yesterday at afternoon tea:

"You wouldn't believe the sorts of spam mails I've been getting lately. This morning there was one asking if I wanted to 'f**k my wet hard d*ck into three inches longer'. It's shocking! I couldn't even parse its syntax!"

I'm aiming to be the crazy parrot lady

This morning I had a guard of honour on my way to university. Eight(!) rosellas escorted me and my bicycle all the way to the end of my street.

I think they were pissed off because I took away their sunflower seeds half an hour earlier than usual, when some of them were only just arriving. So maybe it was more a case of chasing me off their land, rather than following me because they love me so much.

Whatever. It was still pretty damn cool.

Songs I don't need to hear right now

Listening to music to improve your motivation and concentration can sometimes backfire badly.

Three songs in this morning's playlist (Nena) that I probably shouldn't have listened to:

(1) Fragezeichen [Question mark].

Lyrics: Den Kopf voller Dinge die man zu schnell vergißt/Wo fang ich an wenn's so weit ist [...] Ich seh mich um, probiere was /Ich kenn den Weg nicht so genau
[My head full of things that are too quickly forgotten/Where do I start when it's time [...] I look around, try something / I don't really know the way]

(2) Ich häng immer noch an dir [I still have a thing for you].

Chorus: Heut' schaff ich das nicht mehr und lief ich um mein Leben. /Ich warte bis ein Jahr vergeht.
[Today I'm not going to manage it, even if I run for my life. / I'll wait for a year to pass.]

(3) Ich bleib' im Bett [I'm staying in bed]. (The title says it all).

Nena is enabling my procrastination.

Hit Pearl Z mp3/mp4 player (review)

While I'm doing reviews, I thought I should probably review my new mp3 player, since there don't seem to be any other reviews of this brand out there on the great wide innernets. For my usual readers this will probably be pretty boring, so go ahead and skip it.

Before I begin, I take back my complaints two days ago about it not working. Geekman (wonderful Geekman) solved all my problems. I'll give more details on this below.

General:

The player does everything it claims to do, and is pretty, and cheap into the bargain. All the specifications advertised (e.g. here) hold up to scrutiny. The case and the screen seem pretty robust so far.

The display is very animated and cutsey. Think pink bubbles and a Hello Kitty sense of style. I'm not sure if I should count this as a bug or a feature.

All in all, for something that is a third of the price of more famous brand players, I think the Hit Pearl Z is a pretty good deal.

Good points:

Comparatively big screen (1.8 inch). While it is a lower resolution than e.g. the iPod Nano, it is extremely bright and visible from all angles, even in direct sunlight.

Lots of information displayed when music is playing (battery status, total track time, time elapsed, bitrate, playlist setting (randomise or repeat), track title and artist, volume, mp3/wma, equaliser, and even scrolling lyrics for those personal karaoke moments).

Easy drag-and-drop file transfer.

Battery recharges within about two hours and lasts around eight hours of play time. The player can be used while recharging, so if you are at your computer, you can connect it to the USB port and keep on listening while it recharges. It also ships with an adapter so you can plug it straight into the wall. I received an Australian-style adapter, so presumably you will get one for whichever country you place your order from.

Bad points:

The manual is unreadable (think the worst stereotype of Chinese-flavoured English you can imagine) and no documentation can be found online. This means that I still have absolutely no idea how to play one of the games, nor (arguably more importantly!) how to upgrade the firmware.

The player crashed and rebooted randomly almost every time I played a track when I first transfered my music collection across. I thought the player itself was broken, but it turned out that the files had developed encoding errors somehow during the transfer. The culprit may have been the extremely low battery status of the player when I transfered the files, or it may have been that I did the transfer under Linux (although the player is supposedly compatible with Linux). Either way, when I deleted the files and copied them across again with a full battery and under Windows, they were fine.

The user interface is incredibly unintuitive. For example, the "random" setting for playing music is located under the submenu "repeat", which took me several days to discover. Another hard-to-find setting is the one that determines how long a period of inactivity is required before the screen dims. The default setting is only 3 seconds or so, and when you are first trying out the interface, this is very frustrating. I would have expected to find that setting under the same submenu as the "sleep" and "power down" functions, but actually it is further up in the settings menu, under "LCD".

Incidentally there are two different menus for the music-related settings, and which one you get into depends on whether you press "M" with the current track paused or playing; but if you hold the button down for too long you get into another menu entirely. This is very confusing.

A further illustration of the unintuitive interface is that when you select "music" from the various main screen options ("video", "music", "games", etc), it launches straight into playing the first file it finds, so if that isn't the track you want, you have to go through about six menu options to log out of that screen, into the root directory, and into the folder you want, before you can play the right track.

Finally, to scroll up and down through lists you don't use "up" and "down" on the keypad. (That would be too easy). Instead, the left arrow scrolls up and the right arrow scrolls down, while "up" is "select" and "down" does nothing. This is a pain in the arse at first, but gets easier with practice.

It does not recognise older ID3 tags (i.e. version 1 tags). I had to go through and retag my entire collection with the latest version tags before it could read them. (The player uses the ID3 tags for the information displayed on the screen while a song is playing.)

The list of songs in each folder shows file names, not info from the ID3 tags. This would be okay, except that the file name is abbreviated to the first 14 characters. If your music has long filenames, you may find, like I do, that your folders contain twenty files named, "Sarah McLachla" rather than the carefully labeled "Sarah McLachlan - Adia", "Sarah McLachlan - Drawn to the rhythm", etc.

The only choice for playlists is to play either all music in your collection at random, or to play an individual folder (either randomly or in the order stored). This means that you cannot have two playlists containing the same song unless you have it stored on the player twice.

The headphones it ships with are pretty crappy.

Other features:

The voice recorder is very clear if you dictate straight into the player. It can pick up someone speaking normally from around a metre or two away. Further away than that, or someone speaking quietly, and the player picks up nothing. This does mean there is not a lot of background noise in recordings, which is a good thing.

I haven't trialed the movie function.

The e-book feature is remarkably usable for something with such a small screen and low resolution. It has pale yellow text on a black background, which is easier on the eyes than it sounds, and relatively large font. Normal .txt files are readable, although linebreaks occur randomly in the middle of words. I found I got used to that pretty fast, and although I would never choose to read files on this screen if I had the choice, I can see myself maybe loading a Project Gutenberg book or two for desperate circumstances such as a long-haul flight.

Games included are "box man" (sokoban), "bricks" (tetris), "winmine" (minesweeper), and "color bead" (I haven't a clue what this last one is). They are very small, badly designed, and the keypad is not really sensitive enough to make playing these anything but extremely frustrating. But then, no one buys an mp3 player for the games, right?

Google Reader vs Bloglines

After using Google Reader for a few days, I thought I'd briefly review what I like and don't like about it.

Likes:

• That it keeps old items (grayed out), so that you can always scroll down someone's feed to remind yourself of context.
• That you can embed it in your personalised Google page and set it to show a few feeds right there.
• That it uses tags rather than folders (although it displays your feeds in "folders"). This means you can have a feed in several "folders" (e.g. "grad students" and "daily reads") and it will mark it as read in both after you view it once. I'm pretty sure I had trouble having a feed in two folders under Bloglines for some reason. Either it couldn't do it at all, or it kept an item as new in one folder even if you had read it in the other.

Dislikes:

• The fact I have to click on "mark as read" or scroll past an item before it decides I have read it. Often I just glance at a post and know I'm not interested. Or if it's a short post, I read it without scrolling. It is annoying to move to another feed and then realise that the post I just read is still showing up as "new" in the sidebar. But maybe I'll get used to this.
• It has trouble importing .opml files from blogrolling.com. But then again, so does Bloglines. And Google Reader can at least import Bloglines .opml files, whereas Bloglines struggles with exports from Google Reader.

If anyone has anything else to add, or if you use a different feed reader that you think is better, I'd love to know about it.

Happy birthday to me!

I was whining earlier at Phantom's about how people forgot my birthday this year, but now that the day is nearly over, I promise I have a bit more perspective. Actually, it was a pretty good birthday after all. And I have lots of recommendations and anti-recommendations for you, so that you can share the benefit of my hard-won wisdom :)

Let's start with the negative, so I can end on a positive note and justify Rebecca's touching belief in my sunny good nature.

Anti-recommendations:

Cheap Chinese knock-off mp3 players. Even after you decipher the mysteries of the user manual*, you may find the device has strong opinions about your music collection. The only files that mine seems willing to play are Dido (and even then it gets bored and randomly reboots after about eight tracks—although, then again, after eight Dido songs, so do I). It won't recognise the Indigo Girls at all; it hates Michael Jackson so much that it crashes and reboots at least once per track; and the rest of my 80s music (especially Tiffany) causes it to barf every five or six minutes too. If we can't fix it by tomorrow, we'll have to send it back, but since it took three weeks to ship here, and requires return within 30 days of shipping if defective, we may not be able to get a refund. And even if we do, refunds don't include shipping costs, which in an order from Australia equates to about 30% of the total price. Sigh.

Parents. Just don't have any. More trouble than they are worth.

Underpants. As a gift for your daughter-in-law. Especially in a shade of cyan that I haven't seen since the early nineties when computer manufacturers got smarter.

Saying in your birthday card that accompanies said underpants, "I didn't know what size to get you, but I thought, 'Well, she certainly isn't small...'" (Although now I better understand the conspiracy of nature and nuture that inspired my brother-in-law's famous tact malfunction last Christmas. He gave me a bottle of anti-aging cream that promises to make its wearer look ten years younger. Me, "Gosh. Um, thanks!" Him, "Yeah. I hope it works.")

Recommendations:

Ethiopian food. Really. Really truly. And if you are local, this place in particular. It's a little more pricey than some of the other restaurants nearby, but if you are with someone else and just have one of the two-person combination platters, that comes to a total of $50 and you won't need appetisers or desserts (although if you do, I recommend the chickpea fritters for the former, but not so much the semolina cake for the latter, which was pretty ordinary). Also, their coffee is the best I've ever had. Just try to ignore the owner scowling at you miserably from the front of the bar. I think he is watching to see whether you eat properly or spill food all down your front. (I failed).

A Geekman. One who wakes you up on your birthday by bringing you coffee and your present in bed.

Wonderful friends on the other side of the planet who send the world's most awesome present. (A dip pen! With interchangeable nibs! And fancy metallic inks! In the world's cutest bottles!) You rock! And it arrived this afternoon, just when I was feeling like a pair of underpants and a defective mp3 player was not a sufficient birthday haul to satisfy my avaricious nature.

Going shopping on your birthday. You'll find you can justify buying all the things you never usually would. Like fancy teas. And gourmet chocolates. And pretty, pretty new boots.

Blogfriends who are sweet and lovely and email you birthday wishes. Thanks, guys!


___________

*Some gems from the user manual: "Stir or press on NEXT, blue back strip move downward to the last option and go next page to last page and go first page indicate the current activation option."
"If stop at lyric status, please return non-lyric window."
"Upgrade to realize the firmware upgrade, repair, backup function. It's in the waiting status while entering."
"As player is easily telltale, so it is very important for user to protect private secret."

What makes me read your blog

I've just transferred all my RSS feeds to Google Reader instead of Bloglines. Not because I'm unhappy with Bloglines, but just to try out Google Reader for a bit instead. While I was at it, I decided to tidy my feeds up into better organised folders, and minimise the number in my "check these every five minutes because I can't live without knowing what these people are up to" collection.

Anyway, while agonising over who to keep in there and who to demote to the "check these regularly but only after doing some work" folder, I couldn't help but notice the weird factors that influenced my decisions. Just in case you care about increasing and keeping your subscriber numbers, I thought you might like to know that:

I am almost incapable of demoting or (god forbid!) deleting your feed if:

• We have ever corresponded by email, even once or twice.
• I know your true identity (via google-stalking) or know you in real life.
• You write short posts.
• You write hilarious posts.

I will almost definitely NOT keep your feed if:

• It has stopped working and I can't find an alternative easily.
• You haven't updated in a month or so.
• Your whole blog or many individual posts are password protected, even if I know the password.
• You write extremely long posts and/or update more than three times a day.

(These factors don't mean I won't continue to stop by your blog now and then, but they do mean that an RSS aggregator is not the most appropriate way to keep up with your posting.)

On a similar note, here are some factors that influence whether I comment on your blog and/or continue to visit, whether or not I subscribe via RSS:

I won't be likely to comment if:

• You never ever reply to comments I leave. (It makes me feel like I'm talking to a brick wall).
• You make it hard to comment (e.g. I have to subscribe to some other service in order to do so).
• You have a lot of trolls or scary people commenting and make no attempt to moderate the discussion.

Obviously I don't expect people to care whether I personally continue to visit, subscribe to or comment on their blogs. I'm not saying you should necessarily take notice of any of these things. But I thought it might be interesting to see if other people feel similarly about these factors, and if they have other likes and dislikes that influence whether they subscribe to and comment on blogs or not. Presumably anyone out there who is trying to maximise their readership for whatever reason might be interested if it turns out that the above factors do influence many readers' choices.

I'm trapped in the internet and I can't get out!

I just got some spam that began:

Good time of the day

It's nice to meet you here, in the Internet.

And yes, that's pretty much how I feel about all of you too, so I thought I'd pass on the love. Do you like it here in the internet? Because I do. And I like to meet you here at this, the good time of the day. (The bad time of the day, however, is another story entirely).

Speaking of mp3 players

At the gym lately, every time I spot someone with telltale earbuds, I catch myself thinking "Soon... soon... Soon I will join your ranks. I too will evolve."

We welcome our digital overlords.

Rampant capitalism or Things I aspire to own

1. A bicycle that doesn't have anything wrong with it. (Like having no wheels, for example).
2. A blender or food processor. Or even one of those blender-y soup-pureeing sticks. (One that doesn't explode).
3. A sewing machine.
4. An mp3 player (A little birthday pixie tells me this wish will be fulfilled on Friday).
5. A DSLR camera.

I have come a long way, though. Two years ago my list would have included the above, but also:

1. A toaster.
2. Bookshelves.
3. Somewhere for guests to sleep.

Two years before that it also would have included:

1. A kettle/electric jug.
2. A coffee maker.
3. An alarm clock.
4. A digital camera.

Step by step I am reaching the 21st century.

PS: Things I aspire never to own:

1. A television. (Where would I put it?)
2. A mobile phone. (I am hoping that by the time I get with that trend they will have phased them out entirely and we'll all just have chips implanted in our heads).

And she wonders why I wear headphones

Questions my office mate has asked me this morning:

(1) Is there a smarter-sounding word for that thing that angels do?

(2) How do you spell "retard"?

(3) What colour is "parchment"?

Now for extra special bonus points, redeemable for absolutely nothing at all, match each of the above questions with the correct reason why she needed to know.

(a) In order to make sense of her horoscope for today.

(b) For her dissertation.

(c) Because she was writing an email to a friend describing people in our department.

Time for a parrot

Because it's been a few days without a parrot picture, and because this little cutie keeps visiting the tree outside my office window, I bring you my new friend, the eastern rosella:



And I enter day four of Operation Hello Birdies, my cunning attempt to persuade the crimson rosellas that feed on my balcony to eat out of my hand. So far I've had moderate success, in that they will let me stand a metre or so away while they feed and don't seem at all bothered. Unless I am holding something in my hands, in which case they totally freak out and won't come near me. So I can't eat or read while waiting for them, or stalk them with a camera. (I wonder if they have had bad experiences with people stuffing their friends into a sack?)

Five reasons why I blog

I got tagged by Bardiac for this meme, which is very exciting indeed. I love being tagged! I thought at first it would be hard to come up with five reasons, but when I opened up this draft post to write down the three I could think of straight away, another two sort of dribbled out without even trying. (What can I say? I'm a natural.*)

So, this is why I blog:

1. My blog is where I keep my brain. Seriously, it's like a hard drive for my head. Pinning random fluttery thoughts to my blog to hold them still keeps my brain freer and faster for processing the stuff it actually needs to do.
2. I am a comments whore. I love love love the fact that having a blog means people I don't even know on the other side of the world come here and talk to me.
3. Where else would I put pictures of parrots? My family is totally over them and I suspect they now delete any jpeg attachments to my emails without even a cursory click-and-coo-at-the-pretty-birdies.
4. I have an addictive personality. I started blogging to see if it was any fun. And now I can't stop. (Are there self-help groups for people like me?)
5. It means I can call myself a "blogger". Which sounds a bit like "plonker". But cooler.

__________

* Natural meme-er, dribbler, blogger. Feel free to end that sentence with whatever you think fits best.

Books!

Geekman and I went to the local bi-annual second-hand book fair today and were both overcome by an attack of frenzied book-buying. Afterwards we compared finds and were each confirmed in our belief that the other has no taste whatsoever. See if you work out our favourite genres. Bonus points if you spot the one (or maybe two) books in which our separate spheres of interest overlap.

My finds:

Albert C. Baugh. A history of the English language.
Donald J. Koosis. Java programming for dummies.
Patricia Cornwell. Cruel and unusual.
Laurie R. King. The birth of a new moon.
Barbara Vine. A dark-adapted eye.
Barbara Vine. Asta's book.
Ngaio Marsh. Swing, brother, swing.
Ngaio Marsh. Kriminal-kommissæren får bid. (Because there are few things more amusing than reading books you already know in foreign languages.)
Olof Möller. Mikro-universums gåta.
Colin Dexter. The wench is dead.
and three Swedish Reader's Digests from 1980.

Total cost: $35

Geekman's finds:

Gregory Benford. In alien flesh.
Julian May. Saga of the exiles 1: The many-coloured land. (Note: these books promise on the front cover that they "will eventually rival The Lord of the Rings". Still waiting.)
Julian May. Saga of the exiles 2: The golden torc.
Julian May. Saga of the exiles 3: The nonborn king.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The mote in God's eye.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The moat around Murcheson's eye.
James P. Blaylock. Lord Kelvin's machine.
Silas Water. The man with absolute motion.
John Horgan. The end of science.

Total cost: $24

The fair is on all weekend and they put out new books each day, so we might have to go back tomorrow. It's all half-price tomorrow, too...

Now we just need more bookshelves.

WTF?

Dear random student I saw yesterday,

Walking around campus in full camouflage gear and a black hoodie with death-metal designs all over, not to mention your weird-ass (but thankfully EMPTY) thigh holster? Hood pulled up to cover half your face? Black sports bag that bulges weirdly?

So not cool.

Don't you read the news? Or are you trying to scare people?

And stop scowling. If you are going to be a scary freak, at least be a pleasant-mannered, friendly scary freak.

Yours in disgust,
StyleyGeek

This is hilarious

Sometimes local news deserves a wider audience.

Someone is having a really bad day

(With bonus points for most surreal development of a conversation I've heard in a long time.)

I overheard the following today in the photocopying room.

Necessary background: older faculty member (OFM) was collecting his print-out that had as a heading the word "sex" in large letters. (You can get away with a lot in linguistics). A friend of mine, who has a serious case of "speaks before she thinks" (SBST) was picking up some photocopying.

SBST: "Hi, OFM, how are you?"

OFM: "Terrible, thanks for asking."

SBST: "Why, what's happened?"

OFM: "Well I just got sacked, for one thing."

SBST: "Really?!? I'm so sorry."

[I'll leave out the bit where she asks for, and he gives, details]

SBST: "At least you can now go live with your [long-distance] wife!"

OFM: "Actually she recently left me."

SBST: "Oh my god. I'm so, so sorry."

[Awkward silence]

SBST, pointing to the paper OFM was holding: "Well, you could always go have sex! That would cheer you up!" (No, I don't know what she was thinking, either.)

OFM: "No, I can't do that anymore either. I've had an operation."

Suggestions?

A few people lately have asked me what I plan to reward myself with when I finish the PhD. And I really don't have any idea.

I think I need two rewards, though (at least!). The first is for when I complete the whole thing and hand it to my committee (which is supposed to happen at the end of April, but—my my, is that the time already?—you may have noticed that this is nearly upon us. I'm hoping to get it done by mid-May, though, at the latest). The second will be for the official submission, which is scheduled for the end of July (i.e. after my committee returns it with their suggestions for improvement and I make the necessary changes (like fixing overuse of parenthetical asides, just to choose an example purely at random)). I might also reward myself when I actually graduate, which given the university's graduation timetables and the time factored in for the international examiners to mark the damn thing, probably won't be until July 2008. And I suspect I will be totally over it all by then, so only really need two rewards.

The only thought I had had so far was that I will finally be free(er) to travel, so could reward myself with a trip to New Zealand to visit those friends and relatives who always get missed out on our duty visits to the parents. Geekman and I are also long-overdue a trip somewhere nice to use up our frequent flyer miles: we were thinking of going to the Cook Islands again, where we spent our honeymoon.

Travel might not work out so well, though, as various problems conspire to make it difficult for the next few months (including the fact that Geekman currently doesn't have a visa that allows him to leave the country and get back in again), and after July I'm hoping to be teaching again, which restricts the amount of time I can spend waltzing around the world.

So what else could I use as a reward? It can't be too expensive, since me completing this thing will also (coincidentally!) mean I no longer have any funding (and isn't that a great incentive?). But I could probably stretch to a couple of hundred dollars.

So, a question to all academic readers: if you've graduated already, how did you reward yourself at the end of it? And current grad students, what do you plan to do?

A+ for ideas; D- for proof-reading

I was just adding some references from a book I've been using into my bibliography file. Because the format of the reference list in the book only used authors' initials, and I prefer to have the full name in my files, I was checking each reference by googling it for the full version before I copied it over.

Of the nine references I checked in this way, five were incorrect! The mistakes included year of publication, authors' initials, the wrong word here or there in the title, the wrong page numbers... And I know the mistakes were in the book's reference list, not on the net, because once I discovered the first couple of errors, I went to the publishers' and authors' own websites to check the rest.

And we complain that students make careless errors!

I LOVE that this search lands you here

Okay, come clean: who's been searching for "hot syntacticians"?

(And did you find any?)

Doing autumn all on its lonesome

Seasons greetings from border control

I mean to post this last week for Easter, but totally forgot.

I got a very exciting package from America about two weeks ago, and because it contained some food items, it arrived with an attached note to say it had been opened by the Quarantine inspectors. Inside the package, they had left a very helpful brochure explaining all about what you can and can't bring into Australia.

What really tickled me, though, was this page of the brochure, with a list of major holidays and information on what they would take away from you in honour of each. (Click to embiggen).


Like a gift list in reverse.

The 9th Carnival of GRADual Progress

Greetings and welcome to the 9th Carnival of GRADual Progress!

I have decided to start and end on a positive note this time round, so with no further ado, let's move into a round-up of posts that are so helpful you can count reading them as "working" rather than "procrastination".

Tips and tricks and general helpfulness:

Psycgirl asks for tips on how to study for comps, and her readers come up with some very helpful suggestions. And when the studying isn't going so well, she survives by fantasising about life after grad school.

Now that Working Writing Wailing Mama is clear on the big issues, she discovers a new mantra that I suggest we all adopt.

Mosilager discusses the pros and cons of Windows vs Linux, especially when it comes to thesis writing.

Jim Gibbon links to a useful article on dissertating without the agony, and recommends writing before you are ready.

EA reminds us that even when you feel like you are going backwards, this is still a kind of progress. Of course, on the rare days where you wake up to find that yesterday's work is still looking good, you might as well reward yourself by going back to bed.


But a grad student carnival wouldn't be complete without some tales of angst and woe...

The dark side:

Kristen's post about a conversation with other ABDs shows that the American PhD system of coursework plus dissertation means that grad students get to experience burnout before they even start writing.

Maria's grad school applications are inducing panic.

RussianViolets is scared of her advisor, worrying that getting tenure means she has to put out or get out.

T was about to graduate, only to get a letter from the university telling her she needs four more credits.

Clevergirl wants a magic style button to solve all her formatting woes.

Video has some conversations that make her wonder why we do this to ourselves.

Breena Ronan is experiencing the joys of grad school politics, as well as the problems of putting together a committee for an interdisciplinary topic.

Anastasia has been experiencing the extra pressure of trying to draft her (symbolically structured) dissertation with a baby due any day. On top of this, she discovers that a lack of family-friendly jobs at her university means that her only options for funding next year would earn her less than a dollar an hour.

FemaleCSGradStudent has noticed that her university is playing games with her, and she doesn't want to join in. (With bonus hilarious conversation).


Finally, back to that positive note I promised to end on...

Congratulations to:

Flossie, whose comps are over. Be sure to read to the end of this post for her hilarious solution to workaholism.

Sammy, who got a teaching position for the coming year.

Twirly, who has turned in a draft of her proposal and is now spending her time writing letters to her lab equipment.

Marcia, who has completed a draft of her thesis.

Elle, who has reached two grad student milestones: submitting the first draft of her dissertation, and falling asleep in the library.

Mike Slackenerny, who is finished at last, leaving some people very disgruntled. (What do you mean, he's a fictional character? Aren't we all?)


Finally:

Apologies if I missed anyone in this round. A plea to all readers to remember to tag or email in any posts they come across that they would like to see in the next carnival. It's so much easier on the host to have submissions coming to them rather than having to seek them out themselves (and it means a broader range of topics and blogs get covered).

The next carnival will be hosted by Kisha at 10 Year Plan on or around May 15th.

Volunteers to host future carnivals would be greatly appreciated and should contact me at the email address in the sidebar on the right. You can take a look here to see what hosting is all about.

Two views of the limbo that is grad school

Yesterday a fellow PhD student and I were chatting with a stall holder at the market that is held on campus every Thursday. The stall holder said business was slow because all the students are still on Easter break, and so the only people shopping were the admin and teaching staff, none of whom seem to want any of the second-hand clothing she was selling.

Then, "What about you two? Do you work here, or are you still doing the student thing?"

My friend and I replied at the same time.

She said, "Both."
I said, "Neither."

And I think that sums up the grad student identity crisis quite neatly.

Awesomeness

Reading an article in the New Zealand news today, I came across an awesome illustration of how common Maori words have become in New Zealand English.

Speaking of a recently restored waka (traditional canoe) that had just been stolen, the custodian of it said:

"I koha-ed it to the hapu and it was looking magnificent. What do you do? Bugger it, you get wild with these thieves.

"You just don't touch those things and people have told me to makutu them. If they put it back, the tapu will be lifted."

Now the guy may be maximising his use of these words for a deliberate effect, but the point is that New Zealand newspapers no longer gloss them (except for makutu "curse", which was glossed in its first use at the beginning of the article), because they are all in frequent enough use in NZ English that almost all readers would understand them. And I think that is awesome.

(Here's the link to the story, but knowing this news site, it will go down in a day or two.)

Daily meltdown

or This is what a PhD thesis does to your brain

I hate stupid Sanskrit with its stupid grammars written by old dead Germans who don't know how to use section headings or an index or even a freaking table of contents, and their stupid refusal to ever tell you EVER what order words go in, like it's possible to know a language without knowing anything about its word order* just as long as you can decline its stupid nouns and conjugate its stupid verbs, and I especially hate ones that are written in stupid French so I have to read extra slow, with no stupid glosses for the stupid Sanskrit examples, and most of all the ones with no freaking TRANSLITERATIONS like we all have nothing better to do while sitting around reading French written by old dead Germans than to try and decipher the freaking devanagari writing system just to see whether there's an adjective after that noun or not.

And did I mention stupid French grammars of Sanskrit (written by old dead Germans) that are full of examples that totally disprove my main argument for chapter six?

Because I hate them the most.

____________

* And don't tell me Sanskrit has "free" word order. I've heard that one from the tiny number of old dead Germans who mention word order at all, and if you want me to believe that sort of assertion then I want a corpus analysis with convincing statistics (or at the very least some freaking glossed examples) to demonstrate it.

I win!

Today, only four weeks* after we discovered I would have to play the same crazy immigration documentation game that took Geekman three months to master, I ticked the final box of page 13 of form 80, in which the Immigration Department cunningly tricks terrorists into betraying their identities...


... signed off all the documentation, paid (ridiculous sums of money) for my stamped signed sealed translations-by-accredited-translators, stuffed these into an envelope along with multiple copies of police records from ninety million countries and the sealed secret 28-page results of the most extensive (and expensive!) medical examinations I have ever undertaken (the outcome of which I am infuriatingly not allowed to know). This morning Geekman delivered this appetising bundle of bureaucracy to the slathering bureaucrats who requested it, and now all we have to do is sit back and wait for them to tell us we did it wrong.

__________

* I initially predicted that this would take months and months. The main reason we managed to be so efficient this time is that Geekman had kept meticulous notes on all the steps he had gone through when he did this last year, so we already had copies of the required forms and phone numbers and addresses of the organisations and translators we had to contact. Miraculously the health screening people were able to fit me in at a week's notice and do everything in one day, whereas last year Geekman had had to wait six to eight weeks for each of his tests. Finally, we have become masters of parallel processing, and had multiple forms and requests on the go at once, unlike last time where we were too scared of screwing things up so made sure each step had worked out before setting out on the next one.

The more you go, the more you know.

It just struck me that visitors to our house might find our choice of bathroom reading rather unusual. The books on the floor by the toilet, for those wishing to make the most of their incapacitated moments, are currently Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics (Zeilik & Smith 1987) and C++ from the Ground Up (Schildt 1998).

But I bet we aren't the only ones with bathroom book weirdness.

Set my mind at ease and tell me in the comments what reading matter is available to someone caught short in your house.

Oh, procrastination, how I love thee...

It's me!



(And there's a penguin in my library.)

Happy Easter, everyone!

Have a parrot.



(Excuse shakiness. It was my first experiment with my camera's movie function.)

Geekman speak

Upon hearing that a friend had called to say she would come by in half an hour, "I'd take that time estimate with a grain of sodium chloride."

Later, preparing to chop up a pumpkin, "How do you remove the skin from something with this degree of curvature?"

Sigh. Aren't physicists cute?

Why would anyone do that?

Some malicious bastard has stolen the front wheel off every bicycle in our apartment building garage. Including mine.

Circus!

Wow.

The show itself was unbloggably good, but you can get an idea of it from this clip on the official website. The best thing, though, were our seats. I've marked them on this seating plan as red squares, and the people in the row in front of us didn't turn up, so we had a head-free view right down the aisle to the stage.


The performers even came right up to us at times, and at one point they hauled the guy two along from me up onto the stage to "assist" the magician.

Oh, and I will never be able to listen to Jacques Brel's Ne me quitte pas again with a straight face. (Sadly, it's not half as funny if you describe it, but I'm sure anyone who's been to the show will understand).

Unfortunately, the magical mood was tempered a little bit when we got home to discover the strawberry plant Geekman has been nuturing for weeks had been violently assaulted, had all its tender new leaves stripped off, and only evidence of the perpetrator was a colourful feather lying among the torn-off leaves. I think I heard Geekman muttering something about what he will do to the parrots when he sees them in the morning, so let's hope they have the sense to stay away for a day or two.

You know what today is?

It's going to the CIRCUS day!

The Cylons are coming

The photocopier just asked me politely to wait please, it was replenishing its toner. Then it whirred a lot for a minute or two, and told me I could go ahead.

It's kind of creepy when machines can do their own maintenance.

Desktop Meme (Take #2)

Geekman looked at all the desktops people have posted screenshots of and said something like, "Grumble grumble Windows grumble grumble LINUX." So I told him I'd post a picture of his desktop to even the numbers a little.


(I don't know what the purple thing is, but it's pretty damn cool.)

Reasons I can't possibly work on my thesis

Surely no one can expect me to get any work done if...

1. It's so hot, my fingers get sweaty typing
   
2. It's so cold, my fingers get numb when I type
   
3. I'm too grumpy to concentrate
4. I'm too happy to settle to work
5. I have a meeting coming up in an hour or so (I'm too busy preparing)
6. I just came from a meeting (I'm too busy thinking about what was said)
7. It's nearly lunch-time (I can't work on an empty stomach)
8. I just had lunch (I can't work on a full stomach)
9. I've got a huge to do list of non-thesis tasks (I have to get them out of the way first)
10. I have a totally free day with nothing to do but my thesis (I can't work without structure)
11. It's morning (I'm not awake yet)
12. It's afternoon (I'm sleepy)
13. It's evening (I need time to unwind before bed)
14. It's night time (I should be asleep)
15. I've been really productive already this week (Why should I do any more?)
16. I haven't been productive so far this week (I might as well give up for the week and start next Monday afresh)
17. I haven't had any exercise for days (Sitting here at my desk is just perpetuating my unhealthiness)
18. I have just been to the gym (I'm too tired to work).
19. My supervisor just told me she hates my latest draft (I'll never succeed, so I might as well give up now)
20. My supervisor just told me she loves my latest draft (I rock! I can afford to take a nice long break)

What are your favourite excuses for procrastination?

Live-blogging the immigration process

Question #23: Give details of all visits (including short stays) to countries outside Australia for the last 10 years.

This form was totally not designed for anyone who has lived in Europe. Here's a screenshot of the list I have drawn up, reconstructing trips from passport stamps, diaries, and memory, as best I could. Most weekend and day-trips are missing because, for the period when I was living 20 km from the border, I can't even remember how many times I went to France, let alone what dates I was there. I know I've been to Austria and Hungary too, but have no recollection whatsoever of the year or the circumstances. And quite a few of the dates I have given are pure fiction.

Oh, and the section of the form where I have to insert this information? They give me eight lines.

The desktop meme

Shrinkykitten wants people to post pictures of their desktops. I think it's a great idea and am very curious to see everyone else's.

My icons aren't creative like hers, as I just use the ones that come with the programs, but I love my current desktop background, which is a photo by the super-talented Grace (and which you can incidentally buy as a wall-print here).


Now I've shown you mine; I want to see yours!

What does it mean...

... that I am starting to have nightmares about graduation?*

Is it a sign that I am almost finished? That I secretly don't want to finish? Or just that I am really screwed up?

_______

* In last night's dream I was trying to deal with multiple friends and relations wanting to attend, not having enough tickets to go around, people getting offended that I hadn't invited them, and everyone wanting to stay at our house but refusing to socialize with any of the other visitors.** Oh, and I had forgotten to hire my regalia.

**Which is probably pretty much what I can expect in reality, too. So maybe this was just a warning.

Weekend parrots

Geekman and I just went for a walk in the snuggly autumn sunshine and I'm sure we saw every type of parrot that lives in this city: galahs, cockatoos, crimson rosellas, eastern rosellas, king parrots...

Unfortunately my camera batteries died after the first five minutes or so, but here are the few I did catch on film.