lwood

Thanks to a tip from zoe_me, I found the right yarn at Purlescence, in beautiful downtown Sunnyvale. While they're not ordinarily open on Sunday, they are today--for an anti-Super-Bowl party, where all yarn is 25% off. Oh, and in sufficient quantity that I needn't fret about a run on the stuff in the next couple hours.

IT'S ON SALE IN MY HOUR OF NEED REALLY OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD WANT! IT MUST BE A SIGN!

*!grin!*

dpaxson is willing to lend her wheels to the effort, which is nice as otherwise it's not likely I'll have the sweater by Pantheacon. One knows, however, that "done by Pantheacon" is sufficient inducement in her world, as it would be in mine, and so.

For during-con knitting, I shall have lovely, talented, very portable, non-bulky...socks. They may be the only non-bulky thing going to the con in my luggage, unlike, say, the several devotional shawls and other things for my Show and Tell Pagan Fiber Arts panel at P-Con.

-- Lorrie

PS: "Q'pla!" For the scanty handful on my flist who are insufficiently fannish (...!?), it's Klingon. For when one wants an enthusiastic ejaculatory interjection for "Success!". Also usable as a parting statement, like wishing someone good luck. I find it a satisfactorily heathen (and unashamedly modernist) sort of thing.

I have disabled my LiveJournal E-Mail forwarder--it was getting me nothing but spam, and was only used by people who didn't yet know my real address.

This is only a feature that applies to Paid and Permanent members: your usedname at livejournal.com will forward to your real e-mail address, which is great except now it's a favored target for dictionary spam attacks--i.e., "throw a bunch of letters @livejournal.com, some are bound to work". This, by the way, is one of the several reasons why large free webmail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, et al) are particularly spam-prone. It's not that Microsoft sells your e-dress, it's that any alphabet soup is more likely to work than not.

Should you, Gentle Paid or Permanent Member, find yourself plagued by this feature and have no real use for it, descend into LiveJournal's dank, drippy, geeky sub-basement and issue the following comment:

set no_mail_alias 1

--then click "Submit"

Should you ever wish to enable this again, go back to the basement and say:

set no_mail_alias 0

---

In other news, a whole pile of software was just upgraded on lorien, my server. Until I can dedicate the days required to migrate everything to the new snazzy hardware, the best I can do is patch what I've got. Thus, with the new release of Debian GNU/Linux, I have upgraded lorien to 3.0/etch from 2.1/sarge.

What that means to you is that stuff might have broken. wolfs_daugher cannot access my webmail, but I can. How's the weather out there, O Flying Monkeys of the Lazyweb?

Also, as usual, if any of you want a e-mail address that doesn't come with prying corporate eyes of any of that crazy government bullpucky, drop me a line (or comment) and we'll talk.

-- Lorrie

Ha!

http://www.westria.org/forum/register.php

Non-Geek version: Now, when people sign up for my bulletin board thingy, they have to answer a math question. Automated botnets set up to try and register on my (deliberately off-brand-but-actively-maintained) forum system will not expect this, and fail. Yay. Should the blighters get in anyway, another system will check posts over looking for Dastardly Activity, also yay.

Now if anyone ever posted...I'd be set.

Geek version:

I got the code, then jiggered the English parts and, with the help of feonixrift, made it a 50/50 shot you'd get a multiplication question instead of an addition one. Subtraction and division might have frightened people and/or required more elaborate checks; mustn't frighten off the mathematically illiterate.

Also, I swatted the n00b programmer, corrected his missing semicolon (ewps), and allowed as how it is Good Practice to use the long form of the php variable query instead of the short form, as the short form is not universally enabled, and therefore will hamstring the innocent, clueless administrator.

Like myself, until I waved the poor thing at feonixrift while hunting through php.ini for some distasteful setting.

Akismet is Doing the Right Thing--it successfully caught a spam post in its tracks.

Now if anyone ever posted...I'd be all set.

-- Lorrie

(a non-ongoing, non-consecutively numbered series, nicked proudly from camwyn)

While on the several sundry shuttles that get me to the Mad Scientists' Home, I espy one of many signs promoting the new Third Street Light Rail, which will be known as the "T" for "Third".

"But Third doesn't start with a 'T', it starts with a Þ!"^*

Imagine, if you will, a City by the Bay spreckled with Þ's--yes, gentles, San Francisco would be sticking its tongue out at you. Neener!

But no, instead we flush several centuries of West Norse and Anglo-Saxon typography right down the drain and settle on T.

I blame the Normans. Silly Normans...

-- Lorrie 8-Þ

^* - Note for the Orthographically Challenged: Þ, and its lowercase partner in crime þ is a character known as "thorn" or "thurs" (giant/Jotun/etc), depending on which rune poem you're citing--in HTML, the Anglo-Saxon 'thorn' wins out...for a letter only in modern use in Icelandic, go figure. It may represent either of the two phonemes that in Modern English are relegated to the low-rent dyad^† 'th': the voiceless interdental fricative demonstrated above (third), or the voiced dental fricative of the 'th' in 'the'. In Icelandic, it's only for the voiceless version; the voiced gets the also stylish, also underused eth, spelled Ð and ð.

^†‡ - Dyad. It means pair, for when those times "pair" is insufficiently snooty. Don't blame me, blame Edred Thorsson.

^‡ - My footnotes can so have footnotes of their own! See!

Ha! Having tired yet again of the neverending flood of spammer registrations to the forums on the Westria site, to say nothing of mucking them out every day, I have found a simple answer that is not yet another CAPTCHA, 'cos, you know, "hate with the white-hot fury of a million suns" is about how I feel about CAPTCHA.

And I'm not thrilled with the automated spam site checker mods for my chosen forum software, because it means more mucking and some small chance of false positives.

Just found a guy, however, who wrote a mod that asks simple math questions on the reg page. If you don't know that 2+4=6 (et al), you get no cookie from me.

I have written away for it, and await with bated breath.

-- Lorrie

From The Guardian, for the benefit of the Celtically and linguistically inclined on my friends' list. My favorite line? The punchline (which I would love to know how to say in Old Norse for those special occasions), so go read. 8-)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1983434,00.html
( 'Cá Bhfuil Na Gaeilg eoirí?' - 'Where are all the Gaelic speakers?' )

I have an iPod named Omi, who goes about with me. I usually set it on Random, which means that Steely Dan might well be followed by Wagner, with AC-DC or cadhla as a chaser.

As I strode across the quad en route to the Mad Scientists' Home, Omi offered up something lovely, and bouncy, and Celto-Rocky. There were bagpipes, and an electric guitar, and, eventually, a fiddle.

"Is it Annwn? Except for the electric guitar, it might be Battlefield Band. But with that fiddle! It must be Leigh Ann--no, wait, that could actually add up to Heather Alexander, particularly in the incarnation of Uffington Horse, but that album doesn't have any instrumentals...."

Eventually, I pulled Omi from my breast pocket and looked at his screen.

All those guesses were wrong!

It was Tornaod, off of Orìn, which had been a gift to me from the inestimable dr_beowulf, as his sister Beth co-wrote and co-sings one of their snappy "Progressive Breton" pieces, but not this one.

Which means:

If you liked (okay, I admit it, I probably mean "have heard of") any of the above, you may well any others. Specifically, by the way, anything Annwn ever recorded for commercial sale is available via the referenced link, so you can bulk up your mp3 collection, not only for free, but completely for legal.

Enjoy!

-- Lorrie

Uh.

Y'all heathen guys?

I found a thing...

THE THIRTEENTH INTERNATIONAL SAGA CONFERENCE

Durham and York, 6th-12th August, 2006

Major Theme: The Fantastic in Old Norse / Icelandic
Literature

( More details here, including links. )
I'm just starting to go through these, but I think my favorite so far is: "How Elvish Were The Álfar?"

( This is probably because it has a killer paragraph like this one. )Am I going to agree with everything in here? Of course not. But passionate inquiry and discussion of ideas are what keeps heathenry--or any faith!--strong, vibrant, and alive. Some stability is necessary, of course, but not stagnation.

I seek equilibrium...and it's necessarily a dynamic state; dancing on a spearpoint.

Oh, and one more title to tease people:

Spirits Through Respiratory Passages Yes. Exactly what it sounds like.

*swoon*

Now--back to work; that paper won't write itself...

-- Lorrie

"Are those Jedi robes?"

"Yes, ma'am, they are."

"Oh! Wow, cool!"

Some years ago, the Most Excellent lferion made me a set of Jedi robes, which I wear whenever opportunity presents itself--seeing as my costume closet has about three choices^*, this isn't as difficult as it first appears.

Now, I could, conceivably, fold the whole kit up, stuff it in my knitting bag, and take same on the Transbay Bus, but really...it's Hallowe'en/Samhain/Winternights/Dead Guys' Night/etc. If there is any day when it would be better to let your freak flag fly, I can't think of what is. If I can make the hardened pedestrians of San Francisco stop, look, and think--then I've Done My Job.

So I dress.

Drawstring pants. Raw silk undertunic in a grey that wanders toward lavender. Blue-grey overtunic, stole, and sash, all in more raw silk. Black leather belt. Light wool, loose-woven, darker blue-grey burnoose (that's "big flappy cloak-robe" to most of youse). A pair of clogs^**.

I swirl the burnoose around me and, with two hands, pull the hood forward, over my brow. The last step is to clasp my hands in front of me, overlapping the sleeves. It's a chilly morning as I glide toward the bus stop.

A Jedi never hurries^†. The flow of the Force will guide what she needs to her, when she needs it. This includes the Transbay Bus.

Have you ever noticed that a properly done costume...wears you? As I glide through the ramps and hallways of the Transbay Terminal, cloakrobe swirling around me, I stand straighter, walk in a purposeful glide instead of a stalk, charge, or stroll. I find that myself urged to hold myself to be worth of the image I portray: formal speech, good manners, compassion towards all I meet--I walk too many dark paths to be wholly Light Side, but the Grey Side suits me^‡...and today I can show that.

Another shuttle later, I arrive at work, cloak-robe at my side as the bus was too warm for it. Just before I enter my building, I swirl it around me again, pull the hood forward, thread my hands into the sleeves.

"Aw, now, see--she's getting ready," declares the AA who came with me from the shuttle stop to the third in our party. Said third had hoped someone would dress up as Ewan MacGregor, and had wanted to be Satine, herself.

"Well, I did used to wear a Padawan braid, but no costume is going to make me look like Ewan, I'm afraid!"

I hold the door open, let them in, and, alone now, circle Reception and glide at a smooth, measured pace down the hallway and through Administration.

TG, one of the Facilities guys (no costume), and CP, the HR guy who knows enough of Astrology to flip out for Mercury Retrograde (cutesy devil horns), watch me approach.

TG is in awe. "Coming down the hallway, you were perfect. The walk, the posture, everything."

In a practiced two-handed gesture, I draw the hood back and smile. "Thank you; after having this costume for five years, it sort of wears me--and I've had time to practice."

"Shouldn't you have your hair back in cinnamon buns or something?"

"Unfortunately, that would take a lot more hair than I have. That hairstyle is based on Hopi and some rural Mexican looks and isn't terribly practical to do or wear." The top half of my hair is swept back into a black clip slightly more practical than a rubber band or leather thong. "This is Qui-Gon Jinn hair, actually."

He did ask.

We share a grin, and I sweep the rest of the way to my seat in quiet splendor, ready to start my day fixing computers here at the Mad Scientists' Home.

Today, the office can see some of my real job, as opposed to the dayjob that pays the bills, and I am happy for it.

And tonight...we feast with the dead.

Happy Hallowe'en, everybody.

-- Lorrie

^* - Jedi, Migration Era Norsewomanm, and Victorian/Edwardian Whore. The last of those does not get to come to work, is nigh-impossible to get into unaided (there's a corset), and is Fraught with a Certain Amount of Peril.

^** - Those of you familiar with former iterations of this costume will note the absence of my blue Birkenstocks. Alas, they have had to be retired due to insufficient arch support, only to come out on special occasions when I don't have to walk far, and by "not far" I mean "less than half a mile". Boots are Correct, this is the closest I have just now.

^† - Yes, except for a Sith. I know. You're disrupting the mood by making me bust out in all these footnotes, you realise.

^‡ - Yes, I know, it's not canon. Dualism sucks; I'm not Buddhist enough by half to make a reasonable Jedi, nor Machiavellian enough to be a reasonable Sith. I am Grey, we stand between the candle and the star, the darkness and the light, yes I know that's Babylon 5, but jms, now, that's a man who understood a non-dualistic perspective. Also, he is overfond of footnotes. Like these. Moving on!

Friends and neighbors, I'm an animist. Damn near anything with an individual identity has got some spirit to it, and that which is loved, can love in return, and occasionally perform when really it just ain't got no logical reason to--and I like to think that's love.

Herewith, the Tale of the Taurus That Could, and the Death of Its Transmission.

( Short form: I'm okay, the car not so much. )

A rebuilt transmission will run $2000, and that'll take a goodly amount of juggling to achieve, but we'll do it--if for no other reason than that loyalty on a level roughly equivalent to the original marathon run really ought to be rewarded.

The little Taurus That Could loves me lots and now, big strong mean tough silly me, I am crying for it, at work and everything.

Good car. Mommy and Daddy fix.

-- Lorrie