It made me weep.
More about Jill Bolte Taylor.
Via Jeff.
links for 2008-03-12
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“Does reiterating exactly the same existential question over and over again make it any more likely that I will come up with anything but the same smug, predictable, masturbatory answers?”
Hahahahahaha.
Chilly in these parts
My electricity provider has helpfully supplied me with an Age Concern Cold Alert thermometer. It is a piece of double-layered card with a temperature-sensitive strip displayed in a window next to a colour-coded guide relating to the safety of the ambient temperature. A very similar device was supplied by various purveyors of baby-products for monitoring the “nursery”.
Luckily none of us is either very old or very young since, as you might be able to see, it’s quite cold around here at the moment. I think it’s more a result of the wind getting through the late Victorian cracks than the actual outside temperature.
Last night, as I alternated between chill-induced headache and sub-duvet suffocation, I remembered of the delights of that comforting garment, the nightcap (my childhood held its fair share of frugal heaters), and thanks to the stitches of the interknit have already found free pattern. Although I’m not wild about the idea of knitting 1ply wool even if I could find some. It shall have to be adapted for something slightly bulkier.
Actually, there was a period in my life when I wore a knitted hat all day and all night, winter and summer. It was made for me by my mother from this pattern (which I obviously still have).
She only knitted me three things (excluding the possibility of baby clothes which I don’t remember). That hat was the second. First was… this.
In baby pink. Baby. Pink. Made for me when I was thirteen years old. Anyone who has ever met me, even for a millisecond, will know just how diametrically anti-me such a garment would be, at any age. Even in black. But in baby pink? And apart from the colour the most obvious thing about it, to a girl not yet bought a bra and provided with extremely sensible knickers, it’s full of fucking holes. Let us leave aside the obvious fact that it’s hideous. I was used to being forced to wear hideous.
Poor woman. She tried so hard to have a daughter who was some person other than me. It is entirely possible that, in the titanic struggle of identity between us, the hat – navy blue and very plain – became a symbol of something we actually agreed upon. Something given, something taken. Which may explain why I chose to wear it all the time until, as I recall, it pretty much disintegrated, and she elected not to stop me.
Perhaps instead of using some other nightcap pattern I should ritually recreate that blue hat in a symbolic assuaging of ghosts.
Heartened
As I crouched taking this picture with the camera on my phone I heard feet pounding up behind me. Turning swiftly I, rather belatedly, caught sight of the hectoring police notice urging people to take care of their valuables complete with a helpful pictogram of a mobile phone and a handbag.
The rapidly approaching feet were attached to two males, early 20s, both about six feet tall, hoods pulled right over their heads and obscuring most of their faces, the waistbands of their jeans clinging precariously to their upper thighs presumably by some sort of frictive interaction with the boxer shorts beneath, most of which were clearly visible above.
When they reached me, they stopped.
“D’yer like that?” one asked, jerking his hood towards the tree.
“Yes” I answered. “I’ve just taken a picture of it.” No point in trying to disguise the obvious. “It looks like a really sweet gesture.”
“Did yer see the other one?” asked the second shrouded figure, jerking his hood back down the road in the direction from which we had all come.
“Yes” I said. “I took a picture of that one as well.”
“Yeah” said the first, “there’s not enough love in the world. What we all need is more love.”
And with that they carried on ahead, purposefully as before.
“Yes,” I said. Yes.
links for 2008-03-10
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Yes, it *can* make depression worse in certain circumstances.
links for 2008-03-09
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Shiny technique discovered via Krista’s new blog banner (www.slimcoincidence.com/blog/)
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This looks like it’ll do most of what I want, but it doesn’t work because my host doesn’t have libcurl. Bollocks.
links for 2008-03-08
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Via Neha, who needs a hat
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Online yarn: Cascade 220, Sock Yarns, Hand-Dyed/Painted, Knitting Kits, Free Knitting Patterns, British Wools, Blue Faced Leicester
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Ethan argues porn and activism drive web apps in his inimitable way. He concentrates, you’ll be glad to learn, on activism.
Activation
Activation? See previous post for (possible) explanation.
Content organisation (overload?)
I’ve finally set up a tumblr blog having been seduced by hydrgnc. This means I can quickly and easily post small gobbets of all sorts of (even more) inane stuff for which would be irritating to make an entire blog post.
How is this different from twittering, you might ask. Well, you can’t update it via text message from a mobile phone (quick and cheap) nor does it have the socially interactive, community and chatty aspects which I enjoy more than any other social site I’m a member of (an experience much enhanced by the wide range of notification applications available as well as optional SMS updates).
However you can swiftly and simply post all manner of digital content – video, audio, photo – quickly and easily as well as, of course, text. It’s also possible to upload pictures taken on a mobile phone using a designated e-mail address, but only if your handset and service support it.
My problem is that in terms of the web I’m a convergence junkie. Always have been. This means I want one small device (a bit of hardware) to do everything imaginable (run lots of different applications quickly and easily and in an integrated manner as well as take pictures, videos and record audio) (yes, my iPhone lust is now even stronger than before… imagine what could be done… sigh). Similarly I don’t want little bits of content scattered all over the web in separate, albeit all frizzy, strands – pictures, videos, knitting, screen-grabs, audio delight etc etc etc.
This is where it’s at, as far as I’m concerned, the blog. And, short of starting all over again and setting up some sort of personal portal, this is where it’s going to stay. But how to get everything all in one place?
One sort of solution is the Show Yourself widget (over to the right in the sidebar down near the bottom). The problem is that it’s static. It’s a list of links, albeit easily generated and reasonably well presented ones, but it doesn’t change unless I choose to add or subtract to it which is a rather time-consuming business.
A dynamic solution is to harvest rss feeds which can be displayed in the sidebar. I’ve had lots of those for various separate things over the years using the versatile Feed Digest – see for instance the latest Global Voices headlines and the latest tracks I’ve listened to on iTunes which are displayed in the sidebar under “Global Voicing” and “Listening”.
Now I’m also funneling feeds from my flickr and tumblr accounts into my twitter stream using the excellent twitterfeed. When I post something new to either it automatically generates a twitter entry (a tweet) which includes a clickable link back to the original item. I’m toying with the idea of adding feeds of newly posted videos on YouTube (should I ever actually post any) and newly-started knitting projects as listed on Ravelry.
An aside: despite the fact that this site is still in beta and can’t be accessed by non-members it’s currently ranked fifth out of the top ten web applications as listed by Web App Charts. And how do I know this? because pixeldiva twittered it (although you probably won’t be able to see the twitter itself unless you’re already an approved follower).
All these tweets, which now include notifications of exciting content generated by yours truly as well as my 140-characters-constrained text ramblings, now appear as a clickable list of links in my sidebar under the heading “Curly strands of content”, changed from “Twittering” to reflect the rather larger ambit. And, in a move indicative of how exciting I find the whole thing, it’s been shunted to the premium page real estate position at the top of the screen. W000t!
Now you might, if you have managed to read this far and actually followed my labyrinthine explanations, be asking yourself why I’m channeling everything through twitter rather than syphoning all the constituent feeds into a single output using the aforementioned Feed Digest. And if you are, the answer is that using this method not only does everything obediently appear in the blog sidebar it also gets distributed to my (tiny but very select and gorgeous) twitter community and appears automagically as my “status update” on Facebook.
Er, right. That’s it. From the length of this post it might appear that I’ve spent all day setting these things up. I haven’t. It’s actually really quick and easy. Most of the day has been spent researching possible yarn for a hat for Neha and yarn and a pattern for fingerless mittens for a friend, allergic to wool, who has a birthday soon.
(Oh, and be glad I didn’t diverge into del.icio.us territory, and yes I do know that a link to my blog posts appears on my blog. Or at least it should do if I didn’t delete the associated twitterfeed by mistake. So this post also acts as a test of that. Right, I’m really going now.)
Legs, tail and petals
Nothing quite like a full-blown tulip. And a whippet.
frizzyLogic 
