the girly who shall end all girls

I got this t-shirt I've wanted for years: it's the art from the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, but it says

Depeche Mode

Boys Don't Cry.

Makes me smile every time I see it, but it got better: I wore it to work today and on a video conference call it looks absolutely radioactive 😂

i'm spending some time today reading through customer feedback. i decided to see if the French pages are reporting any different issues than the English-language ones.

kind of fun, in that even with my rusty skills i can follow perfectly well since i know the context. but i kept seeing "svp" in the posts and racking my brain for what that could be. i didn't recognize it as part of our product terminology. i haven't kept up on slang vocabulary. i was rolling through what it would sound like aloud, thinking that it might be like "K-7". (when i was studying seriously, CDs were still relatively unusual. music came on cassette tapes. say K and 7 aloud with the French pronunciation and you get something very close to "cassette". it wasn't the "official" word but it was on all the music store signage. i love this kind of adaptation.)

finally i ran Google Translate to see if it caught it for me.

"svp merci" is "please and thank you".

svp = s'il vous plait, the version of "please" you would use with someone you don't know. d'oh.

i dig the winter olympics, and i'll watch most any event (i could care less about the summer games).

i'm pleased that this year the trend in uniforms is away from simplicity - i like to see the US athletes covered in stars and stripes, the eagles on the Russians and the Germans, the checkerboard Croatians - but i especially love Ryan Miller's mask.

a good song for hard times (youtube link)

i'm pretty damn enchanted with the Aspire One. so far i'm okay with Linpus with a regular Xfce desktop, but even if i do make the move to Xubuntu she'll still be mouse-powered and mouse-sized.

therefore i will call her Miss Bianca. not the Disney version, but the one from the novel who wears a fine silver chain and travels by diplomatic pouch. she arrived at my house inexperienced and airheaded, but she has a good heart and will continue to improve with time. (i briefly considered Reepicheep, but this lappy is definitely a girl. also, who can say Reepicheep in casual conversation with a straight face?)

this breaks up the household naming scheme a bit (since we usually name devices after minor gods and/or mythic figures and the network is Annwn) but C says that heroes have an elevated place in the afterlife, so she belongs.

last weekend we got breakfast at Hattie's Hat*, and for some reason they were playing The White Album. i immediately started spewing Beatles factoids, because i imprinted on them as a child and can't help myself. by the end of breakfast i realized that i like Modest Mouse because they sound like White Album era Beatles to me.

currently i have the White Album and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank on shuffle together. it's pretty seamless. not like the White Album is exactly a unified experience. but still.


*i like to eat with the fishes; the back room has a huge saltwater fishtank. Saturday mornings, fish are about as much stimulation as i can take before coffee. and watching a starfish travel while you have that first bit of sustenance is near-hallucinatory.

Darth Mojo is sharing his hour-plus sci-fi dance mix.

not done listening yet. so far, i'm happiest about the Six Million Dollar Man mix, but the Prisoner one and the extended Futurama theme were pretty cool...

ETA: there are at least two different classic Battlestar Galactica mixes. "this is Captain Apollo..."

according to del.icio.us, i started researching martial arts classes in Seattle more than six months ago, and that was i don't know how long after C and me swore we would take a class together. it's a sign of how things go with physical fitness in my house - reading about it is much more engaging than doing, and there's always some reason we should put it off or drop it for a while and then the momentum is gone and we forget...

mimerki mentioned elsejournal that it takes 21 days to form a habit.* i've embraced it as an arbitrary measure. the plan is to go three times a week until we hit 21 classes and hope that makes it stick. so maybe i'll read this in a couple months to see where i was at the beginning, or maybe it will be another well-intentioned failure.

we settled on kung fu. we've done three classes as of yesterday. ( first impressions )

i liked my first week. quite a bit. we got massages this morning to work out the tense bits, and i feel relaxed and excited rather than scared about going back to class Monday. it's a good place to be.




*so i looked it up. it came into popular use from a book with the ridiculous-to-me title Psycho-Cybernetics.
¹research says this is from the style family attributed to Wong Fei Hung - the dude from an astonishing number of films including Drunken Master, Once Upon a Time in China, and Iron Monkey. more fangirl squee.

i don't know why i never looked for an album of New Order remixes before today.

if i play Tomoyasu Hotei while i work, i can pretend that i am on a mission, writing The Dry Instructions That Will Save The World.