This part of Denver feels cozy. All my childhood, I was warned to stay off Colfax Avenue, it being dangerous, or scary, or both. Stories told of drug deals, dirty locked-up storefronts, protitutes. I’m in a coffeeshop and, the coffee is good, the music is good, the people are nice (and every single one has a laptop out at the moment). The stores look like the kind run by thirty-somethings who found affordable rent on a relatively walkable street.

I’m on my way to another coffee place up in Capitol Hill, about eight blocks away in a few. I’ve needed to explore the city under my own power. A few more minutes in the car goung from east Denver where my brother lives to Littleton where the rest of my family is and back again was going to make me mad. So today is sneakers and backpacks and stopping for coffee to look at maps online. It’s not an easy city to navigate. Neighborhoods run together, mazes of one-way streets snake around parks that crop up out of nowhere.

I’m hoping to find some decent places to hang out here, so I can stop loathing this city for its outskirts of sprawl, Big Box® after Big Box®, wide, curved eight-lane roads that seem intent on showing you how many big businesses there are rather than getting you where you want to go.

I’ve needed this time to myself. I don’t really get to know a place until I can walk it.

Denver is as I remember it. It’s a concrete sprawl, and the outer fringes are no fun. The town I grew up in is now a soccer-mom sort of suburb, with safe schools and large shopping centers. We drive through it on the way to my brother’s in Denver proper. He lives in an apartment in the sort of complex we made fun of as kids. “They all look the same!” we’d exclaim.

We drove six and some hours to get here, and we had to drive over the continental divide on the way. We hung out with my brother for a little while, and I got polis.nbtsc.org back on the air after a power supply in the router nearby did something strange for the second time. We went to meet my ~aunt Rosemary at her apartment, not far, but nearly 20 minutes in the car.

Rosemary isn’t actually my aunt. My family survives my mother’s parents divorce, remarriage, large plurality of half-relations and step-relations by simplifying things to any of cousin, aunt, uncle or grandparent. Rosemary was my mother’s maid while she was a child in Argentina, and followed my mother’s mother to the United States after they moved back. She’s from Bolivia, originally, though she spent most of her life in Argentina and the US. She’s now in her seventies (And going on fifty!), and has a wicked fun sense of humour. We went out (through an hour of Friday evening traffic and hellish parking near an Oktoberfest) to the Buenos Aires Pizzaria, and stuffed ourselves on empanadas after a good half hour wait to be seated. Another drive home, not so long, and I’m rather glad to have wireless and my laptop to chill out with before bed.

It’s fun. I really want to travel. I want to go to Argentina again. We talked about the small-scale terraforming of Mendoza, Mendoza, Argentina, immigration from Bolivia, the hassle of Argentine bureaucracy and trying to get a passport for an immigrant (Rosemary’s mother, 90 going on 70 but not able to live on her own anymore). We lamented the restaurant not actually having a real yerba maté on the menu, and laughed and joked about our mixed-up family and how long it’s been since we’ve seen each other.

Tired and happy, I guess, but mostly wishing I were in Ridgway now. I come out to my dad’s side of the family tomorrow. Unless they’re so dense as to not notice. But that won’t happen.

The Internet Company just had a repair job for a laptop, which when the user tried to log in using Windows XP Professional, would display a box for nearly a minute saying “802.1x Authentication Status” and a message “Windows is waiting for the wireless network and DHCP — Google didn’t help much, so we had to guess a lot. She wasn’t using 802.1x at all, she’d only used public networks. There was nothing indicating that it should use 802.1x at login time, no group policy setting to force it, nothing. baileyjordan found several good-looking but ultimately fruitless Microsoft KB articles.

The fix? Uninstall the driver for the wireless card and reinstall. I suspect that there was a registry setting that was reset by doing that. If I could reproduce the problem, I’d figure out which, but we’re in good shape now and going to call it done.

You win again. Your dollar is bigger than our dollar. Anyone want to adopt a queer and her boyfriend?

Hungover. Even I feel no pity for me.

So it turns out that Czech bluegrass is a thing. Possibly quite a big thing. (there are a lot of Czech bands)

I’m listening to Křeni right now, and they’re really quite good. It’s fun to hear a pretty distinctly American style of music in a non-English tongue.

There’s also G2 Bluegrass Band (Swedish), Meantime (Slovak, and I’d actually heard ‘em before), Four Wheel Drive (Norwegian), and Rawhide (Belgian)

Now that Liferea supports remote OPML files (this in version 1.4), I’ve set up my livejournal feeds to automatically come and go based on my friends list. I wrote a little CGI script that transforms the LJ FOAF file into an OPML file (including the authentication that’s needed to read protected LJ entries.

The code’s at http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/projects/ruby/ljfoaf-to-opml/ (GIT repository), if anyone wants to adapt it. It’s obviously not secure, but it should work in a pinch.

I also discovered that there were about 150 journals that I wasn’t reading because my manual process managed not to add them. I’ll be keeping up with people better now. Sorry about that, folks.

Chumbawamba’s music video Homophobia makes me really hopeful and happy for some reason.

Mine’s in relation to computer repairs. Always test with the case on, then close it. Not vice versa, that just invites trouble.

Just made lentil soup with borage greens from my garden. Makes me think of jwitchbaby

I picked up the cello for the first serious practice session I’ve had all summer. My hands hurt and I’m happy and tired and can play the first few bars to one of my favorite slip jigs. I’m amazed at how much muscle I’ve lost this summer. My hands are so much less muscular than they used to be.

I’m seriously wishing I had one more string on the cello, since it’d make playing a lot of fiddle tunes that I find on The Session a lot easier.

Since then, I’ve been going through the recordings I have on my computer and tagging them with genres (and more specifically the kind of dance they are) so I can actually search for things a bit better. I can’t tell you how apalling having everything filed under “Celtic” is. I don’t mind groups that play music from all over the celtic world calling themselves celtic, but I like knowing the Irish tunes from the Scots ones, and being able to see origins and influences and be able to find tunes when I want them.

Had dinner with my sister.

Well, with her guests since she had an abulance call. But it was fun!

Felixity (garlicfiend) wrote in transgender,

An amazing bundle of thought-provoking awesome

So brown_betty puts out a call for artwork of male comic book characters in “female” comic book poses in an effort to examine the stark gender divide in comic books.

This prompts ratcreature to post some scans from a guide to drawing comic characters, including sections on how to draw comic pornstarswomen.

In a brilliant display of awesome, vito_excalibur “fixes” the pages, switching all the men and women.

[remainder clipped]

brown_betty‘s original post links to a couple insightful posts too, and some examples.

Girl-Wonder.org is a site dedicated to women in (mainstream) comics, both characters and authors. Some neat stuff up there.

Sequential Tart’s “Bizarre Breasts” column, sadly no longer updating.

It’s been going on a long time, too, and not just in comics — Loomis’ drawing suggestions from the forties draws otherwise normal female nudes in heels. They’d never do something like this to the men, of course.

Some answers to the challenge: stephendann, naefox, kkglinka (again!), redplasticglass, theblackscorpio, ocarina

and on the subject of sexy superheroes, Racy Li writes sexy superhero stories, including one that’s free.

So what do you do when you decide to leave where you’re staying early during a road trip? Road trip it up another notch. So baileyjordan and I did.

We saw anandabrat and buzzycreature, of course, and made it to tsunobrat‘s 18th birthday. Sorry we missed kindredsgirl, since the opportunity to see her got lost in the change of plans. We headed up to Portland shortly after and saw ladyjausserande, pseudomammal, vruba, d_mcettiquette, whisperchild, snarkish and summerkid, and sadly missed saromia, wolftracks, dreefee, upna, instrumentalx and lightwalker. One day I’ll have to have enough time in town to meet rcoder and wallbrat too.

From Portland, we went to Occidental, CA to see rising_dawn at her rather hippy and hella nice intern job. It was so nice to be there that I entirely forgot to take photos, despite it being one of the prettier corners of the earth. baileyjordan managed to get poison oak, but other than that the only other downside was not being able to stay longer.

We dodged the Bay Area barely, (sorry notnotrebecca, jekissa and belovedmonster!), made a quick stop in Davis, CA to meet inthewall, who I’ve been dying to meet for ages, and hang out with apollotiger. Ran into thelhf, too, briefly, and missed elliotpp, which I am sad about.

We headed down I-5 (which is among the most boring drives ever. People who live in Stockton and Fresno: I pity you. There is nothing redeeming about where you live.) We skirted L.A., though if we’d had time, I’d have loved to stop in and meet dsch and check up on royaboya, though she was out of town anyway.

We camped at Joshua Tree National Park, which was too hot, and then the next morning headed for Prescott, AZ to see whetherwoman and jazkharma. Prescott is in a really nice spot, high in the Arizona mountains. Beautiful surroundings, and one kick-ass coffeeshop. We spent two days (luxurious!) mostly because whetherwoman is really good at helping one procrastinate about leaving.

I didn’t take any photos between Portland and nearing Prescott, AZ, but I like what I got. South of Prescott on AZ89:

Sedona, AZ:

In the canyons orth of Sedona:

The Navajo Nation is mostly flat, though there’s some really pretty canyons in there. It’s a huge area that took us nearly 4 hours to drive through.

We intended to be home that night, but as we prepared for the last leg of the trip from Dolores, Colorado through Telluride to home, we realized that Colorado highway 145 was closed from 10pm onward, so we decided to detour through Dove Creek, nearly on the Utah border. It added a lot of time to the trip, so we decided to camp that night. We wandered around outside of Dove Creek, couldn’t find the national forest and eventually collapsed into an exhausted heap after midnight.

We drove the last hundred and some miles home the next morning, and I got in to work at 13:00, just as the fibre optic line that had been destroyed by a woodpecker in Grand Junction was repaired, so I got to do cleanup as soon as I walked in the door.

Okay, folks, we have a problem here. When you distribute an app or library that uses JSON, will you please document which json you mean?

There’s JSON and there’s ruby-json (and is that related to ruby-json?)

Also, JSON library authors: do you think you could possibly merge all this and solve it? Or at least document your projects as something other than “the json library for ruby”?