[Prompt: A picture of frog and toad; toad has brought a bowl of something in the front door of frog’s house; WHWN 2007-6-25]

“I brought popcorn!” Alyson poked her head down into the half basement and ducked under a pipe and stepped over a chunk of concrete laying in the sand and dirt.

“Oh, man, I haven’t had popcorn since I was a little girl.” said Raven, stepping out bent-over from behind a bunch of pipes that made a turn upward through the floor of the building above them. “I haven’t exactly been anywhere where I could get it for a bit. I mean, I suppose I could have gotten some at the theater when I snuck in for a movie, but I wasn’t really thinking about that. I just wanted to get out of the rain.”

“Oh, geez, rain. Yeah. I didn’t even think about you being in the rain and all that. I mean…” Alyson trailed off, looking at Raven a bit pityingly.

“Stop that. Don’t look at me that way. Everyone does that when they find out I’ve been homeless.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not that bad. Really. I just … y’know. I sneak into movies sometimes, and I usually have a dry place to crash if I look hard enough. It’s just that sometimes you get caught out in it, y’know?”

“Sorry.” She tried to stifle the look on her face and took a handful of popcorn from the container and then offered it to Raven. “I … I’ve just come so close to being there. So many times. I know what it’s like to try and make ends meet in this city. It’s almost impossible sometimes. Jobs suck, they don’t pay enough, you have to work yourself to death to even have a roof over your head. The cheap places to live are weird and smelly and landlords do all sorts of crazy things.”

“Yeah. My brother got kicked out of her apartment for babysitting a kid there once. The landlord just flipped, said it wasn’t zoned for family housing, that if he was going to have a kid in there, she’d have to move elsewhere.” Raven took a handful of popcorn and ate it with a little more vigor than even she expected. “This is so good!”

“That’s so not fair. You try to get ahead a little, and you just get stepped on.”

“Yeah. I just gave up. I left the place I was sharing with my brother a couple years ago. It was tiny, the roof leaked, there were bugs everywhere, and I had to sneak in anyway since he wasn’t supposed to share it. He was working as a mechanic part time, but he got laid off. They didn’t keep him around long enough to get unemployment either. Just one day, he didn’t have a job. Couldn’t pay rent, so the housing assistance people sent him there to keep him off the streets. I didn’t get so lucky, since I hadn’t had a job so recently. They just stop wanting to help you after a while. After that, you have to go find the nuns on 16th to get a dry bed.”

“Wow. I don’t know what to say.” Alyson ate more popcorn.

“Whatever. I don’t really want their help. I’ve got this basement right now. And popcorn!” She grabbed another handful, and deftly caught what she knocked out the side of the container.

[prompt: “Describe the taste of toothpaste”, 2007/06/25]

Minty. Fresh. The television ads blared out their trite summary of a sensory experience, adding a visual of the science behind their product as envisioned by the advertising staff. Alyson wondered what two words they’d use to sum up one of her daily routines. Shove through the crowd of waiting shoppers to get to the door, beat them back a little so she can lock it again and set up the shop? Rough. Daring. Of course, the little old Italian and Greek ladies, there at the crack of dawn to get the best deals, to find the perfect eggplant, the perfect tomato, the first chance at the last quart of their favorite olive oils.

How would they describe her one-handed key-entry all day long, able to bag groceries with just one hand most of the time, keeping up a steady rhythm on the keypad at the same time, stopping only to say “That’ll be forty five dollars and ten cents” or “Sign here please”. Steady? Practiced?

When she’d applied for the job, it had been a Sunday afternoon, lazy, and she’d been in the store to purchase a couple of the chocolate bars that they carried, imported from Italy or Switzerland or somewhere European. She liked them better than the chocolates she’d grown up eating and she let herself indulge once a week after an afternoon of job searching. She’d given up for the day, fretful that she’d not find a job, nobody hiring, when she asked the cashier on a whim if there were any jobs.

She’d said there were and to talk to the manager without breaking her rhythm, ringing up the next customer, leaving Alyson watching her hands fascinated at the steady rhythm.

She was hired on the spot, which felt like relief after a month of searching in the depressed city overrun by young people all looking for jobs. She’d come with the idea of being a library assistant or a coffeeshop girl in mind, but she soon discovered that those jobs were never open, always told “We’ll call you” and they never did. She wondered often what would happen if there was a fire in the shop, with the wall-to-wall bodies, the ladies with their tiny carts going up and down the narrow, packed aisles; the stock-boys restocking shelves the whole time behind them all from the stockroom in the back.

She looked other places, but it seemed like there was a crowd of under-employed young folks hanging out in every establishment, and she knew it was hopeless.

She soon found out why the seemingly lazy little grocery where she dropped in each Sunday needed help. Sunday was the only day a new produce shipment didn’t arrive first thing in the morning, and it was the only day that every first-generation European immigrant grandmother didn’t stop in to get her groceries for the day. It was the only day of the week where at six AM sharp, a line didn’t form out the door with people waiting to get into the shop that lasted until four. Exhausting. Exhilarating.

Alyson actually liked the job, now that she was finding a rhythm. The first month had been nearly impossible for her, trying to keep up the frenzied pace for hours. Her shoes hurt her feet after that many hours, her hands ached from keying and re-keying entries all day long. She was exhausted from the concentration of doing it all right and as fast as possible, because the line didn’t stop. She got two ten minute breaks during her shift. Merciful. Needed. When she did, the manager would trade her places smoothly at the end of a transaction and key madly until she returned, never breaking rhythm.

There was no pause in this place, three thousand square feet of insanity. A deli counter stretched across one wall, and six clerks sliced, cut and wrapped, kilo by kilo, gram by gram, acting as a single well-oiled machine. Hundreds of meats and cheeses lay in the case, some replenished every few minutes from an adjoining cooler, some only every hour or so. People waited in lines all over the store. There was a single throng snaking back and forth through the aisles. One didn’t walk to the shelf where what you wanted was, usually. You just got in the train and followed it until it paused at your destination, and when you got to the cashier, she’d ring up your groceries, smile politely and have you out the door and be on to the next customer.

She wondered often what would happen if there was a fire in the shop, with the wall-to-wall bodies, the ladies with their tiny carts going up and down the narrow, packed aisles; the stock-boys restocking shelves the whole time behind them all from the stockroom in the back. She imagined it, sometimes, during one of the merciful breaks.

She found time to make a few friends, between fits of exhaustion. She worked full-time, and after a shift at work could barely move for a few hours. One afternoon, a coworker drove her home because she didn’t look like she was going to make it up the hill to her house, only a few blocks away.

She paid the rent on time, and after an afternoon nap, she’d groggily wake to make herself a meal — lentil soup in winter, or if she was too tired still, a piece of toast. She’d get out her old laptop computer and try to write or to stay in touch with friends, but the relentless pace of trying to make ends meet left her alone.

polis.nbtsc.org is back up. There was some corruption on the hard drives, so there’s a few thousand files in the lost and found, so if you are missing anything, let me know. (A few thousand sounds like lots, but on a server with millions of files, it’s not so bad.)

polis.nbtsc.org just had a major glitch on its RAID array — I have no idea what caused it, but it’s taking a full disk scan to get things back and running. I don’t see it working any less than nine hours from now.

My apologies to those of you affected, and I’ll try to get things up as fast as I can.

I was just responding to a friend’s post about the trials of explaining things to a new lover who doesn’t speak fluent english. I’ve been in a similar place, with a close friend whose English, while better than my Thai, isn’t terribly good for subtleties of meaning that I’m used to.

We’re so privileged, here, so many of us, native speakers of English, and queer in the United States. We get the privilege of being able to use so many words for who we are: “Gay”, “fag”, “queer”, “lesbian”, “dyke”, “femme”, “top”, “bottom”, so many others. We don’t often run into the cases where the first, second and third ways to explain are all misunderstood or elicit blank stares. Our language, and our culture have had words for things, and we’ve been creating meanings for words for a while.

CACAO, a research Java VM with JIT for many platforms.

VMGen, the VM generator from GForth and used by CACAO.

GPE², GTK environment for phones, based on GPE, for palmtops. Some good and tiny apps in there. They’d be useful on old laptops, too, perhaps with XFCE.

Mark Pilgrim’s one year with Linux.

Photos by the abandoned girls of Nepal.

Reasons why baileyjordan is a pushover:

aredridel

That's _mistress_ to you.

baileyjordan

Yes, mistress

And I didn’t even have to whip him. Geez.

Reasons why baileyjordan is amusing when tipsy:

aredridel

What was that?

baileyjordan

A lemon pit.

aredridel

Lemons don't have pits!

baileyjordan

They do now.

And he’s cute too.

The Last Question is my favorite Isaac Asimov short story.

Hacking sexuality. I like the idea.

G-spot enhancements. Fun!

Boys with longer ring fingers are better at math. And girls with longer ring fingers are more likely to be lesbians. Maybe.

I’m finally working on not self-medicating for my transition, and I’m trying to get the help of a pair of local doctors.

To: Abigail Seaver, N.D. and Patricia Ammon, M.D.

From: Aria (Rick) Stewart

I’ve an unusual request, which you may or may not feel comfortable addressing.

I've been transitioning male to female, as you have probably noticed. At the moment, I'm doing so unsupervised by any medical professionals, and I am at a point where I would like to not be self-medicating, and to monitor things more closely. Though there are few people in Colorado with endocrinology experience that directly applies to transsexual treatment, I am looking for advice from someone local so I am not relying on my own research and resources to treat myself. (The nearest more-or-less specialist I've been able to locate is in Colorado Springs)

Would you be willing to oversee a hormone replacement regimen for me?

Comments?

I’ve been long frustrated with the lack of small, simple CalDAV servers to support shared calendaring for my ISP‘s customers. There’s Chandler/Cosmo, Hula (now Bongo), OGo and sOGo, and probably a bunch of others written in Java that I haven’t found, but on average, they weigh in at a hundred megabytes of code, include huge dependencies, are hard to compile, hugely complex systems that scream “Enterprise” and not in a good way.

CalDAV is much maligned as a complicated protocol. I’ll grant that, but it’s not terrible. It’s possible to implement a server that speaks it (if in a pidgin dialect) in a handful of hours.

So I did that. Weighing in at 8.3K, I present Camping calendar, which can now run a (very insecure, I caution) a shared calendar between Mozilla Sunbird and Evolution.

I’d love feedback, especially code-structuring tips for dealing with such a huge pile of rather arbitrary, namespaced XML.

I’ve been writing a small CalDAV implementation, which isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. Yes, it’s a weird standard with lots of edge cases, but the development has been really linear, spec in hand, implementing sections at a time.

Testing, however, is a major pain. There’s a lot of little things that will make accessing a CalDAV store silently fail.

Evolution, in particular, is picky. Namespaces declared on the wrong elements, despite being semantically equivalent, cause havoc. Using DAV: instead of D: as the prefix for elements (Are you even using namespaces, folks?!), not sending etags, having etags match, all of these will make Evolution silently ignore your calendar data.

This can be a lot better, folks.

I’ve been using the Camping Microframework for a while now, and really liking making web apps with it. It’s suffering a little bit, though, from its concession to its self-imposed 4K limit on code size.

I’d like to suggest another benchmark: 4K × (1+log<sub>2</sub> version).

That’d put Camping 1.6 at 6021 bytes, and Camping 2.0 at 6935 bytes. So much wiggle room! I bet we could even get basic WebDAV in version 2 that way.

There’d even be room to improve the parser for R(), removing a few of the pointy bits from the simplicity of that routine, and a few other things.

New Mexican whiptail lizards, 15 species of which reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis. They’re polyploid, too. (Polyploidy in humans is weiird.) Triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye) is hexaploid, and non-sterile, while the diploid hybrid is sterile. Polypoloidy is implicated in some models of speciation. Also, the Triangle of U, the triangular relation between members of the genus Brassica is interesting.

Congressman Tim Ryan meets the TSA in his experiment with trying to live on a foodstamp allowance diet. Welcome to the world my friends often live in, Tim. Thanks for making some awareness!

Pimlico, a simple PIM platform. GTK+ and Evo, woot!

The Hula project has been forked and called Bongo. Maybe I can get it to actually run. That’d be nice.

Gnome Launch Box, a clone of quicksilver. Also damn fast.

Cryonica electronic music.

Dovecot 1.1 plans. It’s a hell of a good IMAP server. Solid, secure and fast.

Blender 2.44 is out, and it does Subsurface Scattering. I’m impressed.

ANTLR 3.0 is out, and next month will have Ruby and Objective C support.

baileyjordan: Nooo! Hot girls trump evil!