I’ve been thinking about what makes people creepy for the past few weeks. I’ve had several experiences with people that others find creepy, who I do not, and ones who I do, that others do not. I’m also in a position that I’d consider creepy sometimes, depending on subtle attitudes, and I think I’m finally seeing some patterns.

People who are obviously attracted to someone and won’t admit it are kinda creepy sometimes. It’s like they’re being manipulative — sending mixed signals, which are hard to read and unnerving.

On a similar vein, being attracted to someone and showing it and not saying why, I think, can be hard, too. It’s hard to know how to respond, and you wonder about ulterior motives. Most of the time, the motives are pure, but with the prevalence of sexual assault in our culture, and that’s where it would lurk if it existed, it makes it hard to discern. It’s guilt by association, but in a somewhat healthy fashion, I think.

And then there’s being attracted to someone for a physical feature that they can’t help, or for the reasons that people usually look that way, and not having that be the case in that individual’s life. It’s a particularly dehumanizing feeling, being fetishized, or related to only as a relationship or stereotype, not an individual.

Some people find being come on to creepy, especially when it’s by someone they don’t find attractive, but I wonder how much of it is reacting emotionally as if it were one of the above things, and not having the vocabulary to describe it, and filter through the feelings.

Some of these thoughts have been rolling around in my head for a long time. I’m friends with a couple people that a lot of others find creepy, and yet for some reason, my relationship with them is honest and direct and not at all uncomfortable. It’s been a puzzle for a long time to figure out why the reactions happen the way they do.

Ultimately, I think a lot of creepiness comes from not being able to see and not being able to trust someone’s motives.

Being in Davis is a lot of fun. I’m really enjoying just not being at work at the moment.

I realize though that without work and without my cello around, I tend to just not do a lot. Part of that is de-stressing, but it makes me realize how many of my favorite pastimes I’ve put aside to make my business work. I’m really looking forward to re-developing those as the business gets smoother and I spend less time maintaining it and more time developing it and myself.

Polis, the nbtsc.org server lost a hard drive this morning, and had several hours of downtime while we figured out what was wrong.

It was a drive that I’d suspected was dying for a while, but could not confirm without shutting down the server, so all data had been moved off of it for a while. Nothing lost except some hours of uptime.

Whoever eats the next piece of cake will have to eat your nipple. — ftmichael

From $(fortune) as I logged into Polis:

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

The Greyhound trip from Montrose, CO to San Francisco, CA is 3 hours longer than it used to be, thanks to Greyhound’s cuts and schedule changes. There’s a two hour layover in Grand Junction now, and two hours in Salt Lake City.

I don’t mind in the slightest. In both cities, there’s a great eating place with wireless within two blocks of the bus terminal. With two hours, that’s enough time to eat, relax, check email, post on LJ and chat a bit and actually have time for a real conversation.

So I’m sitting in a vegan cafe and coffeehouse, up the street from a punk concert, in Salt Lake City. My bus leaves at 10:30, and I’m just chilling. Life is good.

To the guys who keep randomly seeking to chat with me: This is the internet. Consider being intriguing as being first base.

Panicy and packing. Still have some tax work to finish. Really want to get it done before I leave, but that may not happen. Eek!

made my evening last night. made my morning this morning. texted me after his surgery, more coherently than I expected, and made my later morning absolutely fine. I ate at Siam, our local Thai restaurant, and Sue and Jojo were happy and joking in the kitchen. Zander called me mid-evening as I was working at my office on my taxes, and he’s happy in his new place, which rocks totally and utterly. I arranged my ride to the bus on Friday. I chatted with a ton while I worked, and everyone should know that he’s awesome. I then ended up going to find food, only to discover that everything had closed already thanks to my staying late to work on taxes. I ended up with eight $.69 avocados, a bag of Doritos (I never eat Doritos… what’s wrong with me? Other than the 14-hour workdays, I mean…), and a block of super-sharp cheddar cheese. called again and I managed to make my figures come damn close to balancing while she talked, both events making my evening utterly complete. I stumbled home, posted this, and am now crashing into bed.

Tomorrow (Thursday still), I clean the house, do my laundry, make sure there’s food in the fridge for hellion0‘s return, and try not to go insane with preparation.

Friday, I leave for San Francisco by bus. I’m not sure where I’m sleeping the evening of the Saturday the 25th yet, but that’ll happen. (If not, I sleep in Golden Gate Park again, but I don’t want to acquire a new sleeping bag for this trip, hint hint.)

Goodnight, all.

When we say “I love you”, what we usually mean is “Thank you for loving me”.

My father described to me his accounting system just now. He uses a hodgepodge of methods, because no software that exists works well enough. He’s a contractor, and travels from business to business working on computers. He often works in places with computers that break or network that is unstable for anything but email, so remotely accessing accounting software would be difficult, especially since one of the few workable choices is QuickBooks, which doesn’t play nice in any sort of distributed environment short of remote-desktop over a fast network.

So he uses an adaptation of old accounting techniques, now electronic. He sends bills to customers, puts a copy in his email in an IMAP box, and when a customer pays a bill, he drags it to the “Paid” folder. At the end of the year or quarter, he sums it up and enters it into spreadsheets and calculates taxes and the like. It’s a reliable system that even in the face of software failure, is quite robust. Email is well enough studied that things pretty much Just Work, mailboxes are reliable databases (if poorly indexed).

So to expand on this system and build a distributable workflow for accounting, imagine this:

Build a simple XML or RDF format for accounting documents (I suspect this already exists) — invoices, statements, promisory notes, checks. Attach them to emails as MIME multipart/alternative messages, with the alternate part being a text or HTML (or both) representation of the bill for human reading. Write simple software for generatingthese documents.

Then, the next stage, build extensions or external software for reading and cataloguing these documents — this could be a Thunderbird extension, even — and for summarizing. From there, build simple reporting software to pull what they need from the summaries and be able to calculate tax liabilities and other period-end financial tasks.

It’s a simple, scalable system. Contacts for bills can be pulled from an email address book. Customer relations systems that integrate with email would then integrate with the financial end of customer management. Email recording and logging systems could make record of financial transactions as they can make record of any other email sent or received. Cryptographic signatures can be used to sign the messages.

Last night: Brie and shiitake quesadilla.

This morning: Leek and shallot fritata with cream cheese melted on top.

Brie + Shiitakes + Tortillas = Brie Quesadilla of Delight.

Why my roommate, hellion0 rocks:

She: Fuck IE

Me: Yeah, totally. But wear a condom.

She: Yeah, with all the viruses it carries…

I coerced Fedora Core 5 Test 3 into playing MP3s (and maybe DVD). The patent issues make the licensing really truly ugly, and that trickles down into technical issues when a distro like Fedora plays indifferent to MP3 support. Don’t tell anyone, but I have binary RPMs of what I did (mostly stolen, shamelessly) from Livna. Don’t try these on FC4, they’ll probably explode. The RPMs are here (and there’s sources too). There’s YUM and Poldek indices for those who want to figure out how to use them. I don’t yet.

If you have SELinux enabled in enforcing mode, you may very well have to disable it – there is a permission error, utterly unreported by things in the UI, that makes gstreamer ignore the mad plugin. Your mileage may vary.