James has pointed out that everything I ever posted (back to 1995) on a news group is now readable at google. Apparently I never did any work, and had an unending series of relentlessly grim signatures. It's strange, looking at the self you were 6 years ago.
4/27/2001 11:23:59 AM

Thursday, April 26, 2001

Ex-Senator Kerrey Admits Role in Vietnam Massacre

I can't explain how upset I am about this.
4/26/2001 10:29:53 AM

Wednesday, April 25, 2001

Apparently Arnold isn't going to run for Governor of Cali. That's one less reason to run screaming from San Francisco, anyway.
4/25/2001 12:09:37 PM

Tuesday, April 24, 2001

sometimes there really isn't any justice in life.
4/24/2001 07:04:57 PM

Oh, my god. We virtually live in a police state.
4/24/2001 09:52:45 AM

Monday, April 23, 2001

This - on getting in trouble professionally because of your online journal - is perhaps topical.

Oh, and YAY! My parents are coming to visit!! :)
4/23/2001 10:17:38 AM

Friday, April 20, 2001

I want meerkat babies....
4/20/2001 04:47:17 PM

You know, it is quite irritating when potential wedding venues and vendors have email addresses, but fail to reply when you send them email. *sigh* Oh well. I'm ahead of myself a bit anyway.
4/20/2001 11:04:09 AM

Thursday, April 19, 2001

I wonder how many people are keeping blogs for personae that really don't exist at all? I think it would have been tremendous fun for some of my gaming peers to do character development a la blogs in college, though I think, as usual, that I would have skipped character development in favor of just showing up and weakly gaming so that I could hang out with my friends. I'm afraid that left to myself, I prefer to passively read stories, rather than creating them. (eva, conscious vegetable!!)

On to getting work not done today. I have so much to do that I can't quite figure out where to begin...and probably will come in on Sunday to try to work some of it out.
4/19/2001 04:14:29 PM

Tuesday, April 17, 2001

From a Slate commentator's review of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper: "With a few notable exceptions, the librarians we meet in the book aren't the prudent, book-nuzzling custodians we'd expect to find at the National Archives and major university libraries; instead, they're efficiency-minded technophiles who wantonly destroyed original texts and replaced them with badly filmed, unreliable facsimiles."

I have to admit I'm on Nicholson Baker's side on this one. I've been watching him with some interest since encountering an article (was it Harpers? Atlantic Monthly?) on his efforts to collect bound newspapers before they disappear to make pinkening, vinegary strips of fused and unreadable film. I definitely fall on the perserve-the-object-not-just-the-data side of this debate - there's something that matters about handling an object that someone else, human and long gone, might have handled 200 years ago, even if it's just an advertisement for shoes. The only comparable thrill happens with brilliant literature or music, in which the material transcends the object.

Nevertheless, librarians are charged with providing information with consistently small budgets and limited space and as a result they tend to stress access and information. It isn't fair to entirely villify them, since no one can to give them the budgets to efficiently save EVERYTHING and make it accessible. Rare books and 25 pound newpapers volumes (or Punch, Gentleman's Magazine and the London Illustrated News I was enchanted to find on the shelves of PCL in Austin) aren't easily loanable. People who can't travel can't read them. I think the solution is to find ways to represent these things in adequate portable media without destroying them.

And no, I'm not sure of the best way to do that; all the newest media are too new to know, yet.
4/17/2001 07:15:30 PM

Sunday, April 15, 2001

R.I.P. Joey Ramone.

I'm very sad. At 49, he wasn't nearly old enough for this.
4/15/2001 08:33:19 PM

...as a society, although we claim to despise bullies, the ones we really despise are victims, and this informs our current discussion on school rage.
4/15/2001 02:25:43 PM

Friday, April 13, 2001

Does that say 'Neil Gaiman?' It looks more like 'Nel Gurgle.'"
4/13/2001 02:00:36 PM

Thursday, April 12, 2001

This entertains the hell out of me - and hits close to home.

[stolen from semaj who tells me he got it from zeldman, but can't produce the link]

np bowieradio channel 1. <---------marketing victims-r-us

4/12/2001 11:38:31 AM

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

RIP kozmo.com, which was the most convenient way to get non-porn videos in my urban wasteland of a neighborhood. WE stopped using them when they implemented a delivery charge AND a minimum order, figuring that one or the other was sufficient. I guess it wasn't.
4/11/2001 04:14:43 PM

I just put in FLA's Hardwired for the first time in....probably 4 years.

It makes me happy.
4/11/2001 02:53:21 PM

Monday, April 09, 2001

I should clarify - because it is bothering me - that when I say that James and I don't need a roommate any longer, it's actually because James and I are close enough that we tend to exclude a third person...so it's awkward, and all sorts of tensions develop. Sadly, for the moment, none of the three of us is solvent enough to live here alone. *sigh*

So has anyone reading this ever been to an event at Gadsby's Tavern in Alexandria, VA (I mean, other than the 18th century dinner that Kitty threw in 1995 or so)? I need to know how they accomodate a party of 100, and whether their dining rooms/ballrooms are well lit. I don't want an afternoon wedding reception in dim, cavelike surroundings!!
4/9/2001 08:10:39 PM

...thank god for people who can proofread...

and apols to those of you who might be reading this in n'scape 4.anything, with a low resolution monitor...
4/9/2001 12:11:26 PM

...mutter...mutter....silly linux boxes.
hopefully the gray background problem is fixed now.
It was reported to me that the first paragraph of on me.htm is in the wrong font, as well, but I can't see it in IE (tho it does show up in netscape here at work - though not in version 6 at home), and (not being an expert in the least) I can't find anything in the source code that might throw it off.

4/9/2001 11:39:12 AM

http://www.magnetbox.com/sorry/

4/9/2001 11:05:06 AM

Sunday, April 08, 2001

So I've switched - at least partially - to style sheets for the formatting for this site. I still have to decide whether I want to undo the tables and find another way to format all that. Let me know if anything is suddenly broekn or illegible...

I managed to welch on all the parties I was scheduled to attend this weekend. Apologies to those of you who expected to see me -- I was just really tired, and it seemed like too much work to come and talk to people. In the old days, I used to hate it when people did that to me, so I am actually contrite...
np david bowie bbc radio theatre, vol 2

4/8/2001 08:32:10 PM

Friday, April 06, 2001

Pacific Gas Files for Chapter 11 . . . The bankruptcy filing came one day after Gov. Gray Davis (news - web sites), in a statewide address, proposed relieving utilities' debts by giving them a share of a record rate increase approved last week and by continuing to negotiate the state's purchase of their transmission lines.
4/6/2001 12:08:34 PM

Wednesday, April 04, 2001

No, I haven't been eaten by dragons. The things that are consuming me are tedious, that's all, and I either don't feel free to discuss them fully or don't wish to bore you to tears!

I'm consumed with roommate issues (which is to say that James and I really don't need a roommate anymore), money issues (I'd like to get a new computer, stock up the wedding fund, and other things, but am not *quite* making enough to do all that, and have taken some unexpected hits to savings recently), and finding-a-wedding-site-issues (a lot of the sites I'd like to go for are just too far away from DC, and I'd don't want to inconvenience my guests - especially family...)

I am NOT, however, complaining very much. My life is going too well right now.

In good news, I saw my first returns on a grant I wrote yesterday. South of Market Merchants and Individuals Lifestyles Events (who run the Folsom Street Fair - an annual event in my heghborhood which is billed as the biggest leather event in the world) will be giving us a minimum of $10,000 (depending on the proceeds of the fair) to support civil rights programs for San Francisco elementary school kids. The programs are being sponsored by the library's James C. Hormel Lesbian and Gay Center. How cool is that?
4/4/2001 08:40:57 AM

Tuesday, April 03, 2001

This is exactly the kind of headline I hate seeing.

Of course, there's a lot of that these days...
4/3/2001 05:38:16 PM