Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   solidified griffin tears
Saturday, June 2 2012
Today I managed to set up Windows 7 on Woodchuck to the point where I could use it for some limited things. Before I could use it for work I would need to install Wampserver and move over my local webtree, but I managed to get Thunderbird and Firefox moved, bringing with them the scads of settings and passwords that would be hell to have to re-enter. I also began the process of copying the large directories full of things like movies, software installations, and music. With Bittorrent, it's easy to go out on the internet and get those things again should I need to, but I'm still old school (and paranoid) enough to have my doubts about the perpetual openness and availability of the public internet.
Whenever I'm setting up a new computer from scratch (which was sort of what I was doing), I have a list of things I need to install: the Juice podcatcher, the Vuze Bittorrent client, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and some sort of light-weight MP3-playing application (both for music and podcasts). In the past I have used Winamp, but more recently I've used XMplay and other programs. The problem with these programs is that they always come with hideous user interfaces designed to make them look like an alien cellphone cushioned by a hollowed-out droplet of solidified griffin tears. There may be dorki who find such interfaces "super rad," but the problem with them is that nothing about interacting with them is intuitive. I also find them hideous. When I want to play music, I don't want to twiddle tiny unlabled pimples arrayed in the corner of dragon's eye. I want the no-nonsense functionality of a standard window, complete with a reliable set of menus (File, Edit, etc.). (I've noticed, by the way, that Windows 7 hides Explorer menus by default; I would like to find the idiot who made that decision and take a cheese grater to his face.) I've harped on this issue before, and I'll harp on it again. XMPlay is one of the worst user-interface offenders in the world of MP3 players, though there is a "skin" that makes it almost acceptable.

This evening Gretchen and I drove down to the Rondout to participate in yet another KMOCA monthly opening entitled "Other Than Human". This month's show focused mostly on depictions of anthropomorphic animals. Of special interest to Gretchen was a collection of oil paintings by Susan Siegel, who paints bipedal sheep and cows standing in flowery pastoral landscapes dressed in 18th-Century finery. Her paintings were the standouts in today's show, though the quality of the other works was also above par for KMOCA.
In the back of the gallery were a series of deformed cat heads made of wax, and at some point, J@n H@rrison, the artist who had made them, gave a "presentation" wherein she voiced what these cats might say using a made-up cutesy-pie language spoken in a high falsetto. It happened that as she was doing this, I was out on the street with Paul and Ingrid. Paul and a woman who had fixed up an old firehouse (across Abeel from the gallery) were talking shop, including how best to keep the Kingston Historic District guy happy given that his main concerns revolve around color. It turned out that the Historic District guy is married to J@n H@rrison, and simply by this association, Paul wanted to show me a Youtube video of her doing one of her falsetto-voiced "presentations" on the small screen of his iPhone. So I didn't really miss it after all.
While we were out on Abeel, Paul showed me the results of an earlier mishap. Something had gone wrong while attempting to attach a trailer and now his tailgate was all smashed in, and not in a way that "will just buff out."

For dinner, a bunch of us (including Paul and Ingrid, Deborah, Nancy, and even Susan Siegel and her husband) went to Uptown to eat at Yum Yum. The place was overflowing with happy noodle eaters when we arrived but miraculously a whole table opened up as we stood around being pessimistic (we might have eaten outside, but the weather had taken a turn for the unseasonably cool, and it was a bit too chilly to sit outside). We had to pack in close together for all of us to fit, but somehow we made it work. Unfortunately, Yum Yum was out of both vegetarian broth and seitan, so, being vegan, I had to make due with the decidedly-inferior bibimbap (a Korean rice dish that everyone else seemed to think was awesome).


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?120602

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