Here you is verbed to a funny cool poem called Windows Is Shutting Down, on clivejames.com
“Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?”
slamming windows
Monthly Archives: October 2010
update this
I decided tonight would be a good time to run the Automatic Updates program on my laptop. This downloads and installs the monthly “Patch Tuesday” updates from Microsoft. I always hate it, because it downloads the new software updates while the computer is running, then installs them when you shut the computer off. And typically, if I don’t plan ahead, it happens when I’m tired and I want to go to bed. Then I have to wait around another 3 minutes, maybe 5, to make sure the computer shuts down properly. So tonight I’m doing it early; it’s not quite bedtime, is my point.
I started the shut down procedure at 8:24 and it just shut down. It’s 8:53pm.That’s 29 minutes. Half an hour, just to install the monthly patches. There were 58 of them for XP, which I guess is some kind of record.
Arstechnica reports: Compared to last month’s record Patch Tuesday, this one is massive. In fact, this is the highest number of bulletins Microsoft has ever released in one month, as well as the most vulnerabilities that are being fixed. The last record was just two months ago: 14 bulletins and 34 vulnerabilities.
I suppose one should appreciate that Microsoft is on the ball, keeping our machines up to date and as secure as possible. But it also kind of gets on my nerves. I always worry that something will go wrong and my computer won’t work right – or won’t wake up again at all – after so much change being done so blithely and remotely.
Also, it’s putting pounds and reems of new space-wasting goo on my hard drive. It’s stuff that I can’t even play with.
Most of these patches are made to counter vulnerabilities to the acts of evildoers. Hackers and the like. Wouldn’t it be a lot better, easier, and less costly for everyone, just to hunt down the people who mess with other people’s computers, and hang them in the nearest sturdy tree? I know, it’s a luddite’s approach to the problem, but it worked for our ancestors. And this hacker-spammer-virus spewer types must be easier to track down than, say, Al Queda. After all, they tethered to the same Internet we all are.
A modest proposal, which I think would be a real boon to the economy. Couldn’t make it worse.
double double
This just in my email. Made me laugh.
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. "However," he pointed out, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
the mood I’m in
On Saturday, I posted that I’d learned about an interesting technique for visualizing a creative design project, called a mood board.
Wikipedia says, “A mood board is a type of poster design that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team.
As promised, I gave one a try for my novel in process. I had some images that I’d collected in a folder. They were meant to help inspire my writing, but had never been brought together to help each other jiggle. Other images I found pretty quickly online.
It was kind of fun, but challenging. I had to find photos taken by other people, in some cases before I was born, which actually look like what I’ve been picturing as fiction in my imagination. The dogs were may have been the hardest photos to find, because I’ve been not only imagining their appearance but their personality.
I think it turned out well, for a first attempt.
You can view and download my mood board by clicking here.
good ideas
ethereal daze
Well, it’s been a quiet week here in Carpinteria, my hometown.
No, that’s not right. The week started out very noisy, with a massive – by local standards – thunderstorm on Monday night. Usually, if we get thunder and lightning here, it’s pretty wimpy. Such storms are small and brief, tending to pass along the Santa Barbara channel or over the coastal mountains. This one developed right over town. And it was angry about something.
I’ve never heard fiercer thunder, or seen more ardent lightning, in this valley or over our ambitious little patch of sea. And of course, the power went out.
Thunder, October 18*
Cymbals and symbols, drums
and the heartbeats of small creatures passing
into their certain eternities by and by.
And nothing we can do about any of that.
Except to smile into the darkness
and leave each other searching for a light.
Shantih.
We should let the master handle it:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
… a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.
… Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
[Link]
*Thunder, October 18 by Kyle Kimberlin
is a rough draft poetic work,
licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to copy and share.
an idea for writing
“A mood board is a collage of your ideas and inspiration for any design work, whether it be web or print, in the form of visual representations. It’s like brainstorming, but solely for the development of a design’s aesthetics and feel, rather than its content and other plans as well.”
Mood Board 101: Branding and Image Development | Most Inspired: Design Inspiration Blog.
I’m going to try one for my work, probably using Photoshop. I’ll share, if anything develops. Hope you will too.
Officer Bubbles
Cop weirds out over soap bubbles, arrests girl. Could he be a bigger douche?
"A Toronto police officer whose thuggish behaviour against a young girl blowing bubbles (reported here on Boing Boing) made him an inadvertent YouTube sensation and a symbol of police heavy-handedness at the G20 protests has launched a $1.2-million defamation lawsuit against YouTube."
Seriously, what an assclown. He needs to be removed from the streets.
And this is just the kind of thing I love to see linked and re-linked around the world, its viral-ness becomes inoculation against stupidity.
Drunk Driving
“According University of Oklahoma Police Department’s BAC Calculator, a 180-lb male registers a .08 after consuming six 12 oz. beers or five gin-and-tonics in a span of two hours.”
Drunk Driving: Is the U.S. Blood Alcohol Limit Too Liberal? – TIME
This Time article points out that deaths are lower in Sweden, where the legal limit for blood alcohol is .02. In the US, it’s 4 times higher.
In my opinion, the legal limit should be .00. It should be illegal to drink and then drive at all. Some things kill people and we can’t do much about it (natural disaster), or we can’t be too much bothered to invest in the solution (cancer). Some things kill people and we treat it like a necessary evil (war). But some causes of death are preventable, but for the fact that purblind stupidity is endemic to our species.
Duh. How drunk should we let people get, before they go slinging 2 tons of steel around at high speeds?
first, movement
I want to lead your attention to this post on November Hill Press blog, whence my friend Billie will lead it onward to an excellent interview with the writer Jim Harrison. She’ll simply do that leading best.
There, as you sip your tea, as I do now, or your kool-aid, or Thunderbird, or Stolichnaya, maybe you’ll find a clue to why I’ve titled this post as I have. That depends on the quality and quantity of your quaffing, I suppose.
women are smarter
Let me ask you ladies a question. If you had a cough, would you go to your medicine cabinet, take a swig of cough syrup, then check the label for the expiration date? No, a guy might do that but not a woman, because women are smarter.
Sorry guys, but it’s true. I even heard the Grateful Dead sing about it.
“It ain’t me it’s the people that say, men are leading women astray,I say, it’s the women today, smarter than the men in every way.”
Here are the full lyrics for you.
You are right my friend, that’s Bruce Hornsby of “The Range” fame, playing the accordion, starting at about 3:50. We saw him play keyboards with The Dead after Brent Midland died, but I never saw – or imagined I might – anybody play that instrument at a Dead show. Which is a good reason to love the internet, I guess. That’s pretty damn cool, if you ask me.
Anyway, I don’t feel totally stupid, I found a bag of Ricollas, so I’m OK. …And that exp. date? 01/2006. Yeah, I threw the bottle away.
we are absences
A new poem to share, tinted by October consciousness.
Remembering lying awake in the early morning in my grandparents’
house in the San Joaquin Valley, knowing the creaking floorboards were
my family, up early making coffee and starting breakfast.
Creak
The floors in my condominium
creak and squeak as the wood
under the carpet gives way under me.
The windows give out onto views
of the ocean and the coastal hills
and other dwellings, streets where
countless clustered lights are coming on.
I am not alone if I move about the place
and listen to the floors.
These noises bring back memories.
I wonder if they creak in houses we
have left behind, when we move through,
remembering. I hope they sag
under the weight of us who haunt,
and wake the living people, causing
fear. I used to wake there knowing
the sound was someone sleepless,
whom I loved. But something
has gone wrong and now we're gone.
We move invisibly through rooms where
we are absences and memories and dreams.
We creak the floors and make the curtains
drift, then settle into chairs in places
where the lights are long since out.
We sit and whisper about love, transparently.
Windows give out onto nothing but
the past, flat and endless, steeped in fog.
Kyle Kimberlin
10.10.2010
Creak by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under
a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 United States License.
Feel free to copy and share.
Metaphor 