Saturday, January 31, 2004
The Snook and I have been uncharacteristically busy this weekend. Friday night we met up with Kristen and Mark on the Australian leg of their round-the-world tour at my favorite restaurant. A good time was had by all. That accounts for the first picture below. (Please disregard my crazy hair though. We were on Darling Harbour and it was being whipped in front of my eyes. It's not normally that messy.) Saturday we headed into the suburbs for the wedding of my coworker Martin and his fiancee Mimi. They're Korean-Australian Catholics and we were among maybe a dozen non-Koreans at the ceremony (out of about 300). The whole mass was conducted in Korean. We didn't understand a word. The food at the reception was fantastic though and I loved the traditional Korean dress Mimi changed into afterwards. (She promised to hook me up with one if/when I ever get married!) Thus the second two pictures, which show the happy couple along with the Snook and me. Afterwards we headed home for more socializing and recuperating before yet another engagement tomorrow...    Sidenote for my sister, who cares about such things: Yeah, that's a new dress. I just got it a couple days ago marked down from $90 to $40. It's sorta silky see-through black with a shiny lining underneath, and the top is V-neck with a few sequins. It reaches about to my knees and then has an asymmetrical ruffly hem. (I know; I normally hate diagonal hems. But this one looked good on me, I swear!) The problem was the skinny spaghetti straps, and the fact that the dress had sort of a high, squarish racer back. I realized right away that I couldn't wear a normal bra with it, so I went into the city yesterday for a strapless. I was actually surprised how comfy the strapless was (considering the weight of my boobage). It held up really well. It was only at the end of the reception, when I went to the bathroom and adjusted myself, that I realized how tightly it was digging into my ribs. But otherwise it worked well and made the dress look a lot better. Unfortunately it was cut a bit lower than stuff I normally wear, so I was constantly nervous and I made Rodd be on Bra Guard to make sure nothing showed. And yeah, before you mention it, I really need to get my hair dyed... Those roots are pretty shocking.
Friday, January 30, 2004
Later: Bah. I've dropped off already.
My result: You are Gloria Steinem. You are the McDonalds(tm) of liberal feminism, though you used to expouse some pretty radical ideas, you ended up working the system. Because it's easier? Maybe. But thanks for the only mainstream feminist magazine and for heading one of the most significant feminist lobbys in the history of the US. We wouldn't be where we are without NOW and Ms., as much as some of us are loathe to admit it. I guess that's all right, though I wish it was a little less negative. I think I only got her because I identified as "married."
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Ha! The next time I get into an argument with someone who calls me a "Spelling Nazi", I'm going to point them to this NYT article. Summary: Dumb eBay sellers list items with misspelled titles. Smart buyers find the items, buy them cheap, relist them with correct spellings, and sell for a tidy profit. I repeat, HA! Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Special thanks to my friend Mardi of soulcreative who designed the awesome logo for me. She's a designer. You should hire her. Tuesday, January 27, 2004
 My photos from Camp Creative are up! You can see some of the stuff other folks did in the different classes. There are also pictures from our trip to Dorrigo and my much-anticipated visit to the Big Banana. And yes, that's the Snook and I eating chocolate-coated frozen bananas on sticks. They look obscene but they sure taste yummy!Sunday, January 25, 2004
And did I mention how awesome Dorrigo was yesterday? Here's the Snook and I standing behind Crystal Showers Waterfall in the rainforest. It was amazing.  Saturday, January 24, 2004
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
 Day Four: Today we moved on to wire work. Our teacher handed out these silver "slave cuff" frames that we were supposed to decorate by stringing chunks of crystals and beads across them. My classmates happily began plonking down money for freshwater pearls and ugly metal spacers while my spirit revolted. After three days of making ugly tat, I decided a line must be drawn. I was actually going to make something that I liked. I decided that it would be fun to use a lot of my pretty small beads to make a pattern, the more anarchic the better. So I quickly sketched a little skull design with a pretty pink bow that I'd seen once on Amy's site. I spent the next two hours translating it into beadwork. It didn't take long for the other folks to figure out what I was up to. The younger girls especially loved it. It looked sooo much better than the purple/silvery/amethyst crap most of them had churned out. I even got a compliment from the teacher! Afterwards I did another one with butterflies on it to use up some more beads. I'll probably sell that one at the markets, but I'm definitely keeping the skull. It was my most inspired accomplishment in four days at Camp "Creative".Monday, January 19, 2004
Sunday, January 18, 2004
While Ma Snook and I slaved over our crafts in Bellingen, Snookums and his Dad headed out on the Nambucca River in the tinny. (That's an aluminum boat for you Yanks.) They were fishing for bass but didn't get much luck. Snookums managed to catch a bream though which they brought home, gutted, and ate for lunch. How very manly of them, don't you think? Here's the Snook and I modelling the fruits of our stereotyped labors:   Saturday, January 17, 2004
Friday, January 16, 2004
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Actually there was one amusing thing that happened tonight. As I was paying for my magazine at the newsagent I was surprised to hear the guy behind me in line ask for "three Lord of the Rings." I whipped my ahead around in time to see the clerk hand over six dollars worth of Return of the King instant scratch-off lottery tickets emblazoned with Viggo's head on top. I'm still laughing about it.
1 - set of keys forgotten by me at home this morning 1 - mobile phone forgotten by the Snook at home this morning 10 - therefore useless phone calls placed by me to the Snook 2 - number of hours it took him to realize I hadn't signed on to IM from home 25 - dollars spent on magazines and food at the shopping center to keep me busy 5 - daggy garments tried on at Kmart 2 - blinding calf and foot cramps in the middle of the Kmart bra section (brought on by last night's crappy Pump class) 3.5 - number of hours it took Snook to finally reach home and let me in Add it all together and it equals a NIGHT of SUCK. I'm goin' to bed.
Q. What does Snoop Dogg wash his clothes with? A. Bleee-yatch.
And by the way, I hope you all used your Christmas break to catch up on the Oscar contenders... because the Web-Goddess Second Annual Oscar Contest is coming soon! Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Ow. It's been a while since I had a good gym rant, right? I'm in some serious pain here, people. I meant to go to Pump class last night (with the instructor that I like) but by the time I got there it was full. "No problem," I thought. "I'll just run tonight and tomorrow I'll try out a new guy." Bad idea. First, a little background for you non-gym-rats: Body Pump is a class where a bunch of people do synchronized weight lifting to music. It's pretty low-impact and it targets all the major muscle groups, so it's a good workout for me. The thing is, it's like franchised. The company that invented it makes gyms pay a license fee to use the name. My new gym must have had a falling out with them, because we don't have "Pump" class anymore... We have "Flex" class. It's the exact same workout though and that's all that matters. I mean, the whole point of having this standardized routine is that you pretty much know the workout you're going to get before you go, right? Wrong. This guy tonight apparently decided to do a little innovating. My suspicions were raised when he had us each get some extra equipment ("Two extra bars??"), but everyone else in the class was either an old lady or a scrawny Asian, so I figured I'd be able to keep up. Right off the bat, he had us doing aerobics to warm up. Aerobics! I don't have a good track record with that. Plus it was like eighty degrees in that gym. I was sweating like crazy. (It reminds me of that yoga crazy people do in a heated room.) As for the actual lifting, he went too fast and combined groups together and pushed me beyond where I could go. He had us doing weird things like using the extra bars as ski poles for doing calf raises. He made me do pushups on the floor without my towel and I got carpet burn on my knees. (Yeah, I do girly pushups. But at least I can do more now than I could six months ago!) Halfway through it I was literally trying to come up with a good enough excuse to leave. It was like yoga all over again. Every time I looked around I could see that everybody else was doing fine, while I just couldn't get into it. I had no energy and I was flailing, and every time he'd exhort us to go a little deeper or hold something longer I could tell he was directing it right at ME. And he went so fast! I was trying so hard to keep up that I knew my form was suffering. Now I'm feeling it. My legs hurt and my neck feels seriously screwed up on one side. I've probably slipped a disc or something. Stupid man. I should raise a complaint or something... *grumble grumble* Monday, January 12, 2004
Related: I'm reminded of a scandal at ND a few years back in which a much beloved priest (Father David Garrick, for those that know him) "came out" in The Observer. He was, of course, celibate, but he identified as gay and sympathized with homosexual student activists on campus. His letter meant a lot to some of my gay friends. Unfortunately - despite the Church's stance that it's all right to be gay as long as you don't act on it - he was soon bumped from the schedule for performing Mass and was basically silenced. The last I heard he'd left the Church and was scraping by as a doorman for The Tonight Show in LA. Just thinking about it makes me angry and sad. Sunday, January 11, 2004
Saturday, January 10, 2004
 Periodically the Snook and I - in an effort to better ourselves - take turns recommending books to each other that the recommendee is obligated to read. Most recently he handed me his old paperback copy of Clive Barker's Imajica. I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect (as he was well aware). I had a dorky boyfriend in high school who read nothing but Barker and Piers Anthony and it pretty much soured those authors for me for life. The only Barker I've ever been able to get through before was The Thief of Always (which I enjoyed, to be honest). Anyway, I dived into Imajica trusting that the Snook wouldn't steer me wrong only to pull up short at the first sentence:"It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its themes, there was only ever room for three players."My sister would've immediately sneered, "I don't read books with people named Pluthero in them," and kicked him in the bum. But I persevered... [more...]
Not Fooling Anybody - a photographic chronicle of bad restaurant and storefront conversions, mostly in the Great Lakes region (via Ernie) Pathetic Geek Stories - online comic illustrating real-life pathetic geek stories (via Matt) Friday, January 9, 2004
"Everyone wants to focus on the $50 price difference between the iPod mini and the 15 GB iPod. I agree that the $50 price difference between the mini and 15 GB iPods is negligible. That's exactly the point. Take it a step further and imagine if Apple cut another $50 off the price and sold the 15 GB iPod for the same $249 as the mini. I say, even then, there would still be people who would choose the mini. For roughly the same price, you get to choose between a significantly smaller footprint and 11 extra GB. If hard disk capacity were the only factor that mattered, we’d all be using brick-sized players from Creative Labs."I totally agree and I'd even go so far as to suggest he forgot another selling point for the Mini - the colors. It sounds silly and sexist, but a lot of females would rank the pretty pastel case as a more important feature than a huge hard-drive. For proof I offer this Glitter thread. I've gotta believe that Apple absolutely knew what they were doing with this one.
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Update: I looked through Biana Knowlton's website (the girl featured in the article above) and there's no mention of Star Wars in there. I'm still mystified.
Monday, January 5, 2004
A couple people have asked me recently whether I've had any trouble with my iPod battery. In short, nope. My iPod is one of the original 5GB ones and was purchased in a California Apple story in January 2002. I wouldn't say I've been a heavy user over the past two years, but I'm fairly certain I'm in the fat part of the "normal usage" bell curve. I listen to it on-and-off at work and on my commute, and a full charge generally lasts me two days (but runs out on the third). I tend to leave it set on "song shuffle" and fast-forward through songs when necessary. I don't do anything special to prolong the battery and in fact I do things you're not supposed to (i.e. leave it plugged into the computer for extended periods of time, let it run down completely). I've even dropped it a couple times. So what's my actual play time from a full charge? I have no idea. I'd guess probably around eight hours but it's hard to tell. Therefore today I'm running an experiment to ascertain this once and for all. I started it up at 8:00 this morning and it's been running ever since. I've got it set to play random songs but I haven't been using the fast-forwarding at all. No backlight or sounds or anything like that. The first of the four "power bars" disappeared at the three hour mark. I'm now up to five and a half hours and the remaining three bars are still visible. (For the record, I don't think they're necessarily a very accurate guage of battery life, but it'd be nice to have proof.) More updates as the day progresses... Sunday, January 4, 2004
The milestones just creep up on you, don't they? Today is web-goddess's third birthday. There are now earlier posts in the archive from my first attempts at a blog, but the inaugural w-g post was made on January 4, 2001. As I did last year, I've compiled some statistics for 2003 Number of posts: 868 Number of comments: 3279 Most commented posts: Sydney Peace Rally, Celebrity Identification Quiz, Mensa "24 H in a D" Quiz, Advice on Getting a Cat, Apple Discussion Unique commenters: 287 (of course, a lot of those are people like Ferret who never use the same name twice, so the real number's probably like 200) Frequent commenters: see here Number of posts mentioning "Snook": 212 (that's nearly 25%!) Number of posts mentioning "Apple": 27 Number of polls: 15 Number of poll votes: 484 Most popular polls: What did you do on your 21st birthday?, Can you lick your own elbow? Site designs: two (I'm averaging just one per year!) Sock animals created: 10 Harry Potter Scarves knitted: 6 (that's nearly forty feet of knitting!) Hits Per Day: Ranged from 3000-6500 throughout the year (though it's already over 9600 for January thanks to the Sock Monkey tutorial)
Saturday, January 3, 2004
 Our GardenSince my Dad couldn't believe that I have actual sweetcorn growing my Australian garden, I took some pictures this weekend as proof. Things are really going nuts out there. The corn tasselled about two weeks ago and we've just noticed the first two baby ears of corn starting. We lost our first crop of green onions (due to an extremely hot day) but the second batch are coming along nicely. We hit the gardening store this past week to stock up on seedlings, pots, and soil. We also finally bought ourselves a hose but we try not to use it too much. Snookums even got this stinky fertilizer made from seaweed to spray on everything! Our thumbs aren't green but they're getting there.
Friday, January 2, 2004
Hooray for Kurt! I was predicting his victory all week based on the buzz from the 'Net. Too bad for Guy, but he really didn't choose the best song to show off. I don't think he'll mind losing very much though (as opposed to Kelly and Will, who both looked a little shell-shocked to see some of their scores). I was happy to see how well Peter did but a little surpisred that Ryan didn't score more highly. I guess protest folk songs don't play too well outside the western hemisphere. Read on for more commentary from myself and the Snook. [more...]
Later: Thank God for ibuprofen. Seriously.
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"Moblog" refers to posts and images posted directly from my mobile phone.
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