I admit it. Not only do I not have very many tools, most of the ones I do have aren't very big, and damn, I don't even know how to use the big ones very well.

(Get your minds out of the gutter. The big ones, in this case, would be MS Word and FrameMaker...)

I'm a Help&Manual kind of girl, generally, and when I'm just futzing around with text, I like, well, text, and anything word-processory I want to do strictly for my own use, I tend to do in OpenOffice. The first genuine word processor I ever used was WordPerfect, so even though I haven't used WordPerfect in five or six years, I still feel like using Word is the equivalent to beating one's head against the bus map taped to one's office wall. (It's convenient to my chair, for ease of exasperation.)

Right now, I'm trying to learn RoboHelp Word, because that's what I'm using for the new project. I did a tutorial on RoboHelp HTML, which looks pretty easy -- it looks basically the same as Help&Manual, only with some feeping creaturitis. Pobody's nerfect.

RoboHelp Word is giving me fits. It uses a lot of advanced Word functions, and that's fucking me up, too. Compared to the average-Word-user-on-the-street, I can make Word walk and talk, and sit up and beg. For a technical writer, my MS Word skills aren't very good -- I don't use styles all that much, I try not to use templates, I don't know how to generate a table of contents (though I can generate an index -- both of these things are much easier in FrameMaker!), I don't do macros, and I'm generally of the opinion that simply because a bell or whistle exists doesn't mean one needs to use it.

My document designs tend to be on the Spartan side. On the plus side, many, many people have complimented me on how simple and easy-to-read my documents are, so there is method to my madness.

The previous author on this document obviously did not share my "simple is good" philosophy. There are, for instance, over 140 styles in the master document I'm working on. (I think one hundred forty three, but I could have messed up my count by a couple.) *sigh*

They tell me that the next project I do for them (assuming I live that long), I'll be building the documentation from scratch. I hope they're not expecting something mind-bogglingly complex, because they're not bloody likely to get it.

Hey, everyone.

Boy, it's been a long summer. I spent quite a while hashing out something about streetcars and dealing with my injured arm, then ran out of money and had to spend quite a while herding bureaucrats. The bureaucrats in question were NGO-type bureaucrats, which are definitely the more malignant kind. (Governmental bureaucrats are relatively benign, for whatever reason, largely I think because their funding sources don't depend on how many butts they can cram into whatever programme's seats.)

Why is it that, if you have a physical disability, there's always going to be some particular segment of the population who talks to you like you're three years old or non compos mentis, no matter what you've just said or done in their presence? As the song says, "It's botherin' my miiiind..."

The good news is I think I've managed to escape from the bureaucrats in the most efficacious manner possible -- I go up to Toronto on Monday to sign a contract and take possession of a project and its deliverables. I'm going to be making actual serious money. (voice="Strongbad" HOLY CRAAAAP!) Further on the upside, I may be able to convince the Beneficent State to replace my monitor, on the grounds that I'll need it for work. My newest monitor is eight years old and only does 800x600. *sigh* (On the downside, I can't invoice the new client for a month after starting. Ouch.)

I'm in semi-regular contact with Rustin, and his life is getting interesting. He's planning on moving back out to Portland (OR) late this year or early next year. I wish he had a phone and internet access, though...

Author's Note: This is the first part of a series. The material here represents an excerpt from a longer work (in progress) to appear in print in late June. The material presented here may not appear in the final version in this form, and the formatting here has been optimised for online viewing.



Once upon a time, in a land not too far from here, the automobile was a decadent luxury item owned by a few, and most people rode streetcars. The streetcar was a piece of iconic Americana, inspiring, among other things, pop-culture references galore - from the hard-boiled gumshoe cadging a free ride on the back of a passing car, to A Streetcar Named Desire, to the Toonerville Trolley. Streetcar-centred life changed the way Americans acted, thought, and spoke. The streetcar even changed the urban American landscape.

People born in the latter half of the 20th Century, after the decline and fall of the streetcar, may have the idea that suburban development happened primarily because of the automobile. While what we stereotypically think of as "suburbia," that sprawling vista of single-family houses on neatly-manicured lots -- and other tropes from 1950s sitcoms -- did, in fact, originate with car culture, the first genuine suburbs were built because of, and adjunct to, streetcars. In fact, the modern shape of certain cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore and Chicago among them), are largely due to streetcars. (See a map of the LA Pacific Electric "Red Car" lines here, for example.)

A "streetcar suburb" was a planned community built around a streetcar line or a set of streetcar lines. They were often built by a single developer, and have some distinctive architectural and landscaping features that are still visible today in neighbourhoods where the original development is preserved. A streetcar suburb usually has small lots, a conspicuous absence of individual driveways (as in my neighbourhood, some houses may have no driveways at all, or may have "mutual drives" shared between two houses) with any garages present as outbuildings behind the houses. Front porches, as with most houses built between 1850 and 1920, were a prominent feature of the homes in streetcar suburbs, and were used in some areas for the dual purpose of providing outdoor social space and climate control for the house. (In my neighbourhood, one can find California-style bungalows built between 1900 and 1920, as well as typical Victorian, Queen Anne, and Regency houses of the period. Almost all of them have deep front porches to provide a windbreak and insulation in winter, and shade and cooling in summer -- very important in the extreme Southwestern Ontario climate, which features hot summers and cold winters. See www.ontarioarchitecture.com for more details and a field guide to local building styles.)

Streetcar suburbs were built with sidewalks, on a scale that was also convenient for pedestrians and cyclists. The neighbourhoods themselves feature good soil and large trees, planted to create an attractive environment for residents and passers-by. Unlike modern "transit villages," which seem to be the reincarnation of the streetcar suburb idea, streetcar suburbs were primarily residential areas, with limited integrated commercial space. The idea was less to put commercial and residential spaces into one neighbourhood (as in modern transit villages), than to separate the busy commercial district from the quieter bedroom community while still keeping shopping and amenities an easy distance (by streetcar, bicycle, or even foot) away.

It's also important to understand that many people's lives meshed with the streetcar lines, in terms of their patterns and rhythms of living, and also that communities' physical geographies reflected the streetcar (and other transit) lines. (Some of these systems had different names to differentiate them -- streetcars, light rail, and so on. For example, in Southwestern Ontario, an interurban streetcar system with dedicated trackage, similar to the Pacific Electric suburban lines, was called a "radial railway," and an intraurban streetcar system that ran on rails embedded in the road was called a "street railway." For the purposes of brevity, I'm going to use "streetcar" as the generic term, and "light rail" only where contextual specificity is important.)

Our current culture privileges cars over transit, and transit over cycling and walking, but this wasn't always so. Many of the urban development and lifestyle paradigms we take for granted didn't exist in the first half of the 20th Century. That sounds self-evident, but it isn't, exactly.

For example, one area where the automobile has encouraged a significant and dramatic lifestyle change between the early years of the 20th Century and the mid-1950s is the way people buy food and other supplies. The change was undoubtedly helped along by other advances in technology, such as expanding refrigerators and chest freezers, but the switch from transit as a primary means of travel to the automobile provided the catalyst. In a transit-based lifestyle you are more likely to want to make more frequent trips, buying smaller amounts each time, to someplace that is convenient (ie. nearby someplace else you have to go), than to make one trip especially for the purpose, where you buy large amounts of supplies and bring them home and store them. We have an entire industry of "family packs," "club packs," Price Clubs, Costcos, and Sam's Clubs catering to this outgrowth of car culture. On the other hand, living a transit-centred lifestyle in a transit-centred environment (such as in early 20th Century US cities), encourages buying smaller quantities more frequently, at local shops, most probably near either one's home or one's workplace. This lifestyle is still evident today in Europe and Japan, both places where urban developments are generally amenable to pedestrian, transit, or bicycle travel.

Of course, you already know all about American streetcar culture. If you're at all literate in 20th Century American popular culture, the iconography and landscape, the patterns of living in Streetcar America are already there, imprinted in your mind by everything from Sam Spade movies to Nick at Nite; novels, radio shows, and every other creative and popular artistic endeavour of the early 20th Century. A search of Project Gutenberg lists about 12 100 entries containing the terms "streetcar" or "trolley," which is impressive, considering that the first modern streetcar systems in the US appeared around 1850, and most of Project Gutenberg's library predates the current copyright penumbra, which begins in 1911. Those myriad cultural references grew organically out of Americans' experience with streetcars, and streetcar-centred urban spaces. In fact, although it seems counterintuitive, the relative unimportance of the streetcar in popular literature speaks volumes about its centrality to the American experience of the time.* The streetcar was a background fixture, something that everyone just expected to be there. The streetcar was also an integral part of the great American technological experiment. It even held a certain pride-of-place in the American self-image, as a crucial real-world demonstration of Americans' underlying beliefs in American technological know-how, craftsmanship, and expertise, and their belief that, in America, Things Just Work.

The question is not whether the system that created this lifestyle worked; it did. The question is why it worked, especially why it worked as long and as successfully as it did.

Tune in next time for a look at one of those reasons.



_____________

* Similarly, there is a story of why there is no surviving medieval recipe for bread -- the knowledge was ubiquitous, bread recipes were learnt young and passed from parent to child (most likely mother to daughter), that nobody felt the need to commit them to print.

The new Bob the Angry Flower is particularly apropos, at least to anyone who's on the Internet...

(Back story: Rustin has gone to Portland, without leaving me contact info, so I don't know where he is at the moment.)

Rustin, if you're out there, please get in touch. I've got about a hundred questions I need to ask you.

Anybody who knows where Rustin is, could you please grab him by the ear and get him to call me, collect is ok. If he doesn't have my number, e-mail me at shgstewart at gmail dot com.

Thanks!

As the old Kenny Rogers song goes, I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in, and it turns out the unwashed barbarian hordes have taken it over. A friend of mine just sent me a link to this Language Log post called "A Brief History of Spaz." All this was brought on by Tiger Woods' saying, "I was so in control from tee to green, the best I've played for years... But as soon as I got on the green I was a spaz" in an interview.

I found the Language Log article rather wryly illuminating, particularly in that apparently, across the pond in England, "a BBC survey ranked 'spastic' as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below 'retard.'"

Now wait just a goddam minute here. Who took over a perfectly legitimate, precise piece of medical terminology and stripped away its medical meaning such that it became a pejorative "slightly less offensive than 'twat' and 'piss off,' and slightly more offensive than 'slag' and 'shit'"?! Granted, that's in British English, where, if they aren't creatively mangling the language out of some kind of perversely offhanded dismissive contempt for loanwords, then every second noun, verb, and adjective has some kind of pejorative connotation. However, the rest of the Language Log post suggests that "spastic" isn't doing so well here in North America, either.

The passage that particularly sticks with me from the comments to the article (and if I could find where to send an e-mail to the poster, I'd comment too, in a similar vein) is this one:

When it crossed people's minds that I actually was a spastic, they were usually surprised and bit embarrassed by having said something with a sense that they hadn't thought of. Then, depending on testosterone levels, whether they liked me, and how polite they were, they either apologised or didn't. But I knew that they knew that they felt they should have. So it must have been reasonably offensive...

I have a similar anecdote, since, if it isn't entirely clear from context, I do have Cerebral Palsy, and I actually am a spastic (quadriplegic). A colleague of mine at my last full-time gig liked to sneak up to my office door in the mornings and rap on the little glass window, which, of course, would startle me, and I'd jump. She started calling me "Spazz," which I put up with for a while, since I just sort of assumed she knew that was kind of accurate for me. Then one day, I said, "You realise that I actually am a spazz, right?" The dialogue went as follows:

Colleague: Get out!
?!: No, really, I actually am a spastic quadriplegic.
C: You're kidding me!!
?!: No, c'mere, I'll show you...

...whereupon I went to Google and searched for "spastic quadriplegia" -- just to prove my point.

She turned approximately purple and spent about five minutes falling all over herself to apologise for having ever called me "Spazz" in the first place. Now, that's kind of too bad, since as far as I'm concerned, "Spazz" is one of the if not nicer, then at least more accurate nicknames I've ever had. It certainly didn't bother me too much. On the other hand, that does beg the question: How the hell did "spastic" become so much of a pejorative that some people aren't even aware that it's a legitimate medical term?! How did that happen?

More importantly, how can we stop it? I'd really like my descriptor back from the forces of bigotry and semantic pollution, thank you.

Whenever I eat a tall glass of melonade, what I really want to know is, how the hell can they be elements, huh? The truth? You can't handle the truth, ve'rak ani yode'a ma she'at sho'elet be'emet. Don't tell me what to do, don't tell me what to say, ma zot omeret? Laisse-moi d'etre ta corrida, welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games. Be'agam ha'barbarim, yesh li khaverim. I have been, and always will be, your friend. Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Good fences make good neighbours. Hu bahur ha'bashkhuna. I'm just a girl who like boys who like boys to be girls who paid to the man who put up the rent and always should be someone you really love...




See? Anyone could have written Finnegan's Wake. James Joyce just got there first.

I really want to go to this! Unfortunately, it's all way the hell and gone parsecs out in Minnesota, which is too damn far for me. Do visit the yearbook pages and check out the photos of the cute, sweet, geeky lesbians. :)

I thought I should try to put together a proposal to get the Ontario Science Centre to host one of these. That way, I could wear my new earrings (I bought 'em for Tomble!) with my outfit, since I remembered that I can paint the hooks with clear nail polish and they won't react with my ears that way... (Funny how, when you don't have any fingernails to speak of, nail polish kind of slips under your radar.)

It would also give me an excuse to wear my anime-chick outfit (leather pants and a cheongsam top in black and red), not to mention getting my date into a cool outfit of some sort. (I don't hold with the dressing like a nerd thing.)


__________

In other news, I had a random recruiter contact me about a (short) contract job today, and an HR person from a publishing house contact me about an editorial job, and thanks to dave-tx for taking my resume off to parts southwest; someone from your neck of the woods has been on my site.

Things are looking up, and my recent bout of crushing depression has broken like a bad fever. That is to say, I'm not having suicidal ideation anymore, but I am still feeling a bit fragile. My body chemistry's a bit out of whack, too, but that'll fix itself soon, since I at least seem to have some appetite back...

I am inspired to write this post because of my LiveJournal friend Dorable, who posted this entry recently about her employment status. It looks like it worked, judging from the next entry... So, because Rustin's always urging me to be completely shameless, I did one of my own:

Ok, here's the situation. As Dorable said about herself, I too need a job, and I need your help. You should help me because I too am capable, competent, and smell nice. I meet deadlines, I always finish projects under budget, and I know a lot of people, so I can give referrals back. Also cookies. And Timbits. Technical writers and Timbits go together like double-doubles and guys in flannel shirts.

If I can't get some sort of gig before I run out of money, I'll have to go on Welfare again, which will surely cause me to jump in the river (there's a bridge 500m from my house, you know), and then Nero will be sad forever and Tomble will cry, and we don't want that, do we?

What I am Looking For: I need a technical writing, editing, or communications consulting job, preferably contract and telecommuting.

What I Can Do: I specialise in writing in-program help files, courseware and training materials, procedural documentation, and business communication.

If you need a piece of software documented, I can do that. If you are a developer and would really like to reduce your tech support calls, talk to me.

I can also rewrite your resume, send a professionally nasty business letter to a deserving party, help you put together your business plan, proposal, or formal report, and coach you through difficult communicative situations at work (eg. grievance process, office politics).

I do specialty research-for-hire, on any subject matter.

I can help your company adapt its communications to the English-language market, if you are overseas. I speak, read, and write conversational French and Spanish.

I am an experienced and fully equipped telecommuter. Besides the usual stuff, I have my own legal copies of Help&Manual and FrameMaker. I can provide work in the following formats: Word document, Rich Text Format, PDF, Windows Compiled Help, WinHelp, FrameMaker document, OpenOffice document.

I am reachable by e-mail, telephone, Skype, and IM. Please see my website for contact details.

Rustin and I were just having a conversion about the (as he put it) "800 pound gorilla in the room," tactics to create Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the public mind about everything from software to streetcars. This is not news, exactly; it's the same technique, rhetorically speaking, as anything calculated to create a moral panic in the public mind. Observation of the phenomenon probably goes back to the first edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841 (!). As a tactic, it was refined further in the 20th Century by Edward Bernays in his legendary volume Propaganda.

As Rustin mentioned, the high-profile examples would be Edison's campaign against Westinghouse around AC electricity (and, by extension, demonstrating electrocutions using DC), GM's multiple campaigns (either alone or jointly with the rest of the highway lobby), and, of course Microsoft. Oil companies have also been phenomenally efficient at creating a PR campaign against biodiesel, and, as I wrote about here, so has Monsanto in undermining independent canola farmers.

As I said to Rustin, this is a big systemic problem. If we are really serious about doing something about the professional liars who are thwarting our technology and society and making the possible suboptimal, we have to stop trying to cut the heads off the Hydra and start aiming for the heart of the beast.

That said, please go on over there and give Rustin some examples, or post them here in the comments. Two brains are better than one, and a Beowulf cluster of geeks is better than two brains, jars notwithstanding. *grin*

From The Toronto Star, March 8, 2006:

Troops to get java fix, Timbits
Tim Hortons to open in Kandahar

HAMILTON--Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are getting their wish -- Tim Hortons will be serving double-doubles and doughnuts soon enough.

This just goes to show at least one thing -- wherever there are sufficient numbers of Canadians, Tim Hortonses are inevitable.

On a more serious note, however, I'd just like to ask: Instead of bringing Tim Horton's to our "army guys"* in Afghanistan, why don't we just bring our army guys to Tim Hortons, here, at home where they belong? What, exactly and precisely, are we as a nation supposed to be doing over there with our military, anyhow? Obviously we're neither apprehending terrorists (a job better left to Interpol anyhow, I should think), keeping peace, nor rebuilding the country in any meaningful way (a task which should probably be left to various UN, governmental, and non-governmental organisations, by dint of training, experience, and skill). Pointless war-fighting largely at the behest of foreign powers is not, and should not be, part of the Canadian military mandate.

No thanks, of course, to the Stephen Fucking Harper government, which would like to see this go on for a long, long time, the psychopaths.



* This is a well-known and ubiquitous piece of Canadian slang.

Those of you who've been around for a while know that every so often (when the madness strikes), I slap up another index entry for this journal (alas, despite my recent posting pace that resembles a tortoise climbing a greased glass ramp, probably not as fast as I write the damned things, although I tend to index 'em 25 at a time). I'm currently working on Index Entry #3 (50-75), but it's going to take me a while, since some of the posts in the queue involve lots of keywords, lots of links, and lots of content.

In the meantime, amuse-toi bien with my Truly Massive List O' Keywords.

1984 (book)
2600 Magazine
abstinence education
ACM [Association for Computing Machinery]
activism
activism (boycotts)
AI [Artificial Intelligence]
American Exceptionalism
Amnesty International
Andrew Ortony
Andrew W. Osler
Al Qaeda
animals (fish)
art
aviation
Baltimore
Bell Canada
Benito Mussolini
bioethics and medical issues
birth control
Bruce Sterling
C-POP Gallery
calligraphy
Calvinism
cartels
civics
climate change
clothing and costume
clothing and costume (19th. C.)
clothing and costume (fashion)
clothing and costume (medieval)
community issues and communitarianism
computer-mediated communications
communication theory
conservatism
conspiracy theories
consumer affairs
copyright
corporations and corporate issues
Counterpunch Magazine
Coventry Patmore
credit cards
cryptography and cryptanalysis
cultural issues
Darth_brooks
David (Aleksandr)
Dayglo Abortions
Dead Kennedys
DeBeers
Detroit
DGlenn
diamonds
disability issues
DTD
economics (capitalism)
editing
education and education issues
Edward Bernays
EHS Corporation
electric cars
Ellem
engineering
ETD
"Fascism for Beginners"
feminism
Feodor Dostoevsky
food and cooking
French (language)
FUSE Gallery
geekdom
General Motors
George Orwell
George W. Bush
Google
gun control
HCI [Human-Computer Interaction]
health issues
Heliocentric
heraldry
Heritage Foundation
history and historical issues
history and historical issues (1950s)
history and historical issues (1960s)
history and historical issues (19th C.)
history and historical issues (20th C.)
history and historical issues (Arabic)
history and historical issues (Byzantine)
history and historical issues (Greek)
history and historical issues (medieval)
history and historical issues (Victorian Era)
HTML
humour (black)
humour (computer)
humour (gaming)
humour (political)
humour (SCA)
humour (sexual)
humour (sick)
humour (Slashdot)
humour (workplace)
individualism (philosophy, American)
intellectual property and related issues
Internet and Internet issues
Iraq
James Dobson
Japan
Jaques Derrida
Jello Biafra
Jerry Falwell
John Donne
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
Joseph Goguen
Katha Pollitt
KMFDM
Knute (Skippy, James Kennedy)
language geekery
Libertarianism
linguistics
LiveJournal
London [Ontario]
Marie Curie
Marshall McLuhan
Martha Stewart
MarvinMouse
media and media issues
memorials
Microsoft
Ministry (band)
minutiae
moderation system
monogamy
Moral Majority
MPAA
MSDSs
music
Nash Jewellers
Neil Randall
New York City
Notes From Underground
NRDC
OHIP [Ontario Health Insurance Plan]
Osama bin Laden
OSes [Operating Systems]
OSes (Linux)
OSes (Windows)
OSes (Solaris)
OxyContin
Panda (Jeff Stan, Jeff Timbrell)
Peter Crisp
PDF
pedestrian issues
Pennsic
personal debt
phreaking
Pierre Trudeau
politics
politics (Canada)
politics (car)
politics (gender)
politics (marriage)
politics (sexual)
politics (US)
politics (world)
"Politics and the English Language"
polyamory
poverty and poverty issues
power and power issues (lobbying)
privatization
programming
public and social policy (drugs)
public and social policy (financial, monetary)
public and social policy (medicare)
public and social policy (public works)
public and social policy (welfare and social assistance)
public and social policy (women's issues)
publishing
race relations
radio
relationship issues
religion
religion (Islam)
REM (band)
reproductive issues
rhetoric
RIAA
Robert Herrick
Robert Jensen
Robert M. Young
Saddam Hussein
satire (social)
SCA
science and technology
Scientology
September 11th
sex
SF [Speculative/Science Fiction]
SF Eye Magazine
SGML
Sian (Barbara Slade)
SIGDOC [Special Interest Group on Design Of Communication, see ACM]
Slashdot
smoking (tobacco)
smoking (marijuana)
"Song of Myself"
structured documentation
Stuart Hood & Litza Janz
"Taklamakan"
telephony
Terry Winograd
The Nation
Toronto
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
TTC [Toronto Transit Commission]
UI and UI issues
UN
University of Waterloo
University of Western Ontario
Village Voice
Visual Basic
Voynich Manuscript
W. Edwards Deming
Walt Whitman
War on Drugs
Winston Smith
W.P. Kinsella
World Bank
writing
writing (technical)
writing (fiction)
writing (journalism)
writing (poetry)
Zora Neale Hurston


Endnote: The point of this is, of course, to sort of revisit Rustin's entry from some time ago on subject competency. Besides giving people a look at exactly what is here, buried in the (copious quantities of) back issues, the other point of doing these indices is to give myself more consciousness of exactly what sorts of things I talk about, and what I can talk about.

In light of the recent disturbing developments in South Dakota and Missouri, I'd like to update my previous entry where I shamelessly grabbed Katha Pollitt's article on emergency contraception (EC) and cross-posted it here.

Thanks to my mad research skillz, I have additional updated information to add to the subject. As opposed to what I reported in my previous JE, EC is now available behind-the-counter without a prescription (the same as our famous Tylenols with codeine) in all Canadian provinces and territories. At my local pharmacy, a course of EC costs about $40, and is sold under the Plan B tradename, just like in the US. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, "behind-the-counter" means that the medication in question is available without a prescription, but in order to buy it, you have to ask the pharmacist for it. (I am a veteran of behind-the-counter medications, everything from Lactaid [which used to be] to Rid to Tylenol with codeine.)

While I agree with the Canadian Medical Association Journal that the behind-the-counter placement is suboptimal (compared to straight OTC), I'm pleased that EC has become available without a prescription Canada-wide, especially considering some of my and Tomble's misadventures recently with walk-in clinics. (That said, thank goodness there are walk-in clinics, even if it's still somewhat difficult to get medical attention even here on a Sunday afternoon, especially if you don't have a car.)

One point that Katha Pollitt made that I'd like to reinforce is, if you or someone you know might be in the position of having a pregnancy scare (and believe me, it is scary!), know where you can go to get EC.

Just what I always wanted!

(Hat tip to Perfessor Multigeek, but I did come up with the "pure...satisfaction" part.)

To quote Rustin, "I don't need to explain this. All I need to say is, 'It's desktop fusion,' and we're done." It's real, and at RPI and UCLA, no less. The RPI press release even has a picture, which you all should see.

It delivers a 200 000 EV wallop, which would probably require a stepdown converter for domestic use, but hey, I can get one of those at the surplus place...

Pardon me, what tech level are we at again?

BTW, Rustin has submitted this to the front page, so keep watching.

For those of you who didn't notice, Perfessor Multigeek has a new JE up for the first time since the fire.

Also, I packed Teh Tomble off to Tombleland today, so I'm not feeling particularly verbose. However, I will be posting more party pics and stuff soonish, assuming Fucking Symantec doesn't randomly freak out again and temporary-like nuke my computer like it did about fifteen minutes ago, completely eating a half-completed blog post of mine (not long enough to be bothered saving in a text editor, but long enough that I don't want to go to the trouble of retyping it right now).

Thanks to Sol for her nice pics of herself and Blinder, Johndii, Pancho, and Daoine (wow!), also.