Monday, January 25, 2010

Last weekend was Craft Day, and as I said, I actually finished a project!

From 2010


This is the embroidery sampler bag from a great book called Doodle Stitching. It is suppoed to hold your embroidery hop and since it has all the stitches on the book on it, serve as a reference. But it is really small, even thought I made mine bigger than the book suggested, so only my smallest embroidery hoop can fit (barely) in it. Also, I think I made it more crooked than was suggested by the book, but WHATEVER. I FINISHED.
From 2010


And then became obsessed with the idea of making a quilt. So I spent a week looking at fabrics in the store and online, until whenever I closed my eyes, I saw textiles prints. The ones I was hoping to find, but couldn't. I never found the right fabric for the handquilted project I want to do (inspired by a project in this fabulous book called Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts)

By this past weekend I was saturated, and finally decided to try my luck ordering several fabrics online. I expect colors will be a problem, so I'll probably have to go shopping again to replace the ones that don't work.


Saturday Paul and I finally got our H1N1 vaccines. Oddly enough, NOT covered by insurance! The woman in front of us in line at the pharmacy was being told that her medicine was goint to cost her $300 because that's all her insurance would cover. She said she guessed she'd just have to do with out it if she couldn't get a special coupon from her doctor.

We need Single Payer Health coverage! It's embarrassing that we can't take care of ourselves, that "insurance" companies get to take premiums and then not cover prescribed medicines, and that they refuse to cover vaccines which? are a hell of a lot cheaper than treatments.

Oh, and ever since my vaccine, I'm feeling mildly autistic. Which I'm hoping will help me get a fancy engineering job. Maybe I should go back for another shot.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

words

I for one, am VERY excited about tomorrow's closing of the despicable U.S prison in Guantanamo Bay!

I've got my party hat on in wild anticipation and everything.

Woot! Hope! Change!

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Tell Congress to Get It Right! Protect Women’s Access to Abortion in Health Care Reform

I just did this, and you can too! From the ACLU:


The health care reform bills in both the Senate and the House include severe restrictions on women’s health. We must let our senators and representatives know that both provisions are unacceptable and must not be included in any final health care legislation.

Now, as the House and Senate prepare to reconcile the differences between their two bills, please tell your senators and representative to go back and get it right!

Will you take action, too?

http://action.aclu.org/StopStupak


Sunday, January 10, 2010

My 10 hour honeymoon with Comcast=OVER

Update: I tried following their instructions, which didn't work. I tried using their chat support person, who finally told me "I have tried to turn it off on my end and did get errors" and I tried telling them I'd done all of this and including the chat transcript, to which they sent me back a canned answer pointing to the original docs. When I replied saying obviously you didn't read my email, so let me repeat my complaint and for good measure sent them a screenshot, then????

They finally told me that they don't support Macintosh. Which? has zero to do with DNS or why the stuff wasn't showing up in their little user settings console. (I knew this but just to be a good little user, I tested by using Paul's Windoze machine, with Internet Exploder, and it still wasn't there) But let it be a warning to any other Mac users out there: Comcast doesn't want your business, and the opt-out service (and who knows what else) are not supported for Macintosh. And they won't tell you this up front.

"After reviewing your email and checking my resources, I found out that the disable option is not available for Macintosh and likewise Intel Mac OS X 10.5 is not yet supported by us as of this time. Most Mac-compatible features of Comcast High-Speed Internet (CHSI) should work with Leopard; however, as Leopard is not yet officially supported by Comcast, there may be some Mac-compatible CHSI products that will not work. I do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
In case anyone besides Comcast is living under a rock, Leopard was released over 2 years ago-- not exactly bleeding edge.

Here's what I want from an ISP: send my fucking packets. The way you're supposed to. Not redirecting them to some craptastic site that makes you more money and wastes my time. The way I have my settings in my browser should be the way things work. I just want the intertubes. To send my stuff through. Not your "service" that you won't allow me to opt out of. I don't want any of your vaguely mentioned "Mac-compatible CHSI products that will not work." NO products, please! Just Internet Service. Tubes. Or, a dumptruck, or whatever.


Solution:
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html
Took me ten minutes, set it at the router level, and so far, so good. I trust google not to override my choices. I may be biased, but they have not done me wrong so far.


Update: 10 minutes later, I recieve my first bill from Comcast, and they are already trying to overcharge us. The recurring service they are trying to bill me is $15 more than we agreed on. I saved the original chat with the original number, but I'm guessing this is why they've been so opaque all along.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

DNS Hijacking for only 49.99/month!

Wow, I've had Comcast internet for 1 day, and I'm already pissed off at them!

anyone using alternative DNS out there, can offer pointers or reports on how wonky it might be?

Friday, January 08, 2010

tasty cow

So that's it!
After over 20 years of being vegetarian, I have finally decided to start eating cows and pigs and chickens again.




Whew! About time!






and omg, how tasty they were!










From 2010

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Having this 4 day weekend has been heaven. I know we had one for Christmas, but it had been stretched thin by family obligations. This weekend was mine! MINE! And I can't remember the last time I felt so well-rested. (no, not even the Wednesday of Christmas week when I came home from work and collapsed after dinner into a 12-hour sleep)

Wednesday night I finished sewing a Christmas present (yes, really) and started another craft experiment.

Thursday I slept in too late to allow for my scheduled errands, and then Paul and I lived it up in Sunnyvale in the following way: we gulped down a bottle of "California Sparkling Wine" on the way to the thrift store, ate a nice dinner at the local Mexican joint, and then wandered around Target drunk, wondering what the hell we could possibly do for fun in Sunnyvale on New Year's Eve. The conclusion was "nothing," so we returned home and had our very first fireplace night using the remnant of a duraflame left by previous tenants. We were in bed by 11, and woken up by the local kids screaming at midnight.

Which was nice because it meant I had saved my overindulgence for the following day, when we went to some friends' house in Alameda, where I drank many the beerz and talked to much and too loud. We saw old friends, and I realized that many of them were the same I spent my last turn-of-decade New Years' with back when the world was supposed to end due to some poor coding bug thingie.

Saturday I had my New Year's headache, a day late, which I scrubbed off at the Farmer's Market and coffee house before my parents came over to bring us more firewood and the Christmas gifts we'd left at their house. Just in time too, because we'd need the new waffle iron since our other one tried to catch fire on Thursday morning. Saturday night I worked at New Wave City.

Sunday I went to my parents' house to finally give Nuno felting a whirl, with mixed results. It was interesting and fun, and one of two projects coming out nice isn't too bad I suppose. Needs more experimenting.

In between I did some goal setting, and we hammered out finances to try to stay on track in the next year, including a series of funny discussions in the past few days about, for instance, whether we can afford to run the electric heater in the bathroom for 45 minutes/day (we can!), and whether we can afford to continue our fancy cellphone service (we cannot). We spent 30 minutes agonizing over dumping netflix or keeping on at the lowest possible subscription, where $4/month still seemed like too much to bear. Then we went and blew the difference on margaritas at the local Mexican joint. Ah! We are so enigmatic!

I also felt very proud of putting a boatload of extra time in at the gym this month, and celebrated by not exercising at all, and eating a bunch of garbage for 4 days. hooray?