ministry of efficiency and small hats

Google Reader got some nifty updates, but it still doesn’t support digest authentication. (Or does it? I can’t find it, but it might be buried in the name of newbie-friendliness, so please correct me here.) Until it does, I can’t use it to read my LiveJournal friends’ locked posts, so I won’t be switching over. If this isn’t a concern for you, I recommend giving Google Reader a spin. The UI is much like Gmail, nice and clean and fast, plus there is built-in “sharing” functionality now so you can make your own link log. People can read your shared links on a webpage, via a feed, or through a widget you embed in your own site. Good stuff. Thus ends Week Eight — also known as Month Two — of the new...

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Posted on 29 Sep 2006 | 1 comment

would be enough

The new iTunes is displeased with my request for it to fetch album artwork. Earlier it was stuck on 140 of 1300; now I am happy to see it has progressed to 217 in a mere three hours. I will persist. The rest of my trip to Chicago was lovely, especially time spent with Adam, my friend of 19 years. He’s one of the few people I can and do say anything to, and trust that he’ll do the same. While I was visiting my mom, I was happy to get her all situated with a new wireless router and a new mobile phone. Until I became an adult, I had no idea how great it could feel to help the people you care about. Little bits and pieces have been surreal as of late. I’ve met two Flickr friends for the first time offline. Though I’ve made the...

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Posted on 28 Sep 2006 | 5 comments

NPR fangirls

My mom took me to see “Wait Wait — Don’t Tell Me” last night. We laughed for two hours straight. If you live in or near Chicago, you should go. If you don’t, listen to the show this Saturday (or to the podcast after 19:00 EST Sunday) and you might hear us cackling. O yeah, and I got autographs from Roxanne Roberts, Paula Poundstone, and Peter Sagal, who likes my Visconti fountain pen. Of course he does, because he is awesome. We have done ridiculous amounts (i.e. more than 15 minutes) of shopping for proper corporate clothing since I got here. I discovered the designer Eileen Fisher, who makes clothes that look good on short, lumpy me, so now she is my new favorite designer. Not like I know any other ones, except for Isaac...

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Posted on 22 Sep 2006 | 5 comments

not unhappy

Somehow I have trained Quicksilver that a quick search for my blogging software of choice, ecto, should result in the bookmark for Octodog. Invariably when I just want to write a quick entry here, I end up pondering octopus-shaped hot dogs. And then I lose my train of thought. I mean, who wouldn’t? It’s an octopus AND a hot dog. Thursday evening was the big summer party for work, and it was quite the party. I planned on going right at 16:30, staying an hour, then heading to the gym before the SFlickr gathering. Not exactly. A group of us closed the place down at 21:30 and then went to a bar in the Marina for another few hours. I met some new people, and I got to know a couple of them over the course of one excellent evening. We had fun. I had...

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Posted on 16 Sep 2006 | 3 comments

there is no try

Sorry I wasn’t clearer in my 30 Boxes post about how to integrate your Google and/or Upcoming.org calendars. Go to your 30 Boxes account settings then “Web Stuff” then scroll down to “My Web Calendars” and enter the .ics file URLs there, prefaced with webcal://. Now that the endorphins have worn off, I am pretty exhausted after going to the gym for my first full-fledged workout in quite a while. I am looking forward to getting in better shape, but mostly I am looking forward to not thinking about going to the gym anymore, and just going. Next up: doing that trick with my writing projects. In a way, I’ll be relieved when I’ve seen all the Buffy and Angel episodes, because although I enjoy them very much, watching them...

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Posted on 13 Sep 2006 | Comments Off

how many boxes do you need

For those of you reading cygnoir.net via LiveJournal or an RSS reader, I think I have fixed the issue with my feed cutting off after the first sentence or two. The fix may spew out a bunch of old posts in the process, and I apologize for that. After reading Thomas Hawk’s latest post on the calendaring site 30 Boxes, I decided to check it out again. Now, I have been content to use Google Calendar for my personal schedule and Upcoming.org for social gatherings. They each have a great UI and a ton of people I know are using them already. No point in switching now. The great thing about 30 Boxes to me is that now I don’t have to switch to gain value from it. If you’re using Upcoming and/or GCal to schedule your life, you can specify that in your...

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Posted on 10 Sep 2006 | 2 comments

too cold

I don’t know why I’m writing; I’m barely coherent after the MSG popped my Fry’s cherry. It is truly Geek Mecca. And it is wonderful. And scary. And big. And has a Wild West theme. And I really don’t know what happened to me there, except that after two and a half hours I managed to walk out with a book on Unix and a copy of Black & White and the last vestiges of my sanity. And this after taking Zen to the vet after four hours of sleep, when everything is surreal but particularly the noises cats make when they are Especially Displeased With Their Humans, and specifically the dirty look I received when it was all over, as if I were the boyfriend who responded to the “does my ass look fat in these jeans” question...

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Posted on 9 Sep 2006 | 4 comments

onboreding

Today I was in an all-morning mandatory “onboarding” (god I hate that word) meeting and my exhaustion hit me like a sucker-punch. I felt like I was going to yarf in the middle of a review of business strategies, with all the fancy people looking on. My exhaustion is all my own fault: I’ve felt all week like there weren’t enough hours to do all the things I’ve wanted to do, so I just stayed up and up and pushed myself past sleepiness and wow that is not a way to behave, not at my age, not at any age, and not while I’m trying to be a good productive worker bee. I really need to be in bed by 23:00 tonight for tomorrow not to be painful. When I’m this tired, everything is yarftastic, even public transit. At the bus stop, an...

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Posted on 7 Sep 2006 | 3 comments

peter out

This is getting a bit surreal. Not only am I having a suspiciously awesome time of it lately, but CourtneyP is my new next-door neighbor. That’s right, happypants, the CourtneyP now lives right next door. It’s like a sitcom without the laugh track, the ridiculously large floor plan, or the Matthew Perry. That is really it. O, and the new TV on the Radio album comes out in the U.S. on 12 September. Note to self: you must remember to be humble when your biggest worries are a papercut on your index finger and the fact that your iPod doesn’t remember any cover art except Peter Gabriel’s “So”.

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Posted on 6 Sep 2006 | 4 comments