practicality

I've just started taking a course online on design via Coursera, and our first week challenge (due by Sunday... yep I kind of left that one off, go me) is to find 'gaps' - some place in our lives that there is a problem that can be solved by design (using design in a very loose sense - the course is a general principles/process type thing, so it's not necessarily an aesthetic-design thing). One of these is going to be the basis for the term project, and we have to have access to five other people who share the same 'gap' - the prof would prefer in-person access but I do not have five people I interact with on even a weekly basis in-person so YEP NO. So! This is a brainstorming post, mostly, and I would love people to chime in with a 'yes I'd like that too' if, well, they would.

-Marginalia (working title for the eReader quote db project, see previous post)
-Pantry tracker (what do I have? When did I buy it? Seemed popular idea-wise in #dw)
-FUCKING WIZARD LAYERS (I will probably not tackle this but it drives me up the wall)
-FUCKING LAYER EDITOR (...see above, though Fey has given me a possible solution)
-Something to introduce recipe variety on a basic level (I love whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com in principle but most of the recipes include things I don't have, and I hate shopping)
-work-out reminder/incentives?
-semi-flexible scheduler for practicing artsy stuff (there was a discussion on learning and routines in reddit, and about how it's far better to do something EVERY DAY than a few days a week or something)
-something organization something something (my house is a constant disaster. I don't even know where to start)
-a script/extension for me to annotate my buglist on Bugzilla (because I hate going 'okay, I think I have patches in for these four for review, and this one depends on another bug, and...' because it's not easily visualized)
-highlight reddit posts by subreddit they appear in (can you tell I like visual cues?)

So I've been kind of down lately care of unemployment - it's the sort of situation that's bad enough normally, but I have the extra joy hanging over my head of knowing my current visa expires next summer and as it stands, I'm not in a position to get another one, because, you guessed it, lack of job experience.

I've spent the last two weeks or so contemplating doing freelance web design - started making a portfolio site, doing lots of reading on freelancing, etc. And I came to the conclusion tonight that I don't think I can. I'm a pretty good web designer. Over the broad category of anyone who's made a webpage, I think I can safely put myself in 'above average'. But I lack the talent for creativity and innovation necessary to be pro, to make enough to make a living off it. I don't know if that's something I could improve over time, or if it's just some quirk of luck that makes some people innovative and others not. But I don't really have the time to practice and find out.

And then I sat back and thought - you know what? I have a skill set already that I'm pretty damn good at by most measurements I've seen, which is hands-on betnchwork in molecular biology. I am a pro at this. Except, of course, for the part where nobody will pay me to do what I'm good at. And I know that some of this is the economy, and some of this is the deeply messed up way academia works these days, and some of this is just not knowing enough people (and having no idea how to meet more - seriously, where do biologists hang out?). But I think tomorrow I'm going to call a place or two to ask about volunteer work, and maybe I'll actually do that Masters program application.

So a friend (hi Yana) reminded me that oh, I need to post more. Which is true, I've mostly been microblogging because 1) I keep my microblog locked, 2) nobody here cares about RP shenanigans, and 3) also nobody cares about my spammy, spammy thoughts on fandom (I make running-commentary plurks when reading stuff). So in news people might actually care about:

-Frustrating job laid me off, which effectively resolved my dilemma if I should quit and search harder for something that wasn't pure physical labor at insane overtime.
-I have been swimming in a sea of CSS, mostly working on things for Dreamwidth instead of, oh, any of my own sites. But it's like slacking off productively!
-I have failed utterly at working on learning any other coding language (aside from a bit of S2 and that doesn't count)
-I have pretty much managed to keep to my cleaning goal.
-I'm considering trying to save up for a new car because 1) the crazy lady next door keeps threatening to have mine towed and 2) some jackass smashed one of my windows in and 3) the car is sixteen years old and showing it's age.
-Started reading Marvel comics. If I disappear, I've fallen too deep into the abyss. Don't follow me.

I'm also starting to realize I need to upgrade my personal blog - it's still running Moveable Type 4.1 which is... years old. And uses tables for layout, and now that I look, has no wide content handler. And the layout is a little embarassingly old-school in light of my DW stuff. Options are most likely either upgrading MT which has the pro of a templating language I know and the con of being owned by Six Apart who I'm not fond off after how they handled LJ, or switching to Wordpress. I don't know if the Wordpress templating system has gotten less complex since I first looked at in like 2005, but I've become a better coder, and it does seem to be the blogging software these days. Thoughts, anyone?

So I am actually doing a bingo challenge! cottoncandy_bingo because I love me some fluff. This may all end up being Shatterstar/Rictor because they are my new favorite adorable of the moment >_>

( Posting my card here so I don't lose it. )

This kind of started with unfuckyourhabitat and discussions of how adding one small new habit to your routine makes it easier to add others, but it kind of solidified talking to pjf at YAPC, who is a deeply fascinating individual - the discussion we had can kind of be summed up in his wonderful OSCON keynote, which is on youtube here. Basically, my life is kind of a mess. There are things I should do but don't want to do, and things I want to do that I don't end up doing, and basically my life-system is Not Working. This is for a number of reasons:

1) I'm a very poor self-motivator. This is probably at least partially because of depression, though I think a lot of people have problems self-motivating. Basically I obey Newton's First Law of physics, and this is why I didn't got to over half my classes in my last semester of university.

2) Related to (1) - I'm poor at commitment. And occasionally afraid of it, because I have a very high fear of failure (again, see depression plus anxiety), and if you don't commit, you can't fail. But I'm also fantastic at abandoning projects midway through because motivation dried up.

3) I have an awful case of what synecdochic calls 'goldfish brain' (this is one of several reasons the terrified goldfish is my spirit animal). Basically it's an exciting combination of distractability and short-term memory failure that leads me to do things like almost put the butter away in the cutlery drawer, lose everything I don't keep consistently in the same spot, and forget important things I need to do unless I do them right now.

So! It seemed best to make a list of what I want to do before I figure out ways in which to overcome 1-3 and actually do it.

Long-Term
-Get a job in my field
-Get PR status in Canada
-Own a house

Day-to-Day
-Keep the house clean
-Keep up with my RP commitments
-Cook a greater variety of lunches for work
-Not lose things all the time

Crafting
-Assorted planned knitting projects
-Assorted planned sewing projects
-Deal with the backlog of half-finished and abandoned projects
-Become reliable and skilled enough to make some extra income off my skills

CompSci
-Learn Perl
-Learn Python
-Get my cosplay website out of alpha

Languages
-Learn pronunciation for French, Mandarin, and Cantonese (No interest in the language, but I don't like sounding like an idiot in front of my friends)
-Brush up on my Spanish (I blame comic books)
-Learn Japanese
-Learn Welsh or Irish

This, then, leads to the 'how to do this' portion. The long-term goals are somewhat nebulous, and I need to refine the steps necessary to reach them before I can set that up on any sort of tracker. I've been using Astrid as a possible to-do manager, as it syncs web and my phone, and has a random reminders, which is good for someone who forgets things that need doing. I am, however, open to to-do list managers, as Astrid doesn't have an open API, so no hooking it into other things. So far, that's mostly been for day-to-day stuff/one-off tasks - I can add when I think of it, and come back to it later. The CS stuff - I think for Perl, working on DW bugs may be a good start. For my website, it's honestly just buckling down and writing the damned content. Languages - I have access to some online learning systems through the library, and Anki seems like a good way of reviewing.

The next problem - the big problem - is keeping to the commitments to do things, instead of 'eh, later'. Like the recycling in my trunk I've meant to take to the depot all week. 'I'll do it tomorrow.'. For that, I'm tentatively considering Beeminder. Putting money up for stake is kind of scary (see fear of commitment) but at the same time, money is one of the few things that is sufficiently motivating. Why I skipped classes but I don't skip work.

This, of course, is all very rough-draft right now, and input on what's worked for others is more than welcome.

CHARACTER NAME: Clow Reed
SERIES: Cardcaptor Sakura
CANON POINT:After his death, but before the events of the main storyline take place
LOSS: The deck of Clow Cards - they’re his ultimate creation, and by the time of his death, he’s grown quite used to having them around both for the use of their powers, and for their personality. Losing them is a personal slight to a very proud man, and makes magic use more complicated and less powerful for him, as a portion of his power is bound in the Cards.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER: In canon, Clow is something of an enigma - he only appears in a handful of flashbacks, and, once, speaking directly to Sakura. His demeanor is friendly, quietly and politely upbeat - always smiling, although there's always sort of the sense that he's smiling /at/ you, rather than /with/ you. He is of mixed Chinese and British heritage, and an extremely powerful mage - the most powerful in his world, while he was alive. He is shown to have a talent for innovation - the Clow Cards represent the culmination of his life’s work on magical theory, and are an interweaving of both Eastern and Western magical traditions, implied to be the first of it’s kind.

Many of his personality traits seem to be a result of this immense power - the ability to bend reality to your whims alters one’s perspective and one’s desire. He has absolutely no qualms about manipulating people for what he thinks of as their own good, and seems to even enjoy it. For example, he’s responsible for almost all the events that unfold in the series itself, particularly the Sakura Card arc, where his partial reincarnation affects events directly. He also alters memories of his Guardians of the time surrounding his death, giving them a more peaceful closure to his life, and his reincarnation alters Sakura’s memories, to keep their little game going longer.

At one point, Keroberos accuses him of having a 'twisted personality', which he matches with a smile, and no denials. He's one of the most powerful mages in the world, which means he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants to, and so he /does/. There’s evidence that having this much power has lead him in pursuit of the new and unique. His character profile lists his favorite thing as ‘anything unpredictable’ and his hobby as ‘surprises’ - when you can see the future, finding something /new/ becomes increasingly hard, and Eriol (his reincarnation) shows both some surprise, and a great deal of interest, in the the elements of his planning that did not work, such as Sakura’s choice to be in a relationship with Syaoran rather than Yukito - it’s an instance in which he was wrong, and that’s something that’s infrequent in his life. It’s also implied that he could have chosen to live for longer than he actually did, but was simply bored of life.

Overall, on the surface he can seem like he's airheaded and has zero attention span, as he tends to jump from one thing to another rapidly - however, if something really catches his attention, he can be incredibly thorough, and underneath the smile, he's an incredibly intelligent man with a passion for scheming. He's not actually outright evil or malicious, but he does have a very strange sense of humor, and a tendency to pull pranks which can seem a bit unfunny to those who doesn't share his outlook. He finds people in particular interesting - the more unpredictable, the better.

ABILITIES: Clow is an extremely powerful mage - in his universe, the second most powerful who will ever exist (Sakura being the first), and an experienced master of both traditional forms of Chinese and British magic (with some dabbling in other forms because he’s a nerd like that). The powers he or the cards he created are shown to have in canon include basically complete mastery over creation and change of the physical forms of things (up to doing things like entirely remapping where doors lead within a single building, shifting objects, looping sections of the physical environment, creating sentient beings), divination (not 100% accurate, and it seems to be more focused on his family), memory wiping (this would absolutely not be used without player consent), and postcognitive spells (possibly with a small measure of interaction, but nothing that would allow him to alter past events, as far as shown).

(for a more in-depth list, this page covers the abilities of various cards - it can be assumed that if the Cards can do it, Clow can, as he created them)

I started documenting my cosplay stuff on Tumblr because of the ease of posting short posts and mixed media posts (text and pictures, for example). And then I started actually writing about costumes and costume-making and it basically turns into GIANT ESSAYS and then I think I am maybe missing the point of Tumblr.

(do I have a thousand-word draft of working with plastics saved to finish off at some point? Yes I do.)

So, I have mentioned the previous misadventures of me and my media server. After much debate and discussion in #dw (I seriously ♥ you all for putting up with my annoying tech-support-ish questions, seriously), I came to the conclusion that the reason I've had a ton of boot issues is because my main, big drive on the machine was having problems spinning up adequately when the machine was started, which lead to it failing to various points in the boot cycle (depending how much it had spun up). Between that and SpinRite finding a bunch of sectors it couldn't fix, I decided these were signs that while the drive was not dead, it was probably on the road there, and that it would be better to replace it before it actually died.

So I went out and got a 3TB WD Caviar Green from NCIX, my local parts chain (on sale for $30 less than NewEgg had it before shipping, no less), and set about recovering files from the bad drive, reinstalling Xubuntu 12.04, and configuring all the drives to automount. There were a few hitches along the way, but the only unsolveable one is that it turns out my salvaged memory card reader is incompatible with Ubuntu versions after 9.10 or so, due to updates in how the kernel handles USB devices. So when I have some money, I think this thing finally deserves an IR reciever and remote, and a new memory card reader that's actually USB 2.0 compatible.

I also renamed the machine and all it's drives, as azurelunatic made me realize that naming a machine after a city that gets blown up is almost as inauspicious as naming devices after crazy villains (I named an mp3 player Sephiroth once. Bad idea). So my FF7 naming scheme has been laid to rest in favor of a Gundam 00 based one, because... nerd. So:

- Veda - my sleek little Alienware laptop (it has been Veda since I bought it, actually)
- Celestial Being - The media server
* Setsuna - boot, programs and docs drives (because he's the important one)
* Lockon - Games, comic scans, RPG books, misc Fun Stuff (because you know Lockon is the one with the most normal concept of 'fun')
* Tieria - the 3TB drive for video files (because Tieria is the master of GIANT GUNDAMS)
* Allelujah - music (...because it needed a drive. Sorry Alle, I really do love you anyway)

When I have some free time to dig into files, I'm going to try to make a skin for XBMC that looks like the Ptolemy's computer interfaces, I think.

Also, in the category of 'this might be a sign', I started up RhythmBox, imported my collection of roughly five thousand songs, put it on shuffle - and this is what I got first. Yes, Gundam 00 music. And this is what the desktop looks like when not cluttered with windows.

For pantswarrior's amusement, Ashley and I were discussing plotting plans for our Fuuga OT3 (Kazuki/Toshiki/Juubei):

Her: I also think that at some point, they should all have bathtime.
Me:..........does the Mirage have a hot tub?
Me: because if so they should take it over and fill it with bubble bath (LOL)
Her: lmfao
Her: yessssss

(and to everyone in general, I swear I really truly will have con photos uploaded this week. Once I reinstall the OS on my laptop. Yes, again. I probably could have fixed this one, but trying to swap from Ubuntu to Xubuntu without a clean wipe, after upgrading Ubuntu from 10.10 to 12.04 in one day, was making it's own share of problems, so I decided to just go clean.)