Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to ladyat!!! Have a good one!

"You are not safe. Neither am I"

cadhla says this very well: Channel 11, Worldwide: you are not safe.

...There is always, sadly, a way to die.

Why am I telling you this? Becuase there is a difference between taking precautions and living in fear. Wearing your helmet when you ride a bike is taking sane and reasonable precautions. Throwing your bike away and refusing to ever let your children learn to ride is living in fear. This is a huge, fabulous, amazing world, full of huge, fabulous, amazing experiences just waiting to be had. But you cannot have them if you trade freedom for a security which is always, inevitably, illusionary at best.

You are not safe. Neither am I.

Welcome to life.

(First spotted in cflute's LJ.)

Making a little progress

Music: I've been trying to get ready for Worldcon, which is coming up in (help!!) about a week and a half. This will be the first con in about 9 months, and only the second in well over a year, where I haven't had cflute doing flute and backup vocals. Some things just don't sound right anymore without a second melody line, and some (like "Demon Lover") are just plain impossible. So I've been working with Joyce Uggla, a folksinger and folk dancer who I've known for years and who is getting more and more interested in filk. We had a good practice session Tuesday night; she doesn't play flute, but she does play drum. Sounds like it'll work. And I have to start thinking about whether I can use a second guitar part.

Work: Finally put some code together to make log entries chained together by hashes (rather like git's commit log) -- it's a simple Perl script meant to be called from the command line. I'm not sure why it's taken me several weeks to get around to it: I kept getting distracted. Maybe because it seemed so trivial that I kept hoping it would just write itself. As it turned out, there were enough minor subtleties to keep it interesting, including learning all about Perl's implementation of flock(2).

Health: I've been gradually getting back into walking, and trying to put in at least 45 minutes/day. Managed to get back to my weekend preference of an hour and a half on Sunday, but backslid some during the week. My ankle still isn't quite back to normal; I tried wearing ordinary shoes on Tuesday and had to go back to the high-tops. Feh. My weight stays stubbornly constant; the problem is that a steady gain of two pounds/year is well below the day-to-day noise floor.

Recording: Finally got my recording system back in operation, delayed a little by stupidly forgetting to connect my X terminal to the hub and spending an hour trying to figure out why the recording box wasn't showing up in the XDMCP chooser. Duh. But it's finally quiet -- the only moving part is the hard drive, and I can't hear it from more than a foot or so away. So it's probably OK. The thing looks pretty kludgy -- the parts are all mounted on a plastic clipboard (sort of a homebrew blade server) -- but it's light and compact, which is what I was aiming for.

(Almost immediate edit) and almost forgot to mention -- I've figured out how to rip the audio track off a DVD, as part of trying to pull a couple of songs off the video that hvideo made of my Baycon 2006 concert. I've been doing it with transcode, though there may be a simpler method. It was complicated by the fact that it would hang if I tried to do more than about 25MB at once. And it would have been greatly simplified if the chapter (scene) breaks actually corresponded to song boundaries instead of being arbitrarily assigned by the DVD-writer. Fortunately audacity makes short work of that kind of thing, using "export selection".