Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to smoooom, freyjaw, mia_mcdavid, and catsittingstill!!!!! Hope it's a great one!!!!

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for:

• Colleen, of course. And her gradually increasing mobility and independence.
• My daughters.
• A happy, successful, and stress-free Loscon. Safe trips there and back.
• A bluetooth headset that's actually loud enough for my failing hearing.
• Friends. Especially friends who write.
• A very understanding work environment.
• Introspection, and occasionally learning new things about myself.
• git

Done yesterday (20091202 We)

( raw notes )

Not a bad day. A little odd in places. I'm still having muscle aches in my legs when I walk; I'm assuming this is mostly due to being out of shape.

Went to what was supposed to have been a meeting of some people from Kaiser's caregiver support group (on hold because the person running it retired last month). It's possible that I simply wasn't persistent enough about figuring out why nobody else was there. Plus I kept getting lost/making wrong turns on the way back to work. The whole experience was overlaid with a distinct feeling of being totally out of place. Somewhere out of my comfort zone, apparently.

On the plus side, I sent $5 to pocketnaomi for the next installment of the crowdfunded story she just started. Check it out -- it promises to be a lot of fun.

Some good links. Some weird trivia posted by dejla. The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009 (from wcg). MakeHuman, a GPL program similar to Poser; see the wikipedia article for links to some others.

Loneliness is Contagious/Causes Isolation (from haikujaguar) -- the general idea is that when you drive people away with your loneliness, they become that much more likely to become lonely themselves. No hint of what to do about it, of course.

I've already signal-boosted a couple of posts on grieving.

ETA: And I sold a CD on CDBaby!! Thanks, whoever it was!

River: Colleen:computers::me:people

I just realized, while helping Colleen navigate around an unfamiliar part of LJ and teaching her about the "find" feature of her browser, that her attitude around computers was exactly like my attitude around people. ("Attitude" isn't the right word here; I don't know what is. I also tried "situation" and that didn't work either. Emotions? Maybe.)

Anyway: unfamiliar, scary, confusing, frustrating; easy to get into situations that one doesn't know how to get out of without rebooting and losing a lot of context. A lot of terminology that everyone else seems to have absorbed long ago. Inability to explain to someone else what the problem is, because you don't have the right words. The feeling that you're going to break something, or get something hopelessly messed up. The feeling that everything you've done has just made the situation more and more broken, messed up, and hopeless.

The difference is that computers are infinitely patient, totally consistent, mostly comprehsible, and don't go into a feedback loop when you panic or get stuck.

(23:18) pocketnaomi quite rightly points out that what she and Colleen feel about computers is exactly as valid as what I feel about people, and adds a list of differences that are almost a perfect mirror-image of mine:

To me, the difference is that people are able to catch imprecise statements and translate them in their own minds into precise ones. You don't HAVE to do absolutely everything right with people... doing them marginally close is usually good enough. With computers, there are only two options: 100% perfection and absolute failure. If you don't do EVERYTHING right, it will block you again and again and again. It has no pity or compassion, no willingness to meet you halfway or help out when you are exhausted from trying.

I think the problem on both sides is that I'm trying to think about people the way I think about computers, and "people people" like Naomi and Colleen think about computers the way they think about people. It's the natural, obvious thing to do, and it's equally wrong in both directions.

We're both learning.