I thought I knew every stupid internet meme all the way from Hampsterdance to Ninja Cat and Disaster Kid, but somehow, I missed this one. Probably because it’s originally from YTMND, which I mostly think is lame.

I will lose this in my YT favourites, so…the Finnish intro from Ducktales, of which can pick out exactly one word (duck/ducks).

Someone with too much time on his hands and access to the internet “Anglicised” the lyrics:

Morphine makes the holy known
Uncle Lina!
Eyein’ up/down that sappy nun
Uncle Lina!
I’m going to stroke it
Your arms are BROKEN!
Uncut! Ohh!
Hoot all you and an anus, aha!
Uncut! Ohh!
Your school’s stupid! Your school’s BaHa!
Uncut! Ohh!
If I’m not avail you, taco nazi!
Look around and count on Lassie!
Knit and dance and BAKE A CAKE!
Oh, Uncut! Ohh!
Hoot all you and an anus, aha!
Uncut! Ohh!
Your school’s stupid! Your school’s BaHa!
Uncut! Ohh!
And sanskrit ain’t got hoot to say ’bout
Uncut! Ohh!

I was sort of half grinning until it got to that overly enthusiastic “your arms are broken”, at which point I actually started to laugh because it was so…weird, and I had the strangest mental image of some lunatic doctor singing a diagnosis.

Someone on YT who speaks or at least understands the Finnish wrote out the actual lyrics, so I’ll assume they’re at least mostly correct.

Vauhtimesta hurjin on Ankkalinna, aina täynnä säpinää on Ankkalinna, arvoitus raukee, ja ansat laukee, ankat, oo-o! Uutta juonta aina sahaa, ankat, oo-o! Joskus hyvää joskus pahaa, ankat oo-o! Uhka (?), vaara väijyy takanasi, muukalainen kannoillasi! Mitä teet, sen kaiken kertoo ankat,oo-o! Uutta juonta aina sahaa, ankat, oo-o! Joskus hyvää, joskus pahaa, ankat, oo-o! Ei sääsket eikä hyttyset, vaan ankat, oo-o!

I like the knitting and dancing taco nazi much better. 🙂 Actually, this is at least as funny, if not funnier than the one for Dragostea Din Tei with the sitting feta cheese. I think I have a copy of that one somewhere. The one for Whap-Pa actually made it more difficult for me to learn the actual words because I could not get “mare pest dressing tuna cream” out of my head.

I’m still trying to get a fire lit under P. to get dressed and actually go outside the house, though largely without success. I was sitting here, reading something or other, and in a comment, someone mentioned the irritating behaviour of Windows because if you have multiple windows open, focus does not follow the mouse, as it does in X-windows. That pisses me off because it’s an extra click, and if I’m using XP, I’m already pre-annoyed, so I thought, “Well, I’m not doing anything else, so I’ll reboot and change that…I think I have Tweak UI already.” I booted to XP, enabled the follow-mouse focus, and thought that since I was there anyway and not busy, I’d finally get around to changing the mouse behaviour to single-click, like I use in Gnome. Somehow, I managed to start the Logitech thing (control centre or whatever the fuck it’s called), and although I’d long ago disabled the annoying fucking automatic updates, it asked whether it could check for updates. Feeling magnanimous, I thought, “Meh, why not?” and let it do its stuff. Surprise, surprise; a new update was available. I don’t remember why I even installed the goddamned Logitech mouse software, since it’s only an ordinary two-button, one clicky scroll wheel USB optical mouse and works with whatever XP has (I think–can’t recall for certain), but I had, and couldn’t be arsed to uninstall it.

Finally, the update downloaded, and the install started. I clicked a couple of “Next”, thinking it would take only a minute or two–it’s a fucking mouse, facrissake, not the control mechanism for the Mars Rover–but nope. It took several minutes (so long, in fact, that I thought it had stopped responding), and just as I was getting annoyed enough to kill the process, it finally finished. I was presented with a window that said something to the effect of “Installation complete. Please restart your computer.” Now, be reasonable…I’m not restarting the goddamned computer for a mouse. Forget it–if the cursor moves and responds when I click, it works, and I’ll reboot when I’m good and goddamned ready. The only button option there was “Finish”, and I assumed I’d click that and the fucking Logitech window would go away. I was right…sort of. The window did indeed go away, but the next thing I knew, the screen went dark, and then to, “Saving your settings.” WTF??? The window said, “Please restart your computer,” not, “If you click the only button available to make the annoying, focus-stealing window go away, I’m going to immediately shut down everything without your permission, no matter what you were doing, and I’m going to reboot your computer.”

Fuck you, Logitech. I like your mice, but fuck you. For all your stupid software knew, I had sixteen seconds left on a file upload that had taken me twelve hours to do over my Stone Age capped upstream, or had twenty-five hours’ worth of unsaved changes to the only copy of my Ph.D. thesis. You don’t get to decide when my computer restarts…I do. It’s been so long that I can’t remember why I installed your stupid software in the first place, but I’m not doing it again. Whatever drivers XP can find to make the pointer move and the buttons click will do just nicely, and I’m not buying another Logitech mouse, even if I do like them. Maybe not a Logitech anything, though your webcams are pretty good. It didn’t matter that it rebooted because I was finished what I wanted to do and had nothing important going on, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Fuck you. The computer belongs to me, not to Logitech, Microsoft or anyone else. To me, and it does what I tell it to do, when I tell it.

Okay, this one made even the Grammar Nazi laugh. Headline linking to an article about the court ruling, Re: Mattel vs. Bratz dolls.

Bratz dolls to be pulled off the market after court ruling; I expect there to be less fish net stalkings in our middle schools now.

Bratz are slutty-looking…I dunno….teenage prostitots? Oversized heads with huge eyes, heavily made-up faces and pouty lips; skinny bodies, disproportionately long legs, and (inexplicably) gigantic feet. Little girls typically love them, and many parents hate them because they’re hypersexualised. They’re supposed to be teens “with a passion for fashion”, but they’re generally dressed like Vegas whores. I suppose that if I had a daughter, and she wanted a Bratz doll, I’d probably buy her one…and then see whether she thought that was the “female ideal” or whether she just wanted it because her friends had them. I wouldn’t want to raise a kid who idolised Paris or Lindsay because empty-headed sluts with more money than class aren’t the people I’d want for a child’s role model, but OTOH, kids often want stuff just because other kids have it and “fitting in” is important to most kids. Anyway, the court ruling was over a copyright claim by Mattel against whatever company makes Bratz, not because the dolls are offensive, and none of that has anything to do with the amusing headline.

Using less instead of fewer for something that could be counted (fewer Bratz dolls because you count Bratz one-two-three… and less rain because when you measure rain, you’re counting the mm, not the rain itself, which cannot be counted) kind of made me cringe, but “fish net stalkings” made me snort aloud in a most unladylike manner. Illiterate dude, I don’t know who you are, but that is the first time in my life that I have ever encountered someone who doesn’t know the word…stockings. You are probably American, or Americanised Canadian because anyone with a British background would not likely pronounce “stalking” the same as “stocking” and would know there’s a difference between “fish net stalkings” and “fishnet stockings”. You didn’t, and goddamn, the thought of some creepy guy sneaking up behind his middle school classmates with a trawl net made me laugh. Props for the semicolon, too. Thank you, Illiterate Dude. 😛

I listen to K-Rock 89.3 a lot now, but a few days ago, I was getting goddamned tired of the ACE Insulators adverts, so I switched to RixFM. I use their web player within Prism so I can see the little scrolling banner that shows what’s playing. The song was “Radio” by Danny, and I sort of dimly recalled that I liked something else of his. Not liked as in “this is a classic to which I will still be listening in ten years” (I won’t), but liked as in, “that’s cute and rather catchy.” Though I will cheerfully cough up cash for something I’ll listen to a lot, I’m somewhat less enthusiastic if it’s something I’ll listen to often for a few days and then probably not again for….probably never. Off I went to E******s (the first rule of u****t is that you do not talk about u****t) to look for the song. Couldn’t find it in the four brazillion results, but I wasn’t surprised because the title contains a very common word (“radio edit”, anyone?) and Danny is a fairly common name, so I filtered results for videos, thinking that if it was a new release, the music video would be in one of the multimedia groups. It was, and that was fine because all I needed was a video with high quality audio; this didn’t need to be archive quality, and mplayer can rip audio in seconds with “mplayer -dumpaudio myfile.avi -dumpfile myfile.mp3”. For that matter, so can ffmpeg, but I remember the command for mplayer, so I use that. I did watch the video to check audio quality, and Danny is a cute little 20-something blond-ish, which didn’t really surprise me since I sort of dimly recalled he’s from Sweden. I couldn’t remember his surname, and I was curious, so off I went to Google. Turns out that it’s…Saucedo. I thought to myself, “Saucedo? That’s rather a strange Swedish name…maybe he’s Sicilian or something?” Nope. He’s a half-breed, and his actual name is Daniel Gabriel Alessandro Saucedo….Grzechowski. The Saucedo bit isn’t Italian, it’s Bolivian, just like his mother. I think, though, that he strongly favours his Polish father. Cute little thing, too. I didn’t do the Jesus-glow to the photo; I “liberated” it that way. 🙂

I like half-breeds. They’re interesting. I am one, but I’m the kind like Danny–the kind you’d never tag as a half-breed unless you already know. If I look at him, knowing that one parent is Bolivian, and seeing the strong bone structure, I would not be surprised if his mother is not only Bolivian, but native Bolivian. Not knowing, I’d guessed him for maybe Sicilian. Looking at me, Canadian is no surprise, but you’d guess European background. You’d be half right, too, since my father is from England, but my mother is native Canadian. My curls, blue eyes and fair skin come from Dad, and if you didn’t know what a Mohawk looks like (the tribe, not the haircut, so I guess Kanienkehaka is more accurate), you’d probably not know my mother was anything but Caucasian. If you do know, though, you’ll recognise the sharp features because they are hers. Back home, I knew a young woman called Bonnie. I don’t know that I’d say we were “friends”, but we did hang out fairly often, and I did like her. Her mother was white and her father was black (if I remember correctly). Looking at her, you’d see an absolutely beautiful black woman. Not like “Angola purple-black”, but a black Canadian woman with black hair, fantastic dark brown eyes and gorgeous dark skin…coffee with milk instead of cream. If you didn’t know her hair wasn’t chemically straightened and her nose not surgically altered, you’d never know she was biracial. Bonnie, though, got the “good” of both races. Her unfortunate sister, Robin, got the worst of the “biracial” look; the kinky red hair, broad nose and sallow, heavily freckled skin. Interesting how genes can combine to sometimes produce a “product” that looks like one half of the union, or an attractive mix of both, or an unattractive mix.

Interesting photo…apparently, this little girl was the daughter of a European minister, but was kidnapped during a raid in the early 18th century and adopted by a Mohawk family. I wonder whether she grew up and married a Mohawk, and if she did, what did her kids look like?

This just wrong. There aren’t enough words to express how wrong. First of all, it’s wrong that child beauty pageants exist. Even more wrong that there are mothers willing to enter their kids in child beauty pageants. Even wrong-er (it’s a word…now) that “pageant photo retouching” businesses exist in the first place. So wrong that the very fabric of time and space was rent asunder is that a pageant photo retouching company would take a kinda cute little girl and turn her into something that looks just plain scary. Didn’t I see this girl in Bride of Chucky?

There is nothing wrong with using Photoshop to clean up an image a bit. Correct uneven skin tone or reduce redness, fade dark circles under the eyes, airbrush out blemishes and maybe a few stray hairs…nothing wrong with that at all, especially if the photo will be printed and framed. Turning the kid into a prostitot wearing more makeup than most 20-year-old girls and using PS (ineptly) to remove every scrap of humanity from her features, though, is just fucking wrong. This is worse than those “glamour” photos that middle-aged women have done in an effort to keep their husbands from chasing those overly-made-up 20-year-olds. It’s creepy, and of no use whatsoever as a portfolio shot because it doesn’t look anything like the kid. If (FSM forbid) I were running a child beauty pageant, I’d want to see the kids that were entering, and a poorly photoshopped shot that looks like a bad cartoon of a child would not help me in the least. I wonder whether mothers anywhere but the US (probably Canada, too, since it’s so Americanised now) do this to their kids, or whether it’s exclusively (or nearly so) a North American phenomenon? Are there any “Little Miss Copenhagen” or “Little Miss Crete” competitions? Do 5-year-olds get manicured and spray-tanned in Vienna? Somehow, I doubt it.

Whaddya mean everyone doesn’t make sugar cookies with coloured sprinkles at midnight on a weeknight? When you go out to the kitchen and there’s nothing interesting, then go back into the living room to find out when Futurama comes on, and there’s a muted commercial showing a plate of sugar cookies for Santa, what else are you supposed to do? Bakery cookies are “meh”, and anyway, they’re cold; I wanted warm sugar cookies, fresh out of the oven.

I wonder whether that’s why I can’t really get into the whole Christmas thing here the way I did at home? Cooking may not be my favourite task, but I’ve never killed anyone with my cooking, and I do love to bake! I used to bake at least a couple of times a week, and even more during the Christmas season because I’d deliver “holiday cheer” in the form of what I knew were favourites of family members and friends, and take stuff in to work, too. Date squares, soft molasses cookies or blueberry pie for Dad, chocolate macaroons or jam “thumbprint” shortbread cookies for V., apricot bars for PW, fudge brownies with walnuts for R., anything with fat and sugar that wasn’t chocolate for B., decorated sugar cookies in Christmas shapes for C., especially when he was there to help me decorate them…that was fun. Mickey still has the red bowl from the set of Pyrex I used to use. The small red one for eggs and liquids, the medium yellow one for combining dry ingredients, and the big blue one for creaming shortening or butter, and mixing the whole lot together. I got them in 1986, and I know that because they were a wedding present when J. and I got married. I have a set of Pyrex bowls here that are the same sizes, but they don’t get used, at least not by me. There’s a stove in the kitchen, of course, and enough counter space if I cleared away P’s stupid rice steamer and other junk that really doesn’t need to be there, but what would I do with the stuff when I was finished? P. doesn’t like sweets much, I never did eat more than a couple of anything, and there’s no one else here to whom I’m close enough that I’d turn up at the door unannounced, bearing a Tupperware container of warm baked goods. Christ, we even buy the pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and Christmas, although I’m perfectly capable of making pumpkin pie that tastes better than “mass produced” bakery pies. I used to make birthday cakes, and I have a couple of times here for P. because he likes cream cakes better than “birthday cake”, but over half of any cake always ends up being thrown out anyway, so…why bother? If it’s only going in the garbage, it might as well be a bakery cake as my own effort.

I think the reason I don’t make that “Oh god” groaning noise when someone says, “Christmas” is because to me, it isn’t the presents. Sure, I love presents (both giving them and receiving them), but for me, that isn’t the biggest part of Christmas. The biggest part is…telling Roger to come in for coffee and cookies after he’d finished plowing my driveway. Seat-belting a Tupperware box of brownies into the passenger’s side of my little Tercel and driving over to take them to Marina. Turning up unannounced to see Mar and Rod, and knowing where to find everything when Rod said, “Lisa-baby, make some tea, will you?” Filling my big silver tray with an assortment of sweet stuff and going over to Bob’s shop because I knew his whole work crew would be there and they’d like a little treat. Marina and I, wrapping present after present for Gram because she always bought so much stuff for the family. She’d always say in that singsong voice, “Ama…Cori….Liiii-sa…would you help Marina pack some presents?” and I always did. Gram…heh. You never knew what name she’d call you, but if you just waited a little while, she’d get the right one in the end. Dad would always get their tree early, usually from Kenny’s tree farm, and it would sit in the back porch, waiting for R. to have time to decorate it. She never did, and I knew she wouldn’t, so on Christmas Eve, I’d always go there to decorate it for them. I think R. left it intentionally, too, because even though she’d not had time to decorate the tree, she always had the decorations ready, and always had the cherry liqueur I liked to mix with Diet Coke (yeah, I know, but it actually tastes pretty good), and neither one of them liked it, so it’s not like she just had it around. Dad would put the tree in its stand, getting fir needles all over the place, then put some kind of music that I liked on the stereo and sit at the kitchen table, drinking tea and watching R. and I in the living room. R. would bring out the boxes of decorations, and I’d say, “Okay…now if only I had some rocket fuel, I could get to work!” She’d go in the kitchen and mix me a drink, and I’d get to untangling the lights, R. and I talking a mile a minute about…any old thing. Once I got half-drunk, I’d sing that turkey song for her, and she’d laugh her arse off at the funny voice. Dad, harnessing a reluctant Shadow and hitching him to the sleigh so R. and I could take him out across the Alton Allen field. Shadow’s lazy, as horses often are, but as an ex-harness racer, he knows that once he’s backed between the shafts, it’s time to work whether he wants to or not. He’s black, and his harness is black and red with silver decorations, so he looks beautiful hitched to a black sleigh with red velveteen upholstery, and he’s got a set of silver belly bells that sound just wonderful in a quiet field surrounded by snowy woods. A real “one horse open sleigh”…the one that Shadow pulls is a cutter, built in the 1930s, and has been lovingly restored to near-mint condition.

Christmas shopping at the last minute with V. because he’d left it that long…rushing around, trying to find things that he thought PW would like. He never knew her clothes sizes, but I did. I remember the time he bought her that Tweety push-up bra. He asked me what size and I said, “Well, how the hell would I know how big her boobs are? She’s your girlfriend!” Then I said, “Oh, wait–I know!”, picked up one I thought might be right, and stuck both fists inside the bra to fill out the cups, then held them out. V. put his hands over the bra cups, and I said, “Okay, does that feel about the right size?” He said it did, then I looked over at the clerk, who was staring at us as if we’d lost our minds. I nudged V. and we both laughed our arses off, but by god, that bra fit PW perfectly! Christ…the tennis bracelet. That god…damned…tennis bracelet. We drove around in that little MR2 he used to have, going to every jewellery store in a 100km radius, looking for the kind she wanted. Found one, too, but not until just before the stores closed on the 24th. Then, I had to go to their place and wrap everything for him because V., paper and tape is not a pretty combination.

That’s what I miss; it isn’t the presents, or the decorations themselves, or the holiday music, because none of those things is what I truly love about Christmas. I think P. doesn’t understand that, and doesn’t like Christmas because to him, it is all about the presents. I don’t think he even knows there can be anything else because although I’d readily “adopt” his family as a substitute, I can’t; his is as distant as mine is close, and he doesn’t have any real friends, only people with whom he occasionally hangs out. It’s not that he’s unlikeable–he gets along well with most people–but that’s the way he chooses to have it. Neither one of us is much into the “holiday party” thing. I work here, and he only grudgingly participates in the thing they do at work. For someone like that, it can be only about the presents, but if it is, then it’s all over in an hour or so on the morning of the 25th, and when it’s done, all you have is a pile of…stuff (and an empty chequeing account). Who cares about stuff? I sure don’t. I used to try to add some “holiday cheer”, but it’s hard to do that when you’re the only one with actual cheer; as the years pass, you just get drained of it because you don’t get any back, and eventually, there’s nothing left. That’s why I don’t decorate anymore, and indeed, have to be pushed into putting up even a small tree. A far cry from the ceiling-height balsam fir I always had in my living room, even when I lived alone. I mean, what’s the point? We drink and put up the tree, but…we drink every weekend. It’s fun, but if Christmas is just the presents, then why bother with the tree at all? Just stick them on the table, and there won’t be anything to take down or needles to vacuum on New Year’s Day. Hell, last year we even had an artificial tree, and there was a time when I wouldn’t have allowed one of those in the house, let alone decorate one. We’re not putting that up again; it’s in the basement somewhere, and that’s where it stays unless he wants to put it up alone. The Oddfellows are already selling trees, and they even have balsam firs from Naugler’s tree farm in Lunenburg County, NS. Surprised the hell out of me that they’d have NS trees instead of ON or QC, but they get them from Naugler’s and truck ’em all the way down here. They’re expensive and always the first to go, and nothing smells as good as a balsam fir, but I’d settle for a Scotch pine from northern IL. No green plastic this year, though. In fact, I think I’ll light a fire under P. tonight and tell him that if we’re having a tree, we’re getting it this weekend, and it’s not going to be 1m tall, either–that fucker’s going at least near the ceiling, if not right up to it. Maybe I lost the things I love most about Christmas when I came here, and maybe he would normally procrastinate until all the live trees are gone, but I can still have my balsam fir…if we hurry and get there before they’re sold out. I’ll “hurry” him. I don’t have tanks in the corner this year, just a mantis house, but that’s very easy to move. Yes…I will put up a nice tree this year, and if he wants to complain about not being able to afford a lot of presents because he thinks that’s all there is, I just won’t listen. I won’t let him suck dry the last bit of real Christmas cheer that I have!

I don’t know who you are, and I don’t need to know because I already love you. You have saved me two reasons for booting to XP to use PS, and you did it without my having to learn one goddamned thing. If I weren’t already married, I’d propose to you! 🙂

I love my little S3 IS; so much, in fact, that the last time I looked into buying a new camera, I decided that it wasn’t worth the money, at least not until I can afford to shell out around $1500 for a decent DSLR and the necessary lenses. The camera I have now is adequate for my current purposes, and I already know it so well that I can operate it (and have operated it) one-handed while standing on a steep, loose dirt and rock creek bank, clinging to a tree with one hand lest I fall, eyes trained on a damselfly perched on a branch, muttering, “Don’t you move, you little bastard.” I don’t lose sight of a butterfly because I stopped to change ISO settings or exposure settings because I don’t have to look–my thumb knows where the buttons are and how many times I need to press each one for the desired result. I already have an adapter that fits the S3 IS, a super macro lens that I love, a tele lens that I like (cost 3x as much as the lens I love, of course), and macro/polarising/UV filters that I actually use. I suppose I could get an S5 IS and they’d all fit, but the S5 isn’t enough of an improvement to warrant the extra cash for it. It has a couple more mpx, but I don’t print anything anyway, so I don’t care, and the sensor is no larger, so 800 ISO is as (largely) unusable as that of the S3 (S5 has 1600, too, but it’s terrible). Anyway, I’m not getting another camera until at least next spring; maybe not even then.

All that said, my Canon does have one problem that is common to all of the Canon super-zooms…chromatic aberration. Other super-zoom models have it, too (Kodak is awful for it), though some (like Panasonic) attempt to correct it with in-camera processing, with varying degrees of success. Not unique to Canon, but their super-zooms definitely do it. Since the vast majority of my photography (“photography”…like how I sound all professional?) is macro, I don’t even notice it, but in spring, when I can actually manage to shoot birds without the little fuckers flying off or hiding behind leaves, I really notice it. I love mallard ducks and Canada geese (geese from a distance–they’re bad-tempered creatures), but I know that when I shoot them, especially on the water with a tele lens, I will have to deal with fringing. I can fix, to a reasonable degree, even the worst chromatic aberration; supposing the edges between black (or a very dark colour) and white (or a very light colour) look like they’re lit up with pink neon, I can fix it in PS. Not hard to do, but can be rather time consuming, if, for instance, the shot happens to be a whole gaggle of Canada geese swimming in a pond. I can fix it…but only in PS. Haven’t a clue how to do it in GIMP, and hadn’t got round to learning. Now, I don’t have to learn because Darla rules. Darla made a GIMP script for the specific purpose of removing chromatic aberration. The script is so good that even if I don’t make any adjustments and just click “Ok” (or whatever it says–I forget) to the defaults, it fixes even severe CA, and all I have to do is sit there and watch it do its stuff. Yaaaaayyy! 😀

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard (I’ll assume they were married) on the small pond last April. Some nasty, nasty CA going on at the edges of his fevvers. Not irreparable, but time-consuming to do it, at least for me (even in PS).

Same photo, run through the lovely and talented Darla’s “Purple Fringe” GIMP script, using the defaults. All I did was start the script and click “Ok” or whatever it was.

Not perfect, of course, because there will always be blurring where once there was CA, but a damned sight better than screaming-jeezus pink neon trim on the poor duck’s butt, and with only the effort of two clicks from me, I’ll take it!

She’s even fixed one of my own mistakes. It’s no fault of the camera, it’s the fault of the dumbass who never remembers to put a goddamned polarising filter on when shooting “landscapes” where the sky is involved. I do it just about every time, primarily because landscapes aren’t my thing and if I’m not chasing bugs, it probably means I’m shooting some DG tournament, which is only marginally more fun than being poked repeatedly in the arse with a sharp stick. I do it, though, because other than D. I’m essentially the only one who knows how to operate anything more complicated than a camera phone, and D. is always playing, so he can’t be “official photographer”. I am, if somewhat grudgingly, and I always end up with washed-out skies. Anyway, Darla even fixed Goddamn I Forgot The Polariser Again And The Sky is Washed-Out because she created a script that adds…blue sky and clouds! There’s another for just plain blue sky, but I think I like the clouds better. Again, something I could do in PS, but this I can do without booting to XP, without waiting for PS to load, and without any actual effort on my part. Yaaayyy again!

Dumbass forgot the polariser again, sky that was actually light summer-blue that day is washed out to white:

Same photo after running Darla’s script with defaults. I could have changed options, but wanted to see what it did with no effort on my part. Still not a great photo, but it’s a script, not Annie Leibovitz, and I think the results of the default are acceptable. If I wanted more blue, or more clouds, or fewer clouds, all I’d have to do would be to make a few adjustments to the values. That’s not too much effort, even for me.

Just for the hell of it, I tested the blue sky-only script, again using defaults. Looks good to me!

No, I don’t remember who that guy is, but his form looks pretty good, and he’s not foot-faulting.

Darla, wherever (and whomever) you are, thank you–you rock! When I lose your page in my four-fucking-billion bookmarks, I can find you here. 🙂

Unless I’ve completely fucked up auto-mounting (I did fuck up permissions and accidentally deleted a mountpoint somehow, but fixed those), then I have successfully formatted /dev/hdb1 from NTFS, which it was back when I still used XP without being forced and needed access to my photos, to ext3, which should be faster access. Write speed is about double that of NTFS, and hopefully that will apply to read speed, too. That means the current month is on one ext3 partition of an internal drive, 2007 and “completed” months of 2008 (frequently accessed) are on another ext3 partition of an internal drive, and everything before that (plus backups of those two years, seldom accessed) is on one partition of an external USB drive, also ext3. That effectively eliminates the need for ntfs-3g (except for when I manually mount my XP partition), which, while very handy, was not necessary for a photo storage drive, and hopefully was the cause for Picasa 3 OM-NOM-NOMMING my fucking CPU like there was no tomorrow. I understand it runs on its own customised build of Wine, so there’s a slight performance hit there, but unless it’s importing new files or generating thumbnails, then it doesn’t need to be a fucking hog. I tried an import with IntiPunktu, which is cute (and python), and after importing the stuff from the NTFS partition, it ate CPU cycles, so I think that might just be what’s going on with Picasa, too. I hate F-Spot with a passion, Gthumb is nice, but only as a browser, not a photo collection manager, and that GQview is just plain goddamned ugly, so I’m down to Picasa (with convenient upload to my Web Albums), or IntiPunktu, presuming that the NTFS was causing the CPU hit (and that it isn’t actually attempting to create folders where I didn’t fucking tell it to create folders).

Now, I just sit back and wait for the nearly 10000 files from 2007 to finish copying. Could be worse…if I was copying all the photos I have (just mine, none that anyone has sent), I’d be waiting for nearly 45000 files. Holy fuck, Batman, I take a lot of photos. In bug season, I average 300-600 in a weekend (that does include any that are later deleted for being substandard), and a maximum of 30 actually make it to Flickr. What do I do with the rest? They just sort of hang out on my HDDs and on a bunch of backup DVDs and…do nothing. Then again, one never knows when one might need that photo of a butterfly from the summer of 2006 that wasn’t the best of the lot, so it didn’t get on Flickr. 😀

Come on, files…copy! Can’t complain, though; at least the file copy dialog gives an accurate time estimate, and does a “countdown” of the number still waiting to be copied, which is more than can be said for Windows. That always pissed me off; Win’s time estimate is practically never anything close to accurate, and if you so much as open a web browser, it’ll go from an estimate of 2 minutes to 7 or 8 minutes. Ubuntu doesn’t even faze the CPU or RAM, and it happily copies whilst I go about my computing business. I ♥ Linux.

Hm…I wonder whether Picasa will have to re-import those photos, or whether it’ll just look in the same spot and know it’s already “seen” them? I didn’t change the name of the mountpoint–it’s still called /NTFS–and the directory structure is the same, so the only difference is the file system. Well, in 5 minutes, I guess we’ll see! 🙂

Well, it’s certainly better (after the import), though it’s still using more CPU than I think it should; I don’t know why it needs 10% to just sit there and do nothing after it’s finished generating thumbs. Nonetheless, 10-15% is a definite improvement over 80+, and I’ll take it because it’s really the only viable option. It’s the only photo manager that I like, or at least the only one that does what I want. I did get GQview to look more the way I want, but it still can’t “ignore” non-photo directories, or scroll through thumbnails of folders like Picasa; I have to switch folders to see the next batch of thumbs. That doesn’t help me when I don’t remember what month I took the photo, and certainly don’t know what it’s called. In Picasa, I can just breeze through the thumbs until something catches my eye. Oh well, I guess I can live with it; it’s not like I spend hours going through photos anyway. I apparently fixed fstab correctly; I even rebooted, just to make sure it’d auto-mount the partitions I wanted (and not the ones I don’t) at the mount points I’d specified.

Oh my fuckin’ nerves, that man is gonna drive me entirely batshit! Yes, I was logged into Flickr last night; I hadn’t been there since Christ was a cowboy, and it’s rude to ignore questions that people have asked, plus I like to thank people for their comments, and go visit their streams. Yes, I even visited his, since he does have some nice shots. Yes, I was logged into MSN, and although I was “Away”, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not at my desk; it just means I may or may not answer straight away and people mustn’t be offended if I don’t. If I’m so “away” that I’m not home, I usually stick a little note in my personal message. Yes, I have a plugin that displays whatever is currently playing in Rhythmbox. Yes, you may poke fun at my choice, since I usually just set R-box to randomly play whatever is in an entire directory so I don’t have to bother switching songs, and I have a lot of stuff I only “sorta like”, so the fact that it’s playing doesn’t mean I’m a fan or that I love it, only that I happen to have a copy of it and don’t dislike it enough to click the Next button. Yes, I have a webcam, and yes, it appears as “shared” on aMSN. No, that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to ask me whether you can view it, and no, it doesn’t matter how much I’ve had to drink–the answer is the same. The answer is…no.

Look, dumbass, when you asked why there are no photos of me in my stream and I told you it’s because it’s none of anyone’s business what I look like unless I say it is, you whined. Finally, I said a few photos of me do exist, but are available only to my friends…and you whined because you weren’t on the list. So you’d STFU, I put you on the goddamned list; it’s not like there are two hundred nudes of me on there (actually zero), so…meh. The fact that you have seen still photos of me does not mean you need to see the webcam feed. I’m sitting here at my fucking desk, which is not interesting in the least, and none of the conversations we have or ever will have are involved enough or important enough to require more than plain text and an emoticon or two, so you do not need to see facial expression or body language. If you misunderstand something I say, I don’t really care. I don’t mind being on-camera in the least–I do it nearly every day at some point in time–and I don’t mind being asked to send the feed, but dude, we are not friends, and I know you want to see so you can make some lame-ass flattering comment and we’ll become pals because I’ll just think you’re soooo sweet. Don’t hold your breath. I don’t know much about you beyond your name and the state in which you live, and frankly, that’s enough. I saw a photo of you once, I think, and yet don’t recall what you look like. I’m not interested enough to go look and remind myself. If you want to say “hey” once in a while and make some polite chit-chat, that’s fine with me, but if you don’t stop harassing me about that goddamned fucking webcam, I am going to block you, even if you’re likely to know I’ve blocked you because I’ll never appear online anymore, and even if you’re likely to be offended. For Christ’s sake, man…leave me alone. There are people I really like, people I like, people about whom I’m largely indifferent, people I tolerate, and people I try to avoid. You’re in the third group, swift heading for the last. People in the first two groups get webcam access if they want it, but they’re the only ones. You…are…not…on…the…list. Take the hint, dumbass–you’re beginning to creep me out. Christ, if you nag someone like me this much, I don’t ever want to see your wife because she must be a truly hideous beast.

I wouldn’t say I was exactly a “fan” of the show, but I did occasionally watch Sliders back in the mid-90s. The premise of travelling across parallel worlds interested me, the acting wasn’t too bad, and I think the show actually might have been the first time I ever heard a reference to string theory. I’m sure the science would have made a real physicist cry, but for a TV show that was often on when I had nothing else to do, it was an okay way to waste time. Plus, I liked the way the intro sort of whispered, “Ssssliders.”

I also really liked Arrested Development. Like practically every other kid in the 80s, I’d watched Family Ties with Justine Bateman in the role of Mallory Keaton. It’s not difficult to tell that Justine and Jason Bateman are siblings because they look alike, but what I did not know until yesterday, when I was roaming about teh intarwebs, reading about child stars, was that…the dude who played Quinn Mallory in Sliders did, in fact, not later appear as Michael Bluth in Arrested Development. I watched (and indeed, own) all three seasons of AD, and when I first saw it, I distinctly recall thinking, “Oh, that’s the guy from Sliders…Justine Bateman’s brother, Jason.” No, it isn’t. Oops.

Jerry O’Connell, Quinn Mallory in Sliders:

Jason Bateman, Michael Bluth in Arrested Development:

Looking at both images, I do see a resemblance, but it’s obvious that I don’t pay too much attention to actors, because it doesn’t take much observation skill to see that those two are not the same guy, and certainly not with ten years’ age difference. 😛

Heh…I knew the intro would be on YT.

P.S. I’m not going out there today. I’d rather stay here and upgrade something…or stare at my desktop…or poke sharp objects into my face…anything. I didn’t go on Thursday, but I thought it would do me some good to get outside yesterday (surrounding myself with the shapes, colours and sounds of nature has a calming effect), plus it was sunny and not cold, so I went. I thought most of the guys would still be hangin’ with relatives visiting for the holidays, but I was only half right. Practically all of them had relatives over, but they were interested in getting the hell away from them, so there were ten playing yesterday. Since there are no bugs now (okay, winter crane flies, a few “fall flies”, the odd lacewing and some spiders), I’ve been looking for insects in their winter forms, and collecting some of them, mostly praying mantis oothecae, plus I found some katydid eggs. It’s interesting and fun, but the guys didn’t split into two groups yesterday (Matt’s idea, though if I had to go home to his wife, I wouldn’t be in a hurry, either), so a game that should have taken a couple of hours took for-fucking-ever. As if we didn’t already have enough, halfway through the game some obnoxious little shit turned up and played along with the guys. Just a high school student, but apparently he knows Derek somehow, and OH MY GOD he was annoying. By the time he’d been there for two holes, I was ready to break off a large, heavy branch and bash him over the fucking head so he’d SHUT THE FUCK UP. I don’t know his name (P told me, I forget, and AFAIC, it’s “loud, stupid little shithead”), but I know that if that little bastard is ever again anywhere within a 3km radius of that park, I’m leaving…because it would unfortunately be illegal to knock the little shit unconscious and chuck him over the creek bank. 😀