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fr_defenestratoTaking a break from Harold Bloom to read some Hannah Arendt for the first time. Never did get around to The Origins of Totalitarianism. This one's smaller.
A random update: finished up yesterday with a very annoying proposal for the State of Louisiana... annoying in that they required submission of up to seven complete, individual proposals for seven tasking areas (we bid on six), rather than allowing universal submission of the 75 percent of the material that was common to all. And they wanted 8 CD-ROM copies of each, plus paper. So it made for a busy couple days just getting the final formatting, file maintenance, and production done. This is also the first full-sized proposal effort I've done with absolutely nobody being a Proposal Coordinator (basically a specialized AA who handles logistcs, resources, scheduling, etc.), and I'm not used to doing things like ordering binders—but apparently I'm going to have to get used to it. Anyway, the good news is 8:30 p.m. is the latest I've stayed at work on a proposal here, compared with frequent all-nighters at Pleni Sunt Ani. My boss (whose efforts on this prop were pretty much limited to yesterday's CD burning) and I finished production ~7:30 p.m. and dropped the proposals off af FedEx... they were delivered to the State of Louisiana Division of Administration this morning. Today's all about file cleanup and fucking off.
Brand new celebrity crush (I am SO shallow) on Richard Coyle (I, according to imdb)... My boss lent me the first two seasons of the U.K. sitcom Coupling and I just fell in love with this guy's goofy character, which, I admit, may make the actor appear more adorable and endearing that his physical features would otherwise warrant. Turns out Mr. Coyle is in one of my favorite movies, Topsy-Turvy, but is just a chorister and not a conspicuous one at that. I hope to see him in other stuff, but I don't know if I can bring myself to watch The Libertine (whose breathtakingly unpleasant trailer accomplished the unthinkable feat of turning me off a Johnny Depp movie). Coyle apparently did a single season of a show in which he was the demon-hunter lead, but it looks unsuccessful and unavailable. He IS in the retooled Cracker series, which makes me VERY happy as it will be promptly released on U.K. and U.S. DVD. (Has anyone seen any Cracker? Our own Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) as a Manchester police psychologist with serious psych problems of his own? Great stuff. Netflix now.)
Heading to Chicago tomorrow for little or no reason. Well, I needed one more RT flight on Southwest to get a Rapid Rewards certificate for a free flight, and BWI to Midway tickets happened to be $39 each way. I'm staying at a hostel for the first time in my life, a several blocks (maybe a dozen?) from Boystown... the weather is supposed to be cold, and I actually have some work to do this weekend, so it may not entail much other than a trip to the Art Institute and a single evening on the town stuffing dollars in underwear in the Lucky Horseshoe and drinking beer with pseudocowpokes in Buck's. Now that Madrigals has relocated to Nawlins I'm not sure I'll make the trek up to the North Clark outpost of Boystown... maybe just for Man's Country...
Cried on the Metro this morning reading a Vonnegut obit. Real tears. Not copious, but there. Remembered a thousand moments during my mostly 1980s reading of Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless You, Mister Rosewater (still a beautiful, if obvious, morality tale), Slapstick, Bluebeard, Galápagos, and Mother Night (no, I never did read Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, or The Sirens of Titan). Saw him speak once, but I can't remember with whom... filthyhippie? Greg? both? and at Rutgers? late '80s? Details similarly fuzzy on Allen Ginsberg...
I decided last week to retrofit my new Vista-burdened Toshiba laptop with Windows XP. Now, we all know Microsoft is evil, but how clearly and painfully that is driven home when they issue forth a "new" OS that (a) sucks the life and energy out of even new, screamingly fast processors and 1G+ RAM; (b) arbitrarily changes the way dozens of typical maintenance-y things are done in XP with no concommitant improvement in the user-friendliness of the Help system; and (c) further erodes any reasonable user control over his/her own fucking computer environment by "thinking" too much for him/her. So I ordered a full installation copy of XP online Thursday; it arrived chez moi Saturday, and I immediately installed it. Of course it overwrote all the Toshiba-specific software including all the drivers for internal components like the Ethernet and sound cards. I had to grab all this crap off the Toshiba website using my backup Dell, which zooms along as efficiently as a couple of sedated nonagenarians running a three-legged race through the croquet match in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I loaded up the new Toshiba with all this crap, so my Ethernet works and my DSL is restored; and my sound card functions again... but there's all kinds of new trouble, chief among which is that Internet Explorer almost always crashes trying to load my home page. I need to go through the installed programs and system components again and get rid of anything I don't really need. MAN, am I tired of fighting with my primary home PC. It's going on a year (Mem. Day weekend) since the old Toshiba started hibernating spontaneously; it's more than six months since it finally got so bad as to warrant my first reparatory excursion to Worst Buy. Ugh.
All excited for Movie Marathon 43—just one week away! I sincerely hope the event itself is as much fun as preparing for it has been...!
A random update: finished up yesterday with a very annoying proposal for the State of Louisiana... annoying in that they required submission of up to seven complete, individual proposals for seven tasking areas (we bid on six), rather than allowing universal submission of the 75 percent of the material that was common to all. And they wanted 8 CD-ROM copies of each, plus paper. So it made for a busy couple days just getting the final formatting, file maintenance, and production done. This is also the first full-sized proposal effort I've done with absolutely nobody being a Proposal Coordinator (basically a specialized AA who handles logistcs, resources, scheduling, etc.), and I'm not used to doing things like ordering binders—but apparently I'm going to have to get used to it. Anyway, the good news is 8:30 p.m. is the latest I've stayed at work on a proposal here, compared with frequent all-nighters at Pleni Sunt Ani. My boss (whose efforts on this prop were pretty much limited to yesterday's CD burning) and I finished production ~7:30 p.m. and dropped the proposals off af FedEx... they were delivered to the State of Louisiana Division of Administration this morning. Today's all about file cleanup and fucking off.
Brand new celebrity crush (I am SO shallow) on Richard Coyle (I, according to imdb)... My boss lent me the first two seasons of the U.K. sitcom Coupling and I just fell in love with this guy's goofy character, which, I admit, may make the actor appear more adorable and endearing that his physical features would otherwise warrant. Turns out Mr. Coyle is in one of my favorite movies, Topsy-Turvy, but is just a chorister and not a conspicuous one at that. I hope to see him in other stuff, but I don't know if I can bring myself to watch The Libertine (whose breathtakingly unpleasant trailer accomplished the unthinkable feat of turning me off a Johnny Depp movie). Coyle apparently did a single season of a show in which he was the demon-hunter lead, but it looks unsuccessful and unavailable. He IS in the retooled Cracker series, which makes me VERY happy as it will be promptly released on U.K. and U.S. DVD. (Has anyone seen any Cracker? Our own Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) as a Manchester police psychologist with serious psych problems of his own? Great stuff. Netflix now.)
Heading to Chicago tomorrow for little or no reason. Well, I needed one more RT flight on Southwest to get a Rapid Rewards certificate for a free flight, and BWI to Midway tickets happened to be $39 each way. I'm staying at a hostel for the first time in my life, a several blocks (maybe a dozen?) from Boystown... the weather is supposed to be cold, and I actually have some work to do this weekend, so it may not entail much other than a trip to the Art Institute and a single evening on the town stuffing dollars in underwear in the Lucky Horseshoe and drinking beer with pseudocowpokes in Buck's. Now that Madrigals has relocated to Nawlins I'm not sure I'll make the trek up to the North Clark outpost of Boystown... maybe just for Man's Country...
Cried on the Metro this morning reading a Vonnegut obit. Real tears. Not copious, but there. Remembered a thousand moments during my mostly 1980s reading of Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless You, Mister Rosewater (still a beautiful, if obvious, morality tale), Slapstick, Bluebeard, Galápagos, and Mother Night (no, I never did read Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, or The Sirens of Titan). Saw him speak once, but I can't remember with whom... filthyhippie? Greg? both? and at Rutgers? late '80s? Details similarly fuzzy on Allen Ginsberg...
I decided last week to retrofit my new Vista-burdened Toshiba laptop with Windows XP. Now, we all know Microsoft is evil, but how clearly and painfully that is driven home when they issue forth a "new" OS that (a) sucks the life and energy out of even new, screamingly fast processors and 1G+ RAM; (b) arbitrarily changes the way dozens of typical maintenance-y things are done in XP with no concommitant improvement in the user-friendliness of the Help system; and (c) further erodes any reasonable user control over his/her own fucking computer environment by "thinking" too much for him/her. So I ordered a full installation copy of XP online Thursday; it arrived chez moi Saturday, and I immediately installed it. Of course it overwrote all the Toshiba-specific software including all the drivers for internal components like the Ethernet and sound cards. I had to grab all this crap off the Toshiba website using my backup Dell, which zooms along as efficiently as a couple of sedated nonagenarians running a three-legged race through the croquet match in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I loaded up the new Toshiba with all this crap, so my Ethernet works and my DSL is restored; and my sound card functions again... but there's all kinds of new trouble, chief among which is that Internet Explorer almost always crashes trying to load my home page. I need to go through the installed programs and system components again and get rid of anything I don't really need. MAN, am I tired of fighting with my primary home PC. It's going on a year (Mem. Day weekend) since the old Toshiba started hibernating spontaneously; it's more than six months since it finally got so bad as to warrant my first reparatory excursion to Worst Buy. Ugh.
All excited for Movie Marathon 43—just one week away! I sincerely hope the event itself is as much fun as preparing for it has been...!
