is a blog by Brendan
Afer at least a dozen different samples, the Gender Genie firmly and consistently identifies me as a girl.
Yup.
Update 1947 hrs:
Well, don’t feel anxiety about this. I went to the site and typed in a Hamlet soliloquy and guess what — Shakespeare was a girl!
Deb
Weirdly, googling for sites related to the Tuesday comic gets this site as the top result (under Tuesday itself), and my favorite band as the next one. Maybe it just daisy-chains through links? But that can’t be right. Or maybe somebody posted about it on their message boards.
Either way, though, seeing those two sites bracketing mine is really kind of cool. Google’s generally pretty nice to me, which I like to think of as a measure of karma. I do kind of wish, though, that I weren’t the “feeling lucky” result for people trying to find lyrics to some Mudvayne song.
How many two-year-olds have their own weblogs? (Not enough!) If you don’t already read The Daily Zoe, you should, as it will consistently and significantly improve your outlook on life. It’s hard to feel bad about your day when you see the sheer amounts of attention and love surrounding that kid. Bonus: life-threatening cuteness!
Oh, and remind me to post something else about babies when I get home.
While I was looking up IMDB stuff for Ms. D____ just now, I noticed that one of her newest roles is the lead in a film adaptation of Shopgirl. I picked that book up for a dollar at the same time as Microserfs and read it just afterward, so that caught my attention.
I can’t assume that anybody out there has actually read Shopgirl, because I don’t recall it doing spectacular business and I doubt it would have seen print if not for its author’s celebrity. Steve Martin plots well and his jokes are rare but good, but a) nobody actually prints standalone novellas and b) it’s pretty lame prose. He’s a comedy writer, not a novelist, so he apparently never learned things like “show, don’t tell.”
That said, the book will probably translate well to a movie, I applaud the casting of Jimmy Fallon as Jeremy, and it’s kind of cool that Martin’s writing the screenplay himself. But even without knowing the plot, doesn’t anybody else find it a little weird that he’s cast himself as a romantic lead opposite Claire Danes?
About half the books I requested from the library arrived yesterday (and the magic Library Computer telephoned to tell me so!), so after I got off work I biked on down to get them. About a block away, I got a flat tire.
I really should have had them replace the tires when I got it tuned, but I thought I’d save a little money and just get new tubes. Smart me. I’ll take it in this afternoon and get two new ones–the back tire is the one that popped, but I’m sure the front isn’t far behind.
Anyway, I walked the rest of the way to the library and picked up another packful of pages (Lovecraft and Lem, both of whom I’m trying for the first time, and more) and started the trek back. A few blocks on, I noticed that this store called Twice Told Books was actually open–it had always been closed when I passed before. So I decided to check it out, locked my bike to a parking meter, walked in and was eaten.
The books were so dense there. The shelves weren’t nearly enough to hold them all, so they were stacked on top, piled at the bottom, stacked on top of the piles at the bottom, everything. It smelled like dry paper and glue, exactly like the stacks at the old EKU library, before they tore it up and made it big and glassy. I spent a lot of evenings there in middle school, while Mom was earning her Rank I (again), and read a lot of books. The shelves and the overstocking and the smell were all the same, and it was a pretty memory-intensive experience.
They apparently live to buy old sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, too, and I picked up a lot of them–Le Guin, de Camp, all books about which I’ve thought “I should own that” but never got around to buying. I even got a book I’d been thinking about lately but never thought I’d find again, because I had no memory of the author or title, only the cover illustration. It’s called The Sword and The Satchel, as it turns out, which I learned when I found its cover staring up at me from one of the aforementioned piles.
They had to kick me out when they closed. I was enthralled, and for the first time I honestly wish I wasn’t leaving Bardstown Road. The music stores and comic shop and ice cream I could do without, but I’m going to sneak back to that bookstore whenever I can.
Think they’d give me a job?
Just GUESS who’s on the first page of Google image search results for “MULLET PHOTO BEST.”
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I love my microfiber pants. They make me feel like karate.
In a convincing segue, I googled for kendo+Louisville this morning and found out that my new school has an aikido club, which is really interesting. I was always a little jealous of how good Ian got at aikido while he was in Richmond, and I would have liked to go to classes with my uncle John if I’d had the money and time in Danville. For ten bucks a month in grad school, though, I might just be able to do it. Anybody else want to go along?
I’m pretty sure I’m not violating my NDA by writing this: I’m famous! Whoo! Six of the seven changes in our next point release, which comes out Thursday, were bugs that I FIXED!
This is actually not a big deal, since all the issues I’ve done are what Justin calls “five-minute fixes” (except for me they take about a day). Still, code that I’ve written is now part of a commercial software product. I feel like I should have a badge, or at least a button.
Meanwhile, of course, the eleven other issues I’ve worked on didn’t pass muster with Quality Control and have all been assigned back to me. It’s almost like I’m a real programmer. I would demand to get paid more than eight bucks an hour for this, if I actually worked hard enough to earn it.
Yesterday I learned from Maria that if you fall asleep at a boring meeting, lecture, movie, ancetera, it means you haven’t been getting enough sleep, even if you think you have. If you really actually don’t have “sleep debt”–if you’ve been getting your statistical eight hours a night–you can’t and won’t fall asleep during the day.
Since that means I’ve been constantly in debt for a good six years now, that’s a little worrisome, but it’s also good to know. Hanging out with Maria is a process of continually finding out new things about biology and discovering that half the things I thought I knew were wrong. I guess that should be embarrassing, but really it’s pretty cool. My brain is getting bigger! (Inner Maria: No it’s not!)