the everyday adventures of sabrina

you, you are the web designer. you are here in an advisory capacity, not a directorial one. you do not get to say how big my window has to be and no larger, nor what size the typeface must be. you get to specify, but i have the veto.

i love mashups. when they aren’t outright good music, they generally amuse me.

dean gray presents american edit: american idiot vs. everyone. including john f. kennedy. and daleks. you should download it now.

i miss baseball. there needs to be a winter baseball league. football can blow me.

today is the anniversary of my wrist surgery. actually, to the date, tomorrow is the anniversary — but i felt that having surgery the day before thanksgiving was more significant than having it on 24 november, so i shall celebrate wristmas every year at thanksgiving. really, it’s one of those “the five days of wristmas” things, since i broke it effectively early sunday morning, then suffered monday and tuesday, then had surgery wednesday, then SUFFERED thursday. so today’s wristmas eve. maybe tomorrow i’ll celebrate by taking some of my leftover vicodin.

i have said a lot of things about the scar, not least pejorative of which was nicknaming it the “Creepy Frankenstein Scar,” but actually? i kinda like it. it’s distinctive, and i’m not ashamed of having this strange and very obvious scar on my wrist. i worked very hard at getting beyond the trouble its source caused me. so i kind of like my little Creepy Frankenstein Scar. love me, love my scar!

nevertheless, it is interesting to me to look back over the past year. it’s at least in part because, when i first broke my wrist and the people in the ER in atlanta told me that i was going to require orthopaedic surgery to repair the rather impressive damage i’d done (and to think i didn’t realize i had actually done anything really bad to myself for at least twenty or thirty minutes! hooray for endorphins!), they estimated i was looking at “at least” a year until i was really going to be normally functional again. of course, i chose to travel back to chicago and have the surgery taken care of here — and, in retrospect, i’m immensely grateful for that decision because i cannot imagine having gone through the days immediately after surgery without the support of my friends or in some cold hotel room in a strange city — and i believe that, based on my recovery from the injury, i received outstanding medical care and that’s part of the reason i am blessed, for lack of a more secular word, with damn near normal functioning today. my undying thanks are due to the people who helped take care of me — sean and stephanie (who helped me and all my ‘i’ve just got done with a week of travel’ luggage out of the cab from o’hare, made me dinner and made sure i had everything i needed, walked with me to fetch prescriptions, and generally went far beyond the call of duty), dan who ferried my stoned ass home from the hospital that day after my surgery, michael for bringing by his much-needed moral support, and everyone who dropped by to visit me when i was trapped in my 600-square foot home for ages on end, tactfully saying nothing about my completely stoned self, all of them. of course the medical staff who put Humpty Wristy back together again, especially Dr. Mass who was kind and answered nearly all my questions; the florist who delivered and, when she realized i couldn’t actually handle the door and the bouquet, carried it inside; the peapod delivery guy who helped me get everything into my kitchen and didn’t even look impatient when it took me a minute to sign the receipt; the walgreen’s pharmacist who filled my painkillers without making me wait 30 minutes because i was nearly in tears when i showed up to fill the prescription.

but! let’s not get too thoughtful and pensive. let’s look back at some of my greatest hits from that time.

• 22 November 2004, “this sucks”
• 25 November 2004, “oh my fucking shit”
• 25 November 2004, “ow2″
• 26 November 2004, “the modern technology”
• 27 November 2004, “free at last”
• 27 November 2004, “good humor”
• 15 December 2004, “frankenniqui”
• 14 January 2005, “started physical therapy today”

things are going relatively well, wrist-wise, these days. i still have chronic minor pain, and i guess at this point i’m resigned to having it pretty much forever. but i’ve got a full range of motion back, and i can do things like pushups or downward dog without a whole lot of grief (though i do usually pay a price for them later, it’s not significant enough to make me stop).

so, i suppose really, it’s worked out pretty well for me. i was terribly worried at the outset that i was looking at a very real need to change lines of work — what good is a system administrator who can’t type? — and that seems to have been a groundless fear. my life is pretty normal, really. and that’s something to be thankful for.

of course i still don’t know if i’m going to set off the airport metal detectors.

if you’re reading this via RSS, you probably don’t care.

if, otoh, you actually visit my humble web site as god and man intended, you — unless you are blind and reading the site via a spoken-text browser (and if you are, i did try hard to make it accessible, at least from the point of view of someone who hasn’t ever used a speaking browser. at least i use ALT attributes!) — have just noticed it went from light colors to dark colors. i felt it was time for a change, and i was really bored with the old look. if, however, you prefer it, i have helpfully provided a link to it at the top of the new page header. (it’ll go away at some point in the future when i get tired of it. quake in your boots, muahaha!)

it’s not really done, i’m not entirely happy with it… but i was happier with it than i was with the old one, and i was deprived of a friday afternoon on which to break shit at work, so i am breaking shit on my personal website on the wednesday night before a holiday instead. i am sure that if you look hard you will find things that are obviously broken. actually, i am sure that if you glance passingly you will find things that are obviously broken. c’est ma vie.

no one will care, really, but apart from the colors, i got rid of some of the crap on the sidebar, added entirely new crap to the sidebar, changed the top header, and switched from a serif to a sans-serif font. (palatino to helvetica, if you must know.)

if you are color-blind, i’d welcome your input. i tried to make colors high-contrast but i feel fairly certain that i have as yet failed in that pursuit in at least a couple of places. so it’s probably completely illegible to 50% of the population, or something. nonetheless, i think it looks pretty cool and that’s what really matters, as this blog is about indulging my own narcissism. (am i engaging in egregious hyperbole, or being completely straightforward, with that remark? it’s up to you to figure that out for yourself, dear readers!)

overall: 3/4 thumbs up.

best part: the wyrd sisters.

I had to stay home from work sick with Return of the Son of Asian Death Flu from Hell, but at least my cats are being adorable. So that’s okay.

apparently someone’s lighting shit on fire on campus today, and so this means that i get to stick around here with my cohorts and send email to everyone on campus to call campus police if they witness suspicious activity. it takes a while to send this many email messages.

and that means i have to miss the show i’m supposed to be at in an hour.

GODDAMMIT.

i am having shit luck with live music this year. it’s not fair.

also? rumor has it that the arsonist lit a fire in swift hall. home of the school of the divinity, and the best coffeeshop on campus. only a sadistic bastard would do that. THINK OF THE COFFEE!!!

\m/

class action suit proposed for the pain, suffering, and loss of the ability to enjoy live caused by certain designers’ shoes.

i wholeheartedly support that suit.

it was 48°F out this morning, which is not really cold, but i decided it was cold enough to justify wearing a hat. so i wore my new hat that i made a month or two ago, because i’ve been really excited to wear it. because, dude, tasselled hat. it’s awesome! i love my hat!

…

i’m really amused by this conversation i’m having. (not for anyone unprepared to think about cannibalism, or otherwise faint of heart. you have been forewarned!) i’m just sad that, because it’s in a livejournal rss feed “user”’s comments section, it’ll disappear shortly. boo! i demand long-term preservation of discussions which will result in me burning in hell for eternity!

juxtapose that against me walking out of the office after max refused to listen to me as i repeatedly asked him to stop telling me about the gerbil his kids starved to death through inattention.

…

i love the euro. i think it’s the stupidest name for anything ever. seriously! how creative are you — a single european currency, call it the “euro”! because prefixing anything with “euro” makes it cool! sheesh. if i was an eu member state, i’d demand my money back.

(pardon the pun. it had to be done.)

…

so i have this little konfabulator widget that sits on my desktop and tells me the hostname of people who’re connected to my iTunes. (it’ll tell me the name of their share, as well, if it’s got one, but apparently many don’t. although the ones that don’t show up with a name all seem to be Windows iTunes, so i don’t know what’s up with that.) i wish i had a widget that would tell me what people listen to, though, because that would be far more interesting than learning that “wireless-226-148.uchicago.edu” has been connected to me for several hours.

…

i seriously think my legs are going to fall off. i might have been, uh, overzealous with my workout yesterday. bodyweight exercises are effective! ow, ow, ow!

…

someone ventilitorily violated the women’s restroom on my floor with cinnamon air freshener. i loathe the scent of cinnamon. and it smells like someone ritually sacrificed an entire forest in there. my hair is completely frizzed out because i refuse to stay in there long enough to fix it after i wore a hat to work today. health before beauty, man. i hate hate hate hate hate cinnamon so much.

…

i am being a sleazy capitalist pig, and have set up a plugin that will allow me to easily generate amazon referrer links when i cite something that they sell. so far in the two years i’ve had an amazon associates account, i’ve made thirteen whole dollars, mostly from people buying copies of the soapmaker’s companion. so i figure now if i make the occasional link when i talk about things on my blog, in addition to the emaciated book reviews section on the soap site, i may make FOURTEEN dollars. soon i shall be rich beyond my most fabulous dreams!

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comments: have just switched from using the blosxom writeback plugin, to using comments hosted by haloscan.com. the primary motivation for this is comment spam. but also, i think that their cookies may work which would mean that saving your information from comment to comment would actually function, which would be a refreshing change of pace as well.

i’m contemplating throwing together a quickie perl script to go through my old writeback comments and then POST them to the haloscan site, to import them all, so i don’t either lose them or have to link to the .wb files indefinitely (because, screw that). though i’d have to expunge all the spam first before i did that … which would be, ugh, such a pita. maybe i’ll just do nothing.

i would really like to hack on my rss feed to include a comment link as well — primarily for  niquiblog, as it kinda bugs me that when people comment there, the comments only last as long as livejournal keep the fed post around, but it would also maybe be handy for folks reading via bloglines, et al., as well. but frankly, i have to admit this, i find the rss10 plugin confusing. seriously, it’s like 35 lines. most of which are only newlines. i don’t know where the work is being done, and i’m deeply suspicious and afraid to mess with it. of course today i found that the description was in the blosxom script itself (yes, naturally, when RSS is not a built-in, there are variables for RSS built-in, even documented as being for RSS. people, so strange sometimes!), so i should probably poke through that and see if the body-text generation for RSS is in there as well.

anyways, if haloscan proves to be effective at blocking comment spam, that’ll prolong the life of this-blog-as-blosxom, as that was pretty much my one major beef with it. (sure, the find plugin has been broken for ages, for some reason — searching will give you an apparently arbitrary list of postings which usually don’t even mention whatever it was you were searching for — but i don’t really care about that so much. honestly, i’d rather have a working calendar. well, okay, i’d really like a working search. that was one of the reasons i ditched livejournal for blosxom. still, it’s not a high priority.

…

whirl just emailed me with an offer of a ticket to go see Dropkick Murphys tomorrow at the Vic. sweet!

…

okay, caffeine’s worn off; by-ee!

went by sandmeyer’s after work to see about purchasing a copy of the atkins diet book, since i seem to have lost my copy.

good niqui passed up purchasing both The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy by William Greider, and American Sucker by David Denby, in favor of trying to get them at the library.

bad niqui did not pass up buying The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody: Great Figures of History Hilariously Humbled by Will Cuppy and illustrated by William Steig, Collapsible: The Genius of Space-Saving Design by Per Mollerup (i bought it for max, but i might browse through it a bit … it’s awfully neat looking and max isn’t back to work until Monday…), and grabbed The 9/11 Commission Report (Authorized Edition) at the checkout.

the method to my madness is pretty simple: if i think it’ll take me forever to get through it, e.g. The Metaphysical Club, i should just buy it.

also, i didn’t actually have a CPL library card until yesterday. well, evidently I technically did — they’d never cancelled it even though i lost it in, oh, ‘98 or ‘99 — but i didn’t have one.

you know what’s embarassing? having not been in a library in ages, and asking for the card catalogue — knowing full well that there isn’t one, that it’s all computerized, but not knowing what the name is of an electronic card catalogue (hint: it’s “catalogue.” dumbass.) … and knowing that you’re going to get the pitying look from the librarian when you ask after such an archaic, antique piece of stone-age technology. so. yeah. that was me yesterday. went into the Harold Washington Library to get the new library card and to check out the Atkins book. getting the card was fine. then came the card catalogue question.

the nice librarian offered to help explain the computer to me.

…

turns out all three of their copies of the atkins diet book were out (figured it out all on my own … nyah), so that’s why i went to buy one today.

but i need to go see about checking out those other books i saw at the store that i wanted to read.

just got back from my five-weeks-after-surgery followup appointment. my wrist is healing awesome — yes, like a hundred million hot dogs!

i got examined first by a resident, who seemed mildly surprised at first that i was out of my brace and okay with the world in general, not particularly in pain or anything. he explained a little bit more about the treatment i got — apparently, the plate and bolt that i have in my arm are brand-new stuff, like within the past couple of years, and Dr. Mass (my attending surgeon) treated me totally aggressively, which is why i never had a cast at all. apparently patients with this hardware recover really quickly, because the bones are held in place so effectively by the hardware. and if i had seen a different surgeon i probably still would have been stuck in a cast for four weeks, even if i did have the hardware installed.

am so, so glad i came back to chicago for my surgery rather than having it done in atlanta. go Dr. Mass! you so rock! sabrina likes not having been stuck in a cast! oh my god, i can’t even imagine what a complete pain in the ass that would have been all this time. i mean, seriously, with some obvious exceptions — i can’t support much weight with my right hand, i still don’t have my back and forth flexibility back 100%, only about halfway there, etc. — i’m basically back to normal for everyday stuff now. and the pain that i do have is basically in the “annoying ache” category, which tylenol can take care of. and i’m only six weeks out from the break, so this is pretty amazing really.

the funny part was getting to see my x-rays. the bolt that they installed (holding the scaphoid together, since it was kinda smashed up) is pretty much as advertised. the “plate,” otoh, is — as i just described it to someone at work — a barbie-sized lawn rake with movable tines. the handle of the “rake” is attached to my radius (i think), and then the “tines” are stuck in various places holding it all together. it bears, in fact, very little resemblance to a plate. or anything flat, really.

i suppose that “carpal lawn rake” doesn’t sell very well in the medical journals, though.

today i learned what la système D is. which suddenly makes clear the joke in the name of a french word-processing program i used to own.

i am very amused.

now is the time on “sprockets” when we sing the praises of cabernet sauvignon, books about dirty tricks brigades, and my favorite pink floyd album.

i’m not drunk if i can still operate vi. (emacs? please. practically wysiwyg!) of course, operating vi may be considered after all this time merely a reflex, and not a skill, and therefore not an accurate gauge of drunkeness—

—but i really feel that my ability to still spell ‘gauge’⁰ and type out — must count for something! i mean, ampersands are hard! plus, i still have to chmod 644 this sucker!

oh, also — it’s time for another $2 martini night run; i really feel the need for booze and delicious baked brie. strega nona, this wednesday, anyone? email me or text me if you’re in. just remember, if you’re not in, i’ll be alone at the bar with my blue-cheese olive dirty vodka martinis and that will be SAD, even if the bartender is a cutie-pie and gives me extra olives gratis!

who was born in a house full of pain
who was trained not to spit in the fan
who was told what to do by the man
who was broken by trained personnel
who was fitted with collar and chain
who was given a pat on the back
who was breaking away from the pack
who was only a stranger at home
who was ground down in the end
who was found dead on the phone
who was dragged down by the stone.

– 
0 – not “gage,” love; “gage” is for those who are too lazy to remember the “u”!