elettaria

I have just been spending a delightful two hours with finnygan, who is visiting Edinburgh for a cycling event. We had lunch at an Indian restaurant and then went to D's bookshop, where finnygan completely failed to resist the books. While we were there, we spotted the following book, proudly on display in the children's section.

VAMPIRATES!

How did we never hear about this before?

And now for a poll.

[Poll #1408252]

ETA: And that should have been "sillier", not "siller".

I have decided that spinach is the new lettuce. A bag of it turns out to be a surprisingly versatile thing to keep in the fridge - toss a few leaves into miso and vegetable soup, or a tomato pasta sauce - it's madly good for you, and unlike lettuce, it doesn't sog. I am currently devouring a spinach, tomato, avocado, and green-olives-with-chillies salad, and am one very happy camper.

I was meaning to write a more personal post for International ME/CFS Awareness Week about what it's like having ME, but I find that I really don't want to, it's too depressing. So here's a list of some of the lovely things about my life, some of which probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't developed ME.

I lost music, but I found the visual arts, namely quilting. I was always so busy doing music at school that I never realised that I'm a visual thinker, let alone explored the visual arts (though I remember adoring pottery when I was eleven). I'm thoroughly enjoying quilting and I turn out to be rather good at it. It feels like a new world opening up for me.

Having to approach things in different ways can open up fascinating new perspectives. My eyes are usually too weak to read books these days, so I subscribe to the excellent audiobook service provided by the RNIB. Hearing books read aloud, and they're almost always read aloud very well indeed, provides a completely different experience to reading them on the page, plus it combines well with quilting. I notice things I'd never noticed before when reading the books, such as that startling bit in Jane Eyre where Rochester reveals that he's been wearing a string of pearls under his clothes ever since Jane left him!

I've met some wonderful people online and learnt about subjects ranging from the proper care of long hair to the weird and wonderful stuff about gender in Richard II, not to mention getting hooked on a variety of silly TV shows recommended by my friends.

Eighteenth century flame wars! (Read the next two pages too, and give me a shout if you need context.)

And most importantly, three years ago today I wandered into a bookshop and struck up a conversation with the young man working there. Next thing you know, we were sharing apples (he doesn't like the cores so I eat them) and were each plotting to murder the other for their books. We've been living together since autumn 2007 and I can't think of a lovelier person to be with.

Carol Ann Duffy made Poet Laureate!

They turned her down last time because, and I quote but by now can't remember from where, they didn't think middle England could cope with having a lesbian mother as poet laureate. The BBC gracefully skirts this thorny issue by neglecting to mention that she's queer at all. I'm not that bothered, it's probably better than having a headline saying "First gay person as Poet Laureate!"* Heavens only knows that we all got sick enough of the media suddenly getting the urge to inform us in every single article just after the US election that Obama was going to be the first black US President, as if that were now his defining feature.

Going back to Duffy, I suspect another reason why she was passed over a decade ago is because her poetry is sometimes quite disturbing, all the more so because she's damn good at writing effectively. There was a row when one of her poems was cut from the GCSE syllabus over fears of teenagers being unable to understand irony knife crime (good response here and Duffy's response here). Maybe this shows a move away from the trend of sugar-coating literature-for-the-masses, where they try to pretend that the last thing poetry is about is sex or violence? Or maybe it's like the policy I reckon they follow for the Booker Prize, where good authors such as Atwood and McEwan get repeatedly turned down for their greatest works, then awarded the prize for a distinctly lesser novel out of sheer embarrassment?

Duffy's Selected Poems is a book that's had quite a run for its money in my household. In my teens, I borrowed it from my best friend DT, with whom I spent many an afternoon sitting on the floor, surrounded by books, reading poetry to each other. After a while, we discovered that the copy was nowhere to be found, so after rather a lot of sulking from DT I bought him another copy. A while later, I visited my aunt's London flat and lo and behold, there were two copies on her bookshelf. She must have seen it in our house, assumed it was her copy, and quietly snaffled it. I took charge of one of those copies, and as they were equally battered, never knew whether it was DT's or Aunty D's originally. A few months ago, this copy ended up being given to my friend S, so it has now gone from London to Edinburgh to Aviemore and possibly visited Jerusalem along the way. I bought myself another copy second-hand, and occasionally wonder what its history is. I should also get another copy of The World's Wife, since my former director of studies snaffled mine.

Anyway, Duffy is a poet who's sharp, witty, sexy without being syrupy, able to do marvellous things with mythology, ditto for gender, and is very good at making you think. Read her.

* Incidentally, is she?

Should hospital chaplains be phased out?

I usually have fairly mixed feelings about such matters. I was raised in what I consider, overall, to be a pretty good religion (in that it takes a sensible attitude to life and doesn't propagate bigotry), Reform/Liberal Judaism. I eventually left a few years ago upon realising that I was an atheist. But Jewishness is still part of my identity, and there are still ways in which I think, or am able to think, like a person of faith. I recognise that whether or not God exists is not the only issue, even though it proved to be a key one for me, and that religions are human institutions, capable of both good and evil. Denying human rights to people because they're gay or female is wrong (I'd rather not use "evil", though I'm still working with that idea of opposed concepts); providing comfort to the ill and bereaved is undoubtedly a good thing, an act of humanity, a mitzvah.

Unfortunately, the NHS is terribly strapped for cash. ( Read more... )

Originally, the plan was to do a tree skeleton against a red-gold sky. I think I have a better idea: to let the piecing around the branches suggest leaves. The style I'm currently working with could easily be adapted in that direction, and the needle case I'm making for Sam shows the right sort of fabric combination. I'd need to think about what to put in the non-leafy areas, perhaps the softer gold colours, though the almost solid metallic gold fabric would be ideal for accents amongst the leaves. Olson's Phases: Forest Tapestry is inspiring me, and also reminding me that the background need not look like sky, and could even be pieced entirely differently. I'll work on getting the tree right first. Sam has helpfully taken more photos of his winter tree mask, which may be seen here and here, and also shown me an early tree and sky painting, the sort of thing from which his network designs originated.

ETA: I'm finally getting somewhere with the sketching. Photos beneath the cut.

( Design ideas )

I am pausing to make some needle cases. I owe a couple of people birthday presents, I fancy a small job, and it gives me a chance to start playing with ideas on a smaller scale before I turn them into wall hangings. mirrorshard, this is about your one, so don't click on the link if you don't want the surprise spoilt. Later edit: I've now done the piecing, but I'm going to put the picture next to the one where it was pinned up on the board for comparison.

( Here's what I've pinned up on my brand-new design board )

I've been planning for a long time to make an art quilt to hang above our bed, in the same tones as the autumnal quilt but in fabrics reminiscent of Klimt, as were used in blues and golds in the Rachel's Star. I'm not still 100% sure they, rather than the batiks I used for the bedspread, will be the best choice for this quilt, but I've stocked up on loads of them and I'm pretty much out of the batiks, so it'll have to do.

I kept gathering fabrics without being able to work out how to begin my design. Because of the wall space, it'll need to be portrait rather than layout, which for a tree is tricky. I'm quite fond of Ruth McDowell's trees, especially that one on the front page, and some of her similar botanical work such as the witch hazel quilt and the sumac quilts, but her tree compositions tend to be strongly vertical in style and rather angular. I wanted something that flowed and curved more, something that could incorporate the style I used for one of the coffee cosies.

I started browsing Google Image the other day. I found that bonsai, while not my cup of tea at all, are useful in this respect, since the shapes are small enough to be usable, and sometimes in pleasing shapes. The weeping willow below is probably the prettiest I found. Incidentally, people talking about bonsai sound even more pretentious than people talking about fine wines. Anyway, this search led me to this artist, who makes wire tree sculptures.

( Weeping willow - bonsai and wire sculpture )

Aha, finally something with lovely, simple lines and movement! Using a few of those wire trees, I tried a sketch.

( My first sketch )

It's by no means the final version, but I finally feel as if I'm making progress. Unfortunately it's hard for me to tell exactly what's wrong, not being an artist, but I think it looks a bit witchy, a bit too stooped, almost unhappy. Less curve to the trunk, and make the first main branch (on the left) curve upwards instead of slightly down?

While I'm looking over those quilts again, I might try something similar to the second sumac quilt by McDowell for the loo, where I want to do something vertical and leafy. The loo is painted in apple white with pale green tiles, white fixtures and a white and pine cupboard, and it's also literally the smallest room in the flat, even smaller than the hall cupboard. So any artwork that goes up in there will be relatively limited as to size, will need to be washable (I imagine it could pick up smells eventually), and would probably need to be fairly light in colour so as not to be overwhelming. Leaves in dark greens and/or turquoises on a predominantly pale green background is where I think I'll start. Fewer leaves, most likely, as that sumac quilt of McDowell's would take up practically all of the available wall space.

I posted to my journal in August about the problem I'm having with my local pharmacy refusing to print prescription labels that I can actually read. I'm finally getting around to writing a letter to them about it, and here's what I've written so far.

( Letter to Boots )

How does this look? Am I getting across what I need and how their current provisions miserably fail to meet my needs, and how legally they're required to make provisions that suit me, rather than telling me, "This is what we provide for people who are visually impaired, if it doesn't suit you then you have the wrong disability"? The one-size-fits-all-disabilities is quite sadly a common approach, and it's really hard to get across that it just won't do. The RNIB legal team are willing to hop in and help once I've got past the first stage of sending this letter. The local pharmacy are trying to palm me off with the excuse that it's not up to them, it's the head office that makes such decisions, but I think I need to be dealing with the actual pharmacy where I'm having the problem.

Cross-posted to my journal, low_vision and cfids_me.

Computer programmer creates a prosthetic finger with a USB drive embedded for himself.

Obviously at this level it's a nifty gadget rather than a revolution in itself, but just think where this idea could lead when applied to larger prosthetics. Very promising.

Returning to the blogging for Asus project, they have six computers they'll be lending out. Something that looks like a smaller iMac, a 17" gaming laptop, a 15" personal entertainment laptop, a 14" business laptop, a 12" "Ecobook" laptop in bamboo, and a 10" top-spec netbook, the S101. The last two immediately caught my eye. I already have a nice multipurpose 17" laptop, everyone makes those these days, they do what laptops generally do. It's the possibilities of ultra-small laptops, where it's more of a challenge cramming everything in and getting it to work well, that interest me.




( Decisions, decisions )

The Ecobook

I felt a visceral tug when I saw this laptop. Part of me took one look and joyously squealed, "Trees!" Like Ursula Le Guin, who prides herself on being "the most arboreal science fiction writer", I have a slight obsession with trees. My desktop backgrounds are always botanical, my quilts are becoming more and more so, and I could tell you every kind of wood that I have in my flat, from the rosewood Bluthner piano to the beech doorknobs on my kitchen units to the cheapie untreated pine bookcases in the hall. Anything which evokes trees is a instant hook-in for me.

I don't spend all my time metaphorically swinging about in the branches, though, so let's look at this a mite more analytically. ( Read more... )

It's odd to look back at what computers were like fifteen years ago. When I was growing up, the internet was unheard-of, floppy disks were floppy, screens were green on black, printers were dot matrix, computer games were so basic that they now have retro charm, I was one of the few students at my school writing my homework on the computer, and I did so using a word processor called Wordstar which threw a canary fit every time I inserted a footnote – and footnotes formed about a third of the text when translating Virgil. Or possibly the computer hated the virtuous Aeneas even more than I did.

At uni, I went through a few years of all-nighters in computer labs before getting a laptop of my own via the Disabled Students' Allowance. It was a 14” Toshiba Satellite Pro, with rather nice sound for a laptop. and a trackpoint, or “nipple” mouse, right in the middle of the keyboard. They don't seem to have been very popular, those trackpoints, and looking back they probably didn't have the all-singing all-dancing functions that mice and touchpads today need to have. I did like being able to mouse without taking my hands out of their usual typing position, and you'd think they'd be making a comeback for netbooks, small wireless keyboards and the like. I have to confess that the pointer function eventually went barmy and refused to do anything other than charge off to the top right corner of the screen, but that would probably have been fixable if the uni disability computing services had sorted out the motherboard instead of repeatedly replacing the keyboard.

So when that little laptop finally gave up the ghost in 2004, right in the middle of a raging (and hilarious) trolling drama on gothic_lit which necessitated hastily ringing up eye_of_a_cat and telling her how to hack into my LJ account so that she could become a co-moderator, I ended up buying a cheap and nasty laptop from PC World, under the illusion that it would only be temporary as I'd be getting another DSA-funded computer soon. ( No such luck! )

Last year, this beastie began to make alarming noises suggesting that its fan was unhappy. I cosseted it with a gel cooling mat, not to mention feeding it more RAM and buying it an external hard drive, but I couldn't deny that it was getting elderly. This is the time when netbooks had just exploded onto the computer scene, and I was eyeing them with great interest. I'd previously tried a ( Psion Revo Plus, a PDA which is a forerunner of the netbook. )

Back to the ailing laptop. Those gel cooling mats really make a difference, and I was hoping to get a few more months of life out of the thing yet. I'd been waiting for netbooks to come out in XP, as I use the RNIB's audiobook service via online streaming, which can only be used with NetPlexTalk, which only works in Windows. The idea was that I would get the 9" EEE for small-computer uses now, try to keep going between it and that dying duck of a 14" laptop for as long as possible while the prices went down and the specs went up on laptops, and eventually get a nice big 17" laptop for my main computer and for watching films on. The netbook could live on my sewing table in the living room, where I could listen to audiobooks while quilting and do the odd bit of internet browsing. Alternatively, ghost_of_a_flea and I could give up the lazy habit of watching films in bed, keep the larger laptop in the living room, and use the EEE as a nice little bedside computer. Since even a 17" laptop is perfectly fine for carrying around the house, it wouldn't be difficult to swap them around, it's just that having a netbook as well as a laptop would save constantly ferrying the same computer between rooms.

This didn't quite go as planned. ( At last we come to the EEE PC 900. )

To those of you who do have netbooks, which one do you have and how do you get on with it?

angevin2 has put up a voice post in which she sings a ballad about Daphne and Apollo, sounding very lovely I may add. It has inspired me to come up with a Plan To Save The Planet.

For those whose mythology is patchy, the god Apollo took a fancy to Daphne but she wasn't interested. He pursued her, she ran away, and since he was catching up and she was getting desperate, she called to the virgin goddess Artemis for help. Artemis obligingly turned her into a bay laurel tree.

If we changed it around and made it the would-be-rapist who turned into the tree, to make it fairer, and this happened every time someone tried to commit a rape, think how great it would be. There would be fewer humans, nicer humans, and lots more trees, thus solving in one stroke the problems of overpopulation and deforestation.

In other news, mirrorshard has pointed me to the latest silliness from the evangelical movement, with further eloquence here and here. I'll bet you that somewhere there is a kinky club where people are wearing those t-shirts in not quite the spirit they were meant to be worn. EX-HYPOCRITE is deliciously ironic all on its own, anyway, and EX-FORNICATOR has such a fine ring to it. Which reminds me that "fornicator" comes from the Latin for "brothel", which in turns comes from the Latin "fornix", meaning "arch", as in prostitutes lurking in doorways. (Study Juvenal at A-level and you get to learn all about where the prostitutes of different nationalities hung out in ancient Rome.) If language had developed a bit differently, "fornicator" could mean "builder" today.

So I've already reviewed monitor colour overlay filters, which may be useful if you have eyestrain, dyslexia, Meares-Irlen Syndrome (also called scotopic sensitivity or Visual Stress), eye problems from ME/CFIDS, migraine, or autism spectrum disorders. Now let's look at how you can adjust colour directly on your computer, and how you might like to do so for your visual comfort. This post will cover operating systems, office suites and instant messaging clients, and the next will focus on ways to adjust Firefox. I'll cover changing the size of text and images in another post.

Operating systems - Windows XP and Vista

Firstly, you can tweak your OS. That link gives you an almost bewildering amount of information, so if you want to change the colour scheme, let's start with Windows XP, where there are excellent instructions here. This will set the general colour scheme for your computer, though not for websites (apart from the odd text entry box and such). You can use any colours that you choose, not just the small range of preset colours, although you may be limited in how they relate to each other. If you sometimes use coloured overlays, remember to check your colour scheme both with and without them. There are certain areas where I'd advise against bright colours, such as the text box background (where I use a pale colour), where you will have very large areas, and the message box text (where I use a medium colour with a fair bit of grey in there), which is also used for toolbar menus and can be overwhelming or distracting in bright colours. You may wish to change your colour scheme from time to time to avoid eyestrain. I usually switch between a muted blue and a soft green. With practice, you will probably find out which areas and applications you prefer in bright colours, greys, dark or light colours. If your colour schemes don't quite look right, you can use a colour wheel to make them look more natural. Shade darker colours a little closer to violet, and lighter colours a little closer to yellow, as this is how colours naturally behave with light and shadow (shadows are actually violet, not black). This is probably just cosmetic, but a colour scheme which you like to look at is one that you're more likely to keep. Remember that increasing the text size may change the colours you need, as it may cause the effect of an increase in contrast.

( Vista - not as different as you might think )

( Macs and Linux )

( Microsoft Word )

( Open Office )

( Trillian )

( Windows Live Messenger )

If you have any of the following:

* Deafness
* Hard of hearing
* Auditory processing disorder (neurologically hard of hearing)
* Other hearing problems

then comment here to tell me about your experiences, the adaptations or software you use or are interested in, what it's like surfing the web, what you'd want to know about a computer or computer equipment before buying it, and anything else you think is relevant. You can write on behalf of someone you know too.