annathepiper | A post of little consequence (Reply)

+0: I added the blogs of the Nielsen Haydens to my Friends list last night, and already have found both of them worth the visit. I was especially pleased by TNH's recent post with much commentary about the very interesting trends in the fanfic community and how so many folks there are applying a lot of surprisingly professional standards to doing their work--and what will happen when these folks decide to make the leap to being pros. Since I'm coming out of a very much related community--i.e., MUSHers--I find a lot of the trends she's discussed in that post to be applicable to my experience as well.

Also, it was great fun to follow her provided links off to Sara Donati's set of essays about writing good sex scenes, which begins with this post on her blog. Again, with my MUSHing experience, I repeatedly found myself thinking of the differences between good tinysex scenes and bad ones, and how you can use the same rule discussed in these essays on the vast majority of them: i.e., you can replace most tinysex scenes with "and then they had sex" without making the slightest bit of impact on the characters' lives.

Also #2, I had to snicker at PNH's crack about how our President is apparently afraid of being heckled by Canadians. ;P

+/-1: Work promises to be... interesting this week. In the Chinese sense. The FTE (that's Full-Time Employee for those of you who don't speak Microsoft-ese) I work with is taking the rest of the week off due to his father having health problems, which means I get to run all the tests we're responsible for myself this week. And I get to work with the developers and arrange test machines for them to use, and I get to open bugs and regress bugs and close bugs, and in general try to do twenty things at once. This was pretty much what I did today, starting off with a Surprise Japanese BVT Pass when I got in this morning. For extra added goodness, we had to install the build to test straight off of CD rather than off the usual network servers. This would have made me a LOT crankier if I hadn't realized that I could tweak my usual install scripts to just run off the CDs rather than going out onto the network--because I'm here to tell you, if you don't actually READ Japanese, don't even try to install Japanese Windows. Not unless you have English Windows installing on a machine right next to that one, so you can figure out what the heck you're supposed to be doing.

On the one hand, part of me enjoys the challenge, but on the other hand, I'd like to actually have a stretch of a few hours where I can just chug through what I need to do at work without having unexpected duties thrown my way. Sigh.

-2: For two mornings running, I have awakened in the middle of REM sleep. As I have ranted on this journal before, I hate that. It's especially annoying when I am jolted out of a dream in which my dreaming self is actually pissed off--as happened this morning. I was dreaming about riding my bike into some unnamed industrial complex of some sort, and getting lost. I remember having to actually go through some sort of toll/pay booth to get out of the place, which annoyed me on general principle. It did not help, either, that the booth was manned by a cop/guard type who made some sort of snarky remark at me when I couldn't provide my driver's license for his inspection--and that, too, pissed me off, both because I had to provide my ID and because of receiving the snarky remark. I no longer remember what was actually said, but I distinctly remember bellowing something to the effect of "And what kind of sexist, offensive remark is THAT supposed to be?"

So for the rest of the morning, I had THAT lingering over my brain, while I was trying to figure out how to run six installs of Japanese Windows off of CD and get them to work without me having to personally run through each setup. (See previous item.) Fun!

+3: On the other hand, I have discovered this week that the new guy who just joined our team actually plays the mandolin. :D Although I have not yet actually seen it, he apparently keeps a mandolin in his office. I have no office, otherwise I'd do that myself! But it was great fun to see our lead do a double-take during our status meeting yesterday afternoon, when I leaned over to the new guy and told him it was cool to have another mandolin player on the team.

The new guy apparently likes bluegrass-type mandolin music, though, as opposed to Irish/Celtic. But hey. As Heather Alexander has said, same music, different whiskey.

Note to Self: Must actually PLAY the mandolin more often. Or at least the bouzouki.

+4: And here, have a quiz. I was actually expecting Chaotic Good, given my usual inclination towards such Alignments for any characters I play that have them, but I find that Neutral Good actually does fit me personally. So!

You scored as Neutral Good. A Neutral Good person tries to do the "goodest" thing possible. These people are willing to work with the law to accomplish their goal, but if the law is corrupt they are just as willing to tear it down. To these people, doing what's right is the most important thing, regardless of rules, customs, or laws.</td>

Neutral Good

75%

True Neutral

65%

Lawful Good

65%

Chaotic Good

55%

Lawful Neutral

40%

Chaotic Neutral

30%