Aria Stewart's Journal

18:27: Personal demographics

I had a thought while I was working on replying to a thread on whetherwoman's journal.

What are the things that you think most define how you interact with the world? As an example, “I'm a woman” is particularly relevant in that discussion. What informs your reactions to the world?

I have a list that feels as long as my arm in my head.

I live in a small town, and I actively try to keep the good parts about small town culture alive wherever I go. I'm acutely aware of the amount of interconnection between people in any group, and I'm happiest when I can either be in an internally well-connected group, or one where I'm introducing people to each other.

I am a comfortable, confident, happy transsexual woman, who feels no need to play a game of “passing” as a XX-chromosomed woman. It affects nearly every interaction I've had in the past years. It's made my sex life, my love life and my body something that seems very public, and that people are quite willing to start a conversation on.

Within the queer, and especially within groups of transgendered folks, I find that my tendency to be calm, a peace-maker, and my willingness to be out without confrontation is distinguishing.

I'm a spiritual person, and I have a deep respect and interest to understand religious and spiritual traditions. In my teenage years, I'd taken my family's habitual bashings of all things Christian, and it left a hole in my willingness to understand people, to feel and to relate. Now I'm finding that I have more in common in my thought processes and feelings about things with the average religious person who really thinks about their faith than I do with the atheist liberal culture I grew up in. My own beliefs align relatively well with a lot of Quaker beliefs, and a lot of the traditions speak to me deeply.

I'm white, of a lower-middle class family. My parents have no college degrees, though they're very smart and well-educated.

I have cultural associations to Argentina, latin in culture and racially white.

I grew up in a family where taking care of things oneself was the normal way to do things. My father can fix most anything around the house. We never called a plumber, handyman or repairman for anything. We educated ourselves, we designed our house ourselves, we built our house ourselves. I've watched my father repair cars, roofs, sidewalks, computers, desks, faucets. My mother made a lot of our clothes when I was young. Asking for someone to do something for me is not something I think of first.

20:22: Idea: migrating autotools into a pure gnu-make system

What if autoconf could be replaced by moving the configuration steps into makefiles, rather than vice-versa?

File paths and library lists can already be handled nicely with systems like pkg-config, with the only requirement that the pkg-config tool be in the path.

Why not move feature-detection and other configure sort of tasks into makefiles too?

A library of makefile pieces could be built that represent various autoconf tests, stored in a central directory like /usr/share/pkgconfig, ready for inclusion into GNUmakefiles. Rules might look like this:

include $(shell pkg-config gnuconf-make --variable=MAKEFILE)
all:	check-configuration

PKGCONFIG_PACKAGES=gtk2 atk lua-5.0.0
check-configuration: check-c-compiler check-cpp check-ld my-custom-check check-pkgconfig-packages

my-custom-check:
	do something here to check some part of the build

21:00: Eggplant sloppy joes

Just do it. Surprisingly yum.

15:35: First thoughts on the Nikon D70

I just picked up a Nikon D70 from a friend. It's really nice to be working with a camera and lenses that have apertures somewhat more varied than my Fuji S5200's 4-8, and a bigger sensor to boot. The Nikon sensor is just slightly grainier at ISO 800 than the Fuji is at ISO 100. Apertures as wide as 1.8 on the 50mm lens I'm using are fun!

23:03: Happy pi day!

I made blueberry-strawberry pie today in honor of pi day. Tastiest sacraments ever.

I used empanada dough instead of pie dough, and I like it a lot better. It's easier to work with, too, since you can re-roll it and it won't get tough. It's fine-textured, and flakey in a different way than pie dough. I like the way it flakes better too.

A recipe — filling:

1/4 C flour, 1/2 C sugar, 3-4 cups mixed berries, half a lemon's juice. Stir until it's a slightly mushy consistency. Kinda like oatmeal, only awesome instead of gross.

Dough (translated from Spanish):

1 cup flour, 1 stick butter (cut in pieces), a quarter teaspoon of salt, blended well. Add a third of a cup of boiling water and mix until it forms a smooth, elastic dough.

Roll like pie dough, but without the fuss and hands-off approach. Just go for it, the dough won't even stick to much thanks to the butter melted through it. Bake at 350°F until the crust starts to crisp.

13:40: News on polis

Polis, the server for nbtsc.org, went down with a two-disk glitch int its storage system. That's Not Good in general. It took 30 hours to rebuild the filesystem, but most things are intact. Mail should be up later today, web sites shortly following. I hope.

20:49: IRS drinking game, or "how to drink yourself to death to avoid paying taxes"

Rules:

• Every time a tax form's instructions refer you to the instructions for another form to determine eligibility, take a sip.
• Every time a tax is more than 20% more than expected, take a sip.
• if that tax is more than double what you expected, take a chug. If you took a sip then a chug, refill your glass and take another chug.
• Every time you see a convenience for especially small payers of tax that no business or individual could ever hope to use since amounts that small haven't existed since the depression, check this box [ ] and take a chug.
• Line 5: please enter the number of alcoholic drinks consumed so far: [ ]
• Line 6: If you are not drunk yet, enter the number of drinks required to get you drunk: [ ]
• Line 7: If line 6 is larger than line 5, enter the difference here: [ ]
• Line 8: If line 5 is larger than line 6, please calculate your blood alcohol level and enter it here: [ ]
• If line 8 is smaller than 1%, take a chug

16:57: Don't do this at home. Heck, don't do it at all.

So I picked up my phone last night, and managed to drop it backward over my shoulder into a pan of water.

Don't do this at home, guys.

12:00: MATAVA splits MTPC?

Massachusetts Chapter of TAVA breaks ties with local advocacy group. So MATAVA (a Transgender veterans association) is not working with MTPC, because MTPC has taken $25,000 from the Human Rights Campaign, because of HRC's not supporting an inclusive ENDA?

I have one question: Why?

HRC has always touted trans inclusivity and rarely puts its money where its mouth is. Small donations to organizations have been the norm, mostly paying a lip service. The $25,000 grant is the first time that they have truly made a trans-inclusive action of size.

MATAVA sounds like they're trying to coerce MTPC into not accepting funds from HRC (to punish HRC?). It seems exactly counterproductive to building the unity in action that works so well, and that MTPC has so far managed with skill.

How is this in any way beneficial to the ends they are working for?

18:46: Servers and crashing

So my ISP, where I colocate my servers, has had a battery backup that has had issues. The kind of one-off issues where you reset it, and uneasily it works for a while, then something either related or not happens, and it crashes again.

Tonight he informs me that it came back with fully proper status this time and it shouldn't do that again. We'll see.

23:16:

Helping a friend install linux ... win.

Helping a friend install linux, only to realize halfway through, after their old OS is destroyed, that the only copy is on a bad CD, with no other computer to burn a new copy? Not as fun.

There's amazing ways to work yourself out of that hole, but ... man. It sucks. And boy does it take time.

9:14: Merry Solstice

Last night was my family's solstice celebration. It's a tradition we're slowly growing, replacing the Christmases of a family that has more connection to the seasons than the church with something a bit more connected.

We all got together for a pot luck last night. Pizza with pesto and cranberries, cheesy escarole and mushroom and pasta casserole, home made egg-nog, home made ravioli, a huge platter of fresh vegetables.

We light candles, light for the dark night.

We still have a left-over Christmas gift-giving tradition, though I think that's half held together by my mother, who works in a thrift shop and gets everything half price.

It's a quiet holiday, but I really like how my family celebrates.

My sister leaves on Boxing Day for Denver, six months in paramedic school. I'm going to miss her.

19:05: Oy. At least they're honest.

PLoS Medicine: What Are the Benefits and Risks of Fitting Patients with Radiofrequency Identification Devices

21:30: "So what do vegetarians eat on Thanksgiving?", a short and incomplete list.

• Quiche
• Soufflé gone quichey, "Soufliche"
• Corn casserole
• Scalloped potatoes
• Polenta larghata with tomatoes, portobello mushrooms and mozarella on top
• Sweet potato pie
• Pumpkin pie
• Cous-cous with cranberries in it
• Cranberry sauce
• Wine
• English muffins (Home made)
• Curry

1:38: micro-Tumble

I'd forgotten that I'd ever seen the concept of Soft Security spelled out until chris2 reminded me.

NaNoWriMo is 2/3 over today. Good luck, all!

17:03: Work todos

• move database services to the new cluster machine, in a VM
• rebuild the database to passwd-file converter, to be triggerable whenever a user is added to the database
• set up passwd-file replication (rdist?)
• finish user management in the control panel system
• Start clustered web services finally

There's some fun stuff.

1:14: Well, that sucks.

Polis is down for a somewhat extended count, as it's doing an intensive check on a huge disk.

It's going to take about ten hours.

12:54: Slow logins on Windows XP, and 802.1x on unencrypted networks.

The Internet Company just had a repair job for a laptop, which when the user tried to log in using Windows XP Professional, would display a box for nearly a minute saying "802.1x Authentication Status" and a message "Windows is waiting for the wireless network and DHCP — Google didn't help much, so we had to guess a lot. She wasn't using 802.1x at all, she'd only used public networks. There was nothing indicating that it should use 802.1x at login time, no group policy setting to force it, nothing. baileyjordan found several good-looking but ultimately fruitless Microsoft KB articles.

The fix? Uninstall the driver for the wireless card and reinstall. I suspect that there was a registry setting that was reset by doing that. If I could reproduce the problem, I'd figure out which, but we're in good shape now and going to call it done.

1:37: LJ in a feed reader

Now that Liferea supports remote OPML files (this in version 1.4), I've set up my livejournal feeds to automatically come and go based on my friends list. I wrote a little CGI script that transforms the LJ FOAF file into an OPML file (including the authentication that's needed to read protected LJ entries.

The code's at http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/projects/ruby/ljfoaf-to-opml/ (GIT repository), if anyone wants to adapt it. It's obviously not secure, but it should work in a pinch.

I also discovered that there were about 150 journals that I wasn't reading because my manual process managed not to add them. I'll be keeping up with people better now. Sorry about that, folks.

22:23: Gender expression and comics

Felixity (garlicfiend) wrote in transgender,

An amazing bundle of thought-provoking awesome

So brown_betty puts out a call for artwork of male comic book characters in "female" comic book poses in an effort to examine the stark gender divide in comic books.

This prompts ratcreature to post some scans from a guide to drawing comic characters, including sections on how to draw comic pornstarswomen.

In a brilliant display of awesome, vito_excalibur "fixes" the pages, switching all the men and women.

[remainder clipped]

brown_betty's original post links to a couple insightful posts too, and some examples.

Girl-Wonder.org is a site dedicated to women in (mainstream) comics, both characters and authors. Some neat stuff up there.

Sequential Tart's "Bizarre Breasts" column, sadly no longer updating.

It's been going on a long time, too, and not just in comics — Loomis' drawing suggestions from the forties draws otherwise normal female nudes in heels. They'd never do something like this to the men, of course.

Some answers to the challenge: stephendann, naefox, kkglinka (again!), redplasticglass, theblackscorpio, ocarina

and on the subject of sexy superheroes, Racy Li writes sexy superhero stories, including one that's free.

16:16: Ruby JSON implementations

Okay, folks, we have a problem here. When you distribute an app or library that uses JSON, will you please document which json you mean?

There's JSON and there's ruby-json (and is that related to ruby-json?)

Also, JSON library authors: do you think you could possibly merge all this and solve it? Or at least document your projects as something other than "the json library for ruby"?

14:00:

Pictures of geeks are much more interest in grainy, high-contrast black and white.

22:45: Playing with type

Interface type is used in ways that book type isn't, and it's interesting to see how you can play with things. I realized this morning that my terminal type wasn't letting me distinguish commas from periods easily, so I switched to P22 Typewriter, and despite it being an effect typeface, it turns out to be rather legible for coding. I like the gritty texture, so I tried it for a bit as the Gnome application type:

I like it for the window titles and menu headings. The variation in the letters makes it easier to read in some ways — a bit more visual texture than the Myriad Web I was using before. I'm not sticking with it as application type, since the wide spacing doesn't let me fit much on the screen, and that's important to me when reading email, so back to Myriad Web (or maybe Minion Web) for that. The terminal gets to stay old and clunky looking though.

(Yes, that's the Gnome default wallpaper challenge image in the background.)

19:25: Uh...

aredridel@polis:~$ ls web/2006/11/05\,\ early./ -l
total 2146568199
-rw-r--r-- 1 aredridel  users                   89181 2006-11-05 13:40 dscf0009.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 aredridel  users                  141842 2006-11-05 13:40 dscf0017 cropped.jpg
---srwS-wT 1 2065705264  151593738              69632 2031-11-25 10:10 dscf0026.jpg
-r-Sr-Sr-T 1 1701054729  677868898 651468475179691109 2024-12-27 01:46 dscf0027.jpg
---srwx-wt 1 1713645670 2065705257              73728 2029-02-01 02:29 dscf0031.jpg

Uh...

aredridel@polis:~$ ls /home/users/aredridel/web/2006/11/05\,\ early/ -l -h
total 2.0T
-rw-r--r-- 1 aredridel  users       88K 2006-11-05 13:40 dscf0009.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 aredridel  users      139K 2006-11-05 13:40 dscf0017 cropped.jpg
---srwS-wT 1 2065705264  151593738  68K 2031-11-25 10:10 dscf0026.jpg
-r-Sr-Sr-T 1 1701054729  677868898 579P 2024-12-27 01:46 dscf0027.jpg
---srwx-wt 1 1713645670 2065705257  72K 2029-02-01 02:29 dscf0031.jpg

Huh. Yay for sparse file support?

12:58: Ripple Effect

It's really interesting to watch the news media pick up a story from beginning to end. A friend of mine has been working on voting machine security, and his group just released their report yesterday. I found a summary on the California Secretary of State's site first, just before a press conference was called. From there, I saw it on Slashdot's article which links to the SF Gate. A few minutes ago, it started hitting the progresive political mailing lists, Truthout first among them. It's interesting to see how fresh each source of news is, and how they all follow each other.

I watched a similar thing with comment by the Mozilla Corporation CEO, saying they should probably focus on Firefox and jettison Thunderbird. News sources quoted accurately at first, but the second generation quotes quote it more like it's a final plan, not just a comment made. It feels a bit like a game of telephone.