Category: Me

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Help Solarbird and me name our new iPads!

Thanks to shiny bonus goodness, (and to the iPad 2’s just coming out) userinfosolarbird and I have succumbed to this particular form of Apple shiny! We’ve opted for two white models, each with 64G capacity and Wi-Fi only, since we didn’t feel like shelling out for an extra 3G plan on top of what we’re already paying for my phone. We had to order them from apple.com given that they cannot be found for love or money ANYWHERE in the Puget Sound area (my lack of surprise, let me show you it), and so now we get to wait until mid-April for them to show up.

Which means of course that we have plenty of time to consider a CRITICAL QUESTION: what in the world are we going to name them?

As I’ve mentioned before our usual computer naming scheme at the Murkworks is to name all our computers after Elfquest characters. But as these are iPads, they’re not quite in the “computer” category, and neither are they in the “auxiliary devices” category, so the floor is really kind of wide open!

Here are the options we’ve considered so far:

  • “Kim” and “Shego”, from Kim Possible (mmm, femmeslashtastic)
  • “Ichimaitan” and “Nimaitan”, based on the Japanese counting system for flat things (hee hee hee), and also on OS tan girls
  • Naming them after two Go-Backs, given that Go-Backs tend to be less clever than other elves ;) (note: “Kahvi” is already claimed as a name of Dara’s studio workstation)

Any other clever ideas? Submit your nominations now! Bonus points for any references to names that go well together in pairs, especially if they’re twins, since these are the exact same model of iPad! I’ll do an actual poll at the beginning of April. :D

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I will never buy blackberries from anyone else again

As y’all know I have repeatedly lauded the awesomeosity* of my Pike Place marketboys. As of last night and this morning, though, they have gone above and beyond the call of all awesomeness.

On my way home last night I sorta kinda wigged at one of ’em about my cousin Phillip and what’s going on with him. He made very sympathetic noises at me, especially when I got to the part about “and I’m kinda wigging about this because I’ve gone a couple rounds with cancer myself and why yes this is actually why I buy so much fruit from you guys: adjusting my diet to Cope”. Two of the other boys overheard me though on the tail end of that wigging.

And when I showed up this morning, I was greeted with a surprise hug, a surprise extra pear, sympathetic conversation from no fewer than four of ’em, and assurance that I’m not just a girl they sell fruit to, I’m a friend.

These are my marketboys, and I don’t think I’ll buy blackberries from anybody else in Seattle ever again. And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again with extra emphasis today: if you’re local to Seattle, look for them. The Frank’s boys at Pike Place Market. Buy tasty things from them and tell them Angela sent you, because she says they’re awesome.

* This is totally a word. That, in my capacity as a professional writer, I just made up. Do not try this at home!

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Need your healing thoughts for my young cousin

Not to be Massive Downer Girl or anything, but I’ve recently gotten news from the family that one of my young cousins, Phillip, has been diagnosed with some hardcore Stage 4 cancer. Without going into too much detail about that (since I don’t have his permission or that of his parents to talk about it in detail online), I’ll simply say that he’s been in the hospital this week dealing with surgery. And suffice to say that there’s a whole hell of a lot of stress going on over in that branch of the family.

Since all of my family members are three whole time zones away from me I’m pretty removed from it all, but through the wonders of email and text messaging, I’m still in the loop. And even though I don’t know Phillip at all, I DO know and remember his parents, and it’s wigging me out a bit that they’re having to go through this with their son. Especially since I’ve gone a couple rounds with cancer myself. Yeah, mine was Stage 0, but nonetheless, I’ve had enough experience to begin to get an idea of the shit this kid is having to go through right now.

So I’d like to put out a call for your all’s prayers to whatever powers you call upon, or if you’re not the praying type, your best wishes and healing thoughts. Direct anything you got at my cousin Phillip, if you please, with the hope that he can fight this fight with everything he’s got and be around to tell the tale after.

Thanks all.

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And oh yes, belated thanks!

It’s now a week after the fact, but I must give some public thanks to everybody who wished me such nice birthday wishes last weekend–whether on LJ, DW, Facebook, face-to-face, or what. In particular:

  • Thank you, userinfojennygriffee, for the lovely card!
  • Props to userinfotechnoshaman for getting me a signed copy of this, and a card as well!
  • Big smiles over to userinfojanne who actually hand-made me a book cover, with a suspiciously familiar face cross-stitched onto the front. How sweet was this? Handmade gift, people! <3
  • userinfomamishka knows me very, very, VERY well and sent me this awesome Han Solo shirt.
  • Extra big smiles to my beloved userinfosolarbird for the new instrument rack where the General, Rags, and my bouzouki Spring are all now residing! There’s room on it for my octave mandolin Autumn as well, although Autumn’s getting more play time at Dara’s hands these days.

This Guy Looks Familiar
This Guy Looks Familiar

My birthday technically isn’t even over yet, as userinfospazzkat‘s present is still pending! It’s been late showing up on the mail, although he informs me that he has been charged for it, so hopefully Whatever It Is will show up soon. I have my suspicions, and am dying to see if I am correct.

Thanks much to you all! I feel loved. <3

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Tonight’s amusing conversation with the Handsome Marketboy

So there I am stopping by my marketboys on the way home for my evening round of tasty!fruit when I find that my favorite Handsome Marketboy has the stand all to himself. Hurray, I’m thinking, as he says hi and asks me how my day has gone.

I tell him I have to work tonight but a nice man is about to sell me blackberries and an avocado, so hey! And he asks me what I do with all the money.

Buy books, mostly, I say–because as you know, my children, some women buy purses or shoes, but me, I buy books!

Handsome Marketboy looks a bit boggled and asks, have I not heard of the library? It’s like Netflix, only for books! I explain that I want to Own All of the Books, because this man clearly has no conception of how much I read. I am, obviously, going to have to explain this to him. ;)

(After, of course, I buy All of the Blackberries. Because nom.)

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Piccies of me and the General

Liz Jackson, who posted an awesome gallery of pics over here from the first of our Celtic sessions, has done another round! She doesn’t have them posted on her Smugmug page yet so I can’t link to them off of Facebook, but I did grab two of the Facebook ones that I liked of me and the General. Here they are. Photo credits, again, to Liz!

ETA: And BEHOLD! High-res piccie goodness posted by Liz! The better versions of the ones I did low-res of above are here and here. The whole kit and caboodle is here.

My beloved userinfosolarbird and I are really both quite impressed at how Liz does an excellent job of making us look like Hot Babes With Superpowers. And by superpowers, I mean musical instruments!

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iTunes 10 user? Annoyed by moving of Close/Minimize/Zoom buttons?

Found a fix for putting those buttons back in the configuration that EVERY OTHER MAC PROGRAM STILL USES, with a quick Google. Open up a Terminal window and type in the following line:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean YES

Then restart iTunes and the Close/Minimize/Zoom buttons should be back in their previous arrangement. Yay!

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New record for WORST COMMUTE EVER

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter saw me live-tweeting this last night, but for those of you who follow me from the blog or LJ or DW, here’s the epic saga of Anna’s Worst Commute Ever!

My previous commute record was set back in 2006, roughly three and a half hours between userinfosolarbird calling me and my finally making home to MurkNorth. This beat that. Hands down.

Continue reading “New record for WORST COMMUTE EVER”

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Ever wondered what the inside of a Macbook looks like?

Wonder no more!

Winnowill's Heart is a Scary Place
Winnowill's Heart is a Scary Place

My laptop had been making these weird rattly noises for a while now, as well as running periodically far hotter than it seemed like it should. Replacing the hard drive didn’t help (although it did double my hard drive capacity, which of course was awesome). Neither did taking a can of electronics cleaner to the interior of the machine. So finally I decided, due to the location of the weird rattly noises I kept hearing (i.e., pretty much smack center under the keyboard), that I probably needed a new fan.

There are three places locally I found that I could have taken the box to to have a new fan installed: the actual Apple store, an unrelated chain called The Mac Store in the U-district, and a place in Shoreline that does Mac repairs. In all three cases, though, I’d have had to pay for the cost of the part as well as probably $80-100 in labor. Screw that, I decided; I’ve taken apart plenty of computers in my time, and I was pretty sure I could just install the damn fan myself.

This proved pretty much trivial thanks to ifixit.com. They’re a site specializing in repair manuals and parts for Macs and iPods, and I gotta say, the site was incredibly helpful. Not only do they have a variety of step by step manuals on how to take your Mac apart and how to install different parts, they also sell those parts for you to order. And since the new fan I ordered for Winnowill arrived today, I settled in tonight with Dara’s help to get that put in. It went very simply and without aggravation!

So I highly, highly recommend this site to any of my fellow Mac geeks out there. If you’re up for fixing anything wrong with your own computer and saving yourself the cost of paying somebody else to do it for you, check this site out. They can probably help you get the job done.

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Whoa! Was I EVER this small?

Here’s one of the good reasons to be on Facebook: a lot of my relatives who I otherwise would not be in touch with are there. One of my cousins found me there last night, letting me know that she’s putting together a memorial DVD to honor my uncle Marion who recently died and offering me a copy, which was very sweet of her. But she also has sent me a bunch of very old pictures of myself and my brothers and parents, and various other family members as well.

Including this, which is possibly the oldest picture of myself I have seen in YEARS. Good gods I am TINY. Check out that purple dress!

Tiny Anna is Tiny
Tiny Anna is Tiny