So, funniest thing I've ever heard regarding a car malady, caused my CEL to come on. There's a hose that goes to the evaporator (??) cannister, which is near the gas tank. The computer does pressure readings on it. It couldn't get one so it lit the CEL.

It was clogged. They'd unlooked it and couldn't see to the other end, so they blew it out. What came out?

...

A spiderweb with a small spider in it.

A goddamn spider (they're apparently attracted to gas fumes?) had built its web inside a hose in my car, thus making my CEL light up. I don't think I'd believe it if he hadn't told me in person, and been willing to put it on the paperwork.

I almost didn't go get it checked out either, 'cause today when I started the engine the light didn't come on. It didn't come on after I hit the highway either. And it still hadn't come on when I was reaching I-70, which is the exit I take for work. Tempted to just go in, call the shop and say, "it isn't on anymore, I'm calling to cancel." But, it was still odd, so I still went. It still wasn't lit when I shut off the engine in their lot.

Weird shit.

My foot still hurts. Pretty much as badly as it did Wednesday and Thursday. Doesn't hurt to flex it, to poke it with my fingers (or J poking around), and it doesn't hurt to statically put weight on it. Just hurts like a total bitch to walk on it. And now it's doing this... creaking, sort of thing. You ever felt a sort of creaking, in a knee or something? That sort of feels like you'd expect the door-creaking-sound would feel? Yeah, it's off & on doing that, only in my foot. Definitely oogy, being that my foot isn't a joint.

If it doesn't feel remotely better over the weekend I'll probably make an appointment with the GP on Monday.

My foot hurts from using the treadmill Tuesday (booya, finally got off my ass to do some cardio after 4 months) on account of who knows what, then this morning my check engine light came on and I've no clue why, and just a bit ago I found my lower GI is being recalcitrant. I think next up is to catch whatever cold virus J seems to have. Nothing like what some of you've got going, I just needed to whine a bit. My car will be fixed and it'll probably be warranty work (car's less than 2 years old, and less than 15k miles), my foot will get better no matter what's wrong with it, and my intestines will settle themselves.

On the plus side, it appears I've found my ideal XP shell replacement in BBLean.

All the brain dead shit stain excuses for drivers were out this afternoon, I swear. (Intersections & street names provided for those who know the area & are curious.)

First, I'm pulling up to the intersection at Earth City right by I-70 in the right-most left turn lane as the light was changing (the guy in front of me kinda went on "orange" as it was). Woman in the lane to the left, who'd lollygagged in keeping up with her traffic to begin with, damn near threw herself into cross traffic because she didn't notice the light color. Then the guy behind her had left lotsa room for her to back to the line (she was a good 4-6' past it with her rear bumper), she backed up a whole... 2 feet or so, then sat in reverse long enough I was sure she was going to be surprised by it when we got our light again. Then backed up an inch or two more, finally put it in drive, then scooted up the same 1-2 inches.

Second, and what still has me shaking a bit, is the shit stain who did kinda what the lady above me did, except it wasn't almost. This time I was waiting at the light on northbound Florissant under the I-270 waiting for cross moving Dunn Rd. traffic. Got the green, waited a second or two (there's no pause at this light between one light going red and the next going green), noted a car way back who wasn't going incredibly fast, and went. Yeah, that car decided he was above paying attention to piddling intersection signals or something, 'cause HOSHITCARHEADEDRIGHTFORME. I was already accelerating kinda fast just 'cause, so I utterly gunned it and he screeched his brakes. No accident. Blearggh!. Had I braked he woulda hit me, but I knew I was farther forward than back. I guess the guy in the straight-ahead lane next to me was slower at the switch, either 'cause he doesn't pull away quickly or not paying attention or likes to give a full 3-5s for light runners or whatever, but he was still at the line so everyone else just waited for the guy to go (as seen in my rearview).

Then, while I'm still thinking about all that, a bit before the light at St. Francois some pecker head who wants to treat Florissant Rd. as the autobahn (seriously, the cops may be OK with themselves & everyone else doing 10 over, but fuck, 55 in a 35 and having to tailgate & weave is just stupid) weaves up right on my ass, and then when I'm just thinking of moving around the guy in front of me (hell, I do the aforementioned 10 over if I can) he, of course and with no signal, darts by me inches off my bumper. I knew he'd do it, it was plain as day (we had been going a few mph faster than a Jeep on the right, who was still next to both of us, but the Jeep turned off at St. Francois, thus opening the gap).

I'm shaking less now that I've been home. Things to make the bad feelings go away:

• I have a cyclamen randomly putting up flower stalks & flowering straight out of the ground where I thought they'd died,
• J had a chance to go home between hitting the bank and going up the block for his haircut, which means
• I had cash waiting for me on my keyboard, and
• I also had two packages on my chair awaiting me: The 2nd book of Little Dee and the three pendants I bought (F11, M15, and P18) from JB.

Those things all made me much happier than I was when I was parking my car.

whaler has asked me to talk about: shinies, Pro-choice, celtic music, morgan freeman, java, sam neil and dr. who

shinies

What can I say? I'm a sucker for things like jewelry, nifty ceramics, etc. All things shiny.

Pro-choice

I'm pro-choice. I value the woman's right to decide for herself what to do in the case that she finds herself wanting to terminate the pregnancy. I don't believe in valued person-status life at the moment of conception. I believe that a woman must ultimately make that decision for herself. I advocate education so that a woman does not believe she must use abortion as birth control, instead having knowledge of, and access to, effective preventative methods other than the trite "keep your legs closed." I understand that a woman who is raped should not have to assume ahead of time that she might be, and therefore be on chemical BC "just in case" and should not be required to carry a baby conceived in such a way to term.

Note: I require anyone who chooses to start a discussion on this point to be and stay civil. Get personal, or get nasty, you get your comments deleted and banned from further commenting. I won't tolerate a flamewar.

celtic music

While I haven't spent enough time seeking out good celtic music, I enjoy both the instrumental and vocal sound and "feel" of celtic music and want to further pursue it.

morgan freeman

One of the best actors I've ever seen on the silver screen. When I hear he's in something, it automatically adds a little extra nudge for me to consider that the movie has a little more respectability, and makes me more likely to be interested in it, if I wasn't already. I've yet to see him in anything I didn't enjoy.

java

I'm a programmer, and I write a lot of stuff in Java and generally like doing so. It occasionally is a love/hate relationship, but then that seems to be true for programming in general. I started out with Java being the focus of my "special topics" class I took in college, then got hired to do Java programming into a group that needed it but didn't really know it, and kind of went from there.

sam neill

Another actor I enjoy watching. The first movie that comes to mind that many may have seen is Event Horizon. Definitely not a movie for someone who can't watch any sort of gore, or doesn't like scary movies, but those are right up my alley (well, more the horror movie angle than the gore; I've no interest in the Saw series of movies, for example). Of course movies that had a wider appeal are the Jurassic Park movies, but because I tend towards darker movies, I enjoyed him more in EH. I realize now, looking at his film credentials on IMDB, that he's been in a lot more movies than I've seen, and that I need to rectify that. The first movie I saw him in, which I actually caught in the theatre, was In The Mouth of Madness, in which he plays an insurance investigator who gets sucked into a missing horror novelist's book while looking for him.

dr. who

This was a British TV series that my parents were very much into. The original episodes started airing on PBS, years after they'd appeared in the UK of course, and they would often air them in order. My mom taped them while watching, so she could pause recording during the commercials, and now I believe has the complete set that way. The series ended for a couple decades, until the BBC once again picked up with it. The old series was a little more geared towards older children/pre-teens though without talking down to them in any way. Now that the original watchers are adults (and there are also many, many adults who were into it the first time around) the current series isn't aimed so much to the younger audiences, though I'd say it isn't "adult" in the same vein as, say, Sex in the City or The Sopranos or Nip/Tuck. It's science fiction, it's solid acting, and it always holds my attention. The budget has also obviously been greatly expanded since the original series aired; with the old ones it's obvious they were on a shoestring budget even for the day, whereas today the effects have more of a real feel to them.

Concerning writing my own Ace updater, I think I'm gonna go the groovy direction vs. rails (or JRuby, or Ruby).

I'm trying to figure out whether it would be simpler and less hackish to make calls to the SVN that is already installed (well, unzipped and therefore usable) on the system and make those calls all pipe their output to the file system and file I/O that. Or, would it be a better idea to attempt to connect to and talk directly to the repository. Then again, it's possible that groovy would allow me the ability to make those SVN calls using the .exe on my system, yet still be able to read the output as it happens directly. I.e. I/O directly to the system call. This will definitely take poking into the spec docs themselves, I suppose.

Google turned up nothing in terms of there being any SVN parsing modules already written in either language, so it's left entirely to me. It would be more "pure" to do the second option, and write something that'll talk right to the SVN server. I've never hadda write something like that, though. I'd still have to do stuff on the file system, like go through my Addons folder and get a list of all the SVN controlled ones. And, write all the updates to a temp area so that only a complete file download will result in replacement of older files, in case the connection were to be killed in the middle of a file pull thus corrupting the new file. So I just don't know how much of it I want to trust to file parsing, especially if it's not all that difficult to write something that can talk directly to an SVN repository.

Also, if I wanted to be pedantic and thorough, I'd have to write the damn thing with proxy support if I didn't rely on a preinstallation of the SVN client commands. Unless there's already something pluggable for that, which perhaps is more likely than an SVN-speaking module. Assuming SVN supports proxy settings to begin with, then if what I wrote just used it, by extension the proxy support would already be there.

This is definitely not something I'm going to bang out by the end of the week, unless my research goes faster than it looks like it'll go.

(Off-topic: looky, new icon. Didn't make it, just found it on a comm. Fits this type of thing quite well.)

I was talking with diayma Friday night and could not, for the life of me, remember the name of a book series I'd mentioned. I did remember the author, however, which is Modesitt. I finally thought about it again this morning, and came up with the informal name of the series: The Recluce Saga. I don't know how many books are found with that label on it, and at least I don't think Modesitt actually started giving them that moniker, but that's the one. This Recluce fan site has a complete list, in order of publication, of all the books, including the one that just came out a couple weeks ago and the next one set to come out next year. (It also makes me figure out why I was thinking Color of Magic was a Modesitt title as well as a Pratchett title: I was mixing two titles, which are The Magic of Recluce and The Colors of Chaos.)

In that vein, the reminder here for me is to look for the release date of the paperback for Natural Ordermage. I dunno how fast those come out after the hardback, though I suppose it varies, but if it's scheduled before Christmas it's going on my wish list.