Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Spent yesterday evening nomming teriyaki courtesy of the Wendling, shopping for snacks for future visitors, hoping I had an excuse not to go to Lambert House, and then going to Lambert House. The director had a random query to come up with a list of invitees for a particular activity, and the volunteer coordinator needed me to update income ranges. Yes, we have to collect data on how much youth, if on their own, or their parents earn.

Fun fact: you can do all kinds of gnarly multi-table operations (“joins”) inside one query against a real SQL engine. Microsoft Access’s subset (Ptui!) of SQL is more restrictive, but it appears to support named subqueries, which in many cases will get you where you want to go. I miss real SQL date handling, though.

The director has finally agreed with me that maybe getting off Access 2010 would be a good thing, and not even for the above reasons. It went out of support six years ago*, and the UI library that it comes with has bugs that'll never be fixed. Those bugs are what the director is responding to. I have a long list of my own reasons.

The director drove me home for the second time this week. Much appreciated, because that would have been two chilly waits for a bus otherwise.



*Ten years of support for a particular product isn't bad by industry standards.

ack_yeahright came over last night as planned. By the numbers:

• 720 ml of Otokoyama sake
• 750 ml of Holy Buddha mead from Mr.B's
• a couple of pounds of munchies
• six hours of chatting
• seven and a half hours of sleep
• zero hangover

I think my esteemed Burner buddy is going to be my guide to Treffen.

She told stories of her ex that almost made us feel sorry for the guy, and I have plenty of friends who loathe him for good reasons. Can we maroon all the trash dudes on an island? Maybe we'd even leave them food & water. Since they tend to be global warming skeptics, it should be one of the islands that's about to be underwater. But I digress.

There was much talk of health issues because we're olds, but hers are definitely improving of late, which she attributes to platelet-enriched plasma. There are certain physical activities that we used to do together that I'd love to do again if she feels up to it.

Oh: most of my iTunes playlists have been messed up, which I discovered as I was about to get my 50th birthday playlist going for last night. I don't think it was the migration to the new machine that did it. I had one particularly bad incident about a year ago whereby iTunes just couldn't, you know, do its job, and I ended up rebuilding my library. That's probably when I lost the playlists, which goes to tell you how often I use them. Luckily for me, I can rebuild my 50th birthday playlist from a DW entry if I want to.

Oh oh: the Train Platform Lady is under the weather. I have no plans for tonight, but I'm kind of OK with that. I think I may hit Capitol Hill this afternoon in search of a comic book, and engage in any of myriad circumflatulatory projects.

I got a request from Good Sister this morning for the document that granted me medical power of attorney. This was in 2014, years before GS sued for guardianship. Mom had some kind of falling out with Evil Sister and decided to transfer said power from ES to me in a fit of pique. Yeah, that was all too typical of Mom in her later years.

But why would GS even want this doc? Because her lawyer, to their credit, wants to make doubly sure that they can prove that I was my mother's child. (GS used the word "child", not "daughter". Grr.) I do have a little bit of anxiety about how I as a trans person will get treated by the courts in Florida these days.

Oh by the way, I only had the document in hardcopy form. Apple broke my preferred scanner app with their most recent major MacOS update. Le sigh. I appear to still have an app, but it doesn't know how to tell the scanner to feed documents, for starters, and how to cope with that and still scan a multi-page document isn't obvious.

There are only two hard problems in computer science:

1. cache coherency
2. naming things
3. off-by-one errors

My problem today is the second one, in spades.

I just had my first more-or-less adequate night's sleep since Thursday morning. February has been Insomnia Month for me since I moved to the high(er) latitudes.

Got hairs did, and had dinner with the Siberian Siren. She apologized in advance for how hard she's going to be to get a hold of in the future: she's been working like a fiend to launch her business. She complains that she can't fit most of her many, many dresses because she's been skipping workouts for so long. She's young, hard-headed, and made of ambition. On that subject, I told her that I didn't want to do tech stuff for her because a) I'm not sure I have the skills she needs, and b) I don't share her ambition and I don't want to let her down. She took it with admirable good grace. When I left her I said, "Don't burn yourself out."
"It's too late for that," she said. I wish her all the success she wants. I also worry about her a little.

Woosh back home to get ready for a party up in Shoreline thrown by Funny Lady and friends. I was late to pick up the Tickler, but luckily, she doesn't get her undies in a bunch about things the way I do. As you'd expect from Funny Lady, it was off the hook: crowded, loud, and full of nicely dressed ladies. I had a couple of instances of women remembering me when I didn't remember them. Arg! FL says I have several admirers, to which I made the only sane response: "Tell them to ask me the fuck out! I don't know who they are." But we're talking about queer women here, who notoriously can't muster the ovaries.

FL & co. asked me who I like to date. I came up with two answers: I get along really well with extroverts like the Tickler and cupcake_goth, and I would totally date myself. (Funny Lady, a bit sadly, says she wouldn't. I would totally date her; in fact, I did.) The Tickler and I have noticed that we're similar in these respects, but where we part ways is that I really miss living with someone and she doesn't. Believe it or not, Ex and I had our moments.

But back to the party. The Tickler and I had put our coats on to leave as the hosts started putting their furniture back where it usually was, when two ladies in lovely dresses started making out on the dining room table. After a couple of minutes of watching that, the coats came off. And then a lot of other clothes. I've said it before: gatherings with Funny Lady usually result in hot queer makeouts, fearing for your life, or both. Saturday night did not disappoint.

Crashed at the Tickler's, and found out that Itto's nearby doesn't do brunch anymore. (The good news, though, is that they've opened on Capitol Hill.) So, we had a mobbed brunch at Arthur's where the Tickler told me some stories about how she became the fabulous freak she is today: corrupted by a younger Goth girl in college - I observed that the Tickler didn't rob the cradle, it robbed her - then working as a union organizer in New Orleans in the mid '90s, which was way more fun than it sounds. She too wonders how she's still alive after walking a mile across the 4th ward in a slip around 0400 one morning.

Got zapped - part of pre-Sydney beautification - and went to Lambert House at 1900, where I at least fixed the bug that broke everything on Wednesday*. The schema changes are done plus a couple of minor things, but as I told the director, the remaining 75% of the work is stupid, fiddly GUI stuff. At least I don't have to worry about data migration now.

Came home. Crashed. Woke up and ate breakfast. Started typing. Running late to work out now. Zoom!



*At least when you're using linked tables in MS Access - a horrible feature if ever there was one - renaming a column quietly and nastily breaks everything.

I stayed home to be dry and shake this cold despite knowing of multiple fine opportunities for socializing and booty-shaking. Oddly enough, I'm not all that resentful of the universe about it.

But what I really want to write about is another encouraging sign that my son is growing up. A recap of the story so far: In the spring quarter of this year, he dropped on college class after letting us know, then another without letting us know. He got himself put on academic probation. Thanks, ADD! So he and his adviser worked out a plan whereby he was to take one class in the quarter he just finished - he says he did well, yay! - then two, then a full load.

Well. He came for lunch yesterday because his work & school schedule meant he couldn't spend the usual two consecutive nights with me. On the way back to my place he said he'd made an appointment to talk to his advisor because his college's registration system wasn't letting him register for a second class for next term. I quizzed him on when the registration deadline is, and he thinks he'll be fine if he gets it taken care of this week. I said I'm glad he's on top of it, and that's an understatement. Here's why this is a big deal:

1. He registered without needing a reminder, at least not from me. I don't know if Ex has been reminding him.
2. He took prompt action to deal with a SNAFU...
3. ...apparently on his own initiative.

Yeah, this is all basic adulting, but this kid has long had difficulty with basic adulting, and that's been my #1 worry about his future.

Why is he able to do this now but wasn't earlier? I don't know. I never know, about any of the abilities he gains seemingly overnight, and I'm pretty sure no other parent does either. Children are a mysterious, non-linear phenomenon.

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And what did I do yesterday while I was coughing and sniffling? Plan my birthday party, of course. Schedule spreadsheet? Check! Packing spreadsheet? Check! Traktor DJ software obtained and figured out? Check! (Don't worry, Goths. I front-loaded the playlist with goodies for you.) I must say, Traktor seems to be just what you need if you want to be a laptop DJ. I... don't, really.

TIL Yesterday I learned: what the gozinta & gozouta for map reduce jobs looks like. Yeah, welcome to 2003, but I finally needed to know it. The long-dormant hardware weenie in me wants to hit it with a big content-addressable memory.

Also, in Java land, you can run a web site from a jar (a UNIX tar archive in drag, for you more normal people) that contains your static content. Am I crazy, or is this, like so many technologies from the Java community, a big pile of nope aimed at a pointless design goal*?

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M'boy is with me this weekend because his mother wanted freedom for her birthday, but nevertheless I had a brief jaunt at Substation last night. I figured Pezzner** would be on too late for me - I'd promised the Wendling I'd be back by 0130 - but I was pleasantly surprised that I got to catch his whole sweet set and still keep my promise. Crowd: kinda hippy, kinda househead faithful. I bought 3D-printed earrings from a better-than-usual vendor. I refrained from talking to the tall cute blonde woman in the apparently leather swing dress because she was all over her skinny, geeky-lookin' dude of a date.



*Platform independence. Linux killed it.
**Formerly half of local glitchy duo Jacob London, if you'll recall. He's gotten a respectable amount of national exposure.

Now that I've been using my iPhone 6 for a week, I feel like I can compare & contrast it with my old Windows phone:

iPhone is better at:

• Having apps, period. Everyone supports iPhone, including everyone you care about for all values of you, even if you're a Microsoft employee. Seriously, I've seen at least one Microsoftee vent his frustration online about this.
• Having apps that work. I kept showing up at the wrong time for hair appointments around daylight savings time because of the Windows calendar app. Granted, maybe they fixed that in Windows Phone 8, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.

Windows is better at:

• Navigation. Windows has a back button that works like gangbusters within and between apps. Multiple Gmail accounts are easier to switch between on Windows. One long scrollable screen width of largish tiles is easier to get through than many screens of icons no matter how arty they are.
• Being cheap? I wish I had a second bullet point here, but I don't.

Mind you, the Windows phone I was using was five years old, which may have (ahem) colored my perceptions a bit. I've tried to take that into account here. I will point out that Aspiring Ex has a much more recent Windows phone that I've at least had a peek at, so I think what I've said here is still accurate.

Spent a quiet Christmas Eve & morning with my son nomming the ham he requested. There was a sunny walk around Green Lake, and no complaints from m'boy until I wore him out after two miles.

My present to myself? Ableton, the cheap SKU, on sale. I may be inflicting bleeps & beats on people before too long. It's kind of addictive, and it seems to be quite capable & well-designed.

Christmas Dinner at chez ionan. I have partaken of honest-to-goodness Christmas goose. I have to say I had my trepidations because I'm not crazy about duck. If you imagine a cross between duck & ostrich, that's what goose is like. It's rich, red meat: delicious, but not to be eaten in large quantities.

The highlight for me, though, was the pie that ionan's wife J made from ingredients she brought back from their recent trip to Brazil. That was intense, passion-fruity goodness right there, made with unsweetened passion fruit concentrate and condensed milk that J swears is different from what you find in North America. Indeed, people brought so many desserts (including me, thanks to a neighbor at the old place) that I'm kind of maxed out on dessert until I dunno, maybe summer?

I'm currently at work taking care of a few easy loose ends, nothing serious. It's a ghost town here even though we're officially open.

No Temptress tonight; she's still sick. Maybe I'll go out tonight or maybe I won't, but tomorrow night is definitely a queer girls' night out at Kremwerk - after, of course, an earlier gathering at the house of a certain couple who recently returned the area. Oh to the yeah.

Next week: Sunday night through Wednesday morning I'll be at the old place in Kirkland. I plan on walking Bigpuppy enough, preventing my son from wrecking the house, and making sweet love to Ableton.

There's been a calendar miscommunication between my Aspiring Ex and me. I'd thought I was going to get m'boy this weekend, but she thought she was. Since her mother had bought a plane ticket to fly up here, she won. Never mind my desire to road trip with my son; that can and will wait a couple of weeks. The weather's been crummy lately anyway.

No, what this entry is about is calendar services. I use Google, and my employer uses Google, but since my previous employer was Microsoft and I could get their phones for the right price, i.e. free, AX uses Microsoft's calendar service (What is it even called this month, anyway?) because — wait for it — that's the default on a Windows phone.

The long and short of it is that she doesn't yet have things set up so that she can see my personal calendar, making SNAFUs like the above more likely. I know Windows phones can at least read Google calendars, although I've encountered some problems with trying to write to them from my phone. I'm assuming this problem is PEBKAC until proven otherwise, but I'm not completely sure of that. Hence the gripe.

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Since I have some unexpected free time this weekend, there will be girl time tonight with the Siberian Siren at the Spot, where there will be a women-only event. She's a lesbian in good standing, so she can help me process the momentous events of the last week.