Hi.

OK, take two.

So, how you doin’?  Anyone with me still in their RSS, please comment.  Me, I’ve been fine.

Fine! Ha!  Let’s see, my last real post, not counting Cubs angst…around a year ago…hmm, not as bad as I’d thought.

Too much has happened for a wordy catch-up post.  The bullet list of major recent changes:

• got back with Reaganite, shacked up, moved to new neighborhood, downsized cats to one
• left job/career/identity of 10 years for new job/career/identity
• left old job’s 15″ MacBookPro for new iPhone, iMac
• denouement of family suicide #2 (terminal cancer) included modest financial security
• sister: bought a horse, moved to Montana, is now leaving Montana
• parents: both moved to Kalamazoo (that may have happened before my hiatus)

It’s been a lot to deal with. Work is the biggest adjustment. I work for the government now. I’m no longer a Scientist. Work doesn’t have to rule my life–there is just not enough to it for that. But it’s surprisingly hard to change old habits.

While not everyone had to have a blog back in the day, in the last year twitter and facebook seem to have become de rigeur for everyone. I’m there (under this handle, of course). But neither are quite my form. For one, you can’t do them on the Metro with an iPhone. And it drives me NUTS that I can’t categorize incoming updates.  To have posts from good buddies buried amidst posts from people I haven’t spoken to in 15 years is frustrating.  Not to mention the twitter phenomenon of following businesses, blogs, celebrities, etc.  Is there a way to do this that I’ve missed? Can anyone advise?

So back to blogging. I think I will have a pattern of only lightly edited midi-posts, maybe an occasional longer one.  You can expect to see

• more Metro observations/griping
• evolving obsessions
• more work-life balance observations/griping

Rebirth!

The neuroscience of loss, and egocentrism

Scroll down for the cheesecake. Keep reading for some meat.

Got an interesting idea from this post:

When people speak of losing a part of themselves when a loved one dies, they are speaking quite literally, since we lose the ability to effectively use the neural patterns in our brain that had self-organized to interact with that person.

What a great and accessible application of a neuroscientific idea to explain a psychological phenomenon — and it doesn’t even rid that phenomenon of its substance and depth.

I recently read Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking, which is an extensive exploration of the psychology of grief and loss (I recommend it). If you read it with this thought in mind, I think it will give you an interesting angle on why grief can take the shapes it does. This certainly makes me think of how the same book could be written about the neurological changes Didion underwent in that time…and how that’d be a completely different but also valuable book.

I, for one, have gotten value out of both approaches, at different times. In difficult emotional situations I fixate on coming to an understanding of WHY — what could lead a person to do act X? Only later can I process them at a more emotional level. In the train ride to my parents’ house the night we got the news of my aunt’s suicide, I read this book like a novel. It provides an exhaustingly comprehensive psychiatric perspective on suicide’s origins, from the personal all the way to the epidemiological level. It’s written by a clinician/researcher and popularizer who’s respected in both areas, which is no easy feat. It’s later now, and so Didion’s book has been important to the current stages.

While I’m making book recommendations, I found the suicide book a bit too depressing before I had a particular reason to read it. On the other hand, Jamison’s memoir of living with bipolar disorder is gripping and of general interest.

The rest of the ideas in the post are the standard kind of annoying “we’re so close to developing supercomputers that we can download our brains to, and therefore use to live forever” crap we can expect from a certain stripe/era of AI research. Oh, so many issues I have there. A few:

1) One of my favorite neuroscientific truisms is “if the brain were simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.” Where would a bit dump of our brains/minds even BEGIN? The upper-left-hand neuron? (What about cultures that read right-left?) Memories (“I was born a poor black child”)? And which historical point in time to capture? Should we do backups to keep it current? Save older versions, perhaps to retain health, and ditch the body once deterioration sets in? Not to mention the utter meaninglessness of a consciousness without physical input. Just look what sensory deprivation can do to an embodied brain.

2) Metaphors squelch understanding and new ideas, and all the more so when they try to cover more complex phenomena. “The brain is a computer” squelches understanding of its function because it ignores a lot of the types of connections made between neurons.

In fact, it’s just this disconnect between computer simulations of brain function and the actual functioning of the brain that switched me from computer science geekery to neuroscience, lo these 10 years ago now. In a Neural Networks class, I kept trying to make my network’s neurodes more like biological neurons, and got more and more impressed with the impossibility of the task and how it revealed how little we knew about the brain. Considering that each year of biological education teaches you more and more about what the last class didn’t even get near, to have finally run up against the limits of knowledge in a field was heady stuff. I switched majors posthaste.

N.B., the metaphor of DNA as blueprint/book of life is similarly harmful to the understanding of genetics. But that’s another post.

Yeah, I fully and humbly acknowledge that these objections may someday seem as hilarious as “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” and other statements are today.* In fact, one of the coolest things about extended lifespans, to me, is getting to see so many new things developed and so many old things proved wrong. Not to mention the chance that I could see the Cubs win the World Series, although my brain may need to be in a computer for that one.

In other news, vote for me for DC’s Sexiest Female Blogger. Here is some cheesecake to encourage you.

No, I have no idea who nom’d me (Reaganite swears it weren’t him), why I care, or why I would be OK being associated with some of the most gossipy damn people in the DC internet tubes. Since becoming aware of the Best DC Blog site on Monday, I tried to figure it out by reading a few comment threads there and “DC blog wars” posts on BigHeadRob’s blog, and I tell you whut: I’m never getting that two hours back.

Here’s another perspective though. While I had fun comparing the bizarreness to junior/high school on Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday we spent an hour in lab meeting discussing some psychiatric-genetics-research-field politics. And as any DC resident knows, politics is high school. When I tell him some of my hair-raisers, Reaganite assures me that scientist politics is not substantially different in form from Hill politics. So when we tell the poor kids who find themselves at the bottom of high school food chains that “it’s not always like this, it gets better, people grow up,” we are lying. Lying lying lying!

Other reasons I care. Well, I’m self-centered. Show me a blogger who isn’t. Heck, show me a human being who isn’t. I’m competitive too, in weird indirect ways that are hard to describe: more against past versions of myself than other people. In my defense, I think people who know me will agree that these are not my mortal-est sins. (Guess which is!)

Also, as a child, I was an ugly duckling. Glasses filling half my face, feathered hair, not grown into the nose yet…maybe if I win I’ll post a photo of those days. Yay for the exorcism of childhood demons. And how better to prove the old saw that DC is Hollywood for ugly people? 😉

Also also, it’d make a truly hilarious addition to my imaginary business card. Dr. Scientist. Photographer. Sexiest Blogger DC 2007. OK, only sorta hilarious.

Yeah, I’m in Florida. Reaganite’s mom and I get on fine, as I knew we would. But we are all tired and stuff, and R. has to do some work, which is why I have all this goddamned time to blog. Shouldn’t have much more until I get back–going to Disney tomorrow, for the first time ever.

Vote for me!

---

*As you may know, Bill Gates denies saying “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

Thanks, Gene

So yesterday leaving the Woodley Park Metro I see a trumpeter and a saxophonist playing jazz duets, and I’m all paranoid. Is this another experiment? Is that Wynton Marsalis? Am I on camera? Do I have time to stand and listen? Do I even like jazz??

Reader, I went to CVS. But! I walked slowly.

Someone at the best DC Blog voting likes that I have a thumbnail headshot. Well, because I like it so much, here’s the image in all its glory, where you can really appreciate the expression, earrings and dress combo. I really love the hell out of this dress, although nobody else does. Well, to hell with that! I’m going to Florida this weekend to meet Reaganite‘s parents….apparently it’s 80deg there. I shall pack it!

Hmm. Not the sexiest expression ever. Sorta weird to put up during a sexiness competition. Well, perhaps it counts as “vivacious.” We’ll see how quirky a sense of humor the nothing-to-do-at-work DC blogger community has. Anyway, I do have a secret weapon photo. And two cats.

I should really update my blogroll. Right after I do my taxes, find summer clothes that fit me and are nice enough to Meet The Parents in, get a present for The Parents, prepare my bod for the Florida beach, finish my Artomatic installation, pick up cat food, and correct the galleys of my article before I leave. Oh and somewhere in there I should be solving the mystery of the genetics of bipolar disorder (including the enigma of functional intronic SNPs), processing my pregnant friend’s wedding pictures, sewing up her baby’s booties, mailing it all off, calling her to catch up, and mailing two other packages back to the companies that fucked up the orders — but these can wait until after the trip.

Did I mention my taxes? I had it all scheduled for this weekend. One day of Artomatic, one of taxes. Except I sorta had an Artomatic meltdown on Saturday. 21 feet of wall space I had to fill. 21 FEET!!! Well, not only do I not have the money to nicely frame that much stuff, but I simply have not been shooting long enough to even have the catalog of images I’d be proud — or even simply “not embarrassed” — to display. I had one idea for filling it but in the end it didn’t look good at all. So I went back on Sunday and changed spaces. Thanks to epmd for his proxying and selection of a large space though–if I’d’a thought I’d’a had the option of such a big space, I might have asked him to pick a smaller one, but it didn’t even occur to me that they’d have room like that given what I’d heard about past shows! Actually, I owe a lot of people for AOM favors: miscelena and kneb, bsivad, birdcage and the AOM board, furcafe…the usual cadre suspects. Gee, hope I didn’t forget anyone.

I’ll have to lay in much cash for all those drinks I’ll be buying them at the AOM bars.

uh…I’m nominated…

UPDATE: OK, I wasn’t eliminated. Time for my ego and I to check out, especially as now it becomes clear I AM filler (of the innocuous kind, which is fine by me). Indeed, it’s hard to escape the impression that the whole BDCB site is filler for the “DC blog wars.” I was vaguely aware of them when I was attending more meetups and happy hours, last winter and spring, and I thought they were a fluke of some kind, or something that people had outgrown…apparently not. Anyway, the less said about them, the better. My snark skills are NOT up to the task, esp not at midnight.

Don’t vote for me right now, because it’s an elimination round.

Apparently the nom procedure is not as rigorous as all that. Whatevs.

Scarily, the competition is now for “the BEST and the SEXIEST.” Now that’s a higher bar.

Possible Best DC Blog nod…Sexiest Female Blogger???

I only half-follow the Best DC Blog site. I should RSS it, it’s often amusing — I haven’t so far because it’s so often got that slam book snarky vibe that reminds me of the junior high whimpering on the bed that I used to do. Anyway, this morning I noticed a link from it in my logs. How odd, I’m not a commenter there or on their blogroll. Well, it seems I have been nominated for Sexiest Female Blogger. By Michelle Malkin no less! (OK, really a Michelle Malkin hater. That’s 2 points in your favor, Michelle Malkin Naked.) Another mystery wrapped in an enigma. Have we met, MMN?

Perhaps I am meant to be filler for the list, and would be crossed off at an early stage with a snarky comment. Crossed off eventually would be OK, as I’m unlikely to win where there are far more exhibitionist types in the DC female blogger community. But to be first to go….ouch. The junior high bed-whimpering instincts are strong, but I got the psychological and physical chops to play this game now: confidence in myself, 20/20 vision, boobs, relatively flattering clothes, all the stuff I didn’t have back in the day when “She’s Like The Wind,” “Together Forever,” and “I Wanna Have Some Fun” were on Z95* and vests and bubble skirts were in…the FIRST time.

So, let the objectification begin.  Or, rather, resume: I have after all already posted/blogged this image.

That’s about all that’s PG rated (or is cleavage PG-13 now?) that I will share, image- or story-wise. After all, my mother reads this blog. Hi Mom! (Although she gets far less grossed out by these things than my sister does. Hi sister!)

Would it help to make an appearance at a blogger happy hour, in a nice little v-neck and heels? (I Blame the Patriarchy readers: they will, of course, be comfortable heels. I don’t own any other type. Hey, I never claimed to be a radical** feminist. Unfortunately for me, Katie Roiphe was an influence at this tender age too…although I’m also not a lipstick feminist.)
————————————————-
*I owned all of these songs. If you wish to mock me, I’d like to hear YOUR Worst-Of of what you were listening to in 1988. Anyway, I mark this as a dark era of prehistory to my musical awakening which began in 1991 with REM’s Out Of Time and Primus’ Sailing the Seas of Cheese. Also, during the late 80s my mom played a lot of Leonard Cohen and WXRT, which was at its peak then. This made me much cooler later on.

**I typed “radial feminist” at first. Heh.

the manolo

The Techne, she has been meaning to tell you for a while about the blog of the Manolo (the accent parody of which she is emulating).

At first she would pretend that she was merely reading the Manolo’s column in the course of her reading the Express paper of the Friday. When she started turning to the Manolo first thing, she knew it was the self-delusion to say that she was not a fan. Still, the Techne, for some reason she has the pride, and will feel a little embarrassed in such pleasures of the guilt.

But this is sillier than even the accent of the Manolo. The Manolo, he is not only super fantastic, he educates. For example, there is The Gallery of the Horrors, a good starting place where there are many harsh words about the Uggs and the many varieties of ugly clog available today. He also inspires. On the most depressing day of the year, he lifted the spirits with the photo of the outrageous Pucci boots:



Surely this was a public service. I was inspired to purchase boots just like this! But mine are not Pucci, they are Kenneth Cole Reaction. And they are the chocolate brown. And the heels they are wedges. And the embellishment is limited to the stitching on the seams, which is of the lighter color. And there is a faux fur turndown at the top which is meant to be worn with the jeans tucked in, which makes the Techne look like the wintry ski bunny and not like the manic socialite. And they were not $1000 of the dollars, but were on the sale in the basement of Filene for the 40% off, bringing their price into the Techne’s range of the double digits.

So yes, thank you Manolo for inspiring the purchase of the winter boots. I await suitable weather in DC in which to wear them.

I note also that the Manolo, he has a line of the merchandise. I think you will agree that the shirt on the bottom of the page, it is most appropriate for the Techne. It remains only for the Techne to decide between the black and the super-fantastic pink. The one above it, it is also the hilarious.

hail to the end of January

UPDATED: added Liz’s recipe, so people can get it straight from their RSS.  It’s below.

ALL HAIL WORDPRESS: I’ve been Latest Obsession for a year. My anniversary passed in a whirl of family crisis and January has been so busy I haven’t yet processed a single photograph. (OK, I did take the breast cancer ad picture, but that was a cameraphone.) Let’s not discuss how depressing that’s been, although my eye seems to be too tired to see anything, so it’s not like I’m feeling pressed for time, just not all that creative. Despite last week’s post about the protest, when the day actually came I realized I didn’t want to go down to the Mall and deal with it. (I’d had about 7 hours of sleep over the previous 48.) “So you’re pro-war then?” a friend asks. Snicker. (I have to say though, of all the major protest actions around this war, this one felt the least useful. When a war is incipient, new or popular, marching aginst it seems more purposeful than when it’s unpopular. )

ALL HAIL BRAINPOWER: One thing I have been able to do is read. This is notable because my dissertation seemed to stunt my attention span so much that I didn’t even have the patience for a New Yorker. Yep, my dissertation, as in the thing I was working on TWO Januarys ago. My ability to read for pleasure has been growing back, it seems; I didn’t notice at first but I’m actually reading a NOVEL right now, and it wasn’t even written by Kim Stanley Robinson. For some reason I started keeping track of the books I’ve read this year, and I realized I was on pace for one a week. So I think I’ll make that a goal.

ALL HAIL SECOND-GENERATION ANTIDEPRESSANTS: In other happy news, my cat Sue is a lot better than he was last fall. My vet put him on Prozac and it is really doing the trick. He’s pleasant to have around, even, as he hasn’t been since he was an only cat. So he’s off the market, but thanks for your interest, everyone, and your help. Oddly now it’s T-Bone who is a little anxious. He does this thing where he’ll lightly claw me (to get my attention) and then act like he wants me to pet him, but when I do he merely tolerates it and then walks away. You’d think a brain my size could figure out what’s going on in a brain his size…maybe I should slip him a little drugs too…

ALL HAIL WHOEVER RECOMMENDS ME SOME GOOD NEW MUSIC.

ALL HAIL RESALE STORES: I need new clothes. The effects of last January’s Heartbreak Diet (main effect: size 4) are disappearing, and all the skinny-person jeans I had to buy for that are now a weeeeeeeee bit tight. And the stuff I’m growing back into, well…it was old when it fit me the last time, and is painfully unstylin’. I prefer in my sartorial life to be at worst wincingly unstylin’. So a two-pronged approach. 1: The HD weight loss came about through eating too little, not exercise: even well after the H was repaired, I had quite literally forgotten how to eat and shop for groceries. And then I went home for Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and Family Crisis, all of which basically mean: carbs. So now if I want my skinny ass back I have to do it the hard way, by like, moving my body around, and stuff. I’ve been wimping out and waiting for the bus lately on my commute, so I’ll cut back on that. And I’m half-considering training for a long race, but considering how hard I find it to make time to run and how much I hate running in the heat, I doubt it will happen. Enter Prong 2: shopping. In my pursuit of Prong 1 today I was in Bethesda for a dance class, and stopped by Mustardseed on my way home, where I dropped over $100 for about 12 items of clothing. You gotta love numbers like that.

ALL HAIL DA BEARS: I may be having the world’s least likely Superbowl party. So: a Muslim, a Hindu and a Jew (2 of 3 vegetarians) are analyzing some genetic data. It comes out that they all have plans to watch the Bears in the Superbowl next week. We decide to watch it together, but all I can think about is: what the fuck are we gonna eat?? Is it the Superbowl without my friend Liz’s unbelievably yummy bacon dip? I don’t think so….speaking of which, hey Liz, how bout that recipe?

Liz, comin ‘through, posted this to comments:

Man, I’ve been outed.

The EVIL DIP – AKA BLT dip.

1 lb bacon (i like a good quality thick cut bacon, but use what you have.)
16 oz sour cream (yeah i use light, but if you’re hard core, don’t)
1 cup Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise (DO NOT SUBSTITUTE)
4 – 5 Fresh Roma tomatoes
1 tsp garlic powder
Fresh ground pepper

Fry the bacon crisp (i bake it on a jelly roll pan at 400 for 10 minutes and keep an eye on it). Drain on paper towels and chop up.

While that is cooking – slice the tomatoes on the y-axis in half and scoop out the brains. Dice those up into ~1/4 inch pieces. I somtetime salte and drain these in a sieve. soemtimes i don’t – it’s fine either way.

Mix the sour cream, mayo, maters, bacon and garlic powder in a bowl. Add a healthy grind or 5 of fresh ground pepper. Pop it in the fridge for an hour or two and serve with Ritz or Town House crackers.

Yes, I did have a post about family crisis-related stuff, but I pulled it to work on it some more. Of course, I haven’t had the time or desire, so I may just put it up as-was. The topic was what to say to newly grieving people, since I heard a lot of “I don’t know what to say” type comments, and it’s actually not as difficult as people think to say the right thing. (Hint: let THEM talk.)

I miss blogging…

and working on my photographs. September and October have been a complete blur (with the summer not much better) of work. Our data started coming in in June and it has. not. stopped. In the months since I’ve learned shocking amounts about genetics, statistics, computer wrangling (I’d call it programming but mostly it’s data massage). It’s tremendously exciting, but it’s been a roller coaster. In the spring I was in tears over how badly research was going, and now I’m at the forefront of my field and have only to write the papers to prove it.

I’d write about the work–it DEFINITELY qualifies as the latest obsession–but I feel a bit paranoid about it. While it’s almost certainly ridiculous, it’s fairly easy to identify me within the field, and you never know just what sort of info is bad info for others to know. I promise after I publish I’ll tell all…I could speak generally about the work, about where genetics is going and so on, but I think others do it more completely, and this blog is broad enough.

I just can’t find that hour needed for good blogging/photo-editing. I get home and my mind is in a million pieces from all the little things I have to do, such that I can’t pull the pieces together to concentrate on anything before I get too tired. I’ve decided not to reread and edit this post beyond spelling and typos, just in the interest of getting something out there.

I had about 10 ideas just now as I was loading the “compose” page for what to say, and now I can’t remember them. Fuck you, brain.

I leave for Sardinia on Friday. Lest you get too excited for me: it’s for a conference, and like last year when I went to this conference (in Boston), I’m going into it less than healthy. I’m also worried about bringing my new work laptop and my camera–how can I leave either behind? But that’s a lot of crap to carry/keep track of in a country known for its grabbiness. Yeah, you’re feeling really sorry for me about my trip to a beautiful Mediterranean island, I know. I’ll shut up now.

One thing taking up my time that I won’t be complaining about is Reaganite. He’s had his own trial by fire this summer, but always found time for me, and was never short (or worse), as I am in stressful times. Considering the circumstances we met under (I was on the very worst rebound you can imagine), and some things that happened later…well, tenacity paid off on both sides. So I spend as much time with him as our scheduls will allow. And that’s time spent offline–although now that we’ve both convinced our employers to get us MacBook Pros, and we are completely enthralled by their sexiness, maybe we will blog together 😉 Also he really needs a new name. Maybe he will start a new blog and I can refer to him that way. Eh, babe?

(Seriously tho, the MacBook Pros are sexy as hell. How on earth does Apple do it? The other night I was not feeling well and he brought his over and we seriously got out his laptop, put it at the end of the bed, and Front Row’ed a DVD with the included remote. I don’t recall drinking the Apple kool-aid…maybe it was so long ago I’ve forgotten.)

Yeah, how scattershot am I? I wrote this last night and fell asleep before I could post it. Sheesh.

blogergy, or blog synergy

Last week I posted this, and Jamy replied, so we organized an outing, which also involved flickrites, and at one point I had my camera out and it started a conversation and we met inked. Later, I posted this and Jamy posted this and her friend K posted this, and today inked got tipped off and posted this and my hit count was my second highest ever. I’m surprised we all found time to meet face to face in all that. And we photogs haven’t even posted our shots yet! Maybe I should start a feature about DC blogergy. Any submissions?

Today I managed to get home without seeing anybody I know, but I did see a woman who lives in my building. She is notable because she looks like a goth Mena Suvari.  The resemblance really is striking and I double-take every time, which hasn’t yet gotten me the evil eye, luckily. We’ve never spoken but I have a soft spot for the look, which she does quite well, dressing it up for work with lots of nice vintage and vintage-inspired stuff and going all-out on weekends. Anyway, I noticed she had a Penn Camera shopping bag, which scared me. Is she a photographer? Is she on flickr? Do I already know her? Goth Mena Suvari, are you reading this??

n.b. This came up recently…if you don’t know why I say “internets”, click here. And if you’ve ever wondered how how the internets work, well…wonder no more.

more from a happy Metro “customer”

Hey, I only now saw I’m mentioned in Express again. (Link is to PDF, beware long load time.)  For the record, I only object to the term in that one announcement. Of course we’re customers; we spend money, we want services, etc. etc. While riding, though, we are passengers or riders…right?  As the first Express commenter illustrated, it particularly grates on commuters, who hear it every damn day and so have opportunities galore to ponder its weirdness.  (Also, many of us regulars are less “customer”y than average because of TranShare benefits.)
I love Metro. It’s a great system. Period.  People who seriously bitch about it should try commuting in some other cities for a while and see how good they have it here, what with the air conditioning, and the working escalators, and the 100% of stations being accessible, and the going to almost everywhere you need, and the bike-allowing, and the spic-and-span cars and stations, and the reliable posted arrival times.  (And for many of you, the TranShare.)  Change the announcement (word it more succinctly while you’re at it), put up “walk left stand right” and “don’t block the box” signs, and stop taking bigoted ads, and my love for Metro will be complete. (With more visual art in the stations, train arrival times outside, and bus arrival times inside, it’ll be unconditional. And if you put complete Red Line direction information between the downstairs platform’s up escalators in Gallery Place and Metro Center….well, I might not be able to control myself.)

metaphor girl and the DC blogger cycle

In baseball, a player “hits the cycle” if he gets a single, double, triple, and a home run all in one game (in any order). All it formally means for the game is that someone got 4 hits, 6 extra bases and at least one RBI, but it’s rare and noteworthy if it happens, as a sort of interesting sideline. Even if it almost happens, as it almost did for Cubs 3rd baseman Aramis Ramirez on Saturday. (He missed the single, which is odd because it’s the easiest to get…usually the triple is the hardest one.)

I think in metaphors, so that’s the one that leaped to mind when I found out tonight that my Friday Metro musings ALSO got linked by Michael Grass over at the Express local blog log. And I thought, if there were a “cycle” for the DC blog-munity, what would it be? Might I propose:

DCist

Wonkette

Express

DCBlogs

Opinions? Maybe the Express is like hitting a home run (online only) vs. hitting a grand slam (The Blog Log graphic in the dead-tree version). Likewise, I nominate DCist as the equivalent of a triple since it doesn’t have an explicit “other blogs” roundup (although photographers have more chances to get on DCist than other bloggers. Maybe this is the equivalent of batting left-handed). (See what I mean about metaphor girl?)

I’m hanging with the parents in CT this weekend, where I haven’t visited since Thanksgiving. There are a lot of pictures to take, I tell you whut, and I haven’t even started on their house yet. For now, though, straight from the carnival to you via Rita with only the briefest of stops in a photo editor for format conversion, I humbly offer for your enjoyment: duckies.

that kinda night

post-blogger meetup, originally uploaded by techne.

Can't remember the last time I gave my info out via matchbook, if ever. 

….

Bartender at Pharaoh's: "have you lost weight?"
Me: "yeah, I'm not trying though, it's kinda weird, not sure what to do about it…."

Bartender: "try laying off the smack."

For my money there have not been NEARLY enough smack jokes about my weight loss.

….

hired: DCRob and TheMichael for hanging out on 18th long enough for me to re-run into them after they blew off Pharaoh's.

fired: I-495 Blues for not letting me go back for my camera on our pizza run. Favorite awesome shot missed: 4 suits eating massive pepperoni slices.
….

Overheard at Pizza Mart:

"This slice is bigger than my LIFE."

redesign

Thanks to Jamy of Grateful Dating for reminding me that I had redesigned the site recently. For those of you who usually read over RSS, I invite you to click on in and take a look at the new layout. If I could change the colors I might do that.  That's the only change I'd like to make at the moment…what do you think? (And by all means if you know how I CAN change the colors, let me know — I know it's prolly deep in some stylesheet somewhere, but damned if I have the time to figure it out.)

Famous-for-DC

I-495 Blues posts like twice a month. Yet it seems like whenever he does, he gets quoted in the Express or linked by Wonkette. Argh! Not fair!

Ah well, I knew him when:

(At the January Blogger meetup we blew off Mackey's for the Big Hunt.)

DCist Photo of the Day

I had stopped with the gleeful blogging of each DCist use of a photo of mine to illustrate articles….but this time a photo of mine was chosen for their new Photo of the Day feature!

What's more, it has sparked controversy. We got all kinds of fun elements here: is DCist a commercial or non-commercial site? What are the rights of a photographer's subject? How does one actually use the Creative Commons license? Oh if I only knew an EFF lawyer specializing in IP issues, or a photographer and artist's son who is prominent in the open-source software world, or an academic with cyberculture expertise. Folks such as these would surely have interesting things to say. Alas…

And! My controversy comes complete with troll, who complained that the image was out of focus and cropped too tightly. I'll post a reply on DCist in a minute, but I wanted to thank furcafe and James C for having my back. I've been active on Flickr just a few months, but I really value the friends I've made there. It's been a very positive experience both personally and creatively, one I'm very thankful for.

6 things

I am going to attempt to do this quickly and not write a book for each one. Hey, why are you laughing?

Props to B. and L. for their help!

1) One summer, age 12 or so, I watched the Empire Strikes Back every day.

2) I knit. I made an iPod cozy before it was cool. It was too big though.

3) In HS I was a key starter for a varsity sport. We won State my senior year and got to 17th in Nationals, just missing the Sweet 16 on a technicality (and those games were televised, garr!). Which sport? Scholastic Bowl. Yes, to compete in Sectionals we needed medical exams to prove that we were healthy enough to press those little buttons.

4) An online dating site once asked me what my "most unusual or impressive skill" was. It was too gross to list there, but not here! (THATS YOUR WARNING, MOVE ON TO 5 IF EASILY SQUICKED.)

I can get an immobilizing hold on a rat, kill it with a guillotine before its stress response kicks in, collect 3/4 of its blood volume, remove and freeze its brain in one piece without nicking it or anything, remove and separate out the two lobes of its pituitary gland and freeze them, and clean everything up for the next rat — in 5 minutes. I can do this for hours.

Give me another 5 minutes and I can, instead of freezing the brain, dissect out and separately freeze the olfactory bulb, frontal cortex, hippocampi, amygdalae, hypothalamus, and cerebellum (and others, if needed.) And sterilize the equipment and clean everything up for the next rat.

5) As a frosh, on a dare of sorts one night at dinner, I gave a safer-sex demonstration to a good half of my college's students. Leaving no sexuality behind, I used both a banana and an orange.

6) I can't ride a bike or swim. OK, that's exaggerating a little. If I had to bike or swim for my life, I would live, but it wouldn't be smooth, and sadly I tend to get more tension than joy out of both things. See, when y'all were getting bikes as kids, I got…a scooter. So I learned balance, but not really how to kick off and get started and manage the pedals easily and so on. (I also broke a front tooth in half in a fall, although that's probably not the scooter's fault, qua scooter.) As for the swimming, were I swimming away from a threat I'd be able to keep my eye on it the whole time…since I'd be doing the backstroke.

Your turn! (Adding links tomorrow, too tired and pissed at wordpress right now cause it totally ate the first version of this post. Any ideas for helping it play nice with Firefox?)

al3x

birdcage

eric bourland

future therapist

I-495 blues (c'mon, you're halfway there and that's without the obvious one)

wired dude

Tagged!

In a "read all the DC bloggers you can find!" phase I had a bit ago, one of them turned me on to Good at Drinking, Bad at Life, one of the few blogs to survive the inevitable purge that followed. He brings the funny, and did not annoy me like so many other blogs which shall remain nameless did. I guess I posted a comment sometime, cause he saw my woo girls post and tagged me for what livejournal calls a blog meme: six facts about myself.

We have a problem here though. It seemsthat they shoudl be "little-known" type facts. But I'm kinda an open book. I'll tell anyone anything. When playing truth or dare, I always picked truth (also, my friends' dares were way lame). And I forget who knows what, having a bad memory, so I retell stories and things alla damn time, and, people generally being polite, they won't always tell me that they are bored silly hearing it all again, and then eventually they do tip me off that I'm repeating myself and I feel like an idiot.

OK, I'm putting this off, because I hate listing things about myself. (You better show up at Pharaoh's tomorrow, Bad at Life, so I can make you do something you hate, like not drink, or something.) I have a completely out-of-proportion worry that I'll forget something. Say, for example, someone made me list the people I loved the most. I'd prolly say "well my parents of course, and my young cousins are the cute, and their parents, and um, this friend, and that friend, and the other friend, and, hmm lemme think AAIGH! I FORGOT MY SISTER!" Because I have a brain like a sieve, this is how things often happen up in techne mindspace. (see? I already told you I had a bad memory and here I told you again. I only caught it on a reread.) I can forget VERY important things because they're simply not at the top of the "recently thought-about" heap. And having that happen makes it sound like I (in this COMPLETELY UNTRUE EXAMPLE which exists for ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY, sister) love my sister less than (random friend). Which is of course NOT TRUE.

Yeah I hate being pinned down. (Well, I….er. Moving on.) Hanging with joelogon and I-495 Blues (and Articulatory Loop? Were you there still?) at the January All-Blogger Meetup, the conversation at one point turned to our top 5 albums. They made me list mine and wouldn't let me off the hook. It was awful. I begged, I used the feminine charms, I used my PhD-enhanced powers of argument…no worky. I spit something out, but don't ask me what I said, I don't remember. (Brain: sieve.)

This sure is a lot of not-listing-things I'm doing, and me with lab meeting tomorrow morning. I guess y'all'll just have to wait until I have some work to procrastinate tomorrow. 🙂

yay idiotarod pics

Everyone who was at the DC blogger meetup last night is bitching about this guy. (You gotta read the DCB comments. High school never ends, eh?) So, I went to his blog to see how annoying he was.

And he has a pic of our Idiotarod team! So he can’t be all bad.

Team Double Down backup Dr. Birdcage (the only one in focus) blogged the event also.

Son of DCist Creative Commons Brouhaha: RFC

I've been familiar with open-source/GPL/copyleft issues for a decade or so now, mostly because my crowd in college and the years after after was extremely Linuxy and I found the legal/intellectual property questions fascinating. A few weeks ago a buddy from that crowd pointed out that my choice of Creative Commons license options on my Flickr photos was not optimal. I chose a no-derivative-works no-commercial-use option, with my goal being to have someone inform me (via asking permission) when a pic of mine was being used. Buddy pitched for the ShareAlike option with the logic that NonCommercial-NoDerivs diluted the meaning of the CC license.

As I was pondering making this change (I'm very deliberate…or, procrastinatey), a minor fuss erupted over CC license interpretation at DCist. As best as I can tell, it started when DC-area blogger and Flickrite John noticed DCist use a non-commercial-licensed photo, and made a case for DCist being a commercial site and the use therefore violating the license. While not fully accepting that interpretation, DCist agreed to no longer use NonCommercial-tagged stuff except if the photo had a "dcist" tag (which was taken by all as permission granted a priori for any DCist use). OK. Fin, thought everyone.

Now my readership knows that I get very excited when DCist uses a pic of mine. And as I sat down to catch up on my RSS today I got another happy grin when I recognized another shot of mine on there:

Note three things:

— The pic is under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.
— The pic has no "dcist" tag (I liked the composition enough to post it, but didn't think it worthy — at the time I was using the tag very sparingly and I thought the underexposed building weakened the image).
— Martin cropped the shot from rectangular to near-square, which has artistic impact (the crop makes the image less about the "don't block the box" sign and more about the "U street" sign, for editorial reasons). Also I can't quite tell but the pic may have been lightened (this was taken before I did any postprocessing beyond cropping or I might have done the same, on the building).
The image on DCist:

Seems clear to me that DCist's use is in violation of its license and of their own photo policy. Permission was not obtained by asking me or by my use of the "dcist" tag. So by their own policy they were not permitted to use it since it has a Non-Commercial clause, and while their policy doesn't address the No-Derivs clause, by the same logic that term is violated too.

Was my previous acceptance of their use of my stuff taken as implicit permission? I have to say that in practice, in this case, I don't much mind the use or even the crop. I want the exposure (hah), would have granted permission if asked, and would likely have tagged the photo DCist had I been using tags then as I do now. But that's not the point, is it? Their use altered the artistic intent of the image–both their crop and their mode of reproduction. They appear to use a locally stored low-res copy instead of a link back to flickr, which makes things look crappy (possibly affecting the photographer's reputation) and also removes the accountability/link trail that'd be uncoverable by services like technorati.

I love DCist. I think it's one of the better -ists and I get a lot of value out of my visits/subscription to it. They have played a large role in my development as a photographer–their use of tagged flickr shots taken by Just Folks Around Town was an incentive to get me back behind the camera again and I owe them no small debt for that motivation. And they throw good events and I personally like the DCist-affiliated individuals I've met that way. 🙂 I am perfectly aware of the volunteer nature of the work they do and that IP issues are not at the forefront of editors' minds as they seek to illustrate posts about life in the District. So I have a strong desire to drop this. But that seems like the wrong thing to do on many levels. So this is a request for your comments. What do you think?

Maybe this will look clearer in the morning. It's been a very long day, longer than any weekend day has a right to be…..

blogosphere meme

You scored as Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica). You are leery of your surroundings, and with good reason. Anyone could be a cylon. But you have close friends and you know they would never hurt you. Now if only the damn XO would stop drinking.

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 88% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 88% Serenity (Firefly) 75% Moya (Farscape) 69% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 69% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 63% SG-1 (Stargate) 63% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 56% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 50% FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files) 31%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

This is like the 4th time the universe has told me to watch BSG this week. I don’t need any more obsessions!! Fuck off universe, leave me alone!

On DCist again!

A metro pic this time!

I really liked that idea and I'm glad I got a chance to flesh it out. I'd see trains with that sign around, but never manage to get anything off in time. Then one post-movie Saturday night I was stuck at Metro Center and one was sitting on the opposite platform. I had a lot of time to get the exposure and composition the way I wanted it.

(Why it's coming out so pixelly at that resolution, though, I dunno. Look at the original size, it's much sharper than it looks in this and the DCist post.)

I was having a bummer of an afternoon, too (work guilt). That was an unexpected boost. Thanks Ryan Avent. 🙂

iPeeve

I have an online-life pet peeve.

You know the abbreviation “wtf”?  Which arose, like most internet abbreviations, to save typing time for the common phrase?  It works, don’t you think?  I do. I use it all the time in the real world and online.  Maybe I shouldn’t (I did acquire the nickname “pottymouth” last weekend, and this from a peer group who aren’t so chaste of mouth themselves). But I do.
Recently I’ve started to hear people say “doubleyou tee eff??”  In groups where blue language is just fine, they do this; in groups where there are no online-savvy credentials to establish, they do this. It’s all I can do not to point out that wtf is an ABBREVIATION, the point of which is to ABBREVIATE something, and “what the fuck” is three syllables and saying all the letters is five and FIVE IS MORE THAN THREE.
The first person to hear me say “doubleyou tee eff” gets to point and laugh at me for a long time.

It’s happened!

WARNING: this is a really stupid thing to be proud of.

One of my pictures was picked to illustrate a post on DCist.

I’ve been reading the -ist blogs of wherever I live for a year or so, and only in the last few months did I notice that the pics on DCist were taken by actual non-pro people, generally posted through flickr accounts. “Hey” thought I, “I have a flickr account from back in the day. And a camera. And the ganas.” (You’ve got to have the ganas!) The rest is history, well-documented on this blog. So I’ve had this as a goal for myself for a while, and…now I need a new goal 🙂

Why is it stupid? Cause I went to a happy hour a few weeks ago and met the DCist people, and they’re just folks, and there’s already plenty of just folks who have nice things to say about my stuff on flickr, so why should I want these PARTICULAR folks’ regard? Well, cause they have a soapbox. And while it’s probably not true, I have the bias that if there’s a website that I visit, it must be popular (cause why else would I know about it). So it’s exposure. Which flickr has already been giving me, but this feels different.

Watch me be totally blase about this sort of thing in 6 months, like my flickr friend birdcage, who doesn’t even notice anymore when her pics get picked. I guess when you are so freaking talented that even pictures you shoot half paying attention at a bowling alley are cool, that’s what life is like.

…naah I can’t see myself blase…I’m still the person who, every now and then, loads up a photo of “her name Ph.D.” on the scoreboard at Wrigley Field last year, just to smile at it for a few minutes. I’ll probably always be happy about things like this.

DC pool hall monopoly

Wha! It turns out that pool halls Atomic, Bedrock, Buffalo, AND bars Mackey’s and Aroma are all owned by the same conglomerate! (This actually makes sense to me. I get the same ooky vibe from all of those places, well, the pool halls anyway; aroma and mackey’s are their own thing.)

Fight Big Billiards! Go to Kokopooli’s; $10/hour, perfect pool hall ambiance, and they have small tables (7 feet if I remember right) which helps bad shooters like me play their hustler friends.

Or go to any of the free bar tables around a-m. I’d tell you where they are, but then I’d have to kill you.

Grab bag post: allow me to direct you towards my friend Regaining my Faculties, a blogger academic single mother who specializes in medieval toilets and old english and cool ivory tower stuff like that. Oh, and being HILARIOUS–I met her through a listserv with something like 200+ opinionated fascinating women and she’s a favorite of EVERYONE on there, and we can’t even agree on the color of the goddamned SKY. She had an “awful, but ever so much fun to read about” weekend a bit ago with her son and a friend of his. Go read it, you’ll laugh.

sex advice from fish

Added a ton of blogs to my RSS aggregator recently. One is a science blog clearinghouse, on which I read today:

The lessons are clear. Having a long sword will help you intimidate and beat up your competition, and painting stripes along its length (or at least at the tip) will win you the admiration of females.

If you’re a fish, that is.

There is no necessary expectation that it will help at all if you’re a hairless ape, but if anyone tries it, let me know how it turns out.

Blogger drinky-drinky week

Break shot at Cue Bar, originally uploaded by techne.

On Wednesday this week I went to the DC Blogger Meetup and met a buncha people. On Thursday I went to the DCistHappy Hour and met…a lot of the same people. Well, OK. Some new ones too. Post in the comments if you remember meeting me and when I get around to it I’ll add you to my blogroll!

UPDATE: Others have more informatively blogged the event:
Joelogon was there Wednesday, and took lots of pictures of my boobs
Wayan was there Thursday flirting his tail off, and also hasseveral fun pictures with me in them on flickr
DCJohn was there Wednesday and Thursday (professional interest you see. Uh huh.)
Al3x was also there both nights, but did not get the memo about taking pics to post on flickr
Michael also took lots of good shots, some of which I appear in