an udge and a wink

On spotting a pattern

2012-01-22T20:22:00.005+01:00

Readers may — should — be aware of PostSecret, a kind of anonymous clearinghouse for secrets that people write on postcards and send to Frank, who posts (a selection of) them on the web. (To be clear: people post their own secrets, it's not for outing your friends or even enemies.) I read the site every Sunday (it updates once a week), and am always moved by at least one of the secrets.For a

Christmas

2011-12-30T21:10:00.005+01:00

Hello blogosphere, it's been a long time since we met. I've missed writing, and I deeply regret the loss of the community that had developed here and in the blogs I read. I'm not going to promise to write every N days in 2012, as that would just be another stick to beat myself with when I missed a date; but I will start writing again.I'm in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with cousins and other

Awake (pre-birthday edition)

2011-06-06T05:58:00.003+02:00

Woke at 5:30 after around three and a half hours' sleep. Milk is cooking for hot chocolate, and I am hoping to get back to sleep after writing this note.Had a good day yesterday at the racetrack in Baden-Baden with G and U and their kids, despite torrential rain on the way there and a dead car battery and nearly 90 minutes of delay in tailbacks on the autobahn on the return journey. I spent …

Awake (New York edition)

2011-04-25T12:12:00.008+02:00

I'm in the Big Apple, in a moderately lousy (but also moderately priced) hotel. I woke just before 5am local time, 11am my time, after getting to sleep around 6am my time. I'm unsure whether or not to call this "insomnia", but it is far earlier than I hoped to rise.I have to give a kick in the head to the airport bus service (can't remember the name, will update this if I do) for lousy service.

Awake

2011-04-06T05:18:00.005+02:00

I'm sick. Only moderately, I believe and hope, but I've been sick off and on for nearly a month now. It started as a sinus infection, for which I had two different antibiotics and a week off work (for the first time in recent memory). The second antibiotic did the trick on my sinuses, mostly, but left a dry cough. Last night, for whatever reason, the cough "itched" so strongly that I've now

Risk and death

2011-03-13T11:49:00.003+01:00

Like everyone else, I spent much of Friday (and indeed yesterday) following the events in Japan. I too was shocked and appalled, and frightened, by the force of Nature unleash'd (as the poet said) and the — what to call it? — the futility and uselessness of our technology and science in dealing with it. What exactly should we find awesome about nuclear power or the theory of quantum mechanics if

Finished

2011-02-07T17:45:00.006+01:00

We sent the competition off at 3 o'clock this afternoon, and I have been lazing about since. The weather is wonderful, sunny and warmish and a perfectly blue sky, the air is fresh and clean and smells of the forest. After finishing up and debriefing, I walked downtown for lunch (at 3:30) and then bought supplies for dinner. I'm going to cook tonight and tomorrow, which I haven't done in ages,

Awake

2011-01-31T06:30:00.002+01:00

Hello world, it's been a while since we spoke. It is 6:30am as I'm writing, but I have been awake and drifting since around 5am (having previously woken at 2am but gone back to sleep) so I am calling this "night" and "insomnia." Hot chocolate is in the making, and I will head back to bed after drinking and posting.We are approaching the deadline for a competition aka the chance to have some work

1.1.11

2011-01-01T17:36:00.002+01:00

Happy New Year, my dears. May it be peaceful and enjoyable, and may you find happiness and fulfillment (in whatever forms you seek them in).

Regina, or: On the road again

2010-12-30T21:29:00.005+01:00

So I was out on the frozen flatnesses of the Canadian Prairies (like the "boundless and bare … lone and level sands" of Ozymandias, with added snow) for Christmas (with Sis and BIL and their kids and our parents), and a goodish time was had by all. The only hint of trouble, significantly larger than a single cloud on the horizon, could be summed up in the phrase "getting old sucks." Not that

Public Service Announcement: Apple Migration Assistant fails

2010-12-27T01:02:00.003+01:00

Just so you don't think I'm a totally blind-and-gullible koolaid-swallowing Apple fanboy, here's a bit of bad news for users of Apple's Migration Assistant (which means any non-first-time-buyer). I wrote about this disparagingly last Spring, when I got my newest Mac Mini and tried to use the MA to import my data from the old one.Well, I found some new and exciting borkage in the current MA while

Zatsuroku

2010-12-17T11:04:00.005+01:00

That's Japanese for "miscellany," or so Google tells me, and who would know better? I have quite a lot of odds and ends left to report from my trip to Japan, though I've been home for nearly two weeks and will be flying to Canada on Sunday (weather-gods willing).Many of the oddities that one notices in Japan are social, differences in the way people move and behave within society. Social space

Tokyo: tenth day

2010-12-02T03:03:00.007+01:00

Trainblogging again on the way home from Tokyo, heading into the sunset. For the first half-hour or so out of Tokyo, the train follows the coastline; as when travelling along the Mediterranean coast of France/Italy one gets tantalizing glimpses of the sea between the tunnels. [Written on Wednesday, but I was too tired to post it. It's funny, I am not having any of the usual jetlag symptoms, but I

Fukuoka - eighth day

2010-11-28T14:20:00.007+01:00

I'm trainblogging live on the Shinkansen, on the way to Fukuoka to have ramen noodle soup for lunch with a new friend from SL. How cool is that? [This was written on Sunday, but I was too tired to post it when I got home.]I'm actually using my laptop on my lap, for perhaps the first time ever: there is a tray at each seat, but the spacing between rows is so remarkably wide that it's too far away

Kyoto - fifth day

2010-11-26T01:27:00.011+01:00

I'm settling in well after nearly a week here, finding my way around the city and the mentality. I noticed yesterday a particular sign of the process of getting accustomed to the place: People in the street don't look "Japanese" any more, they just look like people. I still have terrible trouble judging ages (at least from a polite social distance), but then that sometimes confuses me in Germany*

Kyoto - first impressions

2010-11-22T23:39:00.006+01:00

Clean. Remarkably clean, in fact, although I have yet to see a single garbage can (neither domestic garbage disposal nor public litter-bins by the side of the road).This cleanliness has a funny side too. As you enter a Japanese house (or a temple/shrine, or particularly formal restaurants), you step across the threshold into a transitional zone which is not-yet-inside. It typically has a tiled or

In Kyoto

2010-11-22T14:18:00.004+01:00

Survived the flight and the first day (nearly two days actually: landed at 9am). Had a nap and a shower (in that order), walked around town, had some marvellous food, slept nine hours straight through, went walkabout this morning, had a great lunch and a walking tour of a few shrines, then packaged dinner from the local convenience store. More details about that in the next post, let's just say

In transit

2010-11-20T12:47:00.004+01:00

Sitting at the gate in FFM, with an hour to go. There is of course no free public wifi here, but I still have the UTMS usb stick that I used to access the Internets all those months (I now have a working ADSL connection at home, btw, after two false starts when the installers screwed up). The stick works here just fine.This will have to be a brief post as the battery is running down faster than

Buddha's belly, Jesus' tear

2010-10-12T13:55:00.007+02:00

It's a funny word, "retreat:" so many meanings in so many contexts.I'm on a retreat with Susan's* SecondLife meditation group, the third that I have attended with them (all this year). I even organized this one, which was something of a stretch for me. I've never tried to arrange a week-long event for a group of people before, and while it has worked out well there were definitely things that I

On the inconstancy of time

2010-09-11T19:46:00.005+02:00

So here I am sitting in Starbucks waiting for the 11am (SL time, 8pm my time) Fracture dance and conversazione salon to begin, and realizing that it seems a very short time since I was here. This week has been about ten hours long, subjectively. I'm aware that there are seven days between Saturday and Saturday, and I know that I wasn't comatose for a week (G would have surely said something), so

Thought for the day

2010-09-10T12:05:00.001+02:00

One day, while staying at a friend's house, Nasrudin peered over the wall into the neighbor's yard and saw the most wonderful garden he had ever seen. He noticed an old man patiently weeding a flower-bed and asked,“This is a beautiful garden. I'd like to have one just like it. How do you make a garden like this?”“Twenty years of hard work.”“Never mind,” said Nasrudin.Indeed.

The view from here and now

2010-08-30T09:18:00.010+02:00

I realized something this morning as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep.My internettery is all about contact and community, about not feeling alone and lonely. I started blogging out of curiosity, but kept on because of the community of readers and commenters that developed. As I became ever more deeply immersed in SL, the "hotter" and more immediate community feeling there took up more and

Meh.

2010-08-24T10:47:00.004+02:00

There are days (today, for instance) when even apparently simple tasks (e.g. calling up to get a phone line reconnected) seem just too difficult to deal with. I don't know where to start.There have been pleasant events recently, and there is big news to tell, but I'm just too far down to talk about that now.It occurs to me that this is perhaps the start of the anticipated downturn following the

Prince Albert

2010-07-27T17:59:00.002+02:00

(Forty kilometers due east of P.A. actually, but that's the nearest town.) Having a pleasant stay with uncle and aunt and piles of cousins. Weather is mostly grand: coolish temperatures, frequently sunny, gentle breezes. Lots of storms moving through, though: it has rained briefly but intensely every day. Watched a few films on TV, ate our way through enormous mounds of food five times a day.

Growing it out

2010-07-10T12:23:00.005+02:00

Growing it outOriginally uploaded by udgeOr, things I didn't expect to be different and difficult when I moved to Germany.I can't find a barbershop in Stuttgart.In London there was, if not one on every streetcorner, at least one in every High Street. There appears to be none at all in Stuttgart.There are plenty of hairdressers, mind you, and many of them will do men's hair too. But a hairdresser