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So. In a fit of annoyance at the impossibility to quickly find a particular book among those lining the living room bookshelf, I took upon myself to rearrange the books, this time by author's last name. (It was originally sorted by colour by my sister years ago. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but there's no way I'd be able to remember what colour that Neil Gaiman book was.) I also lugged down some of the books that were in my room because the shelves were getting too full, and, well, if I kept my Dorothy Dunnett books to myself how was I supposed to entice other people into reading them?

Most the books left in my room are the unread ones -- those already take two rows of my shelf:

I'm currently reading Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea.

( more books )

Now, if I only could get some reading done . . . I have next Monday off and Tuesday's a public holiday, so here's to catching up with some reading. Or sleep. We'll see.

I haven't been very good about updating, have I.

The drama about the internet connection continued for about a week more after the last post, and my feelings about the whole thing had pretty much boiled down to "what the heck, I don't need the internet anyway". (That is not true. While I have discovered I could live without an internet connection at home, I'd rather not live that way.)

Then I was a bit sick -- a horrible sore throat, low-grade fever combination that didn't seem to want to go away -- and that along with insomnia and fatigue didn't make me the most pleasant person to be around. I found myself drifting off while at work a lot, which made me feel a bit like an idiot, but then again, I doubt anyone noticed.

So now I have an internet connection (hopefully) and am better (mostly) I shall try to be around more. (Yes, we've all heard this story before.)

--
Ramadhan is here. I feel vaguely old and distant from everything.

I think I now know the meaning of patience. It involves things like these:

I've had a problem with intermittent connection since last week. My ISP and phone company is TM, and the only reason it's still around is that there's no other reliable (hah) service around, and it controls the landlines anyway. I called the helpline last Tuesday (that would be 13 July) and after the usual (rather inane) questions about lights blinking and switches switched on and buttons pressed, this bit of conversation ensues:

Tech: Ok, go to the Start button, then All Programs, then Accessories, then Command Prompt.
Me: *tries not to bang head against desk*
Tech: Ok, you got that? You see a black box?
Me: *bangs head against desk* Yes.
Tech: Try this: type ping -- Penang, India, Netherlands, Ghana -- and space, then 127.0.0.1. Can you read the statistics on the fifth line?
Me: . . . Yes.

Then we ping more numbers.

( that's just the start )

This entry was written over a course of a week, hoping that it would end with "the internet's back!" each day and I would be able to post it. Took a while, didn't it. I hope I won't be writing another entry tomorrow going through this whole thing again.

So, a quick one:

• I've been busy and tired and horrible lately, especially at commenting and keeping in contact. I'm taking three days off work starting Wednesday, though I can't promise I'd actually do anything useful within that time. Plans right now mostly consist of going back to my hometown to see my parents.

• I don't think I've read a single book this month. I am rather aghast by this. Despite being aghast, I still haven't managed to concentrate on anything for more than a few pages, and this scares me somewhat. I seem to be reading more fic, though. The more interesting ones are linked up at delicious.com.

• Too much TV hurts your brain. I should know this. I've been watching I don't know how many episodes of FlashForward on the new channel, though like most things that deal with time travel (admittedly no one is time travelling per se in this one, but still) it takes an effort from me not to let my head explode.

And now I disappear again! Good night!

Why is it when it's something about Gaza and Palestine there's almost no noise at all about it? From BBC News: Deaths as Israeli forces storm Gaza aid ship; from Malaysia's The Star, which reports: Two Malaysians on board aid ship attacked by Israeli warship.

I find this completely unacceptable.

Sigh. With that, on to what I was originally going to post. This was drafted earlier, when I wasn't feeling all that disgruntled with the world.

Final Fantasy Exchange gifts were revealed last week! (This journal: definitely not the place to find breaking news.) I'm just glad to say I had managed to escape from being doinked by the tonberry, even with my horrible last minute efforts.

Here's the gift I received, Forget-me-not by Person, and I love how it fits neatly into the FFVIII canon. It's about Ellone and Irvine, and being the only ones who remember, and I really like how Irvine is portrayed in this.

There are lots more stuff posted at the exchange here: DOINK! Final Fantasy Exchange 2010 so go take a look. I haven't found the chance yet to trawl the archive, but I'm sure there are a lot of awesome stuff.

Like this piece of fanart, Valediction (Final Fantasy X, Yuna and her aeons), by

cumuluscastle which is so gorgeous, omg, and so soft and sad.

( adventures in tonberry dodging (or, what I wrote for the exchange) )

---

Now I have to go and relinquish my claim on bug #1813 before I forget. Poor bug. I can't seem to find time for it, and each time I look at it after a few days, I forgot what it was I had done earlier. Another note to self: don't claim these CSS bugs any more, please, you'll just make yourself feel horrible later. >.> I should finish up poor Strata instead, and get a patch for it submitted, and help cut down the number of styles that need conversion in

dreamscapes.

Here's the thing with me and TV fandoms: we're never really in sync episode-wise. On TV here, most shows are about half a season to whole seasons behind. Sure, I can probably download and watch a few days behind the rest of the fandom, but I, uh, mostly can't be bothered, really. So when I finally get into a show (usually because I get the whole season on DVD or downloaded it or someone passes me something and goes "you must watch this!") it's ages after the other people watching it have moved along, and I'm left squeeing by myself. :( It also leaves me not knowing much about the fandom itself -- I tend to avoid spoilers, so I don't join the relevant communities.

Here's another thing: I never seem to dislike the characters everyone else seems not to like. Again, I'm not really sure how accurate my perception of this is, since I don't really go searching for discussions about episodes, etc, and usually just stumble upon these things when I go looking for fic.

That long prologue comes to this: I'm watching Numb3rs, somewhere in mid-season 3, and I rather like Amita, honestly. She's smart, she's pretty, and while she doesn't go around literally kicking ass and taking names, she does work on a lot of maths that help solve crimes. Yeah, she was a bit clingy to Charlie, especially in the first season, and at times I do get frustrated watching her always doing some sort of work for Charlie (doesn't she have classes, research, papers to write?), but despite that I still like her. One argument I read against her was that she was too pretty and I was baffled by it.

I also think Megan is pretty awesome.

Anyway. A weird thing about the show: while the maths seems valid (note: not a mathematician) the snippets of code you sometimes see around is somewhat iffy (note: not a programmer, either). I swear I saw bits of HTML when they were running an algorithm on a computer -- I can't remember what it was for, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have done what Charlie said it was doing, XD.

Also, I totally ship David/Colby now. Totally.

Today I want to share pictures of my garden!

Clicking on the pictures will take you to Flickr, where you can find larger versions of them. I guess that somewhat goes against the spirit of having all content exclusive to Dreamwidth, but I don't think posting the gigantic size versions here will endear me to anyone!

Do you see a bird in the midst of all those heliconias? Look closely. Look very, very closely.

( a more obvious shot of the bird, some flowers )

I think I'll share something about sewing and mathematics today, and get to other things later. I can see people running away at the mention of maths. Come back and look at the pictures -- there are no equations, I swear!

( in which I make something that has a fancy name but is actually a pincushion )

I also found the community

intertwined. Maths + crafty things ftw! Now I want to get back to crocheting or take up knitting so I can crochet/knit hyperbolic planes. XD

---

Other things of interest:
• There is a small fandoms friending meme going on! I have added Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles here. (Can you hear the crickets chirping?)

Okay! Three weeks for Dreamwidth starts today -- well, it was yesterday, but my internet connection was acting up and I'm finally posting this after midnight, past my bedtime. Details here:

three_weeks_for_dw, but I have no plans! Is there anything in particular I should blather about? (Not that I have been posting much lately, but hey, that could change.) Suggestions? Anyone?

I'll just paste this thing here that I copied over from the latest things "threeweeks" feed:

What kind of topics/entries would you like to see me posting about? Any particular questions you've always wanted to ask me but have resisted because the answer would be a huge essay? Ever want to wind me up and watch me go on a particular topic? Anything you've heard me say "I should write that entry about $foo I've been meaning to write" and have been patiently waiting for?

I'll even write drabbles! Or thoughts on books I've read -- there's a list here. Or post some pictures. I've always wanted to post pictures (but not of myself -- a bit too paranoid for that.)

---

FFEX! Posting deadline is less than a month away! Should I start panicking now?

Dear gifter, if you are lurking about, I hope you are having/will be having(/had?) fun with my requests. Nothing in any of those have to be pairings, and I think most of those had additional prompts at the end which are completely optional. Completely. I'm a very easy person to please.

As for the prompts I got, I like them, but I have no idea where to go with them! I can write scenes for them but not a coherent story. I despair when I think about plot.

In somewhat more productive sounding news, I have decided to go back to sewing things by hand. So. Have some hexagons. Lots and lots of hexagons.

( why I have so many hexagons )

Hello! I, ah, haven't been here much, have I.

A summary of what happened the last month and a half: I was really, really busy with work, and then I took a break and came back to work feeling even more frustrated because it seemed like I had more work than I had before I went off on my break and things weren't really going my way even though the big project I was working on was already completed. And I was feeling vaguely miserable the whole time -- nothing I can pinpoint, just a general melancholy about everything.

I dropped the ball several places -- mostly things related to wrangling and fandom, which made me feel even worse, because I felt like I had volunteered to help and then didn't deliver. And I still have a DW bug to my name. I probably should unassign myself from that one; I don't think I can focus enough on it to get it done. Hmm.

Gong xi fa cai! (I am late, as usual.)

--

So. It has been a long weekend here since we got Monday and Tuesday off for Chinese New Year. It's been an ok long weekend, I guess! No beaches, but maybe next time. I miss beaches. But! No worries! I have seven days off that I have to take because I haven't taken a single day this year and I have seven days carried forward from last year and I have to use them up by end of March (sounds like bad planning, doesn't it, or perhaps bad policy-making, but nothing much I can do about the latter) but the thing is I'm pretty much busy until the first week of March and there is no way out of it and I am feeling mostly resigned about the whole thing because I could have said no but I didn't and decided to take this on anyway so now I'm stuck with this mess. Sucks to be me, eh.

Read some books this weekend. Short ones, mostly. I seem to be having a lot of trouble finishing books lately. My attention simply wanders, and I can't focus enough to get through the pages. It's not just books I'm having trouble with, I guess -- I can't concentrate on code either, and I find myself spacing off while watching TV (or completely forgetting that I wanted to watch something on TV, like the episode of Supernatural that was on yesterday, oops).

Somehow, perhaps to make up for the books I haven't been reading, I ended up reading Star Wars AU fic. I . . . am not even sure how I got there; I've never been particularly interested in the fandom before. It's probably Kathy Tyers's The Truce at Bakura's fault. I read the book and found myself thinking, Oh come on. There must be better fic than this around! and ended up reading fic. Very long fic. Fic better than books fic. And I love AUs. Especially vast, detailed ones. Though not high school ones, even if they were detailed. You know, a long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, there used to be a difference between an alternate reality and an alternate universe -- one is where something changes in the original canon universe and causes different outcomes and another is where you'll inexplicably find everyone in a high school setting, but maybe I'm just a fandom dinosaur. (I can't remember which one is which any more anyway.)

Anyway! Star Wars AU! I'm mostly fascinated by the variations of:

Luke and Vader ~~go on a camping trip~~ end up working together. Sometimes, they save the galaxy. The permutations seem infinite: Vader finds Luke as a child; or Luke still ends up in Vader's clutches even after jumping down the gantry, poor boy (this seems a popular one); or Anakin Skywalker doesn't go evil; or Luke somehow joins Vader even before getting his hand cut off; or old Ben makes a disastrous decision and tells Luke the truth about his father; or a thousand other things
Luke turns to the dark side (and somehow or other ends up saving the galaxy anyway).

Here's one in the vein of (i): Between Flight and Longing by Sheila Snow, where Han, Luke and Darth Vader end up working together on a backwater planet finding a cure for a mysterious illness, and it's seriously epic. The writing is wonderful and Luke is Luke, and Vader is almost human while still being an evil Sith lord and Han is absolutely awesome.

Hm. Maybe I should come up with a list of fics later. I have a few bookmarked.

Also, skimming through fic summaries I accidentally found out what happens to some of the characters in the books and ended up having my heart broken, despite having only ever read one book from the New Jedi Order. Sad.

Current Mood: good grief it's warm

It's a bit jarring when you're reading a very well written fic and find yourself stumbling across typos involving homophones. "Taught" instead of "taut" certainly made me blink, but I can brush off things like that, especially when the writing is good and the writer is not consistently misspelling the word -- you just miss some of those, sometimes. Which is why it is nice to have a beta reader, but that's another story altogether.

However, "ryely" almost made hit the back button, despite the fic being almost impeccable otherwise. Most likely because I didn't even recognise it as a word -- I'm pretty sure spellcheck would have caught that. It didn't help that it appeared a few times in the fic. Also, it gives me weird images. The only way, presumably, you can smile ryely is if you have a lot of that particular grain in your mouth.

I wonder about my standards, sometimes.

--

I need to go spend some quality time with the Wrangulator, but I keep getting distracted by fic!

I'm watching season 1 of Numb3rs and enjoying it very much. It's a show I've been watching on and off throughout the six seasons; I like it, but I could never manage to consistently catch it on TV. I know it airs (aired?) on Tuesdays here, but I'm horrible at tracking days and dates -- I always end up remembering much, much later (say, at almost midnight) and go, "Oh, it's Tuesday. I missed the show again." My memory is horrible like that.

I can't remember ever watching the pilot, though. Right now I'm just going "Ha!" at Charlie explaining that the chances of winning the lottery is once in every forty thousand years and saying it's basic probability theory. It's a bit startling to realise how oblivious he could be about some things; I remember more of the recent episodes than the earlier ones, so seeing him so vulnerable at times and cocky at others just makes me shake my head in wonder. Him rushing around in the FBI briefing room made me grin.

(Ahahaha, these guys are consistent. I just noticed that Charlie misspells "anomaly" in the pilot. I think someone points it out to him later in the series, when he spells it wrongly again and gets challenged to a game of Scrabble.)

Some of my friends accuse me of liking the show because of my engineering background. (Most of them just don't understand why I rate it higher than CSI.) That's . . . part of it, I guess. Mathematics fascinate me, though it has never been one of my stronger points. I know very little about the things Charlie talks on the show -- basic game theory, probability and statistics, some parts of the Fourier analysis, yeah, sure, I get some of that. The other things, not at all. Most of the time I just sort of gape at his analogies: he makes it sound so simple.

If only our lecturers made it that fun. And it would've helped if they were cute, heh.

It hasn't been a very good weekend.

I planned to catch up on a number of things but I just . . . didn't. Mostly because I spent most of the time napping. I read some stuff, and then I fall asleep. Perhaps it was because I wasn't feeling very well on Friday -- you know it's going to be a bad afternoon when a headache appears out of nowhere and you get into the lift and it moves and your first thought is oh shit, I'm either going to faint or throw up while another three girls are looking at you worriedly, but luckily I didn't do either, or I would've been mortified for the rest of my life.

I can't figure out what triggered that episode. Probably a weird combination of cigarette smoke and someone's perfume (though usually both of those things are more likely to send me into a sneezing fit instead of causing a migraine), or heck, maybe it was the weather.

Well. In any case. Most things I wanted to do this weekend didn't go as planned. I'm already behind the January start for

intro_to_cs; I didn't do anything last weekend either (not even Python installed, whoops!) so now it's two weeks I need to catch up with. I'll have to find time during the week for this.

Also I need to reply to emails and comments and write up some stuff but I'm already yawning. (Which really seems unfair considering the amount of time I spent sleeping.) Tomorrow, maybe?

Wow. I wrote one (1) piece of fanfic the entire year. I didn't think of this earlier, but with all the 2009 recap posts I've been seeing, I began wondering what did I do the whole of last year, fanworks-related, and . . . there you go.

It's this one: On the Precipiece of the World; Final Fantasy X, about 6,400 words. And it was for Final Fantasy Exchange. If I hadn't participated in that, I would've written nothing.

I am boggled by this! Boggled!

A few minutes have passed . . . and I am still boggled.

. . .

Anyway. In other things: I got involved with Dreamwidth somewhat, and submitted two patches, both style-related. I still have one assigned bug to my name: #1813. Whoops. I keep saying I'd get that done, but I still haven't. I feel bad about it. I also have a style I keep "improving" on; I should really get it done with and submit it. And I should try something other than styles, really. One thing I wanted to do was learn Perl, and I guess this year would be a good time for that.

I also got dragged into tag wrangling for AO3, which is surprising addictive. Probably even more addictive than code, imagine that! Though it has managed to get me curious about what happens behind the scenes -- I'm tempted to go over and volunteer myself as a coder. But! I am torn! Because I can't learn too many things at one go, and they use Ruby and I already promised myself I'd do more for Dreamwidth. Hmmmmm.

--
I went around and subscribed to a number of people that I've been seeing around and I think are awesome! If you came by to see who is this

yati who has this sudden interest in you -- that would be me. Hello!

Ten Yuletide recs, with ~~tl;dr~~ ~~fangirly~~ useful canon information for each ~~because you need to read these books~~:

( recs for The Dalemark Quartet (Diana Wynne Jones), The Gentleman Bastard Sequence (Scott Lynch), The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood), I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith), Malay literature, Matilda (Roald Dahl), To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis), Sunshine (2007 movie) )

I have a few more fics and fandoms, but I'll leave that for some other time. Oh. And AO3's bookmark feature is awesome; bookmark or rec at one go -- you don't even need posts like these, but of course we like long, rambly, off-tangent posts. This has been a "books you should read!" post almost as much as a fic rec post, but hey, sharing things you love is a good thing, right?

2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

December
The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

November
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
Back Home by Michelle Magorian
Coraline & Other Stories by Neil Gaiman
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones
1515 by Faisal Tehrani
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

October
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Changeling Sea by Patricia A McKillip

September
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

August
Red Shift by Alan Garner
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

July
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
Crooked House by Agatha Christie*
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart

June
No books finished! :(

May
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

April
Z for Zachariah by Robert C O'Brien
Lord Sunday by Garth Nix
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome

March
Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn*
Star Wars: Specter of the Past by Timothy Zahn*
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly*
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Ragwitch by Garth Nix
I, Claudius by Robert Graves

February
Star Wars: Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn*
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

January
The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman
The Sandman Volume 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

---
* denotes a reread

I bet no one is really interested in a list of books I read this year. So, instead, we'll have a post with pictures and toppling towers of books.

renay was talking over here about her resolution to read her height in books in 2010. I was impressed by this commitment (and also by how tall Renay is)! I totally want to do something like that but I had no idea how much I needed to read to reach my height. Out of curiosity, I stacked the books I read this year to see how tall the pile is. XD

( the leaning tower of books of 2009 )

. . . You know, even with Dreamwidth's subscribe without giving access thing, I'm still afraid of subscribing to people. (This has nothing to do with how Dreamwidth does things -- it's just me and my insecurities.) Why am I so absurd.

--

Completely unrelated: things I must (must must must) do by the end of the week:

1. Dreamwidth patch for bug 1813! If you're wondering why you still don't have an option to display your userpic on the left or the right of your entry/comment, it's because of me hogging this bug and taking forever to complete it. Even if I don't finish and submit it by this week, at least I should get more done for it! Geez. I had this lofty idea, once, that maybe I could work on submitting one patch a week, since I pick up the reasonably easy bugs. 1813 is reasonable easy if you know CSS (and I do know CSS and I'm not really intimidated by the bug) but we have so many styles it just takes forever. I should at least get the Tabula Rasa–based ones done so I can submit that part of the patch! . . . And then stay away from CSS bugs. XD

2. Tag wrangling-y things for AO3. I have more claimed fandoms to my name now but not many of those are fandoms with existing fic, and I doubt there'll be much fic for it even for Yuletide. But I really should check what's already there. And upload my own fics. Hee.

I felt like there were more things, but I can't recall them. Ah well. Two is a good number.

--

Oh, LJ. Since the commit has been rolled back, I'll just shut up about it. (Still! Impressive back-paddling!)

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Page Summary

State of the bookshelf: August 2010
let's hope this is not where I jinx the internet connection again
A tale of internetless woe
three things make a post?
who the hell attacks aid ships, I ask
somehow or other, I never end up watching what my friends tell me to
this week in tropical gardening---
sewing and geometry: not as distant as you think
Three weeks for Dreamwidth!
hexagons, hexagons
behold my triumphant return!
It has been an absurdly warm weekend.
would you like to have some barley and rice along with that?
with equations, they fight crime!
in which weekends need to be longer
in which I wonder what I did in the whole of 2009
Yuletide recs (and secret and stealthy book recs bonus)
Books read in 2010
State of the bookshelf: the end-of-year report
The point of to-do lists is getting things done. This has not been working lately.

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State of the bookshelf: August 2010

let's hope this is not where I jinx the internet connection again

A tale of internetless woe

three things make a post?

who the hell attacks aid ships, I ask

somehow or other, I never end up watching what my friends tell me to

this week in tropical gardening---

sewing and geometry: not as distant as you think

Three weeks for Dreamwidth!

hexagons, hexagons

behold my triumphant return!

It has been an absurdly warm weekend.

would you like to have some barley and rice along with that?

with equations, they fight crime!

in which weekends need to be longer

in which I wonder what I did in the whole of 2009

Yuletide recs (and secret and stealthy book recs bonus)

Books read in 2010

State of the bookshelf: the end-of-year report

The point of to-do lists is getting things done. This has not been working lately.