Ancient history

Shetterly and Patrick Nielsen Hayden discuss Katrina and racism.

This was totally fascinating. pnh did quite a lot of hard smacking down and explaining and stuff.

I'm most struck by your evident notions that we should "stop talking about race" because (1) class is really, really important, (2) George W. Bush has appointed some black people to high office, and (3) some rich black people are shits. The first is indubitably true, the second is true but not particularly interesting, and the third, while true, is the argument of a five-year-old. Good grief. Some Native Americans kept black slaves, too; I suppose this means we should stop talking about the extermination of the continent's pre-Columbian population when we discuss American history. Indeed, since people everywhere tend to oppress those weaker than them, we should just stop discussing power and oppression altogether.

That's a really good response.
There were many headdesk moments but the one that made me laugh out loud was Shetterly googling "katrina racism" to find out if the world thought racism was important or not!

With great wget comes great responsibility

If you want to have some fun with archiving web stuff, read and play!

http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--mastering-wget-161202.php

For instance if you have an LJ you want to back up, pull up a command line, make a directory named after that LJ or some other handle, and go,

wget -m journalname.livejournal.com

It's that easy.... If you have lots of hard drive space and want to browse a whole LJ community or discussion then you can do some of the fancier variants described and pull down content 1 level deep. I don't really recommend going more than 1 level deep...

Umm, also if you are on a mac, you will need this, http://www.statusq.org/archives/2008/07/30/1954/ and do this,

Copy:

wget into /usr/local/bin
wget.1 into /usr/local/man/man1
wgetrc into /usr/local/etc

you will need to use sudo to do that.

If that didn't make sense I can explain more in comments, just ask.

Enjoy!

State of the Badger - rain sucks

Doing okay, but hurting a lot. I haven't got worse. I can straighten my right leg and put weight on it; not for long and it seizes up again easily. I can walk to the bathroom and back, slowly. I can put on my right shoe, and put things from the front loading washer up into the dryer. I can't pick things up off the floor. I am still using the wheelchair in the house. I'm limiting how much I go out and how much I get up from bed. I'm reading a lot of blogs and books.

Today I went to work for the first time in a while. I feel so grateful to have my job. The morning was bad - hard rain, and being so stiff, having to ask Rook for help packing myself in the car - then I ended up parking in the red zone again at work, tried to call a co-worker to help me with the chair and carrying my lunch, and my phone died. I was so cold and wet and demoralized - afraid my car would get towed by the evil building manager, I cried in my cosy little cube. mzjennylin hold my hand online for a little bit while I complained. Then figured I should eat my lunch for breakfast (as I'd skipped it) and buck up in order to tackle my work. Then I felt happy as I looked around my cube in the corner, my plant and my couch with pillow and blanket. Yes you heard me, a couch! I have a cube where I lie on the couch covered in a red plaid fleecey blanket, surrounded by Xena and Wonder Woman and Margaret Cho posters from the library association. It really rocks. It makes a huge difference that I can lie flat while I'm at work. My corporate overladies really listened to me there (I thought i would have to bring my own couch if i wanted one, but they gave me one and moved it into the new office expansion.) Then my boss got us all lunch. My body still felt sucky, I have a hard time wheeling myself, I could not pick up the coffee pot or mug properly, always a scary horrid feeling. But...

It turned out a good, productive day. Both my techy co-workers met with me and we hashed some things out. My efforts are mostly staring at stuff and figuring it out and saying "let's do this" and then they actually do it. I felt good that they didn't think my huge TMI list of stuff to do was correct and useful. I have to talk to and coordinate some stuff for 2 other teams and 2 outside companies too. And do it very fast! I would balk at doing it so fast, but I'm going to be out a lot in the next few weeks at conferences and vacation so I'm hauling ass.

Then i got SUPER HAPPY as the person I asked if I could republish a critical edition of her writing said yes! Not joanna russ! the other person! We'll see! I think that T. wants to do it! I felt like I had been really brave, and Just Asked, and made a thing happen that I thought for a long time would be cool if it happened. Can I do it!? I felt like a giant sea of "fearing I can't do it" had broken open and revealed itself and I see how much its hidden nature blocked me from doing stuff.

I felt a surge of gratitude today too towards everyone on LJ and other blogs (but for the last 2 years mostly this one) who has been so supportive, and listened to my difficulties, and appreciated whatever wit or humor comes through, and got my back in many situations, and for all the smart brave raw honest things they say in their blogs. What a huge difference it has made in my life. I hope that's so for other people too despite the also huge amount of fail people manage to display. A source of strength.

I worked a lot (deadline) at home too till like 9pm with a while in the middle to hang out with Moomin. We read chapter 3 of Wind in the Willows. I said I am like Mr. Badger. I explained to him a little bit about night terrors and sleepwalking (he has had it a couple of nights in a row, this week). He told me about his dream about a Roc on top of a mountain, and a war. He commented that my having to work extra today was like when he has too much homework, and I felt like a bad model for him with overwork. 8-( But, I had to. Then I talked with owlqueue about the maybe!project and emailed T. the list of contracts to send out for the unfinished!book. I still have more to do. But I have to stop.

When I stop I remember how much I'm hurting physically. Okay, time to stop really, a hot bath and some painkiller.