dead brains don't dance

| Stepmom

rational dialogue - a mode of communication in which I set the terms of discourse such that they support my agenda.

Or, as sophiaserpentia says:

Those who oppose equality complain that expressions of anger or anguish are “unfair” because they cannot “argue against” them. And what allows them to say this is the idea that there is a ‘culture war’ which should stop and be replaced by ‘rational dialogue,’ an artificially stultified form of discourse designed to allow opponents of equality to cite “logically and rationally” why they should continue to have special rights not shared by the disadvantaged, essentially allowing them to ignore everything and anything the disadvantaged say.

Well, that explains why ramtops couldn’t find Mac Jordan on Google - a buggered robots.txt file forsooth.

IIRC she got hammered by an impolite spider a while back and I bunged an explicit Crawl-delay in her robots.txt. Did it there to get it in place fast and, for some reason, redid and committed it here, rather than committing the change on the server. Turns out I put a space after the colon at one end and not the other: cue a CVS conflict on the next update at the server, and I never noticed. Mea maxima culpa.

I’m doing my small part in rectifying the cockup by confessing to it, and more importantly, linking to www.kestrel.org on this here indexed LJ to help kickstart her return from airbrushed non-site-hood.

I can do nothing but quote lady_babalon verbatim:

ZOMGWTFBBQROTFLMAO ALL HAIL TO SHE WOT DONE IT ALL!!!

Well, I’d be glad to have more days like that :)

We started off getting the new stereo fitted to the Thaab, and a good greasy breakfast in Bedminster while we were waiting. Suitably ensounded, we wended our way in a back lane stylee to Avebury and had a fine time wandering around the gardens and the henge, and managing to eat cream teas and join the National Truss while we were at it.

Thence to Trowbridge, and the Village Pump venue-reopening-gig with Show of Hands supported ably by Martyn Joseph and accompanied by the splendid Miranda Sykes. This has to have been the best we’ve ever seen them - the atmosphere was wonderful, a real sense of celebration. And. We won the raffle! First call was our first ticket, and first prize was two tickets to next year’s Trowbridge festival. W00t! I think. Not only that, we also won the third draw too, though (not wishing to appear greedy) we sent that ticket back to the pot.

Oh, and the weather was perfect too, the sunset gorgeous and the night-time moon beautiful. There really isn’t any way this day could have been better.

So, with a relaxing Restorative (Bushmills 10yr old malt + water) in each of our paws, we’ll investigate the contents of our cameras, and then to bed with whatever assortment of the Tribe choose to shove us into positions of painful skeletal distortion tonight.

G’night all :)

ramtops and I seem to have bought a ‘91 Saab 900 Aero S; I just had a random look at pre-Cavalier 900s on AutoTrader and there it was: leather, aircon, electric roof, black (the only acceptable colour for a car) and with a Pendle towbar-mount bike rack thrown in. The current owner lives three miles from our door :)

I gave him a ring, and we went to look it over and give it a test drive. Very clean for its age, and it feels pretty much as tight and beautifully engineered as the day it was built. My Activa couldn’t be replaced, but I reckon this is a very fine alternative.

It really feels like it was meant to happen.

thunderbox‘s concerns about the accessorial inadequacies of ramtops’ new bicycle caused me to ponder the possibilities of attaching a sidecar, nucular devices, for the transportation of, to my velocipede.

Which in turn led me, in the current atmosphere of rampant paranoia, to wonder whether glass knives show up in airport body scanners.

ramtops and I have a bluetooth GPS unit we use with TomTom running on a palm. Mostly it all works as well as you’d expect, but charging the GPS has been an increasingly dodgy process - persuading the unit to notice its power cable (sometimes at home, nearly always in the car) was present has been variable.

I’d guessed the issue was likely dirty contacts (of course, we can’t find our tin of Servisol) or possibly a bent contact in the power socket and planned to investigate further when I could be arsed, but yesterday morning as ramtops plugged it into the house charger my attention was focused as the fault went hard with a click, and subsequent rattle when the thing was shaken.

Turns out, on opening the beast, that the manufacturers believe in the early-iPod-firewire-connector school of construction: the power connector was (emphasise was) held on by the solder its three legs sat in on the circuit board. Thankfully, it’s not surface mounted, so it was easy to reattach courtesy of careful application of soldering iron to each corresponding solder blob on the underside of the board in turn.

It’s now reattached, and will stay that way, thanks to a suitably engineered blob of Araldite. I’m still pissed off with lazy-arse design and manufacturing: the failure mode should have been blindingly obvious to anyone; I guess the bastards just bet that the thing would outlast its guarantee.

I just hope I haven’t fucked it in the fixing; I didn’t bother with earthing myself particularly. It charged overnight and now lights its LEDs in a plausible fashion, but we won’t know for sure until it’s paired with the palm and actually tested next time we go out.

ETA: it works a treat.

We’ve just returned from a round trip to Southville (lunch, veg, green tea, G&B choccie & almond), Sainsbury (diesel, marzipan choccie bar) and Hill Road, Clevedon (Montgomery cheddar, borlotti beans, chili choccie). You may notice a pattern developing in there somewhere.

Also, I drove the entire journey; the first time I’ve driven (aside from parking a couple of times) since my optic nerve myalgic sheath went sideways. I was very stressed+nervous at first, but I seem to have got away with it without even making ramtops scream (much). However, I’ve ended up with toe cramp in my right foot which, I suspect, is down to being a lot more tensed up than I actually realised while we were out...

Appointment with the neurologist came through this morning: 14th December at the Eye Hospital.

Just as well I’m neither in a hurry for it, nor expecting anything useful from it ;)