For fellow iPhone users (I am a recent convert): which "apps" can you simply not live without?

There are a lot of things competing for the thing I love most about the Netherlands. The bicycle paths, for one. And the fact that they speak Dutch, which might just be the coolest language ever, and then there are the stroopwafels, which are right up there, too.

But possibly the very coolest thing is the fact that in their politics, they out-pragmatic even the Canadians. This means that the vast majority of the time, Dutch policies aren't built on the government-flavour-of-the-week's ideologies, but on what has been shown to work to solve a particular societal problem. This tendency is summed up nicely in this wikipedia article about Dutch drug policy: Most policymakers in the Netherlands believe that if a problem has proved to be unsolvable, it is better to try controlling it instead of continuing to enforce laws with mixed results. In other words, if enforcing a law doesn't produce concrete, demonstrable results, you try other things instead. What a concept.

Anyway, the latest example of this (which made me laugh out loud before 7 this morning), is the decision by a city political ward within Amsterdam to, rather than arresting crusing gay men, instead put up official signs that direct them where to go. Although it should be said that the signs aren't just for that (because after all, that would be too limited a use of taxpayer money and government effort!). The same signs contain pointers on how to get to beaches, playgrounds, and the dogpark, of course.

I want to see a picture.

[Update: There's a picture in the comments!]

Just the other day, I was thinking about how much it would rock if they had built a device that would generate electricity while you ride your bike so that you could charge your GPS or cell phone on the road. So on a whim, I just googled a few keywords, and it turns out that it freaking exists: the Ikon Global Pedal and Power.

I love the internet THIS MUCH.

[Update: Well, the bad news is that apparently this particular product has been discontinued. Woe! But this one looks like it could have the same benefits without the drag on my speed. The downside is that you either seem to be charging the product or powering an external device, not both, but I can live with that. A mini wind turbine and solar power in one affordable device! I bought it.]

Remember the post where I was thinking Dreamwidthy thoughts? Well, look, people, shiny: jae.dreamwidth.org!

It's still in closed beta, which of course shows (there were some problems with my livejournal import), but I have to say, I am very impressed with it so far. It's better than livejournal in all sorts of ways that matter to me (the menus are more intuitive, comments can be longer, the diversity statement rocketh, and most importantly, they've split up the concept of "friends" into "people you want to read" and "people you want to give access to your locked posts"), and worse than livejournal in only one (it's only available in English, and will probably continue to be). And of course, over there, I get to be jae. Which is probably the most important thing of all, to be perfectly honest. I have coveted that livejournal name since the day I made this account, almost nine years ago.

For those who are concerned, I'm not moving; not yet, anyway. Dreamwidth will only become feasible for me as a sole journaling service if the vast majority of the people who I want to socialize with online move over there. But I am hoping to buy one of the seed accounts when they're offered, and as the service over there continues to improve to the point where it leaves livejournal in the dust, I may very well start exerting some pressure on friends!

By the way, if you're looking to learn more about Dreamwidth but don't want to page back through old posts, the basics are here, and here is the most recent fact sheet.

Okay, if someone had referred to U.S. politician-wannabee Alan Keyes as a right-wing nutbar before I saw this video, I wouldn't have blinked, but I never realized that he was literally insane.


I mean, the part about Obama not really being President is great, but as far as I'm concerned, the real gem is right at the beginning: "Obama is a radical Communist. That's what I told people in Illinois, and now everybody realizes it's true. He's going to destroy this country. We're either going to stop him, or the United States of America is going to cease to exist."

*shakes head*

Also? I want to know where the Canadian versions of this guy are. All of our right-wing nutbars are just infuriating, not ridiculous. It hardly seems fair.

To me, twitter seems like an endless string of facebook status updates, without the rest of the trappings of facebook and without the privacy. But I've seen lots of people say (for example) that twitter is the Next Big Thing in political organizing, and that makes me go: "huh??? how???" and realize that there must be things about it that I just don't get.

I mean, I think it's unlikely that I will ever be interested in letting complete strangers in on what I'm doing at any given moment. But I'd like to at least be able to wrap my mind around what other people get out of it (those who actually actually use twitter, that is, not just those who use it to follow other people but never update themselves, which I do understand the fun of). What am I missing? Edumacate me.

I've just added a new section to my livejournal policies (and for good measure, I added it to my profile as well). It reads:

languages

Warning: this livejournal is trilingual.
Achtung: dieses Livejournal ist dreisprachig.
Let op: dit livejournal is drietalig.

Not that this wasn't already obvious, I'm sure, but I've added a couple of new friends lately, and I figured it couldn't hurt to spell out that the use of all three languages in this space is officially sanctioned by yours truly. (You can feel free to use other, non-officially-sanctioned languages, too, but be prepared to not get a response!)

I joined the Dreamwidth progress mailing list after the latest unpleasantess with livejournal, and they recently updated with not just one, but two very interesting progress reports. Specifically, for those who don't care to follow the links, they will be going into closed beta Real Soon Now, and open beta as soon as possible after that. This is really going to happen, and I don't know about the rest of you, but I for one think this is a very good thing.

In any case, I figured it was about time to let people over here in livejournal-land know of my plans as far as Dreamwidth goes. As soon as it goes into open beta, I will be buying a permanent account over there--in part because I want to support them with some cold hard cash, and in part because I am just dying to get my little hands on the username "jae" at least somewhere (I've never been happy with "therealjae"). However, I will still keep this livejournal just as it currently is, including continuing to post only over here, until one of two things happens: a) enough of my friends list moves over there to make it more sensible to continue my updates over there, or b) livejournal goes bye-bye and/or becomes unusable.

Anybody else thinking Dreamwidthy thoughts lately? What are your plans?

It's been an awful, awful day. Which makes it all the more suitable a time to find out that sometimes, all you have to do is talk about how much you want something and someone will give it to you.


I'm just...so grateful. Thank you, inveigler. Thank you.

Um, wow. This does not bode well for the future of livejournal. Anybody who's more in the know about these sorts of things want to speculate about what's likely to happen next? (I am fairly business-impaired and even more financial-things-impaired.)

The Organization for Transformative Works is busy promoting fannish alternatives, but livejournal is not and has never been primarily a fannish communication tool for me. This means that I need a platform that all my friends can play on, not just the ones who care about fannish things. Dreamwidth can't get here soon enough, with this new development. Luckily, it's still being worked on.

Okay, I'm going to throw this out here and see what happens.

Back in 2003, I saw the band Crooked Fingers in concert. They had just released the album that's still one of my top five or so albums ever, but even then, the song that stood out for me most at the two shows I saw was a brand-new song called "Let's Not Pretend (To Be New Men)." It was deliciously creepy, and it featured some really chilling, manic piano parts. And when I sought out the lyrics on the internets a few weeks later, it occurred to me that it would make an amazing fanvid for the 1999 Anthony Minghella film "The Talented Mr. Ripley."

Now, I am totally not inclined to make fanvids of my own--I don't really have that kind of brain--but I thought maybe, possibly, I might someday be able to convince someone else to take up the idea and run with it. So I waited for the next Crooked Fingers album to be released. And waited, and waited. It finally came out in 2005...and didn't have "New Men" on it. Argh. So I waited a while longer. Years longer, with no real hope that the song would ever see the light of day. And although Crooked Fingers' lead singer, Eric Bachmann, made a very nice solo album in that time, there was still no sign of an album with "New Men" on it. And in the meantime, the band sort of half-broke-up while Bachmann did his solo thing. And I pouted. A lot.

But there is a happy ending! Five freaking years after I first heard the song, Crooked Fingers reformed with a somewhat different set of members, and this year, they brought out a new album called "Forfeit/Fortune." And "New Men" is on it. And the arrangement...oh, it is so perfect. The piano has mostly given way to other instruments, which is a bit sad, but if anything, it's even more chilling than the live version I've been listening to all this time. And the lyrics are still as spot-on as it gets.

Anyway, I know most vidders have their own ideas that they don't have enough time for. Really, I get that. But just in case some vidder might listen to the song and feel inspired by it in a Ripley direction...and because the movie means a hell of a lot to me, and because its creator died unexpectedly this year and...well, I'm throwing it out there, anyway. Saving that, if people just felt like listening to the song and saying: "oh my god, I so see what you see in that!", that would be nice, too. Or even just "wow, what a cool, creepy song! thanks!" *g*

( the track )

( the lyrics )

A while back, I had an exchange with locketportrait where I mentioned that I never paid attention to celebrities and had no idea who they were. She then asked me whether I didn't get curious about, say, the headlines on magazines in grocery checkout lanes, and just pick them up. It was a very good question--I love stories about people, after all, and that's what celebrity fancy is selling. But my response at the time was that no, I didn't get curious about them precisely because I didn't know who these people were. I mean, if you have no idea what a Brangelina is, even the most eye-popping headline that includes that word isn't going to serve its purpose for you.

I got a little more insight into this recently when I ended up at a hair salon that was populated only by fashion magazines (which, frankly, I would rather read a scientific journal about chemical engineering) and celebrity magazines (which, why not? stories!), and so of course I picked up the latter. At which point I was thrust into a world that seemed to be purposely designed to confuse and bewilder me. The insider lingo in these things is as thick as a phone book, and the lack of context is awesome in its sparseness. They don't even provide last names most of the time. Each article is just a picture of a celebrity, that celebrity's first name (or nickname!), and then the latest gossip, but entirely without any reference to past information about the people which might have told me why that gossip is interesting.

I find two things curious about this. The first is the fact that the choice to not include any context or background information seems to be fairly unique to celebrity fancy magazines. In a newspaper, for example, if you read a story about Barack Obama choosing his future chief of staff, it will identify the man by name, it will talk about the man's background and his relationship to Obama, and it will probably even identify who Obama is in some way, just in case people have been living under a rock. In celebrity fancy, though, nobody's allowed to have been living under a rock. Everybody has to not only have kept up with all the details of every single celebrity's lives, but be able to recall them all at a moment's notice. That seems like a very strange journalistic choice, you know? And I have to wonder what it's about. I mean, even academic publications, which are hardly famous for their transparency and accessibility, refer you directly in the text to places where you can read up on things you don't have the context for.

The second thing I find curious is more of a practical matter. It's very clear that all this background information is just stuff that they think any ordinary human being would have just picked up, but how on earth does that ever happen when the magazines designed for people who are interested in celebrity fancy leave it out entirely? I mean, let's say I wanted to get into celebrity fancy right now, starting from a clean slate--how would I go about it? What would I read or watch that I would actually understand, right off? Clearly people do manage to stumble into celebrity fancy all the time, but from an outsider's perspective it looks about as easy as stumbling out of the earth's orbit and off into space.

If you like the idea of the proposed coalition government, then you need to write to your MP and tell them that. TODAY.

Yes, even if you know your MP personally and you figure they already know what you think. And yes, even if your MP is a member of the current government that stands to be taken down. Especially then. Because trust me, the "no way, José" side isn't being so reticent.

I have NO TIME to pay attention to this, but ( OH MY GOD. )

Remember how Canadian politics is charged with being boring? Boring, they say! *throws up hands*

Is anyone else finding that livejournal is running far more slowly than usual since the downtime?

Remember this wonderful profile about Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff, including all those vaguely slashy bits about his relationship with his friend and rival Bob Rae? And the hilarious conversation we had about it way back when?

Well, get a load of ( this picture. )

1. I'm thinking of setting my computer up to be able to do video capture so that I can put little snippets of things up on youtube. Does anyone out there in livejournal land have that sort of thing set up already? What hardware and software do I need to buy? Any pitfalls I should watch out for? I have a Mac running OSX 10.5.5.

2. This is a serious long shot, but: are there any fannish vidders out there who might have had in the backs of their heads for a while that it might be fun to do a vid of the 1999 film "The Talented Mr. Ripley"?

Every time that iTunes meme comes around, I think it would be fun to do it. And then I try to do it, but I look at the particular songs a random 25 selections of my iTunes collection gives me, and I think better of it.

But now I'm awake (again) in the middle of the night when I really should be sleeping (again), and I'm thinking, what the hell.

Anyway, there are a couple in here that a few people could conceivably guess, but if you folks collectively get more than two or three, I'll be very impressed. *g*

( the rules )

( and, GO! )

I lost my Aaron Sorkin love a long, long time ago--I'm guessing sometime in 2003--but I seem to have recovered it right now, in 2008. If only for a moment.

I have been meaning to make a public post updating everyone who helped me put together a version of Thunderbird I could live with, on how it's going. (This isn't that post, but in general: loving it sometimes, hating it sometimes.) But I have a more pressing issue, if you guys would permit me to appeal to your collective expertise again.

Background: I have my Thunderbird configured to access all four of my regular email accounts. All have access to the individual saved-message folders I used to access with pine, through imap. After reading/responding to an email, I save it to one of those folders. (This is, incidentally, one of the things I hate--it takes so. fucking. long. to save a message when you have all those folders, and when you have a whole bunch of of them to save, it can take the better part of half an hour to do so. Oh, how I long for the heady days of pine when I could just press 's' and it would instantly find the right folder. But I digress.) Sometimes, though, things go wrong--I accidentally click on the wrong folder, or my hand slips, or something magical happens that shoots the message into the wrong folder. When this happens, I access the folder and move the wayward message into the folder it's actually supposed to be in. Cumbersome, but effective.

The question: Until today, that is. Because my hand slipped, and Thunderbird told me that a message that I'd meant to save in one folder had been put into another. Except that this time, I went into that folder to move it, and it wasn't there. Thunderbird thought it had put the mesage into that folder, but it really put it somewhere else. It's definitely no longer in my inbox, though, nor is it in the Trash. I didn't want to have that message in my inbox, but I certainly did want to keep it, and I'm actually pretty distressed that I don't seem to be able to find it at all. Is there any way any of you you can think of that will allow me to search all of the (hundreds upon hundreds and possibly thousands of) saved-messages folders accessible by all four of my accounts, to find out where it really ended up?

Thanks, hivemind!