Get happy, says Judy! And I am happy. My lovely colleagues got me cake and a card and a present, all unplanned and surprise-like, and I went to the pub with some of them and they were lovely again and I managed not to disgrace myself too much despite being awfully crushy-crushy-crushy and I came home and my lovely boyfriend^Wfiancé was watching Judy Garland videos on YouTube and then Rufus Wainwright videos and I got to show him that I (sort of) knew the chords for "Hallelujah". And now it's Liza (with a 'Z') Minnelli videos and he's honestly not gay, really, and even so, I do love him more than the people I am crushy-crushy about, and yes, anyway.

addedentry and I are having a birthday party at our place on Saturday May 10th. (That's not next Saturday but the one after.) I will be 30, he won't be (any more).

( party admin )

And sorry for rather short notice -- lots of indecision and disorganisation round here at the moment...

ETA: and if you have suggestions for things I should do before I'm 30, feel free to post 'em here, bearing in mind I only have a week and I'll be at work for most of it...

There are some things it's very hard to talk about, but:

invisiblechoir has lamented the fact that every time she thinks of a certain song she loses a certain contest (sorry!). As a result of her mentioning this, I now have the opposite problem: every time I lose said contest, which is quite frequently thanks to the welcome message on this timewasting device, the part of my brain that deals with persistent earworms takes a bullet from the other meme gun.

PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.

Jo Brand, in response to a lack of slang terms for what you might call jilling off, once came up with the term "gusset typing". As a sniggering teenager I was quite amused by this, and as a sniggering adult geek I am even more amused and delighted to see that someone has apparently made the metaphor real.

A rather sweet spammer writes: "Your site has very much liked me. I shall necessarily tell about him to the friends."

Nothing on the internet has very much liked me, unfortunately: I hard-rebooted the Airport Express (in order to reset the password (in order to reconfigure it to limit connections to specific MAC addresses (in the hope that it might then be faster because nobody e.g. from next door could sneakily steal our bandwidth))) and it stopped working. Does anybody have a spare Airport to save me from the sharks?

( what do you mean 'stopped working'? )

Earlier this year I also broke the Playstation 2, by switching it on, thereby not only stopping us having that particular shade of fun but also preventing Owen from learning to sing. Bad girlfriend. I then tried to buy a replacement on eBay, but it never turned up (though I did finally get a refund).

If I had the same effect on cattle that I seem to have on consumer electronics, I'd have been burned as a witch by now.

I saved this as a draft, and forgot about it. For those of you who are watching today's episode of j4 before going back and catching up with the last few weeks', the quick summary is, I had to talk to some student about 'geek culture' and how women are from Visual Basic and men are from Modula-2. (For those who are watching next season via bittorrent -- does it rain at Glasto 2008? And incidentally, Does She Ever Actually Shag Him?) Anyway, here's the (slightly tidied up) version of what I wrote:

Well that was pointless. I talked to this chap, he didn't seem to have very much clue what he was doing, he looked about 14 and frankly terrified of me, but I tried to answer his questions without too much handwaving/ranting, and filled in his survey, and let him take a picture of The Geek In Her Working Environment, har har. My god, though, my desk is a mess. Coffee and books and a DVD and some half-wilted roses in a vase and biscuits and a contact juggling ball and a stuffed badger and a waving maneki neko and biscuits and speakers and torn-off pages of my poem-a-day calendar (Robert Frost's 'Fire and Ice' yesterday, ace stuff) and cherry 7Up cans and heaps of paper and a hairbrush and a load of books on Ubuntu, XSLT, Perl, SOAP, and Web Design. He asked if he could "observe me working" for an hour, and I panicked and said no. For one thing, I'd have to get my office-mate to agree to it, and for another thing, well, just NO. Also, no.

( vignettes of office life in which our heroine isn't as funny as she thinks she is, and tries to turn little thoughts into a big picture )

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the user-agent string as a metaphor for gender.

Tags: geek, gender, vignettes

Also, I found this scrawled on the corner of a page of a notebook, and had completely forgotten I'd written it, let alone what it was heading towards:

To say that the beloved is beyond the reach of poetry is the oldest trick in the book (or out of it); and to say that it is old and yet it is true in this case, that is the second oldest trick. And yet (at one more remove) this is his beauty and his strength, that he stands calmly to one side of the smooth superlatives of eulogy, he stands aloof from the dance, observing; he will not be verified, he smiles wryly and turns the page, and at that fingertip's touch the page catches fire.

Still true, I reckon.

Tags: writing

Today I have: managed to book Glasto tickets for me and my mum and EIGHT other people despite EPIC FAIL on the part of seetickets (amazingly there are STILL TICKETS LEFT after several HOURS); tidied the house (a bit); sorted out some stuff to go to charity shops; filed all the boring admin BORING BORING BORING; helped Owen pair A MILLION AND ONE socks (he is very good at pairing my infinite supply of black socks, but we still ended up with about 7 really-definitely-odd ones); played piano (probably pissing off the new neighbours with incompetently-played Rachmaninov preludes); listened to Owen's piano practice (recognisable tunes with BOTH HANDS AT ONCE! did I learn that fast? I wish I could remember); identified all the tasks that we need to do for planning our w*dd*ng (and even made some Decisions, amazingly); made tasty roast chicken (I say 'made', but really, all you do is shove half a lemon up its arse and put it in the oven for an hour and a half, and the 'tasty' owed more to evolution than to the lemon) and tastier plum tart (which I actually did make); and replied to a couple of emails (though the backlog is still doomful).

Today I have not: done the work I was going to do this weekend; got any further with any of the on-the-go knitting projects; written up the EIGHT PAGES OF RANT triggered by the mini-conference I went to on Thursday; read any more of Ulysses.

Tags: diaryism, lists

Films I would like to see:

Indiana Bond and the Octopussy of Doom, in which Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig get kitted out by Q with invisible clothes and have to mud-wrestle giant squids for the lost plot of the Incas. The lost plot is never found, but who cares?