I just got my Macbook from the store. I got my lcd fixed. Now i seem to have a problem with my airport. When i click on it, it says "Airport card not installed".

What am i supposed to do? Is there anything i can do myself without sending it back?

Just committed guest bloggery at Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days: "Niches, Typecasting, and Stereotypes". Go read, yo.

You want to go to there. It will be epic. I promise you.

Please RSVP via Facebook if you are on Facebook! (If you're not, no worries. Just come on down.)

And PLEASE spread the word!

The Bride and her Beast returned from Russia yesterday. Cat and Dmitri flew back in last night and, anxious to get home and wishing to take advantage of their jet lag, packed up and hit the road at about 1am.

Mindful of their time crunch and their compact car (and, to be honest, desirous of making sure that they managed to get out of here with ALL their stuff), I spent some time yesterday evening packing up their things, removing unneeded packing material and boxes and compacting everything down to the essentials as effectively as possible. I figured that would help them get all their stuff into their car.

What I hadn't figured on was them arriving with their car quite full already.

Foolishly, I hadn't thought about the wedding gifts and other things that had gone home with D's parents. So when we looked at their car and then looked at the large pile of stuff on my front porch, it was with some dismay.

D suggested leaving behind some of the wedding things, like the bouquet. Cat protested because she wanted them at home. I protested because - AUGH!! No more boxes in my house!!! I suggested that they leave behind the suitcase with the wedding togs - after all, it's just one suitcase, and they are going to be back at Christmas. That was a reasonable compromise, and we got to work.

I really wish we'd taken pictures, because mere words cannot convey the special Tetris/Tardis combination required to get everything into a vehicle that clearly must be bigger on the inside. It's kind of amazing how many extra things can fit into the interstitial spaces between and around the large and bulky items. Misha and Babymonkey, if you can, take the time to appreciate their unpacking. It's going to look like a clown car. Just make sure they get all the wine out from behind the passenger's seat before they open the back door or there will be sad.

And if they have to stop suddenly on the freeway, the shifting load will likely kill them. Other than that, no problems!

So now they are gone, which means The Wedding of Bard and Beast is truly at an end. I walked back into the cleaned out guest room to savor its return to our possession.

And by the gods if I wasn't just a little bit sad and lonely. Of course, Ferrett being gone for this week doesn't help that, but the wedding was such fun and so wonderful that having it all gone leaves me a bit nostalgic.

Oh, well, I can always go down to my sewing room and revel in the mess left by the seamstress. That's still there for me.

High-waisted wiggle skirt I made for myself. It's thick jersey and quite simple, two darts in the front, 4 in the back.

Do you lovely folks have any tips on picking fabric that you're sure will have minimal bobbling? I particularly have this problem with jerseys which sometimes bobble just from light handling, even before the first wash! I don't know much about fabric properties so what should I look out for?

{x-posted to sew_hip}

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Administration
Hello to new reader wavesandmoon!

Medical
Same, basically.

Lots of celiac research yesterday. The problem here is the inverse of some of my other medical things - there's too much information! Lots to absorb.

Elephant Walk is right out, as everything that isn't Deadly Poison is tainted by foul citrus. I am looking at this menu like "why would you willingly put that in your mouth?" I mean, I could have the flank steak, I guess? But I worry about citrus stench. Soy protein and shellfish = anaphylaxis. Citrus just makes me sick to my stomach. I know, I know, with even more dietary restrictions, I need to not be picky, but I'm not kidding when I say it's hard to keep from throwing up when I smell or taste citrus. Some foods I just have texture issues with, and will have to push through, but this one, not so much.

We're having dinner at Stone Hearth Pizza tonight.

Ways to Not Contact Me
We don't pick up our phone. Almost ever. Just when we're expecting a call from a doctor or someone. I just checked our voicemail? 27 messages, dating from as far back as October 16.

So... not the way to reach us.

Second worst way is via LJ message, as that requires several steps just to reply to the e-mail. Really, just e-mail me. If I only have to hit one button to reply, you're more likely to hear back from me. (Is there a way to disable LJ messaging?)

Texting's also good if you know I'm not home; I don't keep track of my cell phone when I'm home. It's a 3G, so I get e-mail away from home as well. E-mail = still the best way.

Out of Sorts
Quite out of sorts today. You can tell, because I am curt. Combination of figuring celiac stuff out and that mass of voicemails, and just being generally exhausted.

Daily Science
Advances in tissue bioengineering have enabled lab-grown bladders, tracheas, cardiac patches and now penis parts.

Yes, your Daily Science today = lab-grown rabbit penises. You're welcome. :)

Plans
Agh. Still trying to wake up. Today needs to be a writing day, as tomorrow Elayna has no school. Going to Mind's Eye later to fix my shawl with the infinitely-patient asciikitty, and then Diesel + dinner.

This entry originated at adampknave.com.

Two things for you today:

First, I want this t-shirt. It is from Japan and the only way I can find it is in an eBay auction where it is 45 bucks or so. But man who doesn’t want a Pedobear vs Ronald McDonald tshirt?

Yeah.

The second thing is all about Biff. As in Tanner. It seems that Tom Wilson, who played Biff, is a funny guy who does stand-up while singing little funny songs as often as not. Who knew! Here is Biff’s Question Song, which had me laughing quite a bit:

Stories Published This Month:

"In the Land of the Deaf," by Electric Spec
Teaser: I really wish you'd get yourself deafened, Geoff's wife Angie signed. It's just too dangerous out there.

The irony was, of course, that Geoff barely heard anything anymore; years of firing his gun in the line of duty had permanently damaged his eardrums. But he was on his way out the door to give the annual recruitment talk, which meant there was no time to argue Angie out of her damn fool ideas again...

Comments on Publication: This is actually one of my favorite stories that I wrote in the first six months after Clarion, and I'm glad to see it find a home. I should also note that Electric Spec has an interesting blog that often critiques the first pages of submitted stories from an editor's perspective.

Also, on an unrelated note, Diabolical Plots listed my story "Suicide Notes, Written By An Alien Mind" on his Best of Pseudopod Top 10 List. Neat!

Stories Worked On This Month:

• "Shoebox Heaven" (first draft). My Godson Andy's cat died, and so I wrote a story about him flying up to Heaven to find his kitty. It wound up being a horror story - though not, perhaps, from his perspective. Like any afterlife story, it runs into tricky bits with the mechanisms of Heaven, and preliminary critique from the fine folks at Viable Paradise suggest I need to be more explicit about my views of mankind, but I think it'll be quite nice shortfic when it's done.
• "Season to Taste" (fourth draft). My infamous "gay cannibal rhino" story. Much ripped out upon revision thanks to the helpful feedback from The Cajun Sushi Hamsters, wherein I really looked at the character motivations and made them all line up cleanly. Not sure if that made the story better, though I'll keep revising. There's something here. About glorious, beautiful cannibalism.
• "The Insecure Cyborg" (fourth draft). This one's a little weird, because I have an offer for it, but I have to revise out a controversial scene and replace it with something else. Difficult, but doable.
• A couple of minor starts and dribbles on stories with preliminary titles like "Love Shack" and "Cootie Quarantine."

October Acceptances: One. Being a superstitious man, I don't mention a sale before the contract is signed. That damn near killed me with the Asimov's sale, and it damn near killed me to wait five months before I could say that GUD Magazine picked up "In the Garden of Rust and Salt." Alas, it's in issue #6, and my friends funwithrage and ken_schneyer are in #5, so as wonderful as it is to be in GUD, I won't be next to my pals. Alas! And yay!

October Rejections: A whopping eight. One of them, for "What Killed Tyra Herschel?" after saying the same things that everyone else did, convinced me to scrap the story and start over - nobody likes newscasts, apparently. One was for a reprint, so I don't feel too bad. One, from Ideomancer, had very kind, personal feedback; another, from Strange Horizons, told me that they just didn't buy the premise. The rest were generic rejections.

Also, I've got one in a very long wait from F&SF, but I'm pretty sure it's lost in the mail. It's happened before. But you have to wait a while before following up.

Currently In Circulation:
"The Backdated Romance," "The Insecure Cyborg,""...At The End Of All Prophecy," "iTime," "Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol," "Home Despot," "Amanda Rose's Travelling, Earth-Destroying Circus," "A Window, Clear As A Mirror," "Unreal Estate," "Slaves of Hollywood," "At The End Of The Chain"

Overall:
I just ran dry this month; nothing really seemed exciting to work on, though I had some great ideas. So I took off a week. I'm still on that break, and I feel the tugs of little stories aching at me, but I'm not sure whether the break is from laziness or just that the muse needs some time to recover from 1.3 years of writing constant stories. I dunno; I feel guilty either way.

I had to destroy several friendships before I realized I had an addiction. And like any addiction, even now I have to constantly guard against it, because the minute I let down my guard I stop existing and the addiction takes over.

It’s not that my addiction is some separate entity, a Tyler Durden waiting to be unleashed; rather, it’s that an addiction is a habit so strong that, unless you consciously work against it, it will drag you down the same paths again and again.

Time can teach you that those paths will destroy the most precious parts of your life. Experience can make resisting a near-involuntary effort, like putting your glasses on the same counter before you go to bed.

Yet relax for a moment, and that desire will take the wheel. You will break promises, break people, shatter all the goodness in your life, simply because some portion of you is broken. You have an inherent desire, and Lord knows where it came from, but it wants to be satisfied all the damn time. It will wriggle inside you, subtly changing your behavior to make sure its goals are met.

My addiction? NRE.

---

I think about this now because two weeks ago, I had a very good week. Two lovely women were flirting with me, it felt like some connection was being created, and every time I opened my inbox there was something new and friendshippy.

The next week, that stopped. The people in question didn’t abandon me, but real life took over as they had other deadlines, and the emails stopped coming.

And I crashed.

I felt ludicrously depressed and unloved, even though things were stupidly good around me. I had a wife who loved me deeply, I had a house literally filled with good friends, I had two intelligent and beautiful girlfriends, and a load of people complaining that we never had time to spend together.

Yet because last week two relationships had been flourishing, and this week had no new relationships, I felt like I was sliding backwards. I had two people last week, so this week should be three people, and the fact that I didn’t have that meant that I wasn’t any good and everyone hated me, and my God what the hell was wrong with me?

That’s my addiction: New Relationship Energy.

That addiction isn’t necessarily sexual, though it often is. I just like that charge of having a new friendship blossom out. I love falling into somebody new, and I love that thrill of knowing that someone really wants to talk to me so badly they’re thinking of me when I’m not there. I love that initial back-and-forth of OMG, HOW ARE YOU, LET’S TALK SOME MORE.

That charge led me down some pretty dark paths when I was younger, because usually the quick fix for that was sex. That made me an absolute bastard when I was younger; if there was someone who I could be attracted to, why, I would be, because I loved having that connection. And if someone wanted me, well, I wanted to be wanted. And wham, sex.

If those people who wanted me happened to be dating someone else, well… I’d like to say that I couldn’t resist, but that’d be a lie. I could have. But then my desires wouldn’t have been met, and I’d have felt terrible, and to avoid that feeling of isolation I did things I am distinctly not proud of.

I tried to tell myself that the fact of the attraction should be enough - but in the depths of my stupidity, I couldn’t feel that. If there was a potential and it went by, I felt like it must have been an illusion. How could I know that they really liked me if we didn’t go all the way and explore that intimacy? Not the sex, though that almost invariably followed, but the intimacy of spending hours together talking and needing to know and finding out every nook and cranny of the other person.

I couldn’t, wouldn’t, let it go, so I formed unhealthy connections. That hurt people. Sometimes I’d find myself getting into relationships with people who I knew were bad for me just because they, too, wanted that closeness. That hurt me. And then the NRE wore off and I’d need someone new to bond with, and so I’d spend all my time with someone else.

I called it Tarzan-swinging. Just grasping from friend to friend.

And if they dropped off the NRE train first (or just had the normal vagaries of life distract them), then I’d get panicky wondering what happened to our friendship. It sent my mind into tiny little spirals. And I’d do silly things in stupid efforts to make them “prove” we were still friends, performing embarrassing psychodramatic displays that I’m still ashamed of.

As time went by, and my friends found it increasingly hard to defend me, I realized I wanted to be a better person, but didn’t know how.

Thankfully, as usual, God provided.

While stuck in a lonely town, I met a guy who was phenomenal, and he became my best and only friend. We hung out for hours, which was brilliant. Then, three months later, I met his girlfriend. Who was very cute, and we clicked, but I realized that I would ruin both this new friendship and my old friendship by trying to press for full-on closeness in the way I usually did. It would have interfered with their relationship, and I liked my pal so much that I didn’t want to ever do that.

So I became friends with her, and close friends, but not the friendship that squeezed someone dry for that NRE fix. And that, thankfully, was my first step away from my stupidity.

I’ve learned how to cope since then. Now, though I do have close friendships, I can stop at the edge and go, “All right, this doesn’t need to be a 24/7 lovefest where we constantly bare our souls. This can just be cool.” And in many ways, that’s better. I get to keep my wife (who I do constantly have that lovefest with), and have a variety of good friends, and I don’t cause upheaval when the honeymoon period ends and we slide into hey, howya doin’.

Yet I still sense it there, lurking. I still backslide occasionally. And even now, I could do stupid harm. Those people I spent the two weeks talking to? I could do dumb stuff, like sending dumb emails that are a variant on DO YOU LIKE ME? I could try to force a relationship prematurely, which would lead to ruin as this force-grown friendship blossomed in cramped and awful ways. I could try to reach out to new people in attempts to get that charge.

These days, I know. I know that it’s time to step away from the keyboard, and let it go. It’s unhealthy. And so I go back to bed, and I tell Gini what a doof I am, and she hugs me and I realize that this is what’s important. And it’s good.

That tug, though, is always there. It’s been two decades learning my way around it, and it’s still twisting me in unseen ways. It could be argued, and I wouldn’t debate it too heavily, that to a large extent this very journal is a variant on reaching out for NRE. I ask for secrets and post comment-whore threads because, hey, it’s a connection. I like connections.

Maybe too much.

It’s not quite on the destructive level of an addiction like alcohol, thankfully, but it’s as insidious. You have to monitor. Some people think that I think things over too carefully, and perhaps I do, but that’s because I have to analyze my own behavior.

If I’m not careful in my actions, I’ll look back and find that hey, it’s in the driver’s seat again. And for that, I must be vigilant in a way that people who don’t have this internal tugging can’t really understand.

• 12:09 At work doing a sustained bandwidth test using windowsupdate and netflix streaming "cheesy sci-fi and fantasy flicks" #
• 18:39 Oh postal worker, I put the 310 on the mailbox for ju, don't deliver my checks to 314 or 308 #
• 20:31 Came up with new joke about chinese buffets/food. I think this is the first new joke on chinese food since 1983 #
• 21:20 Kim has caught the couponic plague #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Hi guys! So, the iTunes store recently started putting up HD versions of the Pixar films. I've been wanting to get a digital copy of WALL-E, so I'm really excited about it. But I was wondering if there's anything specific you need to have for HD to work or anything like that?

Oh, also, does an iTunes HD movie play on an iTouch, or include an iTouch version, or something like that?

Thanks!

 

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Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers Sunday 9P e/p They say that shrinking heads is no longer practiced. We’re going to ask the experts. Premieres Sunday at 9P e/p on Nat Geo. Learn more at www.natgeotv.com/expeditionweek

brass,
all made by jamaika_

From photos

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=071566fb3483381ca11a0c3a7c88649c

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/10.html

soporific: causing sleep; also, something that causes sleep.