It's a bit last-minute, but if anyone knows someone who still needs a Worldcon 75 membership, I forgot I upgraded to an attending membership at some point. I'll sell it for $100 US.

Yesterday, ladymondegreen had a colonoscopy in the attempt to diagnose, and ideally remedy, her nightshade intolerance.

Additionally, on the way home, we stopped at the drycleaners, where the beanbag chair which we had brought in to be cleaned (a month ago) had finally turned up.

Despite my deliberately provocative phrasing, these two incidents were not, in fact, related.

ladymondegreen was delighted by this entry on khraigslist.

So I thought it deserved an LJ icon.

Here it is!



(I'm also probably one of the few people who's old-school and geeky enough to make LJ icons using netpbm and make.)

cadhla has been successfully retrieved from the airport, and is conked out in our second bedroom.

I haven't posted here in a long time, but I've had a significant life status change lately. To wit, as of this past November 1st, I'm no longer at the university where I'd been since 1990 as undergrad, grad student, and post-doc.

Instead, I'm now working at a small start-up in New Jersey. It's fun, exciting work, and so far I'm having a good time.

However (the point of this post), the start-up is not in a place which is conveniently reachable by public transportation. I've rented a car from Avis, but the cost of this is adding up quickly. So I need to buy a car.

Buying cars is hard.

My company has (through the company we contract our HR through) a program with Toyota which gives us a no-negotiation-required discount -- $200 over dealer's invoice on new cars, and similar margins over the dealership's purchase price on used cars. So I've been looking at Toyotas.

At first I looked at a used Corolla, but the price they quoted me on it was $16,000 -- apparently they paid too much for it -- and that's essentially the same price as a new Corolla, so today ladymondegreen and I went to test-drive a new Corolla.

And we didn't like it. The ergonomics of the interior are awkward -- there's an oddly-placed handle where I keep bumping my head -- and the suspension is way too stiff, so we feel every little bounce and jolt of the potholed Jersey City streets we were testdriving over.

Larger Toyotas (the Camry, and the like) are bigger than I'd really feel comfortable driving, and also seem too big for the fairly teeny parking space I've rented.

So unfortunately I'm now back at square one, and ladymondegreen suggested I post to my Livejournal.

So, what do people like in compact cars, for about the $16000 range, in either new or trustworthy used? Any recommendations?

This past weekend, ladymondegreen and I went to Northampton to visit my mother.

On Saturday, since it was a gorgeous day, Mom and her boyfriend G. suggested we go canoeing. This seemed like an entertaining prospect, so we agreed.

( Adventures on, and in, the Connecticut River )

This meme's going around, and in the process of discussing it with ladymondegreen I somehow started coming up with answers...

Name a CD you own that no-one else on your friends list does.
Echoes and Shadows: Romantic Choral Music of Twentieth Century American Composers.
This was one of the last CDs from Pro Gloria Musicae, the record company of my dear friend Gabe Wiener who died completely unexpectedly in 1997.

It was to be the first of a new series, the Ars Nova imprint, featuring more modern (twentieth century) music instead of the Renaissance and Baroque-era works he'd always done before.

Name a book you own that no-one else on your friends list does.
The Universal History of Numbers, by Georges Ifrah. I'm probably the only person on my friends list geeky enough in the right way to find this fascinating.

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that no-one else on your friends list does.
Do I own any movies? (Goes to check.) Not very many. The one DVD I have is Troma Films's The Toxic Avenger. Note that I did not actually buy this -- I won it (dubious prize) in a raffle run by the Columbia Science Fiction Society. Hopefully no one else out there has felt the need to acquire it...

Name a place that you have visited that no-one else on your friends list has.
Consensus on the meme seems to be that answers like "my grandmother's house" or "the high school I went to" are cheating.

So I'm going to pick something which might not be true, but if it is, will almost certainly continue to be for the forseeable future: the U.S.S.R.

That's A.K.A. Doctor Wil.

So yesterday, I was meeting with my adviser. I told him all the fiddly little things that still needed to be done on my thesis -- write an acknowledgments section, for instance, or figure out why the formatting was wrong in the table of contents.

"Don't worry about that," he said. "Send it to the committee."

What?

So I printed it out, made five photocopies of the thing, and mailed them / stuck them in mailboxes of the committee.

Which I guess means that the thesis is done. There'll still be tweaks to do, and some continuing work I'm doing might make it in before the deposit version, but ... wow.

I seem to have written a dissertation. How'd that happen?

My dear sweetie ladymondegreen has now graciously kicked my ass, and made me think about what I want.

I do want to finish the Ph.D. Basically - because I feel that by this point I've earned it. It's been slow, but I have done a good amount of good work. I haven't solved all the world's problems, but that's not what I need to do.

My main problem is finishing things. I've got 80-90% of the work done on a number of good things. If I push myself, I can finish them.

As a first step, LMG is telling me to write out a plan of what I want to do tomorrow. I'm putting it out here, so I can be subject to public ridicule if I don't accomplish it. (This helps.)

So, tomorrow: see Prof. N. and Prof. K. about what they think about my situation. (These are two other professors in the department, on my thesis committee, from whom I can get second, or nth, opinions about my status. I've heard opinions that my advisor is asking me to do too much.)

Assemble the various papers, and other written material, that I think would make up a thesis. This is just a rough cut at this point, but the idea is to see just how much substance there is there.

And, things not to do: reading anything non-work-related while at work. This includes but is not limited to the GCC mailing lists, FreeBSD mailing lists, fanfic, web boards for discussion of fanfic, Usenet, LiveJournal, or Slashdot. Or the novel I have with me.

Let's see if this works.