[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Morbid Curiosity's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | |
| 7:39 pm | Have done a bit of photography over the last while. As a break from slowly getting life back on track, I've sorted through and uploaded some of it. Really ought to get around to learning how to do such things properly, one of these days. |
| 1:40 pm | Perfectly reviewable in Regency times In which ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} karenhealey reviews Faro's Daughter by Georgette Heyer. Spoilers and hilarity ahoy. Current Mood:  amusedCurrent Music: Stephen Warbeck - The Marquis and the Scaffold |
| Friday, November 20th, 2009 | |
| 9:31 pm | The Disease of Kings I woke up the other day and my foot was hurting. I initially thought I'd kicked something in my sleep and bruised it. Visiting the doctor today, it seems that I've had an attack of gout, despite eating quite minimal levels of food with purine content. *shrug* Maybe it has something to do with my currently broken sleeping patterns. Still, a few changes in the diet - fewer legumes, cutting beer entirely (instead of my current one or two a fortnight), a little less red meat (and ensure that what I have is very lean). I still get to eat plenty of cereal (also good for the cholesterol) most fruit and vegetables, and fresh fish. Keeping hydrated. Anti-inflammatories three times a day with meals until it clears up. Ice to keep the swelling down. Time to try to get my systems back to nominal. |
| Monday, November 16th, 2009 | |
| 2:37 pm | In case you're wondering what my lovely fiancée is doing these days, here's an article about the Maker's Mark Secretariat Center: http://www.horsechannel.com/horse-exclu She's been working as an intern there since September, and just got a job offer the other day. This is indeed a happiness. Current Mood:  pleased |
| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | |
| 10:43 am | |
| Monday, November 9th, 2009 | |
| 10:39 pm | |
| Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | |
| 7:06 pm | Will it blend? We got three bags of corn chips from the supermarket a few days back that were devoid of flavouring. While waiting for vouchers to turn up for new bags of corn chips, I did an experiment to see if I could salvage edibility out of some of the kilogramme or so of less-than-salsa-flavoured chips. So, after using a bowl-and-mug due to lack of mortar-and-pestle, I remembered that I own a food processor. This allows me to turn large corn chips into small flakes quite quickly. Adding in pasta sauce and nuking it for a while to soften, this has left me with... well, something. It's kind of like couscous in texture, but corny. And going fairly well with the tomato and basil sausages I picked up down at the local butcher this morning. Could probably use a little bit of something tart, like vinagrette and diced cucumber. Or the Chilean pebre I picked up from a place near Pasadena when I was visiting there. That stuff was damned good - kind of like a South American pesto. Stomach calls. Ingestion ensues. Current Mood:  hungry |
| Saturday, October 31st, 2009 | |
| 4:24 pm | Ongoing issues with networkery Does anyone out there have an ADSL modem I could borrow, for line-testing purposes? We had a couple of days where it was working fine, but the things got bad again. The link's disconnected and reconnected 15 times already today. I'm fed up and sick of having conversations disappear into the aether. Also, in procuring new screwdrivers to fix my glasses, it seems the bus routes have changed and now neither of the routes right near us go directly to the local mall - it's either a bus and a walk or a walk and a bus, depending. Most aggravating. Oh, and I didn't get my paper accepted to the conference I was hoping for in March, so I'm currently trying to rejig that into a poster proposal instead. Due in a day or two, if I can only concentrate. Current Mood:  frustrated |
| Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | |
| 3:07 pm | Okay, finally well enough to be back at university, at least for an afternoon. On the plus side, a network connection that doesn't die every few minutes! On the minus side, we seem to be in the midst of a virus infestation. Someone brought some kind of virus in on a pen drive which then bounced around the university network infecting everything in sight. Hurrah. My desktop machine was patched and sanitised this very morning though, so I'm able to do a few things. |
| Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | |
| 2:39 pm | It's not detachable. I woke up today and my front lawn and fence was missing. It's an interesting way to start the day. At least I managed to find where they put the mailbox. |
| Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 | |
| 7:55 am | Hrm. It appears a post I made a while ago about being ill got eaten by LJ somewhere along the way. Along with the period disconnects we've been getting, with IRC and IMs screwing up occasionally and all, communication seems to have been very patchy of late. Are we having solar flares, Mercury in retrograde, or some other arcane piece of universe-hatey right now? I don't know. In any case: potential swine flu, given the symptoms that my father and I have shared for the last 2-3 weeks. No contact prior to infection, but we both went through Brisbane on our holidays and fell ill shortly after returnning home. Symptoms not severe enough to require administering antivirals, but still nasty and unpleasant. Also, Sleeping is difficult as the cherry blossom in our front yard is currently being dissected with power tools, and from the sound of things possibly blended to a fine paste. Glad I got some photos while it was still there, I guess. |
| 2:37 am | H1, N1, Me 0 So [revised] suspected swine flu sucks. I think I'm starting to come right, but recovery has been slow. Given that my father has been ill the last three weeks too, it's possible I picked it up going through Australia. Haven't been able to get a lot of work done recently, as my head hasn't been clear enough for it (literally and figuratively). Still. Keeping hydrated, resting, trying to eat healthy and taking what I can to alleviate the symptoms and get healthy soon. Really not liking my patchy immune system right now. Since my brain hasn't been so good for hard thinking, I've been catching up on various media. Watched a few films (including The Usual Suspects, finally - I think it was worth watching, from what I could process). I've tried a couple of times to make headway on Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist, but it's a little too textually dense and expositiony for me to make much headway. Online reading with text size ramped up a notch. Also doing a little light reading for work - I don't have the head for code, but I figure I can always round out some theory a little a day to keep my brain from stagnating. I have a departmental seminar to prepare soon, too. Ironic for someone needing a lot of rest, I've been having trouble sleeping well. Trying to get out of the house or at least a little physical activity each day for my constitution, but there are limits to the length of time I can spend upright. I did finally get to have dinner with my parents the other night - first time I've seen them since they and I got back to New Zealand from our respective holidays. Topics of conversation included food, wolfwitch and how she's doing with her internship (quite well indeed - I'm proud of her), the possibility and impact of new surveillance laws, plantar fasciitis, computer hardware, hockey and Alexander. Though I wasn't able to make it to his birthday, I hear my nephew is doing well. Just two years old, and he's already showing good reasoning ability, empathy, comprehension, understanding consequences and expressing a disturbing tendency towards cleaning up after himself.This took far too long to type. Let's hope I'm healthy soon. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Oh, and the scholarship money for September came through. Though I didn't realise at first because they sent the notification to a different email from before. But it's there, and I don't have to worry about dipping into my savings account now. Yay. Current Mood:  tired, but not sleepy enough |
| Sunday, October 4th, 2009 | |
| 5:56 pm | |
| Friday, September 25th, 2009 | |
| 4:12 pm | Now in Pasadena. A couple of bumps on the way, but largely an uneventful flight. Missing wolfwitch a lot already, which I guess is natural, but still. Will have to get back again soon. |
| Friday, September 18th, 2009 | |
| 5:52 pm | It's nice to see art delving into New Zealand's history in interesting ways. JORDAN REYNE - The Proximity of Death (Blue Eyed Boy) from Eloise Coveny on Vimeo. |
| Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | |
| 10:12 am | |
| 8:56 am | The journey here in a little more depth. Monday afternoon, my father arrived to take me to the airport. Being a little early, our stop at the mall to purchase trade goods also included a small meal, then off to the airport to check in. Got a spot check for explosives and gunpower residue in my carry-on luggage, but that took all of a few seconds before the friendly security officer let me on my way. The CHC -> SYD flight was the worst leg. I hadn't thought to take any extra currency with me for in-flight food and water, so all I could afford was a distinctly substandard $2 Muesli bar. I didn't get any sleep, due to constantly having my elbow knocked by flight attendants coming past, and I ended up with a bruised elbow after about the third or fourth time I had a food/drink trolley smack into me on the way past. It's a bit too cramped for my broad frame, sure, but a little bit of care and attention would be nice too. So I'm not so sure about flying Pacific Blue again, if economy is going to be that economy. Sydney airport wasn't too bad. Free internet access in the transit area (kiosks running Opera under Linux and set up in a security-conscious fashion, for those who care about such things). Unfortunately the transit desk I'd been directed to for V Australia wasn't open yet, so there was around 20 minutes of pensiveness while trying to confirm that yes, I could board the flight to L.A. after all. SYD -> LAX was long, but a good flight. Smooth flying with a couple of minor spots of turbulence. In-flight meals were good, drink choices reasonable and frequent, staff friendly and helpful. In-flight entertainment was pretty awesome. Touch screen controlled, good handling of digital media. The setup was such that I could pause something I was watching or listening and do something else, then return to exactly where I left off - from anything I'd previously looked at. I found at the start of the flight that I could queue up a good ten hours or so of music that I liked in a relatively short space of time, plus a number of movies and TV show episodes. Then, over the course of the flight, select from my own personalised library of things I'd earlier suggested I might like to watch. Very slick. Boeing 777s are a pretty sweet ride, too. Getting through Passport Control/Baggage/Customs at LAX was actually relatively relaxed this time. Slow in terms of the flow of people, but much quicker in terms of the processing. Having declared cheese and chocolate on my forms, officials just waved me through. Then a straight path out to the shuttles. My brief rest stopover in Pasadena was made a little briefer by the shuttle ambling out and around through Alhambra and San Marino, but I guess I got to see a bit more of the area than last time. Even with the bank of thick orange-tinged smoke on the near horizon, arriving near Caltech was gratifyingly familiar from my last trip to the area. After a short trip for frozen yoghurt and the grateful receipt by my hosts of Whittaker's chocolate and a kilo of tasty cheddar from back home, a few hours of blessed rest and back out to the airport. LAX -> CVG wasn't bad, either. I'm not sure if the LAX airport staff have relaxed since my last trip, or I'm just more used to the procedure, but it certainly felt easier this time through. Flying Delta wasn't too bad - juice, water and soft drinks free, and while the food was paid for it was reasonable quality. The staff were good - friendly, and screwing with me just enough when I asked silly questions to make me feel at ease. In-flight entertainment had some TV channels, pay-per-view movies and the like, but most of the time I just left the screen showing the navigation map. We had a good tail wind for most of the trip (up to 90km/h at one point), and arrived in a timely fashion. Met my lovely fiancée at the airport with a minimum of fuss, bags arrived quickly, and then out the door and off home. Most of the time since has been resting, closeness, settling in and getting the furkids used to me again. It's really, really good to be here. Current Mood:  happy |
| Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | |
| 6:55 pm | Here in Kentucky, now. A longer update will follow after I've had a rest, and possibly dinner. Also, I may have a seminar to give about my research if I do head along to visit the University of Louisville CompSci Department. Not totally a busman's holiday, but I've got things to keep myself out of mischief when Jana needs to be doing her work, all the same :-) Now I join the nice yawny lady next to me and do that snoozing thing. |
| Friday, August 28th, 2009 | |
| 4:01 pm | Plane tickets picked up, and weight allowances for baggage generous. PhD proposal submitted. Supervisor is happy - say it has more detail than strictly necessary, but it's well-written and comprehensive. I can feel my shoulders unwinding already. Sleeping tonight will be much more peaceful, I'll warrant. Current Mood:  unwinding, not unravellingCurrent Music: Herman's Hermits - Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter |
| 3:46 am | PhD proposal status update 3 Current approximate word count: 6,800 References in bibliography: 25 PDF drafts made: 1 Pages: 28 single-sided Screenshots inserted: 2 Figures: 3 Footnotes: 11 {\bf Urge to insert \LaTeX{} markup into journal posts and instant messaging:} 0.8 JasonSmiths Sleeping now --- should be able to at least manage a good six hours, I hope. Proofing and submission tomorrow\ldots{} Current Mood: wearyCurrent Music: The Meatmen - Smells Like Teen Spirit [acapella Nirvana cover] |
drained