Background

For those completely unfamiliar, YouTube is an advertiser-supported service that allows users to upload and download videos for free. In a world where personal upload bandwidth is not yet remotely sufficient for most individuals to self-publish even text and images, this serves a fairly valuable purpose. Although to start it seemed to be publishing primarily unauthorized copies of already published material, it seems to have matured to the point where it consists primarily of home clips of people recording their pets, their vacations, their silliness (or outright stupidity), and their personal accomplishments.

Pixel picked a good moment to sit up in the windowsill. This is probably my best cat photo to date.

Halloween has come and gone. We live within walking distance to two schools, and trick-or-treating is so formalized here that it gets its own scheduling announcement in the newspaper, so I expected a small swarm of sugar-seeking munchkins to descend upon the neighborhood. We bought enough candy to fill two large glass jars, and set them out to hasten the appeasement of the costumed.

The sum total of the encounters of the evening: 3 visits, less than a dozen kids. We still have two half-full jars of candy.

Although I am not a lawyer, I have been spending quite some time reading about sexual crimes in my new home state of Maryland, prompted by a recent news story (first brought to my attention at Feministing and analyzed further at The Happy Feminist) about a state appeals court decision in which it was concluded that sexual consent cannot be withdrawn by a woman after vaginal penetration has occurred. The news article is both technically correct and rather misleading — the decision was somewhat complex, and a rape conviction was not "thrown out" specifically due to that conclusion, but the conclusion was made, and after some investigation, it's not the only problem that Maryland law has with sex crimes and consent.

Introduction

Moving is always a pain, and usually an expensive pain. The cheapest and most inconvenient way to move is to do everything yourself: rent a huge truck, load everything into it yourself, drive it to the new location yourself (potentially asking someone to drive your own car up), and unload it yourself once you're there. If you've never packed furniture on your own before, you risk the loss of goods, and if you've never driven a large truck before, you may be risking more than that on the road. Special features like "air-ride" suspension or environmental controls may or may not be available. On the far opposite side of the spectrum, you can pay a reputable company to pack, load, drive, and unload everything for you (paying a company you know nothing about to take everything you own is not recommended). The better companies will advertise air-ride trucks with mildew protection at the very least, and will have their own collection of furniture pads, tie-downs, and bubble-wrap necessary to keep everything protected. The downside is that you will have to schedule your move with the mover between two weeks and a month in advance, and it's very expensive. On my last move, from California to Louisiana, I went this route with Mayflower, moving a 1-bedroom apartment for about $3,500, and everything arrived in perfect condition.

The machines are in their new location with better connectivity, though the main server is still in dire need of an upgrade. Writing will resume soon, though likely more personal entries than news and analysis for a while.

I'm just now wrapping up posting the second day of pictures from the June Washington trip, and included in them were some cat pictures, just in time for the Friday Cat Blogging tradition. I'm tired at this point, so it's only fair to show a tired cat:

Much delayed, it seems I have managed to complete all of the editing for the Washington hike photos in time to get everything sent out for the holidays. There were 471 total exposures (about a hundred less than I thought, when I first started editing, but I'd forgotten that my shoot rate tapered off towards the end of the trip), out of which I produced 274 final edited images. This number is deceptively low this pass; it doesn't take into account that there were lots of stitched images that condensed down into individual panoramas. Although the total number of resulting panoramas is still well into the single digits, their preparation took a surprising bulk of the time. Even using PTGUI, getting a pano just right could take an entire day.

Please pardon the somewhat rambling writing; I'm simultaneously exhausted and jittery. A visit to the woman who makes my life worth living is long overdue, and as a result my rather sporadic updates as of late are likely to become even more so for the next two weeks.

I can never sleep the night before a flight. I don't know why. It might be partly historical; I remember once upon a time trying deliberately not to sleep ahead of a long flight, so that it would be easier to sleep on the plane, and thus make the period of enforced inactivity easier to bear. Now it just seems to fade into the background of my general insomnia, a habit too well ingrained to break when my body actually wants to encourage it for me.

The automotive mount for my GPS arrived today. Inside the shipping box was the hermetically sealed package containing the mount itself... and a free sample of "Degree for Men", an "Ultra Clear Deodorant Stick" with the catchphrase, "For men who take risks, it won't let you down."

I wonder if the seller is trying to tell me something.