Original Painting: Dog, Tired

Crossword Puzzle: All Lit Up: First Lines

This is an original crossword puzzle.

Interactive (with java) Version

Printable Version

Answer Key

Crossword Puzzle: Beauty and the Beast: Names (and Things)

This is an original crossword puzzle.

Interactive (with java) Version

Printable Version

Printable Answer Key

Thunderbird mods: Change Colour of Links in Headers

Thunderbird has *lots* of links in headers. It makes every email address, including yours, a clickable link. The default for colour links in headers is fluorescent blue. This is a pain, literally, if your windows' Menu setting ie. the header background, is Aqua. Or maybe, you've just declared blue 'Dead to Me'.

To change the header colour, you'll need to go inside the Chrome folder within your Profile. There, you'll find a file called userChrome.css. If you don't find this file, make it (by making a txt file, renaming it to match, and changing the extension). Open that file with notepad, and paste in the following and save it:

add.to.userChrome.css.to.change.colour.of.links.in.headers.in.thunderbird.txt

(As code did not want to appear in properly in Blogger, follow the link to the textfile)

Thunderbird mods: Change the Reply Header

The standard Thunderbird reply header reads:

Daisy wrote:

This is boring, plus, more baffling, it's missing the timestamp. Wouldn't it be better for it to say:

Daisy tiptoed through the tulips to whisper at 6/23/2006 9:52 AM:

You can change to that by going to your prefs.js file within your Profile. If you don't find this file, make it (by making a txt file, renaming it to match, and changing the extension). With Thunderbird closed, open that file with notepad, and paste in the
following and save it:

add.to.user.js.to.change.reply.header.in.thunderbird.txt

(As code did not want to appear in properly in Blogger, follow the link to the textfile)

C/D Manuscript Progress Meter

15,010 / 50,000 (30.0%)

Thunderbird is a Go!

Listening to: Stabilo - Flawed Design

It put up an ungodly fight that will be passed down in the epics of
generations, but I *finally* got Mozilla's email client to work.

12 hours--in one solid, continuous, frenzied, neck muscle crimping into
permanent excruciating shrug, harsh consonant laden, argh exclaiming,
endless google and MozillaZine forum archive raking session--just to
make the damn display work.

About another 12, in 4 hour chunks, on extensions and code tweaks to fix
broken things that I didn't manage to kill in the first epic.

Whew.

I can live with it now. For the moment. :)

To the geeks and non-geeks: Yes, like Firefox, Thunderbird can work
right out of the box. For normal people. Disabled people have very
special needs, and I usually have a hostile relationship with software,
because it won't adapt to me, and I *can't* adapt to it.

The gorgeous that is Firefox is that you can twist nearly anything into
and out of that program. It's more custom than any software, ever. But
extensions are the only way to do this easily. Otherwise, you need to
know how to seriously hardcore code. I can html. I can css too, baby.
But I can't do advanced hyper programmer type coding.

Thunderbird is nowhere near as advanced as Firefox, both in the
customising options of the code it comes with, and in the stable of
extensions out there. Most of the things I needed to do, just so I could
read a message, I had to go find code to make happen, and then it was
trail and error. Getting the code where it needed to go, and finding if
the code did anything at all (99% of the time it did nothing).

Even normal users will find that options are scattered at random all
over the place, making it a real hunt and peck to turn anything on and
off. To get plain text email, you can't just turn off html. You have to
switch on this and switch off that, and go over here and do this, and
flip the rock over behind the waterfall, and then throw this unlabelled
lever twice--but only on a quarter moon, if you have a red dress. It was
like playing a corrupt version of Myst, and that game wasn't even fun
the first time.

Anyway, it's far from perfect, but I have it where I can use my mail.
And even in this flawed state, it's a huge step up from Eudora. Huge.

Oh, and details of my mods will be upcoming, in case anyone might find
them handy.

To Sleep

Maybe it's because I've always had such a hard time sleeping. The world
is wired backwards to me. I get tired in the morning, usually around
sunrise, sometimes later. It's always been bizarre, knowing this is when
I'm *supposed* to wake up. Back when I had to go to school, or when I
had traditional jobs, I had miserable days of usually going three to
five days with no sleep at all. My body would stubbornly refuse to sleep
at night. No matter how tired I was, and I was beyond tired, I couldn't
get sleepy.

Setting my own hours has always been the sweetest part about
working for myself :P

My wiring has another role too, in that my mind is always active. I have
a very hard time stopping it from thinking, and if I'm anxious the
hamster on the wheel gets extra frantic, especially in the quite time of
trying to sleep, when there's nothing to distract him. In later years of
desperate exhaustion, when I had my first VCR, I would take to playing
movies that I'd seen hundreds of times, so I could bait and switch that
hamster. Focus on *this*, and sometimes I could slide into sleep. I
didn't have many movies, and I don't think people knew how I used their
gifts, but I once spent an entire summer falling asleep to Speed.

I'm fairly confident I can still quote most of the dialogue. Line perfect.
I'm getting an urge to watch it right now.

But, maybe it's because of my uneasy nature with sleep that:

Naps are treats.

Sometimes I promise myself one to get through something rough. Something
rough is usually body and soul draining, so the reward really works out. :)

The best part about a good nap is that it's like reboot. When things are
going wrong and all hope is lost. Go to sleep, and you'll wake up to a
new world.

I do my dreaming when I'm awake.

So I'm going to dream, and then I'm going to sleep...

Microsoft...Now With Extra Evil

Listening to: Hedley - On My Own

So there I am, having woke up after only a few hours of sleep, and I decide I should do something positive, so I go with the archiving that I've been putting off. Just in time too, because as I'm trying to save files in prep, Photoshop is giving me snarky not enough disk errors (this is only because photoshop takes 2 gigs of space for its 'scratch disk' the greedy gus).

I'm moving on to my fifth disk, and I get to my commissioned game development folder. I decide to delete a few wips files first, because I don't need to archive those, and the folder is 2.4 gigs.

But when I hit delete on a file, Win2000 tells me there's sharing violation. Apparently, it thought the file was in use, it wasn't but, okay. When I hit okay, it *threw out the entire folder*

Understand, the folder was still there, but everything that was in it: instant death.

I cannot explain this rationally, because there's no freakin way that even MS could make code that bad. It *can't* happen, but it did. Ergo, they are just THAT evil. There's no arguing with results:

It's gone; I lost everything I did for the project.

Hundreds of hours of development, dozens of works within the project, and several of them being very loved, among my very favourite stuff I've ever done.

Gone, forever.

Uh, ouch.

Original Photography: Always Falling Bahind

© 2006 Marlo Dianne

(preview pixelation brought to you by Blogger)

Audio: Herbert West: Reanimator - Part 3 - Six Shots By Moonlight by H. P. Lovecraft

Continuing with our free classic horror serial, here is the third installment of the Reanimator series...

From the Archive description:

This a Forbidden Dragon recording. Read by Marlo Dianne.

Part III of VI (3 of 6).

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter’s field...

Convinced that death is merely mechanical failure, and that they can find a chemical mechanism to reboot the machine, West and our nameless narrator, are on the hunt for bodies--the fresher, the better. Through graveyards and laboratories, they want to find death, chase it, trap it, prod it, and defeat it. But when you chase something to within arm's reach, it can reach back...

Published in 1922 as a six part serial, Herbert West: Reanimator is a classic story of sci-fi and horror by H. P. Lovecraft. Atmosphere, language, and science blend effortlessly, timeless in this gruesome tale of a doctor of death.

Download the free audio book of Herbert West: Reanimator - Part 3 - Six Shots By Moonlight by H. P. Lovecraft

Original Photography: Squirrely

© 2006 Marlo Dianne

(preview pixelation brought to you by Blogger)

Original Photography: Hiss and Boots

© 2005 Marlo Dianne

(preview pixelation brought to you by Blogger)

Heart, Broken?

I couldn't go upstairs.

That's the thing. About a month or so ago, I realised I was having my heart beat crazy faster when I went upstairs. My house is two floors, with my bathroom and bedroom on 2nd, so I had plenty of observation trials. I didn't worry that much at first, as I've had a rapid pulse for a while now, and my heart beating double time all the time was ruled not to be a danger *shrug* But that was joined with breathlessness. Again, that wasn't that odd what with the asthma. But they got worse, and then they added in dizzy and shaking, and sometimes stabs of chest pain. I knew the pain was not my lungs or rib cartilage, since breathing deeper didn't hurt. That meant that it was my heart itself kicking me in the chest.

Not good.

Twitching began to add itself to the fun now and then too, and then last night, from one simple trip upstairs, I brought on *hours* of muscle twitching, sweating, *and* a migraine.

I was now afraid to go upstairs.

It's so weird. I can go for a three hour walk, a two hour bike ride. I can never say I'm healthy, and I have to be very careful, but considering everything, I think I'm in decent shape. So what is with the stairs? And how can I manage to avoid them, what with half my house up there?

So, time for a doc appt.

Good news? My blood pressure is dead on normal baby, 120/80. Bad news? The doctor is certain it's my heart; there were many professional frowny faces. Blood was drawn, and an ECG ordered, "for a start".

You don't need an appointment for this test, so I went to the hospital, and it was done in maybe five minutes including 'get in the johnny shirt' time. No waiting or anything.

Except for the results. Those take a week...

The department was downstairs, down three flights of stairs. I had to laugh.

The spousal unit surprised me today by bringing my bike home, fully repaired.

It's been overcast, sometimes raining, the bugs are really really terrible. It's just awful weather for biking. But somehow, I really think I should go for a ride. Just as soon as I can. And absolutely, especially, even if I don't think I can...