mjg59 | Reading

denise posting in

Our processor was unable to resolve the error before the end of their business day, so payments will be down for at least another night. I'm sorry! We're trying to get it fixed as fast as we can.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

The payment system is currently unavailable due to an extremely unhelpful error from our payment processor that can't be resolved until their business hours, which had (of course) ended for the day by the time the error started happening. (I mean, it literally says "an unexpected error". So very helpful, folks.)

Depending on the cause of the error, the failed payments may or may not complete successfully once we resolve it with them. We'll update you when we know which, and if they do complete successfully and you tried to make multiple payments because of the failure and didn't intend to make all of them, give you instructions on how to contact us to get that cleared up.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

brainwane

I just went back and reread "Navigating Masculinity: A Roundtable", in which Mary Anne Mohanraj facilitated a conversation among Elliott Mason, Jim Hines, Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, Jed Hartman, David Moles, and Benjamin Rosenbaum.* (It was originally published in WisCon Chronicles 9: Intersections and Alliances, Aqueduct Press, and reprinted by permission.)

It's such an interesting piece. About masculinity and what men like about being male, about anger and oppression and discomfort, about what work they do to remediate oppression, and how.

It's from early 2016, and I appreciate it and think a followup would be great.

Closing comments because I'm signal-boosting this but don't want to host a discussion about it; others should feel free to!

* Michael Damian Thomas introduces himself but doesn't participate in the discussion, so I'm leaving him out of the list.

wildeabandon

It's normal to spend the day before your wedding on a date with your boyfriend, right?

By then all I had left to do was drop off a few things at the caterers, which I managed to do before

leonato's train arrived in London, so we got to spend the rest of the day together. After picking him up at Kings Cross we went for a quick lunch at Dishoom, and dropped off his things in his hotel room before making our way out to Greenwich. I don't spend much time south of the river, and I enjoyed how uncitylike it felt. I sometimes forget quite how much of a patchwork London is, and how different the bits outside my usual stomping grounds are. We wandered towards the maritime museum, pausing for me to buy a delicious but also enormous ice-cream, and then had to sit on a bench for a bit whilst I finished it. We went around a couple of exhibits in the maritime museum, but I wasn't terribly impressed - there was probably more effort to talk about the more problematic aspects than there might have been a couple of decades ago, but there was still rather more feeling of "Woo! The British Empire! Wasn't colonialism great!" than I was entirely comfortable with.

After the main museum we went on to the Queen's House, which had some lovely art. We walked up to the observatory but it was expensive and closing soon enough that we wouldn't have got much time anyway. Instead we just sat and enjoyed the view and walked and talked before heading back to Mark's hotel for a while. Later we went for dinner at Cornerstone, which I'd been looking forward to sharing with him since the first time I went with

borusa a few months ago. It didn't disappoint, and I came away with lots of intentions to experiment with cooking variations on the dishes we had there. I haven't actually gotten as far as putting that into practice yet, but in fairness to myself, I've spent a lot of the time since away and eating in restaurants.

In the middle of a few weeks where the focus was very rightly and happily on my relationship with

obandsoller it was good to have a day for the two of us to connect. Sometimes it feels as though I get more than my fair share of joy.

wildeabandon

The morning after the wedding we got up reasonably early to have breakfast with people who were getting the mid-morning train south, but we ourselves weren't leaving until a bit later, so after saying our goodbyes I took the opportunity to sit in the hottub in our bedroom for a while. After that we went to Mass at the Cathedral, which gave me a chance to thank the servers and the organist, and then set off back to London, arriving home a little before midnight.

In the spirit of ridiculous optimism, I had thought that inbetween a few appointments, actually spending time with Ramesh, and doing the last few bits of planning and admin for the London wedding, that I might even have time to get some work done that week. That was not to be, as some of the last few 'tiny' bits of admin were less tiny than I'd thought, plus I made my usual mistake of thinking that on days when I had plans for part of the day I'd be able to fit things in around them, which rarely actually works out without rigorous scheduling. Still, I got a lot of other stuff done.

On the Wednesday evening there was an exciting surprise "birthday and handing-in-her-masters-dissertation" party for

kerrypolka which I was very pleased to be part of. I didn't stay long, both because I was feeling under time pressure for wedding stuff, and because my ability to enjoy socialising in large groups gets ever closer to zero as I get older, but it felt important to mark the occasion.

On Thursday afternoon I went to see the Barbershop Chronicles at the Roundhouse, a play about the communities that build up around black barbershops, in London, in Africa, and in the Carribean, as well as being about families of birth and choice, and racism and colonialism and how we respond to them. It was more a series of interlinked vignettes than one continuous narrative, but had enough plot that I didn't find it difficult. I really liked it, and although the run has finished, it's now touring, so worth looking out for if it comes near you.

Earlier that day I also had the outcome appointment which concluded the autism diagnostic process, and recieved a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome. I hadn't realised that the label was still in use since it's been taken out of the DSM 5, but apparently the UK is slightly behind the curve, although it sounded as though they'd be moving in line with the DSM in the not too distant future. As well as informing me of the diagnosis, and giving me a report with rather more detail as to why they came to that conclusion, they let me know about various resources that would be available to me. I've been sufficiently busy getting married and such since then that I haven't done anything with that information, but it's fairly high on the to-do list. I don't expect this diagnosis to make nearly as much difference to my life as the ADHD one, but who knows. I'll probably write more about it later.

ewx

Does anyone want a Fabiatech FX5624? 1GB RAM, 2x gigabit ethernet, 4x fast ethernet, 600Mhz Celeron CPU, VGA, 2x USB, RS232, fanless. Currently no storage included but you might be able to talk me into including a 40GB SSD.

NB it is 32-bit only!

It has been the house firewall/router for many years but I've now replaced it with something more modern. If I don't get a good offer I'll figure out how to ebay it or something...

Some pictures here: https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/sbl/#fx5624

wildeabandon

A couple of things went wrong in the lead up to the wedding. On the Friday night I'd booked a table at Kitchen restaurant, who assured me twice that they could cater to the dietary requirements of the party, and then told me on the day itself that they couldn't after all, forcing

cm and

borusa to go elsewhere for something they could eat, which was quite frustrating. The food for vegetarians was generally a bit disappointing, although the rest of it was very good, leading me to think that they're just not good at working with any kind of restrictions. After dinner we went our seperate ways, because although I'd sorted out accomodation in the reception hotel for the night /after/ the wedding, I was too disorganised to arrange the preceeding night before it got fully booked. The guest house that

obandsoller and I were staying in was nice and comfortable, and all was well until the fire alarm went off at four in the morning. ( Read more... )

wildeabandon

Goals. January February March April June July

Meta
- Don't take on any big new commitments or hobbies until after the wedding - TICK
That means now I can do aaaaaall the things I've been putting off, right? More seriously, I've got quite a lot of things on my to-do list that I just bumped until post-wedding that I need to get through, so I think I still want to try and stop taking on any more new stuff.
- monthly retrospectives
Obviously this one is a bit late, because I was away on honeymoon, but I think it's still going to be helpful. As I mentioned last month, my plan is to switch from annual goals to a combination of lifetime and quarterly ones, as a more effective way of focusing my time. I'm going to try and start that off from Q4 2019, which gives me a couple of weeks to start getting a plan together.

( Read more... )

rmc28

We have survived the first full week of work and school! I have been to Meet The Teacher at primary school; the calendars are set to remind us when PE kits and wellies and homework etc are needed; I have a bunch of meetings and school trips scheduled.
My big work project - that I have been working on all year and had one week in the year where we could go live, or we had to wait to this time next year - has gone live! It has gone mostly smoothly - some issues discovered in the first few days, but I've generally been working on one thing at a time, not trying to put out six fires at once. So go me!
Not very surprisingly, I have been falling asleep early a lot in the last week and haven't really kept up with anything that wasn't work and childcare.
However! I took the children to Macclesfield this weekend for a party to celebrate a Significant Birthday of an aunt. I saw lots of our relatives! And nice friends of my aunt! (many of whom remember me from when I was my offspring's age!) And there was musical entertainment of assorted kinds because that is how that branch of my family rolls. There was even a team(?) of handbell ringers who did a number of lovely tunes, and I greatly regret not surreptitiously recording their Take Five for fanf.
I think we have finally completed all stages of the Water Softener Installation Game, including the side quests to stop a leak under the sink, get the under-sink cupboard repaired, and an exciting post-installation overflow from the cold water tank (Tony climbed into the roof space and fiddled with the floaty-ball intake thingy and it stopped overflowing). So far I mostly notice that I need much less soap to get clean. Oh! We still haven't figured out where to store the cleaning things now that under-the-sink is half-filled with water softening device, so maybe that is one final side-quest.

rmc28

Laptop is upgraded. The accounting software still runs, woot. All my files are where I left them, and as a minor bonus so are my firefox tabs.

The mousepad is not currently recognised, but I have a workaround that's bearable in the short term, and I don't want to push my luck tonight.

rmc28

Made today to use up things in the fridge, loosely following Jack Monroe's Simple Spiced Potato Soup

Ingredients:

5 small-medium onions
Olive oil
Cumin & turmeric
Chicken stock from two carcasses
Approx 1kg potatoes

Equipment:

Chopping board
Knife
Large casserole pan with lid
Wooden spoon

Method:

Dice onion and put in pan with oil over a low heat.
Add a generous few shakes of each spice and stir together.
Put lid on and leave to cook slowly.
Wash potatoes, and chop roughly into small pieces, leaving skin on.
When the spiced onions are good and soft, add the stock and potatoes and stir together.
Turn up the heat for long enough to bring everything to a simmer, then turn it down again and put the lid on.
Simmer for about 20-30 minutes with an occasional stir until potatoes are also good and soft.
Taste and add salt if needed.
Serve alone or with yoghurt or grated cheese depending on preference.

Made about 5-6 bowlfuls of soup: people were hungry so no leftovers today.

I was pleased to be right in my guesstimate of onion volume given the quantities of potatoes and stock. I still don't like chopping onion though, so next time if possible I'm going to use pre-chopped.

rmc28

I'm going to try to upgrade my little laptop to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (yes that's been out 18 months, hush). The backups have been run. Here goes!

(title references this xkcd cartoon which um, I hope is not prophetic about my big project go-live on Tuesday)

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Matthew Garrett

About Matthew

Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Google. Ex-biologist.

mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer.

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Matthew Garrett

Reading

Payment system still down

Payment system down

"Navigating Masculinity: A Roundtable"

Friday

In between days

Fabiatech FX5624

Wedding two of three - Inverness

August Goals Update

Five things

And back

Potato soup

Sharks time

Profile

About Matthew

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