Lent et cetera

It's Ash Wednesday today (well, no, technically it's the day after), which means that the Christian liturgical season of Lent has started.  Lent lasts from Ash Wednesday until Easter, or 40 days (not counting Sundays, depending on who you ask) of fasting.  Not everyone marks it by literally fasting, but many Christians choose to give something up for Lent, such as chocolate or Facebook.  

It's meant to be a time of reflection, meditation and prayer, a time to refocus one's life on what truly matters in the Christian faith (which can also vary, depending on who you ask).  The tradition of 40 days comes from Jesus' time spent in the wilderness, where He prayed, listened, reflected, and so on.

This year, and I think I did the same last year (having realized that giving up material things, at least at this point in time, did little good in the way of actually pointing me in the right direction), I have 'given up' procrastination.  

This is less of a sacrifice and more of a re-focusing and re-orienting move: in choosing consciously not to slack off and let myself get distracted, I will not neglect what I have been neglecting, which is my time with my Lord (whether that be quiet time before sleep, or time during the day).  Lately my mind has been everywhere twice over in the space of five seconds,  leaving little brainpower or space for reflection and prayer (or so the excuse goes).  Not only will I get more done by choosing to do what I need to do first, but everythingwill simply get better.

Also, if you do something for 40 days, it theoretically becomes a habit.

"I'm famous on the Internet"

So I've been fussing with this math for several days.  I finally figured it out: I was making it entirely more complicated than it needed to be.  Figures, eh?  Just like me.

I've been pondering the concept of Internet fame.  I follow Wil Wheaton's and Neil Gaiman's Twitters, along with several others (Fred Gallagher, Dave Kellett, Zoë Keating), and am constantly amused by them, and I feel connected to them.  Yes, I know, it's a standard celebrity thing, but it's cool to have a different sort of look into their lives: a personal one, rather than a media-official one - which is why I like reading Wil Wheaton's blog so much.  Not only because he's a writer who knows how to write well, but because it's way more down-to-earth and approachable than, say, reading an interview.  (I'd read Neil Gaiman's blog too, but with the amount of feeds in my Google Reader, that might be a few months away.  I think I would like to read into the archives of his blog, so I'd like to have a day where I don't feel bad about neglecting other things to do so.  ^^; )

I've been considering why it is these people (and many, many others whom I could list) have hit it big on the Internet - and wondering if they would be so successful, say, thirty or forty years ago.  I don't think so.  The general populace of today is a strangely different beast (but then, any generation could say that), with our instant-access addiction (it's so true!) and off-kilter etiquette.  I only wish the Netiquette that seems to be prevailing in civilized corners of cyberspace would spread to the real world - but that's a rant for another time.

In pondering why these people are big names on the 'Net (I recently heard it put that one of the first things anyone does when they get a Twitter account is follow @wilw, which made me giggle), I wondered just what it takes to become an Internet phenomenon.  Do you have to make a fool of yourself?  (Looking back at the past four years of posts, that shouldn't be hard.  XD)  Do you have to be brilliant at what you do?  (This one seems more likely, with the people I follow actively at least, but then it's not a rule: there are many people who are phenomena for not being brilliant ... but are they more gawked at, or listened to?)

Oh, and in other news, 4+x (my boyfriend, if you didn't know already) has hooked me onto classical techno remix.  It's honestly addictive.  I'm listening to a remix of the Bagatelle in a-Moll für Elise (yes, it's more commonly known as just Für Elise, I'm just being my music-geek self: the actual names are often much more interesting than the common names), and I want to dance.  Or rather, groove.  ... No, I suppose one could choreograph this.  Ballet to techno!  I'd so watch that.  Now it's changed to the Toccata und Fuge in d-Moll.  *headbang*

Connecting to dancing, and also to 4+x: I took an hour-long introduction to ballroom dancing Monday morning (meringue and jive), and was astonished at how simple it is in principle.  Even better, 4+x agreed to learn with me!  I'm quite excited about this now, as I've wanted to dance since I was little, even though I'm not suited for professional ballet (which is what I took briefly) - gotta be triple threat in this world, eh?

I'm going to have to find a way to keep these from becoming blurbs of random musings, and actually giving them subjects.  (Might take a while.) 

Diffusion, Matrices and Sound Distortion

Not the best day so far ...  

Haven't gotten much done, but it looks like I might finish my biology report before the end of the night.  Spent much of the day looking for math help - I'm working on an IB math assignment about binomial matrices (which doesn't even show UP on Google, how useful is that), and while I understand what I'm trying to work towards, and I understand what they're giving me and how to do it, I don't know how to present what I'm trying to say, which is what is causing the problem.  I've been Googling for related matrix theory, and while there are two that obviously work (eigenvalues and Cayley-Hamilton theorem), both have too much prerequisite theory for me to work through them and understand them. Which bugs me, 'cause they're both prettier than using an "n-1" exponent.

Oh well.  I'll retackle it after the bio gets done, which should be soon ... I'm into the analysis and already have something to compare it to.

In other news, I seem to have fixed the Schtroumpf (the Acer Aspire One netbook our family owns): the sound was being distorted and it was running very slowly.  I did some (a lot) of Googling, and found one person who said to disable the Primary IDE Controller.  I did, and it works much better now!  Hopefully it will stay that way.  Hooray for the powers of Google and the limitless information of other people!

Back to the bio.  ><

February 15

Today was not nearly so interesting as yesterday.

However, 4+x is here, and that makes be very, very happy.  ^_^  He currently has his head on my knee as I type on my little minilaptop.  "I hear typing."  "No, really?"  We watched The Princess Bride tonight (yay).  We might watch Nightmare Before Christmas, or we might watch that tomorrow.

Today consisted of church (waking up five minutes before we had to leave, leaving me without tea or chocolate until half an hour later ... not a fun 30 minutes), lunch after church, surfing I don't really remember, then sleep for three hours, putting siblings to bed and playing piano until 4+x arrived.

That was at 10 o'clock or so ... my, how time flies.   

Valentine's Day and its déroulement

Today was supposed to be a day of French analysis.  It ended up being a day of Googling and fiddling, with an hour and a half of French analysis thrown in somewhere in the middle.

It all started when I decided I should subscribe to two of my professors' blogs: chem and bio ... then I thought, "Hm, well, perhaps I ought to not seem like quite so much of a stalker (these are private class blogs, after all), and have something they can see when they click on me."

Since 2005, I've been keeping a semi-regular blog on Windows Live Spaces, which despite its setbacks became a familiar beast.  I much preferred Blogger, but I only kept my writing blog on here.  

I created a couple new blogs: this one here and one for surveys and other fun stuff - that way, they'd be kept separate and those who wanted more serious talk could come here without distraction, etc etc.  I played around with the names (they are all in Quenya, or one of J. R. R. Tolkien's two Elvish languages: quenaleparma means speaking-book, carneapalma means red book, maquenaleparma means asking-book, and lumenyare means history) and got it all set in stone, so to speak.

It then struck me that I've wanted to syndicate my blog on my Twitter for quite some time.  Easy enough, eh?  Did a quick search and came up with Twitterfeed; logged them all in there and voilà!  

That was the easy part.

My next thought was to the four years of archives on my Live Space.  What to do with them?  Surely there was a way to get them integrated into Blogger.  Did a bit of clicking and oh look, you can import XML files.  Okay, let's do a Google: "export Windows Live Space to XML".  I came up with a Python script and some instructions.

I'd never used Python before.  I'd barely coded before, but my father is a developer and I've dabbled in it with his guidance. I poked around the instructions, did more Googling and got the script to work (plus how many to geek? seriously?) just as it should.  Clickety-click, import file.

Google: ERROR ERROR ERROR YOU DINGBAT.  (Or perhaps more politely, à la Google: "Oh snap!  You screwed up!")

Me: WTH?

Google: There were some problems uploading your file.

Me: ... okay ...  

Google:  *polishes monocle*  I, my dear fellow, use Atom.  My sincere apologies.

Me: Oh.  Okay.  Um, accepted.

So more Googling was in order, to see if I could convert this huge chunk of XML to an Atom feed instead of the RSS 2.0 feed which it currently was/is.  No luck for a while, but then I spotted a code-snippet of .NET, which I had worked with a wee bit and which my father specializes in.

I play with it a bit and soon give up: there's no GO button!  What do I do?  How do I compile this?  ... This is what happens when you haven't coded since eighth grade in any capacity except a bit of CSS and a bunch of HTML.

So I go ask Dad.  He proceeds to puzzle over the problem for a good hour or so: builds a form, assigns functions, tries it out a dozen times.  It spits back a string of Chinese characters.  He looks at the code carefully and realizes it won't do what I want it to, even though it's supposed to.  He says keep Googling.

So I do.  In the meantime, I've started using Google Reader, which is neat not only because my boyfriend's last name is Reader (\me: easily amused) but because it lets me group everything in one place!  Hurrah for RSS feeds!!

I end up posting on the Google Reader board after trying a few more things and nothing working.  I give in and sign up for a WordPress account, where the RSS 2.0 works like a charm and all my archives are there, on a much faster site.

After that, I analysed an extract from Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute (in French), writing the 1000-word analysis in about an hour and a quarter, which is good.  It's not my best, but it'll do. 

I now have to work on a handout for my English class, in which we are studying Albert Camus' The Outsider.  This must be done for Tuesday (no problem there).  Oh, and I still have math to do: forgot about that.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!  Or Happy Singles Awareness Day if you're not paired off or don't feel like being lovey-dovey (although singles can be lovey-dovey too).  I get to see my Valentine tomorrow (yay), and his gift is nearly wrapped and ready to go.  I'm excited.  

On Monday comes a long day: leaving at 7.15 in the morning to get everyone in my little amateur student theatre troupe for a discussion at nine.  The discussion will be fun I'm sure; I'm looking forward to it; but I still have to write down all my answers to the discussion questions ... 

I suppose I will go do that now, once I've finished formatting and adding space for later additions in this English handout. 

Update

Well, on the whole, the project was more or less a failure ... the historical posts are not to be found on Blogger.  

However!

They may all be found at http://lumenyare.wordpress.com, all the way back from January 2005.

(Four years of my life on the Internet.  Woh.  That's kinda scary.)

Take ... oh, I've lost count

This is at once a test and an actual post - I'm testing the twitterfeed to see if that will work, and giving this new blog a bit of airtime.

So this is what, number eleventy billion and three?  XD  It seemed like a good idea to consolidate and yet separate at the same time - my old blog, http://kaylotta.spaces.live.com I will no longer use, since Google has so nicely integrated everything I wanted in terms of the blogosphere into one lovely little package ... I'll see if I can work the archives of the old Windows Live Space (which actually won a prize for Sweetest Space a couple years ago and scored me a sweet webcam) into here (and the Diversions blog, which is http://maquenaleparma.blogspot.com and will be full of surveys and blah) so y'all can access it.

... yeah!  So!  

Oh, hey, I wonder if I can link up my devArt to this as well, or my Twitter ...  

Time to searching.

(I'm supposed to be writing a French analysis right now.  Look how well that's going ... )