Tatiana Azundris

Contrary to folk wisdom about the leopard being unable to change her spots, here in Cat Central we of course heed the fashion, and with the upcoming Winter, an upgrade to Snow Leopard seems very much the order of the day.

Except of course nothing ever goes smoothly.

Here are the notes from the front – unabridged and glossless admittedly not so much to provide an unadultered account but because I'm busy beating the doggone thing into submission. Maybe there is some truth to the whole static spots thing after all …

Und schon wieder Piraten.

Vielerorts – z.B. hier oder hier – wird diskutiert, ob man nun mit den Widerlingen bzw. Schmuddelkindern von der Jungen Freiheit reden sollte oder nicht.

Mich hat etwas ganz anderes entsetzt.

Nämlich daß der Herr Popp, nachdem er die JF schon nicht kannte, noch nicht einmal schnell in der Wikipedia nachgeschlagen hat. Medienkompetenz?

Der relevante Teil steht im ersten Absatz, das hätte man also notfalls auch lesen können, während man gleichzeitig Erstkontakt am Telefon mit denen hat.

Ich halte es mithin für verfehlt zu diskutieren, "ob wir die Entscheidung mit denen zu reden gut finden," da ich nicht den Eindruck habe, dass eine Entscheidung statt gefunden hat – oder dass überhaupt rechtzeitig bemerkt wurde, dass es etwas zu entscheiden gegeben hätte.

Meine Kritik ist folgerichtig eher, dass man den Eindruck vermittelt bekommt, dass der Herr Popp nicht gleichzeitig gehen und Kaugummi kauen kann. So jemanden will man doch nicht wählen!

Kann man zwei Herren dienen?

Mein aktueller pipe-dream bzw. pet peeve bzw. Grund, warum ich die Piraten fragwürdig finde.

Ich betrachte diese "rechtsfreier Raum" Geschichte mit Sorge. Natürlich ist das inet an vielen Stellen ein weniger "rechtsfreier Raum" als die physische Welt, aber das gilt halt nur, so lange man mit Deutschen zu tun hat, oder mit Dingen wie KiPo, die ohnehin überall verboten sind wo die bytes mehr als tröpfeln. Interessant wird es bei Fragen wie Holocaustleugnung, Volksverhetzung, usw., wo die Ansichten in vielen inet-beteiligten Gemeinschaften, will sagen Staaten, doch auseinandergehen. Da habe ich dann plötzlich lokale Rechte, die ich "global" (richtiger: "inet-weit") nicht durchsetzen kann, und den Konsens, dass sich das "angleichen wird." Der kleinste gemeinsame Nenner ist dann aber nicht so unterschiedlich von "rechtsfreier Raum." Zumindest ist es dann ein "Rechte light"-Raum.

Ich glaube, ich finde das nicht mal gut, aber so lange sich da technisch kaum etwas durchsetzen lässt, ist Gutfinden Makulatur. Das Problem ist ein anderes.

Das Problem ist, dass die Piraten gleichzeitig "internet" und "Deutschland" sein wollen.

So I was over in the park, knee-deep (well, up to 3") in snowy seeds, took a wrong turn, and found myself in a minor forest fire.

It's kinda hard to take seriously a fire that's all of three inches high, but still, it seemed to cover a good portion of the eastern slope. And of course, Google Maps failed to get a good lock on my position that we could have given the fire brigade. You gotta hate when that happens.

In other news, having to chain three sshs to tweet that seems … suboptimal.

But yeah, it's the barbeque season, what do I even expect.

I heard the sirens off in the distance as I left the park.

Kangaroos in Sweden — PirateBay guys convicted

«The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.»

«This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.»
—BBC

Zensursula

In other news, I stood and was counted at the German Presseamt earlier today. Demo against censorship, and calling out the government's bullshit reasoning: That censorship is needed to fight child pornograpy. Interestingly, most child-porn servers are in European countries where they're highly illegal, so a handful of activists armed with the block-list called the providers, and the providers switched off most of those sites within the day. This means they did more against child porn within the existing framework within one day than the government have accomplished within a year; either our overlords and -ladies are hideously incompetent, or they're lying to us about what they're trying to do. In either case, they've got to go.

And that's not even going into how problematic it seems to make that good porn/bad porn distinction.

The [conviction rate of reported rapes] is just under 6%, down from 33% in 1977. Given that informed estimates suggest only a small proportion of victims report rape, should the conviction rate drop much lower, it really will be more than mere rhetoric to invoke a "right to rape," according to J. Conaghan, professor of law at the University of Kent.

So I quoted back in '04, in one of the first articles on this weblog. Unfortunately, we had to revisit that theme over the years, and things do not look bright in Blighty.

I'm mentioning this for historical context, for continuity. I'm mentioning this because it's literally "too close to home." And I'm also mentioning this in the hope of avoiding, when I write about Afghans later, the kneejerk reaction of, oh well, it's those crazy yellow people again, what do you expect, they're just not as enlightened as we are.

So, Afghans establish the Right to Rape. Yup, women are chattel. It's not just sexual self-determination, it's also that you can't even see a doctor without your owner's approval. Points for being upfront about it, though.

In other countries where you can't easily make that sort of shite official law (although it's altogether too close for comfort to make prostitution legal and require the unemployed to accept pretty much any job, with only the statement that nobody will be asked "that", but no out-and-out law to back that up), you need to push the rape culture from legal theory to legal practice. (Article in German about this rapist abducting a woman, and the police not checking his flat etc. when a witness calls in the case and they work out from the number plate that he's a known predator (prematurely paroled after raping and torturing a 16-year-old, then caught with a 13-year-old and child porn, but never charged). I know I like to recite the tired ol' when every second counts, the police are just minutes away, but I'll acknowledge it's inappropriate rhetoric. When every second counts, the police are just 18 hours behind. Because that's how long his recent victim's ordeal lasted, simply because the police could not be bothered to take action.)

The thing is, it's not the yellow people. When men here haggle about whether it's really rape if she says yes and changes her mind, if you bully someone into it etc., it's exactly the same: I don't care about the woman's fun or feelings, I just want to get off and not go to jail for it.

The Afghan Right to Rape is more upfront about it. That is all.

«Typical permit requirements include residency, minimum age, submitting fingerprints, passing a background check, attending a certified handgun/firearms safety class, participating in a range check/qualification before a certified trainer (for demonstrating safe firearms handling and practical proficiency), and paying the required fee (if any).

Requirements also include certification that a person has never been diagnosed with a "mental illness," which include any condition which interferes with "normal life--" including trauma from being victim of prior crimes» —Wikipedia

Oh joy, once a victim, always a victim! It's almost like, say, how those who were abused as children often end up with abusive partners later on. Phrased like that, it's very much like those ancient laws where you get out of a rape charge by marrying the victim: Victimize someone, know they'll never (phrasing Wikipedia's) get the means to defend themself now, and know they're yours to victimize for the rest of their life now.

Oh Mann, da weiß man gar nicht, wo man anfangen soll.
Gut, sie haben nicht viel über den Fall, aber das scheint ja eher kein Bobbitt zu sein. Ganz klar Was zur Hölle!??

Dann diese Google-Werbung dazu, die suggeriert, Ach, mit den ach so unterwürfigen Asiatinnen ist es wohl doch nicht so weit her, wie wäre es denn mit einer Ost-Frau? Epic fail. Wie Katalogfrau-mäßig die referenzierte site ist, vermag ich spontan nicht zu entscheiden aber
— falls ja, fragt man sich wieder mal, wie genau Google's Do no evil definiert ist …
— die angepriesenen Attribute der "Bewerberinnen" deuten eher nicht darauf hin, daß die Zielgruppe Männer sind, die eine Partnerschaft ohne Gefälle wollen. "Aber vielleicht irre ich mich ja."
— das Geschäftsgebahren (vgl. FAQ, "wir nehmen so alle halbe Jahr mal die Frauen die schon weg sind aus dem Programm") erscheint mir — wie soll ich sagen? — interessant.

Und der Focus? Fail! Eine Zeile über die Diskrepanz in der Anzahl von verstümmelten Männern und Frauen wäre wohl +1 Informative gewesen.

Im anderen Reiter ist übrigens ein in Brand gesteckter Penis; wiederum interessant, weil da eine Frau durchgeknallt ist und glaubte, ihr gehörten die Geschlechtsteile ihres Mannes. Da wird dann korrekt gezeigt, daß das Irrsinn ist, während in der Gegenrichtung Irrsinn von FGM bis proLife in manchen Fällen noch Kultur genannt wird.

Nachdem wir uns beim Vorbeigehen mehrmals wunderten, was denn das für ein komischer PC Laden bei uns um die Ecke ist der nicht mal Schaufenster hat, kam letztens die Erleuchtung.

It started out pretty simple. And with a real world case, too. I'm debating a new keyboard, as this one starts to act up — I'm sick of wireless, I'm sick of batteries, I'm sick of PS/2-to-USB adapters, and it seems the hardware starts failing me, too. That said, I was very happy with the ergonomic ("split keyboard") Logi — it was good to my wrists, it held up for ten years, and it certainly is one gorgeous keyboard —, and if the SafeType doesn't do the trick for me, I'll be looking to get a variant of the Logi that's not wireless. Anyway, the SafeType is also a split keyboard, but they mean it. It's like hacking a typewriter in two in the middle, and then putting both halves of the keyboard upright so they keyboards aren't horizontal, they're vertical. When you type, your hand are not parallel to your desk, but orthogonal to it. It did wonders for me when I tried the "upright mouse", so I think the keyboard may be beneficial, too. The rub is, you don't have cursor keys that way. So I needed to find a way to put the cursor keys on the main keyboard.

So, I'm in the middle of something. DSL goes down for no apparent reason. I don't see any WLAN I could share (and in fact NetworkManager has been behaving very weird since the update; if I don't kill -STOP it, it eats all my CPU — just plain killing it also tears down the net; this problem can be googled — a solution, not so much). So, UMTS. On this, pppd fails, giving unrecognized option '/dev/ttyUSB0'. This is the most obscure way they could find to say, You upgraded the kernel and haven't rebooted yet, so I can't find my shit. So, I reboot. Or, I try to. The upgrade from 2.6.25.3 to 2.6.25.4 plain broke my system (broke as in, EDD check, then BUG: INT14 CR2, dead before I get even the most basic boot messages). It is at this time that I notice that I haven't got a boot-manager installed that won't let me pass kernel options without excessive pain.

Der Telegraph meint, einen Trend zur kleinen Brust ausmachen zu können.

Meh. British chic catches up with continental standards, 20 years late but moving fast. Film at eleven.

Man mag mal eine Ausgabe English Vogue, French Vogue, German Vogue und American Vogue ("bloody Abys- bloody -synian bloody Vogue, darling!" — Italian Vogue lassen wir mal außen vor, die hat sich ja inzwischen zum Schimpfwort unter Feministinnen gemacht mit ihren Gewalt gegen Frauen-Fotostrecken) vergleichen, am Besten aus dem selben Monat, das ist instruktiv. Ebenso ist es interessant, US BH-Grössen mit den deutschen zu vergleichen, sowie die Präferenzen unter den jeweiligen, haha, Herren der Schöpfung. Zum einem ist der "goldene Bruststandard" im englischsprachigen Raum nicht exakt derselbe wie in Kontinentaleuropa. Wenn dort also korrigiert wird, tangiert uns das nicht notwendigerweise. Erstens generell, und zweitens, wenn ohnehin nur in Richtung "unserer" Standards korrigiert wird. Zum anderem ist in Grossbritannien gerade eine Saison mit Lack und Latex und gewissen Schnitten usw. usw. durch, also das was böse Zungen hooker chic nannten — das ist schwer zu steigern, und ich bin nicht überrascht, daß jetzt etwas anderes dran ist, etwas mit weniger "display" z.B. — Mode ist ohnehin reichlich fragwürdig, aber dann eher "immer und überall," als nur dann wenn Frau B vom Telegraph gerade mal meint, nicht die Zielgruppe zu sein.

CD-baby, which I'm normally a fan of, now has MP3s for download. Good. You have to purchase entire albums though. Not quite so good. I like funk. There are, of course, pure funk CDs, but often jazzers, even those whose jazz I don't find terribly interesting, will have a good or even excellent funk track on their album. This makes the sales proposition essentially, buy our album for the single track you want, which is even worse than the usual, buy four good tracks and a lot of filler that the music industry usually offers us. I might still go ahead for an album that is 10 bucks or under, but most are in the $10 - $14 range, and especially in the jazz selection, there are actually $20+ albums, lo and behold. Now I know that the US dollar is essentially worthless these days, but still. $20 for one track is too much. I'm already paying more for CD-baby albums than I do for the few "normal" albums I still buy, since I purchase the latter via amazon "Used & new", which not only saves me money, but arguably also bypasses the bloody RIAA to an extent. Lastly, it'd be kinda nice if I could purchase the physical CD and the download in a bundle — essentially buy the CD so I'll have the media, and then pay a dollar or two on top of that for their bandwidth, that is, the privilege of downloading the music and listen to it immediately, rather than wait for international shipping. This doesn't mean pure download or "just the CD" should go away, it just means that there could be a third option which would make customers happy while not losing the baby any money. Or well, given that CDbaby's reply to that suggestion essentially was, yes, but you could buy both at full price!, maybe there are people who do that. Then the bundle option would lose the shop money. It's just that they've been so good in the "no evil" department so far. Finally, am I the only one weirded out by the download not being cheaper than the physical media in some cases?

To be fair though, mealmaster — I mean kegelmaster, nay, ticketmaster — managed to have my credit card number stolen, so I got a new CC, and bollocky amazon made it a total nightmare to update the data, especially for already existing orders. And then, amazon US won't send me my fridge magnets. (I have an urge to mix-and-match the Yiddish and the Romance ones, and if you can't see the hilarity of that, I really can't help you.) Now, if it were a used-or-new reseller, fine. But if it's called an "amazon webshop", it could bloody well go and be subject to the same principle that governs my other transactions with amazon, which is I send them money, they send me stuff. If they can't do that, they can at least put a special badge on shops that do deliver to amazon standards. But even so, I'm logged in. They know where I bloody am. How about just putting a big red warning on a page when I go to an article they won't ship to me, anyway? If they don't want my business, that's one thing, but they should at least have the bloody decency of telling me before I spend an hour shopping. By that token, CDbaby is still lightyears ahead.

Being a woman, I tend to find a half-dozen friend-requests in skype each morning. Aside from those who like my picture, I presume some are looking for free English lessons. Some also tell me about their private parts — goddammit, this is skype, not the bloody bananaphone, is that so difficult? —, and maybe some actually liked my profile. Yeah, a girl can dream. One thing though: guys, what are you thinking (well, are you?) sending me friend-requests when you don't have a picture, don't have a profile, don't even send a hallo to go with the request. Or in short, "Friend me." You've given me no reason to be interested in you. Or shorter still, "Friend me; I won't tell you who I am." What is it with those people?

I don't flag Skype me!
I don't flag Online.
I'm normally set away of busy.
That doesn't mean anything.

I never really thought much of it, they make an offer, I'm not interested, no harm done, can't blame them for trying. Right? Well, in fact I find it a little rude when the person's not flagged Skype me!, for one thing. But with at least one of a filled-in profile and a little something about you in the hallo-message (that should be both literate and not about your sexual prowess), I might relent. "Unsolicited" seems less bad when it's polite otherwise. And when it's not commercial.
article originally written on 2007/04/29
Amendment: The skype status explained! (Not sure I actually need idle and very idle; I'd have preferred I'll get back to you later (what do not disturb does now), and I'll take your call/message now, but only if you're a friend, otherwise, don't even try to get friended.