Dancing with the Universe

In my post-Burn fog, I had the "bright idea" of tucking our ticket stubs into the pocket of my shirt for safekeeping. They were next seen as a small, tightly wadded bit of pulp in the lint catcher of the dryer. With a touch of glitter from the holograms. Sigh.

I collect the stubs of the years I've attended, otherwise I wouldn't care. But this time, I find myself in need of one ticket stub from "Rites of Passage", any denomination so long as it's in good condition. Email me a postal address (I'm at foogod.com, user torquill) and I'll mail you a SASE and a heap of goodwill. :)

Please amplify signal as appropriate -- I know there are a lot of Burners among my FoFs. :)

I am looking for places to purchase, in a brick and mortar store:

- Golden syrup (aka light treacle), essentially like karo syrup except made from sugar cane;
- Spumoni ice cream for my home freezer.

I haven't seen the former at Cash & Carry, though I'll ask next time I'm there.

The latter may not exist short of driving to a shop that makes spumoni and asking for a take-home, but I thought I'd ask to see whether any of the more niche ice cream manufacturers have hit on the idea of stocking the grocer's freezer with pints of spumoni. Yes, I know I can drive to The Old Spaghetti Factory and buy a scoop at a time, but it's a bit silly to go through all of that if I don't have to.

If, upon reading the phrase "...it looked like i shot a vulcan in there", the first word-mapping I did was "vulcan cannon", does that make me more or less of a geek?

I need to do two things:

1) Select any email with a subject line containing non-ASCII characters and delete it. I can do the second operation, but the only way I can think of to ask it to look for anything other than ASCII is to use a regexp of .*![A-Z|a-z|0-9|\!\@\# ... and so on, and I expect there's something more elegant than that. Alternatively, I hear that sendmail can block messages based on non-ASCII text in the headers (including Subject), but I haven't tracked down how yet. Sendmail might be preferable, as the main times I get a lot of non-ASCII subject lines are when the server load is so high spamassassin drops the ball, and adding procmail instructions to that stress might be unkind.

2) Within the message body, find and replace the character  with something ASCII -- a space or a carriage return would be fine. Something about the email encoding from Macs scatters those throughout messages, typically at the end of lines (but not always), and it gives Mutt conniption fits. Would this Procmail recipe do the trick (with a little tweaking)?

Feel free to point anyone here if they can help out. Thanks for any assistance...

First: I still have heirloom tomato plants. They've gotten tall, and a bit potbound, so they should be planted as soon as possible. I know hopeforyou wanted one (or more?) and amanda_nye asked me for a good sandwich variety, but I'm not sure how many (they need ten-gallon pots).

That's two or three out of about a dozen I have left, though. One last call before I put them on Craigslist!


Second: If you're wondering why I de-friended you on Facebook (or didn't add you when you asked to be), you may have missed the announcement that I'm in the process of closing out my account there. It's nothing personal -- the only friends I have left there are the ones for which I have no other contact info, and I'm working at getting email addresses and such for those people so I can leave FB for good. Zuckerberg is a bastard who screws over his closest friends, let alone the public, and I don't want any part of that charlie foxtrot anymore.

For a good synopsis of the reasons I'm getting out, read this article. It's the tip of a large iceberg, but it provides a good feel for why some big names are fleeing Facebook.

When the tenants moved out of the house last week, they weren't able to take one of the cats with them. Chessie has been living largely outside for the last few months, as she dislikes other cats (I think she doesn't like conflict over space and food and such). However, she adores people; she's been friendly with almost everyone I've seen her interact with. She's very sweet, soft, and fluffy; I'll try to take my camera over in case I can grab a few pictures of her, but I'd describe her as a longhair pale tortoiseshell, with one half of her nose grey and the other half a pale orange. I'd take her in if I could, but we're truly full up here.

If you know someone in the Bay Area who would like a people-cat, who doesn't have many (or any) cats in residence, please pass this on. I suspect that she would be content to stay indoors if she didn't feel that other cats were driving her away. She's so friendly and sweet-natured that I'd really like to find her a home rather than just handing her to the uncertain fate of the county shelter. (I'm sending email to a couple of other adoption agencies around here, looking for tips.)

I need local (East Bay, preferably; I'm in central Contra Costa) gluten-intolerant or wheat-intolerant people to take broken loaves that I create during testing. These are entirely edible, and though most aren't yet perfect by my standards, they are a step up from the usual GF fare.

They need to be a) able to pick up or receive bread in central Contra Costa or make arrangements for transport (I'm not driving to Berkeley once a week just to drop these off), and b) willing to fill out a couple of questions about each one, so that I can improve my recipes. The bread will be small loaves missing an end, usually, or an odd (small) number of rolls, and I can provide basic instructions on how to thaw them if frozen.

If you know anyone who fits the bill, have them send me a message at spammo_hung at foogod dot com. I'm not currently looking for wheat-eaters to take these, as they aren't as good as what's on store shelves (and they're so much better than the GF options) so I'd rather they go where they can do the most good. :)

Please signal-boost. Thank you!

Anybody familiar with patent law out there?

Never mind, I'm pretty well convinced that a patent isn't what I want. Carry on... :)

I am currently looking for a couple of things. Does anyone in the East Bay, who would be able to set up a fairly easy transfer, have:

- un-crushed two-liter bottles, with caps, or
- sheet styrofoam, enough to create an 9"x12"x1" layer (doubling up half-inch will do)?

I'm willing to wait for a bit, if you are in the process of collecting these things, or would need to fetch them from another location. :)

Thank you!

When you have a project which really needs doing, but you've just hit the wall -- writer's block, overwhelm, or simply total disgust every time you try to look at the thing -- how do you deal with it?

My usual method is strategic procrastination: go do something which rests my brain and makes me feel like I've indulged in something I want to do. Then, when I no longer mentally retch at the idea of working on the project, I go back and crank on it. So I'll go off and garden, or watch movies, or read, for a few hours or a day... I don't lose touch with what I'm supposed to do, I just take a brief vacation with the knowledge that I'll get back to it when I can.

It seems to work, but I'm curious whether anyone else has a different method (perhaps more efficient, or less likely to earn manager skepticism) for harnessing wayward brain cells to the task at hand.