Annoyances

ADitL: Things what happened on Thursday.

Before and after pictures of meri's 2015.10.29 haircut, as well as the glasses that broke that day.

Yesterday, after a slightly less painful (but still fairly brain foggy) morning than I’ve had of late, I rushed up to Bothell to get my hair cut by Betty1. During the hair cutting, the inevitable “glasses off, glasses on” routine had to happen a few times. (With my glasses off, I can barely read my phone when it’s 10″ from my face, much less have any sort of meaningful impression of the image reflected by a mirror that’s 5′ away. With my glasses on, it’s very difficult to cut my hair.)

During the third or fourth iteration of this process, I was unfolding my glasses when I realized that they did not need nearly as much folding as experience has led me to expect. Upon closer examination, I realized the right earpiece/arm/stem of my glasses was missing. The wayward piece was in my lap. There had been no trauma or rough treatment or anything else I could think of that would cause this to happen. It was as if the right earpiece suddenly — and without warning — broke its allegiance with the previously cohesive unit that was my glasses. (more…)

Dear Today: I’m onto you. You’ve had your fun. Now behave. Love, meri

[covert-ops] no (2)While waking up this morning did involve a feline alarm clock, it did not involve drama (the narrative mode, not the dog) or trauma (include Sprocket’s recently discovered “I’mma gonna cut you if you don’t get up!” mode). Cats were fed, I was allowed to live. All is right with the world. (more…)

A new twist on the Spectral by Debbi Stone.

I’ve been working on Debbi Stone’s Spectral for the past few days. It’s coming along very nicely, I think. (Sauron picked the color scheme.)

Speaking of colors, that’s actually 4 different shades of grey [aside: as a huge fan of grey-scale work, I’m incredibly annoyed that the phrase ‘shades of grey’ has been permanently subverted in the public vernacular] yarn shown here. They’re all part of Miss Babs’ 5-color Pegasus gradient set, and are awesome. Eventually, the cowl will go from dark to light (there’s one more step down in intensity left in the set) to dark again. (more…)

I am meri! Hear me sneeze!

[covert-ops] medicalAfter nearly a week of fighting the good fight, I believe that my immune system has started its slow capitulation to the inevitable.

G has been sick with a miserable cold since last weekend. I haven’t seen him this sick in years. I’ve been doing what I can for him, while at the same time trying to do everything in my power not to catch the plague. I thought I had things under control, but over the last day or so, I think I’ve started a downward slide into the ick.

I was feeling kind of achy (more so than usual) yesterday. Over the course of the day, I started to get that ‘lungs are heavy’ feeling. By last night, my eardrums were itching. This morning, I’m sneezing, and I have a sore throat.

I figure I have 2, maybe 3 days until I completely expire. *puts wrist to forehead*

No, no. Nothing that dramatic. I’ve just watched G go through the whole thing this week, and I’m not looking forward to what’s to come.

*yawn*

My sleep schedule is more broken than usual, at the moment.

After getting about 90 minutes of sleep on Tuesday night, I managed to make it until about noon before my brain keeled over. I spent the rest of the day not-quite-resting, and finally managed to get some real sleep starting around 9PM last night.

It’s now 4AM, and I’ve been up for an hour. While I may have some thoughts about the differences between a 4AM wakeup and one that takes place at 5AM, I stand firm in my belief that 3AM is simply out of the question on the ‘reasonable time to wake up’ scale. It’s too late to take any additional sleeping aids, but is also too stupidly early to be awake.

So, I knit, and continue on my latest Netflix binge and work on getting to some things I was supposed to do yesterday before my brain went offline. I’m not sure how long I’ll last today, but hopefully it will be longer than yesterday.

PSA: glibc buffer overflow (nss_hostname_digits_dots)

[covert-ops] bullhorn

Via https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2015-0235.

A heap-based buffer overflow was found in glibc’s __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function, which is used by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() glibc function calls. A remote attacker able to make an application call either of these functions could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application.

Update ALL THE THINGS! Again. Once, you know, a patch is available.

Grab Bag: Circadian what? Can’t sleep. Casting on. Introducing Legend.

While G was away, I discovered something somewhat perturbing: any concept I have of a regular schedule is driven almost exclusively by two things: G’s schedule, and Sprocket demanding to be fed at some point between 4:30 and 6:00 AM. As such, I’ve spent the last 10 days pretty much sleeping whenever I got tired, and waking up (generally) whenever my body could no longer handle being flat. Sadly, this little experiment did not produce any interesting results. The aches and pains are still going strong, I still managed to catch a cold, and I didn’t even manage to feel rested. (more…)

Ask the Hivemind: Pinterest for text-only sites.

question mark forestI’ve decided that I want to start using Pinterest for bookmarkers (though I’m willing to be dissuaded). Mostly, I’m tired of having some of my bookmarks available to me in (Google-synced) Chrome browser and some available to me in (iCloud-synced) Safari. (And, of course, this only gets more annoying when I move to other computers / mobile devices.) I’d like to have one place that I can go to for all my bookmarking needs. (I admit that I’m no longer sure why I quit using delicious. Didn’t they have some big going away / taken over / aliens invading scare a while back? Is that no longer an issue?) (more…)

Work in Progress: Flore: Sad panda edition.

Hark! Meaningful milestone! All of the knitting is now complete!

20141226-flore_progress

Smaug has, at this point, had just about enough of being a hat model. Sauron and Toothless find the entire process endlessly amusing.

Unfortunately, I think I discovered an error in the pattern. Furthermore, I didn’t discover it until it was going to be remarkably difficult to go back and fix the issue. So, the hat does not look right. Sad panda. (more…)

Saturday was not a success.

From a purely “getting things done” standpoint, I cannot really call Saturday a success. After a generally quiet and lazy morning around the house, G and I ventured out into the (rainy) world with three goals: get lunch, mail 2 packages at the post office, and go to Target for prescriptions and a few basic groceries.

(Y’all see where this is going, right?) (more…)