Saturday, October 15, 2005
The struggle to look younger
Tonight's episode of "What Not to Wear" featured a 40 year old woman who's married to a much younger man (the son of one of her friends-imagine how THAT went over), a rock musician no less, and was struggling to compete with the 20 year olds that were always throwing themselves at her husband; her solution was to wear the same skimpy, sexy, trendy stuff the girls half her age were wearing. Stacy and Clinton made a very insightful point to her; that past a certain age, dressing young paradoxically makes a woman look OLDER... and "sad" (aka pitiful). I wish all the middle aged women who parade around looking like they're wearing their daughters' clothes could be made to watch that episode.
Vogue talks about this concept periodically; they refer to it as "mutton dressed up as lamb," and also caution against it, because it makes women look foolish, desperate, and like they're trying too hard... which is neither attractive nor stylish. It doesn't matter if you look younger than you are, if you've still got the bod to wear what you like, if you're young at heart, free-spirited, whatever; for better or worse, if you dress a certain way, you'll bring the associated judgments down upon yourself... and since the women who dress too young do it to gain the good opinion of others, they need to realize that it's backfiring.
The aggravating thing is that dressing too maturely makes you look older, too, as does dressing too conservatively, or wearing clothes that are in any way connected in people's minds to elderly ladies (such as a dress with a pattern that reminds us of old-fashioned couches or curtains); even dressing in the muted colors that are emblematic of sophistication can seem matronly and be aging if not done just right. And there's one more, sneaky thing that can be aging; if you wear any style of clothing that was popular in the decade that your late teens and/or early 20's took place in, that makes it clear that you were old enough to wear adult-size clothing at that time, and accentuates how much older you are now.
So what should a woman of a certain age wear? My solution is to wear plain jeans, that can't be pinned on any particular decade and are vaguely youthful, and t-shirts that are equally decade-less and youngish-feeling, and are colorful, interesting, or representative of the things I love (such as science)... yes, I look like a geek, but I look like a geek that's routinely guessed to be 10 years younger than I actually am. For those whose lives require them to dress up a little more, classic shapes, patterns within reason, restraint with showing skin, dashes of color and a little boldness with accessories are your best bet; I know it's hard to turn away from the cute stuff prominently displayed in stores, but if you hold firm you'll be glad in the long run.
Another thing panicky women tend to do past 30 or 35 is to suddenly start growing girlishly long hair, which they dye very blond (or sometimes very red, as was the case with the woman I mentioned earlier); the intention is to look younger, but, as with the teenaged clothes, it accomplishes exactly the opposite-it shows the desperate desire to conceal their age. Long hair drags the face down, making it look older, and harsh hair colors are unflattering and aging to an older face; the worst of all is ash blonde, which adds washing out the skin and looking uncomfortably like gray hair to the problem of being too extreme. Hair that's medium length or shorter, darker blonde, soft auburn or lighter brunette, with enough volume to suggest the luxuriance of a young person's hair, will make a woman look far younger than that platinum blonde mane ever will.
And last but far from least; aging women will sometimes go bonkers with the makeup and start trowelling it on. This is a big mistake, because foundation sinks into facial lines, and so smaller amounts and lighter-weight formulas have to be used as a woman ages; dramatic makeup of any kind is harsh and aging, and frosted or iridescent stuff is an absolute non-no, because those fine particles sink more into facial lines than anything else does, and their sparkle adds insult to injury by drawing the eye right to the lines. Take it from what older female celebrities do to make the most of a face past 35; keep the eye makeup neutral, and give the lips some color to brighten your face... and don't forget the gloss, as a matte mouth looks dry and chapped.
If she knows what she's doing, a woman at 30, 40, 50, or beyond can still be very attractive, as much so as a younger woman (if somewhat less of a hot item)... and we can enter new zones of beauty as well. A couple of day ago, I received a simple black pullover that I'd won on eBay, and tried it on to see how it looked; my geek husband, looking at the nearly middle aged woman he's been with for a decade, commented enthusiastically, "Wow, you look really elegant in that top!! Solid black looks fantastic on you!!"
Elegant, who'd have thought it... take THAT, 20 year olds!! ;-)
Vogue talks about this concept periodically; they refer to it as "mutton dressed up as lamb," and also caution against it, because it makes women look foolish, desperate, and like they're trying too hard... which is neither attractive nor stylish. It doesn't matter if you look younger than you are, if you've still got the bod to wear what you like, if you're young at heart, free-spirited, whatever; for better or worse, if you dress a certain way, you'll bring the associated judgments down upon yourself... and since the women who dress too young do it to gain the good opinion of others, they need to realize that it's backfiring.
The aggravating thing is that dressing too maturely makes you look older, too, as does dressing too conservatively, or wearing clothes that are in any way connected in people's minds to elderly ladies (such as a dress with a pattern that reminds us of old-fashioned couches or curtains); even dressing in the muted colors that are emblematic of sophistication can seem matronly and be aging if not done just right. And there's one more, sneaky thing that can be aging; if you wear any style of clothing that was popular in the decade that your late teens and/or early 20's took place in, that makes it clear that you were old enough to wear adult-size clothing at that time, and accentuates how much older you are now.
So what should a woman of a certain age wear? My solution is to wear plain jeans, that can't be pinned on any particular decade and are vaguely youthful, and t-shirts that are equally decade-less and youngish-feeling, and are colorful, interesting, or representative of the things I love (such as science)... yes, I look like a geek, but I look like a geek that's routinely guessed to be 10 years younger than I actually am. For those whose lives require them to dress up a little more, classic shapes, patterns within reason, restraint with showing skin, dashes of color and a little boldness with accessories are your best bet; I know it's hard to turn away from the cute stuff prominently displayed in stores, but if you hold firm you'll be glad in the long run.
Another thing panicky women tend to do past 30 or 35 is to suddenly start growing girlishly long hair, which they dye very blond (or sometimes very red, as was the case with the woman I mentioned earlier); the intention is to look younger, but, as with the teenaged clothes, it accomplishes exactly the opposite-it shows the desperate desire to conceal their age. Long hair drags the face down, making it look older, and harsh hair colors are unflattering and aging to an older face; the worst of all is ash blonde, which adds washing out the skin and looking uncomfortably like gray hair to the problem of being too extreme. Hair that's medium length or shorter, darker blonde, soft auburn or lighter brunette, with enough volume to suggest the luxuriance of a young person's hair, will make a woman look far younger than that platinum blonde mane ever will.
And last but far from least; aging women will sometimes go bonkers with the makeup and start trowelling it on. This is a big mistake, because foundation sinks into facial lines, and so smaller amounts and lighter-weight formulas have to be used as a woman ages; dramatic makeup of any kind is harsh and aging, and frosted or iridescent stuff is an absolute non-no, because those fine particles sink more into facial lines than anything else does, and their sparkle adds insult to injury by drawing the eye right to the lines. Take it from what older female celebrities do to make the most of a face past 35; keep the eye makeup neutral, and give the lips some color to brighten your face... and don't forget the gloss, as a matte mouth looks dry and chapped.
If she knows what she's doing, a woman at 30, 40, 50, or beyond can still be very attractive, as much so as a younger woman (if somewhat less of a hot item)... and we can enter new zones of beauty as well. A couple of day ago, I received a simple black pullover that I'd won on eBay, and tried it on to see how it looked; my geek husband, looking at the nearly middle aged woman he's been with for a decade, commented enthusiastically, "Wow, you look really elegant in that top!! Solid black looks fantastic on you!!"
Elegant, who'd have thought it... take THAT, 20 year olds!! ;-)
Friday, October 14, 2005
The sad tale of a baby bird
This evening, I noticed a bird sitting out on the patio; not eating, or hopping around, just SITTING, and because that sort of odd behavior can mean that the bird is injured, I kept a concerned eye on it until, just before it got dark, it vanished, and I was relieved...
... until an hour later, when my husband went out there to re-stuff the copper wool into the holes the rats were using around the shed. He jumped backwards into a nearby bush with a yelp and a curse, and in response to my alarmed questions told me that when he'd tried to shove the wool into the mouth of a tunnel under the shed, a rat had shoved it right back out, and had looked out brazenly at him. A couple of minutes passed, and then he made an even more amazing announcement; it wasn't a rat, it was a BIRD.
We'll gloss over how my husband couldn't tell a bird from a rat, and move onto how I went bolting out, expecting to see the bird I'd been watching earlier; instead, I saw a bird of the same species, but clearly a baby... in OCTOBER!! What sort of psychotic birds produced babies this late in the year? I hadn't heard anything that sounded like a nestful of babies, so all I could figure is that 2 abysmally stupid birds must have set up housekeeping a little ways away, and that when the babies had taken their unseasonal leap from the nest and, as often happens, one of them couldn't fly well enough to start its solo life, the mother had hung around it on the ground for as long as possible to keep an eye on it, but had flown off before it got too dark for her to see, leaving junior to squeeze into the tunnel (who would have expected a bird to go underground?) to hide for the night.
Since the bird wouldn't last 5 seconds against the rats that would soon be swarming through the tunnel, we had to rescue him from where he was by that point cowering in the foliage and get him somewhere safe; he didn't want to be caught, of course, so it took a few tries, especially since you can't clutch onto a little bird to hold onto him, because their bones are fragile. When I was fairly sure I had him securely, I had my husband drag the ladder over next to the patio cover, and I began the terrifying (I'm afraid of heights) no-hands climb to where I'd be high enough to set the tweetie safely into the vines; sadly, he wasn't willing to grip onto anything, and his little body started slipping between the twigs, despite my desperate attempts to nudge him back up from underneath (the patio cover is a lattice, not solid). I was squawking anxiously to my husband, who, in the standard pompous tone of husbands dealing with irrational wives, was saying, "He's fine, he's fine, he's not going to fall, and even if he did, he can pretty much fly, so it's not as if he's going to hit the ground with a thud..."
... 3, 2, 1, THUD!! The timing would have been comical if it hadn't meant that the bird might have broken its neck; luckily, it didn't even seem stunned, and belatedly flapped its wings and flew... and then the exterior lights, which only stay on for a few minutes after being triggered, went out, and I shrieked at my husband to wave the lights back on and see if the tweetie had landed, deliberately or otherwise, when darkness descended on him. We did a frantic search, my husband around the cars and me farther out, but didn't see him; I was about to return into the house with a sigh of relief, thinking he'd flown to safety in a nearby tree, when it occurred to me to check over the area my husband had supposedly looked at... and of course there was the bird. He didn't resist being caught this time very much, and I brought him back to the ladder, telling my husband that he'd have to take the tweetie and put him farther back into the vines than I could reach, to get him onto a thick spot that he wouldn't fall through no matter what he did... and then I looked down at the bird in better light, and saw...
He was HURT!! One of his eyes was bulging over a swollen area of his head (fully in the socket, but it still looked scary); the eye appeared undamaged, and so did his feathered skin, but clearly it had been injured somehow. We're hoping desperately that whatever did that to him didn't crack his skull, or do anything else that'll kill him or leave him too disabled to survive, but we just don't know... he would have died in the filthy jaws of rats if we hadn't rescued him, but we still feel AWFUL that he got hurt while we were trying to save him. :-(
We've checked on him several times in the hours since then, and he's still alive and able to look around when the light hits him; if in the morning he's gone, we'll know he's ok, if he's stuck up there we'll have to start calling bird sanctuaries and see if they can take him in, and if... well, we won't even contemplate the other option unless we have to. Meanwhile, I'm fretting endlessly about him, wondering if he's in pain, if he's cold, if he's lonely and wants to be back in the nest with his mommy... anthropomorphizing, I know, but any way you slice it he's not a happy camper, and I'm worried about him. Keep your fingers crossed that a bruised eyeball isn't fatal to little tweeties...
Update: the bird survived the night, and flew away, but not very far... my husband found him dead near one of the cars, and we can only guess at what made him die on that spot. If only he hadn't ended up in a rat zone where we had to move him, if only he'd ended up in someone else's yard, where he would have been safe until morning... this is a sad day in the Omni household. :-( :-( :-(
... until an hour later, when my husband went out there to re-stuff the copper wool into the holes the rats were using around the shed. He jumped backwards into a nearby bush with a yelp and a curse, and in response to my alarmed questions told me that when he'd tried to shove the wool into the mouth of a tunnel under the shed, a rat had shoved it right back out, and had looked out brazenly at him. A couple of minutes passed, and then he made an even more amazing announcement; it wasn't a rat, it was a BIRD.
We'll gloss over how my husband couldn't tell a bird from a rat, and move onto how I went bolting out, expecting to see the bird I'd been watching earlier; instead, I saw a bird of the same species, but clearly a baby... in OCTOBER!! What sort of psychotic birds produced babies this late in the year? I hadn't heard anything that sounded like a nestful of babies, so all I could figure is that 2 abysmally stupid birds must have set up housekeeping a little ways away, and that when the babies had taken their unseasonal leap from the nest and, as often happens, one of them couldn't fly well enough to start its solo life, the mother had hung around it on the ground for as long as possible to keep an eye on it, but had flown off before it got too dark for her to see, leaving junior to squeeze into the tunnel (who would have expected a bird to go underground?) to hide for the night.
Since the bird wouldn't last 5 seconds against the rats that would soon be swarming through the tunnel, we had to rescue him from where he was by that point cowering in the foliage and get him somewhere safe; he didn't want to be caught, of course, so it took a few tries, especially since you can't clutch onto a little bird to hold onto him, because their bones are fragile. When I was fairly sure I had him securely, I had my husband drag the ladder over next to the patio cover, and I began the terrifying (I'm afraid of heights) no-hands climb to where I'd be high enough to set the tweetie safely into the vines; sadly, he wasn't willing to grip onto anything, and his little body started slipping between the twigs, despite my desperate attempts to nudge him back up from underneath (the patio cover is a lattice, not solid). I was squawking anxiously to my husband, who, in the standard pompous tone of husbands dealing with irrational wives, was saying, "He's fine, he's fine, he's not going to fall, and even if he did, he can pretty much fly, so it's not as if he's going to hit the ground with a thud..."
... 3, 2, 1, THUD!! The timing would have been comical if it hadn't meant that the bird might have broken its neck; luckily, it didn't even seem stunned, and belatedly flapped its wings and flew... and then the exterior lights, which only stay on for a few minutes after being triggered, went out, and I shrieked at my husband to wave the lights back on and see if the tweetie had landed, deliberately or otherwise, when darkness descended on him. We did a frantic search, my husband around the cars and me farther out, but didn't see him; I was about to return into the house with a sigh of relief, thinking he'd flown to safety in a nearby tree, when it occurred to me to check over the area my husband had supposedly looked at... and of course there was the bird. He didn't resist being caught this time very much, and I brought him back to the ladder, telling my husband that he'd have to take the tweetie and put him farther back into the vines than I could reach, to get him onto a thick spot that he wouldn't fall through no matter what he did... and then I looked down at the bird in better light, and saw...
He was HURT!! One of his eyes was bulging over a swollen area of his head (fully in the socket, but it still looked scary); the eye appeared undamaged, and so did his feathered skin, but clearly it had been injured somehow. We're hoping desperately that whatever did that to him didn't crack his skull, or do anything else that'll kill him or leave him too disabled to survive, but we just don't know... he would have died in the filthy jaws of rats if we hadn't rescued him, but we still feel AWFUL that he got hurt while we were trying to save him. :-(
We've checked on him several times in the hours since then, and he's still alive and able to look around when the light hits him; if in the morning he's gone, we'll know he's ok, if he's stuck up there we'll have to start calling bird sanctuaries and see if they can take him in, and if... well, we won't even contemplate the other option unless we have to. Meanwhile, I'm fretting endlessly about him, wondering if he's in pain, if he's cold, if he's lonely and wants to be back in the nest with his mommy... anthropomorphizing, I know, but any way you slice it he's not a happy camper, and I'm worried about him. Keep your fingers crossed that a bruised eyeball isn't fatal to little tweeties...
Update: the bird survived the night, and flew away, but not very far... my husband found him dead near one of the cars, and we can only guess at what made him die on that spot. If only he hadn't ended up in a rat zone where we had to move him, if only he'd ended up in someone else's yard, where he would have been safe until morning... this is a sad day in the Omni household. :-( :-( :-(
Thursday, October 13, 2005
My Amazon odyssey
A month ago, my husband and I ordered 3 items from Amazon.com; a calendar, the new Stephen King novel "The Colorado Kid" that was available for pre-orders (the release date was going to be October 4), and another book that was going to be released in early December... yes, we were trying to get the free Super Saver Shipping, lol. As always, I insisted on reading and checking EVERYTHING on every page as the order was entered and processed, which makes my husband nuts, especially since I make HIM recheck it all too; at every step, each item showed the shipping date that we'd seen on its page, which is what we expected from our past experiences of having items in an order that weren't all going to be available at the same time... Amazon had always shipped things as they became available even when we used the free shipping, and we saw nothing to make us suspect that that had changed.
Fast forward a month; I realized that the King book should have made it here by now, and then remembered that the calendar should have been here WEEKS ago (I don't need it until January, so it'd totally slipped my mind) ... so I logged into our account at Amazon, which showed that neither item had been shipped, and that the estimated shipment date for the entire order was DECEMBER!! I sent a note to customer service, and they replied (1st thing in the morning, to their credit) that, since the final book now no longer had a known release date (small presses don't keep to their schedules, I guess), the entire order was in limbo (the December reference must have just been the best their system could do to handle the situation-apparently it doesn't have a "you're screwed" date option); this turned out to be because their familiar line that accompanied using the Super Saver Shipping, "Group my items into as few shipments as possible," which had previously meant that they'd use the outer limit of the estimated shipping time if it meant that your order could all be sent from one location, ideally the one nearest to you (which might need a day or 2 to get some of the items into stock), as opposed to shipping it all the next day from whichever locations had it wherever they might be, now means "we'll hold your entire order until it's all available at a location near you, and then ship it all together."
Amazon.com is one of the biggest online retailers, so can anyone tell me why they changed the meaning of a phrase that was crucial to the customer's understanding of how the shipping works rather than just saying plainly, in even ONE place out of all those pages you have to go through to place an order, "All items will be held until your entire order is available," which every 2-bit online retailer has on THEIR order pages if that's their policy? Why did even the final page generated by the order process show each item estimated to be shipped on a different date, NOT all on the date of the item that would be available the farthest in the future, which would have tipped us off that the items would NOT be shipped as they became available as we were expecting them to? Why was there no clear explanation of, or even hints as to the nature of, the shipping situation, such that 2 intelligent people going over every word on every page several times didn't see that we were looking at a 3 MONTH wait to get the order if we included the still-unreleased book as part of it? Heck, why wasn't there a prompt asking us if we were SURE we wanted to place the order as entered, since we'd be waiting until the end of the year to get it? Un-frigging-believable.
The customer service agent grandly informed us that they'd do a one-time exception and send the 2 available items now, and the 3rd when it showed up, free of charge... which sounds generous until you realize that all we had to do was cancel the order, and that'd be the end of THAT problem-we could get the stuff many other places with NO wait involved, including their rival Barnes and Nobel, and it's not rocket science, or sainthood, for them to eat a buck or 2 in shipping to keep us from having to make the simple choice between waiting an unknown amount of time for our stuff, paying for full shipping ourselves, or getting the items elsewhere (they'd rightly expect us to be too ticked off to try the order with them again with a different combo of items).
All's well that ends well, I guess, but I'm pretty disgusted at Amazon's puzzling refusal to make their shipping policy straightforward and clear; next time I want to order books, my 1st choice will NOT be them.
Fast forward a month; I realized that the King book should have made it here by now, and then remembered that the calendar should have been here WEEKS ago (I don't need it until January, so it'd totally slipped my mind) ... so I logged into our account at Amazon, which showed that neither item had been shipped, and that the estimated shipment date for the entire order was DECEMBER!! I sent a note to customer service, and they replied (1st thing in the morning, to their credit) that, since the final book now no longer had a known release date (small presses don't keep to their schedules, I guess), the entire order was in limbo (the December reference must have just been the best their system could do to handle the situation-apparently it doesn't have a "you're screwed" date option); this turned out to be because their familiar line that accompanied using the Super Saver Shipping, "Group my items into as few shipments as possible," which had previously meant that they'd use the outer limit of the estimated shipping time if it meant that your order could all be sent from one location, ideally the one nearest to you (which might need a day or 2 to get some of the items into stock), as opposed to shipping it all the next day from whichever locations had it wherever they might be, now means "we'll hold your entire order until it's all available at a location near you, and then ship it all together."
Amazon.com is one of the biggest online retailers, so can anyone tell me why they changed the meaning of a phrase that was crucial to the customer's understanding of how the shipping works rather than just saying plainly, in even ONE place out of all those pages you have to go through to place an order, "All items will be held until your entire order is available," which every 2-bit online retailer has on THEIR order pages if that's their policy? Why did even the final page generated by the order process show each item estimated to be shipped on a different date, NOT all on the date of the item that would be available the farthest in the future, which would have tipped us off that the items would NOT be shipped as they became available as we were expecting them to? Why was there no clear explanation of, or even hints as to the nature of, the shipping situation, such that 2 intelligent people going over every word on every page several times didn't see that we were looking at a 3 MONTH wait to get the order if we included the still-unreleased book as part of it? Heck, why wasn't there a prompt asking us if we were SURE we wanted to place the order as entered, since we'd be waiting until the end of the year to get it? Un-frigging-believable.
The customer service agent grandly informed us that they'd do a one-time exception and send the 2 available items now, and the 3rd when it showed up, free of charge... which sounds generous until you realize that all we had to do was cancel the order, and that'd be the end of THAT problem-we could get the stuff many other places with NO wait involved, including their rival Barnes and Nobel, and it's not rocket science, or sainthood, for them to eat a buck or 2 in shipping to keep us from having to make the simple choice between waiting an unknown amount of time for our stuff, paying for full shipping ourselves, or getting the items elsewhere (they'd rightly expect us to be too ticked off to try the order with them again with a different combo of items).
All's well that ends well, I guess, but I'm pretty disgusted at Amazon's puzzling refusal to make their shipping policy straightforward and clear; next time I want to order books, my 1st choice will NOT be them.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
"Dr. Wayne Dyer: How to Get What You Really, Really..."
"... Really, Really Want" is the title of the DVD I saw today... and yes, all of those reallies (is that a word?) were part of the title. Dyer talks long enough to make even MY eyes glaze over, but he's worth it because everything he says makes so much sense... by which I of course mean that his analysis of how the universe works is very close to mine. His central theme is that you draw into your life what you focus your thoughts and feelings on-the most basic rule of karma, although he never uses that term. He gets bonus points for recognizing the little-mentioned "dark side" of that rule, that if you let the bad things in your life, or those bad things that you fear will enter your life, into your thoughts to any significant degree, that's what you'll end up with... I don't know why it's so hard for people to grasp that our thoughts and feelings creating reality means ALL the thoughts and feelings create it, not just those we'd choose to bring desirable results, but Dyer's got it perfectly thought out. If you're interested in hearing more about this concept than my ramblings provide, by all means get the DVD, or read one of his book on the subject; he's not as charismatic as Joel Osteen, but he's just as spiritual.
The most powerful thing he said was something that turns out to be a major point in one of his books (as I discovered when I looked it up to try to get a better idea of what he meant than he gave in his talk), that to achieve success and inner peace (and the spiritual progress that follows along with it), you need to "have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing." Having a mind that's truly open to EVERYTHING is a struggle; I know, because as part of my explorations of spirituality I've had to repeatedly push myself to give a fair shake to all viewpoints regarding the unknown... and it's served me well, particularly where animism is concerned (see my post of 3-16-04). He's a little vague as to precisely which sorts of attachments we're supposed to avoid, as he focuses on the challenges to being open-minded, but the basic concept seems to be (again, based on what I was able to find in a search) that we get it in our heads that we have to be a certain way, that we have to interface with the world in a certain way, that the world IS a certain way, etc, but some of our ideas are wrong, and can block our path to higher consciousness, and some of the actual things or people that we're emotionally attached to aren't in our best interests, and can prevent us from achieving our goals (including happiness). Breaking those attachments to ideas or people and things can be VERY hard, even if they're counterproductive, but we can't move forward if we're being held back by any of that stuff, so we have to at least try.
Am *I* being held back in my spiritual quest by attachments to... anything? I don't know, but thanks to Dr. Dyer I've realized that I have to start thinking about it, and looking out for it; now more than ever, I see why intensely spiritual types often give up their possessions, and even their families, to retreat from the world and live simple, and sometimes isolated, lives... the list of things that distracts the mind from achieving greater spiritual understanding is ENDLESS.
Am I just overly tired, or does progressing spiritually really keep getting more difficult?
The most powerful thing he said was something that turns out to be a major point in one of his books (as I discovered when I looked it up to try to get a better idea of what he meant than he gave in his talk), that to achieve success and inner peace (and the spiritual progress that follows along with it), you need to "have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing." Having a mind that's truly open to EVERYTHING is a struggle; I know, because as part of my explorations of spirituality I've had to repeatedly push myself to give a fair shake to all viewpoints regarding the unknown... and it's served me well, particularly where animism is concerned (see my post of 3-16-04). He's a little vague as to precisely which sorts of attachments we're supposed to avoid, as he focuses on the challenges to being open-minded, but the basic concept seems to be (again, based on what I was able to find in a search) that we get it in our heads that we have to be a certain way, that we have to interface with the world in a certain way, that the world IS a certain way, etc, but some of our ideas are wrong, and can block our path to higher consciousness, and some of the actual things or people that we're emotionally attached to aren't in our best interests, and can prevent us from achieving our goals (including happiness). Breaking those attachments to ideas or people and things can be VERY hard, even if they're counterproductive, but we can't move forward if we're being held back by any of that stuff, so we have to at least try.
Am *I* being held back in my spiritual quest by attachments to... anything? I don't know, but thanks to Dr. Dyer I've realized that I have to start thinking about it, and looking out for it; now more than ever, I see why intensely spiritual types often give up their possessions, and even their families, to retreat from the world and live simple, and sometimes isolated, lives... the list of things that distracts the mind from achieving greater spiritual understanding is ENDLESS.
Am I just overly tired, or does progressing spiritually really keep getting more difficult?
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
An enormous tech triumph
A couple of days ago, I posted about "Karma Kitty the Cursor Eater," my latest sidebar doodad and new favorite thing; today, there are a couple of updates:
When I 1st got him, and for a day after that, I didn't have the sound on on any of my computers, nor did my husband (who, although like most estrogen-challenged people doesn't normally like cute or novelty stuff, has been playing with Karma Kitty too); you can see where this leading, I'm sure... when I finally played with it with the sound ON, I discovered to my amazement that he ROARS when he pounces on and eats the cursor (I edited the previous post to include the roaring so that someone just reading that one would know what all the features were-sorry if that confused anyone). I shrieked with delight (again) and eagerly called to my husband; he came rushing out to hear some roars, and agreed that Karma Kitty is the cutest thing ever... and was sad that he hadn't been able to figure out how to get the file for my desktop.
Since I'd expected him to be able to get this file like he does other Flash files, I was VERY disappointed, even more so after I found out about the roaring; my husband's explanation for why he couldn't get the file was that it was NOT a Flash file, but a "server-side script," meaning that the code was running on the Bunnyhero Labs.com server and not in the browser, making it un-downloadable... and although he's FAR more technically proficient than I am, this just seemed WRONG to me, as I was SURE it was a Flash file and therefore capture-able.
He'd looked at my source code, and seen that there was no mention of Flash, just of a php file, which is why he assumed it was a server-side script (he said like Perl or Python, but those are cgi, not php, it turns out-he knew less than he pretended to about all this); when I pointed out that I had a customized version of the program, and thus that the original file could be Flash and it just showed up in my code as php because of that customization, he got VERY derisive and pompous, insisting not only that this was impossible, but stupid to even contemplate, because no one would ever, EVER set code up that way, that it would be like advertising one kind of car but having a totally different kind actually on your lot... you see where THIS one is going too, right, lol?
Determined to have Karma Kitty on my desktop, I ignored my husband's comments and went to Bunnyhero Labs.com, went to the page that has the tiger on it, brought up the source code, and started reading. When I encountered a mention of Flash (specifically, the code to give an error message if your browser isn't using the latest version), he assured me that that only meant that something on the page was using Flash, NOT that the tiger was Flash; not buying a word of it, I did what I should have done right away... I searched for "swf" (the file extension for Flash files), and there it was:
http://petimage.bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/tiger.swf
Just as predicted; the FLASH file for the tiger. I howled in triumph, and started hammering my husband about his dead-wrong analysis of the situation, and the snippy, condescending way he'd insisted to me that my perfectly reasonable, not to mention CORRECT, analysis had been foolish. He said, "I'm never going to live this down, am I?" and I replied gleefully, "Not a chance-and I'll be blogging about it tonight, BWAHAHAHAHA!!"
So, as promised, here's the story of how instinct won out over supposed technical superiority. My husband downloaded the Flash file (which contains the UN-customized version of the tiger code), and then, eager to re-assert his geekness, claimed that if he digs up an old browser he can probably load my blog on it and then download my blue-purple version of the tiger from the cache... I'd sure like to have my personalized Karma Kitty, so my fingers are crossed.
But nothing will prevent me from reminding him at every opportunity that *I* was right and he was WRONG about something he could and should have easily sorted out himself, of course. :-)
When I 1st got him, and for a day after that, I didn't have the sound on on any of my computers, nor did my husband (who, although like most estrogen-challenged people doesn't normally like cute or novelty stuff, has been playing with Karma Kitty too); you can see where this leading, I'm sure... when I finally played with it with the sound ON, I discovered to my amazement that he ROARS when he pounces on and eats the cursor (I edited the previous post to include the roaring so that someone just reading that one would know what all the features were-sorry if that confused anyone). I shrieked with delight (again) and eagerly called to my husband; he came rushing out to hear some roars, and agreed that Karma Kitty is the cutest thing ever... and was sad that he hadn't been able to figure out how to get the file for my desktop.
Since I'd expected him to be able to get this file like he does other Flash files, I was VERY disappointed, even more so after I found out about the roaring; my husband's explanation for why he couldn't get the file was that it was NOT a Flash file, but a "server-side script," meaning that the code was running on the Bunnyhero Labs.com server and not in the browser, making it un-downloadable... and although he's FAR more technically proficient than I am, this just seemed WRONG to me, as I was SURE it was a Flash file and therefore capture-able.
He'd looked at my source code, and seen that there was no mention of Flash, just of a php file, which is why he assumed it was a server-side script (he said like Perl or Python, but those are cgi, not php, it turns out-he knew less than he pretended to about all this); when I pointed out that I had a customized version of the program, and thus that the original file could be Flash and it just showed up in my code as php because of that customization, he got VERY derisive and pompous, insisting not only that this was impossible, but stupid to even contemplate, because no one would ever, EVER set code up that way, that it would be like advertising one kind of car but having a totally different kind actually on your lot... you see where THIS one is going too, right, lol?
Determined to have Karma Kitty on my desktop, I ignored my husband's comments and went to Bunnyhero Labs.com, went to the page that has the tiger on it, brought up the source code, and started reading. When I encountered a mention of Flash (specifically, the code to give an error message if your browser isn't using the latest version), he assured me that that only meant that something on the page was using Flash, NOT that the tiger was Flash; not buying a word of it, I did what I should have done right away... I searched for "swf" (the file extension for Flash files), and there it was:
http://petimage.bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/tiger.swf
Just as predicted; the FLASH file for the tiger. I howled in triumph, and started hammering my husband about his dead-wrong analysis of the situation, and the snippy, condescending way he'd insisted to me that my perfectly reasonable, not to mention CORRECT, analysis had been foolish. He said, "I'm never going to live this down, am I?" and I replied gleefully, "Not a chance-and I'll be blogging about it tonight, BWAHAHAHAHA!!"
So, as promised, here's the story of how instinct won out over supposed technical superiority. My husband downloaded the Flash file (which contains the UN-customized version of the tiger code), and then, eager to re-assert his geekness, claimed that if he digs up an old browser he can probably load my blog on it and then download my blue-purple version of the tiger from the cache... I'd sure like to have my personalized Karma Kitty, so my fingers are crossed.
But nothing will prevent me from reminding him at every opportunity that *I* was right and he was WRONG about something he could and should have easily sorted out himself, of course. :-)
Monday, October 10, 2005
The commenting conundrum
How do you prevent trolls and comment spam without putting off, or driving away, some of the legitimate potential commenters?
You can't.
Therefore, although I absolutely understand the desire to avoid trolls and spam, and fully support the decisions of bloggers who've had real problems with these things to do whatever they can think of to fend them off, I'd like to suggest that owners of less-besieged blogs re-think how elaborately they need to design their commenting areas:
First, the requirement to enter an email addy in order to post a comment; granted that a troll is usually dumber than dirt, but do you really think they can't figure out to use a fake one so that you can't hold them accountable for their behavior? Valid commenters get stuck typing in their email addies over and over and over, and those of us who don't want to reveal them to strangers have to enter FAKE ones over and over, which is a pain and a waste of our time... and before you say it, I'm NOT the only person who doesn't want to give out my email addy, because all those promises that they'll be seen only by the blog owners and kept secret CAN'T have been written just to reassure ME. Demanding email addies does NOT fight trolls, and at least on most systems it doesn't fight spam either, so what's the point of inconveniencing everyone by asking us for them?
Then, there's the suddenly omnipresent boxes in which codes of various types have to be entered in order for posts to be made; these are for spam control, and as far as I know they work really well for that... but the ones with the convoluted letters that we're supposed to analyze and duplicate can be a nightmare for people trying to post, because too many letters look alike in that format, and even a careful analysis can lead to a wrong guess and having to start all over with a new code. I can't tell you how many times I've spent a minute typing a post, and 5 minutes trying to figure out the code, or several codes until I get one without ambiguous characters; as a consequence, if I see a code box, I have to ponder how badly I want to post, and as often as not decide it's not worth the struggle... and I can't be the only one who feels that way, so on blogs that don't actually HAVE a spam problem, or only have a minor one, and whose owners want more comments, they might want to question the wisdom of having that barrier to posting.
The BIG barrier is of course registration, whether with a central site like TypePad or with the blogs themselves; although in the case of some political blogs the primary purpose of this is to keep people with opposing views from posting, no matter how politely, in general it's used to stop spam and at least mostly eliminate trolling... with the down side of course being that it also eliminates people who aren't willing to go through a registration process to contribute to someone else's blog. What could you possibly want to post that you'd be willing to go to that trouble, and then wait around, to be able to say, after all? Sure, if you're fairly certain that you'll want to participate again on that blog, you might not be too put out, but think for a minute how high of a % of comments are from people who were jut passing through... is it really worth losing out on all of that just to not have to delete spam or ban trolls? There are some awfully quiet blogs that require registration to comment, which makes me think that perhaps their owners got sucked into the idea of how wonderful having that slick tech-y system on their sites would be without realizing how much reader participation they'd be losing out on; after all, isn't the entire point of having comments enabled to hear from people about your posts?
I guess that's really my message to EVERYONE that has something set up that makes commenting on their blog a hassle; are you REALLY saving yourself enough time and aggravation in dealing with whatever level of spam and trolls you'd otherwise have to make it worthwhile to be losing out on comments, which means losing out on READERS? If you set your blog up to have commenting, that means you want to hear from people, people for whom thousands of blogs similar to yours are just a click away; if you've had real troll and/or spam problems, you've gotta do whatever it takes to handle it, but if not, why make people jump through hoops to post so much as a single line, making them more likely to surf on to the next blog without getting involved with yours?
You can't.
Therefore, although I absolutely understand the desire to avoid trolls and spam, and fully support the decisions of bloggers who've had real problems with these things to do whatever they can think of to fend them off, I'd like to suggest that owners of less-besieged blogs re-think how elaborately they need to design their commenting areas:
First, the requirement to enter an email addy in order to post a comment; granted that a troll is usually dumber than dirt, but do you really think they can't figure out to use a fake one so that you can't hold them accountable for their behavior? Valid commenters get stuck typing in their email addies over and over and over, and those of us who don't want to reveal them to strangers have to enter FAKE ones over and over, which is a pain and a waste of our time... and before you say it, I'm NOT the only person who doesn't want to give out my email addy, because all those promises that they'll be seen only by the blog owners and kept secret CAN'T have been written just to reassure ME. Demanding email addies does NOT fight trolls, and at least on most systems it doesn't fight spam either, so what's the point of inconveniencing everyone by asking us for them?
Then, there's the suddenly omnipresent boxes in which codes of various types have to be entered in order for posts to be made; these are for spam control, and as far as I know they work really well for that... but the ones with the convoluted letters that we're supposed to analyze and duplicate can be a nightmare for people trying to post, because too many letters look alike in that format, and even a careful analysis can lead to a wrong guess and having to start all over with a new code. I can't tell you how many times I've spent a minute typing a post, and 5 minutes trying to figure out the code, or several codes until I get one without ambiguous characters; as a consequence, if I see a code box, I have to ponder how badly I want to post, and as often as not decide it's not worth the struggle... and I can't be the only one who feels that way, so on blogs that don't actually HAVE a spam problem, or only have a minor one, and whose owners want more comments, they might want to question the wisdom of having that barrier to posting.
The BIG barrier is of course registration, whether with a central site like TypePad or with the blogs themselves; although in the case of some political blogs the primary purpose of this is to keep people with opposing views from posting, no matter how politely, in general it's used to stop spam and at least mostly eliminate trolling... with the down side of course being that it also eliminates people who aren't willing to go through a registration process to contribute to someone else's blog. What could you possibly want to post that you'd be willing to go to that trouble, and then wait around, to be able to say, after all? Sure, if you're fairly certain that you'll want to participate again on that blog, you might not be too put out, but think for a minute how high of a % of comments are from people who were jut passing through... is it really worth losing out on all of that just to not have to delete spam or ban trolls? There are some awfully quiet blogs that require registration to comment, which makes me think that perhaps their owners got sucked into the idea of how wonderful having that slick tech-y system on their sites would be without realizing how much reader participation they'd be losing out on; after all, isn't the entire point of having comments enabled to hear from people about your posts?
I guess that's really my message to EVERYONE that has something set up that makes commenting on their blog a hassle; are you REALLY saving yourself enough time and aggravation in dealing with whatever level of spam and trolls you'd otherwise have to make it worthwhile to be losing out on comments, which means losing out on READERS? If you set your blog up to have commenting, that means you want to hear from people, people for whom thousands of blogs similar to yours are just a click away; if you've had real troll and/or spam problems, you've gotta do whatever it takes to handle it, but if not, why make people jump through hoops to post so much as a single line, making them more likely to surf on to the next blog without getting involved with yours?
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Karma Kitty the Cursor Eater
If you have no idea what the title refers to, check out my sidebar; go ahead, I'll wait.
I've seen these so-called "virtual pets," web pets," etc before, and never been too impressed; some of them were just static images, some were animated gifs... and most weren't that cute, although they were clearly trying to be. I'd always figured you had to be young and hip to like those things, and as I'm neither this'd be the 1 sidebar doodad I would NOT get; all that changed when my blog surfing turned up a site with a kitten in a basket that I didn't notice until its head followed my cursor as I moved past it... and when I brought the cursor closer, it SWATTED it-I was hooked. Obviously, I didn't end up getting that one, but you can see it here
http://bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/customize.php?mc=cat.swf
and there are a bunch of other critters, too, all of which are worth a look; none of them have the spectrum of actions and interactivity that the tiger cub does, though, which is why I got him.
As with the kitten in the basket, his head moves to follow the cursor, his tail waves slowly all the time, and he swats the cursor if it's close enough. In addition, he walks within his "window" (and somewhat beyond) to follow the cursor, lays down, and stands up on his hind legs, all the while following with his head and swatting where applicable... and he blinks at regular intervals, which adds an amazing amount of reality to his image, as does his continual moving around even if the cursor is far away from him and holding still. Also, if you click on him, he'll close his eyes and rock his head in rhythm with his tail until you click him again; I think that's supposed to represent him being "petted," which is a nice touch.
Now here's the thing that made me shriek with delight, which would have made me choose him even if he'd been lacking the other refinements; every so often, at what appear to be semi-random intervals (semi because they never get too long or short), he'll pounce on the cursor, ROAR, and EAT it... which means that his mouth moves in a realistic chewing motion, down to the flashes of fangs, and during that time the cursor is invisible as if it were really in his mouth. How CUTE is that? I've spent what's objectively a ridiculous amount of time "playing" with the tiger, and I've found that, although the cursor usually has to be at his "knee" level or lower for him to pounce and eat, he does on occasion "grab" the cursor in mid-air and then drop down to eat it... the level of complexity of this thing is astonishing.
Have you been going back and testing the functions as I've described them? :-)
In case you're wondering about the non-tigerish color; on top of everything else, the folks at Bunnyhero Labs allow you to customize the color of your "pet" from a wide choice of hues, and I was pleased to find a good approximation of that purplish blue shade seen briefly at twilight and rarely anywhere else, that seems to me to be the color of karma for reasons I can never quite articulate... which explains the color and the name of my new tiger friend.
Since I was adding something, I figured it was time to remove something; I finally gritted my teeth and took out the FreeFind search that had been in my sidebar since the very beginning, and was in fact the 1st thing I ever put there, after a great deal of time spent looking for blog-search doodads and testing several that didn't work, including an older version of the Google one. It took me a long time to be able to let it go, even though we've had a fully functional Google search incorporated into Blogger blogs for ages, and the FreeFind search had sunk beneath so many more interesting doodads that I'm sure hardly anyone ever noticed it much less used it anymore... it's a silly thing to have been sentimental about, but geeks can be funny that way.
Anyways, enjoy Karma Kitty; I know *I* will... especially if there's way to get him onto my desktop, and I think there might be...
I've seen these so-called "virtual pets," web pets," etc before, and never been too impressed; some of them were just static images, some were animated gifs... and most weren't that cute, although they were clearly trying to be. I'd always figured you had to be young and hip to like those things, and as I'm neither this'd be the 1 sidebar doodad I would NOT get; all that changed when my blog surfing turned up a site with a kitten in a basket that I didn't notice until its head followed my cursor as I moved past it... and when I brought the cursor closer, it SWATTED it-I was hooked. Obviously, I didn't end up getting that one, but you can see it here
http://bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/customize.php?mc=cat.swf
and there are a bunch of other critters, too, all of which are worth a look; none of them have the spectrum of actions and interactivity that the tiger cub does, though, which is why I got him.
As with the kitten in the basket, his head moves to follow the cursor, his tail waves slowly all the time, and he swats the cursor if it's close enough. In addition, he walks within his "window" (and somewhat beyond) to follow the cursor, lays down, and stands up on his hind legs, all the while following with his head and swatting where applicable... and he blinks at regular intervals, which adds an amazing amount of reality to his image, as does his continual moving around even if the cursor is far away from him and holding still. Also, if you click on him, he'll close his eyes and rock his head in rhythm with his tail until you click him again; I think that's supposed to represent him being "petted," which is a nice touch.
Now here's the thing that made me shriek with delight, which would have made me choose him even if he'd been lacking the other refinements; every so often, at what appear to be semi-random intervals (semi because they never get too long or short), he'll pounce on the cursor, ROAR, and EAT it... which means that his mouth moves in a realistic chewing motion, down to the flashes of fangs, and during that time the cursor is invisible as if it were really in his mouth. How CUTE is that? I've spent what's objectively a ridiculous amount of time "playing" with the tiger, and I've found that, although the cursor usually has to be at his "knee" level or lower for him to pounce and eat, he does on occasion "grab" the cursor in mid-air and then drop down to eat it... the level of complexity of this thing is astonishing.
Have you been going back and testing the functions as I've described them? :-)
In case you're wondering about the non-tigerish color; on top of everything else, the folks at Bunnyhero Labs allow you to customize the color of your "pet" from a wide choice of hues, and I was pleased to find a good approximation of that purplish blue shade seen briefly at twilight and rarely anywhere else, that seems to me to be the color of karma for reasons I can never quite articulate... which explains the color and the name of my new tiger friend.
Since I was adding something, I figured it was time to remove something; I finally gritted my teeth and took out the FreeFind search that had been in my sidebar since the very beginning, and was in fact the 1st thing I ever put there, after a great deal of time spent looking for blog-search doodads and testing several that didn't work, including an older version of the Google one. It took me a long time to be able to let it go, even though we've had a fully functional Google search incorporated into Blogger blogs for ages, and the FreeFind search had sunk beneath so many more interesting doodads that I'm sure hardly anyone ever noticed it much less used it anymore... it's a silly thing to have been sentimental about, but geeks can be funny that way.
Anyways, enjoy Karma Kitty; I know *I* will... especially if there's way to get him onto my desktop, and I think there might be...
