Well, it’s done. I’ve deleted the catch-all address I’ve used for years at my domain. I’m actually pretty scared of what’s going to happen…I don’t know if it’s an aversion to all change or if there’s legitimate reason to be scared of losing mail at this point. I visited 233 websites and changed my registered e-mail address. There are another 139 addresses that were either already established as legitimate, or for which I couldn’t change the registration information for whatever reason. The legitimate ones are being forwarded to my Gmail, and the ones I couldn’t change are being forwarded to a webmail account on my host that I can check periodically.

I’m pretty sure everything I would want to receive has been taken care of in one way or another, but it’s still nervewracking. Cutting down on the 1000+ spam e-mails I received daily (and all the bounces from falsified headers) will be nice, but I’m still nervous about possibilities. I’m not sure if I should bother enabling Dreamhost’s Junk Filter on my domain…if it doesn’t apply to forwarded addresses, then it’s only good for whatever is getting delivered to that spare account. I think for now I’m going to leave it turned off; if I continue to get lots of spam in either my Gmail or the spare account maybe I will use it.

If you need to reach me, the e-mail address you already use probably still works. Ask if you have questions about that.

I said this on a mailing list on Lambda:

I actually like it when cashiers and other strangers wish me a Merry Xmas. I am always happy to reply with “actually I’m Jewish, but Happy Hanukkah!” I would probably do this even if I weren’t Jewish, just because it’s fun.

And msmellow responded:

I like Etoile’s attitude. She appreciates when people are trying to be nice, even when their approach is misguided. Some of you could learn a lesson here.

Somebody else didn’t get it, but Mellow really has summed up my holiday-season worldview. I know these people mean well in wishing me Merry Xmas. (I wonder if they say it to people who are obviously from cultures that don’t celebrate Xmas?) I just like pointing out that not everybody is Christian, and not everybody celebrates Xmas, but that I appreciate their well wishes. I’ve never had a bad response to this. And yes, I do happen to celebrate Xmas, but Judaism is part of my cultural heritage and that’s important to me.

A bit of musing even though it’s 1:00 in the morning…and then I shall go to bed.

Most venues for online interaction have a way of keeping a user’s input from reaching your screen. Many forums have an Ignore List feature, LambdaMOO has @gagging, instant messaging services offer block lists, LiveJournal has comment banning, and so forth. I don’t use any of these. My way is actually not recommended, as it requires familiarity with a wide variety of types of online discourse, and a skin that is somewhat thickened. I used to let all kinds of crap affect me online. People would post anonymous comments about me - or even attributed ones - and I’d let it get right to me. I could have used ignoring features, but I didn’t because I was afraid of missing something. Now, it’s more a personal philosophy, and I’ve learned to deal with these comments. I don’t have anyone on my @gaglist or any Ignore Lists, only anonymous comments are blocked on LJ to reduce spam, and I use the blocking feature for IMs only for genuine spammers. It’s not easy learning to deal with those who would annoy you and piss you off. For those who aren’t directing anything specific at you but are just being asshats in general, you have to tune them out. They’re not worth your time. If you read their posts at all, rather than just skimming over them, you can laugh at their idiocy but you have to move on. If someone is attacking you personally, consider the source. The anonymous comments on LambdaMOO bothered me because I thought it might be someone I knew…but I decided it was more likely that they were comments from people who didn’t know me - and if they didn’t know me, they were obviously talking out of their asses and not worth paying any mind.

My personal philosophy of not ignoring anyone isn’t for everybody, and I am vulnerable too. I don’t usually get caught up in flame wars (I’m not the flaming type) or heated debates because I am willing to concede points fairly easily. But things people say to me are still hurtful at times, more so if it’s from an acquaintance who I thought I didn’t have any problems with. (Needless to say, friends don’t do this kind of thing.) I am a peacemaker, and that means trying to make peace with others and also making peace within myself. I don’t need to respond to idiots. I don’t need to listen to jerks. Much of what I read online is from strangers, and I am free to scroll on by.

Incidentally, I don’t think my way is better than using ignore features. If you are willing to use them, and if they help you drown out some of the noise or keep you from getting upset, then by all means use them and they are serving you well. Because I personally choose to not use them doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re a wonderful invention for those who like them.

The Speech Accent Archive is an absolutely fascinating collection from George Mason University. They have gathered 440 audio samples of persons from around the world reading a passage in English. Here is the passage:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

You can listen to that read by everyone from an Afrikaans speaker from Pretoria to a Zulu speaker from Zimbabwe! Most languages have more than one sample; the English list is the longest with 113 different recordings. Most samples also include an IPA transcription.

I did notice a conspicuous omission from this project, though: deaf individuals reading the passage. I sent an e-mail to the comments address suggesting that they obtain samples from deaf Americans, including some who are native speakers of ASL and others whose native language is English. (They could theoretically expand beyond the United States with this, but to do so would risk duplicating the entire globe under that section, so keeping it to the U.S. seems reasonable.)

Added: He wrote back right away!

yes. an excellent idea. if you can sent us some good recordings, we
would be happy to post them.

So now I just need to find deaf people who are willing to record themselves reading that passage. Sure, that’s easy…anybody want to volunteer?

As I am writing this, the Vatican says the Pope has not yet died. It is strange to follow the contradictory reports - to watch an old man thousands of miles away go through the process of dying. His experience is quite similar to any elderly person dying “of old age” in that his body quite simply started to fail. The last several reports from the Holy See indicate his organs are starting to fail - breathing becoming difficult; heart problems; kidneys failing - this is how all natural deaths proceed. This serves to emphasize a thought I’ve had in my head for several years: The Pope defecates like everbody else. I know it’s crass, but it’s true. As much as Catholics deify him - I believe he’s said to be the closest thing to God on earth - he is still human. And as humans die, so too does the pope pass. In the end, we are all the same.

Yes, it’s true. The Secret Service is aware of LiveJournal. At least, they’re aware of anniesj, who documents her experience here. This whole thing made it onto Metafilter (while I was on vacation), and it’s getting talked about all over LJ, of course. And as kalessin (also known as perigee) points out in the MeFi thread, this has been going on for a long time. Our mutual friend Dan Burford (frequently known as Gilmore) was visited by the Secret Service back in 1996 for his Exploding Heads website, which is still around (sort of) thanks to Archive.org. (There’s another summary of Gil’s incident here.) Gilmore’s infraction was making graphic animations of various politicians’ heads exploding. I also have a newspaper clipping from the Washington Post floating around the house somewhere (you can see it above the number 30 here) that discusses Gil’s experience with the Secret Service.

I saw some of the Coexistence art yesterday (that’s how I learned that .museum is now a TLD!), and I really liked it. My favorite piece was Piotr Mlodozeniec’s religious “Coexist” and I also liked Yossi Lemel’s interlocked fingers. Several images were displayed on the National Mall, but the online exhibition includes many more. They’d make good greeting cards, too!

I also got to see the new National Museum of the American Indian as we drove past it; fortunately I was in the passenger seat so I could stare as it went by. It looks much better than any of the pictures I’d seen; when news commentators described the architecture as “it looks like it’s carved by the wind,” I looked at pictures of the building and decided the commentators were full of crap. But it is a beautiful building; I’m not sure if I’d say it truly looks wind-carved but it is definitely more striking in real life than in any of the pictures I’ve seen. I remember seeing a Native American exhibit several years ago in the Castle, which I guess was a predecessor to the full museum. I probably won’t have time to go there anytime soon (and I’d rather wait for winter anyway, when the tourist crowds are smaller) but it is an attractive building.

Via the Ask Yahoo question What is the origin of serving a death row prisoner a final meal? I found a list of Texas Inmates’ Last Meals. It’s surprising how many of them wanted double meat cheeseburgers, and a large number of them wanted what would be considered “down-home American cooking” - perhaps not unusual given that this is Texas. Here are some other interesting requests - be warned that the name links go to info sheets about the inmates, including sometimes gory descriptions of their crimes - most of which involve murder, of course, or they wouldn’t have been on death row.
Read the rest of this entry »

Why do people keep e-mailing me and asking for LiveJournal codes? I made one post briefly mentioning them, and that was back in February 2002. I even mentioned that I was willing to give them out to friends, which does not mean the general online community. I’m sorry, people, but I just don’t participate in LiveJournal the way I used to. Please stop leaving comments on that entry and sending me e-mails, I have no LiveJournal codes.

THIS MEANS YOU!

In the Deaf community, the words deaf and Deaf have two different meanings. The word deaf is used to mean someone who has a significant hearing loss, someone whose audiogram indicates they cannot hear. The word Deaf, in contrast, means someone who is an active member of the Deaf community and supporter of Deaf culture. Actual amount of residual hearing isn’t as important - it’s entirely possible for a person to be Deaf even though their audiogram labels them as “hard of hearing” or “slightly hearing-impaired.” Being deaf is a condition, being Deaf is an identity.

I have also seen a convention like this in reference to people of African or African-American descent. The word black just means someone who is dark-skinned (in varying shades), but the word Black seems to indicate pride in the subject’s African heritage and culture. What surprised me, though, was to see a acquaintance who calls himself Black make a reference to “White women.” I’m so used to capitals denoting cultural identification, that this kind of threw me. Most of the Caucasian people I know don’t tend to identify culturally with their skin tone - some may be proudly German or Greek or Italian or Polish - but they don’t make a point of being light-skinned. White supremacists might feel it’s appropriate to capitalize White, but it just felt odd to me.