An art class with a lot of beginners (and a few old hands). Some were real newbies. Beautiful things were made. The overall theme seemed to be ‘landscape’— even the sitting and standing positions got landscapey elements. Also, proud breasts, perhaps because I’d just had the all-clear letter from the mammogram people.

After the cut: full frontal, dorsal and lateral nudity. Net nannies, please leave here.

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Well, I know where this one lives; let’s see if his humans read my blog and claim their dozen cupcakes.

The sign on the door says “Black tomcat at the door? Please don’t ring the bell!” and yes, he was very insistent.

I don’t remember seeing a 503 in the wild before, but today I had this one from the local paper:

Bad Gateway
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat) Server at www.destentor.nl Port 80

Nice to know that the local paper uses Linux. And when I tried again some time later it wasn’t more forthcoming with the article, but it did give more information:

HTTP Status 503 - Too many incoming HTTP requests
type Status report
message Too many incoming HTTP requests
description The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.
Apache Tomcat/5.0.28

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From Penelope Trunk, via Jay.

Here be questions!

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79 words

What the site told me apart from giving me the badge was more informative:

318 points, so you achieved position 64188 of 844040 on the ranking list

You type 846 characters per minute
You have 79 correct words and
you have 3 wrong words

I used to be a very fast typist when I was temping as a student— about 600 cpm on an electric machine. And my laptop has a very nice keyboard, so I’m not surprised at having become faster.

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I saw yet another striped cat but it wouldn’t stop to be photographed. I actually know where both of these live (the one on the left had an address tag on her collar and the one on the right is the cat from the shop).

If you’re one of these cats’ humans, please send me mail with your street address to claim your dozen cupcakes. New flavour: orange chocolate.

Lots of people including Fr T being in Oxford for exchange with our sister parish, we had to do it ourselves. And “ourselves”, in the choir at least, were only Prima and me. I’d promised her she could sing if either there were only the two of us or other people turned up and agreed.

Congregation: 7 people at Vespers, briefly 8 at the beginning of Matins, 3 after the Gospel, 2 at the end. Not counting the very skimpy choir.
Crew: 2, fortunately both alto.
Coordination: Excellent! Prima read a prayer and a psalm (long; it was Psalm 88) very competently, and the unison Doxology actually went better than at the Afterfeast of the Dormition; perhaps because we’ve been practicing it a bit in the choir. I told Prima “this is really hard, though it doesn’t look it” so she was warned, and we carried it off adequately.
Voice: An annoying frog in my throat, especially when reading, but being able to sing the whole service at my natural pitch helped a lot.
Strangeness: from the end of the Canon until the end of the service, it was completely a family affair: me and all my daughters.

And this is the prettiest place within 2 minutes’ walk: a fenced-off alley leading to a storage shed that can’t be in use, or the ivy wouldn’t be so abundant.

Beautiful balmy autumn weather, and Secunda and I decided to go through the little island park on our way home from the shops instead of the and more boring long way round. She spotted the chicks (with their mother, here is a larger picture) and I saw a duck that was more interestingly pretty than the standard pond ducks. It was youngish, full-sized but still without its pinions, and walked away quacking indignantly when I’d taken some pictures of it.

I’ve been hanging out on #kde-www for a while, and today we had a real meeting “to determine some future goals for the porting of kde.org and its sub domains over to a CMS system and also on the future of open collaboration services within the KDE online community”.

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It’s cruel of you to force me to make my mental image of Valdis conform to the map of Haarlem, even if you give me four gold rings (well, three; one was my own wedding ring, though I could take it off easily which isn’t the case with the real one) to represent various features of it. Especially as you, or rather your henchpeople, weren’t exactly clear about which side of the river railway in Haarlem you meant to project Valdis on. You of all entities should be aware that Valdis, unlike Haarlem, is on both sides of a river. That you did it just before waking made it extra cruel, because it pushed my ‘redo frantically’ button hard and made me wake up with a headache— or perhaps the headache was already lurking and that pushed the button.

That said, I was very pleased that a couple who I know only online turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful, especially in their wedding picture, and made me determined to have it printed large and glossy and made into a jigsaw puzzle to give them for their anniversary. On the other hand, I’m still puzzled by the charge of twenty-five cents on top of the three euros fifty I already paid for cutting the key to enhance it to +1, and why did the checkout girl giggle so?

ETA: dream captcha to keep your dreams free of spam.

I thought I’d run out of local cats to photograph, but this one was new for me (and also slightly new to the world: born last spring, I think).

If you’re this cat’s human and you’d like to taste my newest cupcake discovery (almond and date), please mail me your street address and I’ll deliver them.

Trying to get my custom 404 page to work (yes, it works now) once again, I ran once again into the thickets of the Apache server configuration. Try as I might I didn’t know how to get it to understand that, yes, I have a .htaccess file and yes, I do want you to read it and do what it says. I found myself running in the exact same circles as the first time around.

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Next time you serve me three different threads, do it in three nights, pretty please? I’d have liked to be able to keep my promise to the ghouls, because (for ghouls) they were very nice and civilised, but I had to call Lord Vurian to do it for me because I was on my way to Trier with Secunda on Secunda’s bicycle. Anyway, it wasn’t Trier at all, but a dream-version of Zeist, even though it had whopping big signs saying something Latin starting with C which I recognised as the name of a suburb of Trier. And I got only the merest glimpse of Mary’s new roleplaying system with a very eclectic questionnaire as character sheet, but, well, I had to go back and attend to the ghouls.

This Gospel reading has always made me angry, because of verses 29-30, “from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away”— that seemed like the worst imaginable injustice. But today the penny dropped: there is absolutely nobody who doesn’t have anything at all, only some people who refuse to recognise, and to use, what they do have.

I wanted to teach little kids’ church-school about it, but half of my pupils were going to Children’s Book Festival (which I approve of) so I put it off until next week.

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I’ve been wanting search functionality for the website as well as the blog for a while, and I couldn’t get the blog search widget to work on other pages than blog pages— after all, I don’t know any Perl yet. I was just about to teach myself Perl in order to write a search widget when I happened to mention it in alt.html and someone suggested using Google Custom Search or Atomz.

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Last Sunday, when I had too much of a cold to go to church, the choir was only two sopranos and a tenor: neither of the basses could make it either. Last night, at choir practice, they not only told me they’d missed me, but demonstrated how: they’d had no fundament.

I’ve been told before that I “keep the choir together”, but I never believed it, just acknowledged it as a compliment, perhaps even a left-handed one: not much quality of my own, I’m just the glue. Now I know how. Even if I am just the glue, without that it’s in danger of falling apart. Not that I think I’m indispensable, they did do well enough without me and I don’t think many people noticed, but it’s a nice feeling to be really useful.

After that, we spent most of the practice session working out different ways to cope with incomplete choirs: the bass and I singing melody with the tenor a third above us (in an absolute sense a sixth below me, but it doesn’t sound that way), to which the choirmistress said “you’re doing better than we did!”, various configurations of three parts, ways to fix an awkward pitch that the priest hands to us. Enlightening, bracing, fun.

At last! It’s 4.1.2. And I like it a lot, in spite of all the grumbling after the cut; but the grumbling is mostly because I like it. If I hated it, I wouldn’t grumble, but stop trying to get used to it and go back to 3.5 instanter. And if I was indifferent, the little irritations wouldn’t irritate so much.

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