Yesterday I installed OpenSuse 11.1. Not without glitches: the installer failed in two different places, presumably because of a scratch on the DVD, and when we’d burned a new DVD I had the same problem Boudewijn had with grub. Fortunately he knew from his own experience how to solve it, so now I have a pretty penguin-themed startup menu that I never actually use because I only ever want OpenSuSE, not Kubuntu 8 (or 7 for that matter) or <spit!> Vista (haven’t even tried if that works yet. When the installation failed, all the computer wanted to start was Vista, but I discouraged that as soon as I could and wouldn’t mind if it didn’t work, because the one Windows program I need runs perfectly under Wine, woohoo).

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I realise that I went to bed still trying to decide how to do something, but that doesn’t mean you had to keep the choice hanging over my head, literally, in a Javascript-type input box. It was quite distracting while I was helping salvage the crashed spaceship. I’m not sure when it went away, but it definitely wasn’t there when the cute little alien engineer (who called herself Catherine; I don’t believe for one moment that it was really her name) drove me to the station in the evacuee bus. In fact she liked driving the bus so much that she wanted to become a bus driver, “engineering,” she said, “is just something incidental”.

I ended up at the station at half past midnight, hungry, but all the shops were closing except one, where the shopkeeper gave me a glass of milk and some indifferent sushi. It was my own fault for not realising that the train I took would loop back and become the 2:40 to Amsterdam at that very same station, or I’d have had some of the interesting sushi with seaweed and sesame seeds, but I ended up with a basket full or chunks of salmon-coloured and salmon-flavoured rice. (I do want to try the raw salmon-coloured rice he also had, for making one’s own sushi, if it exists in the waking world!) The milk was excellent, though. And at least the sushi was free: the shopkeeper was giving away his leftovers to people taking the last train because otherwise he’d have had to throw it away.

Time: 1:40 (and 25 minutes for the 3rd and 6th Hour, during which people walked around doing things) Total: 6:20 (not counting the Hours)
Congregation: about 60; lots of children, some people from other parishes
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 2 boys Choir: as large as it can be: 3 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 2 basses.
Coordination: seamless
Tunefulness: very good
Knees: must have been okay because I didn’t notice
Voice: good
Strangeness: The fourteen-year-old acolyte was in red because he is too tall for any of the boys’ light-coloured sticharia, and not broad enough for any of the men’s gold ones (we have only two large white sticharia and the men were wearing them). The twelve-year-old was wearing the white sticharion made to his measure at Easter, which is now at least four inches too short.

Here is Archbishop Gabriel’s Christmas message (in English, with links to Russian, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish and French). “A liturgical feast is not just a simple pious commemoration: it is an utterly concrete reality, transcending time, which is important for the salvation of each one of us.” —Amen, Vladyko.

Time: 2:35 Total: 4:40
Congregation: about 15, but most left after the Gospel and the blessing. I don’t know how many of those actually went on to the carol service in the Protestant church, which we’d started the service half an hour earlier for.
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 1 boy. Choir: a full house! (2 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 2 basses)
Coordination: mostly excellent
Tunefulness: good, especially the festive God is with us which Prima has a strong feeling of “I can do this!” about (and she can)
Knees: it wasn’t so much the knees acting up, but my left thigh and ankle, because after the Hours I slipped on some sand from the candle-stand cleaning and crashed to the floor. Nothing really hurt, but stiff and sore.
Voice: good
Strangeness: at the Litia, there’s a prayer asking for the intercession of a whole bunch of saints; when Fr T repeats it, he does it in Church Slavonic with a different bunch of saints, overlapping in part but not much.
Cuteness: the little girl who, realising that she wouldn’t get attention from her parents because they were both in the choir, snuggled up to her godmother. That’s what godparents are for, after all.

Here is an article about people in the United States who celebrate Christmas when it’s actually Christmas. (“The 12 days of Christmas begins, not ends, on Christmas Day.”) They’re mostly Protestants, celebrating “the arrival of the Magi at the manger in Bethlehem” when we celebrate the Theophany, but at least they do it the proper way. I wrote something to that effect once, mostly about Easter but Christmas comes into it as well.

Time: 2:05 Total: 2:05
Congregation: 4 (including the 2 children of someone in the choir)
Crew: Altar: Fr T (not actually in the altar) Choir: 3 (SAT)
Coordination: good enough, especially considering that this was the first time ever that we had this service.
Knees: normal
Voice: okay. I only got to read the 6th Hour, because there were five distinct bits (4 hours and Typika) and three of us taking turns reading, and I happened to be last.
Strangeness: we’d caught lots and lots of typos in the text (which was new, of course), and the only ones still there were in the Epistle of the 6th Hour. Three of them, and the last so hilarious that someone else had to take over from me because I was breaking down.

Every hour had one psalm that’s also in the non-Royal version and two different ones, making me pay attention more closely. What struck me most this time (it will probably be something else next time) was the cultural background: tribal, still almost barbaric. Particularly Psalm 44, which we usually have only isolated verses from. The king it describes, with his palace and his throng of women, is the material of a fantasy novel of a more mythical sort than I could write.

Here is a little thing in clumsy Javascript which picks a random pair out of the lists of Valdyan women’s and men’s names that I’ve given it. At least that’s what it does now; by the time you, dear reader, read this, it may have changed beyond recognition.

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It’s upon us again, and while it’s nice to see so many people in 19th-century clothing pass beneath our window I don’t want to go to the Bergkwartier, where it’s held. Too much waiting to get in: an hour and a half according to the local paper’s website, and there’s actually a kind of bridge that the people going in go under and the people going out go over, so I can believe that. Also, too much shuffling past pre-arranged events. While trying to reach the cheese shop I passed a gaggle of housemaids with brooms being placed in formation by someone who looked for all the world like a second-rate theatrical agent from a 1950s movie, cigar and all. The cheese shop wasn’t as busy as I’d feared; no more custom, according to the cheese men and women, than on a normal Saturday. Apparently, all the extra people in town don’t do their weekend shopping while they’re here.

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The street is still being worked on, hence the wooden skirt the tree is wearing. It makes it wonderfully quiet (only residents are allowed through) and easy to cross at the bridge where it’s usually scary because cars tend to turn left without notice.

After the Omnivore’s Hundred, Very Good Taste is at it again. I score a whopping 32, due to having spent two Christmases in England (one with a family who did all the traditional things, one with friends) and being in an international Orthodox parish, which takes care of all of Eastern Europe.

Here’s what to do:

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve tasted.
3. Place an asterisk after all the items you’ve cooked/prepared.
4. Optional: Cross out anything you never want to try, or add an exclamation mark after anything your really want to try.

You’re also welcome to post a link to your version of the list at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk.

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We have a nifty programmable phone that I’ve never managed to program, and two or three times this morning it rang at me very loudly in my hand, while I was trying to make a call, making me jump and shudder. Yes, phones do that to me, especially when it’s so close to my ear. I think I pressed the wrong button and hit “sound ring tone”, but I can’t be sure that it wasn’t someone trying to get hold of me.

This was in the course of spending literally the whole morning trying to phone the poulterer: three or four times redial every twenty minutes or so, trying to hit a gap in their engaged tone. Either everyone wants to order game or poultry for Christmas, or they had the phone off the hook. I didn’t think of going in person until it was too late to go in person, but I did realise eventually that they had a website (caution: some of it doesn’t like Konqueror, and a different some of it doesn’t like Firefox; I’d like to get my grubby little hands on the HTML) so probably also an email address. They did, and they promise on the site to answer mail in 24 hours, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t be that fast at this time of year. But <phew>. Mail at least isn’t scary.

Thank you for making me laugh so much at the short curly-haired man who sat at the back-room table offering me “a complete business solution” including editing services. Editing, dear curly-haired man, is what my business is. And I did really mean it when I said “I’d like everybody to stay here”, also, or rather especially, the curly-haired man’s tall weedy sidekick called Atanasiy who was hovering in the kitchen door. If he’d wanted the toilet he should have said that and I’d have kept an eye on him, but I rather think he wanted to go upstairs to snoop, or perhaps to steal. And why did the curly-haired man ask whether “all three of us” (he had only seen Prima, not the other girls) stayed in every evening?

All that time, my other half was in the front room talking to the pension guy, and we had quite a good time (after I’d shooed the curly-haired man and Atanasiy out) having a drink with the pension guy and his wife. I don’t think we got the pension done, but that didn’t seem to be urgent.

Once again, I wonder whether I should put a disclaimer on my language pages: “Ilaini is an invented language. I’m not a professional linguist. This is play, not work. Please don’t try to use these pages as a scholarly source.” Because, more than ever, people are searching for “first and second person pronouns” in many variants.

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From sciamanna; she mentioned it on IRC. I don’t have any one “my novel” at the moment —one fatally stalled, three in submisson-anxiety coma— but I’ll answer for A Voice from the North, colloquially known as “the Frozen North thing”.

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landaulet

It floated into my mind when I was half-awake at 5:45 or so, trying to ignore a headache and to visualise subtle shades of midnight blue because green made me queasy and red hurt too much. A parting shot of the dream engine, I suppose, at the tail-end of a jumble of stuff inspired by the Prisoner of Zenda movie we watched last night. A splendid movie: with effective deliberate over-the-topness and very true to the book.

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Here’s an update on the case of the teacher who confiscated Linux CDs, which I wrote about yesterday. It seems that she and her critic have come to an understanding.

Whenever I fast, my thyroid notices. It isn’t usually very active —that’s why I take synthetic thyroid hormone, and why I’d have died in my mid-thirties if I’d lived in the Middle Ages, or in Valdyas for that matter— but it does notice this kind of thing. I feel rotten for a few days and usually realise why on the second or third day. The first time it happened I ran to the doctor, who told me that all my blood-work was completely normal and congratulated me on my alertness. Apparently, my body doesn’t react to levels of <whatever> as such, but to the rather sudden return to normal as soon as the thyroid catches on.

This time it took my body five weeks, perhaps because I’m not keeping as strict a fast for Advent (lots of fish days this year!) as I usually do in Great Lent.

Anyway, it didn’t only make me feel rotten, it also made me hyperfocused, so when I set out to design a corporate website this morning and felt it had to have a mail form because mailto links are so unprofessional, I spent most of the rest of the day getting a mail form to work on my main web site, just for practice.

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Congratulations on being the first to cold-call my fledgling firm to propose a business solution. Unfortunately, I had to say “sorry, not interested”, and if you knew that the firm in question is at the moment €71,42 in the red you’d likely be “not interested” either. It’s true that I’ll be in the black again when the people I’ve just sent an invoice pay up, but I don’t expect to be more than a few hundred in the black any time soon.

Quite apart from that, I’ve been with Other Bank for thirty-mumble years and I see no reason to change. They’ve done some stupid things (does it really need a dozen notices to change the address of a family of five? do they really expect someone recently turned twelve, and addressed henceforth by you as Ms Initials Surname, to be interested in this great offer for a learn-to-play-with-money gadget aimed at seven-year-olds?) but they’ve never done anything bad to me on the banking front. If I do suddenly start earning great sums of money I may reconsider, and I may even end up with you (you seem to be an okay bank as such, and I understand all banks are a bit desperate at the moment), but your cold call did bump you to the bottom of the list.

I must concede, though, that you employ a higher class of call-center people than the run-of-the-mill ones who try to sell me double glazing or mortgages at 6:30 pm when I’m having dinner, even though I’m privately on the don’t-call list (note to self: find out if there is a business don’t-call list). That’s why I didn’t tell her “no, I’m unlikely to ever become interested in something that’s pushed over the phone”: she was far too nice and polite for that.

If this is true (and I’m afraid it is) it’s outrageous. Executive summary: teacher confiscates Linux CDs from student (US middle school, I think early teens) who was demonstrating and distributing to friends, and threatens with the law because “no software is free”. (Here’s a really sensible comment from a good teacher, by the way)

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…but designing a letterhead and an invoice form, setting up an accounts and hours-registration spreadsheet, and entering receipts and expenses and hours into the spreadsheet took me five hours in all. Which I entered on the hours-registration page of the spreadsheet under “firm: admin”, of course.

And now that I want to send an invoice I notice that there’s a (very small) bit of work that I could invoice as well, if I’d only done it; so I’m now going to do it so I can register my hours and write the invoice. I shouldn’t forget to send copies of the relevant tax documents either. Fortunately I thought of making the copies yesterday when I was copying other stuff anyway.

Note to self: scan, and perhaps PDF, all documents that it might be useful to send copies of to clients; it saves a trip to the copy shop. Also, the firm needs a ring-binder, perhaps two.

Another note to self: set aside half a day a week to be my own secretary. It seems to be harder to be one’s own secretary than to be someone else’s, but I think it’s just harder to start from scratch than to go by procedures that already exist.

Back when I was using KNode (the current incarnation of which is sadly in no state to be any use at all, or I’d try out of loyalty) I asked people who wanted me to edit their texts to send me .rtf files, because KOffice’s import filters were, to say it politely, rotten.

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While I was doing choir mailing list maintenance —deleting spam, that is; this is the small list on which I know everybody personally, not the big sprawling list with lots of members who tend to forget which of their accounts they’ve subscribed from— I noticed several messages purporting to come from the list itself. Now the list never sends anything by itself, it’s just a forwarding service for members’ messages, so any message from the list rather than a person must be spam. I thought I’d save myself some trouble, so I added the list address to the “Discards” filter.

Apparently, it’s not a “discard silently” filter. Every message it throws away, it notifies me of. And I get it in my mailbox with several layers of wrappers.

1. The spam handler notices that the message is in HTML and has some other points-scoring characteristics, and marks it as spam. It encapsulates it and sends it on to koor@valdyas.org, which is handled by Mailman.
2. Mailman knows that I’ve told it to discard anything from koor@valdyas.org and obligingly does so, sending koor-owner (who is me) an auto-discard notification with the message encapsulated.
3. The spam handler catches the auto-discard notification and notices that it’s mostly in HTML etcetera, and marks it as spam. It encapsulates it and sends it to koor-owner, that is, me.
4. The spam handler catches the message and notices… well, yes, that, and marks it as spam. It encapsulates it and sends it on.

I don’t know how to turn auto-discard notifications off yet, but I intend to either find out or find the filter and edit it, because this is more hassle than just telling Mailman to “discard all messages marked Defer” with a few more messages to discard. ETA: disabled auto-discard notification for both lists, and also uncaught bounce notification even though Mailman recommends against it, because I’ve never seen an uncaught bounce —even on the big list— that was anything other than a spammer’s attempt to get an answer.

I don’t really understand the last embedding: it seems to have gone through the spam handler twice. But it’s not the first time I’ve had the extra layer of encapsulation. Four is extreme, though.

I was already tired when the session started and it didn’t get much better (and then in the afternoon I had to give a talk to kids at a church meeting, but that went okay, they were cooperative). Nice stuff, though. Pictures behind the cut.

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Yesterday I went to Apeldoorn and registered with the trade chamber (Kamer van Koophandel).

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More .msv files, a pair this time, so I grumblingly started Vista and set out to convert them. Failure! The free version of Switch works for only X days, for a smallish value of X. They didn’t tell me that, only that it wasn’t full-featured (and it did have the one feature I wanted). Fortunately, my other half was at home and found Digital Voice Editor for me, which converts .msv to .mp3 under Wine though it complains volubly about not being able to play sound and having trouble with my operating system. Twenty times as fast —literally! less than a minute— as Switch too. Fortunately, Express Scribe under Wine doesn’t seem to to have expired. Otherwise I’d have to do it with Amarok which can’t slow fast-talking Malaysians down.

In other news, it turns out that for working freelance in the Netherlands one needs to be registered, and for registering as a freelancer one has to be a firm; so next Wednesday I’ll go to Apeldoorn and incorporate myself. I spent three hours this morning figuring out how to go about it, struggling through kilometers of red tape, and finally registering with the tax office. How the bleep do I know how many clients I’m going to have, when I’m just starting out? Do they really require me to have three or more clients in 2008 when I started in November and didn’t even know there was work waiting for me before October? How do I estimate what I’ll earn and which is worse, overestimating or underestimating?

At least, when I’m a firm, I’ll be able to buy tax-deductible headphones and a corporate bicycle.