preraphaelitepunk.com

Along with the planned MacBook, one of the major purchases being spurred by my trip to Stockholm is an actual film camera. Yes, I know film contains gelatin, and I feel very guilty indeed. I’m a bad, bad vegan, but I’m also a not terribly affluent vegan, and cannot afford a digital camera that would allow me the same quality and control that a modestly good film camera can provide. (Not that I’m good enough to warrant a really fancy-schmancy camera, anyway.)

The point is that I’ve got a secondhand SLR reserved at one of the local camera shops (link included in case they get around to putting an actual page there — currently it’s just a “Coming Soon!” blurb), with 50 mm and telephoto lenses. No, I can’t remember the exact model; I want to say it’s a Canon, with a name that’s vaguely reptilian — Dragon? Komodo? Skink? — but have gone embarrassingly blank on the actual details. It’s a black rectangular box with a handle thing on one side and an opening in the front, okay? The important thing is that it gives me way more control over shutter speeds, apertures, focus, etc., but also has fully and partially automatic modes for when I’m particularly lazy or in a hurry. Secondhand, the total cost comes to roughly what I’d pay for a new mid-range digital camera.

I think I shall name him Skink, because it amuses me.

(I’m not sure where I contracted my habit of naming inanimate objects. I want to blame Stephen Fry and his delightful book, The Liar, in which I could’ve sworn that one of the main characters* named his favorite possessions; I can’t locate the passage now, though, so maybe I’ve made that up. Would hardly be the first time.)

So I’ve effectively added several new tasks to my already fearsome list o’ Things to Do before November: refamiliarize myself with manual focus, read all the books Cindy and Greg have lent me on photography, and practice like hell, especially in low light. Also, try to conquer my shyness about pulling out a camera in public: I know cognitively that no one cares or even particularly notices, but some part of me is convinced that they’re all secretly sneering at the dreadfully gauche tourist snapping away at mundane things and getting in people’s way.

Hmm. Assuming I can still afford the MacBook — must recheck budget — then exactly how much weight will I be lugging around Stockholm? MacBook, digital camera, film camera, telephoto lens, iPod, PDA, emergency phrasebook (note to self: must buy emergency phrasebook), wallet, emergency vegan-friendly snacks, and city guide, at a minimum. Maybe I can find an eBook version of the phrasebook, to try to economize.

obDragonCon Update: Adam Baldwin, Matthew Lewis, and Warwick Davis have all cancelled; presumably this is work-related for all of them, so I suppose I should be glad on their behalf. Still, rather cranky; my inner 15-year-old will have to go without her Neville fix, I won’t get to ask Warwick Davis what was up with his character’s drastic makeover in GoF, and no mass singing of “The Hero of Canton” in the Firefly/Serenity forums. How sad. Adam Baldwin was particularly sweet last year, when this tiny child went up to the microphone to ask a question — he brought the kid up to the stage and the cast table, so everyone could see and hear. I’m still excited to see Alan Tudyk and Summer Glau, neither of whom I’ve seen before, but it won’t be the same without The Man They Call Jayne.

*** ***

*And after whom I named my first car, Adrian. The late Honda Insight, smashed on the highway by what I suspect was an 18-wheeler, was named after Henry VII of England; Sid the Beetle is, of course, after Sid Vicious, who probably would not have appreciated the sentiment but is dead and so can’t sue me or smash my windows.

At long last, I have Internet access at home again! The relief and joy are palpable. In the interest of brevity and not boring the assorted socks off everyone, I’ll try to keep the synopsis relatively brief:

Apparently UPS requires an in-person signature to deliver the new modem. Brilliant. It looks as if I won’t be able to get online until sometime next week, when I may be able to get them to leave the package at the depot for pickup.

Being without home Internet access is starting to make me twitch.

Okay. Obviously, we need to lay down some ground rules about putting people on hold.

Rule 1: You must have inoffensive music playing to let people know you haven’t hung up on them.

Rule 2:Anything of the Ohrwurm variety is forbidden, unless you particularly want to torture your customers. No “Girl from Ipanema” or “Macho Man.” Also nothing too chirpy, lest you seem to be laughing at your irate customers’ plights. Keep in mind, though, that even the blandest elevator music begins to grate after extended exposure.

Rule 3: Please make sure the music is a reasonably high-quality recording. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch — my dodgy hearing makes the very concept laughable — but even I find it irritating when my on-hold music sounds like a distant AM radio station in a violent thunderstorm and three other interfering stations playing violently contrasting music. This is particularly annoying with piano music, because the poor recording quality makes the higher notes very plinky and grating.

Rule 4: Limit interruptions the music to thank people for their patience and tell them that a representative will be with them shortly to no more than once every few minutes. If you interrupt every 30 seconds, the effect will be rather the opposite, and your customers will wind up grinding their teeth to nubs. They will also time the intervals between interruptions on their friendly neighborhood iPods, and then blog about it. If, as the wait time goes over 10 minutes, you start interrupting to thank them for their patience even more frequently, then you will only piss them off even more.

Rule 5: If you absolutely must interrupt the awful and staticky music, at least resume playing the same song when you’re done. Don’t start another, completely different song by the same gawdawful pseudo elevator jazz ensemble that sounds like they got drummed out of the Guild of Really Dreadful Musicians for being just too bloody awful. Honestly, you can just see them in their threadbare gold rhinestone jackets, grinning bleached white grins set in orange-bottle-tan faces, wagging their heads in time to their music but failing to notice their toupees have come loose and are flopping around disturbingly like distressed flounders.

Rule 6: Absolutely no saxophone Muzak.

Actually, I think it’s a plot of the phone/DSL company. If you call because your modem is apparently fried and only has one glowing red eye instead of four shimmery green ones, then they know that, if they keep you on the line long enough, either you’ll run out of minutes on your mobile and have to pay extraordinary amounts of money, or, if you’re on a cordless landline, your battery will die and you’ll have to call back later, or give up.

Caveat: None of the above rant should be taken as irritation with helpdesk people themselves. It’s a stressful job, as I know — one of my duties at my last job was providing tech support to our in-house authors, which was alternately hysterical, nausea-inducing, and desperately sad — and I do honestly try to be as polite, friendly, and grateful as I possibly can. I certainly plan to be sweetness and light itself, if I ever succeed in getting a real person on the line. I even understand long waits; I’ve been waiting approximately 30 minutes as I type this, and am getting seriously worried about my landline battery conking out, but I realize that the rather spectacular thunderstorm we had here last night probably wreaked all manner of havoc with people’s DSL. (It certainly destroyed the security system for my building, making it impossible to open the communal front door from the outside.) I just really, really wish that the phone company would get their bloody stupid, maddening, freakishly irritating automated system sorted out. I’d do it for them, gratis.

Addendum: After 45 minutes, I finally got to a Real Person. Together we determined that, yes, Mr. Modem is no more, the plumage don’t enter into it, he’s gone to meet his maker, if not nailed to his perch he would’ve been pushing up the daisies, and is indeed an ex-parrot, etc. They’re shipping a new one that should be here by Thursday (woo hoo!), and apparently are not going to charge me for it (woo hoo again!). In the meantime, any blogging I do will probably be intermittent; this post, for instance, was typed at home on OpenOffice’s Writer, and then ferried furtively to the office on Fenric for backdated posting over lunch.

Hey, at least it’s a change for you lot from All Sweden, All the Time. (And I was going to post about the Swedish newscast that accidentally showed porn clips in the background, too. Shame. Go look it up on the BBC, or your news provider of choice.)

• Swedish Schoolnet: Lexin - Swedish-English dictionary
  You know the first thing you do with a foreign-language dictionary is look up swear words. Hey, they don’t teach you those on the tapes or in class, and they’re important. (This one has an impressive discourse on “damn” in Swedish.)
  (tags: swedish dictionary language reference translation)

I just figured out how to switch my language preferences in the Swedish tutorial software. Now I can learn the Swedish while viewing the translations in French, or German, or one of a gazillion other languages. I’ll admit that it’s a little more disorienting to see the word “eins” when the software minions are saying “ett” than it is to see “one,” but whatever. (Yeah, this isn’t going to screw me up at all, I’m sure. By the time I finally get to Stockholm, I’ll probably speak in complete gibberish — but at least it’ll be polyglot gibberish.)

Useful phrase: Jag aeter inter koett — I don’t eat meat. (I persist in subbing es for umlauts out of habit, not out of conviction that that’s acceptable Swedish typography. If I’m wrong, I apologize.) The software minions pronounce this vaguely akin to “yo etter inteh [or "eenteh," depending on which one you listen to] shoht.” Let’s hope at least one of them is right.

Minor pronunciation discrepancies still abound, and annoy me. If I can figure out how to do audio samples, I’ll post one or two of the more egregious examples. I also find the little quizzes to be way too easy: they’re all multiple choice, and I’ve gotten perfect scores on even the “hard” tests without even reviewing the vocabulary first. (Well, except for the one on nations of the world — I suck at recognizing flags, which screwed me up.) That’s not to say I’ve actually learned the words, just that the tests are pretty easy, and you know you’re just being tested on, say, types of food, not being asked to identify random words, or compose sentences all on your own. Maybe there’s a later level of testing that will show you a picture and ask you to type in the word, or at least select it from a long list. Having to remember the word yourself is rather a bit harder, I think.

Even so, I find the software more useful than the audio CDs, which are probably useful for building vocabulary but not so much for my purposes. They seem to mainly consist of random strings of nouns, adjectives, etc., and aren’t grouped by what I would consider anything vaguely resembling our Earth logic (e.g., one sequence begins, “the grass / the moon / the sound / the airport”). Viewed philosophically, I suppose it could be poetic, almost haiku-like and meditative. Viewed practically, not so much.

I think I’ll need to invest in a grammatical text, as well as the software and CDs, so I can compose actual sentences on my own rather than spouting random words and phrases. Still, this is a bit of an adventure — it’s my first time trying to learn a language on my own, rather than taking actual regimented classes, so even the disappointments are kind of entertaining. Well, to me, at least.

• The inconspicuous cell phone ring - Lifehacker
  Of course I liked the idea about recording a sneeze as your ringtone: for over a year, my ringtone has been a recording of my dog snoring.
  (tags: lifehacker mobile ring recording)

• Flickr: Vegan with a Vengeance (and friends) group
  How cool is this? I simply must get over my lazy minimal-cooking patch, so I can post VwaV pics. Time to break out the phyllo dough from the freezer! (Via PPK.)
  (tags: vegan photos flickr)
• HSUS Design Against Fur Slideshow Presentation
  Winners of this year’s Design Against Fur poster contest, highlighting Canada’s annual seal hunt and fashion designers who use seal fur.
  (tags: animalwelfare antifur antihunting hsus)

Stockholm has two Lush stores.

This may be bad. I might need to bring a second suitcase, just to carry home my Lushy loot.

I finally got up the nerve, and bought my ticket to Stockholm. The return fare wound up being a little bit more than the outbound, which was rather annoying, but whatever. I’m going to Sweden! Woo hoo! (Of course, there’s a little timid part of me that’s thinking, “Holy crap, what the fuck have I just done?” But we won’t listen to that corner of my brain.)

It’s a bit worrying that my confirmation e-mail bears the subject line, “Airline confirmation for Arlanda-Stockholm, Sweden trip,” but one hopes that is just a typo, and that I’ll be able to fly out of Atlanta, and not have to figure out where the heck the “Arlanda” airport might be.

So. Things I must do now to get ready:

(Of course, this whole thing also brings up the Great and Vitally Important Question: do I e-mail the really cute guy I met who used to live in Stockholm, and ask for ideas for places I should visit?)