There are still some boxes. I need a piece of furniture. I think they used to call them “credenzas.”

“Credenzae?”

I only need one.

I move in December 3. The bedroom is above, and is open on the large living area.

For I, the Unemployed Attorney, have obtained a position!

I can’t share any details about it yet; at least not until I know what those details are myself. But know you that whatever it is, it will lift me out of my doldrums and fill me with lots of hot air to blow forth under this masthead.

All that said, I cannot recommend the Eee line of netbooks to everyone. They have a funky hard drive situation, with a tiny (4GB) main drive that has fast write speeds and a larger (16GB) data drive with much slower write speeds. The write speeds on the slow drive make certain operations tricky. XP often writes back to the drive, so XP and its programs need to be on the faster drive in order to work smoothly. This limits what you can do with the Eee. If you really know XP and know how to do it, you can shrink your Windows installation and move installer caches off to the data drive so you have plenty of space, but it takes work. I have no idea whether the XP version of the 901 comes with these sorts of modifications to the operating system. The version I bought came with a dumbed-down Linux distro that was absolutely useless for what I wanted to do with the machine. I researched the machine’s limitations and knew what I was getting into before buying. I recommend that anyone interested in getting an Eee (or any netbook for that matter) to do the same.

Anyway. I also got a Sony Reader a while ago. I wanted an e-paper device for reading my law casebooks, which, through an arrangement with the publishers, I have made a practice of scanning for use on my laptop since starting law school. I was torn between the Kindle and the Reader, and finally decided on the Reader for two main reasons: 1) I did not need the Kindle’s wireless feature, and 2) the Sony Reader is made of metal, rather than the Kindle’s plastic. The Reader was also $100 less than the Kindle at the time.

And I also love my Reader. I have not actually purchased any books for it from Sony’s e-book store, which has a limited selection, but I have managed to use my textbooks on it with great success. Sony recently pushed a firmware update for the Reader which greatly improved PDF handling and adds compatibility for the emerging, ISO-standard-aspiring IDPF .epub format. There are lots of stores out there on the Internets that sell .epub format books.

So now for school I have my Eee PC 901 and my Sony Reader. Both of which are positively lilliputian and fit into a tiny bag. No more big heavy backpack for me!

Total lunar eclipses last longer in totality than total solar eclipses because the Earth is larger than the moon, so its umbra is much larger than the moon’s, and the moon, being small, takes longer to pass through it.

For those who care about such things, my astrolabe shows the eclipse. The sun and moon hands are in a straight line through the windows in the eclipse hand, which shows the locations on the ecliptic of the moon’s ascending and descending nodes: the two times per calendar year where eclipses may occur.

I will take some lovely photos and post them, for the benefit of those enjoying overcast conditions.

Update: I was going to take digital pictures, but my digital camera sucks for it. So I am taking black and white film pictures with the biggest durn lens I have — a really slow 300mm zoom. I shall have to have them processed before I can post them.

Excitement!

I decided to get a suit made. And some shirts. I had fun. I spent a *lot* of money. I sat there thumbing through hundreds of different cloths for suits and shirts. I chose a lightweight medium gray with a delicious texture for the suit, and four solid colors for the shirts. I’m not ready to graduate to stripy-ness yet.

Tailor is going to make the suit just how I want it. For one thing, it won’t have a breast pocket. Stupid, silly, pointless thing. So I got rid of it. Hooray! And I’ll finally get trousers that make me look as if I actually have a bum, instead of just slumping like a wet sack. And the armholes will be nice and not so fabulously deep, so I don’t look like a bat, flapping about pointlessly, whenever I gesticulate from the shoulder. If all goes according to plan, I won’t have to walk around with my elbows locked to my sides any more.

While getting measured, I confirmed that I am indeed abnormally tiny. My chest measure came out to 35½”, which simply cannot be had in an off-the-rack suit.

I got some shirts, too. All fairly standard. I got one in British khaki, and I wanted another one in olive drab, but they only had olive drab in a linen, which is simply unacceptable. I got a lovely blue that’s a tick darker than the typical blue you see in stores, a lovely textured gray (same texture as the suit, actually, only in a lighter shade), and one other thing that I can’t remember.

I didn’t go for French cuffs. I think they’re silly. And I also think they only work with white shirts, and I am white-averse. I do not own a white shirt, and I haven’t worn one in longer than I can remember. I think maybe to prom. Eight years ago.

I forwent a breast pocket on the shirts, too. I am so tiny that I worry that breast pockets will only make me look smaller, because they’re cut on a stock pattern that doesn’t change size with the shirt. And I never use them, so why have them?

The only thing was, while I was looking at cloth while Tailor was dealing with other customers, the radio was on. On some Christian station. Normally, I can tolerate by just tuning it out, but this was unlike any Christian station I have ever heard. It was FM, but had a format more like AM. It sounded like they were doing a live show like the “good old days” of radio theatre. The format was very “A Prairie Home Companion.” A short story here, an advertisement there. I think it was a children’s show.

One segment was particularly interesting. Announcer Guy was interviewing some shrimp. The first shrimp was a Pistol Shrimp, discussing its interesting snapping mechanism. He started by comparing his snapping claw to a handgun. How he cocks it back, like the hammer on a gun. How he snaps it and it makes powerful shock wave. How it scares off enemies, or can help him catch food. It sounded suspiciously pro-gun.

Now I have no problem with guns as such, but the circumlocutions made me uncomfortable. I mean, why is it necessary to hide a pro-gun message in a children’s story?

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The next shrimp to be interviewed was an Angler Shrimp (which I cannot find in the Wikipedia). That is, a shrimp with really long antennae that it uses to lure food like a fly-fisher. The shrimp described its unique adaptation (but not as such) and pointed out how he is unlike any other kind of shrimp in the ocean. Naturally, the obvious conclusion is that God had made him just the way he was.

Isn’t the intelligence of the Great Designer glorious? Some people think all the thousands of different kinds of shrimp originally came from a single pair of shrimp. But that’s unscientific. The Great Designer created all the kinds of shrimp separately, and they will never reproduce beyond their own kind.

No shit.

It was nauseating. I had difficulty concentrating on the swatch books.

Tailor has never said anything even remotely religious to me. I think he might have had the station on without paying any attention to it. He was in the other room with other customers most of the time. Next time I’m in there, if the radio is on that station again, I might ask to change it. He’s polite, runs a nice business with competitive prices, and makes great suits, so I’m not inclined to take my business elsewhere. I cannot ascribe to him a belief in creationism, but even if I could, it doesn’t seem to affect his ability to make a fine suit.

The Bhutto Assassination
My Sister’s Graduation
My Sister’s Job Interview
Families & The Holidays
Gift-Giving

I will also be cleaning up all these half-finished movie reviews.

Most of you know this holiday by its much less cumbersome and more familiar name, Christmas. But let’s face it: Christmas is about buying stuff for people you like and getting stuff from them, in a fantastic orgy of sales and decorations, smothered in a gooey outpouring of happy delicious good will. Hooray, Capitalism!

In the spirit of the lively exchange of gifts, I have published The List. See the hat on the “W” in the header? You can click that, too.

Not only do I like getting things for Christmas, but I like buying them for other people, too. So don’t be shy! Get those lists up so everyone knows what you want this year!