Author: cheerfulchaotic

housing talk

Well, talked with the roomies about the housing situation. Nobody actually had any epiphanies, but it was good to have everyone express where they stood. This is starting to become a big stressor for me. But it’s good to have it all laid out, so that people aren’t avoiding looking at it anymore, at least.

I was relieved, not that I was expecting badness, the roomies are all good guys, but still. <shrug>

Phoenix, successor to mozilla

My laptop is an ancient piece of crap. Mozilla does tabbed browsing, and blocks popups, so I only have one window for however many pages I have open. And I can flip directly between them, by looking at the headers (Assuming, of course, that I don’t have too many headers for it to actually show text). Mozilla is a memory hog, though, and my laptop is short on memory. This means hard drive grind is constant, any typing is slow, and mozilla, in general has problems.

Courtesy share&enjoy (the zephyr instance, not the lj group), this morning, I have found phoenix. Great stuff, keeps the memory size reasonable, it’s responsive, and my hard drive has fallen silent. Yay =) phoenix++

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/

Dean Meetup, Structure and Iniative

I went to the Dean meetup thing in oakland with . Signed up for a mailing list or two. It was much more structured than I expected. The way meetup.com works is they have people signup, and encourage one or more of those people to be the hosts, give out name tags, print out a sign, whatever.

Apparently, the dean campaign sent out a little something to facilitate these groups. Facilitation was pretty much necessary because there were nearly 100 people crammed into a space maybe 3 times the size of our living room. Mostly it was pep talky stuff, with people interjecting comments about how wonderful dean is, how they want him in office, hate the war, gay rights is a topic we cannot compromise, etc, etc.

As with most unstructured events, there were small conversations of limited relevance on center stage, perseveration over trivia, and pointless interjections. However, I was surprised, given the size, the comparative lack of direction provided by the facilitator, etc, by the coherence, and general on-topic-ness of the group. There were a few concrete suggestions advanced such as production of a distributable media format (ie, dvd, vhs) with his speeches (available at http://www.ca-dem.org http://www.carlwithak.com), group presence in the next peace march (saturday in oakland. I needs to make me a sign), flyer distribution, and general reference passing for websites (horribly done, that, should have arranged some organizational schema, and flyers/minutes to pass around), and affiliation groups (labor, college students, women).

I see alot of potential, but there needs to be a push to develop structure for the group, differentiation to specific tasks, etc. Still, I think it was good, and worthwhile, and I’d like to participate in making this into something bigger/better/more coherent.

Aaron was a little less pleased. The proceedings were too disorganized for him.

And as the requisite bit of hormonal whatever, I did see a cute guy whose planetout ad had appealed to me quite a bit there, I did some look-smile stuff with him, but left without anything more.

initiative and structure

Social Contact

So, I may be introverted, but I have my limits. Work is something I do with Ro, and nobody else. And not all that much time spent talking/whatever with Ro. Evenings at home, I can see Simon Tue/Thu and the weekend. No real social activity at the gym. The clinic is where I get the bulk of my regular social mileage these days.

gay.com, idle dates, occasional hookups, irc, occassionally zephyr, livejournal, etc, I use as stop gaps. Yet they do not fill the void. Consistent social contact on a reasonable scale is necessary to my sanity. Gotta work on that.

Dean Supporters

So, anybody want to join me for the downtown oakland dean in 2004 meetup? (If that’s a bit far for you, go to your local one, it’s happening wednesday at 7pm, local to each time zone).

And a little pamphlet on things you can do to help the dean campaign:

http://www.deanforamerica.com/Dean%2012%20Things%20You%20Can%20Do.pdf