Aneesha: Curing PMS
[info]linuxchix_live
So many women out there suffer a long week every month reeling under the effects of PMS. Feeling weak-willed, trying to get up and move on but not finding the stamina too. I am one of those women. It is almost as if for about ten days every month I turn into someone else I don't quite know. I want to do things, find energy to get up and actually do it but it is as though something has tied me and I just can't do. Most of the time, I would spend these days procrastinating, sleeping, lying down, doing unproductive thing, watching movies, anything which just blocks the thoughts in my head and doesn't need me to make any effort.

They say you take vitamins, eat well, exercise, etc. and that helps PMS. Well I don't actively exercise but I am active. None of these worked, not even a little. Add to that the stressful lifestyle, and there is no hope!

Recently I read somewhere that PMS is caused by serotonin deficiency. Some people are more prone to it for unknown reason. How to fix the serotonin? Well you could exercise, take anti-depressants or in some cases, it has been found that a deficiency of Omega-3 fatty acids causes serotonin deficiency. So I looked around for supplements, generally too expensive. Then I found ground flax seed supplement. Well, it was worth a try.

I took one spoon of ground flax seed, also called linseed everyday with a glass of juice. Voila! No PMS! Let's just hope it wasn't a temporary fix, that it works consistently every month.

Precautions for taking flax seed:
1. Keep it in an opaque, air tight container.
2. Don't cook them. Sprinkle over not-very-hot soup, add to juice or sprinkle over a cold salad.
3. Drink 2 glasses of water extra per spoon of linseed taken.

Go try it!!! It is liberating!!!

The Boringest Birthday Ever
[info]kerravonsen
For my birthday today, I... slept. All afternoon.

It was my day off, and I pottered about in the morning, read fic, hacked away at a problem with my computer (How To Use Screen To Remotely Control A Console Application), solved the problem, read more fic. Ate the snowlog I'd made last night. And tried out some wickedly fattening ice cream I'd made without the ice-cream machine. Which was both yummy and not-yummy.
cut for ice-cream digression )
Not that I'm really planning on repeating the experiment; it was a foolish experiment anyway.

And, as I said, I slept all afternoon. I gave up on staying awake as I kept on yawning. I expect it's the accumulated drainingness of two really hot days in a row (top of 34) and a pretty hot day today (top of 29) even though I've been indoors in sort of air-conditioned "comfort". At work, the air-con is barely adequate, and they turn it off every night just before 6pm - but I was working late both nights. At home, the air-con is only in one room, and while it does help in preventing the whole house from being hot, it's really only cool in the room the air-con is in.

I had bought some steak last night, to treat myself to a steak dinner today, but it's too hot to cook. (sigh)

And, I didn't write one word of my fic. Nor did I watch things I'd intended to watch. Nor did I work on my [info - community] icon_style iconage.

So, altogether, a pretty blah birthday. (sigh)

Cheer me up? Write me fic?

Cross-posted to http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/599856.html.
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I'm A Mac
[info]lots42
http://community.livejournal.com/randompictures/7692543.html?style=mine#comments

Please to be looking at the first one for the LOLS.

The rest are hit or miss, pun intended.

Hospital Weirdness
[info]lots42
They carefully ask what religion you are, then send a Roman Catholic chaplain around to everyone.

This does not raise confidence in the hospital, who are supposed to pay attention to details.

I had written down 'None', which I was pretty sure did not indicate 'Please send me a priest'.

Remembering
[info]oursin

Here is Andrew Motion's controversial 'found poem':

Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock – thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of ailments, and is the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben Shephard wrote in his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from it have often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record. I wanted to hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving through time to establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a poem by them, orchestrated by me.

And also, because I never seem to have posted Edward Thomas in connection with Remembrance Day hitherto:

A Private
This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frozen night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,
"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.


As the Team's Head- Brass
As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.


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Akkana Peck: Mouse failures with 2.6.31, Karmic and Intel
[info]linuxchix_live
I've been seeing intermittent mouse failures since upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic". At first, maybe one time out of five I would boot, start X, and find that I couldn't move my mouse pointer. But after building a 2.6.31.4 kernel, things got worse and it happened nearly every time.

It wasn't purely an X problem; if I enabled gpm, the mouse failed in the console as well as in X. And it wasn't hardware, because if I used Ubuntu 9.10's standard kernel, my mouse worked every time.

After much poking around with kernel options, I discovered that if I tunred off the Direct Rendering manager ("Intel 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G (i915 driver)"), my mouse would work. But that wasn't a satisfactory solution; aside from not being able to run Google Earth, it seems that Intel graphics needs DRM even to get reasonable performance redrawing windows. Without it, every desktop switch means watching windows slowly redraw over two or three seconds.

(Aside: why is it that Intel cards with shared CPU memory need DRM to draw basic 2-D windows, when my ancient ATI Radeon cards without shared memory had no such problems?)

But I think I finally have it nailed. In the kernel's Direct Rendering Manager options (under Graphics), the "Intel 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G (i915 driver)" using its "i915 driver" option has a new sub-option: "Enable modesetting on intel by default".

The help says:

CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS:
Choose this option if you want kernel modesetting enabled by default, and you have a new enough userspace to support this. Running old userspaces with this enabled will cause pain. Note that this causes the driver to bind to PCI devices, which precludes loading things like intelfb.

Sounds optional, right? Sounds like, if I want to build a kernel that will work on both karmic and jaunty, I should leave that off so as not to "cause pain".

But no. It turns out it's actually mandatory on karmic. Without it, there's a race condition where about 80-90% of the time, hal won't see a mouse device at all, so the mouse won't work either in X or even on the console with gpm.

It's sort of the opposite of the "Remove sysfs features which may confuse old userspace tools" in General Setup, where the name implies that it's optional on new distros like Karmic, but in fact, if you leave it on, the kernel won't work reliably.

So be warned when configuring a kernel for brand-new distros. There are some new pitfalls, and options that worked in the past may not work any longer!


reports of the Swedish consecrations
[info]thinkng_anglicn
There are now a number of English language reports available: The Local Sweden’s first lesbian bishop consecrated in Uppsala Episcopal News Service SWEDEN: Lesbian priest ordained as Lutheran bishop of Stockholm Canadian Press Sweden’s Lutheran church ordains first openly lesbian...

(no subject)
[info]oursin
Happy birthday, [info - personal] garrity!

This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1128171.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comment count unavailable comments.

lemon rainmaker
[info]thiel
I removed a plastic bollard from a roadwork site, took it home and filled it with lemons. When angled from side to side it made a tumbling sound; when shaken, it was like thunder.

Two-Party System
[info]xkcd_rss
I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

(no subject)
[info]pentomino
I feel kind of bad now.

I went and bought a big $70 magnifying lamp on amazon.com. And because I wanted it right away, I sprung extra for the shipping.

I got it home, installed it on my test, then took the cardboard wrapping off the lens, and it turns out it makes everything look all warped.

now I'm all, do I want to return this... get a different one... maybe this one's defective?

accessibility and tabletop gaming: first post
[info]kynn
Here's my first post on Dazed (save ends) about the accessibility of roleplaying games by people with various disabilities. I don't think accessibility issues have been talked about much yet in the gaming community, and they bears some examination.

My own games, I know, have serious accessibility problems that I'll be talking about in future posts on this topic.

Kylie Willison: Hands on - Turmeric dye
[info]linuxchix_live

Hands on - Turmeric dye

I'd love to have a go at using this for dyeing fabric. I'll have to try different mordants and see what works. I'm thinking vinegar or salt. I love the colour in the pot!

Teri Solow: Transmissions from 2009-11-10
[info]linuxchix_live

  • Roommate and I are up, flooding my veins. #

  • Catching up a little bit on my RSS backlog, waiting for my next injection. #

  • @willdevine: No thank you. Everyone has been wonderful! #


No tags for this post.

Kylie Willison: My Great Great Grandparents
[info]linuxchix_live

These are my great, great grandparents Alexander and Martha Mary Boyd (nee Heeps). This is the first photo I've ever seen of them!! I just got a book on cd of the Boyd family history which included this photo! I'm very excited and touched. Reading their stories is sometimes heartwarming and sometimes tragic, the families faced many losses and hardships.

[info]dnalounge update
[info]jwz

DNA Lounge update, wherein the axe falls.

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i'll get right on that
[info]kynn
So the response from the University of Arizona's Dean of Students office -- regarding my suggestion to rename "Ask a Tranny Anything" to "LIVE NUDE SHEMALE COCK ON DISPLAY" -- was to invite me to work on this next year:

Kynn,

Thank you for the additional feedback. I will definitely share it with the planning team. I know that this will be a concern that we will continue to talk about. Given your clear passion for the topic, I would love to invite you to be part of the planning team for next year. Please consider it. Again, we need all the help and support we can get!

Talk to you soon,

Jennifer Hoefle
Program Director for LGBTQ Affairs
Student Union, Room 404


Somehow, I think she's not taking my suggestion very seriously.

(Meanwhile: Wouldn't you love to have an office numbered 404? I'd totally take down the sign on the door.)

Michelle Murrain (tech): More symptoms of bigger problems
[info]linuxchix_live

NovSummits1

’nuff said.

NovSummits2NovSummits3


rate my professor
[info]bigdilemma555 wrote in [info]academics_anon
I gave one of my instructors a negative review on that site. I think they are suspicious it was me. Is there anything I can do to rectify this.

Sydney eResearch Australasia Conference
[info]tcpip
Have returned from Sydney where I spent the last few days at the eResearch Australasia 2009 conference, a well attended gathering with almost five hundred of the country's senior IT/research managers present, although the suffix -asia is a bit of a misnomer. The conference was held opposite Manly Beach a site which is most quintessentially Australian and reminds me of Midnight Oil's Power and the Passion (original video clip available on YouTube). I wonder if Minister Garrett remembers saying "it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees ... sometimes you've got to take the hardest line?"). First day of the conference was spent at the annual ARCS all-hands meeting which could have been improved with earlier and more complete reporting from management on operational and strategic activities.

My paper, Social Networking and Weblog Sites for Researchers apparently went quite well; standing room only and people being very attentive and furiously writing notes during the presentation. I argued several points; that reducing the cost of replicated research is worth billions to the Australian economy, knowledge is proximal and networked, for researchers networking and 'blogging tools need to be combined (e.g., Livejournal/Dreamwidth), content moderation and public exposure is required, that content networks are more important than social networks (Flickr rather than Facebook) and that provision must be made to automatically assign researchers to content groups they require. The next step after this is convincing my managers that this is worth throwing some money at.

Microsoft attempted to make a big splash at the conference with the release "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery", a collection of some twenty extended abstracts of scientific research involving high quantities of data and using MS tools. The claim that there even is a fourth paradigm (science via empiricism, then theory, then simulation, then data) receives some significant criticism in the scholary communications chapter from Clifford Lynch and John Wilbanks, the former arguing that the third paradigm is far from complete and the latter arguing that this in no way represents a paradigm in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. To think I had to read almost the entire book to find these remarks. Whilst the research is vaguely interesting, the theoretical grounding of the text is very weak.

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