Speaking of being late to the party, some of us have been talking about privatizing marriage and polyamory for years:

So let’s start with the fundamental question: What is marriage—and what do we want it to be? Is marriage a government program, meant to incentivize certain social goods? Is it a religious institution that should be separated from the state entirely? Is it a personal romantic choice?

In fact, it was our agreement on then less-promulgated views of marriage that went a long way toward establishing our relationship back in 2003.

Once upon a time, I was in the fourth grade, lo these many years ago. 1970/1971, to be exact. I had my first crush, which was not something I understood or could have labeled at the time. She was in another classroom, I never learned her name, and when I tried to figure out the next year who she’d been, I couldn’t. Nobody looked like her. It was formative, in that the way I felt was how I expected love to feel, and it may have helped set the stage for my addiction to unrequited serial crushes that started in seventh grade. The closest thing I had to a crush between those two times was the year-younger sister of a friend in sixth grade, with whom I now work. If anything, that one set a pattern of being terrified, rather than merely clueless. Anyway, in fourth grade, the peak experience was when we were in much-hated gym class at the same time, doing some kind of dance thing, and I got to hold her hand briefly in the course of that. It was like… magic. And she looked nothing like Meg Ryan.

Much later, in 2007, I was invited to Facebook, which I joined under my given name, but didn’t use for an extended time. Basically just had a couple of former colleagues as FB friends. I forget the impetus, if there was one, but before it quite got to where everyone was on Facebook, I became more active and added a lot more people. I thought it was cool to find people from as far back as elementary school, in most cases getting to know them as I never actually did before. In the most extreme case, I friended someone I’ve known her entire life, since she was nine months younger than me. Her father was my father’s best friend, and her parents were the witnesses when my parents got married.

I was surprised some of them even wanted to connect with me, since from my perspective maybe I was embarrassed, which for me tends not to fade or be forgotten, or didn’t like them, or thought they didn’t like me. Time. It passes. There are clear exceptions, and some I don’t understand, as they tend to be people I did like, remember fondly, or have no reason to be embarrassed about.

So it came to be that I even had many of my crushes as FB friends, especially the most major ones, including the first major one, from seventh grade, and the last major one, notable for having finally broken me of fixating on some girl or another – or more than one at a time, sometimes – and convincing myself I was in lurve, capturing That Feeling. Or trying to. The huge exception is my ninth grade crush, arguably my biggest, who strangely, since we never dated, was the first ever to say “I love you” to me. I even have one of the only two girls I think of as people I dated before meeting Deb, whom I arguably didn’t date, just married. Quibbling would give you a couple more, including the one of the major crushes who convinced me no girl would ever have me, and one whose sister’s wedding I was her date for.

But who was the mystery girl?

Finally, this girl named Cheryl came along and friended me. I didn’t really remember her, and only vaguely recognized her maiden name. I never knew her at all. Then someone posts a class picture, with her front and center, in sixth grade. There she is. Looking identifiably the same. She looked completely different, later, with the short hair I actually remember enough to associate with the name.

So I discussed it with her and learned she had not been at the school in fifth grade and part of sixth, thus not being able to identify her the next year. I am so close to certain it was her as to make no doubt. She described our gym teacher as sadistic, and was pleased she brightened the experience a tiny bit. Heh. He wasn’t like the elementary teacher, but the main high school gym teacher I had is one of those Facebook people I have steadfastly not friended. Between my elementary gym teacher and my moderate degree of disability, I was put off gym, or the more recent fad of going to commercial gyms voluntarily, forever. She was tickled, because she didn’t think anyone liked her in elementary school, and pretty much had only one friend. Made worse by an abusive dad. In a fit of synchronicity, she once lived in an apartment just three houses away from where I am now, her favorite one ever. Now she’s in another state, with a superb husband, grown kids, and cute grandkids.

Privacy? All the internet are belong to us/AOL revisited? Scary data mining? Well, yeah. I have a friend who won’t go on FB, or anything else, because she is convinced it will make it easier for the scary conservatives to round her up when they liquidate all the Jews, forgetting that fascists who did that and the like are of the left. Yet I can see being concerned, while it’s also going to have to come to fighting technology and non-privacy with the same. And yeah, it stole the thunder of the blogs circa when I started ten years ago, where you had a sense of community and cross-commenting and linking, but the mega blog sites that want to be news sites also did that (we always talk about how we missed the monetization boat, yet it might not be all that) I will always be appreciative of Facebook resolving that longstanding mystery for me, as well as connecting me with the lives of people I might never have crossed paths with again. That is what it’s all about.

Because I have nothing more to say about politics at this point, lookit my pretty scarf!

UfYH

She’s not the only one, but there are fewer people taking this seriously than I’d like to see. And besides, I have a total blog-crush on UfYH.

So last year I noticed a few Christmas things pop up very early in my store, and they must have done well because this year? There’s a full aisle of Christmas goodies that’s already gone up.

I know they do this because people want it, but that they want it dents my faith in people a bit.

It can be fun? (Repost from the early days of AV.)

For the record, I am blogging on a hand-me-down laptop that barely works, with the screen trying to remove itself from the base. Between not being a real keyboard, and the keys not always registering, I produce a lot of wordswith nospace betweenthem. Spacebar is the worst offender. I usually type into Blogdesk, which doesn’t spell check automatically the way Firefox does if you type into a textbox, so these things aren’t in my face obvious. Forgive me if I don’t always hop back into WordPress and fix them.

Sooner or later, the computer situation will improve. I am still underemployed, and even when I make money associated with computers and computer skills, I am unable to put it into computers or computer skills. It gets sucked into the grocery vortex. Prior to this, I used a cool looking computer in a shiny blue case, built in 2007, a P4 3.2 GHz running (I know) Vista (ironically the second version of Windows I bought at retail, the first having been, yep, Windows Me). As a spare and print server, since my ancient HP 2100 only speaks parallel, not USB, I have an old 1.7 GHz machine running XP Pro, with mostly filled hard drives and a lot of iterations of almost-done code that will never see the light of day as software released by my five years since defunct business. It would have to be redone as cloud software, these days, and probably has, better and by others.

The blue machine fried. It appeared to be the power supply, and that may have been a factor. However, it is more likely the motherboard, and the CPU could have been a factor as well. I’d have to get a compatible motherboard, test the CPU in it, yada yada. In short, I pretty much have to build a new machine, not being able to rely on many of the old parts, and not being in a position to wipe clean either of the hard drives, where massive data remains available/backed up. I always figured putting the digital pictures of the kids on 2-3 computers and maybe multiple hard drives on the same computer would preven their loss. And they aren’t actually lost, but I’ve come damn close, and can’t actually access most of them currently due to multiple/cascading equipment failures.

I got a computer working based on a hand-me-down from my brother, a fairly decent machine, but almost as outdated as the spare I mentioned, which I’ll get back to. In fact, that is where the power supply from the blue machine landed. Still not sure that was wise. (To be specific, the blue computer would not turn on with the 4-prong CPU power plugged in, and would attempt to boot with it disconnected. This is opposite of how it ought to be, and appeared to be a motherboard failure.) Used that fora while, pretty happily and with one of the drives from the blue machine accessible in it. Luckily I’d synchronized passwords between machines with Firefox, and did so again when the set of machines changed. Then it stopped booting, failing on a specific driver. Replacing the file didn’t help. Replacing it in the DLL cache to be sure the replacement wasn’t getting replaced didn’t help. All it can boot into is safe mode command prompt. Rebooting to run chkdsk at boot, it fails. I need to spend some quality time with it, and really, worst case might be putting in a new drive and OS, and that only because I won’t want to lose anything I might have stored on the current drive. My most likely near-term recovery will be working that problem, which I was gonna do Real Soon Now That All Three Kids Are In School. (Still working out the logistics of taking advantage of the hours when nobody is home for things other than napping because I can’t get enough sleep at night before I have to get up at 2 AM.)

Anyway, the old standby machine that originated as a code testing and tweaking machine at my old office now won’t boot either. The biggest problem with both being down is no longer being able to print. The printer can only do single sheet feed, but it still works, still on the one and only tonerr cartridge that was ever bought for it at the office, probably 10 years ago, once the starter cartridge it came with ran out. Good thing, too, since $80 was a lot of money for it. I have no idea what the deal is, having not really touched troubleshooting it. My computers are on a high shelf above/behind the desk surface, and are impossible to work on substantially without moving them. I had setup a desk/table in here specifically for working on computers, but it immediately got stacked with old carcasses and parts, and blocked by things likea chest of drawers. I have to move things to the kitchen table, and then they can’t stay. In the meantime, the old machine lost its power supply to the machine the kids use, but that appears to be temporary because the fan in the power supply is noisy and sounds like it will die any minute. Logistics are bad, but when even $20 for a power supply replacement feels like a lot of money, repairs become problematic.

Wasn’t intending to be so verbose, but seeing the spacebar typo in the previous post got me going. This laptop is slower than it ought to be. I can’t restore it because it has no Windows/restore disk, and the original owner is unaware one ever came with it. There is too much running in the background, bogging it down, and I suspect it may have malware that’s not been found by the usual tools. Though its biggest problems with speed were Norton being resident, and Ad Aware being resident.

On top of all that, I have a crapload of computer carcasses to go through,most of which will be subject to disposal, being hopelessly obsolete. That even applies increasingly to ones that had files I wanted to maintain access to on them, like stuff from the old business. If it’s been 5 years since I closed, and longer since most of the files on them had any relevance, well, worst case I could remove and keep hard drives. At the office, most of what we used were Pentium 3 450 machines with Windows 2000, until long past the point when they were obsolete. You know your business isn’t doing well if you can’t replace obsolete computers, when you are completely reliant on same and are in a computer-related business. Just in case it seemed like I was oblivious to where things were going in, say, 2005, or even before. There are at least 10 old monitors, some of which are dead or unusably bad. I owe a guy I did work for 6 dead/bad monitors to dispose of for me in trade. Just have to test and identify the ones, then drop them in his yard. I figured I’d strip cases of all electronics and scrap them for steel, but the price has plunged. Not that a few bucks I didn’t have would be bad, even if it’s below what it might have been a year or two ago.

Meanwhile, I am intrigued by the Raspberry Pi even if it wouldn’t be ideal as a workhorse, every day computer. It’d probably be something like $60 to get one and anything I’d need for it. I’m intrigued by the idea of trying robotics, and one of those is a likely tool toward that kind of thing. I am also intrigued by being able to get a notebook/laptop/pad for as little as $200, functional enough to do the basics. All I need is that amount of money to spare, which is seemingly impossible these days.