Unsolicited Advice

Took Plugh in. He quit moving too much on Wednesday and wouldn't really eat anything I didn't feed him on a spoon. He took possession of chocolates if I handed him one -- priorities, man -- but he just sort of held onto them instead of nomming. Plugh was a good rat. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He was also one badass motherfucker. He refused to quit until he literally couldn't walk anymore. Today, like two hours before his appointment, was the first time he let me help him climb something without resentfully shaking me off. His back end had gone cool and his feet weren't listening to him anymore -- something was pressing on his spine, I suspect. He was finally tired of things not working right. Dinner last night was Nutella and ramen. Whatever he'd eat. Today he got strained peas and vanilla Ensure (BREKFISS OF CHAMPEENS) delivered directly to him in his squishy paper-towel-filled hammock along with his morning Tylenol and Benadryl. I tucked his ba...

The single biggest reason I have never gone over to the Mac side is that Apple has a policy of discouraging you, at every possible turn, from noodling around with your devices. It's great for people who just want their doodads to work the way they worked when they left the factory -- and would rather gnaw their own mouse hand off than dig around in the guts to change anything themselves -- but I much prefer to own computers I can get into without three security Torx drivers and a hand grenade. It's mine now, I'll break it if I want to. The IdeaPad has an interesting hardware configuration. It first came out after solid state hard drives were made available to the public, but before the prices had come down to any reasonable level. They shipped from Lenovo with Windows installed on an eensy little 24 GB SSD for booting (just a chip smacked directly on the motherboard, so far as I can tell; Linux views it as /dev/sda1), and a secondary 500 GB platter drive for file storage....

I've spent the past week trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong with the ballroom thing. Ye Ballroom Instructor is busy producing a show and the Eccentric is on vacation, so this has consisted mainly of googling variations of "TF am I missing here?" Whether this is helpful is kind of a crapshoot. Sometimes I just get a page full of eHow articles that all say the same useless thing seventeen slightly different ways. In this case, it kind of was. I've only been to casual events so far, and they attract a mix of the usual people you find in low-impact physical activities -- young people looking for cheap entertainment, middle-aged people trying to get out of the house more, little old ladies coming to socialize with their friends, and the small but annoying contingent who pretend they're trying to pick up a new hobby while actually trying to pick up a date. But if you get into the blogs of serious social dancers, they start talking about something they just ...