Can I Get a Witness?

I was playing with VoIP over the weekend and managed to configure my mobile phone and an old sip hard phone to talk to each other, go to voice mail, paging, and receiving calls from google voice all using freeswitch.

One difficulty with the insanity of setting up a PBX system in your home is the "dial plan" -- AKA what happens when you start pushing buttons on the phone.

Imagine you encounter something like the following phone in my home in Los Angeles:



Poll #1483025 What would you try to dial?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

What would you first try for a local call

What would you first try in an emergency.

What would you actually do first for a non-emergency call.

It's monday and I'm back in prison at work. Thursday and Friday we had our appointments at the Fenway, which are generally tiring (2 hours of driving and 45 minutes on the T), but this time really took it out of both of us.

I've also felt a little "off." It's definitely not the flu, but probably just some kind of minor cold or perhaps even just a lot of allergens. But it kind of left me feeling not quite all there, which was a shame. Gauge from Portland has been visiting and I feel like I didn't get a chance to do much. Janna did most of the entertaining and they went out to Bone Hill, the audubon sanctuary based on farmland. I felt bad for not going, but I was just completely fatigued.

I have been reading some of the new Heroquest stuff for the Glorantha/Sartar book. I used to be a huge huge fan of Glorantha and ran a long campaign in high school featuring Orlanthi terrorists freedom fighters in Prax. Wish I could find a group, Heroquest looks interesting. Narrative storytelling, not the combat simulation that other games seem to be heading more and more into. Thinking about Prax reminded me of the Morokanth, the herders of men, and led to me spending some time playing my cow in WoW. Yes, an odd way to end up there, but we'll see.

I'm generally looking at different guilds and I always have preferred the horde, but wow is it ever dead hordeside compared to the alliance. I found another guild that's raiding in my time window that seems ok. Not sure yet. I wish things were different than they are because the people from my old wow guild who are raiding are great, but the rest of the guild just feels wrong and actually I find it a bit creepy.

FOR THE HORDE!!!

Dan Savage certainly nailed it on Olberman the other night. "Obama is a fierce advocate for gay rights the same way I'm a ladies man"

Apparently in addition to saying nothing about marriage in Maine, he also chose to remain silent on the Washington state ballot on civil unions. This is supposedly the separate but equal option that Obama prefers since "god is in the mix." But no. Nothing. Not even a mention in the email blast sent to Washington voters.

We put a back up offer in on a Townhouse a few days ago, and the primary buyer is asking for their second inspection extension, and still hasn't decided if the property passes inspection, and the seller is getting tired of the delays.

So as the first backup offer, my agent was offering us as a quick alternative but wants us to have a loan ready OMG right now.

I only have access to about 10% down, the randomly selected lender seems to think that a 3.5% FHA loan would be fine, even if the condo complex needs to be approved by the FHA.

My agent doesn't want to go through the FHA approval process and wants me to use a different lender to get some kind of alternate loan product that requires 5% down. The lender has no idea what type of loan she's talking about and seems to think that FHA approval is something relatively easy to obtain and the FHA loan would be fine.

I have no idea whose right, or what needs to happen next.

I'm really developing the feeling that they're all motivated strongly be self-interest and I shouldn't trust anyone involved as, to simple approximation, they're all just trying to steal my money.

(And wandering around not knowing if someone is about attack steal all your stuff is a definite part of EVE).

The loss of gay marriage in Maine reminds me of my childhood growing up in a Fundamentalist Christian Church and watching my parents fight constantly.

The christian groups motivated to hate gays are (at least in my experience) the ones most likely to engage in child abuse.

I couldn't find a link to the primary reference, but On Christianity, Fundamentalism, Spanking, and What Constitutes Child Abuse discusses some of the research linking religion and child abuse.

I guess the conservative christians have experience with just how violent, angry, and wretched of parents they are, and since their insane god tells them gays must be worse then them, that's what lets them rationalize the need to "protect" children from gays. At least their advertisements against gay marriage in California, seemed to revolve around if we had gay marriage, children might be exposed to gays.

Speaking as a child raised in a fundamentalist church, why the hell can't we talk about how religion is abusive? Why do the christians get to claim the "moral" high ground of "protecting children". Children bloody well need to be protected from them!

It's official, my officemate's daughter has H1N1

Well I don't have the swine flu, but I can't say I'm really feeling all that well. Just blah in general. I've felt generally off and a little queasy all weekend. I didn't let it stop me, but it makes me kind of worried, especially as I work in a public building with a lot of moms, two of which have kids who might have flu. I really don't want flu.

Other than that, it was a rather nice weekend. We went walking saturday afternoon at Wing Island, which was just incredible. Really, Saturday was probably the most wonderful weather we've had all fall. Just a perfect day. For Halloween, we made pizza and handed out candy while watching Poltergeist. We didn't get hit as bad as I thought for a warm saturday night. I'm not sure if that was fewer kids on cape or if they went to parties or something.

Sunday I felt rather dreary and stayed in playing WoW. I got invited to an Ulduar10 raid, which went well. We're finishing it up tonight. Janna went out for an appetizer of oysters before we have another round of inseminations, but I stayed home and made dinner for us. So she got home to a nice roast pork loin. I felt bad, but I didn't feel like I could stomach seafood.

Gah.

House hunting is not a activity for pessimistic impatient people.

There comes a time when my patience just runs out and aided and abetted with a wonderful steak dinner with more than a few martinis I read a message on my board from some deluded Stockholm Syndrome victim about how we need to do what the shrinks tell us to and we're weak and not really trans if we go to Thailand. Well the patience just ran out and i invoked "drunken moderator privilege" and told them to "fuck off and die."

Here's my real honest 2p. The SOC are illegitimate. They are in any way shape or form by definition a violation of basic therapeutic ethics. If you are a therapist and follow them, you are by definition violating basic ethical standards. Client/patient/HUMAN rights to self determination are a RIGHT.... not privilege. A RIGHT to self determination that outweighs any discomfort and gives clients a right to determine their bodily destiny.

Or in other words, if the client isn't batshit crazy back the fuck off and give them a scrip for hormones.

The SoC are by definition illegitimate any time and always and given the circumstances self-medication and evasion of the SOC are a revolutionary imperative.

And more than anything I'm tired of transsexuals who pull some "I'm more trans than thou" because they were stupid and compliant enough to do whatever some control fixated mental defective therapist decided they needed to do.

As i said, FOAD: FUCK OFF AND DIE. You're not more trans, you're not more legitimate, you're not more female. You're weak and pathetic. Go lick you masters boots and beg for your trans cookie. I'll be living my life as the woman I am and always was.

I probably have come across as some kind of sourball recently. The whole health care debacle disgusts me. Not the least reason of which is most progressives seem to have bought into it. People probably have the vision of some discontented crank looking like Madelyn Murray O'Hare eyes glazed over angry at the world.

Not really. Actually things are going really well.

We had an implementation at work which so far has gone really well. And I have a couple of other projects that are finishing up. The response to the new website seems to be very very positive at least so far.

I've been playing World of Warcraft a lot. Got into a few instances and a fun if unsuccessful onyxia raid. I have a baby huntress I'm working on who's up to level 26. Hunters are still ezmode in a big way. But I can't deny it's fun.

I got my scooter back yesterday. Picked it up in the morning and left my car at the shop and Janna gave me a ride to collect it. The scoot is fantastic. A new tire makes a huge amount of difference. I must admit that I have frequently broken the speed limits in the past two days. Feels like a whole new scooter. The sad scooter news is that javaspeed, the fantastic scooter shop in Providence, is closing as of tomorrow. Very nice shop that did a lot of promotion.

Since we had to go out to collect my car after work, we decided to go out for dinner last night and got a nice Chinese meal. Baby Bok Choy with tofu and mushrooms and shredded pork in garlic sauce. And a nice bowl of their house wonton soup, which is full of vegetables and everything else as well as broth and wontons. It was a really nice relaxing time after the frenzy of other things.

Tonight I'm going to make up some nice local potatos and probably roast some brussel sprouts and we're going to have a nice steak.

Some wonderful tidbits here. The "public option" is limited in both the senate and house versions to the "level playing field" (ie, will have to pay the same for medical care as private insurance). It's expected that while private insurance won't be able to deny coverage to sick people, they'll do their best to discourage them. Making it as hard as possible to see specialists or having very limited numbers available "in network." They'll figure out ways to screw people. It's what they do. But those people can go to the public option, which is good. Except if you drive sick people to the public option and make it pay market rates to doctors? The CBO says rates for the public option are likely to end up more expensive than private insurance.

Of course that could be stopped by just having the public option pay medicare rates. But they can't get that passed because too many democrats and the entire Republican party feel that the ideology of the private market is more important than saving people's lives.

Not that it really matters much because only 10% of people will even have access to the public option or any of the other features of the "insurance exchanges." The rest of us will just be stuck with exactly the same broken system of employer provided insurance we have no. Another great tidbit from that article, depending on your family configuration, a family making $66k total -- a pretty lower middle class level since that's two people making 33k each -- could be expected to pay as much as 19% of their income, over $12,000 dollars, out of pocket and that would be considered "affordable." And of course, if someone disagrees, they still have to get insurance or be fined.

Or we could simply fix the entire system by striking the age limit from medicare and providing health care to everyone.

Current Mood: angry

We've been occasionally attempting to purchase a home, at first we were thinking a house would be good. But then we realized just how well we'd handle dealing with yard work, and how convenient it is to live near transit options.

So started looking at condos, most condos aren't that exciting, but town homes are looking like a good compromise between fewer shared walls, but being closer to transit.

We found a neat place last weekend, but the buyer accepted the first offer before we could see it and submit our second offer. However today the real estate agent told me we were accepted as the first backup offer.

So that's kind of exciting, its the closest to a home purchase I've ever gotten.

However we'll probably need to continue looking at places.