posts from 2007.08

Okay, not an award so much as a door prize, but still pretty cool. I’m the winner in a drawing I didn’t even know I was part of, and no, this wasn’t even a spam!

Hey Teri!

You are the winner of the latest DVD contest! Congratulations on winning the
cool horror movie, “Shadows of the Dead“! Look for it in the mail soon!

Thanks for being part of Goth Help Us and thanks for the support.

Have a blessed day,
Rebecca Hohm
GHU CEO & Founder
www.gothhelpus.org

Goth Help Us is an organization dedicated to “Serving humanity from the underground up“: doing charity and volunteer work while trying to get rid of some of the negative stereotypes that most people seem to have about goths (e.g., that we are all depressed or suicidal, or that we like nothing more than to bring guns to school). In addition to the main international group, they also have regional chapters, a Street Team, and an Environmental activism division.

I signed up with them after learning of their existence back in June. Since then, I haven’t done much with them other than offer any long distance technological services I can provide (programming; support; collecting donated PCs, configuring them and mailing them where they are needed; etc.) and trying to get the word out about them and their related organizations on MySpace. The closest chapters to me are in NYC and Buffalo, so I can’t really do much else, unfortunately (though I do plan on donating money in their name from now on, as that also has the added benefit of keeping me off the radar of the hyper-annoying Red Cross).

I’ve always had problems recognizing people unless they have some really distinguishing characteristics (like being 12 feet tall, or 60 pounds, or having green hair) or I know them very well; especially if I see them in a different context than how I normally see them.

So it’s really no surprise to me that I did so poorly on this test that I found linked on Neatorama:

Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 40.
In other words, you got 56% correct.

On our previous version of this test, the average person with normal face recognition was able to recognize about 80% of the faces. If you correctly identified less than 65% of the faces, this may indicate face recognition difficulties.

This test was really incredibly hard for me. I think I did well on the first section, but for the second section I was guessing on all the questions for all but two faces (that for some reason stood out to me) and on the third section I was guessing for all the faces. The thing with there being a 33% chance of guessing right is, there’s a pretty big margin for error. I think the results would be more interesting if they had a fourth option for “I don’t know”, just to cut back on the lucky hits.

Anyway, I know other people, particularly Marty, who seem to have a harder time with this stuff than I do (although, there is at least one person in Ithaca whom I should know but never recognize, and Marty always has to point them out to me when they are nearby, so maybe he’s exaggerating his difficulty with this stuff).

I find it ironic that I saw this test tonight, as just last night I was talking to someone at the meetup about face blindness, which he had confused with lack of depth perception. For all I know, the two could be related under certain circumstances (which could, I suppose, explain some of my problem) but I am pretty sure that most people who consider themselves face blind have perfectly functioning binocular vision (note: I have no evidence to support this theory).

On a related note, I found this site a few months back (also on Neatorama), which tries to explain facial recognition difficulties to someone who has none, by relating the differences in faces to the differences in stones. Sure, some stand out quite a bit on account of some distinctive features, but unless your brain is wired to take in the thing as a whole and note all the minuscule differences it may be very hard to tell one from another. And that’s pretty much exactly the way I feel when I meet a bunch of new people, or when I was taking this test.

I use Xfce4, and I hate it. I used to use Fluxbox, which I liked quite a bit, but then I found out that Xfce was purportedly just as fast, nearly as stable, and full of much more eye-candy.

Being the superficial Teri that I am, I was intrigued.

So, several months ago, I started playing with Xfce. Problems abounded, including:

• Every few days my computer does a massive processor and disk intensive backup process. Every time this process completes, Xfce becomes retarded: no items in the menu will illicit any reaction at all, save for the ‘Quit’ item, which pops up a “file not found; memory not allocated” error. Running the file it claims to have not found from the command line (‘xfce4-session-logout’) works just fine.
• The compositor, while beautiful, has made my framerate in WoW terrible. I used to have all the graphical settings maxed out with a completely reasonable framerate; now I have all the graphical settings minned out with a mostly reasonable framerate. But as I do other stuff on my computer more often than I play WoW (yes, truly!), the eye candy has still generated a surplus of happiness, so I keep it (though I do like to complain).
• On a similar note, I used to be able to switch virtual desktops without fear in and out of WoW when I used Fluxbox. Now, however, checking Thottbot or surfing the web while rebuilding my Auctioneer database is always a risk. Periodically I try to switch back to WoW only to have the game refuse to show anything other than a black screen, or to have 3D acceleration seem to completely disappear, causing my entire computer to freak out until I manage to kill WoW and restart X.

Today, Xfce managed to piss me off more than usual. I updated Crossover Linux (which I use at work to test pages in IE on my Linux box) with the provided .deb and it decided it was a wonderful idea to replace my user menu with the new system default menu.

For those of you that don’t know, editing the xfce menu is a major ordeal. The interface to do so, while not difficult, is slow and tedious, and while it is theoretically possible to edit the menu.xml file by hand, it seems rather fragile and even more tedious than the terrible interface they have. (As an aside, the fluxbox menu file format is wonderful. I don’t know why people insist on using XML for everything when a normal text file will often suffice.)

During my googling into this terrible (for me, in my melodramatic computer-centric world) event, I found that the Xfce developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that this wasn’t even a bug, or at least, that it wasn’t a bug that they will fix. Even that would have been fine, assuming that the offending update-menus command will run rarely and only with user prompting. But as that clearly isn’t always going to be the case, the very least they could have done is to have it do a cp menu.xml menu.xml.old before commencing to overwrite menu.xml. In that case, a user would have to run update-menus twice before losing data (which, while still possible to unknowingly do, is much less likely).

So, what have I learned from all this? Whenever I have to use some terrible interface in a painstaking process I do not wish to repeat, save the end results someplace safe. A cron job to cp menu.xml menu.xml.old once a week would have been a good thing to have last week.

Luckily, neops1 has a mostly similar menu file, so I won’t have to recreate everything, just the work and syncing menu items specific to this computer.

Unluckily, that computer is still behind the terrible network connection that until earlier this week my website was also behind. Hence, that f