Incoherent Scribblings

I am sure this is one of about 10 million election-related posts in the blogophere tonight, but this isn’t about my choice of candidate or my trying to convince you why my candidate is better than yours. I am not overly political, in fact, more often than not I consider myself pretty apathetic about American politics.

Nevertheless, it is my right, and therefore my duty, to vote and so tomorrow* I will do just that.

! Begin Civic Duty Message !

And that is really what this evening’s blog post is about.

I don’t care what your politics are or who you vote for, if you are an American citizen who has registered to vote, by all means get down to your polling place tomorrow and exercise your freedom by casting your ballot… too many Americans have fought and/or died (and not just in foreign wars either, think about the Women’s Suffrage Movement) so you can vote: Honor them by doing so!

! End Civic Duty Message !

(*) Because Texas is a state that has early voting, I could have voted at any time during the last two weeks, but since I have never lived in a state with early voting casting my ballot early seemed rather odd to me. I know that my vote would have counted just as much last week or the week before as it will tomorrow, but I suppose I will feel more like I am part of the process by voting tomorrow.

I imagine that most people favor feed readers these days and as a result don’t actually visit my blog much anymore, but nevertheless I decided to change its theme in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Yes, my blog is now extremely pink, but luckily I am still girly enough that I actually like it!

I am fortunate enough that I have not personally known anyone (I have been told that my great-aunt by marriage on my mother’s side had breast cancer, but I never knew her) who has been affected by breast cancer, but I suspect that it is only a matter of time.

Therefore, as a way to honor those who have in one way or another had to deal with this dreadful disease, here are a few links. Educate yourself, your mother, your sisters, your aunts, and your best friend today!

• BreastCancer.org: http://www.breastcancer.org/
• National Breast Cancer Awareness Month: http://nbcam.org/
• National Cancer Institute, Breast Cancer Homepage:
  http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/breast
• Pink for October: http://pinkforoctober.org/

Dear Makers of SmartFTP,

I understand the need for a company to make money. However, I am sadly disappointed that you have decided to abandon the majority of your users (educational institutions and poor graduate students) in favor of the all-mighty dollar.

I have used the freeware version of your product since I cut my FTP baby teeth using version 1.X to learn FTP basics as a poor graduate student. However, I recently learned that you have decided to do away with the free version for private and educational use. Professional software is expensive and for those of us who need professional software but work in education (an area that the government is always quick to cut) it is a great disservice to begin charging this segment of your user population. In an era where open source software is quickly coming of age, it seems a better business model would be to expand your free product, not do away with it.

Thanks for memories SmartFTP, but I am afraid I will be re-investigating my free FTP options.

FireFTP here I come!

Sincerely,
Renée, education professional and part-time poor graduate student.

In case you didn’t know, today is Download Day for Firefox 3.

As soon as I have time to play with all the new bells and whistles (not tonight, my nose is buried in Romantic Poetry) I will be sure to put together a post entitled “Why Firefox is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.”

And if you haven’t upgraded to a REAL browser yet, do it today! What are you waiting for?!

New Bedding
Originally uploaded by blondelibrarian

Well, I think I can say that my birthday is officially over.

Today I got the last birthday cards in the mail that I was expecting and the rest of the presents I bought myself arrived. (Can you believe it? I bought myself NO cross stitch stash for my birthday this year!) It’s been a good birthday if I do say so myself. If the rest of the year is half as enjoyable as the past two weeks have been, it will be a hell of a year.

Of course, one of the highlights of my birthday weekend was going to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with Him yesterday. (I have decided to drop the He-Who-Must-Not-Yet-Be-Named for something shorter… albeit much less creative.) I am not going to write a movie review, but I will say this: I liked and didn’t like the movie. As a stand-alone action movie with Harrison Ford it was fun. As an addition to the Indiana Jones franchise, it wasn’t really what I was hoping for and frankly I was a little disappointed.

However, after the movie yesterday He and I went shopping for bedding for my new bed. (Yes! He went shopping with me! Could He be a keeper?) As usual, I wanted something nice, but was feeling too cheap to pay the big bucks for what I wanted so I hit the sale rack. And I wasn’t disappointed either. There was a “bed in a bag” set that I liked, but I found a comforter/sham set that I was partial to as well.

The “bed in a bag” was a very pretty set with purple flowers on it, but when I showed it to Him and asked his opinion he did that man-stutter thing that means he didn’t want to disagree but he clearly didn’t have too high of an opinion of what was being presented to him. Lucky for Him, I agreed: The “bed in a bag” was kind of girly!

In the end, I decided on the comforter/sham set in a pattern called “Summer Rain” and bought some 350 count Pima cotton sheets in a bluish-green-gray to match.

He must not have minded that set too much: After all, he did help me make the bed when I got home!