corilannam | (no subject)

Someone just came into my office to deliver a FedEx and caught me trawling Facebook -- for purely work-related purposes! But there was no conversational opening in which to mention that, so now she probably thinks I'm a total slacker.

Oh well. Guess that means I might as well slack off!

Things I've been meaning to post all week:

* Interesting perspectives on the UK rioting/looting:
-- Penny Red - Panic on the streets of London
-- Eyewitness account of neighborhood looting

Stay safe, UK flist.

* On this side of the pond, the state of society is less flammable, but no less depressing -- How America turned poverty into a crime by Barbara Ehrenreich, an afterward to her book Nickeled and Dimed in its 10th anniversary.

* In the potentially world-changing (in a good way) news department -- New drug could cure nearly any viral infection

* For my greenies, some cool Android apps to help with environmentally safe and non-toxic shopping -- http://www.emagazine.com/magazine/app-happy

I'm not linking to the one about the effects of cell phone radiation. *g*

And back to the shallow waters of fandom--

* I think I am not going to finish my

reel_merlin story by the deadline. This kind of breaks my heart, but there's just still too much to do and I refuse to shortchange this story except by the limitations of my own abilities. I will keep working on it and post when I'm done (assuming that's before the next round!)

* I have submitted my final votes and PTHON IS DONE. I have at least survived with my perfect participation record intact, if not my dignity.

* Update on my computer woes -- My desktop, which had previously succumbed to a really vicious Windows 7 security update, is up and running again, seemingly no worse for the wear! I had to reinstall Windows, but thanks to Dell's DataSafe emergency backup (which I didn't even know I had), I did not lose anything. EVEN MY CHROME TABS WERE SAVED, which of course, is the most important thing because that's where all the stories I haven't read yet live. And there are a lot of them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Interesting link... I don't agree with a lot of it but it's nice to have a perspective from someone else who's in the middle of it (I spent part of Tuesday night worried someone was going to throw a petrol bomb through my window, I am fed up of being told by people who weren't there that the rioters were doing the right thing.)

< / rant>

Thanks for the anti-viral link though. I'll be digging out that PLoS One paper!

Yikes, that's so terrifying. :-( I'm glad you're okay!

I certainly don't think there was anything right about what the rioters were doing, but I do think it's important to think about why so many people would suddenly start destroying their own communities. Trying to ban them from twitter doesn't seem like it's really going to stop this from happening again. Though I guess with the overall way the world is going, who knows what would?

Though if we can cure colds and the flu, things will have to look up, right? *g*