sylvar

I tinkered with the look of my LJ tonight, and decided to use a style that allows custom text. Here's what I put there:

I believe in humanity: our indwelling capacity for good, our insatiable desire to make ourselves known to one another, our coruscating passion for knowledge, our ability to handle the truth, and our capacity for learning from really dumb mistakes.

I believe in humor as the universal solvent of ignorance, grief, and fear.

I believe in public libraries.

I believe in using intellectual property rights to establish a sustaining wellspring for the creative endeavors of others; I believe in the Creative Commons license.

I believe in putting final punctuation outside the quotes unless it was present in the original.

I believe in the Oxford comma.

I don't believe in rigid gender lines, violence as national economic policy, or any particular religion (though I'm congenial to many).

A friend of mine took a religious education class at a Unitarian Universalist church. No, seriously. One of the products was her own personal credo. This is mine.

Jodi's flight got in a bit later than originally planned, and I forgot to stop at a fast-food joint on the way home, so I ended up going to sleep at around 2am. I woke at seven and left at eight, as usual, but tried driving no faster than 55. I ran into more traffic lights than usual, and was beginning to doubt the wisdom of driving slowly, but I got to work on time and felt less stressed. And surely it helps that I'm worrying less about the price of gas around here. I don't know how much gas I'm saving, but it does seem to be lasting longer.

When I get home tonight, I'm going to unpack all the food that was bagged up in Vikane-proof bags. I'm getting awfully sick of pizza, and I've only been eating it for three meals in a row. I'm not sure what I'll make first, but I did see some organic broccoli at Target for $1.49, which is actually cheaper than the other stuff (2 for $3). I know I'll have to have something ready for Jodi when she gets home around 9. (Photo: "NJ Pizza" by Robin Zebrowski.)


But first, I'm going to use a coupon for a $6.99 haircut. I'm getting shaggy. It won't be anything fancy -- in fact, it'll probably be the sort of thing my old barber could have done with sheep-shearers. I've been trying to shampoo less often, washing my hair with plain old surfactant-free tap water. It tends to make my hair easier to style. Hair is supposed to have some natural oils, after all; we spend a lot of money replacing them with oily goop. (Photo: "barberpole" by Paul Keleher.)


I've written a few times about Creative Commons, but this is one of the first times I've been on the other side of the license. The photos above are licensed with the "Attribution" version of the Creative Commons license, so all I have to do is give them credit. No royalties, no negotiation, just search by tags and you're done.

I finally found and sorted through my archives of photos -- several shoeboxes worth -- and I was about to take them to Walgreens for scanning at $2.99 ($3.99?) per CD, with about 100 pictures per CD. And then I found out that they changed the pricing model about a month ago. Now it's 39 cents per photo (with a minimum of ten photos).

So does anyone know about a scanning service that's comparably priced? I'll scan 'em myself if I absolutely have to, but this was going to be a great way to put almost 15 years of photography onto Flickr with a Creative Commons license. (I've already had photos used by a Scandinavian newspaper and (soon) a British physics journal.)

Damn, damn, DAMN my delay!