Voting, and Halloween

So I went to order my absentee ballot and ended up voting on the spot. I felt a little torn -- on the one hand, if I tried out the touchscreen I might be able to help people with it next Tuesday. On the other hand, ick. I voted paper.

We ran out of little playdoughs. This is because I thought we'd get say 30 visitors so we started out giving everybody two. The package had eighty. I'm guessing more like fifty based on how much candy was left.

The costumes were much better than my photography:






There are more pictures here.

So there were maybe a few less adolescents, and therefore definitely more children. Most of the children wdere Hispanic and accompanied by their parents. There were more home made and spontaneous costumes than I remember from recent years. Is that the economy, or people coming to their senses about what they can make? It's not inexpensive to let Emma make a costume, but her costumes are more costumey than what I saw tonight. The nice fellow locked up the dog in the back room, and like an idiot I brought her into the livingroom when things had slowed down to a trickle, so she barked her fool head, and I felt I had to keep explaining.

I'm falling asleep at the keys, here.

On another front, I waded through a box of papers and got to the point that I can dispense with the box.

oh crap

When you google "Kemnitzer" this livejpournal is the third and my little story site the fourth hits. This is wrong on so many levels. (The first is my uncle Brian and the "lemon law" which addresses dishonest used car sales. He does other good things too. The second is a moderately distant cousin, Mike, who makes mandolins. I've never met him, but I'm proud to have a mandolin maker in the family copse)

1: there are a bunch of Kemnitzers who are much more likely to be the ones being searched for, some of whom I'm not sure I'm related to in any measurable way, not that that has anything to do with it.

2: although this is by and large a public journal and I lock any entries that I think might be problematic for any reason, it's still a personal journal, making it much less important in the scheme of things than the professional materials put online by those other Kemnitzers.

I know livejournal has a way to suppress your journal's appearance on Google. I had briefly considered it before but if I really wanted to hide I wouldn't be having an online journal, would I? Now I'm considering it again, because it's just not right to have it be so (relatively) prominent. It's sort of dampening.

Oh, and those tags: they're for me. Any way I can make the list of tags private? I'm not sure I want to, but I'd like to think about it.

Instead of Nanowrimo

I'm already writing a novel and revising a novel. But I need to get better work habits. So I'm going to write more. This is how I'm doing it: in addition to whatever writing I am also doing, I will write one of those short-shorts every day, from when I started three days ago, till the end of the year. Maybe longer. My other commitment is to mail 5 things every two weeks.

The way the short-shorts have been working is this: I start a piece on one day and finish it on another day. I made a list of titles to which I will be adding as time goes on because some of those titles are just not going to do it for me. I backdated the list so nobody has to look at it, but I linked it in case anybody has anything to say about the list. I'll keep posting the stories here: they'll be locked. I am considering making an inner story flist so I'm not scared of boring people or imposing on their reading list. Like when my father died and I considered making a list that was separate for the grief-infused things, though I didn't end up doing it that time because 1) a few people said they would like to be on it and nobody said they wouldn't and 2)immediately after that I stopped wanting to write about it so much. But this would be different. I will definitely lock these stories, though, because I don't want them to be "published" by putting them out in the open: I will submit the ones I think might fly.

So that's what I'm doing. SSWri2mo.

(no subject)

So (personhead)redbird says the google hitson my name might have been mostly people searching ritaxis, and so I decided to look at that out of curiosity's sake. It was about what I expected: about evenly me and the nice fellow in the first few pages, and a sprinkling of Frank's bbs activity and his Pokemon D&D thing, and one hit each for Meribel Taxis and some art student in Canada who signs his Deviantart page ~ritaxis. And then there's one or two references to a misspelled gastropod of the Caribbean and Florida shores also called "Adam's Baby Bubble," which is a dumb name for a snail.

Okay. That's not bad. But there are two or three hits to nonexistent sites which reference my private webstorage space. Get that: nonexistent. By private, I mean there are no links to that space anywhere that I know of. Of course I know that it's not deeply hidden: but it would take a bot or someone who knew me to uncover it. You shouldn't be able to find it by casually messing around not knowing what you're looking for. It's storage. Even though both of those sites are nonexistent, the references on Google do contain the whole address of . . . a novel that's being stored for safety in that space, and which is not meant to be read in that space, because it's in submission for normal print publication. I tried to get Google to remove those two dead pages, without success. I get cannot be displayed errors when I try to use the auto remove thing. Maybe I'll call them on the phone.

I looked at the cached pages, and they are identical. It looks like they were two attempts to create the same Mp3 site, and that they did use some kind of bot to gather links for the band featured on the page, which has the same name as my file (but not my novel). I wonder what they thought they were accomplishing by having such badly-vetted pages.

Look, I know I don't have my stuff stored in a top secret place, and I know it doesn't really harm me if someone gets a peek at my unpublished stuff. But, still: it shouldn't be that easy to find the stuff I'm not trying to show you.

On another front: I just got a call and I might be going out to check water quality on Soquel Creek around midnight tonight. NOAA is calling for at least .1 of an inch of rain stretching down to Monterey. This is thirty days, I think, since we got First Flush in Santa Cruz.