becky haycox

Month: March 2009

  • the dream becky has terrible taste in men

    Mr. X (artist's rendering)
    Mr. X (artist's rendering)

    Thursday night’s dream: I encountered Mr. X (someone with whom, in real life, I had an extended and passionate dalliance during our younger days, and who I haven’t seen nor talked to in years). I knew he was now married but I went back to his place anyway. Our tryst was interrupted by his wife, who walked in on us — with the cast and crew of “Extreme Home Makeover” in tow. My shame was filmed and broadcast by the ABC network.

    Oliver Reed, actor, 1938-1999
    Oliver Reed, actor, 1938-1999

    Friday night’s dream: I was married to Oliver Reed. I knew he intended to divorce me, so I spent the dream evading him in our giant mansion, as if my absence would cause him to give up on the divorce silliness.

    Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones
    Mick Jagger, singer, Rolling Stones

    Saturday night’s dream: I was mingling with guests at my wedding to Mick Jagger. Before the ceremony, I ran into Oliver Reed, to whom I laughingly told about my dream of the previous night — how I was married to him, and was hiding from him to avoid being divorced. He grimaced and left before I could finish my story. It turned out that he went directly to Mick and related my dream. Mick then found me, pulled me aside and said that the dream was a dealbreaker — no wedding for us. I was not terribly upset — in fact, I remember thinking “I wonder if Oliver’s single?”

    Update: Did my dream inspire Cardiogirl’s dream?

  • Magic!

    This chicken (rooster?) was spotted by me at the rest stop above Santa Maria today. I was delicately picking my way back home after a lovely weekend in San Francisco (which lacked for nothing — except for sleep).

    Last night, I attended the deepest, funnest, loveliest, most breathtaking pageant I have ever been to — and it was a wedding, to boot. Even relating the evening to a friend this morning had us both in tears.

    Between last night, and seeing spring springing along 101 — clouds and cowboys and rainbows and lambs and wildflowers, just ridiculous — and this poultry sighting, and a couple of standout meals with standup friends, the past couple days have been shimmeringly special.

    I’ll relate more to you, maybe after the acid wears off (KIDDING). Peace and love!

  • weighing in on the social networking hub-bub part 1: photos

    I am deeply devoted to flickr.  It is a photo sharing site that functions primarily (to me) as external storage for my images, which I can categorize and group to my heart’s content.

    A wonderful secondary aspect is that I have made new friends and strengthened existing friendships through its use. The site is full of playful, creative, engaging people. It’s the only website (apart from beckyhaycox.com, which belongs to me)  that I entrust with my content. I do not create nor store anything on any other site (such as twitter or Facebook) that I really care about owning or keeping. But that can of worms will be opened in a later post.

    My main frustration with flickr isn’t even flickr’s fault — it’s my own stubborn (and no doubt annoying) proselytizing about flickr to those still uninitiated. I have tried so hard to get my close family members to join in the fun to no avail. I find it a simple interface to figure out, but some don’t think so. And my sister A will have nothing (and I mean nothing) to do with strangers on the internet. I try to tell her that you can customize flickr so that you would never have to interact with anyone, but she doesn’t buy it. Flickr is so flexible that it looks like there are endless and confusing options to configure. This isn’t true, of course. At this point she and I both are tired of the sound of my pleas. Man, I just keep dragging these reluctant horses to the water and they just won’t drink! Free will, bah!

    I do understand the appeal of the tools that Facebook has adopted for photos, and why people would want to post their images there. Friend-tagging is fun and I find myself glancing through friends’ photo albums quite often. However, I hate the sloppy interface and photos look kind of compressed and muddy (my opinion.) And flickr has much more sophisticated download, comment, and viewing controls. At this point, if feels  Facebook is for snapshots and flickr is for photographs. Kind of.

    Ariel Stallings also thinks that flickr should adopt some of Facebook’s networking tools:

    [flickr is] still the best place for me to publicly share photos. But when it comes to social photos? Pictures of people? Pictures of friends? Facebook has surpassed it, and that makes me sad.

    That makes me sad, too. I hate the fact that my flickr usage, along with that of most of my friends and family, has fallen off. I don’t want flickr to become a full-on social network; flickr does what I want it to do, and with a clean and simple interface. But I fear that, unless flickr can adopt some of these advanced tagging/sharing options, people will stop using it completely and flickr will disappear.

    I encourage flickr users to post links to their photos and photostreams to Facebook from flickr. At least, the photos that are more than snapshots. I miss my flickr peeps, and I miss making new flickr friends, and I would mourn if my community went away.

    Related articles about the future of flickr:

    This is the first in a series about my humble opinions and observations as an enduser, about social networking and online communities in general. This is prompted by the recent controversites surrounding Facebook. I invite everyone to write about their own opinions and observations. I think we’re at a real crossroads with this technology, and our voices should be heard. We have a chance to make a change!

  • dee dee doo dit dit dit (morse code sound i use when i get excited by science)

    What’s cooler than scientists? Supercrafty scientists! What’s cooler than supercrafty scientists? TEENAGE supercrafty scientists!

    teenage science

    Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

    Teenagers armed with only a £56 camera and latex balloon have managed to take stunning pictures of space from 20-miles above Earth. more

    So intrepid and so cool! I will never forget one of my brothers trying to craft a hot air balloon out of taped-together garbage bags, a hoop made of drinking straws, and several dozen birthday candles. I was six and I thought that that one of the most exciting things I’d ever seen.  I remember standing with my dad, in the chilly Phoenix night, watching as my brother (then 16) gently urged the apparatus to rise .. rise .. which it did for a spectacular half-second before the hoop tipped and the bags almost instantaneously melted, like a plasticky Hindenburg. Oh, humanity!

    As for me, aside from some chemistry-kit dabbling in my tween years, I was cowed and befuddled by science, especially after a curtain of equations and numbers and computations descended between me and the neato concepts. Blame my brain or by embedded gender bias or the monotone, teach-by-droning educators of my high school or my slackitude, but numbers felt like thwarters. Is that a word?

    Avariety of influences (working among really nice and engaging scientists, the RadioLab and How Stuff Works podcasts, the Maker movement, etc.) has reopened my world to the beauty and art of science. Beauty that soars like a little balloon above the atmosphere, aloft by curiosity, hope, and the cheers of countless cracking voices.

    This just in! Darling Andrew points me to the footage of the launch! [direct link]

  • afternoon of the dead

    zombie computer

    Last week at work, I visited a website which installed some excellent pieces of malware into my system (I can honestly say that I was surfing sites for a work-related project!) My computer was turned into a zombie and started spewing spam to the four corners of the earth. (“Spaaaaaaaaam!”) It took the intrepid IT human nearly two full days to breathe life back into my poor hard drive. I am happy to report that I stored ALL of my files and documents on the shared server, so I lost, like, 4 fonts and that’s it. Excuse me while I run home to my computer there and back it the fuck UP. I know, I have a (kind of) virus-proof Mac, but really, there are a variety of Horsemen that can trot a Compucalypse my way, yes? And to you, too, oui? Just asking! (PS i’m inserting a little future-bet with myself: in a year’s time, the phrase “cloud computing” and the word “netbook” will be ubiquitous)

    So I’m fairly wired, computer savvy, whatever, and also I acknowledge this great wide technological playing field of ours. Plenty of people who know more than I do and plenty who know less. I try to live and let live but occasionally those who are somewhat defiant technophones (“Proud to be Luddite!”) can get to me. Example. Recently, while visiting  family members:

    Me: So, yes, my job entails producing podcasts …

    Luddite #1: What the heck is that?

    Me: Well, it’s an audio file that can be stored on your computer or MP3 player …

    Luddite #1 {sour face}: Stop, stop! I just don’t know and don’t understand any of that stuff.

    Luddite #2 {dismissive waving of hands}: Me neither! Don’t have any use for it.

    Luddite #3 {loudly and proudly}: I will go to my grave without touching a computer!

    Luddite #1: So, Becky, what else do you do in your job?

    Me {thinking and failing to think of something that doesn’t involve computers}: Let’s have more wine!

    Another example. The other morning, a friend (with whom I commute) jabbered on, with a little too much glee (especially considering the early and coffeeless hour) about how she doesn’t have a personal email, how her family had to beg her to get a cell phone, how she just HATES computers! Another friend started chiming in, as well (“I just don’t want to be reachable all the time! I never charge my phone!”) Before the brainbrakes could be engaged, I said, with pathetic, deliberate earnestness, “people like you drive me crazy.” It’s a fairly benign statement, and was easily passed off at flippant teasing, but I was so very serious. And it felt so good to say it.

    Please note: Although I could have revealed all with impunity, I have obscured details to protect the Luddites who drive me apeshit but who I love all the same.

    Related hamblinks:

  • march madness (oh i made a funny)

    My life is weird and quite busy right now. I’ve been taking on freelance jobs the way one might stockpile food in preparation for the apocalypse. I played devil’s advocate recently, where I initiated a thought experiment with a friend: what if this recession/depression/economy crisis we’re in truly becomes cataclysmic? Like, what would you do?* This experiment resulted in just freaking us out. Thank you, Professor Haycox.

    So things are busy. I work on my freelance projects, I work on my Etsy shop, I try to keep a variety of fears at bay by building up this wall of busywork. To boot, I have an event schedule over the next few weeks (travel, friends, family visits, work things, etc.) that is pushing the needle to the red.

    Yet, with this jam-packed pseudo-life I still find plenty of time to feel lonely and restless and to neglect great swaths of my life that need attention.

    AND, I manage to work into my schedule plenty of time to reflect on/obsess about

    • the fragility of life
    • the insane rush-rush-rush of time
    • the lack of serenity with which I approach me and mine

    Argh. I suspect the key to some relief here may be as simple as taking a break and getting off this computer and going out for a walk and breathing some air. So I’m going to do that right now — maybe I’ll find that lost hour that Daylight Saving took away.

    *What would I do? I have a vague plan of Joad-ing it eastward to where my sister lives, so at least we could be together when we live in a box. Or, since I live in a fairly ag county, I’d forage for food in the fields and then sleep in a tent on the beach. After all, my parents spent the Depression here, I might as well spend mine here, too. There’s a Depression/depression joke that I just don’t want to make here.

  • more mock

    coffee gift tags

    I’m sorry that I’ve posted two consecutive “HEY LOOK AT MY STORE”s blurbs, and  absolutely no content. I have a nearly-completed draft about my phobias but my self-esteem is a little shaky and I don’t think I can handle a look-at-how-crazy-I-am post right now. Am I’m fresh out of i-am-so-fucking-awesome drafts.

    But anyway! The store is going well. I’m thankful to the close friend and family members that ordered things, hopefully because they wanted the items and not out of feelings of obligation. But I’ll take that, too!

    Turq and I are adding to the store in dribs and drabs. I’m hoping to do some sewing next weekend between other projects. Did you know that you can subscribe to our shop via an RSS feed reader? Why don’t you go and do that right now? Here’s the link.