Miscellany

[stoutfellow]

1. Whenever I see that someone has defriended me, I find myself briefly wrestling with a vague feeling that I've let them down. Silly, but there it is.

2. The committees for my two Senior Project students have been approved, and they'll present sometime in the next two or three weeks. Meanwhile, an SP student whom I last saw in January has popped up again - and I don't remember what project we were discussing...

3. Summer - the real summer, not the astronomical artifact - seems to have abruptly ended. After weeks of highs in the 90s F, we've now gone two or three days without breaking 80. It's gray and a little breezy outside, and it looks as though rain is imminent. (It's looked that way for about 48 hours, and occasionally it hasn't been deceptive.)

4. I'm on a Poul Anderson kick again, rereading the Time Patrol stories. The best of them - "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth", "Star of the Sea", "Amazement of the World", "Brave to Be a King" - are very good indeed, but, as usual with Anderson, infodumps are common and clumsy. PA remains the unrivalled king of alternate history even so, to my mind.

5. I switched to a wireless mouse a year or so ago, and I'm generally pleased with it. However, there is a persistent problem with phantom clicks - I'll click once, but it'll be transmitted twice. This is irritating if, e.g., you're playing Spider Solitaire, but there are other, worse, consequences sometimes. Is this a common problem?

I'm feeling very sluggish, despite the beginning of classes. Gotta shake that off...

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Hey, I think I know exactly what you mean regarding the defriending issue, because I feel the same. "Is it my bad grammar, was my last post insulting, did they look over my recent entries and later decided I wasn't keeping up the standard so I was fooling them somehow..."

So I never defriend someone unless they defriended me first, and then I do it quickly. I have no problem with friending someone and not being friended back, but defriending seem's so... ...rude.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call it rude; I can see various good reasons for doing it, most notably if you find that your FL has gotten so large that it's hard to keep up with it. Then it may be necessary to trim it a little. (The voice in the back of my head wails, "But why me?")

[pompe.livejournal.com]

The friends-list doesn't go too large on its own.

I can understand if say, you suddenly get a change of circumstances and simply cannot read all the people you read once, but then I'd say the polite thing is to simply inform in a post that "sorry, I cannot keep up with all of you, I've found it necessary to cut down on my f-list, but it is nothing personal" - and I've seen people do exactly that several times. Or put in a filter of some sort.

But I mean, if you have say 80 friends and realize you can't keep up, I doubt you cut one. You probably cut 40.

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

I think it is somewhat rude if done without comment. The way that ArchangelBeth and NoraBombay have announced coming *layoffs* from their respective Flist wasn't rude and didn't leave people wondering, as you're doing now.

It probably *did* have everything to do with the size of the list; after all, having you on a Flist is a *good* thing!

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

I'll have to try this Poul Anderson series, then.

I know what you mean about feeling sluggish. Maybe it's the end of summer syndrome...although one wouldn't truly know it over here :)

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

The Time Patrol stories are collected in two anthologies, Time Patrol and The Shield of Time; they should be read in that order. (That's not the order they were written in, but that's the internal chronology.)