I've been spending a lot more time outdoors recently, travelling around sans car. Yesterday, I walked back from Jason/Rochelle's place after hanging out. It was a nice walk -- normally I tend to walk in the woods instead, and long urban walks are rather different, especially early in the morning when the city is largely dead. Today, I went out to get a humidifier, a hat (for future walking), and a shower curtain, so I braved the bus down to the waterfront, having read up a lot about ways to get around. Alas, I did not read enough, but more on that later. I picked up a decent humidifier, a nice, plain winter hat, and some adapters for my laptop to plug into 2-prong adapters. Apparently the Gaiman film isn't showing at the waterfront. Anyhow, after getting all my stuff together, I prepared to head home, hopping back on the 59U, which I took to get down there. I learned two things from this mistake:
- Read the lights on the bus to determine if it is presently inbound or outbound
- If it's outbound and you're going inbound, in some exceptional circumstances it will not necessarily turn around at the end of its route and become inbound
The humidifier's pretty nice to have -- already the air feels nicer. The advertising on the box, naturally, is deceptive -- it lists the expected usage time between refillings on the box as 12 hours, but that's at the minimum settings, which the instructions recommend people not use. Gotta love that. To top it off, when I made it home, I realised that I forgot to get a new shower curtain, so I might need to head back down there again soon.
On the bus there, I was thinking about how people react to moral disagreement -- in particular how it seems improper to me that they make a leap of logic from disagreeing on moral matters to condemnation with only a very foggy notion of the steps in between. I think it would prove illuminating for people to understand what's going on when they make such a series of steps. I suppose by this I mean that the shorthands we use in dealing with value systems seem to be an important part of the point of making value systems, but like with any shorthand, it seems only well-founded when one has a solid grasp of the longhand it's replacing.
I put a bit more time into getting the wireless working on my laptop, but so far it's fruitless -- apparently it would work fine if I were using a 32-bit kernel, but there are no 64-bit windows drivers for my hardware, and I can't make Linux use a 32-bit windows driver on a 64-bit kernel. Phooey.
One thing I hate about cats is that they're so curious and trouble-loving that I need to keep an eye on them and constantly pick up after them to avoid a trashed apartment. They cry for water, but when I give it to them and when they're no longer thirsty, they splash it all over the floor and bury it with cat food. They love to knock things over, and will not leave the humidifier alone (or the box it came in). I yell at them, and they go to hide, but they're back within two minutes, even if I chase them out. I really love having them around, and they're great to snuggle with, but.. oy.
I am exhausted.
