Fictional characters

[liv]

I've seen this meme / game floating around in various journals, I think I got it from kate_nepveu. The plan is that you should comment and come up with a fictional character you associate with me. Can be any kind of fiction, not necessarily books, and I think the most interesting way to play is if you base it on personality rather than looks. If you're brave enough to play, I'll come up with a character for you in return.

This week has been a bit crazy, nothing exceptional has happened, just doing lots of work and not handling time management too well has left me with no free time at all. I left work just before 3 o'clock on Friday, partly because it was getting dark, and there was nothing I needed to do I couldn't leave until next week, and partly because I'd already worked about 50 hours last week, and partly because we had a major spill of ethidium bromide (one of the nastiest chemicals we work with) and it seemed better to be out of the way of the emergency
cleanup operation.

Of course, I had to go out again very soon after, but that little bit of space made me feel a lot more in the frame of mind starting Shabbat. I'm still glad that this evening was the first of our new-style Progressive Friday night services. I've spent lots of time in committee meetings figuring out how the service should go, and yesterday evening made it feel worthwhile. We were only 11, which is cutting it finer than I'd like, but it was a lovely intimate service where everything worked. We had a small meal afterwards, which was friendly and nice. And I was singing to myself as I came home and feeling buoyant, I've rarely started a Shabbat like that since I came to Stockholm.

I rather regretted having committed myself to going to shul today as well. Particularly because the normal Conservative service felt like rather a let-down after something that I found really meaningful. Today was a huge bar mitzvah, which meant that the synagogue was absolutely packed with people who had no idea what was going on and little interest in learning. I shouldn't gripe about them, of course, but it didn't make me feel rewarded for getting up early and giving up half of my precious Shabbat. What did make me feel rewarded was the event I'd committed myself for, namely leading a discussion about this week's Torah portion. That went really well, we had a really lively and intelligent discussion. And everybody made a big fuss over me, including someone who told me that I'm a born teacher! *glow* That is my favourite compliment in the world.

When I steal time from sleep so that I can have just a fraction of time to myself, I don't always make the smartest use of it. So this week the time I didn't have has been used in setting up a new website: polymera.se. Thanks to darcydodo for suggesting the domain name! Other than random displacement, the reason for doing this is that my old site has been inaccessible for about three months now, and I'm not getting any answers to support requests. I remained loyal to Portland for years, because they provided a genuinely free hosting service without any advertising, at a time when this was fairly rare. Their level of service has been getting steadily worse, and I kept excusing them on the grounds that you can't expect the moon if you're not even paying. But three months of failure with no communication of any sort is too much; at that point, free becomes expensive. I need to figure out what to do with the other domain I had at Portland; I'm a bit reluctant to play with it, because it is running my main email address. But of course, it would be better to move before that domain randomly goes offline for months on end!

I really need to sort things out for the sibs' visit, not to mention catching up on email and LJ. But hopefully I'll have a bit more time next week.

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I love your domain name! I don't think I'm in the target audience for the website itself, but the domain name is really magnificent.

[liv]

Thank you. I am very taken with the domain name myself, which is why I really needed to get round to registering it.

I would have said that the target audience for the website is approximately the same as the target audience for this journal, because all the stuff I've put up there is things like indexes and other LJ-related static pages. I hardly expect those things to be fascinating to read, but someone who is interested in my journal might want to look something up there occasionally. Or maybe I'm just gratifying my inner librarian by making gratuitous indexes!

If you mean a website about the actual biology of transcription, well, I haven't made that page yet. But I do intend to create rna.polymera.se at some point.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Possibly you ought to create www.polymera.se with an explanation or a redirect, for people misremembering the URL from memory—or who independently stumble upon the same idea, then are disappointed on visiting it to discover there's no page.

[liv]

Yeah, you're right, I ought to put something on the main page of the domain. I did have a placeholder page there but I accidentally deleted it when I was testing. The ideal would be to come up with something meaningful to put there, wouldn't it?

I actually don't care if people are disappointed though. I thought of the idea first, so sucks to them. There's a thread on Metafilter somewhere where people are disappointed that I have already bagged my other domain, and I am glad that I got there before the geeks. Mean, I know. I wouldn't gloat like this over anything important.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I actually don't care if people are disappointed though. I thought of the idea first, so sucks to them.

I was thinking more along the lines of: "I wonder if anyone's put anything at www.polymera.se... Yay, the name is registered; I wonder what's going to load... Boo; there's no webpage: It's just a cybersquatter."