My New Laptop!

Having recently come into a sum of money, I needed to get it spent before anyone could ask for it back. My first thought was to buy a tablet; but then I decided that it would be nice to have a proper keyboard -- touchscreen keyboards are tiring to type on. Of course it would be possible to have a Bluetooth keyboard, but then that means extra stuff to carry (and roll-up keyboards are no better than touchscreens). So in the end, I decided to treat myself to a nice new Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 15.

The first thing I did, of course, was to get rid of Windows! Though I generally use Debian, for this machine I wanted to get a desktop environment up and running as quickly as possible and so I have installed Ubuntu. Version 12.04 ("Precise Pangolin") is going to be a long term support release, but this is still in beta at the time of writing. The newest 64-bit release the installer offered me was 11.10 ("Oneiric Ocelot") and so I chose this (I've upgraded Debian enough times; and on my main home desktop I use Sid, which you have to upgrade every so often as packages update their dependencies).

"Oneiric Ocelot" is based on the Unity desktop. I have always used KDE in the past, but this laptop has a widescreen display and the default configuration of KDE, with its bottom bar, would leave precious little "real estate". The default here is to have a sort of application dock down the left hand side, and a status bar at the top which gets replaced by an application's main menu bar when you mouse over it. This makes sense -- after all, you don't need to have the menu bar there except when you need it, and it saves on vertical space.

The machine itself has a comfortable keyboard, and features both a trackpad and the usual ThinkPad "nipple". The keyboard does not have a number pad, but all the extra functions that used to be shared with the number pad -- home, end, insert and so forth -- are present as dedicated keys, and I don't actually miss it. It's lightweight, it holds its charge for nearly 4 hours, and it charges up quickly. Networking is wireless B / G / N or wired (up to 1 GB). Ports include VGA, HDMI, headphones (no audio in, but USB adaptors are available), three USB and one combination USB / SATA port which will accept either a USB or a SATA connector.

I'm as pleased with this as I was with my first proper cleavage :)

************************* ..... More stars than in the whole universe in fact!

Presenting

Sometimes, it's hard enough to present convincingly as your identified species, never mind your identified gender.

Bad Journalism

Today's Metro carries a badly-written story about a young trans-girl -- one of the youngest patients to be diagnosed with GID by the NHS. Not, as they called her, "a boy living as a girl": It even says in the article that she prefers to be called a girl, yet they still managed to deny her even that courtesy.

We explained to the other kids at the school that [still using boy name]'s body was that of a boy but in his brain he was a girl. We said _____ was just happier being a girl than a boy. But the other kids haven't batted an eyelid.

Well, that's good at least. Primary-school age kids are still learning about the world, and seeing someone who does not fit the stereotypical gender binary model can only be a good thing for them. But anyone who consistently uses the wrong pronouns is part of the problem, not part of the solution. And revealing the child's name (unconfirmed reports suggest that another paper has revealed her location) is potentially exposing her and her family to trouble.

This could, and should, all have been done so much better. The article in the Metro as it stands is just fodder for transphobes and misogynists (someone out there is going to take from it the message that Dora the Explorer turns healthy young boys into disgusting perverts and it's all the fault of uppity women not knowing their place). In fact, in some ways, it might have been better for it to be a full-on, frothing-at-the-mouth anti-trans rant; because at least them there would have been something immediately, obviously wrong with it that reasonable people could have latched onto.

Come on, journalists. You can do better than this. Please try to remember that there are human beings behind stories, and afford them the dignity that they deserve.

Happy New Year

..... groan ..... What was I doing last night?

I must have had fun, anyway. Forgotten how good JD and Coke can taste .....

Book Review: "The Space Between Things" by Charlie Hill

From the moment I learned of the existence of this first novel by an up-and-coming author (ironically, from a slagging-off it received on another site) I just knew I had to have this book.

It's only a slim volume (barely a centimetre thick), weighing in at under 200 pages. But it happens to be set in a time and place I, or somebody I once used to be, once passed through: Birmingham in the early 1990s, around the time of the Criminal Justice Bill.

Ah, Moseley, Moseley, Moseley. It's time to tell you a little bit more about Moseley. Moseley was two B&H out of town on the number 50 bus, just past the inner city, just before the 'burbs. Travelling through, it may not have seemed that Moseley could have provided much in the way of distraction ..... The houses were fronted by common or garden gardens full of flowers and flowers gone to seed and weeds that were flowering and flowering weeds. Moseley may once have been the best looking district of south Birmingham, now it was fraying round the edges, an unremarkable place.

The main protagonists are Arch, a wannabe poet who doesn't take life too seriously; Vee, a photographer who travels to the former Yugoslavia; Stripe, an up-his-own-backside activist; Sorrell, his girlfriend; and Tom, Arch's sidekick, all desperately trying to make sense of things somehow through all the drink and the drugs.

This is a bog-standard tragic love story that, as it unfolds, provides hooks on which to hang some vivid descriptions, and Hill's writing style never disappoints. The characters and the situations are palpably, scarily real. If you were there, you will remember and sigh wistfully, and perhaps wonder where it all went. If you weren't there, you'll wonder WTF?

Published by Indigo Dreams. ISBN 978-190740120-6. RRP £6.99. *****

A moving story

It's difficult to read this story without tearing up a little: Led by the Child who Simply Knew.

Now, in case you missed it, in between all the emotional stuff, Nicole and Jonas are identical twins. That means they have exactly the same DNA. You could hardly contrive a better experiment to show that gender differences are learned, as opposed to genetic.

TV Review: "My Transsexual Summer"

This was a recent series of programmes on Channel 4. Seven mutual strangers -- four transwomen and three transmen, all at various stages on their respective Journeys -- met up for a series of weekend retreats in a beautiful house in the countryside and to explore their similarities and differences.

Now, four programmes that run to about 47 minutes each without the advert breaks is not nearly enough time to explain all the issues. Still, the "road movie" approach (where you meet the characters full-on first and then learn a bit about their respective backgrounds through situations as they unfold) seems to work quite well here.

They bonded well -- particularly touching was how Drew -- five years into womanhood -- adopted Sarah, who had begun transitioning barely a month beforehand; and how everyone rallied around to help Lewis raise money to pay for his top surgery. It was also good to see "normal" people (presumably they weren't primed off-camera beforehand) accepting the "magic tranny[*] seven" for who they were.

Though, as Max reminded us, a transperson is attacked somewhere in the world every 72 hours, by 2009 statistics.


The programmes are unfortunately no longer available from 4oD, but you might have some luck at your favourite Torrent site, or from someone who recorded them.

****. If there is going to be a follow-up anytime soon, then *****.


[*] She said it first. Please don't use this word casually unless you have been given clearance, or unless it's prefixed by "line output" and you are discussing restoration of an old television set.