Hello 
I'm Siobhan Curran/Kisa Naumova, and this is my weblog. I tend to write about stuff like crossdressing, Macs, code, cats, wine and Second Life, but in general it's just an ongoing conversation about all sorts of stuff. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what this all is, I recommend starting on this page which has a little bit of info on who I am, and what I'm trying to do — or you could dive into my five years worth of archives if you like.
Otherwise, feel free to close this box and explore...
.plan
"So, what are your plans for the summer?" one of my colleagues asked me the other day.
"I'm going to fix my toilet", I replied.
"The summer's a long time"
"Yes, but I'm not a very good plumber".
...
But it's a very good question really: Just what am I going to do over the next few months?
When people find out how much time I get over the summer, they always jump to the conclusion that I lie around on my arse looking pretty for four months. And although that's partly true, I do actually have a lot of things I need to do.
Firstly, I want to develop the idea form a programme of study that's flapping around my head at the moment — the thing all about Human <-> Computer interfaces, metaphors, and perceptions of digital media. That's going to take a lot of research and planning And a fair bit of watching films too.
Secondly, I need to make some more films — just going through all the stuff that I uploaded the other day (and am continuing to upload BTW), made me realise how prolific I used to be in my output. I've only made two films this past year (granted, one of them is over an hour long)...
...and that's just a little bit shit.
Thirdly, I have lots and lots of things to do to the house. The toilet is only the tip of the iceberg. There's painting, shelving, and some kind of wardrobe-solution to my stupid clothes-storage-system looming.
(My clothes storage system, incidently, is probably more correctly know as the "floor")
Oh, and there's also a fair chunk of programming I want to do 
I find myself repeating the same tasks, day-in, day-out, in order to make Stuff™, so I wawnt to automate all that — with cunning Applescript and perhaps the odd (wait for it) actual application — the most interesting (from my point of view anyway) is the idea to write an Applescript Studio based text editor that'll let me do my diary without having to look at a clunky HTML <FORM> page 
...
Of course, how much of all this I actually achieve depends a lot on me developing some sort of self-motivation. If I get to October without having done at least three of all these things, I'll not be a happy girl.
An androgynous coward
Oh — I didn't realise that happened.
I'll see what I can do
Films
In the meantime though, I've been cataloguing all my old MA films — the stuff I did about 6 years ago. I'm going through them one by one and adding them to my archives, but one in particular which I think is worth mentioning is self:destruct
Couple of things:
If you haven't got Quicktime 7 then you won't be able to watch the preview. In fact, that web page might crash your browser. (Serves you right for not having a Mac
)I've put a DivX
.avithere just in case,
It's an odd film — one a bit out of character for me. I originally started it in the middle of a previous bout of depression — but with the time it takes to achieve things when working with video, I'd come out of it by the end, and it didn't turn out the way I expected.
The thing to watch out for, is the rather cunning way my iris moves
...
Also, just me being a bit of a show-off, I've started collating a bunch of links together
Admittedly, I have purloined the styling of Flickr tags (and many other people's) — but as well as making the size of the tag indicative of how many links share it, I've made the colour of it the same
Ready for this?
$r_tag = dechex( ( ($tag_count)/($largest_tag)
* ( hexdec("4A")-hexdec("BD") ) ) + hexdec("BD") ) ;
$g_tag = dechex( ( ($tag_count)/($largest_tag)
* ( hexdec("15")-hexdec("9B") ) ) + hexdec("9B") ) ;
$b_tag = dechex( ( ($tag_count)/($largest_tag)
* ( hexdec("4A")-hexdec("BD") ) ) + hexdec("BD") ) ;
$tagcolour = $r_tag.$g_tag.$b_tag ;
Glorious 
I've had just about enough of your militant pro-Mac stance, young lady! >
It's all very well saying "this page only really works on Macs" but isn't this a "crossdressing adventure" not a blog about macs?
What about people who are forced to work with PCs?
What about people who come here just to read mindless drivel about tranny stuff?
What about people who just want to see pics of pretty things?
In short, what about ME?????
Something else you mightn't have realised: Erin's pinging profligately!
There seems to be a ping, and hence a Bloglines notification, every time someone comments, not only when you post yourself. Actually, the odd thing is that the listed number of 'updates' tends to be the number of comments/real updates plus one.
I also know when you've been playing with the code, as Bloglines records there having been 15 (not 14, not 16) updates.
Is she really Neil? I thought I only had her pinging when I wrote something I used to update the RSS when comments were posted, but I disabled that. Perhaps I forgot to disable pinging...
In short, what about ME?????
Becky darling Buy me a PC and I might then stand a chance of making sure everything plays ball. I know I like to punish the non-enlightened, but the real reason things only really look good on a Mac is because I don't have a PC.
Obviously, if I did have one, it would live under the desk behind some boxes so that I wouldn't have to look at the ugliness on it...
Someone once told me Macs make good firewalls, so I now appreciate they have a use...
Rachel
I assure you, not every PC is ugly. If you pick up a Dell or something you get what you pay for, but the one thing that Apple have done for the PC industry is given some case designers a well deserved kick up the bottom. As well as a couple of very ugly PCs (one Linux, one Windows) which are, funnily enough, tucked (tee hee) away, I have two very lovely looking PCs where they're going to be seen.
I also have an old G4-400 Mac which is too slow to do anything cool and groovy on, and is very loud and on its last legs. So I might shove a PC inside the case instead, Because I Can™. That would make a trannie PC
An androgynous coward
You know what would be a groovy addition to your programming duties? Getting your CMS to convert Mac-encoded extended characters (like accented characters, em-dashes and the like) to the correct ampersand-based HTML dohickeys, so that non-Mac visitors can read posts without a flourish of question marks.
You don't have to, but it'd be a nice gift for The Rest Of Us!