6 posts tagged “me”
I liked playing with Vox but now I am done. I have a blog of my own over at http://jessamyn.com/journal (rss, atom) and I encourage you to read it if this is the sort of thing that interests you. I have photos at Flickr, a professional blog of sorts and I'm even sometimes on Facebook. I'll still be reading here, I just won't be writing here.
I don't ever want to have to unclick a box that says "This may be offensive or otherwise not for the public." again. I do not want to read the Welcome to Vox Design thread anymore. I want to size my pictures more than four different ways. I do not want to see a lock next to a "viewable by anyone" indicator. I want to copy and paste without copying line height and font faces and hyperlinks. I want to see a cursor. I want styles of my own devising. I would like more friends and neighbors, and fewer "friends" and "neighbors." Those of you who are both know where to find me, and I know where to find you.
More to the point, it's Spring and I want to type less and walk by the river more. This is part of that. Thanks for your kind attentions. Come visit if you're ever in Vermont.
How have people mispronounced your name? How is it supposed to sound?
Submitted by Lorie.
My name is sort of like it looks: jess - uh - min. People who don't know me and haven't seen or heard the name before seem to have a hard time with it. Either they say Jasmine, which makes sense, or they say Jezz-uh-min or Jess-uh-mine. The thing I always find weird is that when I say it out loud to them, like over the phone, often they'll pronounce it back wrong. So I'll say jess-uh-min and they'll say "Jasmine?" like maybe I'm pronouncing my own name wrong.
People called me Jess until college, but I never liked "Jess West" much. Then I had a college boyfriend who called me Jessamyn in that college-y way and it sort of stuck. I answer to both. The only name I really dislike is Jesse because I had an evil English teacher who would call me that to get my goat, I have no idea why.
Jessamyn Charity West, it's not a bad name really.
Just a few images from the MIT Mystery Hunt that ended officially today. The first team "found the coin" which is the official end of the hunt at 2:10 this morning. However, the people who made the puzzle [The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight - Dan Katz is a co-captain] decided to let everyone who wanted to continue playing keep playing. They kept answering the phone and confirming answers until three this afternoon. The official wrap up was at 5:30 where we learned that Doctor Awkward had won the game. We also learned that Doctor Awkward had two of the crossword geniuses from Wordplay -- Tyler and Trip -- which is cool especially because the winners of this year's puzzle create the puzzle for next year.
I was a bit of help to the team but I have to admit, not much. I'm good with trivia and librarian culture stuff. In this case, being able to identify TV show screenshots and magazines by looking at one letter (part of a ransom note) were helpful but not crucial. I'm also better at on the fly anagrams than the average puzzler, which surprised me but seems to be true. Where I really shone though was in organizing stuff. I was the "puzzle devil" from 2 am to 10 am which means I was in charge of making sure people stayed on task, that everyone had a puzzle and that every puzzle had a person. I updated the team wiki which has all of our puzzles and solutions and links to the jabber chatroom and the Google spreadsheets for puzzles that required them. I also scanned and uploaded all the ephmera that we got. In this case, every winning round netted a certificate and usually a DVD that was its own puzzle. I got these or helped get these copied and on the wiki and this, in addition to my general cleanup and put-away and stay up late skills seemed to have the most direct team benefit.
The biggest fun of the whole event was just getting to meet a ton of neat new people who were, to a T, smart and interesting and usually really funny. I went in knowing a few of the organizers but not much of the team since I'd only puzzled remotely for this team in the past. Getting to be onsite and stay up late and eat pizza and scribble on chalkboards with a bunch of other smartie math, science and computer geeks is something I don't get to do very often and it was a start to finish joy.
A few more pictures at Flickr, as usual. Puzzles are now up in archived format. Seriously, look at these things. My favorite puzzle? This one.
If anyone knows a way to make Vox and Blogger cross-post to each other,
please let me know. I'm partial to Blogger's "insert your posts right
into your own website" feature, but I have a bunch of friends who live
solidly in the Vox universe. In any case...
I've been having those water dreams again which are totally typical of me at times when my life is all over the place. Usually they're about boating disasters, or unusal restrooms. In this case, I was on a big ship which was at sea and rocking back and forth. At one point, the ship rocked back and did not go forth but kept going and was clearly turning over. I walked out of the boat as it sank by doing one of those Fred Astaire walk-on-ceiling things and wound up on a desert island. The setting was like the teevee show LOST with a bunch of stranded people standing around zombielike, staring at the ocean, tending to wounds, etc. I walked around saying hello to people saying "Hi, I'm Jessamyn, I'm the self-absorbed character." I think this may have to do with the fact that I just finished reading The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime which has a similar boat wreck in it.
In any case, things are looking a little more even keel around here. My Mom went to the oncologist who said "there was no follow-up needed for the lung cancer... [a]lthough it could recur, or another type might form, for now, I'm done with that as far as she's concerned." This is a huge relief and a really big deal. I'd like to say I'm now going to sleep for a week, but some victories still evade me.
