meme: getting to know you

[cellio]

I've seen this a bunch of times in the last few days:

The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about each other. So if you like, ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Then, if you like, post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

Comments

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

What's your voting record like?

[cellio]

Pretty consistently for limited government -- which is hard to find sometimes, because the people who want the government to stay out of your wallet often want it to stay in your bedroom, or vice-versa. So after filtering for the wackos, my general priorities are: (1) a libertarian, if available; (2) a challenger (rather than the incumbent), most of the time; (3) a combination that forces the various houses of government toward moderation. I think the worst thing that can happen to a government is one-party rule; at the national level, for example, if one of the major parties controls the white house I want the other to dominate Congress, and that's true regardless of which party has which part. 'Cause I'd rather see deadlock than either's agenda running rampant.

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

How do you pronounce your last name?

[cellio]

CHEL-lee-oh. Like the musical instrument plus a syllable.

I don't actually know the background (or meaning) of the name. My parents pronounce it "SEE-lee-oh", which isn't even close to the spelling. I made a conscious decision to change it because if I was going to have to correct people anyway, I was going to correct them to a plausible pronunciation. But I have to wonder whether Ellis Island changed the spelling from something that would be pronounced that way. I never knew my great-grandfather, who's the one who would have known. (My grandfather died when I was a child, and my father didn't ask. So the knowledge is gone now -- well, unless I care enough to go spelunking through immigration records, which I don't. I'm curious, not dedicated. :-) )

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

It's the Italian C, like Annette Funicello. :D It doesn't help that the law firm of Cellino and Barnes spent tens of thousands on advertising telling people it's "Sell-lee-no"

[cellio]

Oh, it's their fault? I see their billboards any time we're near Buffalo (how could we not?), but I've never seen their TV/radio ads.

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

(how could we not?)

Rather easily, now. :D Cellino got his license to practice law suspended, so now it's "The Barnes Firm". However, he's still saturation bombing the area with billboards, TV/radio, phonebook ads, etc. I want to see what happens when the suspension is lifted. Is Barnes going to 'take back' a criminal, even if he is a founding member?

[cellio]

Oh, I hadn't heard that. I think we saw Cellino on a billboard in April (last time we went to Toronto); did this happen since then? Or were they just slow to change the billboards?

What did Cellino do?

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

What did Cellino do?

Lend money to clients
Bad lawyer, no billboard

The six month suspension started in June 05, which actually means it's running out about now. I suspect the biggest cost to them was changing all the billboards. :D
-- Dagonell

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

Now that's something I shouldn't forget - considering I play the cello (or I did once upon a pre-kid life) :-)

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

So, CSOS. Good idea, bad idea, or pork chop? :-)

[cellio]

With 20/20 hindsight (or at least 20/30 :-) ), bad idea. We should have fought the fight; we shouldn't have formalized it into something as emotionally-loaded as CSOS. People focused on us too much when they should have been focusing on the breaches of faith and fiduciary responsibility at the corporate level.

[ginamariewade.livejournal.com]

Is it "chellio" or "sellio?" And what pair of shoes do you wear most often? And how tall are you?

[cellio]

Name: the former.

Shoes: in the summer, something filling the Birkenstock niche. (My current pair is made by Na'ot, but they're not as comfortable as Birkies so my next pair won't be.) In the winter, any generic black shoe of the right size (especially width) with decent traction; I got my current ones at Pay-Less for $15, IIRC. (I've tried good shoes; they don't last any longer than the cheap ones, so why bother?)

5'3".

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I DO find that "good" shoes last longer. By far. Maybe we're buying different kinds of shoes.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- I've been wearing Ecco shoes, they last about two years of daily wear. Granted, they cost about $100, but it amortizes down quickly.

The reason the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in the city on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

[cellio]

I'd be willing to pay that if I could get that long out of a pair. (See my comment to estherchaya about failure modes.)

[cellio]

Or maybe the failure modes are different. I do find that it's worth buying good sandals (e.g. Birkies rather than the $20 knock-offs), but for regular shoes, the point of failure for me is always the uppers -- specifically, they will develop holes either above my big toe or on the outside edge next to the widest part of the small toe. Yes, I've gone to good shoe stores, asked them to fit me properly, and bought what they recommended. $100 shoes and $20 shoes fail in this way at about the same rate (about a year, or a bit less). I'd love to be able to wear a pair of regular shoes long enough to have problems with the soles! That happens to me with sandals, but not otherwise.

It's a puzzle!

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Do you wear socks? Offhand it sounds like maybe you need a wider than usual toe box. IANAC (I am not a cordwainer, etc.)

Re: It's a puzzle!

[cellio]

I do wear socks, yes. (Well, with shoes; not with sandals.) I've tried different thicknesses of socks to see if that makes a difference, but it doesn't seem to.

I think you're right that I need a wider, and perhaps taller, toe box, and I select for this when shopping. But somehow it's never enough. Maybe I walk weirdly. :-)

Re: It's a puzzle!

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, I went into a good shoe store and asked for a pair of size 7 1/2 shoes.

The staffer offered to measure me, and ended up selling me a pair of SAS walking shoes, size 6 WWW, that fit wonderfully, and which I'm still wearing regularly 7 years later, including 3 years of daily wear-to-work.

I also recommend the brand of sneakers I wear, which has a really big toe box. (I'd have to dig for that info, sorry.)

Re: It's a puzzle!

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

I agree, it sounds like you've got wider feet than your shoes are willing to accommodate. (I've had that exact failure mode with too-narrow shoes before.)

I found a local "wide and hard to fit" shoe store, and I now wear a 6.5 EE shoe. The ones I have are the Canfield Performance Walker by P. W. Minor. (They have a find-a-dealer box on their home page.) This shoe comes in wide (D), double wide (EE) and quadruple wide (EEEE!) - it's likely that if it's a width problem they'll have something that can fit you. I pay $110-120 for a pair, and I'm at 1.5 years with the older pair and 0.5 with the newer, and probably have several years of wear left on each pair.

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

What attracts you to the particular type of Judaism you are involved in, and why?

[cellio]

Ah, someone who's requested an essay. :-) I'll try to be brief now but am happy to have a discussion.

A theology that fits with my experience of the world. A level of dedication to study even though we can't know all the answers. The ability to connect with the divine through active worship, and the opportunity to help do that for other people. The encouragement to learn more, explore more, and think more, from many in my congregation and most especially from my rabbi.

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

You seem to favor Italian food. What's you favorite dish?

[cellio]

It's funny: I like Italian food, but I don't think I favor it more than most other cusines. But I see why you would get that impression; Dani isn't as fond of some of my favorites (Japanese, Thai, Indian), and if I go to restaurants it's usually with him, so we compromise on the stuff we can both agree to -- and Italian is often a useful option because they're almost certain to have multiple vegetarian dishes and often have fish.

All that said, my favorite specific dish from an Italian restaurant is whitefish (the specific fish varies; often it's tilapia) lightly coated with seasoned bread crumbs and romano cheese and cooked in butter. Mmm! (That would be Il Viletto, for the locals.) My favorite "generic Italian" dish is either spinach lasagna or eggplant parmesan. I prefer pasta that carries a non-trivial cheese payload, whether that's ravioli, lasagna, stuffed shells, or whatever.

Oh, and garlic is a vegetable, not a spice. Choose quantities accordingly. :-)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

How'd you meet [SO]? And is he ever getting an LJ?

[cellio]

We met at the local SCA dance practice about 20 years ago. We were casual friends for years before it occurred to either of us that there could be something more there. Hey, I can be dim. :-)

I assume that if he doesn't have an LJ by now he's not going to. I assume he doesn't read mine, for that matter. He certainly knows about it (LJ in general and mine specifically), but he's never expressed any curiosity to me.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

With your vision problems, how do you go about reading LJ? What modifications do you make to your computer, the LJ default settings, how long or far or what you read, etc?

[cellio]

General computer settings: high contrast and minimum brightness (to avoid that "ooh! bright white!" effect), low-enough light levels in the room to support that, monitor placed about 8-10" from my face, lower resolution (1280x1024 on the 21" LCD at work; something lower on the 19" monitor at home). If using a CRT, flicker rate has to be at least 75Hz or I see it and get a headache.

Browser: larger default fonts and an enforced minimum for the evil web pages that still use hard-coded fonts. (More specifically: proportional font is Serif 18pt, monospaced is Courier New 13pt, minimum font size is 12pt.) Note that it's the combination of font size, monitor size, and resolution that leads to readability; when I got a new monitor at work I had to change all my browser settings because the basic pixel was now a different size.

LJ: for my own journal and for my friends page, I've carefully chosen the foreground and background colors to be easier on the eyes. (Black on white is kind of harsh, but reverse video has its own problems.) I enforce the default style on cut/comment links from my friends page, because lots of people have styles that are hard for me to read. (This doesn't help with memories or directly-linked posts, but "&style=mine" added to the URL can fix that, at least.)

My vision doesn't seem to dictate shorter sessions at the computer, aside from needing to get up and walk around and look at non-computer things periodically to rest my eyes. I work at a computer all day; I've done a lot of work adjusting it and the surrounding environment so I can do that. (And, of course, I have more control at home.)

[cellio]

Oh, one other LJ setting: when they introduced the new site style, the one with the pop-up menus across the top of the page, I switched my account to use the older style, the one with the links in the left column with the blue background. The fonts are bigger in the new style, but either the face or the color is different (I didn't look closely) and the result was that the site was harder, not easier, for me to read.

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

do you (or did you ever) have any recurring dreams?

[cellio]

I rarely remember my dreams, and the ones I've remembered have generally been unique, so no. I think I did have some recurring nightmares when I was a young child; I don't remember what they were now, but I do remember that I was utterly unable to connect them with anything going on in my life. And they went away, so I didn't worry about them.