Sometime this morning, I awoke very thirsty. I opened-up a bottle of tea that I had by my bed, and gulped some down. My lower esophageal sphincter — the valve between the esophagus and the stomach — suddenly started spasming, and hurt as if I had swallowed something relatively large and inelastic. I don't recall previously having that experience from drinking liquid (and tepid liquid at that).

At this point, several hours later, I'm still aware of a low-level discomfort there. (And it truly hurts when I laugh.) I think of food warily.

I'm planning to visit my parents in Tucson, for Thanksgiving, and that argues against getting a mouse until I have returned, since it would be best if the mouse and I had a well-established relationship before I take it on trips of any length. None-the-less, I went to La Jolla yester-day evening, to take a look at a mouse. He wasn't, in any case, what I really want, in part because he looks fully adult, and I'd like to get a juvenile.

The trip wasn't a loss, as I stopped at the World Market site in La Jolla Village Square, and found red stacking coffee cups and stacking large mugs that match the stacking espresso cups of the Woman of Interest. (Some of the sets of large mugs were still in their shipping boxes, and a young woman at the store was kind enough to find for me a set of the coffee cups likewise still packed.)

I also found various seasonal rubber ducks, the best of which had a kippah and Chanukah vestments. I got one for a neighbor who has an extensive collection of rubber ducks.

Much of my time of late has been going into my paper on operationalizing a model of preference in which strict preference and indifference don't provide a total ordering.

Quite a while ago, I reälized very precisely what sort of system the assumptions would have to imply; I mistakenly presumed that I would relatively quickly identify sufficient assumptions (beyond those already recognized). But, at this point, I have a sufficient assemblage, each member of which is, taken by itself, at least passably acceptable. Jointly, however, there's an issue of factoring.

The paper derives its results from three sets of propositions. The first and second sets seem perfectly fine to me, and I don't expect them to provoke much dispute. The third set are more ad hoc. For the purposes of the paper they function as axiomata, but some or all of them would more ideally be derived from deeper principles (the pursuit of which, however, would be mostly a distraction from my goals).

It's amongst this last set of propositions that the factoring problem exists. One of them used to play an important rôle; right now it's doing nothing but occupying space. I'd remove it, except that I suspect that, in conjunction with the very principle that seemed to make it superfluous, it renders redundant another principle which feels even more ad hoc.

At the same time, I am now wrestling with what sort of discussion to provide after presenting the theoremata. I just don't seem to be in much of a frame-of-mind to ruminate.

A 4.1 'quake hit at 33.498°N 116.865°W, at 12:35:42 UTC. I felt it here in Hillcrest, and started checking the USGS SoCal 'quake map, fearing that a population center had been hit by something big. Fortunately, the 'quake wasn't all that strong, and the population density at the surface above the epicenter was very low (even before the 'quake).

[Up-Date (2008:11/21): I was asleep when a 5.0 'quake hit Baja Calfornia yester-day, and don't recall feeling it.]

My parents were in-town from Friday after-noon into Sunday morning. Dad came in part to do a reading and book-signing at Mysterious Galaxy Books.

My parents were quite surprised by my appearance, not having seen nor been warned about the sideburns. My mother insisted that I now have a beard.

They brought with them a bicycle that my father used. He now finds it too hard on his hips, and so gave it to me. It has been more than fifteen years since I owned a bicycle, and more than twenty years since I rode on one. I'll hope that riding a bicycle is just like riding a bicycle.

He also gave me a couple of surplus Logitech computer mouses (one in need of repair and the other essentially brand new), and books and copies of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I gave to Dad the crushable Aussie hat that I got for him, and a Beanie Baby husky. (Dad is not know for being a fan of Beanie Babies, but we have fond memories of our last family dog, a Siberian Husky.) I completely forgot to give to them any of the CFLs that I got when they were on sale.

I have plans to travel to Tucson for Thanksgiving, in part because my parents' computers need some sort of maintenance.

As previously mentioned, one of my Corsair Voyager 8GB USB flash drives has failed.

Christophe Grenier's TestDisk was unable to locate a partition table. But his PhotoRec is racing through the drive recovering various sorts of files. I am quite pleased and impressed.

Unfortunately, the program has no way of identifying the file names! So the files are all being given new, opaque names.

Addendum (2008:12/17): A recent entry by oddharmonic reminded me to note here that PhotoRec reässembled video files like Frankenstein Flub-a-Dubs. Mind you that there was really no practical way for the program to know what bits belonged together, and the resultant files could be fixed by using a decent video editor to re·splice them.

One of the Corsair 8GB Voyager USB flash drives that I bought seems to have completely failed, before I even received the mail-in rebate for it. Grand.

Oddly enough, these were well away from the corner.

I was up for about 23 hours, went to bed, and slept, uh, for about three hours.

I decided to get on-line and see if there'd been a further reversal-of-fortune for Proposition 8, the California measure to outlaw same-sex marriage. Although in the past the electorate had voted to ban same-sex marriage, conventional wisdom, going into this election, was that the Proposition would fail by a clear margin. I believed this convention wisdom, and saw it as the one real bright spot of the election.

But as the numbers started to come-in, it began to seem that the Proposition would pass by about the margin by which it had been expected to fail.

Now, with 22587 of 25429 precincts reporting, the measure leads 4,843,531 to 4,519,010 — about 52% to 48%. There has been a little drift in the percentages since I had last checked, but nothing that suggests that there will be some marked difference in the relative shares reported amongst the later-reporting precincts. Basically, the remaining precincts would have to have voted about 64% against the Proposition for it to fail.

I had been planning to remove the Vote No bumpersticker from my note-book computer if the measure failed. I'm inclined to leave on for a while now, as a gesture of protest. But I'm concerned that it may just depress some of the people around me, so I'm going to conduct an informal poll amongst them.

I guess that, one way or another, the sticker has a short shelf-life. A little more than eight years ago, a Proposition 22, perhaps better known as the Knight Initiative and as the defense of marriage act, set out to achieve much the same ends as this latest Proposition 8. Now-a-days, No-on-Knight is quite meaningless to the vast majority of people, and No on 22 would be mysterious to an even larger group.

On occasion in Hillcrest, I find footwear on the sidewalk, at some corner. And I don't mean a lone sneaker or flip-flop; I mean a matched pair of shoes or of boots, one placed beside the other. These were at the corner of Washington Street and Third Avenue this evening: