Just woke up to find that not only was my cellphone summoning me to let me know I missed a call (unknown verizon number, will have to call back tomorrow to find out who it is), but I apparently was petting my cat Beefalo in my sleep. It's weird to find that one's body has been productive(?) while zonked out. "Today" (although that register bit has already been cleared from these 4 hours of sleep) was pretty surreal - woke up with one of those all-day migraines (which, being seasonal, are probably here to stay) which gave me both constant pain and a feeling of not entirely being on the same planet as everyone else. Was reasonably productive at work, and a brief nap afterwards to lighten it gave me enough relief that I was able to join people for a brief dinner and temporarily join in a night of gaming. Enjoyed(ish) a game called Mao which probably would've been better if my head hadn't been throbbing and I had been able to think, eventually made a mad dash home when the migraine began to threaten my vision.

At least it's mostly gone now. Last winter/spring I was under the impression that migraines were seriously ruining my life - I eventually got a referral to a neurologist who gave me some medicines to try, but before I could really try them it was summer and they disappeared without a trace. For the last few weeks they've shown signs of returning. This combined with my recent difficulties with intense fits/moments of panicy depression... all is not well in Patland. Oh well, c'est la vie, I suppose.

Dreams were very strange - somebody was hiding inside a skyscraper and using bits of Torah, modified, to make fortune cookies and good luck charms, and I was part of a group that was very angry at this (the word "heresy" was tossed around a lot) and was trying to track them down. It's strange to have dreams where one has reactions/a worldview radically different than one's own - much more bizarre than just dreaming about temptations towards things that are immoral in one's worldview being things one is tempted/seduced into doing.

In food news, Ciabatta is a bit of a current fixation - given about 30 seconds of microwave love, it is one of the most pleasantness-per-cubic-inch substances I know (it has fairly rough competition - olive hummus, spinach, and guacamole among the foods).

I recently picked up an old issue of Cerebrum magazine from the Psychology free stuff table (I'm starting to shunt random stuff I don't want any more off to there too) - it's a really strange (but interesting) magazine - claims to cover neurology, immunology, and arts education. It's definitely not a neuropsych journal - while MRI studies are mentioned, they're mentioned with conclusion already attached (rather than with enough data that you could conclude the study meant something different than the conclusion gave it, and without the statistics). There's content on other things as well, from the ethics of allowing mentally disabled people to vote to efforts between philosophers and neuroanatomists over notions of a self (the latter feels a bit forced, honestly). It's good reading so far - will probably try to hunt down other issues at some point.

On the Unix front - I want to play with some of the neat stuff people playing with FUSE have made (last time I looked was only a bit after that old NFS hack cryptfs was decided to be using a bad approach). Recently discovered the right setting to tell screen not to be broken in handling utf8 - now that that's done, I might switch from pidgin to finch. My apologies to non-unixy folk for the illegibility of this paragraph.