I have survived my little temporary excursion into the rock-and-roll world, and I really enjoyed myself. Stories later, once I’ve cleared up the work that piled up while I was off playing roadie. The really short version is that I had tremendous fun, but I suspect that a significant part of the reason I could enjoy myself was because I… Read more →
Month: July 2006
What I’m doing this weekend: On Tour
I’m taking Thursday and Friday off work this week, so that I can spend three days following consummate musician Danny Michel on his mini-tour of the Maritimes. Read more →
What I did on Friday: Birth Of Serfs
Friday night, at midnight, I was at the Oxford Cinema (yes, the same Oxford Cinema that was recently featured in Brian Wood’s comic Demo) to catch the “sort of secret” premiere of Mirco Chen’s movie The Birth Of Serfs. Read more →
Y.A.L.: 100 Science Fiction Books
Phobos Entertainment – Features – 100 Science Fiction Books So just how does one find stellar SF? For starters, why don’t you try out these 100 narrative works. Each one should be part of every SF reader’s—not to mention every SF writer’s—repertoire. Many of these novels are award winners, and most have inspired profound trends in science fiction. Well, it’s… Read more →
Saturday Miscellany
OK, let’s see if we can close a whole bunch of tabs on my desktop, and maybe bring something interesting to you at the same time. Hollywood might have some cool special effects, but Nature can really create a 60km long rift! One that threatens to carve out a new ocean. Damn that’s cool in a “can you imagine the… Read more →
Hidden sequitors
Today’s almost random browsing brings about this series of connections, which links the capital of Venezuela to the highest ranking American killed in World War II, to fact that the act of making a mint julep with creme de menthe can be considered an abomination. Read more →
Keeping It Real
Seeing the review of Keeping It Real pop up on Strange Horizons yesterday reminded me that I wanted to say something about the book. Somehow I managed to avoid any notice that this book was forthcoming, despite my relatively recent interest in Robson, and was somewhat shocked to find out that it was already out (in the UK) before I… Read more →
Monday Miscellany…
Yeah, work is still killing me, so I’m phoning it in. Still, it’s a bargain at the price. Today’s reason to be annoyed with Fortress AmerikaSpinrad predicted this.: U.S. Government Increasingly Blocking Entry at the Border Because of Ideology Fifty NFB films free on the web. The whole Cat Came Back thing was giving me flashbacks to my childhood, but… Read more →
A good week for books…
It’s been a good week for books here at the Ranch. I’ve had lovely new books from Subterranean Press arrive Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (plus a copy of the new issue of Subterranean’s magazine today). I had a SHOCKING SURPRISE arrival from another source (more below) early in the week. Read more →
No, really, it’s funny. I swear.
In an old photo album, amongst images of 16-year old Chris, and his various journeys around the world, there is a comic strip. It has clearly been torn out of the colour Sunday comics and pasted into the book. For the last sixteen years or so, this has been the reigning champion in my personal list of best single comic… Read more →
Offered Without Comment
“They called me the Reverend when I entered the Church unstained”… Man, my scanner is dusty. Read more →
RFID Guardian
You know, I would totally buy a tool that would show me information about all the RFID tokens in my “area of influence”, and allow me to block (or, perhaps more interestingly, spoof) selected ones. It would cater to both my urge to hack things, and my tinfoil hat paranoia. You know, if more and more stores move to using… Read more →
Hanging Around The House 9: The Upstairs Bathrooms
Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are much more highly constrained. The… Read more →
Spam solution working…
Well, since I made the changes to my anti-spam shields, I have been averaging 15-20 spams a day that get trapped by Spam Karma, which is a pretty tremendous improvement from the previous 400+ per day. In those 4 days Bad Behaviour has blocked around 400 activities, which means everything is working like it’s supposed to: those 400 activities would… Read more →
Dealing with comment/trackback spam
Well, after the great spamming of ’06 I thought things had settled down and I could live with the 30-50 comment spam attempts that Spam Karma 2 handles for me every day. I mean, I still have to quickly scan a long list of these blocked spam every now and then to make sure that good posts aren’t being blocked,… Read more →
