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 →
Year: 2006
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 →
The biggest downside of midsummer…
Most of the time I’m a peaceful man, but all the earwigs in the world could die right now and I would be OK with that. Damn you Mom, for telling me when I was very young that earwigs crawl into your ears and can’t turn around, so they have to eat through your brain. Damn you Night Gallery. Read more →
My job is getting me down.
Blogging is suffering due to overwork. My day today felt exactly like this. Of course, even when my job is painfully tedious, there are some levels even I won’t sink to to provide myself with distraction. Read more →
Sleep is awesome
My wonderful wife and child let me sleep in until 11:15 this morning. (Note for non-Canadians: today is the observed holiday of Canada Day, July 1, and is thus a non-work day for me–hence I had an excuse to stay up last night fiddling with wireless card firmware, etc.) While 11:15 would have been “early” for getting up on a… Read more →
I have a wireless Linux box
I am writing this post in a Firefox window on my newly installed Ubuntu Linux machine. I had a relatively old IBM Thinkpad A21m sitting around, more-or-less unused, so I decided to test the rumours I’ve been hearing that Ubuntu is now at the “easy one step install and it just works” stage. Bear in mind that the last time… Read more →
I have too many fillings.
You know, I’ve always expected to see a couple of things in my lifetime: a cure for baldness and a way to scientifically regrow teeth. For both of those, I expected the solution to be some kind of biological one–we would trick the body into regrowing these things the same way it had grown them in the first place. Well,… Read more →
Go SCOTUS
This post made possible by the New Medievalism research team. I was pretty surprised today at the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hamadan–I honestly didn’t expect this court to deny Bush anything, much less make a decent ruling. Here’s a snippet from the AP story: Supreme Court blocks Bush, Gitmo war trials WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that… Read more →
