Despite making a pretty decent living these days, some things still regularly flash me back to my less-well-off upbringing and set me off on a class warrior rant. One of these is conspicuous consumption in the form of ridiculously expensive items which have no intrinsic worth, but are made pricey for no purpose other than to display wealth ostentatiously. Like diamond-studded memory sticks. (Christ, if you’re going to consume conspicuously, buy something that is expensive for a reason, not just made expensive as a way to show off your score, he said with a straight face.)
Year: 2009
Aside
What does it say about me that when I read a piece on scientists attempting to create human/animal hybrids in order to harvest stem cells from animal eggs, that my immediate reaction is “Oh noes, they’re going to make the cat girls and some skeevy people will be way too excited about it”?
A Punishing Beverage
You know those people who only read one book at a time? I’m not one of them. At the moment I have two novels (one noir detective, one hard SF) on the go in my reading room, a collection of short stories (“M. R. James by way of Lovecraft”) in the bedroom, two books of poetry and political tract in… Read more →
The Child Of A Full Eclipse
I was not previously aware that Guy Gavriel Kay had “made his mark” as a poet before becoming a novelist. I can perhaps be excused for this, since my awareness of Kay started when I read his first novel (at age 11 or 12). To me, therefore, he’s a novelist, and one that I tend to automatically buy when he… Read more →
I Should Enjoy This While It Lasts, Right?
Sarah’s “big” Christmas present this year was her own iPod Nano, and a little clock/radio/dock that she could use to play it in her room. We had been having a lot of fun listening to songs in the car, taking turns picking songs, and she liked both being able to pick songs, and looking at the “pictures” (i.e. the album… Read more →
Reality Shock
It’s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with “Wow, that’s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago”. In addition to this being common, I’ve also noticed that X is decreasing. Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two: Teleportation. OK, admittedly, it’s a very low… Read more →
The Black Cab Sessions
Once again, along comes one of these things where my immediate reaction is “I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this already.” I’m talking this time about The Black Cab Sessions: musicians record a single track, in a single take, in the back of a black cab, and the results are then webcast to the world. As they put it… Read more →
A few of someone else’s photos
One of the ways that I can lose time on the Internet–one of the myriad, myriad ways–is browsing through the contents of Flickr. Sometimes I just search on strange keywords, or lyrics, or the names of perfomers, just to see what comes up, and spent way more time than I intended flicking through the results. For example, this isn’t what… Read more →
Let Us Talk Of Webcomics: Part 1, Dresden Codak.
I read a fair number of comics–you know the old school printed kind that one buys at speciality stores these days (admittedly some of them can be purchased at the larger bookstores as well, particularly the Asian imports, but most of what I read is speciality shop only). The “direct market” has been in some trouble for a while now,… Read more →
Worth 2000 Words
A recent cleaning and reorganization process resulted in our more-or-less reclaiming the upstairs family room from our daughter. Not that we’ve kicked her out of there, but we’ve removed a bunch of her stuff from the room, making it seem less exclusively hers. A consequence of this is that we had room to add a new chair. So we went… Read more →
Aside
So, which would be more fun to leave visible on your computer in a full screen, kiosk mode, browser window: Now or Henchmen’s Helper? (Sometimes I wish I was in an office, just so I could engage in these small performances.)
Sometimes you need more than six words
I knew he had potential when, instead of being creeped out, he was fascinated by the antique glass eye I carry around in my purse. One sentence stories. All the potential of PostSecret, but less bathos. Although drunken ideas rarely come to fruition, we found ourselves on Pearl Street the next morning serving syrupy handfuls of my famous pumpkin spice… Read more →
Aside
I found a place–or rather was referred to one–on Saturday that would happily sell me a replacement 1TB SATA2 drive for my RAID array, and at a decent price. (Yes, you can read that as “Future Shop can bite my shiny metal ass.”) The array worked perfectly, and none of my roughly 2TB of data in that array was lost due to the drive failure. I wish I could report the same level of success with Intrepid Ibex and wireless–I did finally get the wireless “working”, but it disconnects every 15 minutes or so, and I am becoming very familiar with the term “kernel panic”.
Easy To Say, Hard To Do
One of many. Read more →
Aside
Mean Tricks To Play On Yourself #345: Install Linux on a laptop with only wireless connectivity (i.e. not just not plugged in, but nothing to plug in to), where that connectivity is provided by a Broadcom-based wireless adapter. Level 2: Once you have that working, enjoy it for a while, and then do a distribution upgrade, so that it will break and you can have that fun all over again. Level 3: Repeat with every distribution upgrade.
