There should always be a 24-hour computer parts store, so that when one of the drives in your RAID array craps out, you can immediately go and buy a replacement for it, rather than having to spend the night in the knowledge that if another one of the drives happens to fail right now, you’re toast.
Year: 2009
SF Writers Say Smart Things: WJW On Geek Fiction
I’ve never mistaken my hobbies for real life. I’ve always craved real life, even when I didn’t have one. I’ve sought out life, even when I didn’t know how. I’ve always tried to live real life, even when I didn’t have a clue. I travel a lot. I talk to strangers. I eat their candy. —Walter Jon Williams Go read… Read more →
Language By Example, Again
As I said the last time I talked about this, several times a week I find myself saying something and I realize that while I know what it means, I don’t know why it means that. When I catch myself at this, I’m off to find out why. This morning brought two new examples. The first was “proof”. I mean… Read more →
Aside
Wow. 22 minutes. He’s right, they do live on shamelessness and motivated amnesia.
It begins…
Look, I know the dude isn’t the messiah. He’s a politician, and he’s way, way to the right of me, so I’m sure lots of things he will do will seem disappointing to me. That’s not the point today. As a very smart friend of mine said today: “For the first time in about fifteen years I believe it is… Read more →
A robot moose walks into a bar…
That’s Bullwinkle, the robot moose. No, seriously. A robot moose. Apparently the Natural Resources Department here in Nova Scotia uses him to catch people who are illegally trying to bag an endangered species. I ran into a story today–admittedly a story from a couple of years back–about this, and it just makes me laugh. It’s a short story, but pure… Read more →
On bacon
I quite like bacon. Indeed, I occasionally require it, ideally in the form of the canonical club sandwich. You might think, then, that see a short, informative video on bacon would be something I would enjoy. As you might guess after watching that, “I enjoyed that” was not my immediate reaction. In fact, my immediate reaction was to Google the… Read more →
Aside
It’s not every day that I scoop William Gibson by more than two years–apparently I am pretty far ahead of him on the gross cheese curve. (It is terribly common for me to see things a couple of days before they end up on Boing Boing though.)
Party politics and the middle east
You know, when representatives of over 30 countries agree on something… it’s kind of miraculous. All the agendas, and internal bickering, and differing philosophies, etc. Hell, just getting the government of a single democratic country to take a position on something is an achievement, since every firm position is bound to offend some power group “at home”. So something that… Read more →
My nocturnally-biased suprachiasmatic nuclei
For at least 20 years now, I’ve known that I’m both happiest, and most productive, with a schedule where I am awake until the wee hours of the morning (between 2 and 4AM), and sleep until roughly the crack of noon. I haven’t been able to achieve that often, and its been more than four years now since I could… Read more →
More Book-y Bits
Did you get a chance to experience the cognitive dissonance that comes from VanderMeerian words read in a high-toned children’s literature type voice? Speaking of VanderMeerian weirdness, there was a nice little slice of it over at Tor.com. Sometime soon (yes, Real Soon Now) I will write another golden book post, and this one will focus on a Pat Cadigan… Read more →
Noted Quotes
A couple of quotations from my web reading recently: “I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.” –U.S. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder (via) “Watch half a film. Ring someone up, ask them about their dreams. Make your life as patchy a discourse as possible.” —M. John Harrison, explaining something about writing “If only it were all so simple!… Read more →
All that foil-folding work for nothing…
At some past jobs, although not so much at this one, I’ve been the guy that my co-workers referred to as “tinfoil hat security guy”. I was the one who worried about cookies and tracking before most people did (and well before we all just gave up because Google knows everything about us), who raved about TIA and Carnivore, who… Read more →
Aside
I must be the worst techo-tv-phile in the world. I just watched a movie that’s been on my DVR since June of 2006. I’m not sure why it’s wrong that I kept it there for two and a half years without either watching or deleting it, but I’m sure that it is somehow. It wasn’t that good either.
Closing the book-related tabs
And here we go again… I’ve been reading Jeff’s daily reviews of the books in the Penguin Great Ideas series. While I don’t think I’m interested in trying to read all sixty of them in sixty days (despite Jeff’s examples and the exhortation of the Harvard University Press) I am very impressed with the presentation of the volumes, and have… Read more →
