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 July
21, 2008: LOLMonsters
 We
were just BSing a couple of nights ago over wine and beers at Julie's
christening, and LOLCats
came up. I'm not a regular reader of LOLCats, but I've seen it enough
to get a sense for the genre, and the addition of a little zinfandel
reminded me that this is not a new thing.
Nossir. I remember Monster Cards.
Back in 1961 or 1962, a fad was raging in my corner of the Immaculate
Conception grade school playground: Monster cards. These were a
little like baseball cards (and about the same size) but instead
of sports heroes, they had stills from old monster movies, with
a silly caption at the bottom. This was in plain English and not
LOLCats-speak (which itself
is a parody of IM shorthand) else the card at left would be captioned
PUT ME ON UR FRENZ LIST? On the flipside was a drawing of a ghost
over a joke calculated to make fourth-graders laugh. (As you might
imagine, the bar was not very high.) The whole thing was wrapped
up in plastic with a card-sized rectangle of some tepid and invariably
stale bubble gum. My friends were all collecting them, and even
though I spent my money on Hi-Flier kites and Tom Swift books rather
than monster cards or comics, I flipped through my friends' stacks,
grinning at some and rolling my eyes at others.
There were two types that I remember, both available from Perlen
Drugs at the corner of Canfield and Talcott. The larger cards had
"Spook Stories" printed on the back and were copyrighted
by Universal Films. These had the most famous and recognizable monsters:
Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and
the Wolfman. The jokes on the back were sometimes even clever. The
smaller cards had "Monster Laffs" printed on the back
over the jokes (which were invariably stupid and rarely funny) and
were printed in sheets of three with bad perfs between them. My
duller friends who didn't catch on to folding at the perfs before
separating them often had to Scotch tape their cards back together
after inadvertently ripping them in half. These smaller cards (which
collectors have dubbed "Monster Midgees") were copyrighted
by cheapo fright house American International Films, and apart from
the several incarnations of the She Creature and the memorable Colossal
Beast, showed monsters that few of us had ever seen, even with Chicago
Channel 7's perpetual scraping of the bottom of the monster movie
barrel. Mostly they were hokey-looking paper mache alien things
or brains with eyes, over even hokier (and generally un-funny) captions.
I'm surprised at how little there is online today about monster
cards, at least the ones that I recall. The genre continued long
after I left grade school, mutating as it went, but I ignored them
because they dropped the humor. The legendary Mars
Attacks! cards were in no way funny; in fact, they were a gruesome
comic book presented one frame at a time. (I wonder sometimes if
they were a poke in the eye of the Comics Code Authority.) Cards
from mid-60s TV series like The Outer Limits and Star
Trek had stills from the shows but no funny captions and no
jokes—and sheesh, guys, I had already seen the TV shows. I
half-expected full indices of the cards and their captions online,
but apart from a
few fan pages and pictures of cards for sale on eBay, they've
mostly been forgotten. "Caption humor" seemed to go into
eclipse for forty years, not to emerge until the Internet Age and
LOLCats. I guess everything comes back eventually. I used to wear
purple bell-bottoms and
worse in the late 60s and early 70s. Are they next?
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July
20, 2008: Juliana's Christening
After much planning and preparation, our new niece Juliana Leigh
Roper officially joined the Catholic community last night, as all
of the immediate family we have left gathered around Bill and Gretchen's
huge dining room table for the Mass and baptism. Rev. Mary of the
Old Catholic Church presided, as
she did back in December 2006 for Julie's older sister Katie Beth.
Once again, Gretchen hand-made a christening dress for Julie, and
Carol gave Julie the little christening shoes that she herself had
worn back at her own baptism in 1953. Again as for Katie Beth, Carol
and I promised to keep her on the path as best we can. Godparents
don't have to be theologians; what they have to be are good examples
and good cheering sections. Carol and I had excellent
godparents, and the example was not wasted on us. And yes, words
are my thing and I am going to attempt a simple catechism for small
children, but we're a couple of years off on that yet. (Which doesn't
absolve me from starting to take notes right away. Kids grow up
fast.) Theology for ten-year-olds can start very simply,
and I will begin with what I learned from Juliana's namesake: Lady
Julian of Norwich, who taught that God is infinitely loving and
forgiving, and that all manner of thing would ultimately be made
well in God's own time. Sooner or later, children must also learn
that that there is death and suffering and injustice, but those
lessons must be learned from a platform of solid belief in the goodness
of creation and God's ultimate victory over all evil and suffering.
The goodness of that creation and God's affection for his creatures
was the subject of Mary's short homily from the head of the dining
room table. Partway through, Julie began to fuss a little, in the
time-honored tradition of infants making a ruckus in church. Without
missing a beat, Mary scooped little Julie up in her arms and calmed
her down as only a mother (and grandmother) can, continuing to preach
her sermon with a baby on her shoulder. (This is something you don't
generally see in Catholic churches.) Julie soon returned to sleep,
and barely stirred when Mary took the seashell and poured the (warm)
blessed water over her forehead, baptising her in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Afterward there was time for good talk, good wine (we had a Frey
organic zinfandel and a Bartenura moscato) and Bill's superb grilling
skills, with fresh Polish sausage and hamburgers, Hawaiian salad,
baked beans, and various small sides. QBit and Aero ran around in
circles in the back yard while Katie watched, laughing with delight,
and even though the evening was muggy and drippy, Carol and I called
it a complete and unvarnished success. Come 9:30 we packed up the
puppies and headed for the door, but Katie cried and kept reaching
for Carol, who had read her One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue
Fish several times. Earlier, she had been brushing what's left
of my hair with her new hairbrush. She is beginning to learn about
godparents and their uses, heh.
After a pretty grim ten years or so on the family front, family
is happy and growing again. For many years Gretchen and I thought
that our part of the Duntemann line ended with us, but God sometimes
answers prayers, and midevening, when our two little prayers sat
together in the big chair for pictures, somehow we knew that All
Manner of Thing will be well—in fact, as far as we're concerned,
we're most of the way there right now.
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July
18, 2008: Odd Lots
- I'm not quite as ga-ga as the reporter, but make no mistake:
This
is one of the most startling deep-space videos ever taken,
of the Moon making a transit across the Earth, seen from a distance
of fifty million kilometers. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- My nephew Brian just bought a Blackberry cellphone and is trying
to find a software package that will allow him to sync his Google
Calendar data with the phone. This is something I've never had
to do (I do not currently have a PDA nor a smartphone) and so
I'm looking for suggestions.
- Eat kohlrabi, Dean Ornish: A
long-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine
indicates that low-carb diets are significantly better at helping
people lose weight and lower cholesterol than low-fat diets. As
complex as the obesity issue is, I speak to people again and again
and again who have found what we've found in their own lives:
Lowering fat does not help much. Lowering carbs, and especially
lowering sugar, helps a lot.
- Carol and I were down in Lincoln Park the other day, and saw
saturation advertising for a wind-powered condo complex that intrigued
me enough to write the Web address down across Heath Ledger's
late face on the Red Eye. Take
a look and read the fine print. Those well-hidden wind turbines
on the roof generate up to 2% of the building's electricity.
And so wind power takes its place as a techno-fetish among the
terminally hip and the gorgeously clueless. Larger turbines could
generate significantly more of the building's power, but the
neighbors might complain—and that's not hip at all, is
it?
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July
16, 2008: Odd Lots
- A reader wrote to tell me that I am "MSG blind," (see
my entry for July 14, 2008) which means
that MSG does not affect my taste chemistry—and that people
who are MSG blind are generally the people who react badly to
the chemical. Alas, I can't find anything about this online, but
it's an interesting idea.
- Screw the polar bears. The big downside to Global Warming™
is now kidney
stones. Ouch.
- I hadn't heard much about the Casimir Effect recently, but courtesy
Frank Glover, here's a good article on modifying
nanoscale structures to minimize "stiction" due to Casimir
forces. More speculative but lots more fun are some links
at the end describing projects attempting to harness Casimir forces
in various ways, many or most of which still seem a little whiffy.
(I made enthusiastic use of vacuum energy in my novel, The
Cunning Blood.)
- The Washington Post suggests that we strap
engines on the ISS and send it to the Moon, to act as an orbital
station to help stage travel to a lunar base. Maybe a little far
fetched, but only a little—and we're not doing much with
the damned thing where it's sitting right now.
- And as if NASA didn't have enough to worry about, now, well,
scientists are telling them that they had better establish an
officially sanctioned 200-mile-high club.
- The acronym is unfortunate, but Sandisk's
write-once read-many (WORM) SD card has an application that
isn't even mentioned in the press release: A unit for mounting
a hack-proof operating system instance. No mention what the access
time is (I'm guessing slowwwww) but it's an approach that many
people have been calling for for some years.
- Finally, as a proud godfather of two nieces who are big for
their ages but still very small, this
video made me cringe a little. (Don't parents have enough
to worry about?) Quick, how long would it take you mechanical
engineer types to devise a sheet-metal flap valve to fix this
problem?
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July
15, 2008: Crackergate, Mon Dieu
I elbowed a bit of a wasp's nest yesterday, in briefly recounting
the story of Paul Z. "PZ" Myers, the biology professor
who put out a call for Catholics to mail him consecrated hosts for
public desecration. There's backstory that fairness requires me
to relate: Webster Cook, a student at the University of Florida,
went to Mass at a Catholic Ministries liturgy held on campus, took
Communion, and went back to his pew without consuming the host.
Why he did this is unclear—I had a great deal of trouble sifting
facts from hearsay in this case, which exists mostly in the blogosphere—but
he took the host out of the building even though some of the people
from Campus Ministries noisily demanded that he either swallow it
or give it back. He refused, and the host went home with him in
his pocket. Thus began...Crackergate.
I may catch some flack here from my Catholic readers for saying
this: The church should have left it at that. But no, the well-known
William Donohue, head of the Catholic League, got into the act,
and suddenly it's a category 5 barroom brawl. Donohue has made a
career of jumping on anybody and everybody who says something that
puts Catholicism in a bad light. How effective he's been is open
to debate. He was certainly instrumental in getting ABC's warm-hearted
but liberal-slanted Catholic sitcom Nothing Sacred canceled
back in 1997; beyond that it's hard to tell. He's gone after solid
milk-chocolate statues of Jesus and tried to organize a boycott
of the film version of The Golden Compass. I'd suggest that
there are other, better places where that sort of energy might be
spent, but let it pass. Most moderate Catholics would love to find
another village that would take him.
Webster Cook returned the undamaged host to the church about a
week later, but not before the Catholic lunatic fringe had begun
sending him death threats. And then Prof. Myers jumped into the
game, eager to play the dozens and keep the pot at a full boil.
Here are his exact words, posted on his blog:
I have an idea. Can
anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's
no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes
prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing
to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to
me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I
won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a
choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue
kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane
act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat
it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed
and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with
laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the
armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion
ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.
Here's the
full post on Pharyngula.
Ok. Does any of this sound to you like a pack of seventh graders
mixing it up on the playground? It sure does to me. The detailed
facts seem to change depending on whom you read, but Cook is claiming
that he was "restrained" by a woman who turns out to be
about half his physical size. He is now filing charges against the
Campus Ministries for violating university hazing rules that prohibit
forced eating. And Bill Donohue is trying to get PZ Myers fired.
So far, as best we can tell, no desecrations have taken place.
My primary comments on all this:
- Genuine death threats are illegal and actionable. If you get
one, don't just bitch. Go to the cops. That's what laws are for.
- If your opponents are insulting you, meeting them insult-for-insult
is precisely the wrong thing to do if you want the moral
high ground, or to simply avoid looking stupid.
- Respect is an inner virtue; less something you show than something
you are. Desecration happens in the man (or woman)
and not to the host, flag, book, shrine, or image.
- Allowing people to make you angry gives them power over you.
Atheists who are cheering on Myers seem blind to the fact that
Myers is making atheism look bad. Which leads me to ask: What is
atheism actually for? If its goal is to win people away from
religion, making sane arguments in a respectful manner would seem
more effective than insults and ridicule. If (as seems to me at
times) it's a sort of tribal venting society, then go for it, keeping
in mind that few people recognize therapeutic venting for what it
is, and you won't get a lot of converts from ordinary folks who
are not axe-grinders by temperament. You'll just look churlish.
I'm sure I've already given this more attention than it really
deserves. I've begun wondering if Webster Cook was challenged over
a drink to come up with the college prank to end all college pranks
(judged by the ratio of effort required to publicity generated)
and he may have succeeded. I've also heard that PZ Myers is considering
desecrating a copy of the Qur'an as well. I'll believe that
when I see it.
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July
14, 2008: Odd Lots
- For a little over a year, I've been buying dry-roasted peanuts
from Safeway that do not contain MSG. Recently we noticed that
the packaging had changed, and checked the ingredients. MSG returns,
gakkh. Dry-roasted peanuts are a much better snack than their
rep would have it, but MSG makes me feel weird in the head, so
the search for MSG-free dry-roasted peanuts resumes. Interestingly,
I had a couple of Planter's dry-roasted peanuts the other day
(knowing full-well that they have MSG in them; I had a few, not
handfuls) and they do not taste any different. Not better.
Not worse. Not a little bit. Not at all. So the companies
that print "monosodium glutamate (flavor enhancer)"
on their peanut labels are being ripped off. MSG does not enhance
flavor. What it does do is mess some people over (like me, and
countless others) and cost the vendors money. MSG is cheap, but
not free. When will food packagers realize that they could save
money and increase their market by just dumping it?
- Pertinent to the above, Jay's Barbecue Potato Chips also lack
MSG, and are the only barbeque potato chips I've ever seen that
don't have it. They are a Chicago brand, and so far we haven't
seen them in Colorado Springs. But when I'm here, I gorge.
- I'm a big fan of lashup railcars, but I startled a little when
Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a model of a
pink Galloping Goose. The paint schemes are described
as "authentic." So was there ever a Rio Grande Goose
in pink and white livery? I've not been able to determine that—but
whoa, somehow I doubt it. That's a spit-and-baling-wire, real-man's
tin-roof rough-and-tumble item that reminds me of Mad Max
as much as it does of the Old West. Pink? Sheesh!
- A tenured professor at the University of Minnesota has put
out a call for Catholics to send him consecrated Eucharistic hosts...so
that he can desecrate them. I had hoped this was an urban
legend, but the Washington Times generally knows better.
I wonder if he (and his clueless university) understand that this
doesn't hurt the Church at all, but makes higher education in
general and university professors in particular look mean-spirited
and ridiculous.
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a
Modern Mechanix item from 1933 that may be the original "watt
dog" cooker, which spawned a
famous Carl & Jerry story cautioning young tinkerers about
the hazards of messing with line current. A board with nails pounded
through it, facing up...with 110V on the nails. Wow. (And while
you're there, click on the cover image to get a closer look at
what was prompting young geeks to buy magazines in 1933. Maybe
the
Flynn Effect really does exist.)
- On second thought, probably
not.
- Thanks to Baron_Waste,
I discovered that the
United States' net carbon emissions declined by 3% between 2000
and 2006. Of the top 17 carbon emitters, only France reduced
emissions more—and I'd wager that that's because France has
had the good sense to stuff their antinuclear crackpots in the
Bastille and forget about them.
- Nertz. Wrong. France closed the Bastille in 1789. Well, hey:
Today is the
158th birthday of the ice maker.
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July
11, 2008: Rant: Idealism and "Settling"
I catch a certain amount of shit for my longstanding conviction
that idealism is a Bad Thing. (I just got another nasty email on
the subject, hence my very bad mood this evening.) The reason is
simple: Idealism consists of demanding the impossible—and
the human response when the impossible predictably fails to appear
is to throw various kinds of temper tantrums, from looking like
an idiot to making other people miserable up to and including imprisoning
and killing those who fail to conform to your personal idealisms.
I've read of this happening back into history as far as the eye
can see, and it boggles me that in the 21st century we still idealize
idealism.
An issue or two ago, The Atlantic ran a wonderful article
that sheds some light on the issue. In "Go
Ahead, Marry Him!" NYC overachiever Lori Gottlieb finally
endorses what some women dismissively call "settling;"
that is, marrying a man who is something less than precisely what
they demand, which is usually rich, brilliant, gentle, pliant, egalitarian,
and unerringly able to incite sexual passion every weekend for the
rest of their lives. As Lori tellingly puts it:
Unless you meet the
man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely
because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside
to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding
out for someone better.
Well, duhh. The downside to perpetually holding out for someone
better is the possibility of spending your entire life alone, cursing
all men because they refuse to conform to your fantasies. This sort
of mental illness is not limited to women. I knew a guy in college
(of average looks, smarts, and ambition) who flatly refused to date
any woman who did not "look like a Playboy centerfold."
(Those were his precise words.) He finally and recently married,
in his early 50s, and his spouse is bright, funny, and warm. However,
I doubt she was ever Playboy material, even in her 20s. Figuring
it out late is better than figuring it out never. But had he figured
it out early, he might have had a lot more fun and been a lot less
lonely for a lot more years.
Life is about settling. All of life, all the time. Life's circumstances
are graphed on a complicated set of curves, and we can either calculate
the minima and make the best of it, or we can rage against the shape
of reality, and make things even worse while blaming those who do
not share our idealisms. Churches and political tribes are aces
at this. Conservative religions (Christianity being only one, but
the one we know best in the West) have a peculiar obession with
sexual idealism. Roman Catholicism condemns both abortion and preventive
birth control, because these do not conform to a complicated and
ancient sort of moral idealism that in essence demands that people
be sexless beings except when they're married and willing to conceive
a child. Endorsing birth control would reduce the number of abortions,
but that would be settling for less than the ideal. And so hundreds
of millions of people defy Church teachings or even leave the Church
entirely, and the abortion rate remains appalling. In refusing to
settle for the achievable, the RCC has held out for the impossible
and reaped catastrophe.
Idealism's prints are all over the political realm. We could end
gun violence by eliminating guns, so the ideal goes. But by only
eliminating some guns, we make gun violence worse. Crisp
gun laws that define legal use and training people in their legal
use would not end gun violence, but it would probably minimize
gun violence. I'll settle for that. Idealists will not. Idealists
tell us that if we would all just take public transportation, live
in the nasty little coffins that some call New York studio apartments,
and give up air conditioning, we would have neither global warming
nor an energy crisis. Whether or not the math actually makes sense,
you have to say, Well, good luck with that.
Marxist idealism, of course, has been the greatest murder-generator
in all of human history. To pragmatists this is common knowledge;
to idealists it's a heresy that they can never accept. There's not
a lot of benefit in belaboring the point. The two sides are not
even talking.
My objection to idealism cooks down to this: Idealism refuses to
consider embracing lesser evils and thereby generates greater evils.
We can argue about the identity of the lesser evils. We can argue
about whether the lesser evils are in fact evils at all. (Many are
not.) We can argue about whether embracing a lesser evil will in
fact minimize a greater evil. (This is not always the case.) But
idealism refuses to engage in the debate. That would be settling.
And there's no point in settling for less than the ideal, right?
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July
9, 2008: The Conundrum of AVG LinkScanner
Just before we left Colorado, and after several weeks of furious
nagging by the software, I upgraded version 7.5 of AVG Free Anti-Virus
for the new V8. I did it on Carol's machine only, as the upgrade
required some damned thing or another that was missing on Win2K
SP4, and I didn't have time to research it. (Carol uses XP.) With
version 8 came something I had not heard about and did not expect:
AVG LinkScanner.
It's an interesting idea, and at first glance sounds like something
truly useful: LinkScanner works with Google and Yahoo to prescan
search results for evidence of malware injection. At a rate of 2-20
results per second, LinkScanner visits each displayed search result
link, looks at what's on the other side, and displays one of three
icons to the right of the search link: Good, questionable, or bad.
I didn't even know the feature was present until later that day,
when Carol was doing some Google work and asked me what the icons
were. All were a reassuring green, but when I Googled on "warez"
almost all of the search results came back with icons of alarming
red.
This seemed reasonable to me, and I was too frantic getting ready
for our trip to think too deeply on it. But a few days later, I
started to run across Web articles howling
about an avalanche of Web hits spawned by LinkScanner. The Register
provides one
of the saner descriptions of the issue. Traffic on some smaller
Web sites has spiked by 80%, and Slashdot says that as much as 6%
of its massive clickthrough comes from LinkScanner's user agents.
LinkScanner, it seems, tries its best to look like an ordinary
user. Well, duhh: If LinkScanner's probe announced its presence,
malware artists would serve up an innocuous version of their sites,
keeping the malware for ordinary Web surfers who could be discerned
as such. I can understand the logic, but given that AVG has as many
as seventy million users worldwide (few of whom have yet upgraded)
widespread adoption of the technology could make ordinary Web traffic
analysis meaningless. Traffic on duntemann.com started rising about
April 1, but I couldn't quite figure what was going on. May was
a record month for me, even though my traffic has been fairly steady
since I launched my
LiveJournal mirror of Contra in early 2006. Things leveled out
in June, but given the proportion of my traffic that now reads Contra
on LiveJournal, I would expect aggregate traffic on duntemann.com
to be falling slowly.
Having had a little time to think about this, I can raise a couple
of points:
- AVG has not made it entirely clear what its probe looks for
when it prefetches search results. A site tagged as "safe"
might not actually be safe—especially once the bad
guys reverse-engineer the probe and figure out how to dodge it.
People might trust the utility a little too much, and assume that
there is no possible downside to visiting a green-tagged site.
- Obviously, AVG actually visits all sites in a search results
list, even those most users would shun as obviously dicey. If
the bad guys discover an exploit in AVG's probe, AVG could unwittingly
become the world's largest malware installer.
- The probe does not mask or alter the user IP in any way. As
far as remote site logs are concerned, the local user clicks
on every link in a search results list. Meditate on that for
a moment, and then read this
article from Slashdot. If you're not at least a little freaked
out yet, read it again.
I'm going to uninstall the feature on Carol's machine when we get
home, and may try one of the alternative lightweight AV products
like Avast,
especially since AVG Free V8.0 barfed on my main Win2K machine.
I've begun to see indications that AVG is patching V8.0 so that
LinkScanner is not enabled by default, but haven't gotten anything
crisp enough to link to. Supposedly, the patched version becomes
available today. We'll see. In the meantime, spidering sites with
some sort of malware-detection probe may not be as good an idea
as it seems on the surface. Better, perhaps to completely sandbox
or virtualize the browser, which would be better protection at a
bandwidth cost of...zero.
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July
8, 2008: Almost Done with Souls in Silicon
 We
got back from Wisconsin yesterday, having had a very good time getting
soaking wet and eating perhaps a little too much. I had forgotten
how pretty that part of the country was, even though my family went
there often in the early 1960s. It was where my mother grew up,
between the
little whistle-stop of Shennington and the larger town of Necedah.
(That's her at left, as Necedah High School's drum majorette in
1942, posing with her band teacher.) Carol and I explored the area
a little bit while we still lived in Chicago, but that's been thirty
years now, and it would be worthwhile to go back and hit Baraboo,
Mauston, Mill Bluff State Park, and a number of other places we
remember less well than we'd like. We want to return to Perot State
Park along the Mississippi, where I proposed to Carol in 1975, as
well as nearby Wyalusing. Next summer, fersure.
We're still in the Chicago area (currently in Crystal Lake) but
this trip isn't entirely vacation, and I'm pushing hard to get some
work done. Today was productive: I finished laying out and proofing
the body of Souls in Silicon, the first of two collections
I am preparing of my own SF. Souls in Silicon contains all
of my published stories pertaining to strong AI, including "Guardian,"
which was on the final Hugo ballot in 1981, and "Borovsky's
Hollow Woman," my 1983 collaboration with Nancy Kress, which
originally appeared in Omni. Other stories in the 9-story
lineup include "The Steel Sonnets," "Silicon Psalm,"
"Bathtub Mary," "Marlowe," "STORMY vs.
the Tornadoes," and "Sympathy on the Loss of One of Your
Legs." The collection will conclude with an excerpt from my
2005 novel, The
Cunning Blood.
With the body done and the page count frozen, I can get to work
on a cover. I commissioned custom cover art from Richard
Bartrop, and just approved his final color concept sketch. By
the time Richard is done, I should have a cover to drop the art
into, and we'll have us a book. Richard is very well-known in Furry
circles, but he's actually a formidable hard SF artist, and the
concept, from my story "Guardian," is terrific. Bodies
are easy. Covers are hard. My mother was an artist, but I think
she left her talents in Wisconsin; neither Gretchen nor I inherited
them. I hope to have copies to show around at Worldcon in Denver
this August, but that means I had better get to work.
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July
5, 2008: Sploosh!
We're at the Chula Vista Resort in the Wisconsin Dells
for a short family vacation, and I think I've identified the first
significant cultural contribution of the 21st century: the large-scale
water park. I'm not talking about a pool with a single slide, or
even two slides. I'm talking about a fifteen-acre indoor/outdoor
complex with twelve separate water slides, some easily fifty feet
high, with coils of people pipes that go outside the building and
then come in again, some in several different loops. One slide even
has a Men In Black 2 style "flusher" at the end. There
is a sort of aquatic roller-coaster-in-a-garden-hose, and a short,
simple flume that pretty much drops you vertically for about thirty
feet. I looked around, and I boggled—but then I started having
fun.
It's a species of fun that simply didn't exist when I was a kid.
We were delirious to have a simple swimming pool or even a muddy
lake to paddle around in. I think I frst saw a water slide when
I was thirty-five. And I have never seen anything even remotely
like this. There is constant motion (much of it from incalculable
numbers of eight-year-olds) and water pouring, squirting, and spraying
everywhere, in every direction at once. Buckets of many sizes, from
a gallon or two up to a multihundred something the size of a hot
tub, slowly fill while on pivots, and when the buckets fill, they
tip over and dump their loads on anyone who happens to be below.
There's a zero-depth baby pool, a one-foot deep toddler pool, a
four-foot-deep activity pool for preteens, a hot tub for exhausted
old guys, and a very interesting thing called a "lazy river,"
which is a linear pool about two feet deep and eight wide, propelled
into slow motion by angled jets in the walls. You grab an inner
tube as one drifts by, and just lie on your back and follow the
flow around the periphery of the complex. Carol very bravely tried
every single water slide in the place, spurred on by our strapping
twentysomething nephews and their svelte, althletic girlfriends.
I did the bunny slides and the "croc walk," which is a
pool across which you go by hanging from a suspended net while stepping
on floating faux alligator body sections. I myself was never one
for thrill rides, and I deeply admire my beautiful wife for being
wiling to shoot through pipes at thirty miles an hour.
One fascinating thing about our Fourth of July day at the water
park was how international it all was. We had chairs next to a group
of people speaking a Slavic language (Russian? I can't tell) and
Carol's mom heard more than one group speaking Polish. A pair of
guys were speaking French on the elevator with us, and I know enough
German to identify it when I hear it. Lots of Spanish, and possibly
Portuguese. Many Asian families were there, including one whom I
suspect were Phillipinos speaking Tagalog. A group of young Black
folks were in the hot tub with us for awhile, speaking a language
that was like nothing I had ever heard. Clearly, the Wisconsin Dells
is a global draw, which I found interesting, since when last I looked
the Dells were kind of like Las Vegas without hookers. On the other
hand, the last time I looked was in 1961, and the really big thrill
was riding an Army-surplus amphibious truck on now-defunct Lake
Delton. (The Delton vista was a little surreal: acres of mud, sand,
and century-old tree stumps where Tommy Bartlett's skiers used to
roam.) But it makes sense: The States is a cheap date these days,
and all those good people from overseas were throwing cubic meters
of money into the local economy.
We spent the evening at a local park, tossing a frisbee around
while waiting for a pretty spectacular fireworks display. We saluted
the birth of the American idea, which has seen better and worse
over the years. We survived the Civil War. We survived the Depression.
We will survive $5 gasoline.
The American idea is not over. It has not failed. It has not even
fully matured. I'm not, in fact, sure that anyone entirely understands
it—but I will celebrate it, for what has been and for
what is yet to be, now and forever, amen.
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July
3, 2008: Odd Lots
- Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous:
Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters
to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone
and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs
phone carriers almost nothing, the
cost of texting to consumers has more than doubled in the last
three years.
- I was at Barnes & Noble a little earlier today, prowling
the history section as I often do. (The history section is now
about the same size as the computer book section. This was not
always the case...) I remembered something I had noticed many
times in the past: B&N stocks an absolutely amazing
number of books on the Knights Templars and Freemasonry. (By contrast,
I counted three—three!—books on Ubuntu Linux.)
The history section at Borders stocks almost nothing on these
two topics. Do people actually buy this stuff? Or is there a Templars/Masonry
fan club at the highest levels of B&N?
- Xandros
has purchased Linspire. Linspire tried their hardest to create
an OEM market for desktop Linux, but annoyed FOSS purists by including
commercial software in their CNR
installation service, which was actually the only part of
Lindows/Linspire that I really liked. Ubuntu has mostly swept
the desktop Linux field, but I admit, they haven't gone after
OEM installs as vigorously as Linspire did, nor as vigorously
as they'd have to to get some traction against Windows. Ubuntu's
parent Canonical is developing a
mobile version that will be sold preinstalled on subnotebooks,
but we're not quite there yet.
- Mike Reith sent me an interesting little utility called IsDelphi,
which will scan a directory, inspect any executables it finds,
and report which ones were written in Delphi. The most interesting
revelation: Skype is a Delphi app. I hadn't heard that.
- In case you weren't already worried about whether you should
take that trip down the hill to get a latte, I suggest a spin
through Dark
Roasted Blend's collection of weird car accidents. You Could
Be There.
- And in case you're not steamed out or punked out yet, head down
to the closest Greek restaurant, order some calimari, and curl
up with an anthology of squidpunk.
Damitall, when are we gonna see glyptodontpunk? I'll show you
escapist and whimsical...
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July
2, 2008: Mainstreaming Sit-Down
I find much or most of the debate on the obesity explosion puzzling.
Many major American cities are trying to pass laws severely limiting
fast food outlets or banning them entirely, blaming them for our
increasingly fat population. The sheer violence of the debate (cruise
pertinent online discussions and you'll see what I mean) suggests
that more is going on here than a discussion of nutrition, but I'll
be damned if I can figure out just what, though I will speculate
below.
As I've said here more than once, obesity, like most health issues,
is more complex than most of us would like to admit. It's about
calories but not only calories, and contrary to conventional
wisdom, one calorie is like any other calorie...if you're a calorimeter.
Sugar calories do different things in the body than fat calories,
yet you wouldn't know this trying to get a grip on the problem online.
The speed with which I dropped belly fat when I basically gave up
sugar was startling. Sleep loss is also a factor, according to the
Mayo Clinic. (Alas, the Mayo Clinic still believes in the BMI, which
does not distinguish at all between fat and muscle. Ummm...and
you guys are doctors?)
I've read a lot of speculation as to what kicked off the obesity
epidemic in the midlate 80s. That's when high-fructose corn syrup
went mainstream and drove cane sugar out of soft drinks. It was
when our high-speed, high-stress always-on culture kicked into high
gear and 60-hour weeks became a commonplace. It's when the overall
inflation-adjusted price of food fell to historic lows. And it was
also the time when something else happened: an explosion of low-end
"sit-down" restaurants fielded by national franchises.
You see them everywhere: Red Robin, Applebees, Black-Eyed Pea, TGI
Friday's, and so on. They are legion. And if you're a true calorie
believer, the
caloric content of their dishes will take your breath away:
One order of Outback's Aussie Cheese Fries appetizer contains 2,900
calories. Even expressed by weight, it is to boggle: A large Maggiano's
pasta dish gets you over two pounds of noodles on a 15-inch
plate.
Wow.
The tirade against fast-food restaurants is peculiar in that it
does not recognize that fast-food portions are generally smaller
than those at sit-down restaurants, and more to the point, fast-food
items are what old-time IT guys would call "unbundled":
You can get menu items separately if you want them. You can get
a single small burger—or a Triple. You can get fries or no
fries, and fries in sizes. On the much simpler sit-down restaurant
menus, you must get the potatoes with the steak, and the portion
size is always...lots. And anyone who says with a straight face
that there's more fat in fast food than at casual dining sit-downs
is either lying or doesn't get out much.
We didn't go to restaurants much when I was a kid, in part because
back then, sit-down restaurants were higher-end, and expensive.
We had to dress up on special occasions to go to Llandl's or the
Kenilworth Inn in Lincolnwood. The notion of "casual dining"
was still pretty uncommon, and probably considered a contradiction
in terms by dining purists. (What there was fell into the separately
interesting category of "greasy
spoons.") Since 1985 or so, sit-downs went mainstream on
a huge scale, as corporate restaurant franchises gobbled up key
slots at the corners of megamalls and major intersections. Your
average American went from dining out a few times a year to a couple
of times a week, with portion sizes that I still find boggling.
My point here is that crucifying fast food as though it were the
sole cause of obesity (or even the major contributor) is magical
thinking, and has more than a whiff of politics in it. (When reading
things like Fast Food Nation I see union opportunism and
attacks from the Vega System.) Nothing is ever that simple, and
if we keep insisting that it is, no progress will ever be made.
It's not about McDonald's. It's about genetics, metabolism, portion
control, exercise, sugar, stress, and sleep—and probably fifteen
other things, most of which we still haven't defined. Let us not
pull the trigger with the wrong guy in our sites, just to be shooting
something.
|
|
June
30, 2008: A Fine Wander
I generally don't go a whole week without posting here, but Carol
and I began our summer trek out to Chicago this past Friday, and
like a loon I left my Web presence thumb drive in my keyboard groove
in Colorado. I have my backups with me, but they do not include
the longish entry I prepared on the 26th, which you now won't see
until I get back home.
Anyway. We're here again, in the land of Green River soda and two-section
concrete basement washtubs. White Hen Pantry has been engulfed and
devoured by Southland's 7-Eleven, but miraculously, the legendary
White Hen coffee bar is still there in the converted stores and
still good. The weather was fantastic on our leisurely three-days-and-two-nights
journey; in fact, we did not encounter any rain until we were through
Marengo, Illinois and only twenty minutes from Crystal Lake.
We drove from Colorado Springs to Kearney, Nebraska our first day
out, and took a couple of hours to sneak up to Lake McConaughy and
see how it's faring. The lake has been greatly diminished by a near
seven-year drought, but this spring the rains started returning
to western Nebraska, and the
lake now has six feet of depth it didn't have last year. The
water was still coldish: 69° on the white-sand north shore,
and 74° on the brown-sand south shore (above), where northerly
winds have apparently been blowing the warmer surface layer for
some weeks. It was still as clear and clean as we remember, and
we're planning on stopping for the night in Ogalallah on the way
back for a little quality beach time. QBit and Aero both wanted
to jump in, but since we still had 150 miles to go on Friday and
didn't want to spend all of it in a car full of wet-dog smell, Carol
kept them on a short leash and dried their feet before we loaded
up and went on.
We spent our second night in Newton,
Iowa, best known for being the home of the Maytag Corporation
and its bored repairmen, at least until Whirlpool acquired them
and shut the company down last year. Newton is one of those "pretty-how"
towns that e.e. cummings used to write about, with a real Midwestern
town square surrounding the 1911 stone courthouse and Jasper County
offices. With dirt-cheap housing, near-zero crime, and lots of office
and manufacturing space opening up, you'd think some forward-looking
high-tech entrepreneur would begin building routers or laptops or
something in the old Maytag space. I can't figure it—oh wait,
forgot, there's no Thai restaurants there. Damn. (But there are
100 women for every 87 men. C'mon, guys. You can always truck in
the khao pad.)
Sunday was my 56th birthday, and we took a little time out to visit
the Amana Colonies, and had lunch at Henry's
Village Market in Homestead. Andrew, the owner, made us up some
ham sandwiches on bread baked right there, and partway through had
to run out to the garden to pick some more lettuce. We watched for
flood damage in eastern Iowa, but apart from a submerged park along
the Cedar River near Iowa City, we saw nothing we could unambiguously
ascribe to the recent torrential rains.
So we're here, and will visit with friends and family and see our
new niece Juliana Roper baptized. I hope to get some writing done
here at the condo, and will try to keep up with Contra as time allows.
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June
23, 2008: Productivity Theater
Slashdot recently aggregated an
article from The
New Atlantis suggesting that multitasking makes us stupid.
This is old news to a lot of people, myself included, but it's interesting
how today's pervasive multitasking culture is finally engendering
a healthy dose of backlash. Last November, there was an
even blunter piece in The
Atlantic Monthly that I had hoped to comment on here, but...I
was interrupted. Turn your cellphone off and read both.
In human cognition as in computer systems, context changes are
costly. Rational thought (as opposed to pure subconscious ideamaking)
is strictly linear, and depends utterly on bringing a network of
pertinent facts and relationships among facts to the forefront of
the mind for easy reference. Lose that network and you will
lose your train of thought; in fact, that's what "losing your
train of thought" actually is. Some people may be better than
others at picking up the train and slapping it down on another section
of track without spilling the coal cars, but nobody delivers the
load faster than the one who just brings it to the destination in
uninterrupted linear fashion. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling
himself.
That's the gist of both articles. The deeper question is this:
Why do we believe that multitaking is better than focus? In part
I think it's because our culture demands productivity, and multitasking
is a sort of productivity theater: It makes our managers think we're
productive because it gives the impression of furious constant activity.
Alas, it makes us think we're productive as well, when in fact most
of that furious constant activity is just us dodging what we really
ought to be doing.
I've seen this effect in myself: When I'm working on something
and hit a difficult spot, the less disciplined parts of me start
looking for a context change. Hey, I haven't read email for awhile...hey,
wasn't I supposed to call Keith? Hey, there's that corner of the
basement that I keep meaning to tidy up...and so I drop my current
task precisely when it would benefit the most from renewed and
intensified focus.
This is hardly a modern phenomenon; what's different is that in
the past it was considered a temptation to scatterbrained-ness and
a failing inherent in weak minds. Today it's considered the hallmark
of a truly modern intellect. Modern, sure, but hardly efficient:
Allowing yourself this sort of unwarranted context change trains
the mind to bounce from the easiest parts of one project to the
easiest parts of another, making little genuine progress and getting
very little to the finish line.
Much of the blame falls to a modern educational system that doesn't
reward focus, followed by overworked managers who lack the time,
the tools, and the gut instincts to understand "how things
are going" in their organizations. HR doesn't help; people
who insist on the time and the solitude to focus are often disparaged
as "not team players" even when the work in question is
not essentially collaborative. In my experience, most real productivity
is achieved during "heads down" time, and most "teamwork"
cooks down to kibitzing. In fact, the most productive meetings I
recall were the ones where that obnoxious guy kept yelling "focus!"
(Most of the time, that obnoxious guy was me.)
Flow follows focus. Systematically breaking focus leads to a state
of mind that, irrespective of what it happens to be doing, is constantly
wondering whether it should be doing something else. This way lies
madness; nay; this is already madness. Resist it with everything
you can muster.
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June
20, 2008: Easy Duplicate Finder
I've used a number of utilities to search for duplicate files under
Windows in the past few years, but in doing research for Degunking
Essentials I've run across the king of the category: Easy
Duplicate Finder. I like it for these reasons:
- It's a "portable" or "no-install" app, meaning
a single .exe file that can run from anywhere. It does not shotgun
itself into fifteen different places on your hard drive, including
the Windows Registry. You "uninstall" it by...deleting
the file. Damn, what a brilliant notion! Why haven't more programmers
thought of that?
- In a sense, the UI contains its own documentation. You proceed
through the single screen from top to bottom, filling things out
in an order that makes sense. It actually says "Step 1:",
"Step 2:", and "Step 3:"
- It is astonishingly fast, at least in the mode that checks for
duplicates using file size and a CRC32 checksum. When I captured
the screenshot above (full size image here)
it had just scanned 6,300 files in...seven seconds. (I suspect
that the alternate algorithm, which performs a byte-by-byte test,
would take a little longer.)
- It's free. Really and truly free, without ads or spyware or
any other gotchas of any species.
In the two hours of testing I put it through, I managed to find
two old copies of my mailbase that I had forgotten I had, plus almost
two hundred duplicate digital photos. I realized that I had an extra
copy of the Hardy Heron .iso (700+ MB right there) a dozen or so
duplicate MP3s, plus a substantial number of other things scattered
allthehell over the place, which taken together lightened my hard
drive by a little over two GB.
It reminded me of lesson I learned a couple years ago, too: Empty
your digital camera when you move pictures over to your PC. Most
of the duplicate photos happened this way: I moved photos from the
camera to my folder hierarchy without deleting them from the camera,
then gave the numeric filenames more descriptive replacements. Alas,
the next time I synced the camera, the same files came over again
in their original numeric filenames, leaving me with identical file
pairs with names like 100_0519.JPG and QbitChewsTennisBall1.jpg.
After the utility locates the dupes, you can select specific files
for deletion, renaming, or moving to a catchall folder. You can
limit the search to particular file types and file sizes, and define
masks for ambiguous filespecs, like QBit*.jpg. Overall, a spectacularly
useful utility that has no defects that I can see.
Highly recommended.
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June
19, 2008: Mi Paste
I've been busy for the past few days, and not at my best. I had
a "crown lengthening" two weeks ago, which basically means
lengthening the amount of tooth above the gum line by cutting away
gum tissue and (in my case, at least) shaving away some bone. The
surgical site was protected for two weeks by dental packing material
(a goopy plastic that hardens into a sort of armor around the affected
gum tissue) and the packing material was removed on Monday. What
I soon found is that without the packing in place, the exposed sides
of the tooth were extremely sensitive to temperatures even
a few degrees from 98.6. One slug of Diet Mountain Dew for lunch
on Monday and I damned near went through the roof.
Hot coffee twinged me a little bit as well, though the temperature
delta was nowhere near as great. But this put me in a bad mood,
and I returned the next day to pick up a tube of something called
Mi Paste. I
freely confess I don't understand the biology here, but after applying
it to the exposed tooth for two days, I can now slug ice-cold sodas
and barely feel it at all.
The product was created to counteract the sort of mild tooth sensitivity
that often apears after teeth are whitened. I didn't think it would
have much effect on a case as severe as mine, but shazam! It worked.
The stuff isn't cheap ($18 for a smallish tube) but it didn't take
a lot to do the job, and it's available without prescription online.
It's based on casein, so if you have milk allergies it may be problematic.
Otherwise, damn. Like magic. Highly recommended.
|
June
15, 2008: Father's Day
To the eternal memory of Frank W. Duntemann (1922-1978), engineer,
who said, "When you build 'em right, they fly."
You did. And I do.
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June
15, 2008: Odd Lots
- After posting my June 13, 2008 entry,
I did locate an
unofficial list of apps to be included in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix
distro: Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin,
Rhythmbox,
FBReader (for ebooks),
Liferea (RSS feed
reader), F-Spot (photo
viewer) and OpenOffice.
No serious surprises here, though I wonder how well a mobile CPU
like Atom will run OpenOffice. I guess we'll find out later this
year.
- Ken Taaffe spotted my
lament that my rotatable parts tower was no longer available,
and pointed out that it
can be had from a different vendor. It's more expensive than
it was in 1990 (though what isn't?) but it looks like precisely
the same item. $439. I paid about $350 for it in 1990. See a photo
in my
shop tips article.
- Years ago, I half-seriously suggested that somebody should create
a Bottom 60 radio format, and only play songs that charted but
never made it into the Top 40. Well, Shawn
Nagy's SuperOldies is pretty much the item, though it uses
the Cash Box charts rather than Billboard. It's Internet Radio
and you can listen with Winamp and other Internet Radio players.
I've had it on for most of an hour and have yet to hear a song
that I recognize. Is that good? Well, how bored with Clear Channel
are you?
- I'm intrigued by a recent run of articles about tweaking certain
simple algae and bacteria to produce Diesel fuel as a metabolic
waste product. Here's
one. And another,
both from the London Times. Assuming that this works reliably
and doesn't have a downside, we may all eventually have a refrigerator-sized
thingie in the basement or garage into which we dump trash, lawn
clippings, or other organic waste and from which we extract vehicle
fuel, drip by drip. It doesn't matter if it only produces a gallon
a day; for a smallish car with a good Diesel engine, that's plenty.
The other (and in my view, far greater) advantage is that it's
completely decentralized: If our vehicle fuel comes from
a hundred million little boxes (rather than five or six monster
refineries) terrorists and hurricanes will have a bitch of a time
messing up the transportation industry.
- Aki Peltonen sent me a link to a
large forum post by Java expert and author Bruce Eckel, about
why he can't abide Vista and won't use it. Read the comments,
too. Lots of interesting ideas and suggestions here.
- Michael Covington posted a
note abut the
Ebox 2300, a very small, fanless $200 PC-compatible computer
suitable for dedicated/embedded applications running Linux or
Windows CE. One little but brilliant touch is making the machine's
mounting holes the same as a VESA-compatible monitor stand, meaning
that you can mount the computer on the back of the monitor using
the same holes. I envision a desktop weather station or something
like that. Oh, for time to tinker...
- Pete Albrecht sent me a pointer to Virtual
Moon Atlas, an extremely rich resource for Lunar geography
that belongs in every SF writer's toolkit. 422 MB download, but
hey, dare ya to find all this stuff on one Web site, or anywhere
else.
- Finally, here's
the reason that "woe is me" is actually correct English,
and always has been, right back to the days of Chaucer or even
Beowulf. I had heard that, but never had the presence of mind
to chase down the grammar. It's about the
dative case, and all these years we thought we were just repeating
an old error. Woe is we.
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June
13, 2008: Ubuntu and the Application 20/80 Rule
As time has allowed, I've been downstairs getting a sense for the
new Ubuntu 8.04 release (Hardy Heron) in both its Ubuntu and Kubuntu
(KDE 4 UI) distributions. My experience with Kubuntu was cut short
when the new and rather bleeding-edge KDE 4 system malfunctioned
in a weird way just a few days after I installed it. I will reinstall
it when they get a bug-fix release of KDE 4 out there; in the meantime,
it's been worthwhile playing with Gnome-based Ubuntu.
As I said in my May 28 entry,
desktop Linux has arrived. People still quibble about whether or
not Grandma can install Linux, but think for a second: Does Grandma
have to install Windows? Hardly. If we can persuade hardware vendors
to offer Linux preinstalls, Grandma will have no more trouble with
Linux than she would with Windows, especially if this is Grandma's
first PC and she isn't constrained by old Windows habits.
I've been testing four free software packages in some depth: Abiword,
OpenOffice, Gnumeric,
and Kompozer. I tested Abiword and OpenOffice some years back and
again last year when I installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Both worked
fine. OpenOffice seemed slow to me last year, but then it was running
on a 2002-era 1.7 GHz machine, not the loaded P4 3.2 GHz box I'm
using downstairs these days. OpenOffice now seems more than responsive
enough. Abiword, by contrast, has always seemed pretty brisk, and
it has evolved to the point where it can do just about anything
I need a word processor to do. It loads and saves Word 2000 files—with
a couple of minor gotchas—and had no trouble with the documents
I edited. The Gnumeric spreadsheet works extremely well for me and
handled every Excel 2000 spreadsheet I threw it at, keeping in mind
that I'm not much of a spreadsheet guy and none of my spreadsheets
ever gave Excel stretchmarks to begin with.
Kompozer was a bit of a
surprise: It's a fork of Linspire's now-abandoned NVu WYSIWYG Web
editor, and as close to Dreamweaver 3 as anything I've tried. It's
available for Windows, and if it doesn't fail me in any significant
way, I'm moving all my HTML development over to it, because it outputs
cleaner HTML than the 1999-era Dreamweaver 3.
I've done less testing of OpenOffice, but will continue testing
and report more here. If I have to move to a non-Microsoft office
suite in the future, this will probably be it, and what testing
I've done so far tells me that file compatibility is probably the
only serious problem I'll have.
What my recent testing of Ubuntu and these several apps suggests
to me is that only a lack of big box store preinstalls keeps desktop
Ubuntu from becoming a very big hit—and the biggest challenge
to Microsoft since OS X. What has always been true but rarely mentioned
in the computer press is that 20% of app features satisfy the needs
of 80% of app users. That 20/80 rule goes further: Email, Web, word
processing, and spreadsheets together represent probably 80% or
more of what home users do with computers. (I suspect that the rest
is a combination of media players, IM, photo managers, and games.)
And within those apps, 20% of the features do 80%—or more—of
the work. I know a lot of people who still use Office 97 every day,
and have no intention of upgrading. It works like lightning on modern
PCs—and it's paid for, heh. It's harder for me to tell with
Gnumeric, but I'm quite sure at this point that Abiword is on par
with Word 97 and very close to par with Word 2000, certainly close
enough to satisfy the 80% rule.
The recent (and completely unexpected) explosion of interest in
cheap "netbook" subnotebook PCs comes into play here.
The Atom-based netbooks I've researched will not run Vista and probably
never will. Caught again with its pants around its ankles, MS is
trying to popularize a streamlined version of XP for netbooks, but
Linux was there first and seems to be making headway. A netbook
does not have to be a completely general-purpose PC. If it can execute
that 20% of app features supporting 80% of user work, it will sell—especially
at the $500 price point. A distro that preinstalls Firefox, Thunderbird/Lightning,
Abiword, and Gnumeric would be one hell of a road warrior machine,
especially if the hardware has a fast SSD and comes in under two
pounds. Canonical is working on what sure looks like such a distro,
its recently
announced Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Ars has a
nice preview. No crisp word yet on what apps it preinstalls,
but we'll find out before OEMs begin preinstalling Ubuntu Remix
on their hardware later this year. In the meantime, I'm very encouraged
on all fronts. Finally, there is a non-Microsoft, command-line free
path to 80% of what PCs do. As far as I'm concerned, that's plenty.
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June
12, 2008: Odd Lots
- Aero won his first "major" (a win against at least
three other males of his breed) at the Colorado Springs Kennel
Club dog show this past weekend. That gives him a total of five
points toward the fifteen he needs (and the first of two majors)
to win his championship.
- Shopping a little harder for gas these days? This
site may help, keeping in mind that driving miles to save
pennies isn't always a win—and the price could change before
you get there. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
- Neal Rest sent me a pointer to "Ten
Things I Hate About Commandments," which is a parody
trailer made as a remix of scenes from a very famous movie that
you may recognize. It's less a parody of the film than of film
trailers in general, and very funny.
- From Roy Harvey comes a link to a
paper containing a great deal of data on historical climate
change. I don't agree with all the points made by the author,
but the paper is so thick with graphs that I'm not sure his conclusions
are the real value-add here. Do take a look.
- One of
the scariest videos I've seen in a while shows a good-sized
house literally sliding into the rampaging Wisconsin River and
floating away downstream. Lake Delton, near Wisconsin Dells and
home of the (in)famous Tommy Bartlett Water Ski and Jumping Boat
Thrill Show, basically created a new channel for itself and drained
completely into the Wisconsin River, driven by massive rains.
The Dells themselves weren't directly affected, but a great deal
of aquatic activity on Lake Delton (duck boats, jet skis, and
poor Tommy) are now gone for the rest of the 2008 season. (And
we're going to the Dells this July!)
- Missed including this one a couple of months ago, but it's worth
some consideration: Blogging
has become the new work-at-home piecework, with "professional"
(read here: sometimes paid) bloggers working themselves literally
to death for as little as $10 per post. Damn, I wish my blog earned
me that little! (Here's a
counterpoint that misses the point a little, but worth reading
for balance.)
- Finally, I stumbled on Curious
Expeditions while trying to find aerial photos of the Roman
Catholic church I grew up in on the Web. No dice on the church
(it's so ugly the parish Web site contains no photos of it!) but
if you want to see a picture of a petrified bat, Galileo's mummified
middle finger (now, who did he give it to?) or hundreds of other
peculiar things, this is the place. It's not all creepshow stuff,
either: The entry
on New York City's pneumatic message system (similar to the
legendary pneu of France) is the best treatment I've seen
on the American side of the subject.
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June
6, 2008: Fire Drill!
Damn. Like, inc(damn). There is a wildfire a little less than a
mile south and east of us, on the lower slopes of Cheyenne Mountain.
The cops have sealed off all the roads into our neighborhood and
won't let Carol get back home here. I'm gathering papers and stuff,
and will be tossing whole computers in the back of the Voyager in
case I have to run.
They're working on it, and if it weren't for the strong wind I'd
say it wouldn't be too much of a challenge. But either way, it's
a fire drill. With real fire.
Update (4PM local): Carol and Aero went back to Jimi Henton's
house (she's the local bichon groomer/breeder) and I have this huge
pile of stuff by the garage door. However, I just learned that the
police reopened Farthing, which is one of the two paths into this
area from outside. Broadmoor Bluffs is still closed. I'm not seeing
helicopters circling anymore (I can't see the fire site from here)
and I'm guessing that they're getting a handle on it. Remarkably,
TV news has been almost no help. Nobody wants to interrupt the damfool
soap operas. I can be out the door with QBit and the big pile in
the back of the 4Runner in less than ten minutes. In the meantime,
I'm sitting in the livingroom with the TV on, reading Mark Kurlansky's
Salt. I'll post an all-clear here when it's all clear.
Update (7:15PM local): The fire has been controlled, and
is mostly out. Carol is home. Tomorrow, alas, is going to be very
hot here, and very windy, which is always bad news on the fire front.
The fire department is soaking down whatever hot spots they can
find at the fire site, to keep them from rekindling tomorrow if
the winds get bad.
The fire was not large (5-6 acres) but it was in a small pocket
of undeveloped land surrounded on three sides by subdivisions and
on the fourth by NORAD and the NORAD access road. It was right across
Highway 115 from Fort Carson, so both the Army and the Air Force
had an interest and contributed resources.
I'm still taking some Tylenol for the sake of my stitches, else
I would be pouring myself a drink about now. Nothing like a fire
down the hill to mess over what would otherwise have been a very
productive day.
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June
5, 2008: Contra Is Ten Years Old
I know I'm older than dirt. What still boggles me a little to think
on is that I'm older than...blogging. Yes, indeedy: Ten years ago
today, I wrote the first entry for something I called VDM Diary.
(VDM, of course, being Visual Developer Magazine, which I
owned and edited until we shut it down in early 2000.) I had no
idea what I was doing, and certainly had no idea that what I was
doing would soon become a global phenomenon that would put whole
newspapers in their graves and change the shape of information dissemination.
It's amusing to go scanning around the Web to read the heated arguments
about who invented blogging. I'll pull an Al Gore here and say that
I did. So did a number of other people. It's not like it's rocket
science to take a literary form that goes back to at least 1660
and put it...on a Web server. Oh, the genius!
Actually, I'm even more like Al Gore in that I didn't invent
blogging—I just like to say that I did. In truth, Lisa Marie
Hafeli did, and she simply pestered me into implementing it. Lisa
was my ad sales rep at VDM, and she wanted me to figure out how
to get more product mentions associated with the magazine, so that
she could get a little more credit with developer tools companies.
We only had so many pages for reviews and news releases, but...how
about talking about products online? How about just writing a little
something every day or two about a product?
I remember her bringing up the idea at the beginning of 1998, and
I thought about it for months before giving it a try. I had never
kept a paper diary, though I wrote a lot of email and posted on
forums, so I was used to writing in short pithy snippets. I was
leery of pandering to advertisers, so I tried hard to avoid the
appearance of just doing VDM Diary to work in product mentions.
It was by intention that I sprinkled in little weirdnesses like
the FBI's database of UFO sightings (June 17, 1998) and odd observations
from my own work in technology, like how Word 97 irritatingly autoconverted
the sequence ":)" to a smiley icon. I did the product
mentions, but they didn't seem to make much difference in our ad
sales efforts. So I branched out, adding personal observations on
my own life, and by the middle of 1999 I was thoroughly hooked.
Alas, that was about the time that VDM began imploding, and I was
depressed for a solid year after Coriolis shuttered the magazine.
(Coriolis itself didn't last much longer.) But even though I no
longer had a magazine, by the middle of 2000 I re-established a
Web diary on my own domain (duntemann.com) and have been doing it
ever since.
ContraPositive is not the oldest blog still posting regularly.
I think Lileks' Daily
Bleat (which goes back to early 1997) has that honor, though
if you know of any older ones still posting, please send a pointer.
Bob Thompson's Daynotes
Journal started up less than two weeks after Contra did, and
is still going strong. Jerry Pournelle has been doing something
with regular postings on his Web site for a very long time,
but it's not organized like a diary, and very hard to figure out
where everything is and how long it's been there. (This doesn't
mean it's not worth reading.)
Interestingly, I've been told by a couple of people that what I
do is not really a blog, and is actually more like a daily newspaper
column. There's something to that. When I was a kid, I used to admire
writers like Jack Mabley and Bert Bacharach (not his composer/musician
son Burt) who wrote daily columns in the local newspapers. (Jack
Mabley wrote a blog for
a time when he was 90, until he
passed away in 2006.) The energy that sustains Contra comes
from a conviction learned from far better writers than I (like Gene
Wolfe) that no matter what else they might do, writers should write
something coherent every day. I usually manage that, though understand
that I write on a lot of different projects, of which Contra is
only one. Doing it daily isn't difficult. Being coherent, now, well...
In the last year or so, I've been doing fewer Contra posts and
longer ones, and gathering shorter items (usually focusing on links)
up into regular Odd Lots posts. I'm trying not to split my concentration
too many ways on any given day (context changes are costly!) and
if I'm working intensely on something like Degunking Essentials
or Old Catholics, I tend not to work on Contra that same
day. I have bookmark and email folders for items to address later
on, and periodically go through it, deleting or archiving items
once I've covered them here. The system works, and I'll use it until
I think of something better.
As I've said here in a number of contexts, writing benefits the
writer as well as the reader. It's good practice, it's discipline,
it dissipates tension, and it's one way to stay current in the world.
Having something coherent to say requires that you live an attentive
life and remain curious about many different things, and the best
way to learn something yourself is to explain it to someone else.
Contra works for me. I hope it works for you. Thanks for reading,
and stay tuned.
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June
4, 2008: Fantasy? Or Science Fiction?
"Hilary? Hey, John McCain here. How's it going? Yes. Understood.
I read the news. Look, I'll get to the point: Do you still want
to be President? I think I can help get you there. It's unorthodox,
but hear me out.
"Your party is in trouble. Once the media decided to anoint
Obama as our next President, they turned on you, and split the Democrats
wide-open. My numbers people tell me that about a quarter of your
supporters would rather vote Republican than vote for Obama. They
may not actually do that; they may just stay home. But if Barack
thinks he's just going to walk off with the election, he's greener
than he looks.
"My party, on the other hand, is just about dead. The corpse
is still twitching, but the neocons killed it a long time ago. The
Democrats are split two ways. The Republicans are split ten ways.
Ok, I won't lay it all out; I respect your research staff. This
is not new news. Over here we're all having a bitch of a time trying
to decide what the party stands for, and the party leaders don't
even like me. They're keeping their mouths shut; they don't want
to do what your party's doing to itself. They wanted Rudy Giuliani,
and they expected me to lose gracefully and go away. I lose gracefully—when
I lose. But they're gritting their teeth when they say they support
me. Behind the scenes they've said a lot of the same things about
me that your party bosses are saying about you. I'll admit to you
privately that I'm pretty angry about that.
"But set that side for now. We both have this other problem:
There are a lot of people who are disgusted with the whole business.
It's not fair to say that they're in the middle, between you and
me, between Republicans and Democrats. They're outside the graph.
They're tired of the posturing and the tribalism and the personality
cults. They know the country's in trouble, and they want it fixed.
They're tired of the War, they're afraid for their jobs, they're
afraid of getting cancer and losing everything they own before dying
in agony. Global warming isn't on their radar. Neither is gay marriage.
Those are fringe issues. It's about the economy. It's always about
the economy. Bill had that dead right.
"There's a window here: Remake the Republican Party out of
the rubble, put some solutions on the table, and try to find a way
out of the mess we've gotten ourselves into. That's what I'm going
to try to do. I'm going to piss a lot of my party people off, but
I'm going to tell them to hit the road. I'm going to turn the whole
thing inside out. I'm going to let the tax cuts expire. I'm going
to propose another approach to universal health care. It may take
a couple of years, but I intend to end the War.
"No, I don't blame you. I don't expect anybody to believe
me, which is why I'm not telling anybody. But that's what I'm going
to do. Look: I'm 71. I'm in decent health but I get tired sometimes.
I have this one last chance to do something completely audacious,
which is to break the gridlock and get this country back on track.
Otherwise, I keep the status quo and go quietly into that good night,
probably before the end of my second term. I do not intend to be
another William Henry Harrison.
"I admire your guts and your persistence. I respect your positions,
even the ones I don't hold. I think I can win this November. But
with you as my VP, I don't think we can lose.
"Hilary? Hilary? You there? Yes, I'm serious. And I'll make
you this promise: Run with me in 2008, and I will choose not to
run in 2012. We don't have to say anything now. I'll be 75, and
that's too old to do it again. The public will accept that.
"Hold on. You do not have to actually be a Republican.
You simply have to pretend to be one for a year or two, until we
completely re-create the Republican party somewhere in the center.
My research indicates that many more Americans want consensus than
ideological polarization. We may have to upset a few noisy people
at the extremes who like to think that they're more important than
they are. I'll cover the right if you'll cover the left. But I promise
you, when we're through with it, it will be an utterly different
party.
"Barack's young, and his people worship him. He'll try again
in 2012. Still, I don't think there's a slate in the universe that
could win against Clinton/Rice.
"Are you in? You don't have to tell me right this...
"Wow. Good. So let's do it. You've waited long enough. I've
waited too long. It's time. It's just damned time."
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June
2, 2008: Odd Lots
- Carol and I were at the Longmont Dog Show over the weekend,
and Aero got another two blue ribbons, though that was in the
Open Dog category and didn't yield him any points. I actually
"handled" (took around the show ring) another dog owned
by Aero's breeder Jimi Henton. Showing Jackie (Jimi's Hit the
Jackpot) was fun, especially since Jackie is the biggest, heaviest,
strongest bichon any of us has ever seen (23 pounds, all of it
muscle!) and there's nothing the least bit fussy about him.
- The Make blog aggregated an item on making
your own railcarts and railbkes. I've often thought that this
might be fun (it's certainly nothing new) but the snag is that
when railroads abandon a run of track, they typically tear up
the rails for scrap almost immediately. The mere presence of iron
suggests that trains come through, if only occasionally, and that
would make me nervous. I have been looking for but have not yet
found an index of track sections where trains are known not to
run.
- In the certifiable Brain Sludge category of Web content falls
Topher's
Breakfast Cereal Character Guide, which lists (and in most
cases shows images of) all the characters hawking cereal on boxes
and commercials that you've ever heard of, and I suspect more
than a few that you haven't. The list also includes purely fictional
cereals like Calvin's Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and Admiral
Crunch and Archduke Chocula from Futureama. Early versions
of the Rice Crispies Elves are interesting—and I never knew
that Tony the Tiger had a spouse. All here.
- Speaking of cereal, this article confirms my grocery-store math:
House
brands cost as much as 40% less than largely indistinguishable
name brands. If you're spending more for gas, at least spend
less on Rice Chex. The only type of cereal where house brands
taste distinctl
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