Obsolete Your Idols

Vylar also pointed me at this set of time management pages. Nothing about being able to bottle it, however.

Vylar pointed me at this history of tapestries.

Following a link from boingboing took me to doxpara which took me to the Linux Userspace FileSystem which took me to this excerpt:

You mount a gnetfs in ~/gnet. You wait a couple of minutes so it can establish its peer connections. You start a search by creating a subdirectory of SEARCH: mkdir ~/gnet/SEARCH/metallica mp3. You wait a few seconds for the results to accumulate. The you chdir to SEARCH/metallica mp3 and try a ls: surprise the files are there! You shoot up mpg123 and enjoy... You are happy.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's here...

Oh me, oh my. If someone implemented shadow-fs in it, maybe it'd get more press. Of course, it's already in Debian, so I have no excuse for not having heard of it before.

Belatedly got around to reading Clay Shirky's piece on Groups and Software, close kin to the keynote speech he gave at O'Reilly's Conference on Emerging Technology. It's got several head-smackingly duh points, explained in ways that are only so obvious because I'm looking at someone doing a better job of making them than I ever could. When developing software for group usage, there are three things you must accept about the system and four things you must design for in the system. Go read the piece yourself to get it in context. For additional insight and inspiration, here's a copy of the LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction document referenced.

Kate said John Paul Caponigro's photography would knock my socks off.

She was completely correct.

Here's an article I ran across the other day about the idea of a canonical object in Java. It's quite dated but it might serve as a leg up on OO thinking.

I keep thinking I should attend more conventions, conferences, festivals, fairs, and so forth. Along those lines, here's a calendar of things happening in my neck of the wood and here's a different calendar of Seattle specific events of all sorts. Thanks to Qrs and Drew for finding these on my behalf.

Recently joined the mailing list of the University of Washington's Linux User's Group, which reminded me of my previous interest in the Seattle Wireless project. Which reminded me to email Travis.

I need this prelude to Bone. OK, I don't need it; but I sure do want it.

Join the craze of playing golf with telescopes. You know you wanna.

PG pointed me at this site for finding out one's FICO score. Probably useful for people looking to buy a house or rob a bank or something.

Laws says I must buy TV Carnage and then I can be like the cool kids. But not, I dare say, cool. Probably just a poseur. Still.

Vylar pointed me at this book sale, which is probably the world's biggest used book sale, and occurs annually. On a similar thread, I may finally make it to the Northwest Bookfest this year.

So Stephenson's Quicksilver is out and Morris pointed me at a Quicksilver wiki, which she says she found through metafilter, which reminded me that I didn't have a link to it or even memepool from here, yet. It's true; I'm a consumer and aggregator of aggregations. The logical culmination of aggressive passive entertain fixations.

Soon, stormagnet will finish the house copy of Quicksilver and I'll get my peepers on it. Until then, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so I can't even tell you if that wiki pointed at above is cool or not. I put away the tab as soon as I realized what it was.

I'm not sure why an opera about a Gypsy among the Spanish is sung in French, but I rather liked this version of Carmen.

Of course, I say that having seen no other version.

I say that unable to recall having seen any other opera.

I would not, however, say it's my favorite opera, despite its reputation as such, world-wide, in different languages. It's the story of a Gypsy and what may be her desire to die in order to atone for the damage she's wrought upon one man's life, or perhaps she's pursuing the freedom to be herself even if it kills her, or maybe she's a femme fatale, so eager to pull strings without considering the consequences, that her end is as foreordained as it is irrelevant to her decisions.

In any case, the casting for the title role was great on this version and everyone else was pretty decent. It's a film of a proper opera and so the cameras are distant from the action and it wasn't always immediately obvious to me where my attention should be. It's subtitled, but only in places where the French becomes interesting. For phrases the translator presumes everyone knows, no subtitling. That caused some disorientation. But the music is memorable and even familiar, though the only images I associate with it are Bugs Bunny cartoons of Bugs as a matador. Hardly inexplicable.

Continuing my streak of finally seeing things everyone's already seen, I recently enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate. Going in to it, I had heard it was a movie with lots of food in it. That it did. There was also tragedy, frustration, passion, love, taboo and humor. It's got a great villain in the form of the protagonist's mother, a domineering, controlling, vindictive and utterly self-assured obstacle.

In the end, it has a happy ending, assuming you consider death and fire happy. I got the feeling that this movie was more of the magic realism stuff which I seem to be encountering in piles, lately. Things happen which could be natural, could be supernatural and it's all sort of ran together with a strong thread of subjective point of view to make sure one can't really trust any of the narration.

I wasn't so keen on the haunting by the mother but I did enjoy the transformation the sister underwent when she became more like the mother in appearance, voice, and bearing. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to marry their mother, or something like that. Not exactly a funny movie or even really a fun movie, but it was moving and passionate and parts of it will stay with me.

There's a story out about a U.S. District Judge finding that the Federal Trade Commission exceeded their authority by creating the National Do Not Call Registry. I suppose the irony in a judge ruling that the group responsible for regulating trade isn't allowed to do so almost balances the subsequent aggravation at Yet Another Delay on some change to get peace and quiet. Evidently fifty million people were so delighted with an opportunity, at last, to opt out of the use of their time and phone to try to sell them things that they leaped at the chance to escape that. Do you think this might indicate an industry desperately in need of some regulation?

I was pointed at this story by PG.

I recently had a chance to see The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of Shakespeare [Abridged]. Thirty-seven plays, over one hundred fifty sonnets, three men and a dizzying array of condensations. It really works well.

Starting off with Romeo and Juliet, including an intermission, and culminating in Hamlet, it's well worth the time to watch. Clearly, these guys know their stuff. Watching it on DVD, there are even some amusing extras, such as video footage of the first ever performance of the play. It's a breakneck paced tour through the plays of Shakespeare.

Time is saved by consolidating all of his comedies into a single convolute narrative.

The culmination involves the kind of tomfoolery with Hamlet you'll enjoy if you're a fan of Stoppard's Fifteen Minute Hamlet. All in all, a cute silly abuse and homage of The Bard, all at once. It seems they're touring with other shows, as well. Probably worth the price of admission.

In keeping with the intention of doing something with the ways I'm allocating my time, here's a review of the book I just finished, Collected Novellas, which contains three Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novellas:

• Leaf Storm -- This opens the collection and is, I believe, Marquez's first novella. It rotates between four points of view, a grandfather, a mother, a son, and some sort of disconnected floating perspective. It skips back and forth through time and it focuses tightly on details which seem unrelated while glossing over details which might answer questions I, as a reader, had. In short, it was very annoying for me to try to read it as a story. Once I gave that up and just read it for the words, it's quite pretty. It's like a poem which is communicating most through negative space, the words not said in it. That's actually my favorite form for a poem to take and this novella has that feel to it.
• No One Writes to the Colonel -- This is a sad story about sad old people who live in a sad village and are raising a rooster. The Colonel of the story reminded me a lot of my maternal grandfather in temperament. He's stubborn and dignified and persists in the face of danger to himself and his loved ones. The village the story is set in reminds me a lot of my hometown, if it were located in South America and subject to violent political upheaval. This story made more sense to me than the first one, but it was still quite a downer. There's a lot of hard luck scrabble going on here and that was an unpleasant reminder of my childhood. But the prose is quite nice and so this story is a good read for people who like words for the sake of words.
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- This was the work I checked this book out of the library for the purpose of reading on the recommendation of Vylar. All in all, this was my favorite story in this work. It's about a guy who's killed, obviously enough. The story is the efforts of the narrator to reconstruct the events surrounding the death of the protagonist, with a sort of he-said she-said and distorted through years of memory effect to the efforts. At this point, an informed critic would probably compare this story in some way to Rashomon. Unfortunately, I've never seen it or read the works it's taken from, so you'll have to fill in your own comparison here. There's a lot of good description in this novella and some quick, concise characterizations, capturing a multitude of attitudes and behaviors in short passages. It's also got a rather nice little love story inside, with a touch I really liked [the thousands of letters, carefully organized ... but all unopened] but which is a tangent from the narrative though arguably the point of the story. It's got a few gory bits but well worth the read. No one really seems to come off in a good light, here, and there's culpability aplenty to be handed out for the murder which is the cornerstone of this story.

Translators on this one were Gregory Rabassa and J.S. Bernstein. Yes, it's true. I'm woefully monolingual, though it's distinctly possible I could have tackled a Spanish version of this, with dictionary at hand. It's been a decade since anyone expected me to speak the language of another country. Any polyglot tendencies have been along the course of programming languages in the interim. There's no foreword or afterword from the translators so it's not easy for me to discern what elements are their voice and what is Marquez's original intent. There do certainly seem to be typesetting issues with at least the first novella, where a point of view switches mid-passage when other such switches have been presaged by typographical devices.

I guess this is representative of the genre of magical realism, a phrase I'd always associated with Tim Powers, quite wrongly. To me, magical realism meant a sense of the orderly fantastical, a magic with a logic beneath it, perhaps not known but certainly practicable. Do A, B, C, expect D, not from understanding the process, but simply from trial and error evidence of consequence. I gather genuine magical realism is more like telling a fantasy story and disguising it as modern prose, so that the outlandish elements don't jar with the real world setting of the work. That's okay, too. But I think I still prefer whatever Tim Powers might be writing in to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in general. I guess I like to know when someone's pulling my leg.

Vylar sent me this link on Friday, but I didn't get a chance to look it over until today.

It is, in fact, fairly freaking awesome. A simulator for artificial life, a magnitude more interesting than RoboCode and not only is it a wizard in the kitchen, it's a snappy dresser.

I rather think I'm going to have to spend some time playing with this. I especially enjoy that there's source available.
I'm sick of software which supports both kinds, Windows and MacOS.

So here's an interesting trio of sisters. As it is said, "One loved money, one loved power, and one loved China". A remarkable family, with motivated women who achieved notable destinies. Curiously little seems to have been written about their male siblings. The Furies of the Guillotine, the Greek furies, Charlie's Angels, the Dixie Chicks, everyone loves a trio of powerful and dangerous women.

Interestingly enough, the one most renowned for cleverness is said to have loved power. I suppose power does trump both money and China. Or to remap it, scissors triumph over both stone and paper. Thanks to PG for the pointer.

Continuing her quest to educate me, Laws has now pointed me at an excerpt from a forthcoming book by David Foster Wallace, who you might remember from such thick and meaty works as Infinite Jest. It's a personal failing that I can only start David Foster Wallace books while on airplanes but that doesn't mean I find him inaccessible. I'll just have to drag myself kicking and screaming in to his mad world.

Laws pointed me at an interesting article about Murphy's Law. John Paul Stapp just went from a "who?" to a "whoa." at supersonic speeds.