Obsolete Your Idols

This is the end, my only friend.

Of this manifestion of a blog, at least. I've migrated the blosxom entries from the server they used to be on, into a new server space, but having gone through all that, I'm freezing this one in time, disabling comments, removing old comments. As a curious side effect, any updates I made will appear to have been made on this date. Que sera fuckit. If you'd like to continue following my screeds, head on over to http://blog.manjusri.org/

Thanks for reading.

The book I just read turned out to be a couple of firsts for me

• first Ken MacLeod book I've read
• first post-Singularity book I've read (possibly)*
• first book I've read this year which I'm ready to pronounce my favorite of the year

This book follows one old and dedicated woman in her quest to resolve a deep and abiding threat. We get flashbacks of her youth, we get political and philosophical arguments, we get ironic social commentary, we get sf alien tech.

The book is called The Cassini Division and when I first saw it on a friend's shelf I was compelled to pick it up and look at the back cover and flyleaf text. Once I'd read that much of it, I was driven to borrow it and bump it to the top of my reading queue. If anything, it was even better than I was hoping.

So what's it about? This book is about anticipating what life after the Singularity might be like if only people selfish enough to sacrifice everything to attain it pass through that event. It's full of references to other sf, most overtly in the chapter titles. It's a nice character study and often the dialog had me chuckling aloud.

I like it. I think it's the best book I read this year.

Who else might like it

• people who think about the Singularity
• people who like Heinlein's narratives but not his politics

I would like especially to thank Brad who, on every occasion I have spoken to him for the past year said nothing but "KenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeod" and Brent, who loaned me his copy to read.

*Depending upon whether you consider Wil McCarthy's post-Scarcity analogous to post-Singularity

UPDATE 2007/12/30: No it's not new
I may have given the impression simply by being so late to the party on this book that it's a new book. It's not, it's been out for years, but I am a slow reader and have a long to-read queue which prevents me noticing many good books. This book does meet my new reading criteria: it's good enough that if I had died without reading it, I would have been sad about that (in theory, in an alternate reality where sentiment persisted beyond incarnation or where one could know of things beyond one's exposure).

Imagine someone sapped you, popped open your skull like a Pez dispenser and shoved a radio into your head which enabled someone to transmit instructions into your head with the same plausibility as your own thoughts. If that sounds familiar, you've read some of the same books I have.

So I read another book on the same theme and it was The Squares of the City. It's from 1965 and it's One of the Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of the Year. I know that because the publisher helpfully printed that on the cover. What is this book?

It's a novelization of a chess game. Specifically, this chess game. In this aspect, it's a little like The Man in the High Castle, where the narrative is shaped by an external pattern. Chess is less random than the I Ching, or so I seem to believe.

That's not a spoiler, about the chess game. I say this because

• the back cover tells you this
• the foreword tells you this
• the introduction tells you this
• the afterword tells you this

You're supposed to read this story, knowing that it is an anthropomorphic rendition of the chess game. Name characters are pieces and they move, interact, threaten and capture, according to the schedule set by the chess games.

Does it work? Yes and no. It's easy, reading the story, to forget the structure imposed upon it by the chess game. The story is reasonably interesting as a man vs. society struggle. But in the end, it felt overly constrained by that framework. Sometimes the protagonist seems struck inert and unmotivated by the dictates of the game.

Things I liked about it

• prescient awareness of the threat that subliminal messaging presents
• prescient warning that someday the government would manage populace using gimmicks dreamed up by advertisers
• Maria Posador, a strong female character
• romanticizing civil engineering
• an experimental framework which added a layer to understanding the work
• an exploration of prejudice

Things I didn't

• the presentation of the story which laid out over and over the chess game underlying
• the endgame compromise where Brunner abandons the game as played

Who might like this story

• chess fans
• fans of John Brunner, the godfather of cyberpunk
• fans of experimental fiction

Offered almost without comment.

This is National Novel Writing Month. You may or may not remember that I 'won' that in 2003 by writing a time travel porn novel. Hey, I hit 50k words, even though they're utterly unpublishable. It counts.

I've tried to compete in NaNoWriMo a couple times since then but something has always gotten in the way. So I'm not doing it this year, either. But I do like the sensations receiving in my brain from the act of writing so I am going to try some writing this month.

Specifically, I'm celebrating National Letter Writing Month, a contest I just made up.

I'm going to try to write a letter for each day of this month and send it off. For this year's NaLeWriMo, I'm focusing on political issues. Because, like Arthur Silber, I'm concerned about how things are going. So, referring to The Consumerist Guide, here's the text of my first hand-written letter. It's to one of my Senators, Barbara Boxer, on the topic of Iran.

The Honorable Barbara Boxer                     November 1, 2007
112 Hart Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington DC 20510

Dear Senator Boxer,

I've been a Californian for two years, volunteering my time and skills to
various local user groups and non-profit organizations, as well as working
as a Unix system administrator.

I'm writing to you about Iran.  I'm afraid that our country will soon
be thrown headlong into a needless and devastating war upon Iran.  
I think that Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was so perceptive on the matter
of Iraq's nuclear program, is again correct in his assessment of Iran's
capabilities.  Iran is years away from being any kind of nuclear threat.
I saw news stories indicating you'd co-signed a letter to the President
expressing concern about the heated language he's been using in reference to
Iran.  Thank you for doing so.

Please put that sentiment into law by advancing S.759, prohibiting the
use of funds for military operations in Iran.  As a member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, you are in an excellent position to do a great
deal of good.  Please have a meeting scheduled to discuss it or co-sponsor
it before matters deteriorate further.

Sincerely,
Shannon Prickett

Oh, and good luck to the NaNoWriMo participants this year, especially the returning ones who might have not quite made it before. It's hard to get back on a horse which has thrown you once. Keep at it!

(If you're a Californian who wants to write a letter on a similar topic, the pertinant staffer seems to be Sean Moore.)

I've since updated the laptop to Ubuntu 7.04 and then immediately thereafter to Ubuntu 7.10 and nothing bad has happened. The web camera was getting closer to usable as I could see it in lsusb

binder@death:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
binder@death:~$

and so knew it was a Syntek webcam. I did some browsing around and found recommendations to use the cutting edge Syntek driver via an Ubuntu forums thread and following those suggestions, I could see it recognized in dmesg:

[   31.580000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 - STK-1135 based webcam found.
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek AVStream USB2.0 1.3M WebCam - Product ID 0x0501.
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Release: 0005
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Number of interfaces : 1
[   31.592000] stk11xx: Initialize USB2.0 Syntek Camera
[   31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is ready
[   31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[   31.808000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_stk11xx_driver
[   31.808000] stk11xx: v1.1.0 : Syntek USB Video Camera

So now I was nearly home. But I still needed to do one more thing to get it to go because when I tried to start Camorama it kept erroring out with:

Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0). 
Please check connection.

And when I ran it from the command line with the -D switch, I got a touch more information:

binder@death:~$ camorama --debug
VIDIOCGCAP  --  could not get camera capabilities, exiting.....

Which turned out to be resolved by the same thing that always fixes using multimedia devices in Linux: permissions. In this case, /dev/video0 existed, was owned by root:video and only had permissions for user and group. So I added my user account to group video with:

sudo adduser binder video

and all is right with the world.

Today we bought a mattress from a woman I wouldn't have wanted to have in bed (no offense). This reminds me of how the barber on ST:TNG had no hair and how one is told to never trust a thin cook. But on the plus side, new mattress coming soon. BOUNCIE BOUNCIE!

Dig this javascript:

At least for a few more days.

So a friend of mine is making her way through Snow Crash. Plowing, as she cleverly puts it. Reading her midpoint assessment of it reminded me of the first time I read it. How the opening passage, with The Deliverator, grabbed my attention, how everything seemed comic book slick and sf movie out-there.

It was like an especially good novelization of a wicked cool dream some nerdy guy might have. Which is why it held such appeal for me then and still does. But after a couple times through it, and having learned more about how stories get crafted, it's no longer a book I'd rave about to someone.

In fact, as much as I really deeply enjoy Stephenson books, it's not even the first Stephenson book I'd suggest someone new to him read. For sheer accessibility, I'd recommend Interface and even then I'm not convinced I'd recommend Stephenson to most people. Honestly, the kind of fetishization of information and language and long perspective view needed to really suck the marrow out of the bones of his novels is not very common.

That is, it's a niche of an already niche market. A subselection, as it were. I don't exactly construe it as a guy vs. gal thing but I think there are probably social forces which make it more likely that there is a higher percent of gears which will mesh in a guy's head when reading Stephenson than will click with a gal reader.

I know. Exceptions. If you're reading this, you're quite possibly in the self-selecting narrow range of people who read about the kinds of books I read and write about, even if you don't read those books, yourself.

So I think it's a fair assessment to believe that Snow Crash is a book which will predominantly appeal to guys, in particular a subset of guys who are computer savvy, language obsessed and who, yes, fetishize girls on skateboards. I suppose by now the market must be relatively flooded by derivative and imitative works which refer or have the underlying assumption of familiarity with Snow Crash but I haven't sought them out because, after Snow Crash hit all those buttons for me, I was satisfied.

But that implies to me that there is, somewhere subsequently, a novel which is enough like Snow Crash that the bit-head guys would dig on it but which has broadened out enough in appeal that people outside of that demographic, even just a little bit [bit-head gals, non-bit-head guys] or way, way out [non-bit-head gals] would enjoy but if that is true, even if I were to become aware of the book, would I even recognize the similarity? Would I be able to read it?

I know I couldn't read many of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy books, and when I could I would be unsatisfied at how incoherent, contradictory or blandly derived they were.

So if Alli Dalisay had asked me for a book recommendation sort of in the cyberpunk modern style, I wouldn't have said Snow Crash. I'd have said When Gravity Fails or if she wanted Stephenson in particular, Cryptonomicon -- hey, it even has scenes in the Philippines.

So I spent the weekend with a crushing headache and difficulty breathing without hydrotechnics, thus missing, among other events, the annual company picnic.

But I wasn't completely inert as I could still perform the all important actions of clicking and scrolling. All important if one wants to waste time on the internets. Which I did!

So now I am a user of sonicliving and I even used the nifty import from last.fm feature which was a snap. I also finally recruited a team at Fantasy Congress.

Then I rated a bunch of movies at Netflix and diverged even more from my friends.

The D&D 3.5 game I run on alternate Sunday afternoons has reached a milestone. The party has traversed the first Region in the World's Largest Dungeon.

That's been, more or less, seven months of dungeon crawling to get to this point. Two original characters remain from the original party, both dwarves.

Now they're on to Region B, full of traps and goblinoids.

Perhaps now I can find time to fit in getting double duty out of the book by running it for my co-workers, as well.

It's possible to draw a line, dividing the comic book works of Warren Ellis I enjoy from those which I don't. It severs the cape and sf work (which I can't get enough of) from the horror and prehistory stuff (which, while viscerally affecting, I do not consider enjoyable).

Some of his work is closer to the line, on one side or another. Global Frequency is just barely on the like side, for example. I can't read that as a book, I have to read each chapter/issue and let it simmer between readings. Nextwave is just barely on the dislike side, mostly because I'm not a fan of the Marvel setting which he's riffing on, there.

I like his way of seeing the world enough that I even bought his Available Light book. Read it, and enjoyed it for more than novelty's sake. Some very striking images and suitable prose.

So now he's written a novel. This novel.

It's called Crooked Little Vein and in a word it is awesome.

It's an American road trip viewed through the lens of the internet.

It's a natural outgrowth of some of the text fragments I've seen him posting before on his various websites, news stories he's flagged as research materials, rolled up into a nice sharp bolus of insight. It's a perspective on America from the other side of an ocean. It's funny and gross and suspenseful and wry.

It's in a similar vein to the last book I read and a pair of my all-time favorite books but updated to a more modern set of patterns of perception.

Who might like this book

• paranoids, practical and practicing
• fans of Warren Ellis's dialog and characters
• fans of secret history
• fans of noir stories

Who might not like this book

• people who are frightened of the internet
• people who are so over the internet, already

Tangentially, there's a more informed and less glib review of CLV over at fearzone written by Nick Mamatas.

Assuming you haven't given up completely, a bill which might do something about Habeas Corpus so yay for that.

Today I recycled over twenty solicitations for contributions from alleged politicians and activist organizations. I have never sent money to any of them. I also set aside solicitations from four organizations, to whom I have previously given money.

Here's the deal. The first one to actually do something useful which makes the world a better place and lets me know about it without bundling it with a solicitation for donation gets money.

From now on, I'm going to recycle without reading anything which even smacks of begging me for money. Stop panhandling me. Get to work, you greedy parasites.

After I moved to the Bay Area, my desktop machines began the long slow death march which machines undertake after they've been bumped around from state to state for a half decade, and seen heavy use as development platforms, house servers, and world facing servers. Which is to say they got gradually less useful / available to me on a personal level. Meaning that for the past three years or so, I've been using whatever laptops my job issued to me for anything I needed to do at home. Meaning I stopped coding on my personal projects, stopped enjoying much of the material the web has to offer. You know. Pr0n.

But now that's changed!

I bought a laptop for myself, my very first just-for-me laptop, in May of this year and as I threatened at the time, here's my review of it.

First off, what is it? It's an XW1560 from RCubed. I'd link to it but they seem to have discontinued that model. The closest match is probably their XW1580. It's about the same size, had the same CPU choice, different video, similar RAM. So pretty comparable to what I have.

How do I like what I have? It's AWESOME.

I got a dual boot configuration because there are a few things I need to provide technical support for in my superhero identity which require me to use Windows but I only tend to boot up in that mode when fighting crime or when a particularly exciting Patch Tuesday has happened and I need to catch up. Otherwise the laptop runs Ubuntu 6.06.

Despite it being a dual core 64-bit CPU, it's running the 32bit release of Linux so that I can have multimedia flash support. Remember that bit in the first paragraph where you thought I was joking? I'm still making that joke.

One of the services RCubed provides with an Ubuntu pre-install are nice icons to install proprietary binary-only multimedia drivers. That means I can watch Windows Media and MPEG-n format video on this laptop and getting to that point was painless. Yes, I know how to do that manually and yes I've gone through that loop more than once but oh how nice it was to have someone else do the work for me on this. The downside to that is that I'm leaving it at release 6.06 until the next Ubuntu LTS releases, rather than chasing the cutting, or even the stable, edge.

Things I do with this laptop which seem pretty cool to me

• watch DVD movies
• watch videos from the web
• use wpa2 wireless access points
• code in as many languages as I care to (I exclude here the ones which suck, ie, are proprietary or otherwise lack SDKs for Linux)
• boot painlessly into Windows when I need to suffer the Land of Suck
• use a number of solid state removable media with it, no gotchas

Things I don't do with this laptop but wish I could

• use the built-in camera; maybe a newer kernel / drivers will help
• use the firewire or E-SATA interfaces; none of my devices need this so the ports just sit idle and I couldn't tell you if they work
• go on battery power for more than two hours; my only real complaint, the battery life is shitty but I think I'm just spoiled from using other laptops
• make better use of the SD/MMC bay; all my solid state stuff is CF (oops!)

Things I'd do differently if I were to buy a laptop today

• nothing; this is exactly the laptop I wanted and I didn't pay more than seemed reasonable for it

Who might enjoy a laptop from RCubed

• people who want to get a dedicated Linux laptop without doing a lot of research / labor to get to that point
• people who like to use the little magic key stuff on laptop keyboards; they come configured to work with Linux (thanks, RCubed!, thanks, Ubuntu!)
• people who will not be angry when UPS drops the package and SOAKS IT IN WATER as they did with mine; man, UPS keeps working my teats. If I could change one thing about RCubed it would be to have them provide shipping options other than UPS ones

I did buy myself a ShaggyMac screen protector because I'd been very happy with what a similar set of laptop pajamas did for a Powerbook I bought some time back and am pleased at how well that has helped keep the RCubed laptop clean and crud-free. So that's a pretty cool purchase I made, there.

I went to a couple social gatherings yesterday and took pictures.

Photo sets here and here.

Yeah, they're in my regular flickr stream but evidently not everyone subscribes to the RSS feed there or even looks at the site top where I have the flickr badge.

Remember when I read Catch-22 and I said I should have read it years ago? That wasn't strictly true in that at a younger age I probably wouldn't have appreciated it as much as I did reading it now. That I had to age into the point where that cynicism glitters.

I just read The Crying of Lot 49 and I may have the opposite situation, where I'm past the prime of my enjoyment of the book.

I did enjoy it, but I probably would have enjoyed it more at the point where I still thought powerful ideas were enough to change the world. That the sharpest knife is actually perspective and that it can be used to carve away all the parts which don't fit in the perfect world. That's the kind of book this was for me, an exploration of a perspective where paranoia is contagious and the extrusion of other worlds into one's own are wondrous and revelatory as well as disturbing and sickening.

Is that an operational definition of the consensus reality of the real world? Maybe. I'm less sure than I once was.

This story did seem to capture something core about the California experience, the droning background impression of living here, where everyone seems to be the star of their own dramatic tale and all other humans are merely bit players. In the same way that Oedipa Maas entertains the notion that the entire sequence of events she's experiencing are perhaps an elaborate prank or a targeted threat, many of the people I see every day similarly behave as if everything is staged for their benefit. It's an odd realization to notice that you're the least important person in California, if you were to judge by the reactions of others.

The book is the story of a woman brushing up against and becoming ensnared with either madness, a prank, a conspiracy or something which borrows from all three. It's structured very pleasantly and the protagonist is likable and not at all unreliable. The other characters are deftly conveyed but not very convolute. That's the surface.

I suspect there's a lot to decode here, going deeper and analyzing and unraveling the symbols but I'm a shallow reader so you'll need to talk to a graduate student about all of that.

What I liked about the book

• reliable narrator, hooray, even when she's possibly hallucinating
• conspiracy stories, love 'em, especially with secret history overtones
• short and fast read
• meta-fiction, with the play within the book narrative

What I didn't

• nothing

Who might like this book

• young aspiring anarchists, artists, rebels, malcontents, riffraff, hop-heads, surrealists and Republicans
• people who think they should like Pynchon but find his other works too long or too slow
• stamp collectors who've been looking for a racy book to prove to other people that philatelists can intersect with fornication

It's been a couple years since I did anything useful with the code which JunkBBS runs, itself a mild fork of bbs100. Last Sunday, just for fun, I got it to build on my personal laptop. A few tweaks, some modernization of idioms, and it built. Sweet.

Then for the past 24 hours, I've been gradually merging in bits from later releases of bbs100 than the one I based JunkBBS code on. It's still early in the process, but I'm optimistic this will get me out of the weeds on this project [which has languished for 5 years] and let me get my hands dirty with actual programming once more.

That's what I did last night when I actually left work at a Usual Time. Tonight when I left at an Absurdly Late Time, I sat in front of a fan and wrote this post.

I hope to set up a flow soon so I can blog from my Sidekick (in addition to twittering which it does very well, indeed) perhaps through the tumblelog, perhaps through this blosxom instance.

I got a new phone!

This one.

I traded it in exchange for having any time to do anything with it. Seems like a pretty good deal so far but I know I'm still skimming the surface of what it can do.

In other news, Flames seems to have undergone some kind of life-changing experience and no longer offers fried chicken so I failed to attain lunch satisfaction. The counter lady didn't understand my order and so I didn't even get the burger I asked for.

See? I can blog the pointless, too.

My boss gave me a camera. A digital camera. My first dedicated function camera. So I took it with me today as I was out and about and took some pictures without using any of the lenses or neat-o features (well, I did use one neat feature) just to see how the basics of it look.

You can find them in my flickr page.

So now that I've got a camera, I'm going to retire my Nokia 6600 and complain less about my ability to capture what I can see (I hope).

So this is my review of Sicko.

Well, it was going to be. When I started my day, I was planning to see Sicko as my third and final documentary of the day. But then a funny thing happened. Vy had joined me for dinner and we walked past the Gaia Arts Center hunting the wily burrito. Lo, and likewise, behold, it was Documentary Tuesday at the Center. That meant a free showing of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room!

I'd been meaning to see this one since I first saw trailers for it, but I don't normally go to the movies. Or so it seems to me. So we jumped at this chance. Or I did and Vy humored me.

My take on Enron: a symptom of the problem.

The problem: systems built to diffuse responsibility combined with pursuit of money above all other concerns. It's a triumph of single minded obsession lauded as an individual and group virtue. It's sick and it's disgusting and it's how things work.

Pissed me off.

The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters was the second movie I saw. Again, a documentary. Again, highly rated at Rotten Tomatoes. Even better, it had things in it I'd actually seen. There's a video game tournament from 1982 ... in Ottumwa, Iowa.

You know, where we used to have to roll up the window to drive past the Hormel plant so we wouldn't gag from the stench.

Oh, yes. I've been to Ottumwa. I even remember when that tournament happened. I wasn't allowed anywhere near it, of course.

Just as I remember the Twin Galaxies video game arcade in Fairfield, Iowa. I remember going in to it and being dazzled by the options, the lights, the sound. I remember staring at those boxes and knowing that inside of each one there was a simple computer doing all of the work I was perceiving as sound and sight.

I was in there once and then never again. I suppose I must have not shut up about it in a way which worried my parents that I'd fall into the trap of pouring a lot of money (not that I had any) into the machines. But I did go in once and it was amazing.

There's also some bits about Transcendental Money-extraction in the movie which is just as creepy now as it was when I was living right next to it.

I didn't recognize any of the current day streets of Fairfield stuff but how would I? So much has changed. The last time I visited, I didn't even recognize much of the stuff on the main drag. I could find my way to the schools I'd gone to and that's about it.

But this documentary isn't really about Fairfield, it's about playing arcade video games competitively. It's about doing whatever it takes to win, including estranging your wife, neglecting your kids, social engineering, acting through proxies, playing mind games, and spending hours a day playing. This story starts off playing for laughs, gets unseemly pretty quickly, and turns into something of an underdog tale.

Very good movie for the nerd set, the retro gaming set, or people who like barbecue sauce.

Not so good for people who never saw classic video arcades, don't care about video games or who think dude rivalry films need guns to be worth watching.

Yesterday I saw three documentaries. The first one was one named The Devil Came on Horseback. I chose it on the basis of the Rotten Tomatoes rating it had: 96%. That's a pretty amazing score for a documentary.

It's an amazing documentary. It's brutal, bleak, tragic with dashes of hope and optimism. It really moved me with pity and compassion for the suffering the people of the Darfur region of Sudan suffer at the hands of their own government.

This movie is brutal but should be mandatory viewing for any citizen of the world.

Hey, I finally took Tim's bait and got myself a tumblelog. I don't know what I'll actually do with it; so far I just seem to be using it to scare myself and scar others.

Its rss feed is stuffed into the landing page at the top of my [site] [manj] as well.

Oh, and I got myself a myspace account, too. No connection there, just catching up on things I did while I was fiddling around online.

Do I need a page to list all the places I am online, yet? Have I achieved Social Network Saturation? I've got my fingers in everybody's pie.

Tomorrow I'm planning to Not Work.

I'm going to stave off work burn-out by turning off my cell phone and going to a movie. Then another movie. Then a third movie.

They're all documentaries and I'll see if I can survive on movie theater food. It'll be relaxing and scientific.

Last night we went to the Lesher Center for the Arts for a magic show by Gerald Joseph. When I was a kid I was enamored of Erich Weiss and read all I could about him, including what I think must have been this book as it seems to have illustrations of his escapes.

I had let my interest in stage magic languish over the years but when Vy spotted a local magic show I knew I had to see it.

So the good first

• Gerald Joseph has great kid management skills
• Gerald Joseph has pretty decent patter
• Gerald Joseph has excellent stage presence
• Harry Houdini was referenced during the show

The bad

• there was not one illusion I had not seen before in one form or another
• this was clearly targeting the family-and-kids crowd and I don't know if you know this but kids are freaking annoying

Also, and not part of the show, but part of the venue, there is an awesome if small art display on the ground floor. Admission to it was free because we were ticket holders for an event there and it was well worth the wander to look at Carny art (this URL will cease to be useful at some future point when it's no longer the current exhibit; they don't seem to support linking to permanent descriptions of exhibits) and even handle some old school arcade games, where they had actual payouts of a gum-ball, not always conditional upon success.

The book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is not science-fiction but it is fiction. I'd previously read The Speed of Dark and I can't help but compare the two (compare, not contrast).

Both have autistic narrators as protagonists. Both feature simple narratives and focus on the kinds of situations which one assumes to be simple for non-autistic people to navigate but which are shown to be challenging for the functional autistic people in our societies.

So what did The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time bring which was usefully new? Some ruminations on how absolutely brutally difficult it is to assimilate betrayal into one's mindset if one has little to no emotional empathy. The implication here being that with a sense of why someone might do or say to express complex emotional states, it becomes possible to perceive a gradation of excusable behavior.

So in that reading, this book is not really about an autistic sense of the world, it's more a narrative about how people are constantly committing betrayals of one another, great and small, for the most justifiable of reasons and they are able to do this because of a deep sense of emotional empathy. Because I suspect some fact may harm another, I choose not to reveal it or perhaps I reveal it partially or perhaps I even obfuscate that fact to hide it from the person who I suspect it may harm.

But the world is a multi-vector space.

Even if I never reveal the fact, the potentially harmed person may learn it in some other way. The impact may be heightened if they can learn or deduce that I kept the information from them.

That's the message I took away from this book and that's much deeper than the textual narrative. I don't know that that's something the author put into it on purpose but it's something I feel free to take from it as a late modernist period reader (tangentially, we are not yet post-modern because I haven't seen anyone actually being over modernism; we're junkies in denial, not remission) and that explanatory framing of this story made it an enjoyable read for me, after the fact. During the reading, the story was interesting but had no real accelerant quality to motivate me to read it faster and faster.

Interestingly, this is a book which a record number of co-workers had already read (TWO of them) before I did and both of them loved it and raved about it. They're not especially genre readers so this book is probably pretty accessible to people who hate the other books I write about having read.

(I also read Secrets and Lies in the interim but nobody cares about my take on that as it is the anticipated response.)

Who might like this book

• genre-haters who like books with a little different spin
• people who like to read about children and broken homes
• people who like bite-sized math facts

Who might not

• dog-lovers with sensitive constitutions

Overall, a not very challenging, easy read of a book. It even has pictures and some fun math bits.

If I knew a strange story of something which happened to me but rather than tell you that story I told you a story about telling you the story of the strange events which transpired, it would be a form of story not entirely unlike Kelly Link telling you stories as she does in stranger things happen which I just read. This is not an explanation of her stories, this is not even an explanation of my experience of her stories but it does seem to indicate an almost irrepressible urge to take on some of the practices of her writing in shallow form when writing about her writing.

It's all very meta-, you see.

There's a blurb on the cover and it's by Jonathan Lethem and it seems to me to be Jonathan Lethem writing about Kelly Link as if he were Kelly Link writing about someone else (who has the same name as Kelly Link) but is not the Kelly Link about whom Kelly Link (in her guise as Jonathan Lethem) is writing. It says

Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.

When I read that blurb, before reading the stories in the book, I thought What a curious way to say that and it didn't sound very much like the Jonathan Lethem books I've read but now that I've read this collection of stories, I think it's very much like something Kelly Link might say about her writing if she were someone else.

This collection has eleven stories. Here are some brief notes about them.

• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. When this story was over, I wanted to watch The World According to Garp. It seems representative of Kelly Link stories to me, in that it has a protagonist who is unclear on their origin, motives, and environment.
• Water Off a Black Dog's Back. This is a moral tale about not fucking people you meet in libraries. Or a cautionary tale about being sure to lose things you care about before it's too late. I'm not entirely sure.
• The Specialist's Hat. I can give this story no higher praise than to say: this story could have been written by Vy.
• Flying Lessons. This is a good story for people who want to run certain kinds of Unknown Armies games or for people who like a kind of glib knowing modernization of Greek myths.
• Travels with the Snow Queen. I guess it's a fairy anti-fairy tale but I didn't really care for it very much.
• Vanishing Act. I have no response to this story. I think that I don't get it.
• Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party. I have been waiting all my life for someone to write a story based on this joke premise. It's everything I dreamed it would be, almost. Needed more rough sex.
• Shoe and Marriage. This story seems like a writing experiment. The last part was the best part. The Miss Kansas bit was also pretty good.
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water. I think this is my favorite story in this collection. Sadly, nothing happens, so I can't tell you what happens in it. There are some phone conversations and some emotions, mostly sadness and lust and love. You should read this story sometime with whiskey and if you think it's you I'm talking to, yes, you're right.
• Louise's Ghost. Another story which makes me think it's the result of Kelly writing a writing experiment along the lines of "how can I have a story with two characters of the same name?" Given how reasonable an explanation that seems to me, I'm pretty sure that's not what she did here. But it's got some fetishization of cellists so, hooray for that.
• The Girl Detective. I guess this is the story everybody loves. Shortest response: I'm not everybody.

So this collection is totally readable and not at all hostile. It is friendly but doesn't know what to say to you, quite, when it sees you in the hallway of conventions. Do I read too much in to it? Very well, I read too much in to it.

I liked this collection but I am looking forward to having my own thought patterns reassert themselves.

People who might especially like these stories.

• writers who are serious about their craft
• writers who are frivolous about their craft
• people who are or suspect they may be dead

So now I have read something by Kelly Link, only three months after I could have talked to her about it; there is always next year, but I still don't think I know anything to say she won't already have heard. Many of the things I enjoy in her writing are things I enjoy in Vy's writing. The few things I don't enjoy I attribute to my not getting some underlying mechanism of narrative.

Kelly Link: she is thinking harder about her stories than you are.

I haven't been listening to a lot of music, lately. I busted both my primary and my auxiliary pair of headphones. Now I've got an excuse to buy some new ones: Magnatune's The Art of Persuasion.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that Brad Sucks has not one but two compilations of remixes out now.

You may recall that I have long supported impeachment for this administration. I remember promises to restore dignity and honor to the office. I remember promises to protect the environment, the Constitution, and the country.

So now there's Yet Another Impeachment Effort. I don't have a lot of optimism that this puppet show will go anywhere but what the hell, I put my name on the list.

I'd rather be rioting in the streets but, you know, I've got bills to pay. You could go add your name to the list. Or not. Don't do something just because I told you to do it, that's the stupidest reason to do something. But do think about whether sufficient treason has been committed by these short-sighted selfish criminals.

Over the past day I've been setting up some new accounts with services I've not used before but been aware of (you can read that with an air of contempt, if you like) and thinking about what is working for me and what isn't.

Some very preliminary thoughts:

• I really like cdbaby's Sounds Like search, perhaps because it's built on input from the artists, themselves, but the UI is maybe too basic as it doesn't give me any confidence rating for the similarity
• the difficulty for posting to livejournal is, obviously, very low and if I were a person who was not interested in learning new skills, it would be a very stress-less path toward expressing myself and seeking community
• pownce will really only be useful to me when a critical mass of people are sharing pr0n files
• habbo hotel scares me before I even try to make an account, just hitting the front page; I think this makes me officially Too Old using a metric I read recently: if the tools of connectivity are a barrier, you are Too Old

Yes, I did just create a livejournal account this morning but it wasn't just to comment on Nick's lj. That was just a nice side effect.

I did it to continue my goal of providing five nines of tech support to Vy who is dipping her toe in the livejournal tub to see how the water feels to her. So stop in if you know her and say hi, at whichever site of hers you like.

As I write this, there's more content at vylarkaftan.net but who knows whether that will be the same by the time you read this.

A co-worker helped me celebrate System Administrator Appreciation Day by buying me a beer at House of Shields tonight.

This: is the beer I bought for myself after.

Never been to House of Shields before and it took me forever to spot any shields. I was expecting something more like a shield wall. I guess that would be too gaudy for a crowded place full of shouting people watching everyone else.

New record minimum, though: only one person spilled beer on me while I was sitting at the bar.

I won something! Which never happens. Specifically, I won $20 in store credit from my favorite book store, Powells. I won it by writing a review of Move Under Ground and having it picked for the Daily Dose.

The only down side is that since I first signed up for the Daily Dose I've seen a lot of books I want and wish-listed them so now I am trying not to use up all of my credit all at once. My day is in this Daily Dose archive near the bottom (oh, I crack myself up).

Note that if you want to buy the book without giving me any affiliate store credit, you'll want to use the link to the archive and go from there. The book title itself in my first paragraph is affiliate coded as is the search box at the top of this site.

Because Vy is awesome, she buys me books.

Most recently she bought me Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas and I just finished reading it.

First, some digressions.

I know Nick. Have known him years, first as a quirky and amusing set of pixels forming acerbic text and later as a more tangible manifestation of cynicism.

I've read all three of his novels, now, shortly after they've been printed.

I remember when I read Northern Gothic I was puzzled by something and so I connected to the online place where I knew he hung about. I said, "Hey, NK, I just read your book and I have a question." He said, "NO, I'm not gay!"

So I never asked him my question, which was, "But why is the ghost haunting the dildo?"

Which is to say, I think I have trouble making these simple and fundamental connections which infuse his stories.

His second novel, Move Under Ground didn't confuse me so much but that's because I don't expect the Beatnik novels to have any kind of closure or to ever really be about anything I can make sense of and the Lovecraftian fusion in it, well, that was just gravy and pandering to the audience of People Like Me. All, uh, 12 of us on the planet or whatever.

Now I've read Under My Roof and I've got one question which has confounded me (aside from what seems to be some fairly bad copy editing) and that is: How does Geri drive away in the car which Daniel just pages earlier sold and had Herbert help him pretend was a car jacking?

But that's enough digressions about my confusion so now I'll talk about the book itself.

It's short.

It's really short. Like, 150 pages short. Is this Young Adult fiction? Probably, hence the lack of length. It moves at a good clip and uses some good devices to keep the story engaging and skip over the boring parts.

It's a coming of age story for all ages. Various characters grow up, grow down, or grow in circles. There's some clever science-y bits and some strong female characters and suitably wry grown-ups-don't-get-kids observations from the young point of view character, who is arguably the protagonist though his struggles are few and far between and he mostly observes distantly the meaty bits of the narrative.

Who might like this book

• kids who are misunderstood by adults
• adults who are misunderstood by adults
• kids who are telepathic or want to be
• satirists, cynics, anarchists, iconoclasts, malcontents and commuters

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which exist

• satmaps.com

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which do not exist

• treatyonline.org
• mysonherbiethelovebug.org
• topplethegnome.com

So if you're looking for some domains to squat for when this novel becomes a movie, now's the time!

I went to BALUG last night because not only was it a pretty good price for deliciously unhealthy Chinese food, it was a chance to hear a person talking about the One Laptop Per Child project.

So, the most important thing first, the laptop itself. I gather this is called an XO model.

First impressions are that it's small. It bears the same relationship to a laptop, visually, that the undersized and plasticized versions of elements of the adult workaday world become children's toys so they can practice being good little cogs, tirelessly using their plastic saw, plastic oven, plastic cash register for the Good of their Owner.

So it's got that going for it.

The speaker (it says on the BALUG site that his name is Ed Cherlin and web searches seem to bear that out) demonstrated how the laptop can find and display wireless networks. He talked about how multiple units will peer and form a mesh network. They've tested this and had a fifty node network in a two mile radius around a central server.

The central server will ideally be connected to the Internet and if it isn't, have a sizable cache of useful content. So in optimal conditions, a user of the laptop peers with the server and through it reaches the outside world. Or the laptop peers with a laptop closer to the server and through it reaches the server and through the server reaches the Internet.

The laptops he showed are running a stripped down Red Hat Rawhide install, including a pared kernel. Because the platform has a known, fixed, and specific set of components the kernel and application can be tailored for just what it has and drop out what it won't ever need. Parallel port support, for example. There aren't any in it. Won't ever be any in it.

So the software load is small enough [presently] to go on a CD. The software updates can be put onto a thumb drive and I overheard unclearly that there's some magic for it detecting that there is a reboot-worthy update on the drive when it's inserted, applying it, and rebooting itself.

To quickly move data from server to server, because high speed Internet is an artifact of the kind of infrastructure in some of the countries with greater tech addiction, the plan is to have the server system have DVD-reading, CD-(re-)writing drives. Chunks of data in CD size can be exported and sneaker-netted to another server.

A user application was shown off, TamTam and it was pretty awesome. It displays a visual set of instruments, you select one, it synthesizes the sound of that instrument, notes mapped to the row of keys. Better still, if you're peered up with other laptops, it combines the notes from the peers with the one you're using. The audio can be recorded as you play it, remixed, edited, looped, and so on. One Laptop Per Musician!

Interested parties are urged to visit the OLPC wiki but mostly as contributors. If you're looking to buy one, you need to put together an order of a quarter of a million units at a touch under $180 each and wait in line while the one place on Earth making them fills the eight million unit backlog, first.

The components are made in China and assembled in Taiwan and the chip-set is AMD's.

I managed to re-swipe enough of the Holesque Grail to get every element I really care about back on this page. Needs more work, certainly, if only so I can understand what's going on here.

If you look at the css I'm using, I recommend not using it yourself. You're better served swiping as I swoped.

... hey, they are right, this CSS is all messed up and I've been playing with the DOM Inspector Tool so why don't I just fix it up real quick like.

If you happened to look at it during this time frame (Hi Drew!) that would explain the extra junk look it had at the time and the still not-quite-right it shows but I'm too tired to keep fiddling with it.

The categorytree is a casualty of this, at least in my web browser. It's an element in the DOM. Firefox 1.5 won't display it for me. What. The. Felch.

Come back later, it might be easier on the eyes.

Once upon a time I worked for a manager with an overtly unusual sense of humor.

An example would be an occasion on which he set up an automatic response in his email client to respond to anything he received from his boss with "That's an excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion." I guess that went on for a couple weeks before his boss caught on that it was scripted.

Similarly, at one point he loaned me a book which he said he thought reflected my attitude toward my job and my co-workers. He loaned me A Confederacy of Dunces.

Right.

I didn't see a whole lot of myself in that book but I wasn't offended. I was amused. Now that I've read a different book, I know what book he should have loaned me, the one which captured my sense of my career field.

Catch-22.

Everyone around me is insane. Many of them are trying to kill me. Some of them are trying to literally kill me, some are merely trying to expose me to fatally dangerous conditions.

Is it too late to become Milo Minderbinder, I wonder?

I won't try to actually review this book because you've either read it by now or nothing I can say will convince you to do what a stack of critics, pundits and probable friends have told you. I didn't get around to reading it until now because I am slow to appreciate classics. In a sense I'm very glad I didn't read it until now because it seems quite probable to me that at some earlier point in my life I could not have appreciated this novel, certainly not to the degree that I now savored the bureaucratic constriction.

So insofar as reviews of books often say more about the reviewer than the book, the important thing to know is this: if you work with me, I'm on to you!

I took the opportunity while catching up on my email to replace my hand-rolled rss2html based twitter stream at the top of my site with an actual proper twitter provided badge.

Also, I watched The Fountain and it was ... another opportunity to watch Hugh Jackman struggle against death. It was a pretty okay movie.

Sometimes I read the blogs of strangers and it inspires me.

Last night I read a tumblelog called Anarchaia which I think I probably found through some other stranger's blog on my curious staggers through the thoughts of people who code. In particular, the highlighted Thought on that page got me to thinking. So I tried scratching the itch in code and this is what fell out.

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 # splitrot by Shannon Prickett <binder@manjusri.org>
 # rotate vowels separately from consonants

 use strict;
 use warnings;

 #use Smart::Comments;

 my $consonant_string   = 'bBcCdDfFgGhHjJkKlLmMnNpPqQrRsStTvVwWxXzZ';
 my $vowel_string = 'aAeEiIoOuUyY';

 while (<>) {
     chomp;
     for my $letter (split //, $_) {
         my $rotted;
         if ($letter !~ qr{[$vowel_string]}msx) {
             $rotted = rot_n({ character => $letter, offset => 10, string =>
             \$consonant_string  });
         }
         else {
             $rotted = rot_n({ character => $letter, offset => 3, string =>
             \$vowel_string });
         }
         print $rotted;
     }
     print "\n";
 }

 sub rot_n {
     my $arg_ref = $_[0];
     my $character           = ${arg_ref}->{character};
     ### $character
     my $offset              = ${arg_ref}->{offset};
     my $letter_string_ref   = ${arg_ref}->{string};
     my $letter_string       = $$letter_string_ref;
     ### $letter_string

     if ($character =~ m{ [[:space:]|[:punct:]] }msx) {
         return $character;
     }

     my $character_index = index( $letter_string, $character );
     ### $character_index
     my $result_index = $character_index + ($offset * 2);
     ### $result_index
     if ($result_index > (length( $letter_string ) - 1)) {
         $result_index -= ($offset * 4);
     }
     ### $result_index

     my $return_letter = substr( $letter_string, $result_index, 1);
     ### $return_letter
     return $return_letter;
 }

That's not as horrible as I had feared it would be when all was said and done. Some examples:

 binder@death:~/src/r13$ ./splitrot 
 A man, a plan, a canal, SUEZ! 
 O zob, o cxob, o pobox, GEUM!
 O zob, o cxob, o pobox, GEUM!
 A man, a plan, a canal, SUEZ!
 You mean it just contradicts me all day?
 Iae zuob yh vegh pabhfoqyphg zu oxx qoi?
 Iae zuob yh vegh pabhfoqyphg zu oxx qoi?
 You mean it just contradicts me all day?
 binder@death:~/src/r13$

See? Reversible. Pronounceable? I don't think so. But you're free to pabhfoqyphg zu if you dare.

I've started trying to update the board game library at work.

That's right. I get paid to think about what games I want to play at work and then I get paid to play them. You wish you were me.

This week I picked up

• Stonehenge
• Carcassonne Big Box

but I don't anticipate getting any actual time to play this week what with my lunch date at E & O Trading tomorrow. So next Monday will probably be my first chance to sit down with one of those and get my game on.

Luckily I've got a day of boardgames going on Saturday and then D&D and Ars Magica on Sunday so, yeah, I really can't complain.

Here's the public profile I have on linkedin. Isn't it ... bland.

I made two trips to the co-location facility today.

First trip was terminated when I realized the install media had somehow become corrupt since I performed three successful installs with it.

Second trip was with fresh media and I went around in circles because once I had a good install of Ubuntu onto the Sun v20z I found that grub wanted to try to boot off of the first logical volume in the external T3 array. Even when I told it that the internal SCSI drive was (hd0), it wouldn't boot but now because it wanted to use a mythical IDE drive.

I finally resolved it by lying in /boot/grub/device.map and telling it to consider /dev/sdc to be (hd0). What a pain.

My clue that it was going off the rails was that it would boot, say GRUB and then ... stop. Bad disk geometry, no positive affirmation.

All that and I had time to sit in a meeting and have a vision of the future.

So today is Vy's birthday.

We tried to fulfill her childhood fantasy and the owner of our local franchise denied her after she'd already gotten an okay on it.

Baskin-Robbins sucks.

My former co-worker Oliver Marsh has moved on to do his Own Thing at Video Fantastica!. He was already doing his own thing at Dig Your Own Grave.

He's pretty selective in what gets on to DYOG; he declined to post the only link I ever sent him. Do stop in and take a look at his sites.

The venerable-in-computer-years Linksys WRT54G we use for home wireless became incapable of sustaining a wireless connection, no matter how I spun it, configured it, or hoisted it. I updated the firmware, no joy.

I bought a Netgear which looked like an upgrade in functionality, but which was even more cumbersome to configure, had similar problems sustaining connections and additionally added a connection timeout to the mix, even across wired circuits.

So I tried what I should have done in the first place.

I turned to one of the open-source firmwares for it, dd-wrt and it's worked like a champ all week. Not only that but the administrative interface is actually informative, the settings seem to actually change and, perhaps most importantly to me, it gives me a login shell.

So I'll be returning the Netgear for some other chump to waste money on. I hope this Linksys can go for a bit longer with the firmware upgrade.

Then we availed ourselves of an opportunity to hear Cecilia Tan speak at Borderlands Books. That was fun and funny. She's a witty speaker with clever anecdotes. The only downside to the trip was that I kept seeing books which I wanted to buy. Which I wouldn't get around to reading for maybe a year or more.

We went to last night's SF in SF event.

It wasn't quite the rollicking good time we had in the past but I'm glad we went. Paul Park read a longish story quickly and Greg Benford read a short story slowly.

The audience A&Q had an amount of pre-question ranting and a sprinkling of disjointed observations.

I don't really want to get myself wound up composing retorts to the bits which struck me as laughable but I will say I find it odd and telling that in this time and country, at least one of the advisers to NASA vocally prefers privatized space efforts over anything pursued by the federal government.

Having gone through the effort to insure my Atom feed was valid, I've added a button down at the bottom linking to it.

Button is from antipixel with the Gimp having done the work of squishing the .psd file into a .png and cropping out just the piece I wanted.

So having started using the FatalsToEmail code I was receiving a disturbingly high number of similar seeming emails. They were all coming from the plugin which generates the atom feed for this blog, the aptly named atomfeed.

A little more digging showed it being croaking by the XML::Parser when it tried to parse some of the older posts. Well, more than some. An abundance. Which was a combination of my crappy use of HTML, some redundant markup from markdown processing which happens and the non-XHTML html youtube provides for embedding video.

That last part was solved with the kind assistance of the Flash Satay article which outlines the step by step transformation needed to turn an embed into an XHTML object.

I turned off the print to STDOUT part of FatalsToEmail long enough to validate every section of the blog against the w3c xhtml validator until it all passed and this has brought a lull to my barrage of emails generated from the valiant but quiting easily parsing by atomfeed of the crappy markup I and machines had written through the largely random near-constant visits to my site by indexing bots building every more elaborate query strings by aggregating tags from my tagcloud until their taglace is so tangled they choke on it.

I read a list of books which all the cool kids already know about in New York Magazine and I had already read one of them and have another of them kicking around in my queue of books to read. When I showed the list to my co-workers, my boss loaned me a book by an author who was on that list.

It's called Paradise and it's by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It's about a boy who is given into the care of a merchant. He learns that he's now a slave and his entire life is turned upside down. It's a sad book with some moments of hilarity and others of brutality.

What I liked about it

• good pacing with a distinct narrative voice
• protagonist who is both sympathetic and invested
• really different from most of the books I read

What I didn't like about it

• protagonist isn't very active for most of the story
• it's a sad book about slavery and deprivation

This is probably a good book for people who like sad stories. Like, say, Beloved or Farewell My Concubine.

I got tired of grubbing the apache error logs on this system for chaos so I have rolled out Randal Schwartz's FatalsToEmail module as an accessory to blosxom. You may have seen some server errors if you happened to hit the feed or site while I was fumbling around with that. Maintain low tones. Peace, be still. Shalom. And so on.

Vylar is part of a fund raising effort for Clarion West going on right now and is auctioning off Tuckerizing to raise some money for Clarion West.

Oh, and she's also doing the Write-a-thon at one and the very same time.

In the interest of full frontal disclosure I should mention here that I am the unpaid volunteer webmaster for the Clarion West site and the unpaid volunteer husband for the Vylar Kaftan.

UPDATE 2007/12/30: This Just In
Vy made it to boingboing. w00t!

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Mostly, recordings of other people's RPG sessions published by Yog Sothoth and RPGMP3. It's been edifying. I do rather wish that some edits had been made to these recordings.

• I don't need to hear the 20-40 minutes of preceding table talk before the gaming actually starts
• I could do without the 5-10 digressions during the session
• so long as I'm asking for things, separate mics for the GM and the player pool might help

I greatly appreciate these recordings have been made available but I groan whenever I see how long they are, especially when I have to ignore the lengthy preludes of non-game related pop culture talk.

So we're trying to use ibm-jdk on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn at work. We've hit two small gotchas which I mention here for my future finding.

First, the JRE wouldn't start, reporting an error about not being able to start the VM. That seems to have been caused by a problem with glibc which went away when I applied the patch from this bug. Then the java binary would work and start up.

Second, one of the two (identical!) machines was improperly reporting the timezone under Java. That was traced down to the logic used by the ibm-jdk to determine what timezone it's running in. It uses the timezone to determine which daylight savings time rules to apply. Resolved that one by removing /etc/localtime and making it a symlink to the /usr/share/zoneinfo file needed.

I've signed up to be an affiliate to my favorite Internet bookstore, Powells so I'll be changing some existing links to books I've talked about in the past to include my affiliate code.

If someone buys a book after following one of them, I get a cut of it.

Yesterday there was a potluck lunch at work. Here's what I made for it. It's from 365 Ways to Cook Vegetarian and it's recipe #178 in that book.

Obtain

• 8 oz of rotelle pasta (the book calls them corkscrew but they look more like wagon wheels to me; it also says I can find them in multi-colored form)
• 8 oz asparagus
• 8 oz mozzarella cheese
• some (ugh) tomatoes (recipe calls for two, seeded and diced; I put in a dozen cherry tomatoes so I could easily avoid them)
• 8 oz mushrooms
• 1 C walnut pieces
• 1/4 C olive oil
• 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1 oz of Italian salad dressing mix powder
• two saucepans
• serving bowl
• small mixing bowl
• some water
• pinch of salt

Prep-work

• cut enough off of the base of the asparagus that you could imagine what you have left being edible
• chop the asparagus into 2" chunks; be careful if you are sizing it by putting your thumb next to it while cutting
• cube the mozzarella cheese; the recipe says 1/2 inch sides but you're a free-willed chef monkey so do what feels good
• slice the mushrooms

Cooking

• put water in a saucepan, throw in the salt, get it boiling
• put your pasta in the water and cook until tender, maybe ten minutes or so
• put water in the other saucepan, get it boiling
• put the asparagus pieces in the second pan of boiling water
• cook the asparagus until it's tender but stop if it's starting to disintegrate, about three minutes
• when the pasta is done cooking, drain it, rinse it, throw it in the serving bowl
• when the asparagus is done cooking, do likewise
• add the cheese bits, tomatoes, mushrooms, walnut pieces to the serving bowl
• whisk the olive oil, vinegar and salad dressing powder in the mixing bowl until it's as grit-less as you can get it
• dump the wet stuff from the mixing bowl into the serving bowl
• toss the salad

Notes

• transports well
• serves well chilled; still good after sitting out for several hours
• mozzarella cubes may be misidentified as tofu so if you dig soy and hate dairy you could substitute those on purpose

My employer has a nifty new game up named Dream Chronicles. I really dig it and even better I can get you a deal on it if you like it, as well. For the next week, if you use the coupon code SPRDREAM (for Windows) or SPRMDREAM (for Mac) you'll get the game for $9.95.

That's incredibly cheap for such an awesome game. But it expires June 18th so jump on it.

I'm a bad person. I went to WisCon 31 this year without having ever knowingly read anything by either Guest of Honor. I'd met Kelly Link before and I was vaguely aware of the kinds of writing she does, but it was all second hand. I don't think I'd even heard of Laurie Marks before this WisCon.

I decided to atone for this in the wake of the convention. No, not by actually reading any of their writing; at least, not yet. Instead I'm reading works by the Guests of Honor for next year. Specifically, I read China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh over the last week. (Before that I was reading a collection of Philip K. Dick short work from the 50s.)

I can see why this novel was nominated for awards (the Hugo and Nebula) and nominated for and won awards (Locus Best First Novel, James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award) and I can see why people gush about it. I see all that. What I don't see is why it ends where it does and that is probably because it felt incomplete rather than ambiguous to me in the same way that I find Catcher in the Rye to be an incomplete story.

That's not bad, mind you. Other people will probably feel that enough is resolved for them to have a warm fuzzy feeling about the characters in the story. For me, I want a sequel or an epilogue or something. Because I can't imagine what happens next in their lives. Maybe this represents an insufficient understanding on my part of their nature, their motives, their universe. It felt like too few pages; when I reached the last one, I turned back to make sure I hadn't missed something, that some pages weren't missing from my copy.

It's a fascinating world viewed through genuinely sympathetic and sharply expressed characters. It's a complex interweaving of desires balanced against fears. It's a book which makes me crave a sequel in the same universe.

Aside from the disquieting sense of incompletion, which I admit may be a deliberate part of the presentation of the story, it's a book I'd recommend to just about anyone. It's got socialists and gamblers and prostitutes and Martian colonists and a protagonist who is pushed by his situation into fulfilling a greater portion of his potential than he might otherwise have done so I read it as a maturation story and a stirring from inertia story.

I'll be trying to get my hands on something by the other Guest of Honor, L. Timmel Duchamp, soon, and catching up on the Kelly Link we have in the house (because I keep buying it for Vy) and finding some Laurie Marks but first, first, I need to glut myself on my (not so secret) crush on the worlds Ed Greenwood made, The Forgotten Realms. I have a backlog of current and out of print D&D books about it to read, as well as a slew of downloaded gratis PDFs provided by the otherwise thoroughly detestable Hasbro through their Wizards of the Coast orifice. No link love for them. You know where to find them.

My photo-set of our trip through the Midwest via House on the Rock and the Mustard Museum culminating in WisCon 31 is now complete or at least as complete as it's going to get. Again I lament of the lack of flash, the lack of resolution and, even more so, my lack of skill.

I didn't even upload all the ones I took because some of the images were even crappier than the ones there [which is why there are no images of the Mustard Museum, or any number of other notable sights].