Obsolete Your Idols

Again With the Fiction

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.

posted at 08:55 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: bay area, san francisco, science fiction, sf

Find the Feed

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.

posted at 00:05 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: atom, rss, systemic

Archeoblogy

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.

posted at 23:04 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: blog, markdown, systemic

A Found Story of the Lost

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.

posted at 23:39 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: book, review, slavery

Here's a Quarter

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.

posted at 17:21 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: blosxom, perl, systemic

Word Pimping

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!

posted at 14:40 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: clarion west, people i know, vy, vylar, writing

Listen Up

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.

posted at 14:32 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: games, podcast, rpg

Two Hoops

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.

posted at 13:57 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: amd64, dst, ibm-jdk, java, memo to future me, patch, ubuntu

Selling Out

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.

posted at 07:31 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: affiliate, blog, partner, system

Asparagus Walnut Pasta Salad

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

posted at 06:55 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: asparagus, cold food, cooking, recipe

Dreamcicle

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.

posted at 19:18 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: games, puzzle

Irresolution

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.

posted at 08:53 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: novel, review, wiscon

And Upon This Rock, I Shall Build My House

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].

posted at 08:10 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: house on the rock, mustard, travel, wiscon

Steal of a Meal

Vy and I both enjoy food.

Which is a ridiculous thing to say. What healthy animal doesn't like food?

I mean to say: Vy and I seek out good food.

Again, ridiculous, but getting closer. For food to be good in our nomenclature, it must manifest some qualities.

• deliciousness
• free of known allergens
• compatible with our Won't Eat Mammals stance
• compatible with our low-carbohydrate, high-protein desires
• compatible with our locally grown, little preservative stance

Which sounds pompous and elaborate and cumbersome in words, but which tends to work pretty smoothly in practice. We can generally glance at a menu and have a pretty good idea if we'll be able to find something we like. Since we have markedly different appetites and flavor requirements, it helps for us to go to a restaurant with a variety of dishes and even styles.

Last night we went to what is probably our favorite restaurant, Nibblers.

Not only is it good food, it's a nice brisk walk away so I can feel virtuous and wholesome as I anticipate gorging myself on cheese. It's an accidental find from when we first moved into the neighborhood and were looking for a video store and decided to treat ourselves to a meal out. It's in a plaza with a barbecue place [great for me, not so much for Vy], an Italian place [not so great for either of us], and a Thai place [usually ideal for us but it was closed at the time]. So we stopped in to what we thought was a cafe, judging by the outside seating area.

We were wrong.

It is a delicious Epicurean indulgence.

Last night, we went back for our third visit and we took with us our friends Annaliese and David because we wanted a chance to share this restaurant with people we really like and who we thought would enjoy it as much as we do.

A thing which Nibblers does which we enjoy is have a theme to the food for any given month. This month was Japanese cuisine, which is one of our favorites and when I say our I think I can safely draw David and Annaliese into my bloc.

David & I started with coffees, the almond mocha kiss. Then we all had wine flights, three different themed wines. Vy had the Aromatics, Annaliese the Elegance, I forget which one David had, and I had the Spanish Sips. Mine was the only flight to include any reds but there about 37 other flight choices and many of them were red-specific or red-heavy.

We had the on-table snack of shrimp chips, or at least Annaliese and I did.

We had a pair of salads which were butter lettuce with balls of cheese rolled in nuts on them and a fruity vinaigrette dressing.

Then we had creamed spinach which was really spinach, in a cream sauce, with caramelized onions, so it was not only attractive and edible, but deliciously so, and stir fried mixed vegetables which had carrots and purple carrots and they reminded us of perfectly grilled veggies.

Then the entrees of the meal:

• rolled chicken stuffed with garlic and fruit, with a tomato sauce
• corn and masa pancake with avocado slices
• squash blossom and fiddlehead quesadilla
• shaft blue and amaretto fondue with apple, carrots and slices of focaccia

Dessert was a chocolate gelatto [locally made by an Italian who got off the boat 12 yeas ago and is very particular about the Right Way to make it], and a ginger cake, and a plate of four artesian cheeses, chosen by the chef.

He chose:

• a Cahill porter cheddar, made in Ireland, with a process where after the curds have begun to form, the throw them all in a vat of beer and let them sit for a time and then take them back out and put them in the mold to squish and shape the cheese
• a cheese from Galicia named San Simon which is crafted with a tear drop shop and is said to be as 'sweet as a kiss' and [according to the chef] is the inspiration for Hershey Kisses being the shape they are and bearing the name they possess
• the Andante Acapella, a goat cheese produced by a local dairy, ran as a one-woman show by a retired biochemistry professor, which has the name it does as it's 'unaccompanied' by any other flavors, it's simply a delicious goat cheese flavor
• a bleu cheese of some kind but of which all details have fled my mind.

Paired with each cheese was an appropriate tidbit: pressed walnut paste, oatcake, apple slices, and so on.

Price per person, after tip? $40. That is a steal of a price for a meal this delicious.

Then we walked back home and because our taste in video games is as refined as our taste in food, we played some four player Gauntlet: Dark Legacy to burn off all of those calories with frantic running away from acid barrels and explosive barrels.

posted at 08:01 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: bay area, cheese, food, review, wine

What Are You Talking About?

Two things about commenting on this blog.

• if your comment never appears and it wasn't spam, it's a bug somewhere; I approve all non-spam comments
• I've toggled the bit to allow the use of markdown syntax in your comments as it's what I write the posts in

So if you've tried to comment before and failed, I suggest trying the Preview button and if it looks kosher, Post and if it doesn't show up in a day or so, fire me off an email or try commenting in some simpler syntax and try to let me know what character the comment handling plugin doesn't seem to like.

posted at 08:03 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: blog, comments, markdown, moderation

Now That We're Back

I don't have a lot of observations to make about WisCon 31 since I mostly spent it decompressing in a hotel room or a bar. I've been gradually trickling up the phonecam pictures I took during the trip to my flickr account but those are mostly of House on the Rock, not WisCon.

I did come back with a handful of story and book recommendations (for myself, not for you) and some links to propagate. For example, the [FemSFBookSwap] [fsfbw] which I think stands for Female or Feminist Science Fiction Book Swap. There's also Diet Soap and the August Derleth Society.

We're already registered for next year's WisCon.

posted at 11:26 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: conventions, mlp, travel, wiscon