Obsolete Your Idols

Reaching to the Perverted

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.

posted at 17:00 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: novel, review

Ever Hopeful

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

posted at 16:07 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: idealist, politics

I've Gotcher Policy Right Here

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.

posted at 14:48 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: charity, money, politics

A Laptop of One's Own

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.

posted at 12:06 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: hardware, laptop, review

Camera Madness

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.

posted at 11:28 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: camera, people i know, photography

Message For You, Sir

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

posted at 10:17 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: anarchy, book, novella, review

Splashing in the C

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.

posted at 22:04 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: coding, junkbbs, projects

Ring Ring Ring

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.

posted at 22:20 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: phone, sidekick

Picture This

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).

posted at 23:35 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: photography