My Science Fiction World
I realized this morning that I'm living in the cyberpunk future I used to read about in high school and college. Consider these items from my morning news:
(But before you do that, consider that I have my morning news, rather than the same morning news everyone else has, and it's made up of a collection of blogs and feed aggregations.)
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From the local chief of police: Thursday Night Fights.
Last night's festivities outside Opulence started when the Head of Security decided that the best way to get the crowd to leave the area was to deploy his stash of pepper spray. Rather than calming things down and encouraging the lingerers to disperse, the crowd became enraged and someone punched out the Head of Security. The caused a second employee to release more pepper spray, which did not calm the crowd either (funny how that works).
To sum up: if gasoline doesn't put out your fire, try pouring gasoline on it.
The comments on the entry are also an interesting read.
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In other news: New gold seller tactic: Trying way too hard.
[A] certain gold seller got creative when trying to figure out ways to advertise past Blizzard's spam filter. The gold farmers created hundreds of identical level 1 gnomes, postion-hacked them into mid-air, and let them fall to certain doom in a way that spelled out the web address of their gold-selling site...
This caught my eye not only for the sheer absurdity of it, but also because it was mentioned on the blog of an author whose work I enjoy. He imagines trying to explain it to a person from the year 1977, an interesting exercise in future shock, and what we've been able to assimilate.
It's the birth of a new advertising medium: transmitting your message via the corpses of dead, virtual gnomes. Obviously, the audience is somewhat limited, but I'm fascinated that the least valuable commodity in the WoW milieu is beginning avatars. Not rocks, not piles of stuff, but potential denizens of the world.
I Stood Up
I've been reminded that I haven't updated for a while, and to my
critics I would say, How vain it
is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Last weekend I:
- Had dinner with Barbara, Tim, and Brian; and with Jeff, Ingrid and Shannon.
- Rode my bicycle to the Old Cheney Farmers' Market.
- Turned off Beryl. Some of the effects are neat, even useful, but mostly it slows me down. The basic window manager features need more work. (It might be better if I spent more time with the configuration manager, and installed it on all the linux machines I use, but that's not happenin'.)
- Helped unload the truck at the Flying Zucchinis food delivery, then waited while Barbara examined a burned out house, maybe because she wants to buy it, I was warned by another member of the zukes.
- Went through the agenda for Wednesday's Planning Commission Meeting
- Helped Barbara prepare our herb garden bed.
- Tried to troubleshoot a network problem that turned out to be upstream.
- Ate lots of asparagus.
- Made a couple of nice dinners with Barbara.
- Went to a house warming for some new neighbors.
Last weekend I did not:
- Work on the kitchen. (It crossed my mind though.)
- Spend time with Caitie. (She had a dance workshop.)
- Work on Atalib, the user script to add WorldCat search results to Amazon pages. (It's 80% done.)
- Write a single line of LISP. (Other software projects I didn't work on have higher priority.)
- Practice aikido or HNIR. (I hear the aikido group is no longer practicing at the aikido group and Sho Rei Shobu Kan honbu.)
- Clean and lube the chain on my bicycle, rewrap my bars, or install my new computer. (I'm too busy riding.)
- Do anything with the two Apple iBooks on which I'm installing Ubuntu for Barbara and Caitlin. (Feisty or Dapper? Need to get more memory.)
Things I Learned Over The Weekend
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That goat isn't being friendly. He's trying to establish dominance.
How does he know I'm a male, anyway?
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Don't engage in dominance games with a goat.
It encourages the goat, and you'll just end up embarassed.
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Mushrooms are not so common as you might think.
Even in shady, damp, wooded areas, off the trail, I only managed to find a couple of 'shrooms, probably highly toxic, which weren't morels anyway.
Nettles, however, were everywhere.
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Cats are frequently abandoned in Wilderness Park.
Charles II of EnglandTechnically, I learned this today from our vet, but the reason it's even a topic for discussion is we rescued a very friendly, very hungry, young unfixed male cat out there, when he emerged from the undergrowth to say
hello
andfeed me
. He's a charmer and currently a resident of the spare bedroom.Because we were looking for mushrooms at the time, I suggested we call him
Morel
, but Barbara's holding out for something better. MaybeLorenzo
orPierfrancesco
orCharles II of England
in keeping with the Medici theme we started with Cosimo.Dignity and comportment forbid further discussion of the sort of person that would dump a cat in the park.
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Either I don't understand
document.evaluate()or the mozilla implementation has a bug.I'm using
document.evaluate()and an XPath expression to extract some data from a web page. It returns a set of nodes that match the expression, but when I try to use one of the nodes as the context, as opposed to usingdocument, to further refine the search, the result is always NIL. -
A hurdy-gurdy sounds just like bagpipes.
And looking inside one, you might think,
I can't believe this thing works at all.
I've never been quite sure what a hurdy-gurdy is or what it sounds like, being acquainted with them only through liner notes. All I knew was that it was a box with a crank on the side. Now I wonder how many times I've heard one and thought it was pipes.
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Getting from home to 16th and K by bike is a bit daunting.
First Christian Church, where Musica Antiqua Lincoln was playing Sunday, is on an island surrounded by massive, four-lane, one-way arterials. No problem for an experienced cyclist, but intimidating for a n00b.
It's an interesting exercise getting around town with a casual cyclist, like Caitie, who isn't entirely confident in her ability, doesn't see road rash as a badge of honor, and isn't interested in showing SUVs who's boss. It opens my eyes with regard to Lincoln as a bikable city.
16th and 17th between, say, South and the fairgounds look to me like prime candidates for the next round of bike lanes.
Until people like her feel comfortable jumping on their bikes to go from here to there, wherever here and there might happen to be, bikes will remain a marginal mode of transport, whatever changes we might make to the comprehensive plan.
Totally Carded
Barbara is out of town, at the ACRL conference, so I'm baching it until Sunday. After the planning meeting, and a meeting at school, I decided to treat myself to a bike ride downtown for a burrito at Oso, and sitting outside to watch the world go by.
...and a Corona,
I completed my order.
Okay. Do you happen to have your ID sir?
What's that? My ID? Guess how old I am.
That's what I thought. What I said was, Oh, sure,
and
handed it over.
Hungry after a light lunch and all the riding in between, I took my dinner and found a table outside. This is a terrible story, but everything was great. It was a terrific night for a ride and dinner sitting out by the sidewalk.
And I got carded.
It's Just a Perfect Day
I looked out the window first thing this morning. It had stopped snowing, but it must have snowed hard after I went to bed. The neighborhood was blanketed in a layer of white, perfect snow. It looked like about five inches.
After pulling on a sweater, gloves, and hat, I went out to do the shovelling.
The air was calm. It was chilly but not cold. Quiet, the sound deadened by the snowy shroud. The sun stayed hidden behind milky clouds. Ideal.
I tossed the snow this way and that, carving out the walk, the sidewalk, the walk down at the duplex, and finally the driveway. As I shovelled, I began hearing the scape of other blades through the snow and the drones of two-stroke machines used by those not fortunate enough to own a shovel.
I watched neighbors on both sides of the street clear the sidewalks
in front of their own neighbors' houses. No problem! I'd gotten this
far; it was nothing to finish this up. You're welcome...
I sat on the porch for a few minutes after finishing the job, enjoying the comfortable chill, until the call of of hot cup of coffee drew me back indoors.