newer log
These times when it's incredibly busy at work and I have so many things to do that there's definitely not going to be time to get it all done, and I ought to be spending every moment engaged in intense intellectual activity are nice, in a way. Because at these times I always get lots of office-cleaning done.
Medley points us to "The TCPA; What's wrong, What's right and what to do about". I figured I ought to link to that, given what I've been saying about Palladium and all. Having good authentication and crypto stuff built into the hardware is actually a good idea, security-wise, as long as it serves the interests of the owner of the machine, rather than the Content Cabal.
I was cleaning out my shirt pocket, and one slip of paper said, among other things whose purpose was more obvious:
Most people are incapable of focusing their speech acts.
It was in my handwriting, too.
Have I mentioned this rather cool Flash stuff?
Taking us rather literally, a reader writes:
beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep 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Whew. I'll bet this page will compress well...
Joke o' the Day, from those intellectual property satirists at Microsoft:
You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the .NET Framework component of the OS Components to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.
The funny thing, of course, is that they're slipping these words into all sorts of places where they're not at all relevant; they've been spotted not only in halfway related places, but also in Media Player upgrades, and even in Critical Security Updates (the latter noted by Ed).
What a great sense of humor these guys have! No wonder they're so wealthy!
Naturally this sort of wording in a "click" license is completely without legal effect. Can you imagine a world in which that wasn't true? (That's part of the joke, of course.)
From Kestrel's Nest: a way to provide your weblog over the telephone. Wow! There's something else the world desperately needs. People are always calling me up and asking if I can read my log to them over the phone; this would automate that.
Noun phrases o' the Day:
Edible Aerogels
Homeland Securities and Exchange Commission
Department of Homeland Securities
The award for oddest weblog premise goes to: Dear Owen.
I would have lots more profound stuff to say, but I've used just about all my discretionary time today playing Alter Ego, a game in which you are born, grow up, get old, and die. Want a change from this life? Live another one! (Found on geegaw.)
I did it twice, once making moves corresponding more or less to my actual nature and having a simulated life eerily similar to my real one (so far, anyway), and once trying to be more of a hellion and prickly person (that me died in an auto accident at a reasonably advanced age because she wouldn't acknowledge her limitations enough to slow down, and she never married or had any kids, but had a pretty good time all told).
It's kinda fun, a bit compelling, a bit thoughtful. It has a pronounced tone, occasionally bordering on the preachy. Moderation in all things (even moderation), be nice to people, be trustworthy, get along well with your parents, and seek professional advice when you have problems. The kind of nice gentle sane voice that eventually makes you consider punching it in the snoot (if you did, it would probably say "it's good that you're able to express your feelings; but be careful not to go overboard").
(Also from geegaw, today's offical really neat short story. Highly recommended. I wax heavy with intellectual envy.)
Our readers please us, as usual, with flaming apples, anagrams, sounds, non sequiturs, references to previous log entries, and some unusually determined searchers. Have an apple!
Thank you. Galas are probably best, though not for cooking.God! Attack of the Killer B's was, like, the best! (But really, it makes for a lousy apple.)
no thanks, I just put one out.
bake a pie
Unicode text is nonsense. Author compares situation in Orient to that of forcing English to use French alphabet. Well, funnily enough we do. Every character in the English alphabet also appears in the French alphabet. Politically, there may be some grief in forcing the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese to share their core Chinese characters, but there's no good technical reason why they shouldn't. This guy's logic would insist that the Chinese also get their own copy of the ASCII code to allow them to write pinyin. Feh.
iris chacon
rich and poor
rich
iris chacon
... papal heaven!
rich and poor
crunch!
iris chacon
we've been getting rain too! Thunder showers all around us but only yesterday did we get 1.2 inches. Some places have been deluged, not us. Now I'll have to start swimming in the morning 'cause of the lightening in the pm.
teddy bear virus
Thanks.
High heels?
Do you love an apple? Do you love a pear? Do you love a laddie with curly brown hair? Yes, I love him, can't deny him, I'll go with him where ever he goes. --
huh
ahhh
Steve gives us his own variant of the snail gambit (otherwise known as the hoka-boka). Not to suggest that Steve's version is in any way derivative; we each lose our minds in our own way.
James "Laboratorium" Grimmelmann points us to this very frightening video of a certain government official doing a certain thing. This has no doubt already been widely blogged, but there you are. Note that it's also on ifilm.com, and see the lyrics, including the supressed second verse.
Also from Laboratorium, a classic SF story (from the "romantic oversimplification of Libertarian Anarchy" school), and also another classic SF story.
I want to reread all the classic SF stories that I have on shelves up in the library (and boxes up in the attic).I want to read lots of new modern SF stories, including the ones I've already bought, and a bunch that I haven't.
I want to go through all the piles of not yet discarded mail at my place at the back table (and the two enormous teetering piles by my chair), and do something with every piece of it.
I want to finish (or restart, or intentionally abandon) all the books I'm currently in the process of reading.
I want to sit at the edge of the meadow in the deepening twilight, working on a poem.
I want to have one big room in the house that's sparse and spare, with just a few pieces of furniture, a bookcase, nothing piled on a floor, and one or two pieces of exquisite art.
I want to watch "That Obscure Object of Desire", that I bought on DVD awhile back.
I want to watch "Green Snake", that I bought on video a much longer while back.
I want to spend a week giving the house a thorough going-over, cleaning and throwing away and fixing up.
I want to watch all these old "Avengers" videos from the 60's that I bought somewhere in there.
I want to learn a non-European language: Japanese or Swahili or Hawai'ian.
I want to complete my collection of videos of "The Prisoner", and then watch them all, in order.
I want to write a novel again (maybe in November?).
I want to sit around, night after night for at least a week, in an old house, preferably near the ocean, and talk to interesting and clued people about everything, perhaps over beer or single-malt Scotch.
I want to read all those documents for work, slowly enough that I actually understand them, and think about what they mean and how the things they describe might be improved.
I want to spend many hours at mindless diversions, like Alpha Centauri or DOOM, without feeling that I ought to be doing something else.
I want to spend a few quiet minutes in the evening, after everyone else is in bed, thinking about things in general, and making a list of things I want to do.
Incredible lethargy. Must make vast efforts of will to type one... more... character...
All sorts of busy recently, as Avid Readers probably suspected. Wednesday all busy with Important Meetings Reinventing the Future of Computing, and then immediately off to the airport to take an airplane to a distant state, where the hotel had no broadband connection, so instead of blogging I watched Naked News TV (it's just not the same without Victoria Sinclair) and turned in early, for a long day on Thursday with two colleagues teaching Stuff to People, then home and M's birthday on Friday, and today the little daughter has Swimmer's Ear, and I'm just totally overcome by lethargy and not-moving and falling asleep...
(And now the laptop's doing that annoying "beeping once per second" thing for no good reason again, and I'm toooo lazy to turn it off and on, which invariably makes it stop.)
So I started reading "Assignment: Maltese Maiden" (another of those books from the campground the other week), but now I've stopped; it's a pretty generic humorless noir espionage story, and flipping ahead I see that the hero's love interest is going to be messily killed and everything will be gloomy and miserable even though the underlying evil plot is foiled, and the writing is run of the mill, and at the moment I feel, like, why bother? Y' know?
Maybe later.
So now I'm reading Archangel Protocol, which I picked up on a whim at the local book and Frappuccino store. It's not bad, decently diverting, but nothing special. The author can't quite decide which set of clichés she's going to use, so she just throws them all in (world retreating from science after a horrifying high-tech war, angels taking on human form, standard Gibson-knockoff cyberpunk technology, bitter ex-cop turned PI, etc, etc, etc). Which is, really, just what my lethargic mind wants right now; something without any big surprises, done just badly enough that I can feel superior to the author ("Man, I could write this stuff in my sleep, if only I could stay awake").
The little daughter commented about the gushing blurb on the cover, and how even bad books always manage to have gushing blurbs (blushing gurbs, glushing burbs). This one was from "SF Site", which I figured probably meant sfsite.com, and sure enough a quick search turned it up: this person really did say "one of the best novels in memory". Must be a small memory.
There were lots of glowing five-star reviews on Amazon, too, but I will not be moved; this is an unremarkable book. But I'm still reading it. Just 'cause I'm lazy...
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