Stephen Harris' Friends
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
[ << Previous 25 ]
| Thursday, January 7th, 2010 | |
dilbertdaily
|
12:00a |
|
| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 | |
eaglespath
|
10:54p |
Fail better
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2010-01/011.html
A climbing vine hiding in the shadows of steps. I played a bit with the
contrast on this. Must remember how much that helps with making things
jump out.
Today was the first work from home day after vacation, with one of the
major goals being to get started sooner and work more smoothly than I had
been before vacation. I can't say that it was a complete success, but I
think I failed better. I like that way of looking at things: for a lot of
things in life, the goal isn't really to do it perfectly, but to keep
trying and keep failing better.
The plus side is that I got up and did the grocery shopping first thing,
as planned, and that went very well. I also got the laundry done between
doing other things and thinking through work problems. And I got a long
period of mostly uninterrupted solid work done, understanding and
reworking some patches.
The minus for today is that I'm increasingly feeling like I prioritized
badly and what I did today was not really the highest priority. It's
something that I need to get done, so this is not a completely grounded
feeling, and there are pluses to doing what I'm doing. But it's been
niggling at me. I also didn't start on real project work until late again
(afternoon, although not as late as was typical before vacation), and I
didn't work from my to-do list, so some fast tasks didn't get done today.
All of that plus some goofing off during the day created pressure to run
late and not stop when the day was over, which meant that I didn't get
this post and photo done early, which in turn means that I didn't get a
review written this evening. However, I'm letting tasks move to later
days instead of pushing my schedule, which is exactly what I want to be
doing.
I think ideally I'd like to post the photo and the noodling about life in
the morning instead of the evening, since in the evening I want to be
writing book reviews. I may try experimenting with that tomorrow.
So far, a firm schedule is looking like a fairly good idea. We'll see
what happens when we get to the weekend, when there will be more pressure
to stay up late and do things with friends. I haven't quite worked out
how to fit that into my schedule yet.
|
| Thursday, January 7th, 2010 |
zonereyrie
|
12:04a |
|
| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 |
dvandom
|
7:36p |
|
solipsistnation
|
11:18a |
GERMAN PUNK
This song is great. "Please, Mr. District Attorney, you're a man too, right? She was really hot and I didn't know she was underage! You'd've totally hit that too, right? Oh, uh, she's your daughter? Oops." |
|
charlies_diary
|
3:03p |
Flame bait
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/flame-bait.html Let's see ...
We've done "Dr Who is shite". Ditto "I hate Star Trek (and all your other crappy TV shows)". I've poked the hornet's nest that is the P7[*] in SF fandom, albeit very gingerly. I've sent the space settlers' society to bed without their dinner a couple of times, railed against the Deep Greens with a side-swipe at the Conservatives and the Libertarians along the way — there's no point whacking the dead equine of Communism this decade — so who's left to persecute in the name of controversy (and higher reader ratings)?
I know. It's time to really say something controversial! And it is this:
I like Marmite and Vegemite!
Note to American readers: Marmite is what I (being a Brit) grew up with. If you brew beer on a commercial scale, when you drain the fermenting vessel you end up with a scum of dead and dying yeast cells on the side. Some time in the late 19th century, rather than treating this as waste, some nameless genius had the idea of tasting it. It turns out that brewer's yeast, once you lyse the cells by adding salt, tastes remarkably savoury — somewhat like soy sauce, only thicker (with much the same consistency as non-set honey). Marmite, the product, is mostly yeast extract, combined with salt and a few additional spices. It's what belongs on toast, or cheese, or in gravy and sauces to add body to them. And the stuff's addictive. I get through it in catering-tub quantities, alas: it's my one real high sodium vice.
Vegemite ... it's the antipodean antithesis. Invented in 1922 by Dr Cyril P. Callister in Australia, it was designed to plug the strategic gap opened by unrestricted U-boat warfare against the vital British Marmite convoys that had kept the colonies supplied during wartime — or something like that. Kraft popularized it, pushed it into military rations during the second world war, and over a decade clawed back sales from Marmite until it's now the favourite toast topping down under. The recipe differs somewhat from Marmite, as does the flavour — just enough that if you're used to one, the other tastes slightly "off" — too flat, or too astringent.
If you want to really liven up a party, pour a small jar of Marmite into the fruit punch — or add Vegemite to the dog's bowl (as long as you don't mind being asked to clean up afterwards). Hours of friendly discussion and informed debate can be provoked by discussing the relative merits of the two products! And it's always a good idea to introduce visiting American guests to what they've been missing all these years, by exhorting them to spread it on their bread "just like peanut butter".
Mind you, even if you don't like the stuff there's one thing it's good for: if you bake bread (by hand or in a bread machine), it never hurts to add a teaspoonfull of Marmite to the mix. It makes the crust slightly harder and darker, and adds a marvelous nutty malty taste to the loaf. (But remember to reduce the amount of salt you use accordingly.)
([*] The P7 are the ruling conspiracy of the age: Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis People of Power.)
|
pvaneynd
|
1:07p |
|
|
dilbertdaily
|
12:00a |
|
| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 | |
eaglespath
|
11:26p |
Review: Against a Dark Background
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-85723-179-1.html Review: Against a Dark Background, by Iain M. Banks
| Publisher: |
Orbit |
| Copyright: |
1993 |
| Printing: |
2005 |
| ISBN: |
1-85723-179-1 |
| Format: |
Trade paperback |
| Pages: |
487 |
Sharrow is heir to a noble family, which is much less useful than it could
be since her grandfather was declared a criminal by the powerful World
Court and most of her family's property was confiscated. She's a former
military officer and squad leader, and now is a retired antiquities hunter
and retrieval specialist. She's also the target of a religious cult, who
murdered her mother and who believe that either all the female members of
her family line have to die or an artifact known as the Lazy Gun must be
returned to their collection for their messiah to return. They are on the
verge of getting a Hunting License from the World Court, a legal document
giving them a year to murder her with full legal protection.
The final antiquities contract Sharrow and her half-sister took was
finding and retrieving the second-to-last remaining Lazy Gun, which
promptly exploded and destroyed most of a city when people attempted to
analyze it. The last remaining Gun is the one supposedly stolen by her
family from the cult. Sharrow plans on finding it, since the alternative
appears to be death. Family lore has it that a clue to its location was
left in a legendary book called the Universal Principles, a book
her half-sister believed was kept in the fortress of the Sea House.
Sharrow's half-sister is now imprisoned there for attempting to loot their
treasury, with the price of her release being the Universal
Principles.
Against a Dark Background has a style and a mood familiar to
readers of Banks's Culture novels, but it itself is not a Culture book.
(Although, as one discovers late in the book in a memorable moment that
most summaries of the book spoil but I won't, it could be in the same
universe.) The entirety of the book takes place in one star system,
mostly on two habitable planets, with no interstellar contact. But Banks
layers into that star system a wealth of history and complexity that
brings to mind Culture novels, particularly Use of Weapons.
Sharrow's squad during the war underwent a process called
synchroneurobonding, which means that they can anticipate each other's
thinking processes in combat situations and make extremely accurate
guesses about tactics such as which direction one of them would dodge away
from enemy fire. It also makes them very close. Sharrow's second act in
the book, after approaching her half-sister for clues to the location of
the Universal Principles, is to pull together the remaining members
of her squad. That's when Against a Dark Background falls into
shape: this is, at core, a caper novel. A small, close-knit, diverse team
combines their skills to pull of dazzling heists, following a trail of
clues through various antiquities to the last remaining Lazy Gun.
If you've read any Banks before, you might immediately guess that this is
great fun. This is a team of highly competent and somewhat jaded people,
who have been through a war together and who are cynical, sarcastic, and
very sure of their skills, but also dealing with emotional damage. It's
set against a marvellous background, a world full of twisty legal codes,
microstates, a wealth of half-forgotten history and half-remembered
knowledge, and a truly baroque legal system. So much of SF reflects a US
sensibility of a young country devoid of the detritus of history. Banks's
world is gloriously lived in, full of past mistakes, odd corners, and
remnants that need not have any specific story implication. They just
are. I could lose myself in the convolutions of the background; the story
is just a good excuse to play in it for a while.
So, a caper novel with great Banks protagonists against a memorable
background in search of an artifact that's delightfully odd (and whose
details I won't spoil for you; it's more fun to find out what a Lazy Gun
is in the full context of the book). What's not to like? Well, I have
two cautions.
First, this is not a book about explaining things. Golter's history
simply is. The caper plot has a resolution (which worked for me, although
I know others found it unbelievable), but if you go into this book
expecting grand revelations about the world and its history, you're going
to be very disappointed. That ties into what I found to be a useful angle
from which to examine this book: Against a Dark Background is a
story about special forces troops, not about engineers.
Much of SF, particularly much of US SF and including much military SF, is
about engineers, or at least about people with an engineering or
scientific bent. It's about discovering, designing, building, analyzing,
and taking things apart. It's about understanding the world. The
military perspectives in SF are normally those of the Air Force or,
particularly, the Navy, where understanding, building, rebuilding, and
tending to the needs of complex and comprehensible machinery is the center
of the military experience.
Sharrow and her team are not like that. They appreciate good technology,
but things they acquire are meant to be used. They don't take things
apart and try to understand them; they use them for their immediate
requirements until they break or they have to leave them behind, and then
they acquire new things. This mentality extends to almost everything in
their worlds. Banks ventures somewhat into the morality of this and
provides some emotional justification in the extensive flashbacks that
tell Sharrow's life story. Her goal, from the beginning of the book
through the plot climax, is never to understand things. The reader can
figure out quite a bit along the way, but Banks is not going to provide
the catharsis of jigsaw pieces coming together, and the engineering
reading that SF normally encourages is going to be frustrating.
My second caution is that this is Banks, which means that the story can be
quite dark. He provides some warning early on: the book opens with a
violent flashback, and not far into the story a third player enters the
plot by torturing Sharrow. But even with that, I was caught by surprise
by the bleakness of the last section of the book. While Banks does
provide an upbeat twist to the ending, this is not a happily-ever-after
sort of story, and the last 100 pages are a harrowing experience. He's
vicious to his characters. There's enough odd gallows humor and personal
courage mixed in to make the ending enjoyable (despite a typical,
predictable, and very annoying wounded protagonist sequence), but this is
not a book that's going to leave you feeling optimistic about the world.
Think more Use of Weapons than The
Player of Games.
Those two caveats aside, Banks is an excellent writer and this is a
beautiful book, full of rich description, layered history, and characters
I cared a great deal about. The reader gets to know Sharrow thoroughly,
including a miserable childhood and some of the miserable things she did
in reaction to it, and she remains appealing as a protagonist despite
being far from a saint. Banks does a good job weaving world background
and extensive flashbacks into the story, keeping things moving forward
while giving the reader lots to piece together and appreciate (and often
laugh wryly at). It does require some attention to recognize the pieces,
and Banks's description is rich enough that one has to go slow, but I
never found it excessively hard to follow.
I came away from the book upset by the ending and wanting more discovery
and understanding of the world, but the more I've thought about it since
finishing it, the more it's grown on me. It's not The Player of
Games, but it's a solid SF caper story that feels better grounded in real
emotions, believable characters, and deep history than nearly all SF.
Recommended, but be aware of what you're getting.
Rating: 8 out of 10 |
|
eaglespath
|
11:11p |
Back to work
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2010-01/010.html
I'm keeping a Zen-like mood from the calm of vacation, so you get more
sand texture, this time under water.
This was about as good of a first day back to work as I could have hoped
for. The only place where it fell short is that I didn't make forward
progress on my current big project, but just about everything else
worked. The schedule worked, I felt unhurried and capable, I crossed
things off my to-do list, I made commits on multiple projects, and I
worked out a tricky bit of work I've been wanting to do for a while. I'm
feeling very positive about it.
Tomorrow, I need to do grocery shopping, and then I get to work from
home. This will be another significant test, since I've had a great deal
getting started when working from home before vacation. I'm going to do
shopping first-thing to see if that settles me down, and then see if I can
dive directly into work before getting caught up in answering e-mail.
I'm still working on my evening schedule. I'm supposed to be in bed
reading by now, and I'm running late. I did that yesterday as well by
about a half-hour. This may just be acceptable variation, or it may be
something I want to push harder on. Still deciding.
In general, one of the challenges is how much I want to have a fairly
strict schedule and how much I want to let things move around. Ten years
ago, this would have been an easy question: moving things around was how I
was the most productive. But as I get older, I'm finding more and more
signs that I'm benefiting from a fairly strict schedule. Among other
things, it seems to be useful in kicking me out of sitting around staring
at the screen being unproductive. But I still haven't figured out the
balance.
(You're likely to get lots of noodling about schedules and time management
for the next few weeks. This is what I'm always like immediately after
clearing my head from vacation.)
|
tskirvin
|
11:12p |
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes (2009): ** 1/2 (out of 4) The trailer for Sherlock Holmes was one of the worst short pieces of video that I had ever seen. Its fundamental flaw was playing up the Victorian/Modern juxtaposition - fistfights! firearms! explosions! tasers! - without allowing enough context to actually make that interesting. Instead, the viewer got the (strong) impression that they were just throwing a bunch of stuff at the screen, and looking to see what stuck with the audience. The only hope I had for the movie was that most of those scenes would be left out by the director because... well, I'm not sure. It's not like I'm the target audience... Anyway, none of it was left out. But in context, it worked out a whole lot better than the trailers had led me to believe. It still wasn't good, but it was worth watching, and certainly it was fun. And that's a start. That said, what I really want to talk about is the Sherlock Holmes elements. Many of the objections that I had to the trailer were, fundamentally, problems with the idea of mixing certain concepts into the character of Holmes. Since when is physical violence a strong element of the Master Detective's repertoire? Well, the answer is "since Guy Ritchie took over". It worked in the context of his direction style, it worked in the context of the actors chosen (who did a fine job), and it worked in the context of a need to still overshadow Watson in a newly action-y pairing. The violence became part of the point, and that turned out to be okay, if not great. On the other hand, where did this fit into the mythos? Without getting into spoilers, this seemed to occur both early in Holmes' career (based on characters met), and after the stories (based on Watson's moving out and on with his life). While they were certainly going for a new mythos - something that they could make a franchise out of - it was still a bit confusing for this casual acquaintance of the original stories. I would have preferred one or the other. And the story... was kindof Holmes-y. There were the right number of "supernatural" elements. The deductive work was pretty reasonable. The mysteries weren't, for the most part, cheats, which is a good sign. And while the story may have been a little bit more momentous than perhaps necessary, it was still something that could mostly have fit in. Mostly. Anyway. I feel like I'm rambling, because that's how I felt coming out of the movie. I didn't feel ripped-off; that's good enough sometimes. ** 1/2 URL: http://wiki.killfile.org/reviews/movies/sherlock-holmes-2009/ |
tskirvin
|
10:33p |
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fantastic Mr. Fox: **** (out of 4) When I was growing up, my father loved to read to me and my brother. At first, this was mostly stuff like the Dr Seuss family of books, good stuff that read well and lent itself to memorization. But as we grew up, we got into more "sophisticated" fare. His absolute favorite was Roald Dahl, whose books (The Witches, The BFG, and especially The Twits) were twisted and humorous - what other authors do you know that write about a woman hiding her glass eye in her husband's beer? - but most of all, they're fun to read out loud. And as we grew older, and no longer quite so easy to read to, he's found other kids to read to - nieces and nephews, family friends, etc. But still, one of the things that comes to mind when I think of my Dad is the joy he got - still gets - from those dark, twisted, smart children's stories. But I really wasn't expecting to be reminded so clearly of those old days when I walked into a second-run theatre on Sunday night and watched Fantastic Mr. Fox. Part of it was the animation. I had seen the animation style in the trailers, and while I had been impressed, I didn't quite recognize at the time how close of a fit it was to Dahl's work. The stop-motion puppetry was different, immersive, effective, and ever so slightly off in a positive way. It was both jerky and graceful, and interestingly understated. The characters were visually distinctive, both in stills and in their motions. Together, it brought across Dahl's writing style in a visual manner, something that I don't think any previous adaptation has managed nearly so well. Another part of it was Wes Anderson's direction and writing. I certainly had seen his minimalist dialogue, quirky writing, and episodic formats as conducive to a children's story - something like The Royal Tenenbaums would play spectacularly for children, IMO - but I hadn't really thought of how it would work out with animation. But Dahl's work clearly matched his style in a way that I had little reason to suspect going in. The adaptation felt like a book, and the narration gave it that feeling of a bedtime story. But mostly, it was that story, and more accurately the characters in the story. The characters were either unremittingly evil and dark (the humans, a few animals), or noble and dark (the rest of the animals). Every character was flawed, and they wore their flaws on their sleeves. Their mistakes were made knowingly, telegraphed for the viewers in a way that didn't seem fake or unfair. And while the good guys may come out on top in the end - more-or-less - it's not without some losses that seem both real and relevant. Together, it felt like a bedtime story that was worth listening to long after I should be done with listening to bedtime stories. And I spent the whole movie grinning. I didn't see this movie in 2009, but it may still be my movie of the year. Or at least I think that's how it works. Certainly, I look forward to seeing it with my father when it's out on DVD. And if, for some reason, he ever works on The Twits or The BFG, I suspect I'll have to fly out to see it with my Dad on opening day. **** (Also - we have a second-run movie theatre in the Bay now? Yay, Bluelight!) URL: http://wiki.killfile.org/reviews/movies/fantastic-mr-fox/ |
| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 |
zonereyrie
|
12:04a |
|
| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 |
jwz
|
1:50p |
|
jwz
|
12:44p |
Well done, Kodak! The Goatses will continue until morale improves.
 How to show everyone what's on your Kodak frame. So much win: - If you know or guess the MAC address of any Kodak wireless digital picture frame, you can extract the images that are displaying on it.
- You can also remotely reset the frame, meaning you can 0wnz0r it and change its image sources.
So Kodak has built an appliance for letting complete strangers (a) browse your family photos, and (b) beam shock porn directly into your living room! GOD BLESS AMERICA! This all works because the appliances won't connect to (e.g.) Flickr directly, they only phone home to Kodak's server, which then proxies all of the requests. But at least they're using OAuth instead of making you type your Flickr password into Kodak's server. This is a little surprising, actually, given the tip-top job their security engineers did of designing the rest of the infrastructure of this product line. I guess I ought to add a WebCollage source to generate random Kodak MAC addresses for use as an image source!
Current Music: Powerman 5000 -- An Eye Is Upon You |
solipsistnation
|
12:35p |
|
janetmiles
|
2:34p |
|
|
eaglespath
|
10:03a |
reminder 1.11
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2010-01/009.html
Version 6.x of Date::Manip now chokes on date modifications with two
consecutive pluses (<date> + +2 weeks, for example), which caused
reminder to choke on repeating reminders where the repeat time started
with a plus. Since this was previously supported syntax, continue to
support it by stripping off a leading plus in the reminder data before
adding a plus to do the date calculation.
You can get the latest version from the reminder distribution page. New Debian packages will be uploaded to my
personal repository.
|
syringavulgaris
|
1:16p |
The Dell Happiness Patrol
We have some several small-form-factor PCs which we were testing for use in the student terminal 2.0 roll-out. One such is a Dell Optiplex 760, which was way too big for the job at hand; and since trying to run Windows in a VM on my desktop iMac eats all my computrons, on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) spride's advice I snarfed it to stick under my desk and remote into when I have the need to be plunged into the warm gelatinous mass of Redmond. While I'm at it, why not see if it will PXE boot and talk to our management console? So I hook it up at our testing bench and turn it on. 1. No BIOS, it just 2. goes directly to a crippled XP configuration screen 3. THAT PLAYS REPETITIVE HORRIBLE MUSIC REALLY REALLY LOUD THAT YOU CANNOT TURN OFF UNTIL YOU GO THROUGH IT ALL Ensued then a Three Stooges-like routine involving me frantically searching it for a volume control (there isn't one), or an "off" tickybox on the screen (there isn't one), or a physical control on the machine itself (there isn't one), or failing that A PILLOW TO STICK IT UNDER (none of those either) so as not to disturb the fifteen other people in earshot. Eventually it booted to XP proper, and hopefully this will not recur on the next reboot; but I have procured a heavy coat to throw over it just in case. |
elibalin
|
12:41p |
Saggy Tough Guy Violence Squad GO!
The Expendables or, TESTOSTERONE!: The Movie. After years of corruption, murder of American hostages, and betrayal of foreign policies, the US - with the help of other Nations who secretly put together a squad of their most highly trained military personnel - will finally attempt to overthrow the dictator who has caused devastation in South America for over 20 years.
The team sets out on its mission to complete the assassination, while simultaneously attempting to keep the mission secret. In the film, they have no outside help and must rely on their own sources to fight not only the dictator's army, but also the Governments that set them up. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny Trejo, and Eric Roberts. In guttural grunts and snarls, with English subtitles. |
rbarclay
|
4:17p |
|
jwz
|
12:20a |
|
jwz
|
12:12a |
|
|
dilbertdaily
|
12:00a |
|
xlerb
|
1:11a |
Tell me you're crazy; maybe then I'll understand.
One of the little things about last year is that I started keeping track of my money again, using ledger. ( And I was looking at the year in numbers, and got carried away. )So there I am, on New Year's Day, doing my taxes, except not really. ( Am I in trouble with the IRS? Hilarity ensues. )And that's how I spent January 1.
January 2, I was “riding the Minuteman Trail”, if you know what I mean. ( And I think you do. ) The feelings I experienced for the clean, wet asphalt at that point are difficult to put into words.
And then I set up IPv6. Wait, no. First I took up a virtual host at Linode, for eventual use as a backup to the one I have at Panix. It, of course, runs NetBSD; this is not even all that hard to set up if one knows what one is doing[*]. (I'm pretty sure it's not “officially supported”, and I'm pretty sure I don't care.) ( The future is now, but networking still sucks. )[*] Someone wrote up a how-to on the Linode wiki. It is... how can I put this... I may need to “revise” it. |
[ << Previous 25 ]
|
What happens when the immovable object of terrorism meets the unstoppable force of kiddie porn?