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Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Hello again!

First a piece of weblog-community business: would long-time reader F, whose email address used to (but does no longer) start with "u1", give me your current one in the comment box, or send me mail at dmchess on gmail dot com or chess on davidchess dot com? I don't seem to have a working email address for you, and I feel terrible for having dropped my end of the conversation the other year.

Readers should also see the talking place for some rousing discussion about my gut reactions the other day.

Speaking of which, that $700B bailout sure worked great to calm down the markets, didn't it? Woo-woo!

It's so odd to see these guys making inflammatory predictions of doom and gloom, showing up on teevee to say how awful everything is, and all. Can you imagine Greenspan doing anything remotely like that? In fact, let's:

Where there's smoke

Scenario: someone's forgotten a pan of eggs on the stove, and they've started to smoke.

Alan Greespan: wrinkles his nose slightly. As a result the family looks up from their newspapers with alarm, and go and turn off the stove.

Ben Bernanke: screams "Oh my God, oh my God!", runs into the kitchen and throws a handy bucket of gasoline over the stove, while Hank Paulson shouts "We're all gonna die!" and makes emergency calls to the police, fire, ambulance, coast guard, and army, demands that the Governor declare martial law, and also persuades the family to withdraw the children from college and set fire to the dining room "to create a firebreak". Bernanke waves his arms over his head, hysterically wailing "Calm down, everyone calm down, oh my God!!".

And I apologize for being All Current Events All The Time these days, but while we're here, did everyone catch this imaginary talk show last night?

Casey: But it's not just Obama's positions on abortion and the war; we're overlooking the most important part of Obama's position that bothers people. Jenny, why do you think that, despite everything, Obama is still, to put it bluntly, black?

Lewis: You're absolutely right, Adam. This is one place where he's completely bucking history and the focus groups. History shows: no candidate has ever won the presidental race if he was still black on Election Day.

Upton: So do you think he'll change his position?

Casey: He's shown no sign of it so far.

Lewis: That's right, Adam, he's held the line here. I think he doesn't want to be seen as a flip-flopper.

Casey: The Dreamland factor?

Lewis: Yes, the last public figure to switch positions on blackness was Michael Jackson, and you know Obama doesn't want to put that into people's minds.

Casey: But still...

Upton: He must know it's going to hurt him in November. Don't you think the party's got to be putting on some pressure, behind the scenes?

Casey: So why do you think he's staying there, on the black thing?

Lewis: It could be that, deep down, he feels he's really black.

Upton: So you think it's a matter of principle?

Lewis: Yeah, principle. That and skin-color.

Casey: Okay, that's all we've got time for tonight, thanks alot!

Upton: Thanks, Adam.

Lewis: Always a pleasure

An interesting point.

Bill points out that "Somebody has created a nice markov-model based Palin answer generator".

And finally, buried under all the sturm und drang, rocket ships!

HAWTHORNE, CA -- September 28, 2008 -- Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) announces that Flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle has successfully launched and achieved Earth orbit. With this key milestone, Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.

Woot!

(Has a privately developed solid fuel rocket orbited the Earth previously?)
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

I'm surprised how insular and obnoxious all this Bailout stuff makes me. So when I read the Australian Prime Minister saying about the US Congress

The call that we need to make is for them to put aside party politics and to pass this package because it is necessary for the stabilisation of US financial markets and global financial markets.

or a European Union spokesman saying

The United States must take its responsibility in this situation, must show statesmanship for the sake of their own country, and for the sake of the world... We expect that the decision will go through soon.

my immediate gut reaction is

Ha ha ha ha ha ha bite me!

Run your own fucking country, assholes.

If your economy depends upon the US government stealing a trillion dollars from its citizens, then as the lolcats say, U R DOIN IT WRONG.

[rude sounds]

This is of course a horrible reaction! I should be telling myself that we are all in this together, that the world is an interconnected place, that if some other part of the house is on fire I should not begrude the use of my extinguisher.

Or, given that I think the bailout would be equivalent to paying the blackmailer, I should comment in calm tones that while this looks like something that would help the world out of this tough situation, in fact I think it would be a mistake for all of us.

But in fact my reaction is full of rude noises and cursing. The mind is an odd thing...

A reader reminds us in this week's comment box that saying No to a bad thing isn't always a good thing:

What's going to happen is we're going to spend the money anyway, but we're going to get a whole lot less for it. (Actually what's going to happen is the plan will be revised into something acceptible to another dozen or so of the Republicans who bolted but probably less good than the one they rejected.) Distance from Russia: less and less.

Well, yeah. But it was nice to be amused for a little while.

I'm off to write my elected officials again, for what it's worth...
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Monday, September 29, 2008

So wow, I think this is maybe the first time I've skipped two whole weeks of weblog. My my! Hope no one has been worried; things are fine, just very very busy, and I've been doing lots of other stuff and not weblogging.

To get Big Important World News out of the way first, I have to say that I take great delight in the defeat of the Huge Very Important Really Critical Bailout Package by sufficiently many stubborn US Congresscritters to actually stand up and vote against something that Dubya and the leaders of both parties wanted them to vote for.

I mean, after Nancy Pelosi's speech about how

Our message to Wall Street is this: the party is over. No longer will the U.S. taxpayer bail out the recklessness of Wall Street. I mean, we'll give you the seven-hundred billion dollars this one last time, but if you do it again, oooh, we will be so angry!

(roughly), and Sarah Palin's emphatic:

...like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Helping the -- it's got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade -- we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as competitive, scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today -- we've got to look at that as more opportunity.

(and yeah she actually said that, that isn't from the Tina Fey sketch, although the two are very similar), after those two compelling arguments to the contrary, that a sufficiently large body of congresspersons could stand up and say "um, no, not really", gives me an element of hope and delight.

This bailout would be like paying a blackmailer; it's awfully tempting in the short term, but he's just going to be calling again next month, that breathy voice on the phone, disguised with a dirty T-shirt wrapped around the handset, saying that now there's a terrible crisis in I don't know the market for Collateralized Inverse Credit Card Debt Obligations, and this time it'll cost two trillion dollars to save the world economy.

And then what do you do?

Yeah, the stock market went down 777 points; that's the blackmailer sending us a crude sepia print of the incriminating photographs. But if we say, if those brave whackos in Congress say, "sorry, bub, do your worst", and stick with it, it may be a little embarassing when the pictures appear in the local newspaper, but in a few months everyone will have forgotten them, the stock market will be back at 11,500 as the market says "darn" about not being able to buy all those new yachts and private jets and gets back to business, and we'll all be able to look back with relief.

And can we like fire Hank "may not be reviewed by any court of law" Paulson while we're at it? I mean my gawd.

So that's the boring (if world-shaking) stuff. On more interesting fronts, the little daughter is still all excited by school, and even has a cool job, as well as vast amounts of work, and is learning to write Computer Programs and other things dear to her ol' Dad's heart. (And boy do I envy her sometimes when I'm sitting here writing PowerPoint that will influence the course of computer science research worldwide; in the right mood, being a college frosh seems far preferable.)

Good ol' Spennix is level 64, and now has skill level 375 in First Aid (Heavy Netherweave Bandages ftw!), as well as her Epic Mount (a Swift Grey Ram), and is busily exploring the mysteries of the Outlands. Dale has been doing various things in Second Life, I'm getting over (touch wood) a slight but annoying cold, M went off to an event at a Local Needlework Store (which is, I understand, a technical term in the international online cross-stitch community) the other day so I got to bond with the little son (by, mostly, playing online video games in adjacent rooms), who is doing Just Fine in high school.

And here's an article on Solving Every Sudoku puzzle using about 100 lines of Python.

And there's a bunch of other things in my "to maybe log someday" file, but, well, you know. So much else to do!

(rushes madly off, stage right)
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

So I was listening to News Arrrrr on the BBC on NPR on the radio this morning, and they had a nice piece on the Large Hadron Collider and how the first beam got working quicker than expected and they were starting to work on the second beam and in just a couple weeks or so they will cause them to collide with each other, reproducing conditions at the moment of the Big Bang, and thereby bringing into existence a whole new universe, which will expand in all directions at the speed of light, destroying the Earth and the solar system, and eventually the entire galaxy and so on.

(Although this is sort of a problem in the short term, and for that matter in the long term, I agree with those scientists who say that it's still "pretty cool".)

I hope they get it working and the Earth destroyed before the U.S. Presidential Elections. (A pity they didn't get it done before tomorrow's Endless Stream of 9/11 Footage Displayed on Every Vertical Surface in the Nation, really.) You can keep track of whether the world has been destroyed yet here.

Okay, I know, the end of the universe has already been widely blogged ("blogged"). But I keep meaning to post here, and so I save up stuff and then I don't post for so long that it gets old, but I'm sort of fond of it so I post it anyway. For instance:

Now both Presidential candidates are talking about CHANGE, but they've been awfully vague about it. I hereby offer to either candidate (the one with the Boring Old Guy VP, or the one with the Excitingly Female VP) the following list of True Changes:

• Painting the White House orange,
• Making Estonian the official language of the United States,
• Outlawing the automobile,
• Cigar rationing.

Now those would be changes that the American People could see firsthand! They would really make a difference in our lives!

Tasteless political joke: With McCain's VP pick, it looks like for the first time we'll have either a black man or a woman as President of the U.S.!

Also tasteless: Wondering about the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education? Just ask Sarah Palin! (And the related Juneau / Juno jokes.)

Okay, that's probably the end of the old stale stuff. Well, the obviously old stale stuff anyway.

So much has happened! We dropped the little daughter off at school 'way back Saturday before last. She's been emailing and phoning now and then, and she always sounds happy and busy and excited. Classes start tomorrow, and she's actually taking a programming course! She will probably learn Java! Woot!

But I'm not going to write down all the details of her going off to, being off at, college, because it's still too immediate and personal and emotional and I haven't nearly processed it enough to really write down.

I've been using Google's Chrome browser, and it's really neat (hm, I guess Chrome is old stale news by now too, isn't it?). Who could resist a browser that's introduced with a comic book?

Let's see, virtual worlds stuff. I've been doing various things in Second Life, as usual. Here are some lawyers specializing in Virtual World law, which is kinda neat. Here's a picture from Burning Man which looks an awful lot like it's from Second Life.

Oh, right! So the other day in SL I was a girl with long demon horns dancing on a dancepole, talking to other interestingly-dressed people, looking at the colored lights and the fog and all, and listening to live music (or at least a live DJ). And then the next day in RL I was a boy with short stubby devil horns, walking through a crowd of people in leather and swords and faerie wings, listening to live music and playing games and generally being entertained and amused and impressed. That latter was, of course, our local Renaissance Faire,

Burning Man and the Ref Faire are the two things in atomic life that Second Life reminds me most of. And they're both things that I've heard about for a long time and wished I was part of (never been to Burning Man, and have been to a couple of Ren Faires but always dream about having been Really Into It in my youth 'cause I think that would have been awesome). Which goes very well with my current Second Life addiction. *8)

At the Ren Faire (I went with the little boy, but he went off with1his friends, so I was wandering happily by myself most of the time) I got some little devil horns and a little reed pipe, and ate and drank things, and watched the fire show and some jousting and the very wonderful Flirts of Fancie and all, and admired all the costumes and general wierdness, while at the same time wishing that IM and TP and profile viewing were working. And flying, for that matter.

I mean sure, the atomic world has the resolution and sensory bandwidth down, but the general feature-set leaves alot to be desired otherwise!

Speaking of the atomic world, sigh:

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

Because, hey, if we don't use the police to stifle domestic dissent, then the terrorists win! Or was it the other way around?

And to end on a lighter note, a reminder (from a Plurker) that the Internet is for porn, and the fascinating story of The Great Hatsby.

cya later, eh?
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Saturday, August 23, 2008

To celebrate the ninth anniversary of the weblog, I seem to have skipped two entire weeks, which is unusual even for me these days. I've been posting a little more often to the secret Dale Innis weblog, mostly because that's much easier to post to on the spur of the moment. It's tempting (as it's been for years) to either start using someone's weblogging infrastructure for this log (which would no doubt be annoying when I wanted to do something they didn't support), or write my own code to make it easier to post here (which would require work).

But probably not tempting enough to get me to do either one. *8)

This is the last weekend before we drive the little daughter off to college and the Real World. Today we all went out together to Cold Spring for one last going-out before the Big Event. We ate at the good old Foundry Café, and the ladies shopped in clothing stores, and I bought a copy of Ayn Rand's "For the New Intellectual", which I probably already have and have even read but it was just a quarter, from the perpetual porch-sale just beyond the path under the railroad tracks.

And we sat on the grass in the shade of a tree down by the waterfront, where's they've knocked down the old decaying factory warehouse and built nice-looking house-style condos or apartments or flats or something where that and the weedy fenced vacant lot used to be. People were playing music on music-things, and the little daughter's new iPhone (3G) was getting an internet connection from somewhere.

The little black LG phones that we got a zillion years ago (I went back into the old weblog entries to find out when, but I got distracted) are all wearing out, and the little daughter decided that she wanted an iPhone as her big birthday and going-to-college present, so now she has one of those. And the little boy decided he wanted a Samsung A737 (in orange), so now he has one of those. M and I are still thinking about it.

The AT&T Store in the Mall (where we got both the iPhone (because the Apple Store can't do it if you have a discount thing on your AT&T account) and the Samsung) is like the most inefficient store eh-var!

We ordered the iPhone awhile back, and M noticed that the postoffice or whatever web site said that it was in, so we called them and they said oh yeah hey look at that it is (but they hadn't called us to tell us yet). We went to the store to pick it up, and the person that we'd talked to to order it wasn't there. This is apparently a Highly Unusual Situation, because they had no idea what to do. We'd ordered it from Chris, but Chris wasn't there! How could Nick possibly give it to us? He'd need Chris's codes!

Thinking quickly, Nick sent a message to Chris on his Blackberry. Now all we had to do was stand there until Chris got out of the shower or whatever and replied to the message. Perfectly sensible. Unfortunately Chris must take long showers, and no reply came for awhile. Thinking quickly again, Nick decided to ask the store manager for Chris's codes. The store manager was busy with a customer, but after only a few hours he became available and began writing down the codes on a scrap of paper. But then Nick's Blackberry warbled! It was Chris! Out of the shower and replying with his codes! Wow!

So now all we had to do was wait while Nick entered Chris's codes and then stared at his terminal for another few hours, moving his mouse around and clicking on things, and then wandered away for awhile for no apparent reason, and then asked the little daughter if we'd like to transfer the numbers from her old phone, and when we said yes he pushed buttons on her phone for a bit and noticed that it was set to Spanish (the little daughter showing off for her Spanish-speaking boyfriend), and she set it back to English for him, and he pushed more buttons, and wandered off again for awhile, and came back to tell us it would be done soon, and then came back again and moused and clicked for awhile longer, and then finally, after only about five days in the store, we were done!

It was similar for the Samsung phone for the little boy, except that rather than having to find Chris's codes, Nick had to (a) fiddle around for an hour or two with his register, because it was "full", and (b) wait around for Chris himself for another hour or two, because Chris was both a salesperson and the Acting Manager tonight, and had to approve everything that Nick was doing before it could actually happen.

I was going to go into more detail about the Samsung-buying visit to the store, but I'm just too exhausted. Suffice it to say that when we got back to the parking lot, moss had formed on the car, and several large tree were growing out of the roof.

Oh and then on the way home with the little boy and his new phone, we were stopped by an Officer of the Law, who noted that I'd been driving 59 in a 45 mph zone (unlike everyone else on the road, who as doing at least 60). Fortunately for us (and I hope not too unfortunately for anyone else), as he was examining my license and registration, his radio said something, and he handed them quickly back to me, said "have a nice evening, sir", got back into his car, and sped off siren wailing.

So it's been an eventful day. *8) And I'm very sleepy due to staying up to late in Second Life! But now I've at least written in my weblog, and tomorrow's Sunday, and we can have bagels...
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Thursday, August 7, 2008

In case anyone's still reading this neglected ol' weblog, but really as usual mostly just for me, it's time to say

Happy Roughly-Ninth Anniversary of This Stuff!

We have a pretty good 'net connection this year, but I think I'll continue the tradition of writing this entry slowly over the week, and then posting it back-dated once we get back. (That way the Wired Burglars who constantly scour the intertubes for evidence of houses being empty won't find out we're gone until it's too late.)

We are, as usual, up in Maine; the air is, as usual, breathtakingly sweet and cool, the water heartbreakingly lovely. It's (let's see) Tuesday at the moment, and everyone is rustling around getting ready to walk down the road to the Ocean Point Inn for the Buffet Breakfast 7:30-10:00 Open to the Public.

Less as usual, "everyone" is five of us: us four, and the little daughter's (gasp) boyfriend). Can you imagine?

(Ah, amazingly enough everyone seems to be pretty much ready to go, even though it's only 09:15; so I'll see ya in a bit.)

Ha, we're back! That was very nice. Idyllic an' all. Full buffet, plain and blueberry (mmm) pancakes, French toast, oven-browned potatoes, scrambled eggs, ham an' asparagus quiche, sausages, bacon, fruit an' danish an' coffee an' assorted fruit juices, US$11.95 each (cold side alone, US$6.95, but no one did that).

We're in the Boothbay area again this year, not right in town like last year, but rather south down the same peninsula that the very first house we stayed in is on. Down past that very first house, in fact, down in Ocean Point, south of Linekin, which is south of East Boothbay (bustling downtown East Boothbay, with a postoffice and a restaurant), and south of Bayville at the head of Linekin bay there.

Because there aren't all that many houses or people, the only post office is in East Boothbay, so as far as Official Addresses are concerned Linekin and Bayville and Ocean Point are all in East Boothbay, but that's boring.

This year I took Thursday and Friday off from work, and we stopped in Rhode Island on the way up to visit with friend K before coming up here on Saturday. That was fun; haven't seen her in all too long. We drove up to Boothbay on Saturday, stopped at the Hannaford to get food (not having packed much so as to have enough room in the car for a boyfriend), and then went to the downtown East Boothbay restaurant for my first lobster (mmmmm) of the week.

On Sunday morning I made Bisquick (tm) pancakes for breakfast and fudge brownies from mix (the little daughter's idea) for after that. We did the traditional run into Boothbay Harbor for ice cream and general wandering around, and then went out along the road eastward to our traditional informal outdoor lobster warf. Unusually, it was full to bursting with motorcyclists; so many that the street in the immediate vicinity was closed off, and we had to park over behind the church and walk over.

We had, it turned out, come over just as the 28th Annual Stoney's Lobster Run passed through East Boothbay. A whole mess of people with motorcycles, many leather jackets, T-shirts many black and/or with skulls, many men with big bellies and women with big (or at least proudly displayed) chests, people laughing loudly, waving arms in the air, calling to each other across the crowd, and in general being boisterous.

We ordered and started eating our lunch among them; it was great fun. A few minutes later someone announced over the warf loudspeaker that they'd be heading out, and soon afterward there was a really earsplitting noise for rather a long time, that slowly diminished with distance, and then they were gone.

On Monday (yesterday as of this writing), we had cereal for breakfast and drove to Bath, stopping at a more or less ordinary suburban mall's GameStop to buy a Nintendo DS or something charger (because ours had all been left behind), visiting Halcyon Yarns ('cause M likes yarn an' stuff), and then randomly strolling around scenic historic downtown Bath. Through random good luck we stumbled on and had a most excellent lunch at Beale Street Barbecue; good jazz, local microbrew beers, friendly staffpersons, very delicious foodstuffs.

On Monday evening the little daughter and the boyfriend went for a walk and got pleasantly rained on by a passing shower (they were in swim things anyway, since they were planning to play on the rocks and look for a beach), and then later I walked down the same way and found the Ocean Point Inn and their Breakfast Buffet sign, which brings us around to the start of our story.

I'm being very straight-up narrative, aren't I? That's allowed, though; I like to narrate. *8)

Somewhere in the middle of the paragraphs above the kids and I went off to Popham Beach (M once again staying home to relax, not being a big fan of beaches). This resulted in two Heartwarming an' Gratifying Stories. Here is the first one:

The kids and I got down to Popham Beach without any trouble (not even any traffic through Wiscasset), and it was a lovely day. Such a lovely day, in fact, that when we got near the beach parking area the road was solidly lined with parked cars, and then there was a line of cars waiting to get to the entrance, and then at the entrance there was a nice man in a park uniform and little hat, patiently explaining that the lot was full and turning cars away.

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"I don't know!" he said, "You might try Percy's."

So not knowing what else to do we drove onward along the road, and after quite awhile there was a little sort of town, and in that town where was a Percy's General Store or something, and it had a not-quite-full parking lot, and in that parking lot was a sign "Beach Parking $7".

So I told the kids we'd drive back to the park entrance and drop them off there, and then I'd drive back to Percy's and park, and walk back to join them.

"What if Percy's is full when you get back?" they asked, and "That's a really long way, are you sure you want to walk that far?", and I said well what else can we do we'll cope.

So we drove back to the park entrance, and when we got there the gate was open and they were letting people in, so we paid the largish parking fee, and parked, and went to the beach.

And that was nice.

Wasn't that Heartwarming an' Gratifying? Or at least easy to skip over, due to the variant formatting?

Here's the second one:

I was sitting on the blanket reading when a little pink girl in a pink two-piece swimsuit came up to her mother, who was sitting in the next bunch of towels and chairs a yard or two away, and held up her arm in an upset fashion. There was a velco strap around her wrist, and trailing from that was a black elastic cord that was clearly supposed to, but did not, lead to one of those floating "boogie board" things that kids flop around on in these decadent times.

The mother made vague notions that the little girl should look for it, and the little girl made sounds to the effect that she already had. I got up and went down to the water.

There was no sign of a loose board floating on the water where the little girl had come up from, but the surf was flowing pretty strongly to the right (I had to keep looking gradually rightward all afternoon to keep an eye on any of my charges that were in the water), and down aways to the right, just at the edge of the water, was a boogie board, near but not obviously associated with a couple of people. I started down that way just as the owner of the board and her mother arrived and started scanning nearby waves.

As I approached the suspect board, a wave caught it and began to tug it off further to the right, but someone grabbed it and held it out to the people standing there, who seemed uncertain about the whole thing.

"Is this yours?" I asked, and they said that no it wasn't but they'd just put it higher on the sand so it wouldn't get swept away. I said there was a little girl looking for one just up the beach, and they handed it to me.

When I got back, the little girl and her mother were just turning away from the surf, which they had been examining on the apparent theory that the board might have been impishly swimming up-current and hiding under the surface of the water. They didn't notice me until I held the board out and said "Is this yours?"

They looked quite surprised and said yes it was and I gave it to them and said that it had washed up down that way. They said Thank You and all, and I went back up to my towel.

And that was nice, too. I don't know why I find the "mysterious stranger who suddenly appears from nowhere and solves the problem and vanishes" role, but I do. *8)

So yeah wow that probably didn't deserve nearly that many column-inches, but there we are. Oh, here's something else! Not heartwarming or gratifying, especially, just sort of odd...

Maine Traffic Phenomenon: Route 1 is a major thoroughfare in these parts, along the coast here, and in particular in Wiscasset the highway bridge there is the only practical way between points around say Bath and points around say Boothbay.

Wiscasset is a pretty little town ("the prettiest town in Maine" the sigh says, roughly), and down at the bottom of the hill, just before (or just after, depending) the bridge, Route 1 is a small local road, with a couple of intersections (at least one of which is lacking a left-turn lane), a couple of crosswalks (giving pedestrians the right-of-way), and a couple or four seafood places, one of which (Red's Eats) is a tiny shack that invariably has a line, sometimes stretching down the street.

The effect of this little small-town intersection on Route 1 is that whenever the volume of traffic and the density of tourists reaches a certain threshold (as it apparently does pretty much every afternoon in the summer) there is a miles-long twenty or thirty minute backup on Route 1 in both directions, often stretching all the way across the highway bridge and up and down one or more hills in the southbound lane, and all the way through Wiscasset town and out into the fields in the northbound one.

I wonder about this. Surely the state (or the county, or the town, or whoever) know about this. I wonder why they haven't added at least that missing left-turn lane, and for that matter a pedestrian bridge or underpass or something. Or rerouted that bit of Route 1 around the intersection, perhaps. Seems unlikely that the mess is good for business, all things considered; there are always cars turning around and going back the other way when it's bad, and in fact we did that ourselves on Sunday, which is why we didn't get to Bath until Monday. But maybe Red's Eats likes it?

Hm.

Wow, what alot of typing already! Right now the windows are open and there's an almost-chilly twilight breeze drifting in, and outside the little daughter and the boyfriend are playing their guitars and singing, and the music is drifting in with the air. I think I'll stop writing things down for now; not sure what we'll be doing tomorrow (the forecast is calling for rain). Maybe I'll give you the traditional (and I'm sure eagerly awaited!) list of books that are lying around the place.

Today, Wednesday, it rained pretty much all day. I slept late, went to the grocery to restock the bread and milk (and deli meat, and ice cream, and brownie mix, and...), and did very little else. Had Texas Garlic Toast with Sardines in Mustard Sauce for lunch (the rest of the family were all like Ewwwww Yucch). Checked my various personal (but not work!) emails. Read Man-Kzin Wars stories. Dozed. Looked out admiringly at the world a few times.

Mmmmmmm, lazy...

I think my mind has gotten quieter, sleepier, over the years. Not spontaneously thinking up bundles of CGI scripts to write, or new designs for the website, so much anymore. Lack of sleep due to SL? Or a channeling of ideas into SL? Or just advancing age (and, presumably, wisdom!)?

I'll think about that more later... *8)

Yesterday, Thursday, we went into Wiscasset, ate at the very nice cozy friendly Sarah's by the waterfront, just across from Red's Eats, did our bit to contribute to the traffic problem by crossing Route 1 a few times, walked by and looked over the fence at the Ancient Cemetery (1753), looked at antique stores and the Old General Store, found a present for the boyfriend's mother. I had lobster again at Sarah's; delicious and guilt-provoking as usual. And we made brownies again.

Today we were going to go on a Whale Watch out of Boothbay Harbor, 'cause we've never been and I like to get out on the water somewhere at least once, but it was cancelled because of the rain of all things. Stupid rain. So I get to mope and feel sorry for myself. *8)

Nothing else to do on a rainy day has occurred to us, so we may just spend our last full day here sitting around in the house again, listening to the rain again, reading, playing games on our iPods and things. Maybe it'll let up enough that I can at least go for a walk; I'd like to do that.

Ooh, let's do the piles of books thing, just for old times' sake. No links, 'cause I'm not sitting close enough to the modem to plug into it, but you can look on Google or Amazon just as well as I could.

I finished "Man-Kzin Wars" the other day; it's upstairs in my bedroom. It was fun, although I've probably read it before; "The Warriors" is the logically-first Niven story about the Kzin, Poul Anderson's "Iron" a good if somewhat too long story about plucky humans outwitting a Kzin force, and Dean Ing's "Cathouse" a good and also somewhat too long story that includes some Kzin females from back before language was bred out of them. Also up here are some other books I bought for a dime each at the Friends of the Library Used Book Store in Boothbay Harbor and haven't read yet: "The Family at Tammerton" ("The Very Best in British Mystery"), "Judge me not" by John D. MacDonald, "Hope of Heaven" by John O'Hara (which doesn't appear to be either SF or mystery; how did that happen?), and "Vor" by James Blish (safely SF). And on the subject of old SF novels with short titles, there's also John Robert Russell's "Ta", whose cover features a dandelion with breasts, which I finished the other day and which was fun but silly.

And also also up here, on top of the pile of Buddhadharmas and Wireds and New York Times Book Reviews, are Buckley's "Right Reason" and Bunnie Hwang's "Hacking the Xbox" that I brought from home, and Italo Calvino's "Numbers in the Dark" and Xam Cartier's "Muse-Echo Blues" that I bought at a used book store in Providence on the way up.

(There will now be a pause while I lie back on the bed here and read a story of two of Calvino. Ha, he's a genius!)

Downstairs is Ellery Queen "The Dragon's Teeth", also from the Friends of the Library Used Book Store and also unread; it's downstairs because I took it to the beach with us the other day. Also Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", which I got from Amazon ages ago for reasons that I've forgotten; I'm about half-way through it and it's strange and good. And then Man-Kzin Wars IV, in which I've read Kingsbury's "The Survivor", interesting because it's so much from the Kzin's point of view, and am just starting Greg Bear and S. M. Stirling's "The Man who would be Kzin" (haha title).

And that's about it. And now the sun's come out! Maybe I'll put on outside clothes and go for a walk...

Ah, that was nice. The sun stayed out just long enough, and there was no rain to speak of. A nice walk in that incredible Maine shore air, and I'm not sad anymore. We're probably going to all go out somewhere together and eat (maybe that barbecue place in Bath again even).

What is sorrow? Pain says "that's damaging us; don't do that!". Does sorrow say "things aren't as good as they were, or aren't as good as they could have been; don't do that!"? I was sad, just a small sorrow, that I wasn't going to get out onto the water as expected, didn't get in a real swim. That the sand dollar that the little boy found at the beach got broken in the bag on the way home. That this summer doesn't have the blissful (and probably time-imagined) glow of the first few? Sorrow that can be dissipated by the sweet air in my face, by feeling that this, now, is very very good, Whale Watching or not, swimming in freezing water or not.

There is something very subtle, I think, in a brain, in a mind, that determines whether or not this, now, is good, feels good, gets counted as good. Upbringing, philosophy, hormones, neurotransmitter balance? Air temperature and pressure?

Now it's nearly midnight on Friday; up early (or at least earlier) tomorrow, then the long drive home. It's been a good week, despite the rain; I feel rested, and if not distinctly energized then at least not tired. It's been fun doing personal email, and Plurk, and yet not spending too many hours online; I think I accidentally hit a good middle-point there.

Maybe I'll post this tomorrow. Or the next day. Happy Saturday and/or Sunday! *8)
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Haha! Something keeps putting up a plaintive little popup, all modernly-rounded brushed-metal look, in the center of the laptop screen here, saying "Please check your internet connection. Your PC appears to be offline". And there's an "Ok" button, but no "yeah, I know, go away" button.

Isn't that cute?

Whatever it is, it clearly thinks that being offline (because, say, you're sitting in the waiting area at your son's music school where he's having his weekly half-hour bass guitar lesson, and both of the visible wireless networks are, for a wonder, encrypted) is something abnormal that you really ought to know about, and something that no other program on the computer is going to tell you about, so a popup is quite quite necessary.

I do wish people making products would think a little harder about them.

(In fact I suspect that the culprit here is the EA Games Download Manager, which has no business being active on the machine at all, seeing as how I used it only once, to download the Spore Creature Creator the other week, and did not ask it to hang around monitoring my internet connection for the rest of eternity. Grumble grumble idiots.)

Online free very good SF story o' the day: Down on the Farm, by Charles Stross. I didn't really understand why moving the magic chess pieces did things to the Evil Robots, but hey, it's a Laundry story, and I love Laundry stories.

From Bruce Schneier, a Wired piece (with video!) which just cries out to be called "my new fighting umbrella is unstoppable" (see mnftiu).

I've been pretending to cross-country ski and bicycle, and lifting heavy things up and down, at the Club two or three times a week still, and I've decided that I'm lacking these "endorphin" things that happy runners and suchlike have. Endogenous morphine analogs are supposed to give you this "runner's high" when you run or lift weights or otherwise do physical stuff enough to start the body really stressing. But my body just (a) sweats profusely, and (b) screams "owch that hurts stop that, what are you doing you idiot?" at me in no uncertain terms.

Or maybe it's just that my endorphin generators are hooked up to my "lying down with a good book or a virtual world" receptors, rather than my "body-stressing exercise" receptors.

Internet Censorship: Subtle, Non-Governmental, and Totally Legal contains our Quote O' the Day:

If ISPS and other network operators voluntarily decide that they don't want any violence, profanity, or pro-choice content streaming over their networks, for example, this would have a marked influence on the nature of free speech on the Internet.

Can't argue with that!

See the secret Dale Innis weblog for the latest in Second Life news, although for some reason I'm going to mention here instead of there the kinda cute Scratch tool, which provides a GUI that more or less writes SL scrpts for you when you drag little boxes and puzzle pieces around on the screen.

I was just claiming as a fact today at work that, despite many many many efforts to disprove it, it remains a fact that you can't do significant programming by dragging little boxes and arrows around on a screen (although people who live in PowerPoint, where all you ever do is drag around little boxes and arrows, continue to be easily convinced to fund One More Attempt to do programming that way too).

But I was thinking of programs fancy and functional enough that someone might be willing to pay alot for them; Scratch may be well-suited for the low (but voluminous) end of the SL script market, which is currently served by people who don't actually know the language finding some script that does something vaguely like what they want, and fiddling with it until they either get it right, or give up and call me or someone like me who will do the rest of the needed fixup just because it's fun to do little favors for friends.

From very cool SL resident Argent Bury writing on Plurk, we find Project Indigo (working title): Design of a vertical seaside metropolis. Very lovely and mind-bending. Good SF stories should be set there.

Sanity!

A federal appeals court on Monday threw out a $550,000 indecency fine against CBS Corp. for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction."

And, heh heh, maybe not quite so sane, but pretty amusing: RNC To Sue CafePress For Helping People Promote Republican Candidates.

Let's see. I've just created a Troll Warrior on yet another World of Warcraft server, with the intent of being able to hang around with Soph and the hordes (hahaha) of other smart people who apparently run around there now and then to relax and stuff. He's already level three! (The first five or so levels of WoW being utterly trivial and quick, so as to rope newcomers thoroughly in.)

And now I'm back from the little boy's lesson, and he and the little daughter and the little daughter's boyfriend are all sitting around in the livingroom playing their guitars, and it's really impossible to describe how utterly cool that is...
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Sunday, July 13, 2008

The new law gives the government the power to conduct dragnet surveillance that has no connection to terrorism or criminal activity of any kind.

A law like this is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution and with the most basic democratic values.

I have to admit I'm not all that worked up about the part of the new FISA law that shields the telcos from lawsuits about their illegal wiretapping; to my mind, if the government asks someone to do something illegal, and they do it, the most serious thing is that the government asked, not that the someone went along with it. Whether the telcos can be sued or not seems mostly a distraction from the basic issue, which is that the Bush Administration blatantly violated the law.

Can we sort of concentrate on that more?

And speaking of governments without enough respect for the rights of the goverened, Bill points us at the very interesting 15 powerpoint slides on the organization of Iran's government (which he accurately describes as "fascinatingly Byzantine").

Closer to home, "Why it really takes so long for a pharmacist to count out a few pills" addresses a mystery that we wondered about years ago. Is this the real explanation?

The latest object to be hackable over the Internet: Coffee Makers!

And continuing to climb the curve of seriousness, here is Mr. Clock Radio!

(That came in some spam, and I was impressed.)

And here is Dale Innis in Google's exciting new virtual world, "Lively":

Click through to flickr for amusing commentary.

And finally, speaking of amusing commentary, I will break with tradition and link directly to the Secret Dale Innis Weblog to point you at Meaties, a short story of which I am very proud (and there's an interesting link or two in the comments, too).

So there we are! Another lazy Sunday, eating bagels and watching TV, thinking about doing some quests in WoW or some random hanging-about in SL, looking out the windows at the sunlight, indulging in sleepy blinking and random lolling-about. Thanks for reading as always, and may your own Sunday be just as sunny as you want it.
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Good morning! Although it'll be afternoon in about two minutes. *8)

We went out last night with friends and neighbors, and saw the Hudson Valley Shakespeare folks do Cymbeline. Unlike the last two years, there was no quirky overlay theme, no Flash Gordon characters or cowboy singers, just a well-done presentation of one of Shak's plays that I don't know hardly nothing about.

The program notes include the director or somebody opining that Cymbeline isn't really the sort of self-pastiche that it appears to be and that people sometimes dismiss it as, but is actually a deep and mysterious thing, a product of the Bard's maturity and a great depth of thought. I've only seen it once, so I can hardly judge, but it was a fun time in any case.

No spaceships or Hee-Haw numbers, but there was one notable event: about thirty seconds after they started up again after intermission (Act 3, scene 4), a large and noisy fireworks display began across the river; a few seconds later they blinked the houselights and the actors smiled and left the stage area, and Belarius (being especially loud-voiced) strode out and said "We cannot compete with gunpowder; enjoy the show and we will resume when it is done" or other words to that effect, and we all flowed out over the lawn to the side of the grounds where there's an amazing view out over the river, and watched the fireworks (out of West Point, I think), which were very pretty and loud, if somewhat small at that distance, even oohing and aahing a bit, and then when the obvious finale was over we all flowed back, and the play resumed (with a loud round of applause for the first players to re-enter the stage).

And then one of the teenagers wanted to hang around for a bit afterward to see if he could talk to Imogen, who he'd had a class with once, and she came out after a long time and did in fact remember him, and was very nice, and they talked for awhile, and we said how much we'd enjoyed the show, and then we made our way, the last of the audience stragglers, back to the cars and drove home, and it was quite late.

And then when everyone else was in bed I foolishly went into SL (just for a minute, heh heh), and it turned out that Gypsy herself was running an event at Gypsy's, the club that I first felt at home in when I was a newborn, which hasn't happened much at all lately, so I had to go over there for an hour or two, and I got to sleep much too late.

But heck, it was Saturday after all. *8)

I've posted various things in the secret Dale Innis weblog (if anyone reading this would like to find it and is having a hard time, let me know and maybe I'll actually link to it); mostly pictures of random things, and one of my brief foray into Twinity, which seems so far like an attempt to redo Second Life from scratch, only with a geography that's at least nominally that of Earth, but why would anyone want to do that?

A couple of links for your perusal: an interesting story of some wayward Class Bs (big chunks of Internet address space) that seem to have been clandestinely taken over and sold to spammers for their evil purposes, and the Underhanded C contest, which employs underhanded skills in a more benign fashion.

Equality:

Two elements are equivalent iff neither is less than the other

Equality:

is not the same as identity

less than is the new greater than

Even after all this time and silence, I still have the best readers... *8)
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
Tits

Thank you, George.

So many many things have continued to happen. I'll try to mention the significant mentionable ones, but will no doubt leave out something.

Dad and Muriel came up to visit and to attend the various ceremonies (and to see old friends from across the river and cetera), the little boy became a Middle School Graduate on Wednesday or so (too hot in the sun in the field behind the school, the person reading the names of the graduates getting wildly behind the line of children coming up to get their handshakes and pieces of paper saying that their certificates will be available week after next), we drove down to Kolstein's (using the fun little GPS unit named Jill to guide us) and traded in the little boy's rental bass and bought him an actual that-we-own bass (double bass, string bass, bass viol, not a bass guitar, although he has one of those too), we all went out for dinner together at The Diner, the little daughter became a High School Graduate (and for that matter an official Valedictorian, performing her speech wonderfully and also leading the procession of students and performing in the quintet backing up the singers an' all), we went to the neighborhood Graduation BBQ and ate things (including M's yummy cold peanut-butter noodles), I took the little daughter and the boyfriend to another Grad party and hung around for awhile to talk to the grownups (and I'm about to drive her and the boyfriend off to another one).

And that's all that springs to mind. Also a bit of World of Warcraft to relax in the interstices (my Blood Elf Mage is now level 22 or so, specializing in Ice Magic).

Oh, and a very nice wedding in SL last night that I nearly forgot to go to and that M very kindly went and picked up the little daughter and the boyfriend so that I could attend (I got there just in time for the vows and then the congratulations and the afterparty). The brides were a lovely faerie and a dream-demon; I wore some wings for the occasion. *8)

So all that important stuff and craziness is now over. Next week should be pretty quiet at work, since lots of people are taking the week off (since Friday's the Fourth of July). Maybe I'll get into the virtual worlds and/or write in my weblog more. Possibly including actual content! There are at least two recent Scotus decisions that I really want to read.

(Speaking of weblogs, I've now started one for my Second Life self. Just for the sake of Preserving the Mystery I won't link to it from here, but a few minutes in Google will find Dale Innis's weblog without much trouble I expect. I haven't been updating it much either, heh heh.)

And to close, my best wishes to all readers, and a pointer to Wally the Wordworm! *8)
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Missed another week of the weblog; where does the time go?

It goes into the end of the little daughter's high school career, deciding just how to pay for her first year or so of college, her prom and related activities (although M bore the brunt of the driving and arrangement-helping for that, and I only had to do a bit of late-night duty when thunderstorms and some worried not-us parents brought their group's planned two-night campout in a local park to an end after only one night), the little boy's first performance in a band in an actual venue (okay, so the music school probably rents the place for the evening and he wasn't of course actually payed or anything, but still), two-plus days of sometimes-actually-interesting Spring Strategy Meetings at work, lots and lots of Second Life and World of Warcraft (did I mention Spennix is level 60?), and even an addiction to one of those vapid Flash games that, after much effort I finally beat (one of the Beginner levels of), and so on and so on.

And not nearly enough sleep. Or weblogging! *8)

Thanks to all kind readers who reassured me that the mysterious white mist coming out of the car's interior ducts (not "ducks") when the A/C is on on very humid days is probably just water mist from benign natural processes, an' I shouldn't worry.

Thanks to the weather for being extremely gorgeous this morning, although I look up with some surprise just now to notice that it's apparently raining outside. This is fine, too, although I would prefer if we didn't return to the horrible humidity sort of thing for a bit, eh?

A piece of reader input I missed last go 'round somehow: What do you see?

I see you at [link]

I'm not sure that that's actually me strictly speaking (well, okay really strictly speaking it is, but you know), but I appreciate the thought.

Cute wordification sites continue to spring up; see for instance the Declaration of Independence (or the Declaration of Independence, or etc etc).

Am in a rather interesting place at work right now, as I can't recall if I've mentioned. Working on a couple significant-sized pieces of the Research Division's strategies and Technology Outlooks, which involves trying to get time with smart busy people and to ask them questions that'll get them thinking about strategies and technology outlooks rather than whatever urgent thing was already on their minds, and then working with other smart and busy people to boil down the result into something that might actually influence the company's behavior in positive ways. And also at the same time officially looking for a technical area to get deeply into and be a leader in and do amazingly wonderful work in and publish papers and file valuable patents and so on.

Most recently I took the bit in my teeth and told my immediate and perhaps-interim (or not) manager that the technical area I wanted to start seriously working in was all this here Virtual World stuff, and notwithstanding that it does involve a certain amount of dance clubs and people dressed as chickens and whatnot, my instincts tell me that there's important stuff there, potentially worth quite a bit to both the company and the world, and the idea of looking for it and developing the ideas around it are exciting to me.

I expected some pushback, some suggestions that there are more serious things I could be doing, whatever, but after some good technical discussion of the science involved and possible research questions and so on I asked as I left if it was okay with him then if I worked on that, and he said "if that's what you're passionate about and your gut tells you that there's something there, go for it!"

Which was really quite nice.

As well as the usual treasured reader input and spam that either the spam filters catch or I instinctively purge, the reader-input boxes on the ol' weblog here have been getting quite a few (well, a couple dozen) odd little comments that seem extremely generic and content-free, but also aren't spam in any particular sense. Things on the order of "This is a very good site. Maybe you could have more pictures", or "A wonderful site, I will visit again", or "Sensitive and poignant, grand". Some of them have odd little misspellings, or an extra letter after the final period, or something like that. Some don't seem to.

I'm guessing, as I have in the past, that these are odd little probes for forms which automatically post what's submitted to the web, and that the prober will eventually come back, see if the words that they posted have appeared on the site, and if so post ads for male enlargement products or pr0n or whatever it is that spammers are selling these days. But I'm not sure. Why, after all, would they bother with the probing step? Why not just post the spam itself to every form in sight, and let what appears appear? Much less effort, same result?

The net is such an odd place.

For reasons that I've now forgotten someone recommended that I watch the "Hush" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a few years ago, and eventually I mentioned this to M and she put it on the Netflix list, and eventually there wasn't anything above it on the list, and the other day it came. It's the second episode on a DVD with two other episodes, and as is my wont I watched the first episode first, and wow it was silly!

This was the one where Willow accidentally acquires the power to make (well) anything that she says happen (sometimes), and so Buffy and Spike are going to get married, and whatsisname is blind, and etc. etc. I'd forgotten or hadn't realized to what extent Buffy is (was?) a silly comedy. Part of its complex appeal I guess.

Otherwise, hm. I'm sleepy from not sleeping enough. I'm taking my neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors religiously, and have been a functioning member of society pretty steadily. There's still, somewhere more or less deep down (more deeply buried some days than others), a sort of pain at the notion of existing at all, of functioning in the world, of being out of bed, that seems to be the main thing left over from The Incident a bit over a year ago.

It's an odd pain, not having anything obvious in common with normal pains except that I'd really rather that it stopped, and that "pain" is the best name for it, for reasons that I can't express (at least that I can't express while sitting on the floor of this auditorium pretending to be taking notes or something on this talk that I'm hearing for the third time). In some sense it's made (it's making) my life richer and deeper, less taking things for granted, improving my appreciation of darkness, of being hidden, of rest. But I'd still like it to stop.

Best of warm wavings to all my readers, all your work and play and pleasures and pains. Maybe I'll go not quite so many days before posting here again; we'll see! *8)
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Thursday, June 5, 2008

"... I'm running for President Bush's third term."
  -- John McMain

So I'm very worried about a voting paradox this year: that the Democrats slightly prefer Obama to Clinton, and strongly prefer Clinton to McCain, whereas the country as a whole strongly prefers Clinton to McCain but slightly prefers McCain to Obama, and so we end up with McCain as president, even though everyone strongly prefers Clinton to McCain.

Pheh.

One crosses one's fingers for the country as a whole having more sense in November.

And while we're making little simplified models of things, imagine that there was for some reason a competition, open to everyone, requiring a huge entry fee, consisting of a long examination where the questions are things like:

Frenzied rabbits in clockwork:
  (a) June
  (b) 127
  (c) 14x + 2
  (d) higher tarrifs

and where you fail if you forget to show up, or don't write your name on every page, or fail to answer too many questions, but otherwise the scores are entirely random.

And every year the top thousand scorers are given tens of millions of dollars as a reward (although not enough, given the huge entry fee and the many many candidates, to make the expected payoff non-negative).

Think what would happen. The winners would be lauded, celebrated, attacked, constantly on TV, having their own lines of clothing and perfumes, and some of them would write books about how to win. Some of these books would emphasize showing up, and writing your name on every page, and answering all the questions. Others would give elaborate rules for how to answer the questions, based on the alphabetical order of the answers, or the numerological parity of the questions, or the phase of the moon.

And although some of us would suspect that the scores are really random, and that the expected payoff is negative, and that there are vastly more losers than winners, we wouldn't be completely certain. Once in awhile we would think to ourselves, "gad, look at that winner with his own yacht and penthouse and infinite free time, we'd love to have some of that stuff; why aren't we brave enough to take the exam and maybe be a winner, too?".

And once in awhile that would bother us.

What do you see?

I see London, I see France...

...only the bluebells and the stems of the orange tulips.

I'm very well, thank you. Though I am a bit confused. Why is "2012" funny? Please make me clued.

sims 2 storys

sims 2

Ah, youth! 2012 is funny because it's like unimaginably far in the future (always has been), and yet my daughter's now a member of the Class of it. It's, like, absurd and impossible!

Sims Stories.
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

So should I be worried because when I have the Air Conditioner running in my car on humid days, and I push the button that makes it blow encolded air out the dashboard vents, there sometimes emerges from those vents rolling (if insubstantial and transparent) clouds of white steam and/or smoke? I don't know if it smells like anything, 'cause of I still can't smell. It stops if I turn off the A/C, but today on the drive home I really didn't want to turn off the A/C because the relative humidity was like a zillion percent.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America, and in particular the recentish decision in Crawford et. al. v. Marion County Election Board et. al., which I've just read because it's interesting an' educational to read Supreme Court decisions, and I haven't done it enough lately.

As each of you may or may not have noticed, Crawford v. Marion is about the constitutionality of Indiana's voting laws, which were recently changed to require presenting a government-issued photo ID at the polling place, or alternately filing a provisional ballet and then showing up at the county seat within ten days and signing your name to a paper saying that you had one of the allowed good reasons for not having one (like being poor and not having enough money to pay for the paperwork necessary to get the documents required to get a government-issued photo ID, although you do apparently have enough money to like miss work and get to the county seat).

Now some folks thought that this constituted a Poll Tax, one of those Bad Things from a Long Time Ago that were Unamerican because they were mostly designed "to keep them damn cahlahds from votin'". Proponents of the measure said that is was not a Bad Thing at all, because it was designed "to keep them damn poah people from votin', erhh, ah mean from committin' Election Fraud, uhh, ah mean t' keep ennyone from committin' Election Fraud, yah, thet was it!".

One of the main problems with this latter argument is that never in the history of the State of Indiana, and maybe a dozen times in the entire history of the Solar System, has there been an attempt to commit Election Fraud in a way that this requirement would in fact have stopped. But hey! You never know.

Eventually this got to the Supreme Court, and the other day the Court issued a Decision, saying that the Indiana requirement was actually peachy keen. I summarize the Decision here for those short on reading time:

Justice Stevens (joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist I mean Roberts and Justice Kennedy) for the Court: "Well, I dunno, it's true that the state didn't prove that there was actually any election fraud to prevent, but on the other hand the plaintiffs didn't prove there were actually any particular number of poor people that would be burdened. And even if the law was enacted mostly to disenfranchise poor people, there are other reasons they might have enacted it, too. So whatever. The law stands. And here's about six thousand previous Decisions with the word 'vote' in them somewhere that one of our clerks found for us on Lexis/Nexis."

Justice Scalia (joined by Justice Thomas and Justice Alito) concurring: "Now hold on! We don't want to be so wussy here. Even if the plaintiffs had proven that there were poor people who would have been burdened by the requirement, the law still would have been fine, because the law imposes the same burden on everyone; it's just the impact of that burden that might be different between people. It's like if a law said you had to be male to vote: that would impose the very same burden on everyone (having to be male), it's just that the impact might be heavier on some people (women, for instance).

"Now there's this pesky Poll Tax decision in Harper v. Virginia that might seem to hold exactly the opposite, saying that a poll tax would be an unfair burden on the poor, but we can construe this very very narrowly as applying only to requirements that people pay money directly to the government, and not applying to things like the Indiana requirement where you have to pay money to taxi services and maybe to the people that can give you a copy of your birth certificate -- but hm that's the government too isn't it, but, well -- LOOK! IT'S HALLEY'S COMET!

"So since this law does not put an undue burden on voters in general, where by 'voters in general' I mean wealthy white voters who belong to my country club, and since discrimination is okay because, without proof of discriminatory intent, a generally applicable law with disparate impact is not unconstitutional, the law stands (as should every other law that mostly impacts poor people, since poor people aren't yet a protected class, and you know how I feel about any suggestion that we might create new protected classes)."

Everyone reading the decision: "Hm, but on that thing about discriminatory intent, didn't the main opinion say that there might in fact have been discriminatory intent? Shouldn't we worry about that a bit?"

Justice Scalia (with a heavy sigh, clearly nearing the end of his patience): "Anyone with a proper respect for stare decisis and quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur will realize at once that in this case -- LOOK! IT'S HALLEY'S COMET! AGAIN! WHOA!!"

Justice Souter (joined by Justice Ginsburg) dissenting: "Oh for heaven's sake. The only even vaugely plausible reason the state could give for this law was to prevent a kind of fraud that no one ever tries to commit, and by the most conservative estimate tens of thousands of people will be unable to vote because of it. The parallel to the Poll Tax found unconstitutional in Harper is painfully obvious. Sheesh. The law is unconstitutional."

Justice Breyer dissenting: "Yeah, what they said! I'm only writing my own separate dissent because I had some time to kill before lunch. Here are some precedents."

So a mealy-mouthed bad decision by the Court, a more forthright if really mean-spirited and anti-egalitarian and incredibly narrow interpretation of Harper by the mean kids, and a rather sad, and sadly quite correct, dissent by the kids from the Art Room.

Sigh! I intended that to be funny, but it's mostly sad, isn't it? Ah, well, on to...

Second Life (ah brave new world, that doesn't have such Scalias in it):

This is the first shot of my new park in Hughes Rise (yay!) in a decently-complete state (although it's still changing).

I bought my first 512 square meters here back on Xmas of 2006 (back when each resident got a chance to buy one 512 at well below market rates), and I've been erratically buying adjacent parcels as I happen to notice them becoming available. (Seems to be a pretty high turnover rate here for some reason.)

The other day I bought two more, enough to get me to the edge of the next Tier (monthly payment) plateau; I now have 2560m2; woot! And for some reason or other I decided to actually do something with it. Never really having done a ground build before I started on a sort of slapdash park, with the result (so far) that you see here. Uneven slightly weathered looking walls, trees, birdsong, a fountain or two, places to sit, some decorative fireworks, a big lumpy placeholder sculpture, and (just to the left of the tree in the foreground and not lit well enough yet) the copy of her lovely piece "Embrace", donated to the park by the wunnerful Callipygian Christensen, of who I have writ before.

(Also rosebushes. And that picture of dogs playing poker, 'way up in the back. And and and...)

People are saying I should have a party there. I might! Of course I'm been saying that about my Indolence club build for awhile now. *8)

And just to close, here's a Twitter feed of all mentions of the word "wish" on Twitter, and a graph of sunshine levels.

G'night!
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Man, remember back when I used to post in this weblog every single day? Them was the days, eh? Back before Second Life, and Twitter, and Ballet Craziness Season. (And for that matter mostly before ol' 296.22.)

In fact I haven't been in Second Life at all the last couple of days either (not counting a few very late-at-night hours logged on as someone else, trying to fix some scripts of theirs that had been broken by a small change to the laws of physics, in time for a scheduled experiment the next day, while they were more or less inaccessible at a conference on another coast). Work stuff and Ballet Craziness Season have been consuming all my time.

The latter Season ends tomorrow, though! And for the last time. In a few minutes (as of this writing) I'm taking the little daughter into town to drop her off for hre first two shows. M or I will be ushering at the second one, tonight, and then tomorrow we'll go to the Sunday show, and then the party afterwards for the graduating Seniors, and then Dance will be something that she does off at college (eek!) if she feels like it, rather than something that we roust her out of bed for and drive her off to.

How very strange.

Then there's a passle ("passle"?) of conference papers that I should be reviewing for SRDS2008 (which is in Italy, and I'm probably not actually going to it, but I do love reviewing papers), rather than say writing in my weblog, and various important presentations that I'm giving to executive-types over the next week or two about the future of various kinds of technology and markets and so on.

But right now I'd rather be writing in my weblog. *8)

I've been spending lots of time reading and writing on Twitter, too, under my Secret (ha!) Second Life Identity: Dale Innis. Have been having lots of fun there, meeting people and saying silly and/or useful things, and clicking through to various weblogs and things.

I've also somehow roused the ire of Prokofy Neva, one of the more colorful characters of the Second Life twittering and weblogging community, who is convinced that I am stalking and harassing and poking him, and who calls me rather vile names now and then.

I never quite know what to do with respect to folks like that. People generally advise ignoring them, of course, but I find some kind of pleasure in the interactions. Maybe it's that a few times in the past I've managed to convince such people that I'm really not an idiot or an implacable enemy. Or maybe (relatedly) it's that I'm always sensitive to validation or its opposite, and when someone says negative things about me I always want to make sure I understand why they're saying it, so I can satisfy myself that it's not grounded in some actual thing that I'm doing wrong, that I could fix.

Which is, natch, a good sign that I should work a bit on letting go of that particular desire. *8)

Twitter is in general an interesting thing. It's very tempting (and I think maybe even true) to say that Twitter is to IRC as weblogs are to Usenet, along the lines of my previous comments on that subject (and followups). (Which were, I'm distressed to see, like eight years ago!)

Just like weblogs are like newsgroup postings, only organized by speaker rather than by topic, and are primarily about statement and only secondarily about response (and are in newest-first order), so Twitter entries ("Tweets" hee hee) are like lines in an IRC or other chatroom, only organized by speaker rather than by topic or room, and are primarily about statement (in fact the ability to "reply" was originally thought up by the users, and support was added to the system only afterwards), and are also in newest-first order.

And Twitter has some of the same nice features that weblogs do, particularly that it's less subject to cognitive overload; it doesn't matter if a thousand new people start Tweeting, because you won't see them unless you choose to. And since everyone knows that the medium is organized by speaker, no one expects you to follow all the same people that they follow, and so there's no social / conversational pressure to expand your follower list without bound.

(Ha, J. Phil. just came, and the first paper is called "Is Ignorance Bliss?". A great hook; I wonder what it's about.)

I'm reading (on and off) Cory Doctorow's latest, Little Brother, which is available free online, which is pretty cool. I'll probably still buy the book for portability and readability purposes (which is part of his point), but it's nice having it Right There. It looks pretty good so far.

What else? It's a lovely Spring, we have dance recitals this weekend, next weekend is Memorial Day, and the weekend after that is Reunions already! M's 25th, and the little daughter's first as a member of the class of 2012.

(Twenty-twelve! hahahahahahah hysterical laughter)

Haven't done much outside in the way of pool preparation or lawn mowing (that'll be the little boy's job, but he's busy shooting paintballs at an old door in the back yard right now), or plant planting or other material things like that. Hands always too full of bits, and I've never been all that good at atoms anyway.

So that's general catching-up-ness. How are you? I see the little daughter's about ready to be driven off to her first triumphs of the weekend, so I'll probably post this after.

Be good, hug each other, make pie (oooo, pie!), and so on...

Postum Scriptoriensis: Oh, I love the world! I dropped the little daughter off for her performance, and parked in the nearyby lot, walked around the end of the town track and soccer field (numerous earnest tiny girls in soccer gear toddling around and kicking balls and petting an enormous shaggy white dog that was passing by), bought myself a hot dog (with mustard and saurkraut) and an ice cream bar (the Krunch kind) from the friendly Mediterranean gentleman in the hot-dogs-and-ice-cream van (the inside walls half-covered with Italian wine posters and pictures of his grandchildren and refrigerator magnets saying "God Bless America" and "Save a Tree; Eat a Beaver"), and then I walked down across the field in the center of the track (kicking off my sandals and walking barefoot over the grass, my toes sinking into one muddy spot left by yesterday's rain), and down the stairway on the other side to the grocery store, getting two cloth poppies from the Veterans of Foreign Wars guy for two dollars, going in and buying cheese and Capri Sun for the little boy and his friends, getting money from the ATM, then back to the car and driving home with my window down and my hand sticking out, feeling the air cool and soft and sweet as sweet wine, and now I'm home and the windows are open and the world is suffused with bliss.

Thank you.
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:33:07 PDT