Anyone out there help me with this?

One literary turn of phrase that has stuck with me (unfortunately) is "necrotizing hemorrhoids." Was it used by Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Was it used by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash? I just can't seem to recall. Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Almost free books

If you've got an interest in an inexpensive source of books to read, you may want to check out FrugalReader.com. This is a service that aggregates listings of the libraries of it's members, and then allows members to request books from each other. All that's paid is postage. No membership fees. I can't see where they're making their money, but, the about page indicates an altruistic mission:

Why We're Here
FrugalReader.com exists to help you and avid readers everywhere enjoy the satisfaction and convenience of reading the books you want, when you want them, at the lowest possible cost.

Seems pretty cool.

Update: Upon further examination, it may be that part of the revenue model is click through links to Amazon to buy books that aren't available for borrowing. I certainly don't begrudge them the opportunity to make a little cash, since they appear to be charging nothing at all for the service.

Totally useless, but totally cool

While looking for an image of a balloon for use in a presentation, I wandered down this particular rathole. It's fascinating to watch, and makes the idea of inexpensive space access even more exciting. Sadly, the NASA home page that contains this presentation is kind of boring, and doesn't give any easy way to find this cool series of images and movies.

Need a Lift?

Looks like a new article on space elevator technology has been published at IEEE Spectrum. Pretty exciting stuff. It just seems that in this world of billions of dollars being spent on wars and bad stuff that we should be able to cough up a measly billion a year or so for the next ten or fifteen years, and have something to show for it.

Flash from the past

So, I was looking at HackingNetflix, and there was a link to "Statler & Waldorf -- From the Balcony." A series of movie reviews & previews done by Statler & Waldorf, the two old guys from The Muppet Show who sat up in the balcony and heckled the rest of the Muppets. There were a few bits in the three segments I watched that were chuckle-out-loud moments.

Fished in.

So, I have to admit to being fished in by the FullTiltPoker.com sponsored tournament that was on some random cable channel the other night. I didn't get to see Phil Gordon bust out, but I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that they were playing it out live, and showing every hand instead of just the dramatic highlights.

The fumbling of the button back and forth when it got to heads-up was so genuine it was almost endearing. I experienced that frisson of seeing something honest and real. More than once a furtive smile on the two players' faces when coming back from a commercial break made me feel their feelings of just wanting to get the thing played out.

Official Trip Around The Moon Lottery

According to The Guardian the Russian federal space authorities are offering a trip around the moon for $100MM. I've decided that I'm going to start a lottery to try and fund just such a trip for one lucky winner.

Send me a paypal payment for $10.01US to my email address, and I'll toss your name in the drum. If I don't get to 10 million entries by July 31, 2006, or if Roskosmos cancels the trip, or if they change the price significantly, then I'll send you your money back. No interest or anything, just a refund of your $10. I'll keep the penny for the time and effort of organizing the lottery.

You know, thinking about it, I'll even promise to forward any ticket-equivalents on to a larger lottery, if one comes up. I'm just an aggregating agent, in one way or another.

Mountains, Washing Machines and Winged Punkettes

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" and was mightily entertained and provoked into thought. I was thinking about writing a review for Slashdot, but instead came across this review that said everything I could want to say about the novel. I highly recommend getting a copy and reading it, if not for the sci-fi/fantasy elements for the pure literary skill displayed. After all, you can get it for free.

Hello? The Eighties are Calling, They Want Their Lightcycles Back

As if I didn't have other better things to do with my time, I unfortunately found a really good racing game. It's free, it's pretty well done, and it's based on the lightcycle sequence from the 1982 movie Tron. You can find the relevant scoop and links to the downloads on SourceForge under Armagetron.

Nicely done guys. Good UI. Nice graphics.

Interactive Fiction: Short Circuit Edition

So, I found out about Facade, a new interactive fiction program. There's a blog about it. It provides an interactive environment where you play a dinner guest at a couple's apartment. They have issues. One of the kind of neat things is that it keeps a script of your session. I believe I've found the shortest possible one:

------------------------------------------------------
FACADE STAGEPLAY
Thu Jul 07 09 52 10 2005

(ROB quietly approaches the front door.)

GRACE
Trip, when are you going to get rid of this?

TRIP
What, Grace... this?

GRACE
Yes, you know how I feel about it --

TRIP
I know I know I'll do it right now, alright?!

GRACE
You know I've had to ask you about this several --

TRIP
Get off my back!  I'll get rid of it in just a minute!

GRACE
Fine, Trip... fine...

(Trip opens the front door.)

TRIP
Rob!!

TRIP
Hey!  I thought I heard someone out here! God 
it's been so long since we've seen you!    How
are you doing, man?

ROB
Are you two having a fight?

(Trip closes the front door.)

(ROB knocks on the front door.)

(ROB knocks on the front door.)

(ROB knocks on the front door.)

------------------------------------------------------

Not a lot of drama there. Still, a very interesting experience. I walked through it a few times, and while non-sequitors abound, I was actually somewhat emotionally moved when the couple reconciled. There's a bittorrent for the download (800Mb).

Ahhh. A truly horrendous pun.

I apologize for the following pun unleashed on Slashdot this afternoon. My comment is the reply.

Let Freedom Ring

I found (through Slashdot) a story about someone wanting to give SC Justice Souter a taste of his own medicine. I think it's brilliant. "Lost Liberty Hotel" along with the "Just Desserts Cafe." Now that the Fifth Amendment isn't everything it used to be, it seems appropriate to apply its new nature to the property of one of the architects of its decline.

The Pledge of Allegiance

I was listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, and the guest was Richard J. Ellis discussing his recent book about the Pledge of Allegiance, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance. He had several interesting points, including the fact that the original pledge was:

• I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

No God. In 1954, Congress after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, added the words, 'under God,' to the Pledge. No "United States of America". Ellis posits that this change in the early 1920's was a reaction to the flood of immigrants that weren't WASPs. These immigrants might be thinking about the flag of Croatia when saying "my flag" instead of the US flag.

He also wonders at the fervent adoption and defense of a practice that institutionalizes state worship for the people of the most individualist country in the world. I wonder about this as well. How can we foster a sense of freedom and responsibility for one's own actions when every day children are pledging themselves to unquestionably "follow the leader." These are leaders that have proven themselves time and again to be more concerned with re-election and the protection of business than with the true needs of the American populous.

So, I propose a new pledge:

• I pledge allegiance to the constitution, and to the principles contained within: one people for the common good, with liberty and justice for all.

New Word Spotted

So, on Slashdot today, I posted a comment declaring the coinage of a new word. 'Wob'. It is used to describe any web-based mob or mob behavior on the web. The Slashdot effect would be a good example of wob behavior.

Spread the love people.

Updated 2005-06-21 13:42 -- Hey! Lookit that! I suggest it and somebody else follows up. I must be a manager or something.

The Future of the Future

Wandering around Slashdot I saw a link to the RepRap project.Essentially a project with the goal of creating a machine that can create copies of itself and can also create other things. The fundamental idea being that if anybody has one of these machines, they could give away a copy of the machine to a friend if the friend gives them the materials. Sort of open source for atoms instead bits and software.

There's a lot to think about if you posit the ability for anybody anywhere on the globe to be able to make anything. For starters, the gating economic factor becomes energy, if you assume that materials are all commodities and are more or less available for free.

I just found out about a really great game.

Read about it.

Otherwise, not much else new. Although I did find out that I have one person who is interested in me writing stuff here. So be it.

Long time in coming

Well, rats. Seems like it's been a very long time again since I've posted. Almost a month. It's not that there's not a lot going on. Just not a lot of time to say anything about it. At least the search engine spiders keep visiting.

Brilliant explanation of regular expressions

This probably means nothing to you unless you have a certain degree of dealing with computer software as a part of your daily life. I found this page about regular expressions very lucid. I thought I would share.

Back

So, let's start off with the obligatory comment about how long it's been since I wrote anything. Now, with that out of the way, I can relate a bit of what's been going on for the last week-plus. Hm. Seems that time went by, but not a lot was accomplished. At least not by me. Oh, that's right! It's springtime! It's really strange how the nights can seem so long when you wake up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning, and you lay there as still as you can, obsessing about all the things you didn't get done during yesterday and how much more there is to do today. You lay still and don't get up because you don't want to wake up your spouse. You feel tired all day, then lay awake at bedtime. You stare at the keyboard and screen, willing your fingers to press some combination of useful keys instead of just reloading the Slashdot home-page for the thirty-eighth time that hour. You go to meetings and click on the 'remind me later' button on the reminder pop-up windows. Seems like I have one that's now fourteen days overdue. I think that's a personal best (worst?) for active inactivity. I actually knocked off a couple of committments today that have been dragging behind me for at least a week. Of course I totally failed to get one moderately critial test deployed out to production, and I haven't even pretended to do work on getting the next revision of bug tracking deployed. That one's actually been slipping since January. At least the fog is lifting now. I think I'm through the worst of it. Let's see where I am this time tomorrow.

And I Thought I Was Being Clever

So, I thought that I'd come up with a clever turn of phrase this morning in the shower. I was contemplating fairness, equality, liberty and the rights of citizens in the U.S.A., and I was thinking about bosses and workers, and the different jobs that we all do well, and the different abilities that we all bring to those jobs. My mind lit upon the phrase "all men are created equal." I got to thinking that we aren't. If we were, there would be no need for laws preventing discrimination, since there'd be nothing to discriminate against. Different people are good at different things, most importantly, different people have differing levels of ability in treating others with respect and in doing no evil.

That led me to what I thought was original (and I only wound up re-proving Ecclesiastes):

All men are created evil.

Perhaps it's pessimistic, but we are all born of a baser nature. As babies, we're fairly innocuous, but that's only because we don't have a lot of control over our actions at first. Just think about the last two-year-old you met. Terrible twos, indeed. The child discovers the freedom to do what it will, and so it does exactly that, heedless of the consequences to itself or others. Only through learning restraint and consideration and that actions have consequences do we have any hope of that little monkey growing up into an actual human being.