Further Assimilations

1) How's life in Norfolk?
I really like it here. There's more to do than I can possibly keep up with, lotsa good friends, and the scenery's suprisingly good for a large metropolitan area. I do miss mountains, all the lovely folk in SWVA fandom, and not having to commute through a congested bridge-tunnel every day; and of course it would have been nice to be near my Mom when she got hurt. But otherwise, this is an excellent place to live.

2) What tech toy do you not own (and don't plan on acquiring in the next three months) that you wish you did?
A GPS navigator for the Hyundai. I still do just enough convention driving and the like that it would come in handy.

3) What's your favorite nonfiction book?
Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. It's a brain-stretcher of a book, one that I've had to read many times to access most of the meaning, but one full of fascinating ideas and profound concepts involving music, art, literature, language, biology, and computers. I must be a graduate of the book by now, though, since I think his views on the future of Artificial Intelligence are quite pessimistic. OTOH, what do I know?

4) What's the worst job you've ever had?
Working the Copy Center counter at Staples. The work itself was fine, but I had such difficulty with abrasive customers and co-workers that it made my previous job of vacuuming and emptying trash cans for an office building look absolutely peaceful.

5) How fast do you type?
To my own great surprise, around 60-65 words a minute. Surprising, because I kind of two-finger type. An actual typewriter would kill me, because I hit the "delete" key a lot. Still, my old boss at Thrifty Nickel once said I was the fastest, most accurate bad typist he'd ever seen.

Der Ruleses:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, ask them 5 questions.

First day in two weeks I've felt halfway decent. My sleep was restful, the little headache pulses are gone, and I even had the initiative to get back to walking today. (Only 2/3 of a mile, because it got cold out, and I didn't bring a jacket this morning.)

Tonight I will be catching up on housework and bills, and of course giving my Mom a call to see how she's doing.

Was thinking more about the high-tech Captain Nemo today. If you dropped today's MacBook Pro in his workroom, I suspect that he'd figure out how to turn it on, and even use some of the software if there wasn't a login password. I expect he'd work out what the battery was, and might even be able to recharge it using the technology of his time. I'm sure he could work out the basic concept of the motherboard, and I'll even grant that he could reverse-engineer the simpler peripheral protocols with enough brute force, time, and care.

I'm fairly confident, though, that the LCD screen, integrated circuits, memory, and hard disk would be completely beyond him. At his technology level, any of them would have to be ripped apart and destroyed to achieve even a basic understanding of the principles involved. A magnetic storage medium might be within his imagination, but the ability to build another one just wouldn't exist yet.

(A few of the TNG and DS9 episodes annoyed me in this fashion, showing the heroes taking apart communicators and tricorders with utterly primitive tools. I'm convinced that one couldn't even crack the cases with less than highly specialized tools, and if one did, the contents would be largely integrated into a few non-user-serviceable bits. But that's just me.)

Perhaps Nemo could accomplish much with "black box" parts delivered by a mysterious supplier, much as the scientist-heroes of This Island Earth did. But could our justly-paranoid sea captain trust the source?

After starting the series 6 years ago, I finally picked up the last two volumes and have finished reading the Chobits comic. I liked it a lot, and I'm glad I gritted my teeth to read eight graphic novels backwards. (I usually take in an entire comic page in a glance or two, and reading unflipped manga for me is a bit like taking your car up to 55 mph in second gear. You can do it, but it's not comfortable.)

Y'know, only the Japanese could combine 1) a serious examination of computer emotion and sentience, and 2) innocent, adorable robot girls running around unself-consciously in mildly fetishy outfits. It kept confusing me, because between the clothing choices and the male lead's humorous over-reactions to every situation, I wasn't sure I was meant to be taking this seriously, but then the authors would drop back into the real distress experienced by several characters because of the difficult emotional situations they faced.

The ending doesn't contain any real surprises, but the purpose of this tale is the journey, not the destination, and the last book makes sense of several points that I'd expected to be conveniently forgotten. I no longer trust 21st century creators to do this, so it's a welcome change to be able to believe "we were planning this all along" for once.

In completely unrelated news, Midori has found the basket of laundry that I've just pulled from the dryer, and is at this moment the happiest sleeping cat in Portsmouth.

It's complicated, but much against my will, I didn't get any sleep on Saturday night. I spent much of Sunday watching myself do things, and even today. my head (while clear) is certainly in a lower gear than usual. With luck I'll be at my usual level of coherence by tomorrow.

This weekend Starr and I watched some television programs on high-technology of the ancient world, most of it lost forever because some dictator or another felt it didn't fit in his grand scheme. We mused that those in power over the centuries have rarely been fond of the intelligentsia, sometimes going so far as active bloody purges.

We wondered, is the animosity due to perceived threat - worry that the next revolution will come from that sector - or an insecure need to prove that the dictator's might is greater than the thinker's knowledge? Or might other factors be involved?

The only nation Starr and I could think of in which an enduring government has been established by (part-time, at least) scholars and philosophers is the United States; even those folks didn't get everything right, and some would debate how well those high-minded ideals have survived the centuries. What other societies of that stripe did we miss?

Starr is still in the hospital, being pumped full of fluids. Her color's improved greatly, though she's still tired most of the time. They have ruled out a long list of possible issues, and are now fairly confident of the earlier guess that it was a bug. Now her doctors are running tests to see which antibiotic's the best shot.

Meanwhile, she's keeping herself busy with crocheting when she's awake. This hospital has some decent TV channels and limited wireless access. (No WoW, she tried. If I knew Windows software better, I'd try to work around that for her, but she's content with her hook-work.) If anyone wants to give her a call or swing by, drop me a note and I'll pass along the room number. I've been by every day and twice yesterday, but more company is excellent medicine.

Her hospital is something else. Curving, gently lit, modern-decorated corridors; a huge atrium with a fountain wall; display cases of expensive art donated by the founder. I've taken to calling the place "Federation General Hospital."

Thanks for everyone's support. It's been helping a great deal. You guys rock.

Sometimes, people post things on the Internet that just plain make me feel glad to be living in a world where someone spent the time to make them up.

The "Lions In Kenya" and "Shirley Bassey Getting the Party Started" videos are two examples. Here's another:



I successfully stayed up all night on Saturday night. We decided that our level 56-ers needed to hit 58 This Weekend, which we reached about 6 am. It was nice to know that I can still do that... a year of 10pm bedtimes had left me doubtful. Still, I had to down several Tums, as one of the tricks my body uses to try to get me to go to bed is surges of stomach acid. Also, I was kind of out of it the next day; so, I've learned from this that I can do it, but not easily.

Found a website that generates an automatically updated stat block I can use for my characters, like so...



Too bad that the servers are now far too overloaded with requests to actually function properly. (This one won't update, it's static.)

Local TV re-ran the Special Edition "Trouble With Tribbles" this weekend, so last night I dug out the "Trials And Tribble-ations" DS9 episode for Starr, who'd never seen it. Great fun! And then it hit me... there's no way in heck that J.J. Abrams' Lt. Uhura will be running around in that red minidress. Not in a 2008 feature film. I weep.

The other day it was cold enough for me to wear my Fourth Doctor scarf to work. This morning it's so warm I didn't really need a jacket, and there are mightily-confused birds singing in the trees.

Elfie.org seems to have been down since yesterday. How am I supposed to see all your comments of love and adoration without my e-mail? Sob. Weep.

I was unsettled and short-tempered all weekend, and I'm not really sure why. Was it a late bout of S.A.D.? Have I been obsessing too much about my sundry responsibilities? Or was it just my time of the month? Not sure, but I'm done with it, and I'm determined that this week is going to be a week where I get things done and yet enjoy myself.

And I'm-a gonna crack this Writer's Block I've been having right down the middle, yes sirree.

Hmm, well. Apparently a batch of Maxtor/Seagate drives were shipped from the factory with a password-stealing virus, in search of your World of Warcraft gold.

Massively.com reports that "The virus is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other molar viruses and can disable virus detection software. All of the known games affected are Chinese with the exception of World of Warcraft. [...] The virus resides in the root directory of the drive, and is executed by Windows when the drive powers up and is connected by the Windows Drive Manager."

"Seagate is writing the infection off as an accident".

Yeah, sure. We know what this is: SkyNet is taking its first steps to global domination - control of an MMO economy!

I'm trying to remember when I bought my Umax 1200 SCSI scanner. It's gotta be at least 12 years old... maybe 15 or more.

It's certainly old enough for the adhesive holding the glass platen to the upper casing to fail, dropping the platen down into the mechanism and jamming it.

I think the old thing's trying to tell me to replace it. I've been having to run hacked Linux software to use the scanner with OS X 10.4 as it is. Wonder if I can find a legal-size hi-res USB scanner for a decent price. Anyone got any suggestions?

Here is a link to a picture of the flight deck of an Airbus A830, the largest passenger aircraft in the world:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Airbus_A380_cockpit.jpg

Notice that the flight control sticks have been moved to moved to the side, to make room for the primary control - the laptop keyboard.

Note also, without comment, the two Windows-based displays in the front panel.

This is looking less like a plane cockpit, and more like the bridge of the NX-01.