Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

This is a blatant plug, suck it up and deal.
One of the conventions I work with, Ubercon, just opened pre-reg for Ubercon V, March 11-13th, 2005 in the Meadowlands, NJ. These guys run a great convention. If you’re into tabletop, lan, larp, or console gaming, cmon in!

This weekend I’m travelling to Washington, DC, to attend SMOFcon 22, a sort of meta-convention for people who run SF conventions. I’m staying at the Wyndham Washington DC through Monday. This is one of those inside-out hotels – no real windows on the outside, all the rooms look in on a 12 story high atrium. The base of this structure is a bizarre multi-level terraced arrangement. In that picture, I’m currently sitting right next to the big clock on that terrace. Quite surreal.
And, what’s with the world now? The hotel rooms are nice… not cavernous, but the ever-present desk in the room… comes with a Aeron chair. I’ve always found the hotel room chairs totally unuseable for real work, but ya know, having a really nice office chair like that makes me consider never leaving my room.
I did arrange to make my way from Boston to DC on Amtrak’s Metroliner service (as opposed to the Acela, which was noticeably more expensive). Even still, the comfort level of a coach Amtrak seat far outshines even business class on most airlines. And given my frame (6’6, 250lbs), I’ll take the extra time required for the train.
On that topic, it’s not hard to make a point that train travel is really not far behind airline travel. For me, it was 45 minutes to the station, only 10 minutes to checkin and board, 7.5 hours to DC in a comfy seat (with 120v power for the laptop!), then 1/2 hour through Union Station + the Metro to the hotel.
If I were to take a plane, it would be an hour to the airport, an hour checkin / security, 2 hours to DC, 1/2 hour out of the airport, 1.5 hours various trains to the hotel.
9 hours in comfort for the train vs 6 hours running and sitting in painful seating. On the train, it’s basically a work day, just in a different location. I was able to get an enormous amount done on my laptop during the trip, thanks to good music, headphones, and a power outlet. I can get up and mosey around, walk to the snack bar car and eat in there, stand in the isles / open spaces and stretch – even get out and walk around on the platform in NYC if I want (15-20 minute delay there). Heck I can even use my cellphone anytime. For the airline trip, of that transit time, perhaps an hour of and a half of it can be used for real work, and no phone during that time.
Besides. Trains are cool.

Time again for a music moment. Radio Paradise again hits my buttons dead on with playing Nickel Creeks “Smoothie Song“. If you have any interest in modern ‘folk’ instrumentals, with powerful fiddle, mandolin and guitar, run, dont’ walk, run and get this album

Today I learned:

1) You -can- get used kids skis for a decent price. Play It Again, Sam, a chain of stores around here, had stacks of used kids skis. I got 120cm shaped skis with bindings, size 2 ski boots, and ski poles for a mere $90. Zach and I are ready for the ski season! It’s going to be interesting seeing how him on skis and me on my snowboard will mix it up. Maybe I’ll go back there and look for a used set of skis. My old 195’s are really too small for me now.

2) 256mb ‘Cruzer’ flash pen drives can in fact survive being run through the washing machine. I emptied my laundry today to find said drive sitting in the bottom of the washing machine. I use my pen drive for backing up my databases, mail files, and other important things, so I was a little concerned. After giving it a few hours to dry out, lo and behold, docked it into my laptop, and :

root@jboat:/mnt# df -k .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1               250496    160064     90432  64% /mnt

Hooray!

So I don’t really watch much network television, but I have to admit I’m a Law and Order junkie. All the spinoffs too. Between various cable channels, it’s a 50/50 chance that at any given hour, there’s a L&O episode on. Nowadays, you can pretty much run from 9pm til midnight just hopping from one show to another.
Last night there was a new L&O: SVU episode on NBC. Rosa and I decided to sit down and watch it – a new episode? Sure, why not! We were feeling pretty low key and it seemed like a nice thing to do.
The episode was quite good, really leaving us guessing right up until the last 5 minutes. No clear bad guy, no deliberate bias, some very interesting interplay in the characters – a good episode.
L&O is somewhat formulaic. At the end of the trial, the verdict is read, and there’s usually some pithy commentary afterwards by the trial lawyers, or something dramatic happens (fellow commits suicide, gets shot in the courthouse by an angry family member, whatever) – there’s about a 3 minute window there.
Last night, NBC -CUT OFF- the end of the show. “We the jury find the defendendent…” and stopped it! They flashed up a message “Do you think the professor is guilty or innocent? Go to NBC.com to find out!”
We were aghast! It totally destroyed the mood / interest of the show, and we were outraged that a story we were immersed in was now held hostage by a marketing ploy.
There was no completion, no ending to the story, they went on to the next show. Now, leave aside the fact that despite our digerati lifestyle, a huge percentage of the populatioin does NOT have net access, let alone ubiquitous net access. They have to dialup, or turn on their computer, or whatever.
Beyond this, the NBC.com website was totally swamped and unavailable. I gave up after a few tries, and wandered off grumbling. Today I hit the site, and had to dig a while to even get a REFERENCE to last nights show, and saw only a poll. “Do you think the professor was innocent or guilty?” – “Innocent” “Guilty” “Need more evidence.” – I basically picked one at random, it showed me the current results (most folks appear to think innocent, but who the hell knows), and that’s it. No explanation, no detail one way or the other. End of story.
What the hell is that all about? Is this like schroedingers courtroom? He may be guilty, he may not be, it depends?
How will this possibly play in syndication, which is where the show actually makes its money… will they fill in the missing dialog and show then?
I know that Rosa is planning on writing a letter to NBC about it, she was as incensed as I was.
Sheesh.

I’ve been avoiding going to the movies lately. What used to be an enjoyable experience has continued its slide into blatant commercialism and customer gouging. Skyrocketing ticket prices, indifferent service, and obscene concession prices make consumer action a necessity.
In defense of that age-old institution of the American movie experience, I bring you Planet Geek’s Guide to Modern Movie Attendance.

Continue reading “Planet Geek’s Guide to Modern Movie Attendance.” →

Many many years ago when I was playing with AutoCAD I made an image that had an remarkably large level of zooms in it. You could zoom in on the picture and find even more pictures, then zoom in on that and there were more, an unending series of images that were small only relative to where they were referenced from.
Someone has to put together the ZoomQuilt, a Flash animation that lends far more artistry to this comment than I ever could…
Check it out…
(Thanks to Molly for the link.)

If you met these two people on the street, would you be able to tell them apart?
My sister did a great post about my dad on veterans day. As part of it, she dug up an old picture of him in his uniform (she says ‘Navy’, I thought he was in the coast guard on tender duty, but I could be wrong). I actually haven’t seen this picture before (or if I did, I forgot about it), and I was immediately struck with the “Hey! That’s me!”
A little Gimp cutting and pasting, and there you have it.
Yes, I think this confirms it. I’m proud to say that man is definately my father, and I’m his son.
By the way, the source of the right hand side of that picture is this picture from when I was about 20, circa 1983.

This was sent to us as a potential cohousing community property (since we’re looking for land for our cohousing group. I don’t think the location would work for us (it’s basically as far east in the US you can get without either hitting ocean or Canada :), but boy wouldn’t this be fun?
Check it out..

Off to an event down in Maryland for a couple days. Connectivity and posting will be sporadic… Ciao!

I’m totally putting the current election nightmare out of my mind and getting on with my life. We survived the last 4 years, we’ll survive the next 4.
I did however get some very good news in my mail this morning. Keith Knight, the artist behind the K Chronicles, is going to be in Boston! He’s doing a bunch of touring about, here’s the info that went out in his mailing:

*K CHRONICLES/(TH)INK SLIDESHOW TOUR
i’ll be swingin’ on through a few of the cities that run one or both of my strips. if you haven’t seen my slideshow, ya gots ta check it out. favorite strips… censorship stories…shocking, controversial stuff..here’s the info i’ve got so far:
*SALT LAKE CITY, UT 11/9/04 7:30pm @ Westminster College, 1840 South 1300 East- FREE, ALL AGES EVENT
*CAMBRIDGE, MA 11/20/04 2-4pm @ Million Year Picnic, 99 Mt. Auburn St. Harvard Square-FREE, ALL AGES EVENT
*NEW YORK CITY 11/21/04 8pm @ Jigsaw Gallery, 526 E. 11th St.(between A & B)- FREE, ALL AGES EVENT

I hope I’ll be able to make it, he’s a great cartoonist.
*UPDATE: Did you know that Keef has a blog? I didn’t! He writes some good stuff.

” Blogs mix news, gossip and opinion and are viewed with skepticism by many media watchers for their overt bias.”
– Reuters, via Yahoo! news. Thanks to Lisa for this link.

I voted today.
Massachusetts uses the optical scanning voting machines for folks casting their ballots. They have the advantage of leaving an undeniable paper trail (everyone has a sheet of paper), as well as instant registration and counting (they are scanned immediately and data is collected right there and then).
Can someone tell me why these are inferior to ‘touch screen voting machines’, which have no paper trail, and audit capability is completely out of the hands of the people running the vote for the state?
Everyone at a site running the optical scan machines can pick up the votes, count them, and say “We have xxx votes recorded, if you give me af ew, I can even tell you who.” I bet one in 10,000 volunteers at sites using touch screen machines could get any form of information from the touch screen voting machines.
I just don’t get it.

This is becoming somewhat of a pattern. After going away on business trips (in this case the trips lasted about 4 weeks), I tend to get sick when settling back into the house. Oddly, it didn’t happen during the gap between Gnomedex and Ubercon as I expected.
It did however happen this week. So now I’m walking around the house, zombie like, feeling like my head is stuffed with a wet pillow.
So, things’ll be a little slow until I return from the dead.