Barkerburgh

I didn’t even know this guy and I just got this email!

So who needs a new house? Whose kids need to go to university abroad? Who needs exotic surgery in foreign climes?

(Italics mine.)

“MANAGING PARTNER
GRAPEVINE & ASSOCIATES LAW FIRM
LONDON - UK.
NOTIFICATION OF BEQUEST

Hello,
On behalf of the Trustees and Executor of the estate of Late Engr.Huish Shearmur;I again try to notify you as my first letter was returned undelivered yet i tried still to reach you again by this same email address stated on the WILL.He left the sum of Seven Million One Hundred Thousand Dollars(USD$7,100.000.00 ) to you in the codicil and last testament of his WILL.
Late Engr. Huish Shearmur died on the 13th day of march, 2006 at the age of 80 years, and his WILL is now ready for execution.Please endeavor to get back to me as soon as possible at grapevinelawfirm@hotmail.co.uk to enable me conclude my job and give you more detailed information about his WILL.

yours in Service,

BARRISTER ANDREW MARTIN ESQ”

The lineup starts now.

I heard a young man recite this on CNN, during an item on the North Carolina fire that killed several members of the Delta Delta Delta sorority and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity from the University of South Carolina. He was speaking about his late fraternity brothers.

It’s a little dated - and even sexist, in the sense that it could - and should - apply to women too, in any age, but I like the feel and the flavour of it.

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The True Gentleman
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.

—John Walter Wayland (Virginia Omicron Chapter 1899)

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References
Delta House
Robot House

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Edited on October 30 to correct location of fire and students’ school.

Wow, it sure is ugly. What a mess.

It’s more than a little appalling that there’s artistic types all over the city patting each other on the ass and telling themselves the ROMperor’s new clothes are haute cuisine.

Last night was hot TV at my place.

First off was the one hour season premiere of Family Guy, which was an abso-totally-lutely hilarious take-off on the original Star Wars - no, Nerdapalooza, not Episode 1; the original movie, later subtitled ‘A New Hope’ to fit into Lucas’s diabolical - ahem - plot.

Stewie as Darth Vader, Peter as Han Solo! Chris as Luke, rescuing his mom, as Princess Leia, from the cell on Death Star - his mom! Get it? Get it? At one point,when the laughs lulled out for a minute, I felt sad. Then the laughs started again, and kept coming.

Good for the soul.

Then at midnight was Discovery’s repeat of Episode 1 of ‘Race to Mars’ (premiered earlier that evening). As I’m sure many of you know, I am of the opinion that we (as a species, but me personally especially) should have been living on Mars by now. Instead, NASA has concentrated on growing Space Tomatoes on the shuttle and trying to see if ants can be trained to manipulate small screws in zero gravity. Bollocks.

So when the fictional team made orbit successfully around Mars after some Earthside supplier/contractor-caused technical glitches, I nearly cried. ‘God speed, John Glenn’s spiritual descendants!’ I thought. Okay, I didn’t, but I’m thinking it now. Episode 2 is next Sunday.

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In Non-TV-TMSL news, I’m discovering more and more cool stuff to do with MediaWiki. The latest trip is that, using a very simple block of code, you can create a list that is dynamically sortable by the viewer, or just by default. I had been inputting and/or rearranging Glossary/Encyclopaedia/Dictionary entries in alphabetical order just to keep them easily browsable later, but now I don’t even have to do that.

Usually, of course, with these sorts of things, the highly nerdal documentation sucks syphilitic donkey ass - it’s unclear to start with (often overly technical - like the cartoons in <i>Scientific American</i> - or obscure, like the cartoons in the <i>New York Review of Books</i>) and if you do exactly what it says in the example - <i>exactly</i> - it doesn’t work. Then it takes five hours of experimentation to get it to work. And if you forgot to document your own progress in figuring it out, then you do it all again next time. “I” have to do it all again next time.However, with the sorting of lists (and tables!) it was fairly clear and straightforward. My Sandbox test worked almost immediately and then I applied it to a ‘real’ page - viola!

Better and better!

“Oh, the wonderful things I shall know on the morning of the day of my death!”

Ever since the Future began in 2001 (January 1st, not September 11th, <i>pace</i> thousands), Reality has been catching up with Science Fiction, IMHO. But Reality’s also been fine-tuning Science Fiction as it goes along.

Face it, slidewalks, city-sized computers to <font title=”mmm, pi crunching…”>crunch pi</font>, or transfer booths might be cool plot devices, but Reality doesn’t have a plot (<i>pace</i> thousands of crazy-ass conspiracy theorists), the natural resources or the laws of physics (that we’re aware of so far…).

D’y'ever read David Brin’s ‘Earth‘? Published in 1985, it took place 50 years into that future, 2035. The title simply means that story action takes place everywhere in, on, and around Earth from the core to orbit. In terms of what he ‘predicted’ for the evolution of a shared global data network (and yes, I know, SF writers don’t predict; they’re storytellers first and foremost), almost everything he imagined (think of this kind of imagining as a type of private, subjective, storytelling-focussed prediction, spare and stripped down) is available now (1985+22) to some lesser or greater degree of sophistication, and then some.

‘So Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Dave. Where ya headed?’

The Wiki. Brin didn’t call it that, but it’s here already; Wikipedia is probably the most well known example.

For my many soon-to-be-famous SF&F stories, I need to do background development, and occasionally considerable research and development. A while back I had downloaded an interesting looking wiki setup from SourceForge, called Wikka, free and open. I figured it would complement FreeMind, an excellent, simple and easy to learn Java-based (and thus cross-platform) mindmapping application, (like a much easier to learn and use Visio; flowcharting and the like) again from SourceForge. Wikka was okay, but a little like 1985 email, if anyone remembers those anymore. Very Flintstones. MS Word-style GUI functionality is mostly missing for formatting and editing - most commands are things like two apostrophes before and after a text string to italicize it, or two equals signs before and after to bold it. To be fair, wikis are web-based and some Word type highlight-and-click functionality is present, but it’s rudimentary, and sometimes even warmly funny for its earnestness, like a nerd doing a box-step at the prom.

Then, God bless me, I found Mediawiki. It’s the wiki engine that Wikipedia uses, free to download and install. (I’m running an Apache/MySQL/PHP server and it slots right in.) Its back end is more sophisticated than Wikka (and one or two others that I tried) but it’s got a GUI (still a bit too fancy a term for what it is, but hey, we’re living in the Future, not the Future Perfect), and it takes no time to learn.

The ability to order and categorize information, research, ideas, and connections - all interlinked - is built in (that’s one big idea of a wiki, after all) and I can construct glossaries, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, with tables, images, and lists of all types to help me keep my ideas straight. Granted, one other big idea of a wiki is collaboration, but I like to think of this as a collaboration with myself over time.

MS Word is still the main tool to actually compose the oeuvres, but my beloved Mediawiki helps keep all my ideas straight.

What’s next? Well, I’ve always (insofar as a sentient adult creature with a limited lifespan can use the word) liked the idea of Geordi Laforge’s e-worktable in the engine room on the Enterprise, an IPhone-like touch-screen tabletop for whatever you need to do. Well, just this morning I saw on TV that Microsoft is introducing a prototype Surface Touch-Table, which they’re showing off at a downtown hotel today.

And next after that? The Lost In Space robot, a flying car, the space elevator and immortality.

C’mon, Future!!

So I’m watching a White House press conference on CNN in which President Bush plans to announce his veto of the recent bill passed by Congress to fund stem cell research.

He outlines his moral and ethical reasons for his veto and then presents a victim of spina bifida who had her damaged bladder replaced by one grown from adult stem cells in the lab. (I have not independently verified this with my sources.)

Moments later, he refers to her condition (which he had to have been briefed on) as - and I kid you not - spina biffid-eye-da. Spina bifidida.

Why don’t his handlers drill him?

A few weeks ago when he was in Russia, he referred to a conversation he’d had with Putin and quoted himself: “Vladimir - I call him Vladimir…” which name he pronounced to rhyme approximately with polymer, as opposed to the more proper Anglophone pronunciation which should rhyme approximately with polymeer.

Can’t wait for tonight’s ‘Daily Show.’

On Tuesday I went over to Peter and Leslie’s to do a little Simon-minding, then stay for dinner and a movie. Well, Simon’s always fun and the movie was Guillermo del Toro’s ‘The Devil’s Backbone‘ (or more properly, because I can pronounce it like a pro,, ‘El Espinazo del diablo‘. As far as moody ghost stories go, it’s right up there with 1963’s ‘The Haunting‘ and one of my favourites, 1980’s ‘The Changeling‘.

I totally have to see ‘Pan’s Labyrinth‘ (’El Laberinto del fauno‘) now. Who’s got it?

Then I was hanging out on Langley with PL&J. You might already know they have a Wii, which Jon’s highly cool grandfather got for them. If you haven’t seen or played it in person, holy guacamole, should you ever get PL&J to invite you over, and get Laura to make paella, which she didn’t for me this time (but she did last time accidentally), but it’s Spanish (Spanish Spanish ‘Castellano’; you pronounce two ells like they were ‘ly’: trust me) and so is Guillermo del Toro. (’ly’ again.)

I’ve got my own Mii (my Wii avatar) , which they created for me, and apparently, if you allow them to, they’ll wander across the web into other people’s Wii games! Is that not cool? Of course it is! And you can load your Miis (your Yoos?) onto the controller and take them to other Wii’s houses and upload them to those Wiis! Of course that’s cool!

So anyway, see ‘The Devil’s Backbone‘, get a Wii and let me know if you have ‘Pan’s Labyrinth‘.

30 Grams Per Week

The Toronto Star has been publishing their weekly TV magazine for decades; Star Week. Up until recently the daily TV listings were presented in narrow columns, maybe five or six to a page. New TV series often had a brief synopsis of the episode’s highlights or the plot, usually with an ‘N’ in brackets to indicate a new episode. Movies usually had a one or two person cast list, the production year, and maybe the genre. There was usually useful information along with the bare listings. It was helpful.

Suddenly they changed to a tabular format with no room for descriptions or synopses. I am not a married-to-the-past traditionalist in any way (ask anybody) and I usually take things like this on a case by case basis. This time, the old way was better.

25 Grams Per Week

A week or two after they made the change they had the gall to tell us in a short article on an inside page of the Saturday Star that people had expressed the opinion that they preferred the tabular format. (Well, nobody asked me. Harumph.) As before they have a section for daytime listing that vary only slightly from day to day, but now they only have a single page for weekday primetime, with almost no detail, then at the back, late night weekdays. Often all we know about a movie in a particular timeslot is that it is a movie, because it just says ‘Movie’, especially in the late night listings. After a few weeks - responding to kudos, I’m sure - they added a sort-of highlights box with synopses of that night’s popular shows’ episodes, maybe Gray’s Anatomy, House or Heros, but forget the others. It’s better now though.

No, it’s cheaper. In more ways than one. The new format reminds me of nothing other than those free regional ad-driven TV magazines you used to find all over the place that had no room for details because of all the ads. This isn’t quite that bad, but you can see the resemblance. It isn’t better; it’s a rip-off, a cop-out and a fuck-up. It’s an increase in the chocolate ration.

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Why the title of this post? It’s a reference to Orwell’s 1984, and Winston Smith’s task of trying to rewrite history by spinning the fact that the chocolate ration went up from 30 grams per week in 1983 to 25 grams per week in 1984.

‘Nuff said?

Okay, so I have this totally legal, ethical and moral copy of Microsoft Encarta 2001. It has a reasonably good encyclopaedia, a reasonably good dictionary (non-etymological, but that’s okay since I know where all words come from anyway), and a reasonably good atlas.

I like the package because the encyclopaedia helps me cheat at Final Jeopardy (as if I really needed to) and when I’m watching some ‘true crime’ show, I can use the atlas to look up the little town in Kansas where the atrocious crime occured.

Here’s the thing of it. After I got my new (old) computer, I did what I did before which was to create image files of the four critical CDs that came with the Encarta package and mount them as virtual SCSI drives using one of a couple of packages I have that can do that. There were issues with the encyclopaedia but I resolved them. However, the atlas issues (the image file would mount but the system kept telling me to insert the correct CD) seemed insoluble.

Turns out that when I installed the atlas the first time, the drive letter for the virtual drive was added to the atlas’ registry entry and it wouldn’t recognize the new one when I remounted it with a new (automatically assigned) drive letter.

After a moment of inspiration, I started searching the registry for the atlas entry, saw the old drive letter, changed it to the new one, and, as you’ve probably guessed by now, it worked. And it gives me something to look out for in similar situations in the future, if there is one.

That’s why I don’t like Macs. No similar challenges. Plus they scare me.

Examples of True Mac Experiences:

“I’m not questioning your word, Dave, but it’s just not possible. I’m not capable of being wrong.”

“Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

There ya go.

Many will not miss him.