Barkerburgh

Laura invited me to join her on Thursday evening at the Princess of Wales Theatre to see “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part I”.

It was based on/cut down from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage version of Charles Dicken’s 1838-1839 serialized novel of the same name, minus the ‘Part I’. In 1980, the RSC produced a version that “lasted more than ten hours (counting intermissions and a dinner break - the actual playing time was approximately eight-and-a-half hours)”. This play, and Part II, which I will again be joining Laura to see, were condensed out of that first grand production. Both parts together are six hours, so we didn’t lose much.

In 1982, a miniseries of the production was produced and was later broadcast on America’s PBS. I remember it being on and being interested, but I didn’t watch it, and I don’t remember why. Maybe the length…

Laura, being a big fan, had lots of background on the original production and the original novel, and I enjoyed her sharing immensely.

Being unfamiliar with the story but for the very basics, I did some research on Wednesday about the novel and the stage presentation, which I had heard of, and was intrigued and impressed.

And just so I could catch up a little, I downloaded the Gutenberg text of the novel. I hope I can be prepared for Part II.

(Sometimes when I am really impressed or moved by a show like this, including a TV show or a cinematic movie, I tend to try and replay it in my mind, to think about the language or the imagery or the story, and maybe I have cool dreams. Well, I had cool dreams last night; I just can’t remember what they were - and I really wish I could.)

I was getting so sick of switching over to CNN during commercial breaks and hearing them dissecting every little aspect of every little primary and every little caucus and every little mouth-fart and every little tic and twitch and hiccup of the candidates, their staffs, the exit-polled, and the results, that I was hoping for different news, real news - an earthquake or a tsunami, maybe.

Well, Gott sei dank, I got a metaphorical one.

You’d think, I mean don’t you think you’d think, that if you were a Democratic politician in a high position, that you won partly by claiming the moral high ground during your earlier career and your campaign, that you’d know better than to schwanz a hooker on the public’s clock. Multiple times. I mean, vey iz mir.

Next thing it’ll be CBC and the Olympics. And the Olympics. And the Olympics. And no weeknight Coronation Street.

What a world.

For the first time since I saw it at the cinema when it was released here, I saw Serenity the other night. It was on TV, I forget which channel. Wow. It was even better than I remembered. And I usually hate seeing cinematic releases on commercial TV - that is to say, if I’ve seen them recently at the movies.

Anneli saw Serenity in London, England, when she was on sabbatical abroad. I liked what she said about it, and I paraphrase shamelessly from a bad memory, “It was like a condensed second season of Firefly”, to which my reaction was something like, and again paraphrasing shamelessly from a bad memory, “Hear, hear!”

Now she sends me a link to a story about a new Firefly novel written by Steven Brust. It is downloadable under a Creative Commons license. The Future is cool.

Of course, the Brust fanbase loves it, and the Browncoats do too, but some are calling if ‘fanfic’.  Which is good since members of that last group are not as irrationally psycho-loyal as, say, hardcore old guard fandroid trekkies. Yeah, I said ‘trekkies‘.

Notes on dog-sitting Photon while PL&J were in Florida

1> She would sit, silently pining, on the deck, staring at the back gate where they take Jon in and out in his wheelchair.

2> One night, she woke me up twice by dropping her hard toy down the stairs into the basement (where I was sleeping in the guest bed).

3> Twice more the same night she woke me up by jumping up on the bed and licking my face until I woke up.

4> Around 4:00 or 4:30am that same night, I found myself in the back yard in my jammies and Peter’s Crocs playing keep-away with Photon in the snow, wondering just how the heck she tricked me into doing it.

5> Dang all, she’s cute.

6> Cobalt, her same-litter sister lives somewhere near the park but, while I’ve seen her before, I didn’t see her that week.

7> She has a sister-friend relationship with another, unrelated, Mini Aussie named Ruckus, who lives on the same street. They’ll chase each other around and wrestle for twenty minutes or a half an hour at a time, pretty much ignoring all the other dogs. And me.

8> On two different nights I woke up when she was trying to get under the covers with me. When I was a kid my dog slept with me, often under the covers at the bottom of the bed, so no problem. The first night I woke up later to find her laying right beside me. The second night she ended up on top of the covers at the bottom of the bed.

9> She has a crazy relationship with a park dog named Knowledge (yes, Knowledge), a frisbee catcher. Photon runs after her and constantly barks (which she hardly ever does, really…) but Knowledge pretty much just ignores her, running and leaping to catch the frisbee.

10> I didn’t know P&L were teaching her to fetch. I’d never seen her do it either. For the first couple of days I saw no evidence she even cared to try it. Suddenly on New Year’s Day in the park she started bringing the frisbee to me, dropping it at my feet, sitting and staring at me expectantly. At first I didn’t get it, being untrained. Suddenly I realized what she was doing, treated her, tossed the frisbee again, and thereby began to run out of treats. I’m not sure that it was just treats she wanted because if I moved away from her without throwing the frisbee, she’d pick it up, bring it to my feet again and maybe yelp. After a day or two she had me trained. “Barker to Barker; <i>throw</i> it!”

11> The Homecoming. Laura was the first one in the front door when they finally got home very early Sunday morning, after a grueling day. Photon came to the door to see who it was, stopped, stared, recognized Laura and went delightfully, ecstatically, crazy, as only a happy dog can do. (Cats have no equivalent reaction.) A few minutes later, at the back door, Jon and Peter got the same treatment.

Afterwards, an afterword:

12> While falling asleep in my own bed at home, I have hypnogogic hallucinations of a dog jumping on the bed, including the jingling of the tags. (It used to be a cat jumping on the bed, and before that it was a door slamming, but I had a psychotic landlord at the time so the door slam might have been real.)

The divine punishment problem was with my client machine and it’s more or less fine now.

After I’d finished that religious observance, I began to have problems with my server, whereon reside the WAMP family of divine servants, Apache web-server, MySQL DBMS and the delightful sprite, PHP.

Well, WAMP started to fail intermittently.  It appeared to be associated with Google Desktop Search’s indexing operations so I disabled that.  It seemed to be okay for a while.  Then it happened again.

There appeared to be a connection with Windows’ own screensaver kicking in.  When that happened, the MySQL server would fail, but not consistently.  I disabled the screensaver and the frequency of the problem lessened.  (I was testing all this from the ritually restored client machine, in case there was a networking component to the failure.)

I thought, ‘Dear Gods, screw this’ and I reinstalled WAMP, being careful to back up my databases and websites.  (For simple laziness I have taken to installing a separate instance of Mediawiki for each project; it’s easier to plan and navigate the project, the harddisk footprint is small and they all use the same MySQL, so the processor overhead isn’t all that bad.)

The reinstall didn’t help and when I restored my databases, it saw the tables but said they didn’t exist if I tried to SQL them from the management interface.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, thinks I.  (It’s an ancient expression of dismay and concern among my people.)

I analyzed the Windows system logs, the MySQL error logs, the ini files.  I examined the database files as if they were simple text files to see if the data was there; I was terrified I’d lost it all!  Everything was where it should be, yet it wasn’t working.

Long story short, about 3:30 this morning I reinstalled WAMP again and everything worked as if there’d been no problem in the first place.  I have no idea what I did or didn’t do rightly or wrongly; it just started to work.

My people’s ancient gods at work again.

I’ve been waiting for this show since last fall.

As many of you know, I truly believe that Google will bring about the Singularity and activate Skynet. Seriously.

To be honest, I never saw the first movie for years after it was made, but when I finally did, I really liked it. The second one was almost as good, partly because of the twist, but the third one…

The premiere, two one hour episodes over two nights, wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, ie on par with the BSG miniseries, or practically any episode of Earl, Gas, or 30, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was very much afraid it was going to be.

Really though, how wrong can you go with evil robots from the future, a borderline psychotic mother, and hackin’, fightin’ Jesus-boy?

I was very happy with the casting of Summer Glau and Lena Headey, and not discomfited by the rest of the casting.

I’m looking forward to more fight scenes where robots from the future throw each other through walls, unless they happen all the time.

Every year during the winter solstice holiday season, I celebrate my people’s ancient Sacred and Revelatory Restoration of the Crashed Operating System.

This year, as an atheist, I was planning to forgo it as outmoded and irrelevant to this, our modern world of the future.

My people’s gods are angry and petulant, capricious and heedless.  I was forced to repeat the primal, days-long ritual.

Finally, on Friday I succeeded to my gods’ satisfaction.

Again I am blessed.  For a year.

Another truth about that photo of Riverdale Park.

The night of Wednesday, December 12, 2007, and into Thursday morning, I spent several hours playing Quake II, Warcraft III and Mechwarrior III, and a little Thief. I’d spent an hour or so working on NaNoWriMo 2006 and the TV was on in the background. Once or twice the William Shatner Warcraft commercial came on.

Part of the NaNoWriMo 2006 project involves non-imitative Star Trek replicator type technology which is related to holodeck technology, and I was writing a scene that involved its use. (NB: Star Trek didn’t invent it first. I’d mention Venus Equilateral, but…)

I’m mentioning these as likely influences because when I went to bed, I dreamt.

When I dream, man, do I dream. And I dream in colour.

(more…)

So I go to sign in at this government sponsored think-tank work-shop job-search internet cafe at Parliament and Wellesley.

There’s a bit of a line up, so I wait. But the staffer proceeds to take my card and sign me up on a computer. She tells both me and the client she’s already talking to that she can multitask. Predictably, I tell the other client that she’s a robot from the future. She says, and new paragraph

“Oh, you’re sweet.”

So I say, again predictably, “the last time I told a woman she was a robot from the future…” but I never finished the sentence because what she said caught up with me.