Barkerburgh

…and I’ve got diagnosed osteoarthritis in both hips so I figured, for Wetstock this year, I’d just go easy.

But my people do not go easy into that good night. And this was in the afternoon.

I didn’t run around too much with the general ruck and rumble of the water-gun fight itself, although I wanted to. Luisa came to be, with water balloons, in the upstairs john which is always a target as it is overlooking the backyard wetting-fields, and I went up to tag her, but I got suborned to her side. We got Jeff R. and a couple of young people who I’d just met that day, (and bravo for the next generation, God bless’ em), and we won the day. We did. We did so.

Reid, with a high-powered water-rifle, employed a ladder to climb up to the bathroom window, in spite of the absence of one of our dear family of friends, partly, in part I’m sure, due to a ladder accident a few weeks back, with a head thing. And Baby H. Jesus, Reid, what were you thinking? But since he didn’t fall. it was genius, and hilarious. And he pulled open the window nearest me and I took the brunt of his humid and humorous assault.

This was Simon’s first Wetstock, and he needs experience, God love’im, he’ll be three in November.

Later, in the round backyard pool, we did the traditional whirlpool, with two reversals. K. A.

As always, the company was great, the food was great and I look forward to several next years.

What’s hilarious, seriously, is, that right now, two days later, when I was expecting one or both hips to be almost literally killing me, WTF and NGOOHA, it’s my thirty year old chronic back condition that’s bugging me, not my hippage.

At this same age, my parents did not have this suite of experiences or concomitant consequences. But they didn’t have waterguns.

I was always a big Inspector Morse fan, both the books and the series, and was sad when all ended as all human things must end.

Now, Kevin Whateley, who played Endeavour Morse’s faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, has returned to PBS’ Masterpiece as Inspector Lewis, and is welcome. There was one episode (as far as I know) a few years ago, but with last night’s episode and next week’s promised one, there are least two more. The ads for DVDs during the show suggest there’s an entire series; whether PBS will carry it all, I don’t know yet.

The other night I caught the CBC premiere of their new series jPod.  Darkly funny, funnily dark, excellent cast, quirky Vancouver locations, weed, quite enjoyable.

I have never read any Coupland, although I’ve always wanted to.

Anybody have an opinion on the books?

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!!

Either Firefox, WordPress or Youtube are screwing up my post on the Darby ‘You Suck’ Prank.

So sorry.

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.

1> Last night I finally saw ‘A Mighty Wind’ and thought it was great. What was even greater was that in the closing credits was this: “Video Assist - David Barker”. I can’t believe I don’t remember doing that. I guess I was really busy at the time. Now I only have to see ‘Best in Show’ and ‘For Your Consideration’.

2> I haven’t looked at CSS for a while so I thought I’d catch up. So I was reading quite a bit about CSS yesterday afternoon and wondering a lot about how to apply both PHP and CSS to the construction of my Jeopardy scoring project, instead of just using plain vanilla HTML and just a little CSS and PHP, which is what I’ve been doing. One of the books suggested that HTML tables be avoided in favour of CSS positioning, which kind of made more sense the more I read about it. So last night I actually dreamed about creating the Jeopardy screen without tables. When I remembered that this morning, most of it actually made sense. Cool.

3> This weather is wonderful. Lovely and springy in the daytime and cool and comfortable for sleeping at night.

4> Look at Chez PL&J to catch up on Jon’s recovery and Photon’s life in general.

Woohoo! I finally figured out how to do something very cool in regards to MySQL and PHP! It involves dynamic SQL strings, commas, single quotes and common sense, but it took me a week to figure it out!

You are all happy for me.

As I am for each and every one of you.

30 Rock, Alien vs Predator and The Dresden Files?

I was watching all three at once last night, while editing PHP files for fun and now all three are mushed around in my head and I really need to know what the difference is.

But seriously.

Peter Cook got me into 30 Rock. The creator, executive producer and occasional writer is the brilliant Tina Fey, formerly of Saturday Night Live. It’s really funny with some of the most internally consistent characters in sit-com history, all delightfully eccentric and unique. No comparison to Corner Gas, though. (And definitely no comparison to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, contrary to what some dummies on imdb would have you believe.)

I wanted to see Alien vs Predator for the SFX ad the fights, which were cool but the initial premise just got sillier and sillier the more they set it up.

The Dresden Files is okay but pretty pedestrian and predictable even though I quite enjoyed last night’s episode.

So a while back when I was coming home from dinner at Tim and Anneli’s, I found a Dell Dimension Pentium III on the curb on the Danforth. The case was open and the hard-drive was gone but everything else, including 128M of RAM was still there. It was very heavy, so although I normally walk home from the Wright/Pekkonen household (on a good day it’s only a 25 minute walk) , I decided to take the subway, and of course, take the risk of the machine not working at all after I hauled it halfway across the frakkin’ city. It took me a while to make room for it but I finally got it working with one of my own hard-drives and Windows 2000. And it has two working USB ports so now I can use my data-spud, (as Peter K. calls my USB jump-drive and I think it’s funny…)

I’m very relieved to have two computers again that I can waste time playing games on and not working on my PHP or writing a great F or SF novel- or series of intricately inter-related short stories.

Hurray for me. And hurray for you, too, whoever you are and whatever you’ve recently accomplished.

PS, if you haven’t seen this on Reid’s blog, take a look. It’s hilarious.