Farsong Blog-o-Matic

I read Best of Craigslist when it updates. There are usually some gems. This month, there are a couple that I find really amusing because of their juxtaposition.

First there's these two: problem and resolution.

And then there's these: example, then rage.

siskmarek asked me about stuff I've read that's made a strong impression on me. Specifically, he asked me about online scifi stuff. I need to find some more of it, but here are some things that have influenced me (most are print):

Classics like:
Moby Dick
David Coperfield
the sound and the fury
hamlet

There was some LOTR

There was also:
Dune
Dragonriders of Pern
Honor Harrington
Ender’s Game
Artemis Fowl
HHTTG
X Marks the Pedwalk (I haven't been able to find this story anywhere on the web, but it was in an excellent sci-fi anthology we read freshman year; I read the whole thing)
The aforementioned anthology, of which I know not the name. It included an Eniac that could love and a story about a death game in an arena.
2001
2010
Crooked Little Vein
Neuromancer

There are other influences from things in visual formats like:
Babylon 5
Star Trek (TNG and Voyager)
American Born Chinese
Transmetropolatin
Aqua Leung
Flight anthologies
Blackadder
Mr Bean
Monty Python
Thin Blue Line
Dr Who (which is more recent an interest)

I can't say that these were all strong influences, but many I've liked or enjoyed. Many are comics, and those as much as anything contribute to the method of storytelling. The TV shows are about the world, characters, feelings from the settings ...


As far as online, here's some of the stuff I can find:

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Little Brother

Cory Doctorow's “Scroogled” (I'm sensing a pattern here ... this was a story I thought I had lost like the others further below; thank god I knew the author's name).

( some more musing about it, and looking for some stories I can't find any more )

No president can give you anything unless they first take it from somebody else, and that is a formula for failure.

Or so claim conservatives. The reality is that freedoms and liberty are not taken. They are not something you can get by taking them from someone else. These things are given from one person to another and they are in abundance.

I've been reading and listening to arguments lately, specifically about nationalised health care, and it occurs to me that the conservative worldview is one that believes that in order to give freedoms to one group of people, they must be taken from someone else. For instance, in the health care debate, Michigan congressman Rogers says:


( It is not like taking a piece of pie from one person and giving it to another; there is enough pie for all )

[ … ] The archdiocese's statement follows a vote Tuesday by the council's Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary to reject an amendment that would have allowed individuals, based on their religious beliefs, to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings.

"Lets say an individual caterer is a staunch Christian and someone wants him to do a cake with two grooms on top," said council member Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 6), the sponsor of the amendment. "Why can't they say, based on their religious beliefs, 'I can't do something like that'?" [ … ]

You can't do that because it's Discrimination.

It's the same thing as discrimination based on skin colour. Everyone knows it's not okay to say, “I don't want to serve you because your skin color is different than mine, and the bible says your skin colour makes you inferior.” And it's just as silly as saying, “I don't want to serve you because you're lefthanded,” (though that is a bit of a sinister example).

(via The Washington Post)

It occurs to me that our culture is based entirely around the evacuation of waste, but it's something no one wants to talk about it. More than religion, more than culture, the driving force behind technical innovation and growth as a species is finding new and different ways and places to take a poo, from a hole in the woods to an outhouse to indoor plumbing. If there is one defining thing we have as a culture, it is the fact that, at one time or another, we have all had to poop.

A table of places people have taken a poo:
• In the woods
• Behind the shack
• In the bathroom
• In space
• On the moon
• Around the corner
• At the Gas-station
• At a restaurant
• And many, many other places


If you think about it, even momentarily, it makes a lot of sense. Every building people like or work in has a bathroom — many have more than one — all for eliminating waste product. There are more bathrooms than churches and shrines — there are even bathrooms in churches, and every culture has created a toilet in similar fashion. Our buildings and culture are based around the need to evacuate waste. We have more toilets than churches.

More than that, cultures that are considered "higher" are the ones with more sophisticated means of pooping. The Romans were civilised and they had running water to get rid of their waste. The middle ages were a step back, and people lived in squalor and filth lined the streets. Modern plumbing has made cities possible, but it wasn't until indoor plumbing and toilets that carriers of disease and pestilence are almost completely eliminated — when a seasonal flu is all you have to worry about, life is pretty good and your society is clean.

Even our language is structured around it, but has built up the elimination of waste from our bodies — a very natural thing — into a taboo subject. The words "poop" and "pee" are hilarious to small children (don't tell me you didn't giggle at them, too, because you did). The words "shit," "piss," "crap," and "ass" have all become dirty words. People don't say that they are going to poop — they say that they are going to go "use the bathroom" or "go number two," as if they are ashamed of a perfectly natural process. The fact is that there is nothing to be ashamed of — it's natural and everyone does it. It's not good or bad — it simply is, and it's a commonality among all humanity, yet we still seem reluctant to acknowledge that any of us do it.

In fact, to make words for natural acts into taboos is to give power to these words and to say that these things are bad, when they're not. Even calling waste management "number one" and "number two" is silly. It also presents a layer of abstraction to the whole mess that is difficult for small children to understand.

Pooping is simply a fact of life. If you're alive, you poop. It's that simple. Let's not glorify it by making up fancy words or using euphemisms for it.

“I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the nth time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.”

I know exactly how that is. Sometimes you just have to act on the feeling — you can't rest till you do.

Neven Morgen via Daring Fireball

This quarter has been busy. Very busy. I'm taking 17 credithours. It's intense. And I've been busy outside of class.

Anyway, I got back to my room a couple hours ago after heading to town. I went to 1) drop of a disc of pictures, 2) get some new jeans! and 3) setup a computer for my dad.


The first is a series of pictures I took for a sculptor on the dedication of her statue, which looks something like this (I'm not good at making up names. Also, I think that the photos should stand on their own without needing a title, only a description of when and where):


Except for the above, the pictures in this post are unrelated to the content, simply recent uploads I want to share, so it's pretty as you scroll by, like the next one below (which I suppose is also the only other exception) and is larger because it is more stunning that way (seriously, it's more stunning the bigger it is; making it small gets rid of the Depth of Field):



The second are a pair of Levi 501s and a pair of 505s. Classic blue denim. They'll last a year each before the knees get holy like the pair they replace, like the pair that replaced the one before it, like the pair those replaced …


Three: My dad has a great MacBook Pro. It's better than mine, as well as quieter when running Flash. It runs OSX. He recently also started a job as a realtor, and many of the websites he needs to use are the sort that require IE. I tried every free option I could think of: I tried Safari, Firefox, Opera, and even IE for Mac (5.2; it sucked even back in the day when it was the only Mac OS browser). I tried spoofing the user agent strings. I even tried using WINE and running IE through that, but that didn't work either. It was crashy — too crashy for even me to use. I finally gave up after I was unable to get a virtual machine to do the trick, recommending Parallels as an option (I wanted it to be mobile, and there was no way in hell I was giving him back his old laptop — it was too slow and too loud.

I went home this evening to drop off the aforementioned disc, got two pairs of jeans, and a tasty salmon dinner. At home, I dredged up an old desktop machine (slimline tower), because this seemed like a decent solution. I had a computer in the basement, as well as an extra keyboard and monitor (one of my two 19" Samsung SXGA TFTs), so I set him up with a 2.0 Ghz Celeron "Northwood" running Win 7. I had a bit of trouble getting the first drive to boot, so I replaced it with something newer. It's an adequate, functional computer and runs 7 just fine, if a little sluggish — but it's better than XP by leaps and bounds. It'll do the job of printing and accessing ActiveX websites, and it was a problem taken care of with parts I had on hand.

Also a new addition, I got a replacement for my crappy RAZR (which was stolen). I used my backup Nokia 1208 for a couple weeks, but I now have a 2007 HTC T-Mobile Shadow, care of kistaro. It's a good phone, and my first experience with Windows Mobile (apart from playing with my ex's WM5 Motorola Q briefly a couple years ago, but that was a poor experience to say the least). It's slick, but it's been easy to get used to.

It has good battery life with an extra large 3rd party battery, wi-fi for email (my router's WiFi magically started working again, AND I got the G router I was lent working as an access point tied to my hub), and is a decent crossover device. Actually, it's much nicer than the BlackBerry Perl with which I started this contract — faster, more intuitive, more versatile, and more useful, and while it does have a little bit of chunky and clunky, I'm getting more used to the interface; it has its quirks, but it's nothing that I can't ignore as a developer. It's no iPhone, but it's not supposed to be — it does its job just fine, has no touch screen, and does my Email. It can even automatically switch from "normal" to "vibrate" modes based on my calendar.

Actually, I've found that the killer app for it is Google's sync. Google employs an exchange server to copy contacts, calendars, and send and receive email, so moving into the new phone was as easy as setting up Google as an exchange server and BAM! all my contacts and my inbox are there on my phone. I read a message and it marks it read in my inbox. Since I use Gmail's IMAP server for my desktop client, it means that all changes propagate across all devices. Even better than that is the fact that I have iCal linked with Google Calendars via WebDAV, and Address Book syncs to Google as well, so I add a contact on my phone, and he or she appears on my computer. Honestly, this is exactly how computing is supposed to be.

Additionally, it would have been an absolute nightmare trying to coerce Windows Mobile into syncing with anything non-windows-mobile, since I'm almost exclusively Mac/linux.

So, I've been using it to stream internet radio while I sleep (a laptop is overkill for this), and I've got an ebook reader installed on it, too (the Window Mobile version is much nicer than the BlackBerry one). It used to be so nice to be able to have books with me on the bus — especially since I don't like carrying many things with me, and when the Blackberry died, so did a lot of the reading I did for pleasure. Now I can finally fall asleep again reading stories about Honor Harrington and the Star Kingdom of Mantacore.

So, yeah, Windows Mobile doesn't suck — and this is coming from a Mac/Linux user and a design geek (so it's as close to a ringing endorsement as you'll get from me without torturing me with a BB Storm). Believe it!

“Do you think that is acceptable wolflike behaviour?”

I've been reading a bunch of articles this afternoon on The New Republic and they're all smart and very well written.

• Rush Limbaugh and his Reverse Racism
Halp, white people are being oppressed!

• Quayle v. Palin: Quayle Pulls Ahead!
Even mister “Tomatoe” is better than Mooseburger

• The Worst Argument You've Ever Read For Banning Openly Gay People From the Military
Apparently, according to the Right, gay people are pussies.

• The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage
If the last article talked about in the previous link wasn't bad, this one is.

• Assimilation and its meaning: The End of Gay Culture
And finally, we end with something sensible, about how gay culture as a subculture is disappearing and no longer the single defining thing about gay people.

It's voting season. Yeah, I'm late on this because they sent out the ballots a couple weeks ago, but if you haven't voted yet, here's what you need to know. Yes, this is a politically-charged post.


Vote no on I-1033. It's Eyman. You remember how he fucked up the budget with I-695? How it effectively broke the STA*? He's trying to do that again, this time capping the budget in the worst year on the books — a year we had to lay off teachers and cut programs.

The tl;dr is that it's proposed by Eyman. If that's not enough to make you vote against it …


Vote to approve R-71. It's about legal rights for domestic partners, including same sex couples and older pensioners who do not want to lose benefits by remarrying. It is not even a warning shot across the “institution of traditional marriage” — this is simply an issue of civil rights. (Full disclosure: I have a personal, vested interest in the approval of R-71).


The only other really important thing to do is to vote for Rocky Treppiedi and against Laura Carder in the District 81 Director race. Carder would bring crazy fundie creationism into the classroom. That's not science; don't teach it. Hell, even the Spokesman Review doesn't think Carder is a good choice.


These are the things on the ballot that really matter — for the rest, use you best judgement; I believe in you. Don't let your community down. And remember to turn in that ballot. The first two measures are not exclusive to Spokane County, either, so if you're in Washington, you know what to do.


--
* Back in 1999, when the Spokane Transit Authority had just started their plans for a new and shiny bus transportation hub downtown, Eyman got I-695 passed. Car licensing was where STA got much of its operating funds. So, STA had just gotten a new downtown hub, paid millions for it, and now their funding was cut. They couldn't dip into the coffers because they just spent that money on the Plaza. So they cut service. Even today, STA is not as good as they were in the mid 90s. They are expanding, but that was a serious blow to those of us who do not have cars.

Also, I was mad because I-695 actually raised our tab fees for our car, because they went from a car-value-based equation to a flat rate.

I think I've had this blog for more than five years, now. I got it shortly before hallowe'en, back in senior year of High School.


Here are some sketches from the past few weeks that I'm actually pleased with:






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Yesterday, I hung out with a bunch of friends, watched some hallowe'en-type movies (not generally the biggest fan of gore or horror, but I'll make an exception around this time of year). It was one of those migratory parties that started in one place, moved to another (the second location quite different than the first — more of a nerd basement lair pit. With stuff everywhere (a stark contrast to the first place). There was also a fire. I will say that I'm jealous of people who can afford fancy quad-core computers and large flatscreen TVs and fancy new widescreen monitors — but I wouldn't use a TV much for TV, I don't play many games, and the computers I have work fine for me for now.

I did feel a bit awkward at times as there were several couples and only a couple people without someone else there. Josh apparently echoed the same sentiments about hallowe'en parties in his neck of the woods. Situations like those are only as awkward as you make them; just have fun and it's fun. Plus, meeting new people is fun. Still, I wish he were here. Or I there. Or something like that.

I probably should have sneaked in and stayed at home last night, but I felt like that would bring up questions and be awkward.


Though, earlier this week I went home to help out and see if I could help my dad access a website. It requires ActiveX, though — ergo, Windows, and he's using a MacBook Pro he got in late 2007 (it doesn't feel that old). He needs it for stuff it his new job, and spoofing the user agent string doesn't work (not in Opera, not in Firefox, not in Safari). Using IE 5.2 for Mac also didn't work — and besides, that browser is the worst one ever, even when it was considered "modern." IE in WINE is buggy and crashy, BootCamp is too much overkill for what he needs and a little awkward, and I'm not going to give him his old laptop back to run XP and IE on — that laptop is bad and loud and slow, and would give him an unfair view of Windows. Preferably, he should have access on his laptop so he doesn't need to worry about accessing what he needs.

I've come to the conclusion that he needs Parallels. I suppose we can find uses for Parallels for more than just IE after he gets it, but none of the other options are as elegant.

At least the trip into town included dinner and some cookies; it's also nice to see the parents once in a while, and it was a welcome break in the routine of life here; the week felt shorter.


It might also have felt shorter because I slept a lot of it (though, I was up all night Sunday through Monday and I was surprised to be as alert as I was for my group speech presentation). This week's sleep schedule has been all over the place, and while the Melatonin has helped some, I have to remember to take it. I also have to force myself to get into bed (unlike tonight), and if I try, I can ignore the tired feeling that the melatonin adds — it's a gradual, natural sort of falling asleep that it creates. I don't know if it's a physical effect at all — it could just be in my head, accepting that the remedy works, putting me to sleep by convincing myself that it works.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.”





We are starstuff.

It's a no-brainer.

From Spokane Skeptic:

"In the end, Referendum 71 is simply a matter of fairness and, if anything, will lead to stronger families in Washington state."

Vote to approve R71. It's not about marriage, but about extending legal rights to visit and care for loved ones in the hospital. It's about extending legal rights to a minority -- rights many take for granted.

Vote yes on R71.

A song for your socked-in Tuesday Morning:

Here are a few more comix I sketched out last week. They're regular pencil, somewhere between sketches and final things.



( Bicycle comix )

( Spaceman Comix )

kistaro on Twitter:

“Twitter has definitely cut into my LiveJournal usage. Previously, something I wanted to mention would happen, I'd file it for later, and then it was highly random- with a percentage around 25% or so- as to whether I'd mention it. This represents some fairly major things I pretty much missed; I just never got around to writing them up.”

He hits the nail on the head. Livejournal (and blogs in general) are differentiated from one another, just like Email, SMS, IM, and Telephone Calls are all different layers of communication (in order of increasing perceived urgency, decreased expected response latency, and increased levels of interruption).

I often use Twitter as a list of both cool things to share as well as a place to store short ideas I want to revisit in the near future and/or would like some response to.

I've been digging this song ever since @trabant (it seems it was bassplayer1231 who) linked it last week:


I may have to look this one up and put it on the "Watch" list.


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I've spent most of the past week engaged in group work for Bio and Communications. The former is a real blast, and we're designing experiments to carry out in a group. I'm probably going overboard in work for it, since it's only a 3-credit class.

The other one, I'm not really taking seriously. Well, I'm taking the project seriously, but not the class. It's communications for people who lived in their parents' basements and have never experienced the world or interacted with others. Maybe I have the benefit of age and experience.

Regardless, I (think) have 17 credits this quarter, and am on top of it all. For the first time in years. It feels good.


Other things have happened: I imploded earlier this week and was all like "FFFFFF" at T-mobile because I got bilked for texts this last month. Seriously, don't tweak with your texting plans ever. Unlimited is cheaper than 100% of your phone bill in texts, if you're being stupid. Stupid costs you money out in the real world.

I've also been hanging out with CAs (EWU's Version of RAs) and will probably see about doing that next year, for a jorb. Most of them have been camp counselors in the past. I've also made friends with a short, black CA named Katie. She's seriously like 5' tall and has a huge personality and knows everyone. I've also ended up hanging out with people from clubs. Making new friends is pretty sweet.

Inspired by a conversation with Sam.


The bookcases were added complexity.


I draw these things in bed while watching Teevee on Hulu.