Date: 2008-05-05 17:47 Subject: Always add a subject line on the second edit. Public Location: Let's nuke that bridge we torched Music: Propagandhi—And We Thought That Nation States Were A Bad Idea Tags: dump post, holidays

Happy Temporary-Victory-Over-the-French Day!

EDIT: Uptick in native Unicode webpages! (via Daring Fireball) Good. I look forward to the deprecation and eventual destruction of all those obnoxiously indistinguishable-yet-incompatible Western European charsets. It shall be our war chant: UTF-8! UTF-8! UTF-8!

(Explication: If you've ever opened a document only to find all the quote marks replaced by Ò's for no good reason, you have a dog in this fight.)

EDIT: Special preview of Things I Read in May: Go read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.

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Date: 2008-04-16 13:29 Subject: The update Public Music: Universal Hall Pass—Sally's Song 1 Tags: dump post

Electromagnetic Pulse

I spent Saturday in a room with a hanging model of Deep Space 9 listening to nerds talk about Blue Öyster Cult, Eva Tanguay, and disco. It was completely awesome.

Anyway, I learned about the EMP Pop Conference two years ago and have been wanting to attend ever since. This year, I was finally in town and at loose ends, so I bussed up to Seattle for one of the (what, four?) days it was running.

A good time was had, and it reminded me of how much I used to enjoy being a scholar. I think that if I ever become one again, I will be a great deal better at it than I was.

Grains

I've decided to give up wheat for a while -- maybe a week or three -- to see if it has any unexpected effects on the old meat machine. (I have a few suspicions, so it's time to gather some data.) And wow that's a lot of stuff I can't eat. I do not envy the gluten-intolerant.

Weaker

So the other day at work, Meg put The Weakerthans on the stereo, and she mentioned that John K. Samson used to play bass and sing in Propagandhi. And I was like, WHAT? But no, really. You'd think that racking up about 50 playthroughs of "Gifts" and 45 of "Plea From a Cat Named Virtue" (according to iTunes) would be enough to clue me in before now, but apparently not.

( Cut: In which I get a new toy and make a spy joke. )

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Date: 2008-03-12 21:54 Subject: Dump post Public Music: JUDY AND MARY—RADIO Tags: dump post, dvorak, macs, nick is doing something impractical, stop posting

Four things, and I post.

Expansion

Anyone else notice those new "Expand" links in the comment threads? Best new LJ feature ever.

Insomnia

My computer has again developed insomnia. We've already been through this! It was totally fixed! Why is it broken again? Pain in the ass!

Time to back up and call AppleCare again. arrrrrrrggggghhhh.

Under There

Boxer-briefs. Someone explain these to me.

If one has an underwear model's abs, hips, ass, thighs, and package, then yes: boxer-briefs are the most aesthetically pleasing underwear for men. This is the undeniable truth. Until the wearer runs, walks, twitches, or scratches himself, at which point the legs roll into these sort of unappealing donut shapes and the garment rides up and smooshes one's balls.

Boxer-briefs: The underwear for physically perfect men who never move. Get yours today!

ARE WE NOT MEN

( ...we are Devo. )

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Date: 2008-02-13 17:06 Subject: Via Pandagon Public Tags: dump post, poly-ticks, sex

I hear a mighty buzzing noise, and it sounds like... freedom.

EDIT: Also, via Daring Fireball: The most aggressive cinderblock ad EVER.

EDIT: I've changed my mind. This is definitely a low-mid grade flu rather than a cold. At least I'm getting over it fairly easy this year? I still feel crappy, but I'm not totally miserable.

EDIT: Ft. Lewis is doing nighttime shelling exercises tonight. It's kind of like a thunderstorm, except more irritating.

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Date: 2007-09-19 18:58 Subject: (no subject) Public Tags: comics, dump post

Presented for your META.

(froborr in particular, because we know that's how he rolls.)

Also, Anthony Stuart Head has really pretty eyes.

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Date: 2007-09-13 16:17 Subject: Dump post Public Music: Over/Under—Possibilities Tags: dump post

• What IS it with serial killers and living with one's mother?
• Working together for your arachnophobia!

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Date: 2007-07-09 22:33 Subject: I am still in the process of watching season 2. Public Music: People screaming and running from randomly-appearing snakes Tags: buffy, dump post, stop posting

See, if you lived in Sunnydale, this wouldn't be a problem.

In other news, I am totally into Cordelia. Any other series, she'd have been dead before season 1 was out; here, she is hilariously awesome and unkillable. Definitely one of my favorite characters.

EDIT: Apropos of nothing: I don't have any desire to go see the musical of Wicked, but I do kind of wish I had tried and failed to get tickets. Because then I could complain about it on LJ, and the title of my post would be, wait for it -- "No Wicked for the rest."

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Date: 2007-03-20 22:26 Subject: Two dorky things Public Tags: dump post, enter2option, macs, remember this for me, stop posting, technobabble

1. (Attn: veggies) Miso soup is approximately equivalent to chicken soup, in the arena of convalescence. I've noticed that I've started craving it whenever my health is preparing to take a downhill skid.
2. (Attn: Mac notebook users who hate the superfluous "enter" key) fKeys, while rather difficult to install and activate and much harder to configure, is better than DoubleCommand. Story shortened, DoubleCommand kept wandering off into la-la land whenever I logged out and back in; it claimed that my settings were still active, but they weren't, and the only way to bring them back was to do a full reboot. fKeys, for all its current usability faults, doesn't do that.
   
   (Though, uh, if you use a Macbook, you'll have to get the beta version and do some plist hacking. Actually, just skip the plist hacking and grab the finished versions; follow the regular instructions for getting things working, but substitute those files instead.)

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Date: 2007-02-26 20:20 Subject: The Longest Post in the World Public Tags: books, didread, dump post, music, stories, writing

( Tanyas )

( With Crows )

( Cartography )

( Things I read during January )

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Date: 2007-01-30 21:12 Subject: The Corrections Public Music: The Mountain Goats—Distant Stations Tags: dump post, stop posting

Pardon me for getting this news from a report about computer clocks, but what's this about Daylight Saving Time changing?! Had anyone else heard about this?

EDIT: Holy balls, THAT was special.

EDIT: Facebook is full of Gustav Holst fans.

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Date: 2006-11-22 23:55 Subject: I think I'm going to fake this as the "current music" for every dump post from now on. Public Music: The Books—There Is No There Tags: dump post, piffle, stop posting

You know what would be a really, ultra-great comic book? Ramtha 1/2. Being the adventures of a surly martial artist, who, when doused with cold water, turns into a 30,000-year-old man from Atlantis. (Lemuria. Whatever.)

EDIT: It's not that the List of Fictional Birds has any relation to anything. It's just that even I'd have a hard time justifying a whole post on it.

EDIT: Here's one for you, Polly:

Can I do NaBloPoMo without actually having to call it that? What if I pretend it actually stands for Narcoleptic Bloated Post-Modernism and just write lots of coy footnotes instead of blog posts?

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Date: 2006-10-31 20:54 Subject: (no subject) Public Music: Takeshi Terauchi & The Bunnys—Hungarian Dance No. 5 Tags: dump post, music, stop posting

iTunes just played Hungarian Dance #20, mixed it up with a Rebecca Pearcy song, and followed with Hungarian Dance No. 5 for an encore. Except, you know, the Japanese surf rock version.

EDIT: Check it out, I've hit the big time! Some ass stole something I wrote to beef up his splog! Good thing it was just useless piffle in the first place, isn't it.

(Discovered as a consequence of Jon's suggestion to search Technorati for one's LJ. I also found that one of the top-tier comics blogs linked to/quoted me this year! Specifically, a post in whose first three words I — wait for it — make a cuss involving testicles, in capslock. Yup, I'm a credit to my family name.)

EDIT: (I meant to mention this earlier in the week.)Gawd, FINALLY someone has the sense to license Bump of Chicken for a video game. That bit where Luke runs up the pillar, half turns, locks eyes with Asch, then they crash swords, the bridge collapses, and the building explodes? That's what happens after the break in every Bump of Chicken song ever. They fucking rule.

Also note that, in an interesting reversal of roles, video game characters are now cosplaying as mullenkamp. (From a conversation with vaulted_eel.)

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Date: 2006-10-13 13:18 Subject: (no subject) Public Music: John McCusker—Night Visiting Song feat. Kate Rusby Tags: dump post, links, stop posting

Today's Cat and Girl brought me great joy, so I thought I'd share.

Also AWESOME: Read the customer reviews for this book. (Then you can go back to the original Schneier post. Unless you're on vacation from context.)

EDIT: Tim Bray makes an interesting point: there are incentives in place encouraging automakers to sell miscalibrated speedometers that report higher-than-actual speeds. Whether they respond to these incentives is an open question; he's just noting that they exist.

EDIT: Do you get mysterious evaporating Russian mystery robot pornmonger friends sometimes? It's a script. Irritating.

EDIT: Everything I see seems to indicate that Vista will be both the best OS Microsoft has produced and the absolute worst.

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Date: 2006-10-05 18:10 Subject: (no subject) Public Tags: dump post, stop posting

I dunno, I might skip the Neil Gaiman event tonight. I'm torn. (Between what, I don't know. It's not like I've anything else going on. I'm just not feeling it.)

(Should I go? Eh, I'll probably regret it if I don't.)

EDIT: BoingBoing is right, this shit is PRIMO LAFF.

Also: Second day at the bakery went fine. And it turns out I am already getting paid, so bully for that. I think I can live with this. This, plus something that gives me the rest of the hours I need to survive.

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Date: 2006-09-27 08:59 Subject: Yesterday's News Public Music: Mirah—Life You Love Tags: books, dump post, martha wells, music, technobabble, twin cities, writing

Unplanned fringe benefit of writing my major projects in plain text and keeping them in an SVN repository: I can work on them from multiple computers at once with no real penalty. Fuckin' sweet.

Yeah, context, right. The (radiant? sardonic?) Crow doesn't have a case yet, and until then, I'm a little loath to take it out on the town. Which is kind of irritating, since I enjoy typing in cafés around the neighborhood. However, I happen to have been wrangling my Cheaters files using tools that were designed to let several dozen people work on the same files at once, and which have built-in allowances to handle conflicting changes and out-of-sync versions. So I get the ability to keep writing on the Albatross without worrying about keeping track of what I took with me, and I get it for free.

Not that I actually wrote anything yesterday afternoon. I'm kind of neck-deep in The Element of Fire. Hot damn is it good. I've been warned by people in the know that, partway through your first novel (maybe earlier, maybe later), you lose the ability to read fiction for pleasure, and won't get it back for a year or three. It's one of those situations where your brain is recompiling itself, and one of the symptoms is hyper-awareness of what other writers are doing craftwise coupled with an obnoxious predilection for backseat driving. I think I may be starting to get that; ask me again in three months. If that's what's going on, though, this is exactly the novel I need to be reading right now, because it's like riding behind James Bond: all hazards to navigation are being met with proper action and massive flair. If you're not reading it yet, climb on, man.

( Bits and chunks: )

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Date: 2006-09-09 21:17 Subject: It's times like these that I wish I shared this apartment with someone Public Music: Belle & Sebastian—You Don't Send Me Tags: dump post, stop posting

Nick's inner monologue: "OKAY, what kind of tea are we having? That blackcurrant stuff sure sucks ass for some unspecified reason, so maybe we'll play the maté game."
Nick's inner monologue: ...
Nick's inner monologue: Not to be confused with the waiting game!

Bonus only-works-on-paper pun for readers who don't speak Japanese:

Nick's inner monologue: ...except there's no one here to mate with.

By the way, Justin Pierce (of Killroy and Tina fame) has a fun new comic going on called Wonderella. You remember Dean Trippe's strip Butterfly, where it was kinda sorta a Batman* comic except hella goofy? Pie's got a ditzed-out Wonder Woman thing going on here, and it's pretty fab.

EDIT: Man, why do I always forget about KFAI? Other than the fact that they're often playing some interminable talk show in Hmong or seven straight hours of blues, I mean. But damn, not on Saturday nights. Saturday nights are a good time to be in Minneapolis with a radio.

_____
* "Knight-Bat." All names were changed to protect the innocent.

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Date: 2006-08-22 14:04 Subject: (no subject) Public Music: Silversun Pickups—Lazy Eye Tags: dump post, links

Brilliant. (via.)

EDIT: Oh look, proof positive of Dark Matter, also via BoingBoing. I expect I'll summarize it wrong, but the idea is that they found a situation where the bulk of the visible matter in two galactic clusters basically hit a brick wall and stopped, while the real center of mass, composed of dark matter, kept on moving. The result is that the two were neatly separated out, giving them a chance to measure dark matter in relative isolation.

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Date: 2006-08-17 16:57 Subject: WiFry Public Music: Tom Waits—San Diego Serenade Tags: dump post, stop posting, technobabble

I've been getting pretty damn good long-haul wi-fi results using a 6-inch double cylindrical parabolic reflector rig on top of some basic Linksys rubber duck antennae. It was cheap, it's non-invasive, and it turns a hacked $60 router into free internet for life, regardless of your computing hardware, home network size, or operating system. But. If you were going to be using a USB adapter anyway... the Chinese deep fry basket looks like the way to go. (Via Street Use.)

EDIT: Okay, dump post. THIS is the smart playlist I've been looking for:

• Rating is greater than 3 stars
• Date added is within the last 3 months

EDIT: The Unix command "yes" is just about the funniest thing ever.

What does it do? It repeatedly prints the letter "y" (well, or something else, but "y" is the default) at an incredibly rapid rate. Forever. (Or until you hit ctrl-C.) It basically emulates a cat sitting on the keyboard.

What's funny about that is that necessity tends to be the mother of Unix commands. I mean, "Unix" isn't really even an operating system--it's a consensus-shaped framework, a big pile of useful rocks to smack against other rocks, worn smooth over time by use and re-use. So the fact that yes exists in a modern Unix like Mac OS X means that the ability to barf out an appalling amount of y-age is in high demand. I mean, I can think of a few cases where it'd be useful, but man... a whole program for that.

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