Awards of the day: the winners of the 2004 Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards have been announced.
I can’t believe I forgot to blog yesterday—maybe I’m all blogged out. Somewhere around here is my one thousandth entry, but it’s hard to tell exactly which one it was. If I had to guess I’d say my GRRM review was it, but this entry could also be the one.
Joseph Scott has instructions for linking your WordPress category feeds. Mine weren’t working at first, until I realized that I needed to update my .htaccess file. The instructions are in the WP admin interface, under Options | Permalinks. I may hack the WP source for slightly nicer display of category feed links.
[Update:] There you go, category feed links, with an image. I changed the line in index.php that produces the category list to:
<?php wp_list_cats("sort_order=asc&sort_column=name
&feed=feed&feed_image=/jemimap/gifs/rss.gif"); ?>
(Note: The line is broken for display purposes only.) I think “feed” produces the RSS2 feed, though you can change it to get atom or a few other choices. The path is the url of the image, which is adapted from the graphicpush XML and RSS icons.
I also fixed my feeds to be full text. Apparently WP doesn’t generate both full text and summary feeds (although a full-text rss2 feed includes summaries anyway). The setting is under Options | Reading in the admin interface.
GNXP Post of the Day: on James Hart—thanks to Seema for the link.
This is a Jemima link dump. Jemimas of the world, unite!
Security fence of the day: A question of neighbors
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin is another example of the super-novel form that I’ve tried to name before. Although I’m still fond of novelitis, it’s too derogatory for this particular example of Novels Gone Wild. Let’s go with n-ology, or nology, to indicate that I don’t know how many volumes A Song of Ice and Fire will be in the end.
So far it goes like this: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, with A Feast for Crows expected out in hardcover any month now (and the check is in the mail). Those are just the names you need to know to find the books; they aren’t particularly meaningful divisions of the greater nology. (I didn’t realize it was called A Song of Ice and Fire until I heard someone else refer to it that way.)
For example, in the prologue to A Game of Thrones, we see some nasty cold things, definitely folks on the Ice side of the nology. They play no further role in the novel, make a guest appearance or two in A Clash of Kings, and don’t really get freezing until A Storm of Swords. Although ostensibly main characters die in every installment, they don’t do it picturesquely at the end of the book. In fact, I couldn’t tell you now where one book ended and the next began. A Song of Ice and Fire is more of a medieval soap opera (in a good way) than a typical fantasy quest-for-plot-coupons. Each chapter is named for the character whose perspective it follows. By the time the nology is 8 or 10 books long, the surviving characters will have had a whole novel of their own, in installments.
Unlike the perpetually annoying Otherland books, each chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire is relatively freestanding and cliffhanger-free. The intervening chapters aren’t spoiled by the reader’s desperate need to find out whether so-and-so survived his or her last chapter.
So how can I mean “soap opera” in a good way? The chapters are episodic, so reading the books is like watching a TV show about GRRM’s fantasy world. That’s not surprising for someone who was in TV before he started this nology. What is strange is how well it works, whether because of or despite the structure I can’t really say. The characters, action, and background are all wonderful. I usually can’t bear fantasy, but I loved this one.
Nor am I alone in my appreciation. A Song of Ice and Fire was at the very top of The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List the last time it was compiled, right above Lord of the Rings. If you only read one 3,000+ word nology this year, make it A Song of Ice and Fire. You won’t be sorry you stayed up all night reading.
I really ought to check my web stats more often. In the past month I’ve gotten over 5,000 hits on an obscure and uninformative blog entry from 2002—just a quiz post, and the quiz results there all have broken images.
Somehow this entry has been climbing up in the results for “Quizilla” in Yahoo’s and therefore MSN’s search engines for at least six months now. Why my silly quiz results and not someone else’s? Why that particular entry and not any of the others in my extensive quiz category?
I’d suspect one of the new trends in comment spam and referral spam, but there’s no spam on that particular entry to explain it . I can only conclude that something is amiss in Yahoo’s search technology. I use Google, so I don’t see this kind of result weirdness, but maybe Yahoo/MS people are used to it.
Get a real search engine, people.
Political link of the day: Major Geeks has a list of what Kerry has done for the space program.
Both Quicksilver and Calenderclock have been updated again since my previous entry. You can read more about Calendarclock at macosxhints.
Quicksilver now requires plug-ins for pretty much anything beyond simple Finder actions. I couldn’t find the plug-ins anywhere on the site (which as I’ve noted before is specially designed to discourage people from using Quicksilver), so I figured I’d have to live without them. Then I noticed that not even my Safari bookmark for the WordPress admin page (where I’m currently typing this blog entry) showed up. I couldn’t live without that (Quicksilver is highly addictive), so I went on another hunt for the missing modules.
They turned out to be hidden on the front page of the site, well below the download and forum links where there used to be nothing at all. Since my screen is only 12″, the plug-ins were off the page. I don’t even know why I scrolled down, but there they were! And now I have the Safari, iTunes, and Dictionary plug-ins. Quicksilver uses a proprietary scheme, qsinstall:, to do the plugin install, so it’s really easy once you know where they are.
Some other Mac links:
I’m a huge M. Night Shyamalan fan, so I enjoyed “The Village,” but I also understand why it’s getting mixed reviews. I saw it with Dr. Deb, who loved it, but I was torn for most of the movie. I’ll try to keep the spoilers down, though I’ll need a few to make my point. Please see the movie before reading any further.
Miscellaneous links:
You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party.
What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.
What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
The party’s over, and it turns out no one showed. A blizzard of Democrats blocked the roads and derailed the T; all the actual residents of Massachusetts paid attention to the weather scare and stayed home. There weren’t enough Democrats to make up for the loss of regular business downtown—the restaurants were empty. This is a second-hand report based on the Metro (all the bias of the Globe in a fraction of the space!), because I didn’t venture any nearer downtown during the DNC than Coolidge Corner. Why risk a strip-search by riding the T?
In other local news, there will be a Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Museum of Science from Sunday through October 24th.