Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Tomorrow will be a blue moon—time to do those once-in-a-blue-moon things.

Thanks again to Nicolas Taffin for a new French translation of the color wheel. My next color wheel project will be making a miniature version. After that will come the Tiger gadget…

Also on the updates front, Jade won an award in the July Final Frontier contest. I also added a link to her latest Voyager stories.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used IRC; I think it’s time to download a new client. I used to use ShadowIRC, but it’s time to move on. Ircle and Snak are still the big shareware names, but I was looking for something that won’t give me guilt when I neglect the shareware fee.

On the free front, I found Colloquy and Fire. The latter also does AIM, MSN, and Yahoo chats, plus ICQ, but I’m trying out Colloquy first because it looked the prettiest.

[Time passes…]

I’d forgotten just how annoying IRC could be. After a long struggle, I got onto DALnet, but there was no one in the chat room. SearchIRC is a good place to find channels, and New IRC Users has a handy command list, marred only by the annoying floating menu. News flash: DHTML is no longer cool.

Thanks to Liz for this link to SecureMac.com, with (happily) no news since May.

It’s a link dump, but it’s a fresh one:

• Bitoogle, the Google of Bittorrent, looks great but is down for the count.
• A List Apart has a cool article on
  preventing bandwidth theft using mod_rewrite and PHP.
• Some fun free fonts from Letterhead Fonts.
• More spam amusement at spamusement—spam-based cartoons by stevenf, now with an RSS feed!

In other net news, yours truly is now a guest blogger at Gene Expression—today I blogged about creationist museums.

I’m back from the woods, the highway is shut down, and all is well with the world. I’ve been unpacking and grocery shopping today, but tomorrow I may have some real blog content. Future entries will be live unless otherwise indicated.

The management apologizes for the inconvenience.

The MCFI (Mass. Con. Fandom, Inc.) put up a list of reasons of why Noreascon 4 is not like the DNC. Noreascon is the upcoming Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention), which is being held this September in Boston.

Now that sort of endless list (70 items and counting) generally isn’t all that funny, but some Patrick Nielsen Hayden and company seem to think it’s also Not Funny. I’m not a big sci-fi fandom fan (you can tell because I call it sci-fi for clarity, rather than the fandom term sf—and I admit to being a Trekkie), but I am a Bostonian. I can attest to the fact that the list is not about Democrats, or, Ghod forbid, “expressing science fiction fandom’s traditional contempt for normal democratic politics.” It’s about the DNC logistical hell that we locals are going through at this very moment, because our city is designed around insecure cowpaths from 375 years ago.

If Patrick Nielsen Hayden says fans are generally contemptuous of democracy I’ll take his word for it, but sometimes a joke is just a joke. I don’t know a single soul on this side of I-495 who can pass up the opportunity to laugh at the latest shenanigans downtown. That’s what you bought when you voted to hold your Worldcon in Boston; please keep it in mind for next time.

If you don’t like New Englanders, there are 44 other states available.

The sun’s blowing chunks again, so Space Weather says today is a good day to see purple auroras in Canada, the northern US, and northern Europe.

In other news, my lightbulb just blew up. I think I unscrewed it and screwed it back in too many times. Fortunately, the shade goes up so I don’t have lightbulb all over the floor. Those things shatter into a zillion pieces when they hit.

On or about this day in history, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia fell to the Red Army. They would not regain independence until 1991. The United States never recognized Soviet claims in the Baltics.

I sent in two entries to a writing contest five months ago. I included SASEs with both, and neither came back. The website didn’t list the winners, and I didn’t hear from them when the judging happened, so I assumed I had lost. I just got a bunch of my forwarded mail, though, and in it was a certificate for first place in one of the categories, and a prize (of as yet unknown monetary value). There was no actual notification with it, though—no cover, no list of who won the other categories or places, nothing.

I’m happy, but it reminds me of the time a magazine published a story I’d submitted without telling me. The publishing industry is infinite in its weirdness.

For reasons that shall go unmentioned, I’ve been looking for nice LotR fonts. There’s a lovely collection of rune and tengwar fonts at Orlando Bloom Central, but I was looking for the Latin alphabet in an Elfish style, or a nice Carolingian or Uncial font. Thundrune seems to have some.