Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Metaphor of the day: the Titanic, on its anniversary. (Thanks to Seema for the link.)

QuickSilver is up to Beta #22, though not much seems to have changed. You can read about it and other Launchers for Mac OS X at MacDevCenter.

But my big Mac discovery for the day is Celestia, a cross-platform 3D outer-space simulator. It’s not exactly user-friendly, but you Windows and Linux people should be used to that by now. I downloaded it for sci-fi writing purposes, though it has educational and entertainment value as well. It’s free and the documentation is linked on-site and also in the Celestia users’ forum.

As long as I’m mac-geeking, here are a few more mac links that have been piling up:

• Mandelbrot on Cocoa is a fun fractal explorer I may have mentioned before.
• Here’s a macosxhint about disabling command-Q for Safari, so you don’t accidentally lose all those open tabs. It didn’t work for me, but you can just add an extra key (like option) to the quit command using System Preferences | Keyboard and Mouse | Keyboard Shortcuts. Did I mention that one before?
• Trapeze will extract text from a PDF, for a price.
• OS X for geeks gives helpful mac advice from a geek switcher.
• I know I’ve mentioned the VLC media player before, but I’m plugging it again because it played a corrupt educational video for me that Quicktime wouldn’t play.
• MacOSXHints has yet more free backup advice.
• MacDevCenter has an article on DarwinPorts, an alternative to fink.

Well, the ASC Awards are over and I voted all over the place - pretty much everywhere except DS9, most of ENT, and some of MIS. I still haven’t done my taxes, but the big post offices are open until 9pm tomorrow, and the one near South Station until midnight. I suppose it’s no rush.

Once the madness was over (I cast the last vote at 11:01pm), I came here to blog and noticed tons of comment spam had piled up. Nothing new, and the blacklist plugin can delete it en masse, but the trouble was I hadn’t gotten any notification of the spam, either. It turns out I haven’t gotten any comment notification at all since the beginning of March. I try to keep an eye on the comment list in the MT interface as well, but it looks like I missed a bunch of comments. So I haven’t been ignoring you - I just didn’t know you cared.

I’m trying to catch up on the lost comments, and then I really have to do those taxes.

I’d heard good things about Blood Music by Greg Bear, and it didn’t disappoint, though I’m not sure it was quite the groundbreaking work I’d been led to believe. What begins as a typical tale of viral carnage cooked up in a lab by a young, overreaching Frankenstein takes a sharp turn into a Singularity scenario. I’m no fan of the Singularity because true transhumanity is as difficult to convey as true alienness, but this one is reasonably well done.

The sudden break in the middle drops several characters, picking up an almost entirely new cast - not a good sign for characterization. It took me too long to realize that one of the new characters was mentally retarded rather than poorly written. I thought there was a bit too much hand-waving over the “biologic” to make up for such sins of characterization. The Singularity tends to do that to writers - it’s as hard to write post-humans science as post-humans themselves. I’m impressed Blood Music worked out as well as it did.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, either. Normally, I’d enjoy a nice post-apocalyptic disaster novel, but this one broke a few too many rules. The suspense of the novel is generated by the reader wanting to know what the main character, the Snowman, already knows - that is, what the heck happened to the planet? Eh? Eh? Getting the truth out of the author/narrator/Snowman one flashback at a time is like pulling teeth, so that by the time I found out I didn’t care anymore - and it’s not like me not to care about wiping out the human race.

There are amusing moments of plot, especially Snowman’s encounter with a sounder of pigoons, and the buildup to a climax of the non-flashback action -
but all is lost in the typical mainstream novel non-ending, in which Our Hero is faced with a pivotal choice and…the end. If you want to know what happens at the end of the novel, I advise you to read a different novel.

The 2003 Hugo Award nominations are out! I haven’t read much on the list beyond Blind Lake and “Walk in Silence”, but it makes a good reading list and reminds me that I really ought to subscribe to Asimov’s.

I’m not eligible to vote, so don’t bother sending your minions…

Thanks to Liz for alerting me to the first Mac trojan horse ever. The OS has made the big time, even though the virus doesn’t actually do anything and isn’t contagious either.

It’s just nice to know somebody out there cares enough to write for OS X.

The exterminator came and noticed that one of the walls (though not the one in which my new pet currently resides) is open to the cabinet under the sink. You can see the unplastered slats and everything. It looks like when the new sink was put in (judging from the logo, in the fifties, but from the shoddy installation, probably later), the baseboard was cut out to fit the cabinet against the wall and that gap behind it was never filled in. The cabinet covers part of it, but has no back wall of its own to cover the whole gap.

So, going with the antiques theme, the exterminator left some V for Victory traps under the sink and is coming back next week to fix the hole in the wall. I didn’t know exterminators did their own plastering, but I guess you can’t trust the contractors to get it right.

I wonder if I’ll hear a little squeal in the night…

Some links for Veronica - the rest of you can just move along…

• Alien Song download page (I Will Survive)
• The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu - unfortunately not as funny as it sounds
• Identical quadruplet calves
• elgooG
• PerversionTracker to switch to “All Sushi” format
• The Right to Read, a story
• The classic game of xbill has been ported to the Mac as MacBill - stop Bill Gates from installing Windows everywhere!

Mac menu of the day: Menu Calendar

The entry title comes from this USA Today article about offshoring in which a guy forced to train his offshore replacement said, “You feel like you’re the guy wearing the red shirt on Star Trek. It’s a very unpleasant situation. It’s unfair. These people appeared, and they’d sit and shadow us and watch what we do.”

Note the utter disregard for human dignity, never mind the economy of the US (or of whatever country sells its jobs overseas). Oh for the robber barons of old, who had the decency to bring the overseas labor into the country before exploiting it…

Corporations are completely immoral entities, so the only way to stop them is to boycott the ones that go offshore. Technically, I guess that means I should be boycotting Earthlink, but I don’t know of a nice local ISP to replace them.

I forgot to mention last time that the repository has been updated too, with a screenshot for comtrya plus a spelling correction for the Secretary of Defense thanks to Jessa.

I’ve put a few stray Stargate drabbles up on the SG-1 fic page. There’s a second Stargate filk in the works, and of course the long-lost Colony is coming sooner or later.