Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

See BoingBoing or go straight to the close-up for the year’s best Halloween costume.

No, not here at Jemima’s Chevron. After our migrant summer, ficml.org is back up for good. No, it’s NaNoWriMo difficulties that have the spinning Safari spinner (not the rainbow pizza pie, but the daisy spinner on the tab) spinning in vain.

The load of new novelists is always an early-November stress on the NaNo back end. Maybe Google will buy them out and devote some high-powered servers to the cause of updating one’s word count every 15 minutes…

Two hours remain until National Novel Writing Month. It’s not too late to sign up! I’ll be off to a frightfully unprepared start as usual this year. My characters don’t even have names yet…

It was a windy day today in America’s windiest major city, as I waited half an hour for the bus to the suburbs. I was the only one at the stop for a while, which normally would mean I’d missed the bus, but in this case meant that the bus was so behind schedule that my fellow 8:45am commuters had caught the 8:10 sometime around 8:40, leaving us suckers who show up at 8:43 in the lurch.

When the bus finally arrived, the bus driver told us (me and some serious stragglers) what went so horribly wrong: the new CharlieCard machines have been installed on my bus route.  Now I’ve seen the dread beasties on the occasional 66, but I figured my bus had far too high a number to get Charlie’s attention so soon.

But I guess it’s not so soon anymore.  The new fare machines were so much more trouble for everyone to use, from the driver to those of us with passes holepunched onto our keychains to the poor low-tech slobs passing three dollars and change into the dollar-sucker every day, that the cumulative delay of rush hour added up to half an hour.

Keep in mind that the full trip to the far corner of the burbs takes 45 minutes (fortunately I don’t have to go that far), so the half-hour late bus I stepped onto could only have been on its fourth run or so of the day. In addition, the burb-ward morning runs are relatively underpopulated compared to the full buses coming into the city, and sometimes the bus just goes back empty and out-of-service for another burb-to-Boston run instead.

I live in fear of the day Charlie comes to the green line trolleys.

Thanks to Stephen Lang for reminding me that Futoshiki was coming back. He has the latest puzzle from the Guardian up in his blog.

If you liked that one, justplayfreegames.com has a google module and a printable page of six random futoshiki. Uniqueness of solutions is not guaranteed. DoFutoshiki.com guarantees uniqueness.

The rumors are flying that BSG is moving to NBC. Here’s someone who claims his iTunes season 3 pass was partially refunded in connection with the move.

I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 today at work. I didn’t care for the new new tab button, so I went looking for themes.

I found a bunch of Safari-like themes, but most of them are OS X-only, e.g., GrApple. I wasn’t pleased with iFOX or GrayModern; Phoenity Modern was pretty good, but I ended up going with the new, slim Orbit Blue.

As I like to point out, when pedestrians cross the T, the train wins. When large vehicles cross the commuter rail, however, it’s usually a draw, as in yesterday’s commuter rail crash. A train on the Franklin commuter rail line hit a stone crusher atop a flatbed truck that was stuck on the tracks. The train was a total wreck, and reports of injuries vary between 17 and 19 commuters, none killed.

The truck driver was outside the truck waving frantically at the train when the accident occurred and was uninjured.  The state of the stone crusher is unknown.

After sixty days of uptime, I rebooted my mac recently to do some updates. I noticed when it came back up that it connected to an open network in the building rather than to my network. I looked in System Preferences, and my Network location was very confused about how I was connected; it said I was using “PCI Ethernet Slot 2″ instead of my Airport card, but I think I would have noticed an ethernet cable hanging out of my mac.

So I went into the Network Port Configurations and turned off everything but Airport and the internal modem—not that I’ll be going back to dialup anytime soon. That shocked the system into admitting it was connected with Airport. However, this made the original problem worse: now every time I put the mac to sleep it reconnected to the weaker open network rather than my network.

When in doubt, google. I found this macosxhints thread which recommended deleting all preferred networks and starting over. So I did, sad though I was to see Yersina, Veronica’s wireless network, go. Now the airport connects to my network, although it could just mean that the open network has faded out completely…

The sudoku of the day is greater-than sudoku, where you get no clues; instead, every box is marked greater-than or less-than its neighbors. If you need more than the ten at the link above, Killer Sudoku Online has a weekly greater-than sudoku. The greater-thans I’ve tried so far have been less challenging than other variants, but I’ve seen people claim it can be fiendish.

Greater-than is sudoku-like enough to come in some of the standard variants: here’s a samurai greater-than sudoku and a jigsaw (nonomino, geometric) greater-than sudoku.

A related puzzle type is futoshiki, which got off to a bad start in the Guardian.