Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’m still busy geeking. I’ve moved on from updating the Konfabulator kitchenTimer widget for the latest Konfabulator edition to editing the game ChainShot (by MscapeSoftware) so that the scoring is more like that of the Yahoo!Game JT’s Blocks - or as Veronica calls it, PantyCat. (Don’t ask.)

Another important piece of housekeeping was retrieving my .emacs file from the old mac and getting fresh copies of my favorite Emacs modes, folding mode and html helper mode. The latter is what produces the timestamp at the bottom of the Repository page.

The new mac is still adorably cute. Though the screen is smaller than my previous 15″ PowerBook, the resolution is the same, so it feels sharper rather than more cramped. The fan has been on longer in the past few days than my old fan ran in the entirety of its four years of active duty. Maybe it needs some stylish radiator fins like a spaceship’s. (In the vacuum of space, the problem is getting rid of excess heat, not keeping it in.)

The WotF people were kind enough to email me upon my manuscript’s arrival:

This is to inform you that your manuscript has been received and entered in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of The Future Contest, quarter-ending September 30th. Please allow up to 8-10 weeks after the quarter deadline for judging to finalize.  Best wishes, Contest Administrator

Pardon the lack of content - I’ve been busy learning to script Konfabulator. I also downloaded the Apple developers tools, installed the PHP Apache module, and built Emacs for MacOS X.

Mac rumor of the day: Panther goes gold master

I’m sure you’re dying to know what on my new dock. At the moment, the collection is: the Finder, Mail, iTerm, iChat, Safari, NetNewsWire (no longer lite), Address Book, iCal, and iTunes. I also have System Preferences and Preview open at the moment, (Programs without links were included with the OS.)

I just downloaded Konfabulator. Stuffit Expander 8 is supposed to have some problems, but I upgraded yesterday and haven’t encountered them yet.

This entry was posted with NetNewsWire.

Source: Endymion, Keats

In a surprise move, the Mac (a new 12″ Powerbook) appeared on my doorstep this morning at 9:30 a.m. I’ve been playing with it ever since. So far I’ve changed my desktop, set up iChat with some icons (it uses the Address book icons instead of AIM ones) and gotten Safari tabbing. I’m also calibrating my battery. Next, I plan to play with the DVD drive.

Late-breaking mac sighting: Anchorage, Alaska!

I’m still amazed by the idea of MailBucket. I was looking up RSS readers for Jerie and found that some Windows readers (eg., NewzCrawler) which can’t hold a candle to NetNewsWire, nevertheless do interesting non-RSS things like reading newsgroups or regular web pages. Add the MailBucket email-to-RSS gateway and you can do virtually everything with an RSS reader.

But if you really wanted to do everything, you’d use emacs, wouldn’t you?

Mac sighting: C.K.S. International Airport, Taiwan - it’s leaving on a jet plane, but where is it going?

Who would have known Chestnut Hill had a post office? Certainly not someone who’d just put “Chestnut Hill” into to the USPS post office locator, which claims the closest P.O. is in Jamaica Plain.

If you know anything about Chestnut Hill, you know the locals won’t be going to JP for their stamps, 0.4 miles or no 0.4 miles. I hiked out there to meet Dr. Deb’s favorite oral surgeon, who, of course, wanted to remove all my wisdom teeth even though only half of them are ailing at the moment. I was on my way back to the Chestnut Hill T stop, inbound for the stunning variety of Brookline postal options, when I spotted it. It was lovely and well-manicured and looked exactly like a sterotypical post office. Inside the clerks were amazingly friendly and helpful - it was like being in a whole new postal world.

Don’t get me wrong - the Brookline people are nice, too, but the Chestnut Hill post office had that special Stepford Wives touch about it. Having accomplished my postal mission (a last-minute submission to Writers of the Future [the link is especially amusing if you have popups turned off]), I decided to take the scenic route east and walked towards the Chestnut Hill reservoir. I took a turn up Chestnut Hill Road, a private way, and it was like I’d stepped into another century.

Picture those gorgeous old houses you see in Newton when you’re driving out of the city on Route 9, but instead of being all crowded together imagine them with lots of immaculately landscaped space around each one. Throw in a few topiary trees and lots of slate roofs, and you have the Hill. I felt that I was polluting the shades of Chestnut Hill just by walking up the road with my CVS bag.

I emerged at the wrong end of the reservoir, with the homey asphalt landscaping of Boston proper equally far away on both sides. I went left. There’s a fence around the reservoir, but if you really wanted to get in there and spit in my drinking water, it wouldn’t be hard. (I’m trying to express a disturbing thought without attracting the eff bee eye or nasty people looking for water to spit in.) Many joggers passed me by, but eventually I reached Boston and lived to blog the tale.

Word count: 3739
Cool link of the day: The Church of Spock

Good news! The mac is on its way. It’s still on a loading dock somewhere in Taiwan at the moment, but the shipping prognosis is good for later this week.

The Sense and Sensibility type: These delightful
(:-P) people have their feet set firmly in the
Eighteenth Century. Devotees of satire and
irony, they are far more likely to be reading
Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift than Lord
Byron or William Wordsworth (no offense to
these men; all four have merit). Generally
reserved and self-controlled, they quite often,
though not always, resemble Elinor more than
Marianne.

Jane Austen novel quiz
brought to you by Quizilla

Word count: 1300

I wasn’t going to blog because I’m busy writing, but Seema wrote about canon relationships and I couldn’t resist the topic.

My interest in canon pairings began with C/7 - just hearing the rumors undermined my will to JetC, and I went on to write C/7 stories. (I’m writing a new one at the moment.) Though I’m fond of J/P, I’ve never been able to write much of it.

I also love AU’s. What I can’t do is take an AU characterization or a counter-canon relationship and put it into a normal fic. While Voyager was in the Eternal Voyager Now, mixing and matching characters was no great stretch, but in seventh season the P/T became sadly irrevocable and the J/C undertone became a C/7 overtone. I’m not apologizing for anything I did in the Eternal Voyager Now; it wasn’t me who changed but the show.

In Stargate, I haven’t even scratched the potential of canon. The AU’s are canon, too, so if I ever feel like something out of the quantum mirror why should I bother to pretend it happened on this side?

I picked up Raft because I haven’t quite given up on Stephen Baxter yet. It’s an old juvenlie of his, which is to say it’s a boy’s coming-of-age story, so characterization, even of said Boy, is a bit sketchy. Raft makes up for it in spades, though, with a truly original milieu.

Boy is the descendent of the survivors of a unique shipwreck - somehow his forebears took a wrong turn into a high-gravity universe where trees fly and miners walk on the surface of dead suns. The plot turns on the consequences of high, and apparently increasing, gravity, as Boy explores the decaying human societies and meets the wildlife. It’s a wonderful example of the genre.

I also found Blind Lake in the library right before it was slashdotted. Robert Charles Wilson writes some odd stuff, and this one is no exception. An observatory spies on lobster-shaped aliens using a technology no one seems to understand. A group of science journalists come to the Blind Lake installation at the wrong time and are caught in a security lockdown. But how can an observatory threaten to contaminate Earth - with memes?

The characters are well-drawn and their problems unusually normal for science fiction - joint custody, annoying bosses, the trials of being a science writer - but my favorite was the young girl in the middle of the custody battle. Blind Lake manages to be both a a good novel and good sci-fi. I’m not sure it could have been better on either side without a loss on the other.

Wired has a nice article about Virginia Tech’s G5 supercomputer, which was also slashdotted earlier this week. The original images were mirrored after the slashdotting, but seem to be back up now.

Those 1,100 dual 2GHz G5 towers sure look cute together. I’m guessing that’s 1064 PowerMacs for computing and 36 spares for playing iTunes. (That’s the only explanation for ordering the macs from the iTunes store.)

I should have bought my PowerBook there - my estimated ship date has been postponed from today to 10/3/2003. Virginia Tech gets 1,100 G5’s, and I get Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf:

I’m not sure what the refund is for, since they haven’t charged my credit card yet. And I thought I was the Apple Computer consumer. Alas, not yet.