The rumors were true for once; there are new PowerBooks out today. I couldn’t resist - I ordered the 12″ Combo drive model. It’s supposed to ship by the 25th - the 15″ and 17″ PowerBooks are shipping sooner if you’re after immediate gratification.
Are you new to the Joy of OSX? You might want to look into MacMentors for switcher support. Concerned about shipping delays? Apple has a new spokesman to reassure you.
Rumor of the day: New PowerBooks tomorrow!
I was looking for Boston blogs to add to my RSS reader and I found an incredibly useful page at Boston Online: the Wicked Good Guide to
Boston’s public restooms. I tried to send in an update for the Copley Library facilities, which deserve at least 2 rolls, but the form script was broken so I emailed my recommendation instead.
On the Arraiolos front, I’ve put off my Persian yarn mission to the local needlework and knitting shops (eg., Woolcott in Harvard Square) because I’m in negotiations with a kit supplier over foundations. If you ever need to ask a Portuguese speaker whether the kit comes with jute or linen, the words are juta and linho.
I’ve found more Arraiolos links: Santo Antonio has a nice selection of images of Arraiolos rugs and also stitch diagrams (em português). Serranofil still has kits and magazines, but I like the looks of the Casa dos Tapetes de Arraiolos kits better despite the inscrutable order form.
I’ve been thinking about aniline dyes while cross-stitching my Arraiolos-on-cotton experiment. Dyes, like so many things, are much more complicated than they seem. It used to be that you mashed up the right plants and you got a certain range of colors. Then came progress, in the form of aniline dyes.Aniline dyes have a bad reputation from the nineteenth century, when they were made from coal tar and gave garish, runny colors that faded easily. I suppose people used them then because they were new and cheaper (like Windows) than colorfast dyes. Aniline dyes have allegedly improved over time, but it’s still a scare word in the handmade rug world, where other “chemical” dyes are used - mainly “chrome” dyes using potassium bichromate, from the acidic dye category. (See the rugtime dictionary for more terms and definitions.)
To see how far we’ve come, walk into a craft shop and look at the DMC embroidery cotton colors. We can make any color we want - or rather, DMC can. I have no idea how they do it, though, so if I were trapped on a desert island I’d have to go back to pounding veggies - or worse, using aniline dyes.
It disturbs me how ill-equpped I am for life on a desert island.
By the way, the Repository has been updated with a bunch of names from TV Tome.
Cool link of the day: The LJ Times (created by stevenf)
I get an about.com writing newsletter which isn’t particularly useful to me. The latest issue had an article about the whys and wherefores of pseudonyms which mentioned the issues of smut-embarrassment, genre-separation, whistle-blowing and privacy in general. It leaves out some important motives for name-changing - adopting a cooler, more memorable name, hiding your gender because girls don’t write scifi or boys don’t write Harlequins. Back in the pulp days, publishers had authors use multiple pseudonyms to give the appearance of a larger pool of writers. Today, being prolific just adds to your brand name.
I’ll be away for the weekend, so don’t bother watching this space.
Word count: Shh, I’m editing.
I was going to do the Seema thing and honor the day by omission, but I have updates to report. Hail, Dorothy is my new drabble addition to the episode “Seth.” Several new terms have been added to the Repository.
I read some fic by Denise, pretty much at random. Most notable of my choices was Fini, a post-apocalyptic Sam fic coauthored by Adi. I thought the Sam abuse was egregious, but her reaction and recovery were interesting. There was also plenty of Sam angst in Fractured Reflection. You can tell from the title what subgenre it was, but I won’t reveal which Sam was involved. The tension between a Sam and a Jack was good.
In non-Stargate news, I just discovered that there’s a Khanfest going on. Non-smut and non-slash are allowed. I made a button:
Cool link of the day: Every Fan’s Canon Primer by Steve Roby
So as of a couple of days ago, I’d written 20 drabbles in my first month as a Stargate fan. At first it was a challenge to come up with something to drabble about for every episode, but lately it’s been easy. I’ve also been trying to edit some old fic - part of the Seven Saga and also a couple of TOS stories - without much luck. Maybe the muse has moved on to Stargate permanently, or maybe drabbling has spoiled me for fics of over 100 words.
Actually, I’ve found writing drabbles a much more useful exercise than I ever intended it to be. It’s a pure art - come up with an interesting idea and then express it in 100 words. The hard part is coming up with the idea; rearranging words until you hit 100 is more like filking, and that’s always fun.
I’m looking forward to getting back to my first real Stargate fic, though. It’s for Beta Reader Appreciation Day, so I have until October 13th to finish it.
Word count: 100
Umpteen spellings of Setesh have been added to the Repository, along with screenshots. Also, two new drabbles are up on the fic page.
I stumbled across this clunky Hieroglyph translator - you have to click on the little buttons, since typing doesn’t work. Then I did a search for better ones: Isidore of Seville has a list of translators and Hieroglyphs.net has nice tools. The UPenn translator is the prettiest.
I was having trouble with an educational video kindly provided by Jerie. Nothing could get the sound to play until I stumbled across this QuickTime AC3 codec. It required a newer version of DivX than I had, so I downloaded DivX 5.0.7. The latter claims I won’t need to validate avi’s anymore before playing them. If true, it would be cool.
For more about playing avi’s on a mac, see my blog entry on DivX for OSX.
Word count: 200
I spotted Darwin’s Children, the new sequel to Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, in the library and decided it was about time to read them both. They were rather odd.
Darwin’s Radio is about a viral epidemic in more-or-less present-day America. The Good Scientists suspect they’re dealing with an unknown evolutionary mechanism about to punctuate our equilibrium, but the Bad Scientists insist that it’s just another disease and a very good excuse to increase the CDC’s funding.
Both the science and the politics are engrossing for a while, despite the annoyance of a Woman Scientist and her typical (for Bear) Bad Decisions. Woman Scientist spends the first section of the book angsting about her husband without ever making it clear what there is to angst about. This is a clear violation of the rule against creating false drama by hiding information from the reader rather than from the characters.
When his troubles finally come to the forefront, the husband does manage to create some legitimate drama. In another dramatic subplot, one of the good scientists goes bad. The novel bogs down when Woman Scientist runs off with Rebel Scientist and they decide to make beautiful Radio music together. While that’s fine as a plot twist, the ensuing chase and reproduction scenes are not enough to conclude the book.
But wait, there’s a sequel. In Darwin’s Children our favorite characters are back on the run because the Bad Scientists have tightened their grip on the country. Newly evolved children are locked up in state schools, where many of them succumb to yet another virus being broadcast over the versatile Darwin’s Radio. (That is the moment of interesting science, so don’t blink.)
After spending years on the run, Woman Scientist returns to work for the Bad Scientists in hopes of proving their theories wrong and hers right. The Bad Scientists are worried that Darwin’s Children will start transmitting on Darwin’s Radio once they hit puberty, so they start to do Bad Things. Eventually there is a rescue scene that might have passed for a climax, except that the book stumbles on after that.
The religious experiences of Woman Scientist were odd in that they didn’t seem to integrate into the plot. Though the new characteristics and culture of the evolved children were interesting in the abstract, they were neither explained in enough detail nor given any actual evolutionary justification.
The unexpected conversion of several Bad Scientists into Good Scientists worked well, though, except in the case of the Business Woman when she was tied into the religious subplot. The general defeat of the Bad Scientists could also have been a climax had it not been so tentative and off-stage.
I enjoyed the disaster-novel aspect of the viruses in both novels, but otherwise the present-day realism and wandering plot weren’t what I look for in scifi. If you liked Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, then you may like these two.
The iTunes store sold its ten-millionth song. It could have been me - I bought a song last week, too - but it wasn’t. There are also new iMacs and new iPods out, but no new PowerBooks.
In other news, Mars is still hanging around and four new Stargate drabbles have been added to my Stargate fic page.