shark bytes

23:34 - the fun stuff you find in EULAs

iTunes told me that there was a software update for the iPod classic, and as these things do, popped up a clickwrap license with the End User License Agreement.

For the vast majority of you who are never bored/paranoid enough to read these, please note:

THE iPOD SOFTWARE AND iPOD SOFTWARE UPDATES ARE NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE iPOD SOFTWARE OR iPOD SOFTWARE UPDATES COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

18:36 - At Penguicon

I'm at Penguicon, finally. (Traffic, bletch.)

If you're also here and want to leave contact info, comments are screened.

23:38 - belated Boskone report and some general updates

Boskone
I didn't see everyone I wanted to see, or get enough time with the folks I did see, but that always happens. Setup on Thursday was enhanced by the wise overlordship of fluffcthulhu; the weather was pleasantly lacking in precipitation, though it was still really cold; food options near the hotel are still not all that abundant, but between the con suite and staff den there were pretty good options for "refueling stop" food. I'm still happy with the hotel's physical layout (the bar/seating area in the lobby is a big win) but I'm looking forward to more food options and better function space next year when the currently-in-progress buildout is complete. Food highlight of the con: dim sum in Chinatown with mnemex and drcpunk.

I didn't get to a whole lot of panels, but those I did were lots of fun. orzelc managed to top Charlie Stross, Karl Schroeder, and Tobias Buckell without even trying; David Weber had some great stories of Jim Baen; the "is this the year for e-books" panel was pretty well distributed across viewpoints, though it dipped into a round of the Eternal Copyright Flamewar there for a bit as well. I did a fair amount of gaming, including many games of Race for the Galaxy. I got to the Tor party, and contrary to my expectations it wasn't wall-to-wall people, so I could actually move, and have conversations, and so on. Unlike some people I didn't wind up with a copy of Cory Doctorow's upcoming book, though I did buy Noreascon I on a Stick. (I bought the cheaper version with the LPs; my sometimes-officemate has both a turntable and an interest in several of the authors on the recording.)

Chad's post also mentions the "graying of Boskone". I'm not absolutely sure that the total attendance is aging quite that quickly; it's my impression that there are a fair number of YA readers attending. (Bruce Covillle as the Special Guest this year would presumably have raised that number, also.) I do think there's a bit of a demographic hole caused by Boskone's years in the wilderness[1], exacerbated by Arisia and Anime Boston drawing in potential Boskone attendees who may not have the time, money, and/or energy for multiple conventions within weeks of each other.

Life in general
It continues, as these things do. The TV's broken, the weather's been doing the traditional New England "wait 10 minutes and it'll be different" dance, and last weekend we got some always-delectable Kelly's Roast Beef in conjunction[2] with a visit to the Natick Mall Collection and then the nearby REI for their climbing wall. (That was for hr_macgirl, not for me. Heights? DO NOT WANT.)

Upcoming conventions: Minicon (N) Readercon (Y) ... and a New (to me)! Exciting! convention
Sadly, no Minicon for me this year (again), much as I'd like to be there. However, I am going to be at Readercon (as usual) in July.

Now, the new! exciting! bit: I'm going to Penguicon in April! SF! Games! Computers! A list of "Nifty Guests" that includes several very nifty folks on my flist! Three hours in Newark Liberty International on the way out, because that was the only way to get the cheap fare without getting to BOS for an 0600 (DO NOT WANT) flight! Okay, that last one's not too exciting. I certainly hope it's not as exciting as my last connection in EWR. The last time I flew through EWR, there was a minor power problem.

As a bonus, the following Monday is a holiday in Massachusetts[3], so I get a recovery day afterwards and can sleep in unlike all the folks living in less enlightened states.

( footnotes )

Mood: cheerful

19:43 - Voting

hr_macgirl and I voted in the Massachusetts primary at just before 1800, and were ballots #612 and #613 at our polling location, which was busy but not packed; there were empty booths, of about a dozen total (I think; I didn't count). For the uncontested special election [ETA: last May] to fill our vacant state Senate seat, we were #22 and #23...and voted sometime around 1830-1900.

As unenrolled voters, we got to choose which party ballot to take, and both of us took D ballots. As we were walking to the booths, we heard the staff say "we need more Democratic ballots".

23:57 - I still can't wrap my head around it

I can't. I just can't. Hours since I first heard the news, and I still can't.

filkergem, who I first met almost 20 years ago, is gone, killed in a house fire that completely destroyed the house.

Please give Greg, his wife Maya (kyttn), stepdaughter Faeryn (lovensong87), brother Scott (smcmullan), and his other family and friends whatever prayers, thoughts, and/or energy you can spare, in whatever tradition you practice.

Mood: numb

22:39 - Amazing Race 12, in retrospect

Through the wonders of TiVo, hr_macgirl and I watched the season finale on Monday night.

My thoughts on the season just past: ( Spoilers included )

11:31 - U-Turn?

It looks like Amazing Race 12 is going to have some new twists.

At the end of the CBS recap for the premiere:
U-TURN:
There was no U-Turn on this leg.

SPEED BUMP
There was no Speed Bump on this leg.

Hmm!

No mention of Intersections, but the Fast Forward and Yield are both mentioned. (The Fast Forward gets mentioned twice for no apparent reason.)

14:38 - xkcd

Whee!

00:39 - You know you're a dedicated library user when...

...at the prompt "Type the 14 digit number on your library card" you don't have to look, and in fact haven't had to look for many years.

Because an arbitrary 14 digit number that lets you get books? That's worth brain space any day.

Especially when you can request the book over the Internet while attending a panel at farthingparty. Heh. (It's still in transit, alas, even though I requested it last weekend; this particular copy looks to be coming from Dedham.)

You know what else is cool, though? An application that tracks your library requests and checked-out items. Mac OS X 10.3 or later only. (Note to locals: Minuteman Library Network seems to require the beta to see your checked-out items at the moment.)

01:00 - Five questions, five answers

1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favorite song, or your favorite kind of sandwich, maybe your favorite game. Any remark, meaningless or not.
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post.
5. When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions.

yhlee asked:
( some questions (with answers) )

I like that this one is self-tagging, since I really dislike the whole concept of "tagging" people to respond.

15:08 - Another paid time extension

For those paid-but-not-permanent folks who might find it useful:

http://www.livejournal.com/pay/claim.bml

LJ is offering a three day extension to paid account time for those affected:

The outage was beyond our control. However, we value the support of our Paid members and want to compensate you for the window of time where the site was not accessible. Anyone who was an active Paid member as of any time Tuesday, July 24, 2007 is eligible for a 3 day extension of Paid time. You can claim this extension anytime from now until 12:01 GMT on August 6th.

13:36 - The most interesting thing about King Charles I

We're installing a new version of some software at work, and have to have a name for the installation. The current version is named "charles", because it was originally installed on the systems in our building on Charles Street; those machines have since moved to our new building and its spiffy data center.

So, ( inspired by the rules of a card game ) how we named it.

20:32 - Panel report poll

These are taking long enough that, by the time I'm finished with them, I'll be a year older than when I started.

(Oh, wait, that already happened.)

They're taking long enough that both They Might Be Giants and Suzanne Vega will have new albums out.

(That's already happened, too.)

Hmm. Well, anyway, they're taking a while.

So, a quick poll:
Poll #1023389 Panel Presentations Poll People's Preferences
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Which panel reports do you particularly want to see?

20:21 - Readercon 18: Heinlein as Narrative Innovator

The Saturday 1100 panel:

"The Door Dilated," Needless Exposition Contracted: Heinlein as Narrative Innovator.
James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Daniel P. Dern (L), Fred Lerner, Tom Purdom
Robert A. Heinlein was the first sf author to regularly write about the future as though the reader already lived there. From our current perspective it may be hard to imagine just how radical an innovation this was. We celebrate the centenary of his birth by examining the profound influence he's had on the art of sf storytelling.

22:37 - Readercon 18: "The Singularity Needs Women!"

Second panel of the con. These reports are coming along, slowly, as I'm finishing one every two or three days...I hope they're useful and/or interesting.

"The Singularity Needs Women!"
Elizabeth Bear, Kathryn Cramer, Louise Marley, Victoria McManus (L), James Morrow
At Readercon 14 (2002), GoH Octavia Butler said "As the only woman up here, this may be a strange question, but I can't help wondering how much of this speculation about a post-human future has to do with men's desire to control reproduction." We sadly can't ask Octavia exactly what she meant, but we want to pursue this striking statement. Does the post-humanist ideal of freedom from bodily constraints clash fundamentally with the ideal of freedom for the more than half of the population with female bodies? Or might the Singularity actually be a means to the freedoms sought by feminism? Has anyone written fiction about how these ideals interact, and if not, is this an opportunity?

22:37 - Readercon 18: "Smooth and Lumpy Expanded Universes"

Here's the first of my panel reports from this year's Readercon. This was the first panel I made it to, starting at 1600 on Friday.

Smooth and Lumpy Expanded Universes.
Michael Cisco, James Alan Gardner (L), Yves Meynard, Ian Randal Strock, Rick Wilber.
There are convincing and unconvincing ways for a writer to build on a created world. The introduction of the Bene Tleilax in Dune Messiah strikes many readers as an off-note, because it's inconceivable that the organization wouldn't have been mentioned in the original novel. In contrast, the Order of the Phoenix fit beautifully into J. K. Rowling's world. Isaac Asimov spent the last years of his career relentlessly expanding and merging his created universes, with controversial results. What other examples stand out? What are some of the tricks of the trade?

01:35 - LibraryThing

I resisted. I stayed away. But finally, the Readercon panel (writeup to come) pushed me over the edge.

You people are evil. Evil evil evil evil evil. Damn you all.

That is all.

Okay, not all. But when you throw me in that metadata briar patch, danger awaits (looks at clock). I've ranted before about the craptastic nature of the CDDB metadata, and now I'm busily going through and fixing up LibraryThing data. (I'm very picky about my metadata quality.)

The username is my usual one, of course, since it was available.

Mood: tired

00:11 - Upcoming lecture series on genetics and genomics

Interested in genomics? In the Boston area? Have some time on Wednesday nights?

You might be interested in this free lecture series.

Midsummer Nights’ Science will recount the scientific transformation that began more than a century ago with the seminal studies by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel — the “father of genetics” — who observed the ways in which physical traits were passed from one pea plant to another. In honor of the scientific field it helped to launch, the pea plant provides the inspiration for the seminar series, which takes its name from one of William Shakespeare’s well-known plays.

• On July 11, David Reich will explain how decoding DNA from chimpanzees and gorillas is enabling scientists to dissect the evolutionary relationship between our ancestors and those of other primates.
  
• The following week, on July 18, Pardis Sabeti will explore what researchers are learning about the crucial changes to our DNA that have occurred during human evolution and the biological forces that drive these changes.
  
• On July 25, Todd Golub will describe how genomics is helping scientists to classify tumors according to what goes wrong inside them — information that has the potential to advance the understanding and perhaps treatment of cancer.
  
• Concluding the series on August 1 will be Vamsi Mootha. He will deconstruct the inner workings of mitochondria — the miniature engines that normally supply our cells with much-needed energy — and how their misfiring can lead to human disease.

00:01 - Readercon 18, preliminary report

This is not a full writeup by any means, and is not organized in any particularly useful manner. Think of it as an Impressionist painting, or something, I don't know. I'm tired. There are also no panel writeups in here.

Those will be coming; I have my notes from the various panels, and they're somewhat more complete than last year's. With luck, this means I won't confuse Glenn Grant and Greer Gilman again. (Look, I was taking notes on a PDA with a thumb keyboard. You try being verbose while trying to keep up with five fast-talking and very erudite panelists.)

( warning: alliteration inside )

kate_nepveu is collecting other Readercon reports over at readercon.

Mood: tired

22:11

At Readercon. Having fun. More later.

Mood: happy

23:46 - When you know you take voting seriously

When you're the 22nd (hr_macgirl) and 23rd (me) people to vote in your precinct, at 1830. (Polls closed at 2000.)

Special election to fill a vacant seat; the only actual race was in the Democratic primary, and so there was only one candidate on the ballot (plus the write-in line).

It was amusing to see how happy the poll workers were to see us, though.

10:58 - If you can't change your mind, are you sure you still have one?

One of the key parts of the story of yesterday's Massachusetts Constitutional Convention is the part played by those legislators who changed their minds, and their votes, between January's vote and today's.

In a representative democracy, laws are affected by two separate but equally important groups: the representatives, who serve in the legislature, and the voters, who elect them. These are their stories. (Bomp bomp.)

The nine lawmakers who switched sides on gay marriage yesterday came from both parties, different parts of the state, and they traveled different ideological paths to their decisions . But in interviews yesterday, they seemed to share something in common: a desire to listen to all sides and a concern about hurting gay couples and families who they believed in many cases had experienced discrimination. The lawmakers spent hours, even days at a time during the last five months, meeting gay couples and their friends and relatives. Their personal stories made the difference more than anything else, the lawmakers said.

Some constituents wrote saying that they had changed their minds, like the elderly woman who said she previously asked Candaras to support the ban.
"But since then, Gale," the woman wrote, as Candaras told it, "this lovely couple, these two men, moved in next door to me, and they have a couple of children and they're married, and they help me with my lawn. And if they can't be married in Massachusetts, they're going to leave -- and then who would help me with my lawn?"

Mood: impressed

23:43 - Lyrics Quiz: the two leftovers answered

I'm unsurprised to find that the two songs that nobody was able to identify were also, by several years, the two songs most recently released of the ones in this quiz. (The oldest, "Behind Blue Eyes", dates to 1971; the most recent of the identified songs, "Torn", is from 1997.)

The two releases on the list from this century:
9. I am too dumb I am too smart ( answer )
12. They tell me your blue skies fade to gray ( answer )

You also may have noticed some linkage between the songs chosen. Yeah. Not random.

20:13 - Lyrics Quiz

1. Everything is temporary anyway "Circle", Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, lizzielizzie
2. When I'm surrounded I just can't stop "Brian Wilson", Barenaked Ladies, victorthecook
3. It's too late tonight to drag the past out into the light "One", U2, bikergeek
4. I have stood here before inside the pouring rain "King Of Pain", The Police, bikergeek
5. That long black cloud is comin' down "Knockin' On Heaven's Door", Bob Dylan, bikergeek
6. Sat on a fence but it don't work "Under Pressure", Queen w/David Bowie, lizzielizzie
7. Some are altogether mighty frightening "Don't Speak", No Doubt, lizzielizzie
8. Aspirations in the clouds but your hopes go down the drain "No One Is To Blame", Howard Jones, bikergeek
9. I am too dumb I am too smart
10. If I shiver, please give me a blanket "Behind Blue Eyes", The Who, happyfunpaul
11. Conversation has run dry "Torn", Natalie Imbruglia[1], happyfunpaul
12. They tell me your blue skies fade to gray
13. These are the words I never said "Why", Annie Lennox, lizzielizzie
14. What a cold and a rainy day "Like The Weather", 10,000 Maniacs, bikergeek
15. Sometimes everything is wrong "Everybody Hurts", R.E.M., happyfunpaul

[1] Technically, this is a cover of Ednaswap, but their version's rather obscure. OTOH, see this interpretive dance version.

10:40 - New driving directions

Since I am Yorkletts, I figured I'd ask Google Maps how to get from here to there.

I found out.

Given my propensity for sinking even in swimming pools, though, I think I should find an alternate route for step 11. (Yeah, even though sharks aren't supposed to stop swimming.)

(Thanks to yendi and irilyth for noting this new addition to Google Maps.)

21:33 - What Kentish village are you?

It turns out that I'm Yorkletts, which is sufficiently small and obscure that it doesn't get a Wikipedia entry of its own, being simply a redirect to Whitstable. (And is therefore clearly less notable than any random Pokémon.)

Yorkletts is just north of the Woodland Trust's new Victory Wood, which is being planted on an area that was only deforested in the early to mid 1900s. This will restore a link between the ancient woodlands of Blean Wood and Ellenden Wood. (Yorkletts is at the northwest extreme of the latter.)

Nicely matching my interest in things nautical and naval, Victory Wood is named for Nelson's ship and is the "flagship" of the multi-site Trafalgar Woods Project.

19:14 - Buy a Pandemonium T-shirt!

You might or might not need another T-shirt; Pandemonium needs to sell some. I think it's important to have specialty bookstores, whether they be technical, travel, or SF/F/H; Cambridge is lucky to currently have all three of the above, and I'd very much prefer that it stay that way.

I've been buying my SF from Pandemonium since it was above the Wursthaus, in the space that Spike MacPhee's SF bookstore had previously occupied; I really don't want to stop now.

It's a venue for signings; it's a place that will hand-sell a book that they think you'll like; it's a store that's not driven by an impersonal computer algorithm that forces authors to write under pseudonyms just to get a fresh chance at shelf space. They'll carry small press books, and chapbooks, and all those things you don't see at Borderzon & Noble. Help 'em out if you can.

16:00 - Bye, bye, Mr. Floppy Disk Pie

After a long, slow descent into irrelevance, the final days of the floppy seem to be arriving.

13:45 - Something that really *does* harm marriage

Anthony Lake's Boston Globe op-ed, describing a conversation he had with a former student who commanded a platoon in Iraq:

His mission, he said, came down largely to trying to keep his platoon alive. And it was one of the few in his area that suffered no fatalities.
But the personal costs were still high. Almost one third were wounded, some severely. And of 14 who were married, 10 are divorced or separated.

23:23 - Post-con crash

Arisia: good overall, not perfect. The hotel was, as many have noted, physically problematic; my impression is that the architects did their design with the sole concept of "hotel-hosted function" equal to "wedding reception and dance". OTOH, it's a heck of a lot closer to home and this meant that I could in fact stay until 0300 if I wanted to, and still get home without having to walk halfway across Boston.

Saw lots of folks, went to some panels, finally got a chance to play Star Fleet Battles, got hooked on Tsuro, hooked folks on various games (Chrononauts was a particularly popular choice), and now comes the post-con energy dump.

To sleep, perchance to catch up. Hooray for academic institution holiday policies!