I’ve been offline all day because of malware on my office computer. Thanks for putting pron links on my work desktop, malware writers!
Randomness for 12/3
Standard1) “Climategate:” Not as damning as certain people would like.
2) My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement Former front man for the band Too Much Joy jousts with a major label over royalty statements. Much more interesting than it sounds.
3) NFL creates more stringent rules to prevent players from going back into games with concussions. Which is great and all, but it doesn’t tempt me to watch again.
4) I wish I understood why the NY Times included this as the second sentence in this article: “She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.” Maybe it’s a valuable piece of information in an article about a new bill in the French parliament that would require all retouched photo to be labeled as such. Maybe they wanted to deflect accusations that the politician was just a jealous fatso who should get to the gym. Maybe the writer couldn’t write a story about fashion and women’s bodies without taking careful note of who has an approved body type and who doesn’t. It just seems unprofessional to me.
Guh!
StandardIt turns out that Joshua Jackson has been cast as Captain Foster in the feature film adaptation of the British SF TV show UFO. No word yet on who will be cast as the ultra-fashionable but mean as hell Commander Straker.
And yeah, that sound you hear is me falling over like I’ve been punched in the gut.
Joshua Jackson! In an Interceptor! You know he won’t be stuck with that one stupid missile on the front of his ship. Mr. TV Star is going to have, like, ten!
And he’s going to slide feet-first through an opening in the wall to board his space ship, and I never, ever will. The bastard. I wonder if I can sneak onto the set.
Randomness for 12/2
Standard1) Perils of translation: Emailed out-of-office autoreply text from translator used on road sign.
2) Seductive monsters, Batman-style. Has to be seen to be believed. The “best” part is that this is part of a villain’s origin story.
4) The NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. No, I’m not going to read it, either. I loaded the page, “control f” searched for my name, and of course found nothing. Now I’m done with the list.
5) Cormac McCarthy donates his typewriter to charitable auction. The most amusing part is that the dealer handling the auction thinks it’s astonishing that McCarthy wrote all that fiction on such a primitive machine. Someone should explain to him that it’s the machine in McCarthy’s head that did the real work.
6) Celestial Soul Portraits. The perfect gift for your most hated enemy. via tnh’s Particles.
7) Maureen Dowd in a telling misstatement: “Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power.” A quick note for Ms. Dowd: Barack Obama didn’t crash a thing. He was invited by the only people empowered to give out invitations.
SETI@home and recipe contest followup
StandardAs a followup to the previous post about a guy fired for loading SETI@home, apparently, he’d done other things as well, such as “bring home” 18 computers, download pron at work, and claim to have done work he hadn’t done.
So, it’s not the wacky story the idiotic cnet writer made it out to be.
Also, we ate the T-Day leftover empanadas from the recipe contest for dinner on Monday. Verdict: we liked it! The next time I make them, I’ll cut the salt in half for the pastry–it was a little thirst-inducing. Least favorite for everyone was the bacon and cheddar mix. The favorite was different for each, with the boy liking the gravy best, and my wife and I favoring the cranberry.
Yeah, I’ll be making them again.
You know how your read an article that makes you want to slug the writer in the gut?
StandardYeah, you know. But aside from the ignorant and infuriating he-wanted-to-talk-to-Klingons! tone of the article, the author reports a claim (without checking it, obviously, since that would have required work) that startled me.
Let me back up for those who didn’t want to click the link. The article reports that the Higley Unified School District asked an employee to resign after he installed SETI@home on all the district computers. More backing up: SETI@home is a program that uses idle time on your computer to scan radio signals for signs of alien communication.
This is what caught my eye: “And his alleged downloading of alien-hunting software might well have used additional energy resources and caused other related damage or accelerated depreciation to the hardware. The school district estimates these losses at between $1.2 million and $1.6 million.”
Over a million dollars, maybe up to a mil and a half, just for SETI@home? Is that fair or complete bullshit?
Suspect shot
StandardI haven’t been online all that much for the last few days, but the news here has been filled with stories of the four murdered police officers in Lakewood (a suburb of Tacoma). Coming hard on the murder of a Seattle police officer on Halloween night, it’s a tough time to be an officer of the peace in the northwest.
The suspect in that Halloween shooting was killed by police while the cop’s funeral was going on. Maurice Clemmons, the troubled Arkansas man who was the leading suspect in the shooting, was also shot and killed by a police officer investigating a stolen car early this morning. Early reports indicate he was carrying a gun taken from one of the officers who were murdered, but I’ll wait to hear if that’s confirmed.
I hope they got the right guy, and I hope the inevitable questions of “How could this have been avoided?” don’t run rampant. I sympathize with Mike Huckabee (for one of the first times ever) for the way “Governor frees convict who goes out to shoot cops” meme has been spreading. I sympathize with the Washington state government officials who only allow a suspect to be held without bail in capital crimes. Both tried to do the right thing, and no one has a crystal ball.
But we still have a chance to do the right thing here. Those four officers left behind 9 kids between them. You can donate to help support those families through the donate button on that page (which should be larger and more visible) or you can mail in a gift. Checks should be made out to the LPIG Benevolent Fund at P.O. Box 99579, Lakewood, WA 98499.
Reviews of Child of Fire, part six
StandardBlack Friday Non-Shopping and Leftover Contest Winner (Exclamation point!)
StandardAnd the winner is…
(drumroll)
Continue reading
Book too short?
StandardI don’t often give out writing advice here on my blog (seems pretty presumptuous at this point in my career[1]) but on message boards you can’t shut me up. So instead of writing something original this morning, I’m going to link to a post I made for people who find they need to add plot to a novel that came out too short in the first draft.
Feel free to tell me I’m wrong, there or here, or offer additional ideas.
[1] Holy crap I just called it a career.