Dangling Conversations

On the dubious pleasures of rereading

Every now and then I'll pick up a series that I really liked when I was in high school. I should remember to stop doing that, because I'm almost always happier with the memories than the experience.

Right now I'm going through Jack Chalker's Quintara Marathon trilogy. There's a lot of things that I recall liking about Chalker when I was reading his stuff as a teenager: his use of diverse cultural and mythological elements, his ways of talking about technology, his depictions of different worlds. Neat ideas, neat plots, neat settings; these things make for decent space opera.

But the writing! His characters in this particular series have backgrounds that shift as the books go on, often flatly contradicting facts established at the very beginning. There's a lot of telling not showing as far as character traits go, and the way the story is set up means that there's a lot of decisions and discoveries that are repeated multiple times among multiple groups of characters... and it's not that interesting to read the third description of a tesseract in fifty pages, really.

What this probably means is that I need new, better fiction in my life; my recent spate of library borrowings have been almost entirely non-fiction, the lone exception being Patricia McKillip's lovely The Bell at Seeley Head. Suggestions, oh possibly imaginary readers?

A modest contention

Procol Harum's Conquistador, especially as performed with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, is perhaps the finest flowering of progressive rock.

That is all.

U3 vs. Portable Apps

Odds are you've got a USB memory key AKA thumb drive AKA memory stick. Odds are you only use it to shuffle around data. Fortunately, there are portable apps available now, designed to actually be run off of memory sticks, rather than being installed on a computer. In fact, there are two different formats avalable: PortableApps and U3.

Both of these platforms are Windows-centric, but the former does offer WINE compatiblity for those who are allergic to products from Redmond. The former seems to be limited to Open Source Software, though. The latter requires a specially formatted memory stick to be usable as such.

I'll let you know more after I try them both out.

Brett Spiel Welt

Brent and I were catching up over the holidays, and one thing that came up was how we used to like playing board games. No, not Monopoly--games like Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan. Turns out games in that vein are actually available for play at a German website: BrettSpielWelt.de. It's a web interface, but there's also a java client available which can cash content for you, so that you don't have to repeatedly reload images for games that you tend to play over and over again.

Old School Strat + Open Source = Wesnoth

Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty sweet old school single player strategy game, in the vein of games like Battle Isle, or the combat system for Civ, but with a fantasy motif, and plenty of campaigns for a single player to play it with.

The "official" campaigns range in difficulty, and many have selectable difficulties, which can be good, because it gives the campaigns some decent replay value.

The game scenarios are written in Wesnoth Markup Language, which makes the game very customizable.

All in all, excellent replay value, nice scalability, and excellent production values for open source.

Updated Xmas Stories

Updated Xmas stories.

4 Things

Four Jobs

Dishwasher (Golden Griddle)
Dickie Dee
Test Lead at Xbox Live
Senior Programmer at BioWare

Four Movies

Incredibles
Shrek
Gattaca
Shawshank Redemption

Four Places

Waterloo
Ottawa
Seattle
Edmonton

Four TV Shows

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
The Colbert Report
Mythbusters
Mantracker

Four Vacations

Florida
Algonquin Park
Hawaii
Banff

Four Websites

Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com)
Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com)
Order of the Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/ootslatest.html)
Megatokyo (http://www.megatokyo.com)

Four foods

Deviled eggs
Pecan Pie
Dark Chocolate
Bacon

Four Places

Visiting Friends
Australia
Italy
New Zealand

Four bloggers (might be a stretch...)

Sky
Lisa
Justyna
Nikita

4 Things

A little something...

Four jobs I�ve had in my life
youth counsellor
farm hand
business process re-engineer
product manager

Four movies I can watch over and over
White Christmas
Shrek
Sound Of Music
The Fifth Element

Four places I have lived
Orangeville, Ontario, Canada
New York, New York, USA
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Waterloo, Ontaio, Canada

Four TV shows I love to watch
(this is very hard for someone without a TV)
CSI
Firefly/Babylon 5/ST:TNG (and various other extinct sci-fi shows)
Discovery Channel
Music Videos (MTV, MuchMusic, VH1)

Four places I have been on vacation
Mardi Gras, New Orleans
Signal Hill, Newfoundland
Highlands Backpacking Trail, Algonquin
Cat's Pyjama's B&B, Lion's Head

Four websites I visit daily
Questionable Content
Jay Is Games
CNN
Travian

Four of my favorite foods
Pad Thai
BBQ T-bone steak and a baked potato with butter and sour cream
Pie (and other pastries)
Fruit (almost any kind)

Four places I would rather be right now
camping
someplace new/on an adventure
playing ultimate
anyplace with friends

Four bloggers I am tagging
Matt
Kael
Brent
Wendy

If you've been tagged, the only rules are you must answer the same questions, and you must tag 4 new bloggers.

Windows Vista: The Burning Questions

I've been having a hell of a time finding a good utility that was:

Free
Burns ISOs to CDs/DVDs
Isn't limited by ISO size

I already had Nero, but it doesn't work yet on a clean install of Windows Vista. (I'm running RC1 build 5728).

So I wrote my own utility. You can download it or get more information at : ISOBurn

Source is there as well if you want to play with it.

What I'm grooving on, 09/2006 edition

So consider this a resolution to put up at least one post a month in this space. Here's some stuff I've been listening to a lot recently.

Le Vent du Nord consists of four veterans of the traditional Quebecois folk-music scene. There's a fairly strong similarity with the maritime-celtic sound that became a Big Deal back ten years ago. I'm about 98.8% sure that these guys would be awesome in concert.
Every now and then I rediscover music in my collection that I haven't thought about for a while, and the most recent rediscovery is the Concrete Blonde back-catalogue. Fine stuff.
Kael's recently got me listening to the Killers' first album. (Or not so recently, I suppose, but the sampler he gave me back in June got lost in the shuffle.) The first four songs, for my money, are pretty much perfect; after that, I begin to get bored. I've only heard a remix of a song from the second album, so I don't know if they've shaken things up or not for the new release.
Listening to them both earlier tonight, I realised that the Decemberists' The Sporting Life has some strong musical commonalities with Adam Ant's Goody Two Shoes. The former song's been my introduction to the band, so I'm left with the question: are the Decemberists new-new-romantics?
The Impact is the Michigan State University student radio station, and it's pretty great. I find myself in range of their transmitters for almost an hour of my typical Long Drives, and I make a point of tuning in. One of the many songs I've discovered through them is Fred Jones part 2 by Ben Folds, which is possibly the saddest song I've heard all year. (It's also notable for featuring Special Guest Star: John McRae on harmony vocals. You might well think that the lead singer of Cake's voice is not particularly well-suited for blending with the voices of other humans, but he and Ben make it work quite well.)

Oh yeah

Today, in addition to being the birthday of one of the authors (hi Brent!), is the second bloggiversary of Dangling Conversations. Given that the front page still has posts from freakin' April on it, it's fair to say that the initial excitement has died down substantially.

Memory: still like a whatchamacallit.

Had it not been for a stray comment in Neil Gaiman's blog, I might never have realised that Susanna Clark, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, also wrote one of my favourite stories in the Sandman: Book of Dreams anthology. I haven't picked up the volume since shortly after the Great Flood in my apartment over six years ago, and while I remember the story (Stopp't-Clock Yard) vividly, I had nothing to hang the author's name on in my mind at the time.

(Looking in the book now, it turns out that I still sort of follow the authors of my other two favourite stories; I've been reading Steven Brust for quite some time, and John M. Ford is one of the posters on Making Light.)

Calgary

Lisa & I are in Banff for our 5th Anniversary. It is incredibly beautiful. We enjoyed the hot springs last night and wandered around town.

The real reason I'm posting however is on our way to Banff we went through Calgary and had lunch at James Joyce's Irish Pub downtown. The food we had there was amazing. Lisa had strawberries and brie on small pieces of toast (mmm mmm good). I had a lamb burger with pistachio nuts, bacon, blue cheese, and really good home cut fries. It was fantastic. Service was really good and the ambience was phenomenal. It's in a historic building and there was even a tour outside talking about the origins of the building. Anyway, could write more, but it is our anniversary :)

Math + A Capella

If you're a mathie, you'll like this.

If you're a music lover, you might like this.

If you belong to the intersection of those two sets, you'll likely howl at this.

[P.S. this is one of those cases where I wish I could double categorize a post.]

Block thing walking

Via Good Math, Bad Math: want a screen-saver that leans how to walk? My fellow OS X users should check out breveCreatures, developed in an A-Life simulation package called breve.

It's an evolutionary simulation: twenty-five critters made out of between two and many blocks (I've never seen one with more than eleven parts) are dropped onto a featureless plane, and each one in turn tries to walk (or, well, perambulate). Success is defined as maximum distance from the starting point; the more successful critters breed to populate the next generation, the less succcessful die out. Pretty standard genetic-algorithms type stuff.

The soon-to-be-released game Spore that Blue wrote about a while ago plays around with evolutionary ideas, but (from what I've read) does so in a particularly unscientific way. It's got player-designed organisms and a "march of progress" from simple aquatic creatures to planetary civilizations; those are great for a strategy game, but pretty much entirely against the spirit of the modern understanding of evolution. breveCreatures functions nicely as a demonstration of those same principles.

Is your home wired enough?

Your laundry machines beg to differ.

(From wired.com)

Airplane Boarding Algorithms

Ever wonder what the most efficient algorithm is for arranging passengers boarding an airplane? You're not alone! This paper is a mathematical analysis of the topic of airplane boarding algorithms. Well, two of them.

Nice Bed

I try not to talk about $WORK[0] on here anymore, and this sort of qualifies, but in an interesting way.

And I love the 2001 reference.

[x-posted to my LJ.]

The final frontier

It's been a day of picking up keys: I'm moving offices (this weekend) and moving house (over the next few weeks), and I've been given access to both of my new spaces today.

I've therefore spent an inordinate portion of my waking hours today wandering around in empty rooms, sometimes clutching a tape-measure, and envisioning things. The actual process of moving will be kind of arduous, but right now the sense of possibility is making me happy.

Let there be no more doubt about where I stand on the Judging/Perceiving axis: P all the way, baby.

(I'll post a link to photos once I've uploaded them. I'm using the cheapest damn digital camera money can buy --- it's like the Polaroid 600 of digital cameras --- so don't expect much.)

My Day Isn't Over Yet

Well, the server is back up. It appears the primary machine has suffered either a motherboard or power supply failure. Thankfully I do have backup hardware, just took a bit to copy stuff over and reconfigure it for the other machine.

I'm still tweaking some config stuff, but everything ought to be a go at this point.

This has been a culmination of a day where a vast amount of unlikely events have occurred in the span of just 12 hours.