I’m blogging at work
There’s nothing to do
I’m normally busy
At half after two
But everyone’s gone
No one is calling
With system errors
Or programs stalling
In my server room
Green lights are flashing
No software errors
Or hardware crashing
So my gear’s packed up
I’m ready to leave
’cause no work gets done
On Thanksgiving Eve
So I realized this week that I have yet to really pimp any of the sites on my link list. My “Friends of the Program” list is comprised of the works of a fine group of folks with whom I have had the pleasure of conversing and sharing thoughts. I don’t really feature sites on my main page very often - mainly because I don’t want to leave anyone out. So I’m going to take this opportunity to briefly highlight these fine writers.
Insignificant Thoughts - This is the fine weblog of Vincent (Vinny) Ferrari. Vinny was the first person to link to Voodootime over a year and a half ago. Vinny is a relatively new convert to conservatism, and his site covers mainly political topics with a right-sided slant. His comments sections are more lively than most chat rooms though, as folks from both sides engage in debate over today’s more controversial topics. Vinny is a good guy and tolerates my political views stinking up his site. Well worth a daily read regardless of your politics!
Blue Goo Ate My Mom - This intriguingly named site is a peek into the mind of Troy D’Hondt. I don’t remember how I found Troy’s site, but I linked it shortly after. Troy doesn’t get to blog as often as he’d like anymore, but when he does, it’s an honest look into a genuinely good person. By the way, as far as I know, blue goo has not, in fact, eaten Troy’s mom.
Ministry of Squeaky Music - Actually mskoog.com, the blog of my friend and former co-worker, Mike. We worked together at a company that no longer exists; having more fun than we should have, playing with expensive technology. Mike is a proud cynic and connoisseur of all things weird. If it makes “normal” people twitch, he’s into it. I have dubbed him the Minister of Squeaky Music because of his penchant for multi-layered electronica and trance.
Analog Duck - I met the Duck through Mike some time ago. His blog (aptly-named AnaBlog Duck) is a great brain dump of the technical miscellany and arcana that he runs across daily in his work. If you’re in information tecnology, you’re sure to find an interesting tip in there somewhere. The Duck occassionally posts a bit of politics as well. I think he’s been a bit busy lately, so the posts have slowed a bit, but I imagine he’ll be back.
Serene Chaos - I found Rebecca in Troy’s links. She runs a fun site that captures the musings of a college freshman. This is someone who’s not afraid to tell the entire Internet about her goofs and embarrassing moments. Really good stuff.
Life With a Geek - “The lamentations of a geek’s wife” chronicles Gesikah’s ongoing conversion to geekdom, prompted by her techie husband. At the moment, she’s blogging the trials and tribulations of first-time home ownership. It almost makes me want to live in an apartment forever.
Digital Skunk - Actually titled “Intangibles in Decrescendo”, this is the world of Obigabu. We ran into each other at Troy’s site in a disagreement about religion, but found we have more in common than that. Like me, Obigabu has recommitted himself to blogging, but with the admirable goal of once a day, at least seven words. He’s back in form, and well worth a visit.
Chapel Perilous - This site is officially about all things paranormal and esoteric, but is much more than that. It’s Beastie’s baby, but it’s also a collaborative effort, with something like 15 members who post there. I’m proud to be a part of it. The Chapel is one of the more unique stops you’ll make on the Web. if you’re not visiting daily, you should. Be warned - sometimes there are boobie pictures on the page, so wait ’til you get off work.
Chapel Furnace - “The political wing of Chapel Perilous” started in an effort to remove the more divisive political topics from Chapel Perilous. The Furnace features a great mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives in a battle of wits and ideas. If you comment here, make sure to do your homework first, or someone will call you on it.
Caiterwauling - Politics and kitties. Don’t let the cute pictures fool you, Cait is an ornery Texan (a regular contributer to the Furnace as well). Once you visit once, you’ll come back. The cats will hypnotize you…
So, go check them out. All of them. Right now. I’ll wait.
I found a link at FARK with some suggestions for the ways in which nanotechnology may modify and enhance the human body in the future. Nanotechnology is the science of building electromechanical devices on the molecular or atomic level. The idea is that atoms could be coaxed into specific shapes and aligned in such a way that these molecular components work together in a mechanical fashion. The result - teeny tiny robots. A single drop of water could contain hundreds of billions of complex atomic robots. I wrote a little about this possibility in a post back in June 2002.
With sufficient sophistication, the applications of nanotech are unlimited. Nanorobots could be developed to deliver medicine, or even make repairs at the cellular level. This has amazing promise for all kinds of disorders from cancer to sickle cell anemia. But the technology need not be limited to medicine. As the technology matures in the coming decades, I believe the “killer app” will be physical enhancement. Nanotechnology could heighten our senses, strengthen our muscles, or improve our memory. I, for one, could use a few mods. X-ray vision might be useful. I also wouldn’t mind some kind of reinforced stomach lining for meals at Taco Bell.
The idea of fleets of nanorobots floating through our bodies is a little disconcerting, but I think the merging of humanity with technology is inevitable. This idea is nothing new. In the 1970s the future was bionics. In the 80s and 90s, science-fiction foresaw the rise of the cyborg - a human merged with machinery. The idea of nanotechnology is not much different fundamentally. I say the sooner we’re all crawling with little tiny droids the better.
There are 1.67 sextillion (1,670,000,000,000,000,000,000) H2O molecules in a single drop of water.
When threatened by a predator, an emu will spontaneously shed several hundred feathers in an effort to distract its pursuer.
My wife and I recently got cable TV hooked up in our new apartment. I’m not a big watcher of TV generally, but my wife would divorce me if I didn’t order it. And I concede that I would eventually miss Food Network and the History Channel before too long. I’m a fan of edutainment television. I figure if I’m going to lie down on the couch, staring slack-jawed into the blinking lights, I might as well be learning something. I really don’t have much use for network television anymore. There is rarely anything worthwhile on the networks. I would cancel all the local channels, but my wife would divorce me… and then kill me.
We had cable TV at our old apartment too, but it was a pretty basic package. Not counting all of the foreign language channels, sports channels, home shopping, and all those channels that show nothing but reruns of Law & Order all day long, there were only a handful of channels worth spending any time on at all. In our new place, we got a better package. It includes about a thousand channels and requires a hefty remote control with many multi-colored buttons that I’m afraid to press for fear that I may accidentally order a $10 pay-per-view porno movie.
Honey, it was an accident! I was confused… Honestly!
So when we got hooked up, I decided to take a tour of the channel lineup by just clicking the + button that scans through the channels. It took about half an hour to roll over back to Channel 2. At first I thought that was pretty cool. More channels = more choices, non? I’ve since come to realize it’s not as cool as I’d previously imagined. There’s too much stuff on all the time. It’s like walking into the ice cream shop and choosing a flavor. By choosing one, you miss out on all the others. So sometimes I find myself agonizing for several minutes before finally committing to a program. This whole TV thing was much easier when my choices were chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.
Anyway, I have to go now. I want to make sure I’m not missing anything good on the other 999 channels.
Bye for now.
So I mentioned ants in my previous post. As it turns out, our new apartment is loaded with them. They live in the kitchen, or more likely under it. We’d been living in ignorance of them for most of the week until we set out a bunch of bananas on the counter one afternoon. The next day, our kitchen was covered in ants. They were trying to carry the bananas away on their little backs, and I think some of them were even working together trying to open the refrigerator door.
Neither my wife nor I have a real problem with ants per se. If we see a few around, we generally leave them alone. Unfortunately, where there are one or two ants, thousands lie in wait just below the surface. If they would just live in happy little families of four or five, I’d be cool with them. But living with ants is like living with all of Manhattan under your sink. And once they start getting into everything, the vermin must die. But being as we had just moved in, we had nothing handy that even nearly resembled bug spray. The previous tenants had left behind some spray starch (who uses starch anymore?), so I hosed them down with spray starch. It worked. (Though later experimentation proved that almost any chemical sprayed in sufficient quantities will do the job.) That not only killed the ants, but left them frozen in place across our counters and cabinetry. The scene was reminiscent of some kind of myrmecological Pompeii in the wake of Vesuvius. My wife wiped them off with a paper towel. I wanted to leave them there as a warning to others.
Instead we bought some ant bait. The idea behind this is that it smells and tastes like something ants like to eat, so they swarm all over the stuff, and take it back to the nest to share with the group. Only, the joke’s on them because it’s made of poison! Anyway, they jumped on that like a hobo at Thanksgiving dinner. At first I kind of felt bad for tricking them like that, but I got over it. It’s really stupid when you think about it. What if you were walking around and found a triple-scoop ice cream sundae on the ground? Would you eat it?
This kind of thing is precisely why humans don’t typically eat random stuff they find laying around on the ground - with the exception of mushrooms, which are close enough to poison as far as I’m concerned. Things that only grow directly on top of moist dead things do not have any business in my mouth.
Bye for now.
As I mentioned here previously, my wife and I have moved into a new apartment. This was the primary driving influence behind my recent hiatus, and I took off last week from work in order to commit as much time as possible to getting us moved out. Ordinarily this would have been plenty of time. But this time there was a hitch. Our old apartment is in the small foothill town of Stevenson Ranch, CA. Perhaps you’ve heard of it in the news lately.
Everything we own smells of smoke, and I have probably inhaled more particulate matter in the past week than is wise or healthy. If you’ve never been that close to a major fire, it’s hard to explain the density and pervasiveness of the smoke. It is absolutely everywhere. Keeping the doors and windows shut and the air conditioning on worked pretty well for most of the first day. After that, the inside started to smell more like outside. At first, it smelled almost pleasantly like a fireplace, then like a bonfire. Then as the fire came closer it began to take on a scent that was just unnerving - as the sweet smell of wood fire gradually gave way to a heavy odor of danger. It’s a smell that makes one feel instinctively like it’s about time to get the hell out of Dodge.
On the second day, the fire crested the hills above our building. It was more than a little unreal to watch the fire line coming down the mountain in the evening. It came down in a long glowing orange dividing line between the sage color before it, and the black behind it. It looked strangely like the way the lit end of a cigar creeps slowly toward your lips as you smoke it. Late that afternoon, the light changed. Everything turned orange - illuminated by the pumpkin glow of the smoke-obscured sun. It’s something you have to see to really appreciate. We took a few pictures during the move, and I’ll post them if they come out.
The whole time, ash was raining down like snow. I know that analogy is pretty cliché, but it really does look that way. It gets caught up in the wind and floats down in the same way snow does in a flurry. I considered trying to catch some on my tongue, but thought better of it before it was too late. Like the smoke, the ash is completely omnipresent. It collects on any horizontal surface in no time at all. It is down your shirt and under your hat. It is in your nose, in your mouth and often in your eyes. It’s in your carpet, and in your food. It’s probably still in my lungs tearing apart my delicate tissues. Is it normal to cough blood?
The Stevenson Ranch fire ended well - as far as things like that “go well”. There were no mandatory evacuations, even at the height of the action. Most of the flammable brush has burned away, and no homes were lost. Many other communities were not as fortunate. Regardless, we’re out of there now. Since we moved to a nice place closer to the coast and away from mountains and brush, hopefully we won’t have to go through that kind of thing again. We have a new nemesis at our new place. Ants. I’ll be telling you about them soon, I’m sure.
Bye for now.
Well, here it is November 3rd, and I’m back from my little AFK. I feel recharged and ready to write some fun stuff. We’ll see how that goes.
Enjoy the new random counter at the top of the page. I figured the newscasters are probably using random fire containment numbers anyway, so mine should be at least as accurate.
Anyway, thanks for coming back, and I’ll be seeing you around - hopefully more often than before…
