General

Browsing the CNN web, came across this interview with Gerald McRaney, who used to play the brother with the moustache on “Simon & Simon”. And he says this about the actors in his current series, “Deadwood” (never seen it), who try to put some human imperfections into their acting to make it seem more real: Showing a touch of the poet himself, McRaney compares [series creator David] Milch to “one of those great Arab carpet-weavers who purposely will weave imperfections in, because only God is perfect.” ...

This morning while working on a report, the gal with whom I was working looked at another woman walking by with a doughnut and a Diet Coke. She couldn’t believe that’s what they were having for breakfast! Since that’s exactly what I was having for breakfast, I asked why she hadn’t said the same about mine. “Well, you’re unique. I mean, we’re all unique - but you’re unique in a different way.” ...

We have severe problems with e-mail at work. We use Outlook 2000. Named not for the year it came out, but for how much mail you can have before Outlook sticks a revolver in its mouth and pulls the trigger. Pass 2000 megabytes of mail, and it’s gone. Corrupted. Without a hope of retrieval, unless you use two Microsoft tools to fix it - the first whacks several megabytes of mail from the end of your monolithic message file, the other heals the wounds THAT caused and makes it usable, until the next time that person passes the limit. ...

A long long LONG time ago… like half the rest of the world, I was crazy about virtual pets. My favorite? Rakuraku Dinokun (or Friendly Little Dino). My old blog from around 1996-2000, Penultimatum, was disappeared (and the domain name stolen, STOLEN, by someone else!), but the Internet Archive had bits and pieces… including some of my painstakingly hand-drawn and animated scenes from a Dinokun’s life. Some of these live on in other people’s pages… I made these on a Macintosh. I hadn’t yet used a PC… ...

Lack of updates; must be something exciting happening in my life? Not really! Just very busy; my boss is in Bali for two months and I am very busy at work… where I used to find time to blog a little each day. I have this blog completely imported into a new, shinier, Wordpress body on Baph, my Linux machine at home. The people who host THIS blog use Linux as well, so it should be (I hope) fairly simple to bring it over. The default theme is yucky. ...

My son is well again, I’m not sick anymore, my daughter is preggers. It’s a warm San Diego Saturday afternoon. Cat’s off his medicine. The apartment is clean, shopping is done. We went out and saw a good movie (“Thank You For Smoking”). Finished the two songs in Guitar Hero that was keeping me from the final set of five in the game on hard. Few enough days are really good ones, but this is one of them.

I have been thinking all day about that theory that states that humanity faces a crisis within the next two hundred years, based on the sheer improbability of us being born in such a time of change, with all the millions of relatively stable years behind us and, if there is no catastrophe awaiting us, the millions of stable years ahead. I’d love to remember where I read that; it sounds Greg Egan-ish. I remember thinking it was silly when I first read it. That every year in every age was a time of great change, but the perspective of history makes it look stabler than it was. ...

I added House of Fame, the Geoffrey Chaucer blog, to the sidebar; it’s hilarious. Thinking of changing blog software. I went with Simple PHP Blog because it was… simple… simple enough for me to host and install it myself… but it looks so primitive compared to the other blogs I see. I am thinking about trading up. I still can’t figure Wordpress out. I can get it to run fine, sure, but to make it look like I want it to look… question marks over my head…

I was about fifty/fifty on whether or not to log into EQ1 or WoW and raid last night; the coin came down EQ1, and so I logged in and made my extremely slow way to the Demiplane of Blood. This is the most cleric-unfriendly zone in the game; to get there safely, a good invis and a nice lev is vital. Sure, I have “cleric invis” - my 18 seconds of invulnerability - and I have used that when invis wore off at a bad time. ...

Was just surfing, and came across mention of China’s government-sanctioned Linux distro, Red Flag Linux. It has the cutest logo ever… but I wonder how they reconcile the freedom and openness signified by Tux, the Linux Penguin, with the oppressive communist regime of the PRC? It’s a bloggy kind of day, I guess. Prince Harry of Jolly Old England graduated from military academy today. He may be sent to the front lines, he may be kidnapped and held ransom, who really knows? With a life so scripted that his girlfriend, arriving from Africa, is scheduled to be cross with him about his going to a strip club (between 3:45 and 3:55 British Summer Time, after a formal tea, with five minutes scheduled for rebuttal), I wonder if he really will have a chance to actually die for his country. ...