My phone died a nasty little death a few days ago. At first, it just started dropping calls. Then it started turning itself off at random times. Finally, it wouldn’t turn on at all. This was a little distressing. Suddenly I was out of touch with Lime, who works on the other side of town. I was out of touch with the office, which is bad because there’s a tendency for news to reach me at the last minute. I was out of touch with anyone who didn’t send me an email. And, then again, in some ways, distressing wasn’t …
Category: GENERAL
Full of it.
Quote from Lime tonight: Me: Yeah, Andre Kim is pretty weird. Lime: Andre Kim is full of weird. I don’t know why, but I really do like that one. (For those abroad: He’s a scary fashion designer in Korea… apparently quite a nice guy, but he looks quite strange.)
AFM
AFM stands for A F___ing Meltdown. Both of my computer systems went bonkers today, which is strange, and is one of those little things that happens when you use a totally-free OS, I suppose. Ubuntu went mad on my laptop, though in that case, simply running the LiveCD fixed it, which sometimes happens in good old 5.10. But in version 6.10, something weirder’s going on. My DVD-ROM drive won’t even open once the system has started up, and I also had to put in some little file blocking part of the startup system, as outlined here. (Though, you might note, …
Curse the Cursive
Charles’ post on the slow death of cursive script brought back my own memories of remedial handwriting exercises. My teacher, Mrs. Bremner, discovered when I was in, oh, sixth grade that I was printing everything. So, since I was also completing all assignments in half the time it took anyone else in my class, she started assigning my handwriting practice. I couldn’t understand why print wasn’t good enough, and so I did the exercises with the same dedication with which one completes punishments consisting of the repeated writing of lines. If s looks like this, or like that, what does …
Alarums&c.
After a week of grading, and a week sick, I thought I’d ease myself back into exercise. Well, even so, it was rough. My heart was beating so hard after only ten minutes each on the treadmill and the stationary bicycle that the pounding in my chest was distorting my vision. That seems like a very bad sign to me, but anyway, it must be related to having been sick lately, as I didn’t push myself anywhere near as hard as I did last time. But I did take the hint, and call it a day. I shall go very …
Tweezer’d
If you don’t want to know about tweezers and nose hair, you might want to skip this one.
Only the Surface of Things
So my mother and I have this off-and-on discussion–it’s been going for years, and usually it works out to my main criticisms of New Age conceptions of the world being, well, arbitrarily descriptive without any rigorous demands for evidence, and my mom’s criticism of science is that it “only looks at the surface of things, and not the deeper levels”. Much as I love my Mom, this really frustrates me.
The Other Projects in My Folders…
My last post was about stories being tracked in my sidebar. But I have folders full of other stuff. Those other projects in my drafts box, I thought I’d mention just to keep myself honest, and to amuse those curious about what kinds of things I’m writing about. 4. Refugees (short story): A spooky response to the Fermi Paradox that starts with a sudden reception of a signal from a civilization about 1000 light years away, and gets compounded by the sudden, highly-visible, and (relatively) slow front of a wave of interstellar refugees through close visible space. 5. AI Ghost …
Flandersland
To those Canadians and other Commonwealthers among you, you might remember that today is Remembrance Day. I was explaining this to a Korean friend I met today, and I said, “You know, when they commemorate all the young men being shipped off to Europe and the Pacific and North Africa to die. There are gymnasiums full of Canadian kids right now, listening to speeches and explanations of the War.” And I wondered, to myself, whether some of the kids are thinking that the teachers and old guys are talking about Iraq. I certainly had no real idea which war was …
MissIzzy on Alan Turing
Miss Izzy’s thoughts on Alan Turing remind me of my own essay on the fellow, which for some reason was marked private for over a year. I’m not sure exactly why. UPDATE: On having read the Alan Turing essay, I think I know. There’s a little crackpottery near the end. I agree with it, but it does wax a little apocalypso. Ah well…