Funk Babblings

This weekend we'll be heading to Columbus for Marcon. Every year at Marcon I end up buying a pile of books, usually stuff that's hard to find locally, and often rare or out of print stuff. Last year's take included my first real effort to get into graphic novels beyond Sandman.

( And also Elric... )

( My fictional influences )

So, all those people who backed up their livejournals when they heard about the sale to Six Apart may have had the right idea after all, even if it was for the wrong reason.

Slashdot had some comments on the LJ outage, including some Informative comments from LJ admins bradfitz and denisep/rahaeli. My favorite comment there (among many funny ones):

A great disturbance in the Force... (Score:5, Funny)
... as if millions of teenage girls suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I'm on the MadCow cluster, so I had to wait until this afternoon to exist again on LJ, while most people came back last night. I survived by anonymously sucking on my friends' friends lists, and luckily didn't need to gnaw my own keyboard off. (OK, actually we had a great visit with a friend last night.)

Around the time that LJ went down Friday, I got a brief firsthand look at some real-life downtime. ( Read more... )

Every geek who knows what the title refers to will appreciate this song by Jonathan Coulton called "Mandelbrot Set".

It's better if you listen before reading the lyrics, but somehow the line that really cracked me up was "You're one badass fucking fractal".

Last time I was this amused at a song was when I heard Me First And The Gimme Gimmes doing "Rainbow Connection".


BTW, this is one of my new discoveries via the IndieFeed Alternative/Modern Rock podcast.

Remember when I mentioned that there would be a lawsuit about the Ohio vote?

Now you can go read the 93-page lawsuit, and the related motion for injunction against the Electors submitting their votes.
Or go read a summary at dKos.

The detailed allegations include both "traditional" methods of vote fraud, and new methods using electronic voting and vote-counting machines. The bottom line is that according to these calculations, Kerry should have won Ohio by at least 142,537 votes, rather than losing it by 119,000.

I doubt this will actually change the Ohio result (Eris will be busy if it does), but there's a thin sliver of hope here. At the very least it will publicize the major problems we had this year, and is likely to begin Ken Blackwell's downfall.

It's impossible to keep any flat space in my study free of papers for longer than a few days. At times it gets ridiculous.

When I replaced my CRT with an LCD monitor last year, I was excited to gain a lot of space on my desk. But now all that space is filled with papers and other oddments. No more empty space there.

Whenever I have my laptop docked and closed on my desk for more than a couple days, I end up putting papers on top of that, which of course means I need to move things when I finally want to use it again. (And if I ever moved the portable dock from my desk, the laptop would soon be forced out of its designated deskspace.)

When we moved into our previous house, I bought a cheap drawing desk, complete with tilting surface. I kept it up at an angle, but it still gathered a pile of papers thick enough that I never used it for drawing. When we moved and it started over empty again, the same thing happened -- even faster and thicker this time since I left it flat. I finally gave up and moved the pile to a little TV tray, and the desk to the basement, so I could at least gain some floor space.

My flatbed scanner has a nice big flat surface on the lid.... so there are now three different piles of paper on it. (OK, it's at a disadvantage being next to the printer.) This makes life interesting when I actually want to scan something.

Even my shelved books aren't safe. I have two bookshelves in this room, and both of them have things piled on the top row of books.

At some point I think some sort of flatspace preservation society might want to come in and take over.

Recently our local pagan group has had quite a bit of discord. In their efforts to bring harmony, some in the group equated that discord to chaos, and equated chaos with evil. The following is based on my response to those opinions. I'm interested in what others think of these things. ( Read more... )