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GRAFFITI -- August 16, 2010 thru August 22, 2010>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
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August 16, 2010
Wait for it ....
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August 17, 2010
2132 - Good evening. The trials of post-vacation existence: Molly's sick, so is Marcia. I came home early, picking up medicine for Molly on the way, and minded the dogs (after cleaning up Molly's messes) so that Marcia could rest this afternoon. Hopefully everyone's now on the mend (and hopefully I steer clear of all the problems, myself).
I posted some pictures of the Paris trip up on Flickr. They're also on Facebook, but I can't find a way to share them without forcing you to login to that, so I set up a Flikr account for the purpose. The 18 pictures there are selections from the over 1100 pictures I took with the little Nikon Coolpix L20. It's a very handy and inexpensive camera, but I think I may bust for a real camera one of these days - I'd really like to have a lot more, and better quality pictures, but it's hard in the lighting conditions that prevailed during much of our trip.
Okay, back to taking care of my girls. Ciao!
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August 18, 2010
2119 - Marcia's feeling a bit better. So is Molly, we think. I ran her back to the vet's (Molly, not Marcia) for a quick visit to ensure that all was well - she's an old dog, after all.
I'm greatly amused </sarcasm> by the latest missive from Verizon:
From time to time channel lineup changes are necessary to improve our content offerings.
So I click the link to see what "improvements" are in store.
If you ordered the FiOS TV Extreme HD package prior to January 17, 2010, the channels below will no longer be available in your TV package.
[[ Followed by a list of ten stations no longer carried by Verizon/FiOS ]]
Now that may be an "improvement", after all, I don't think I've ever watched World Fishing Network, or any of the others being removed from play. But it's hard to spin "removing" as improvement. I could see replacing them with useful stations as such, but that wasn't what was going on. Just "we offer less, but we'll charge you the same" - that's how I read it.
I've been enjoying Jason Charles Miller's You Get What You Pay For, a song that featured in the third season of True Blood. The link? Felicia Day. Jason Charles Miller wrote the music for The Guild's new music Video: Game On You can also see Jason in Game On, as the "Surprised Thug".
Hmmm, still tasks to take on, better get back to the list. Ciao!
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August 19, 2010
No Post....
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August 20, 2010
No Post.....
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August 21, 2010
2124 - Marcia's on the mend, we think, and so is Molly, more or less. All of that, plus catching up with two weeks of yardwork has taken up considerable resources, though, so I apologize for my unseemly absence.
My brief today is eBooks. I don't buy them. Seriously. I read a great review of Scalzi's The God Engines the other day, thanks to a tweet from @scalzi himself. My very first thought, since I have Stanza, iBooks, and the Kindle app on my iPhone, was this: "I can be reading this book in about 15 seconds. That is so freaking cool." Then I had second and third thoughts - do I trust eBooks? I'm perhaps one of the last people you'd suspect of harboring such luddist tendencies, but there you are. If I buy an eBook, and load it onto my iPhone, I can read it there, yeah? Okay, then I drop, or break the phone, or something. Can I download it again? Maybe, eh? That's by the grace of the vendor. No promises, no remorse. I imagine that folks like Baen, Tor and O'Reilly are probably there for me ... as long as they're there. But at what point does Amazon see an increasing quarterly profit in reselling (for a discount, naturellement) books that people have purchased and lost track of, one way or another. I've never lost track of a printed book.
Well, that's not precisely true. But, unlike a lost collection of bits that once constituted an eBook, I'm quite certain that nearly every book I have lost track of is out there being read and enjoyed, at least occasionally. Several copies of Silverlock, for example, are irretrievably not mine anymore, while still bringing joy and tears and laughter to others. Asimov, Heinlein, Pratchett, McDonald, and many other works committed to dead tree pulp have passed through my hands and on to others. Mostly that's either difficult, impossible, or against some law to do with an eBook. Frankly, that pisses me off more than the potential "loss" issue. Books and knowledge are to be shared, and eBooks mostly break that long, long tradition.
* * *
I don't do online banking, either. Funny, that. I won't buy eBooks because I can't share, and I won't do online bill-pay because I'm concerned that I might accidentally share. Hmmmm. I did buy The God Engines, though, in the dead tree edition. I'll have it in my hands real soon now.
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August 22, 2010
1109 - Leo Laporte said, "Bye-bye Google Buzz..." on Twitter, in support of this blog post: Buzz Kill. He wraps up with this:
Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.
I think that Leo is overreacting, possibly because he started choosing to treat Social Media venues as something they weren't, and won't be. What they are is impermanent, like conversations. Remember that, I'll come back to it. In the era before Web 2.0 and Social Media, blog posts had to cover all the bases. From long, well thought out pieces to what the cat had for breakfast. I'll admit to more of the latter (metaphorically speaking) than the former, around here. Now, trivia goes in the trivial place: Social Media sites. This post, too, is trivia, but it's meta-trivia, and it's longer than two or three sentences, so I'm giving it play here, where it belongs.
So, I say it here: Social Media is built of conversations, not designed for the ages. Now, some of them may live a long time (or even forever, in the Internet Archive or the Goog's caching servers), but I treat them like I treat my memory of what I said to someone at lunch last week: unimportant to remember unless I've committed to something, in which case I write it down. Posting here (and backing it up) is "writing it down".
Facebook is a conversation pit with your friends. Twitter is a conversation in a crowd, where everyone has a megaphone. The latter is particularly well-suited to pointing people at interesting things, which why I follow Leo, Tim, Mitch, and others. I don't look for stuff to learn on Twitter. I look for pointers to stuff to learn. And short jokes. The Google tools? I've poked at them, but they always (or mostly, anyway) seem to be oriented towards developers. I seriously think they need to do more stuff like Gmail, which just worked for normal folks right from the beginning. When they enter the Social Media scene, they need to make it clear what paradigm they're following: permanence or ephemeral conversation.
Back later...
2217 - I'm back. I got a few things done: I made a deep dent in the stack of magazines and journals that have been piling up. I wailed and mourned the remnants of our garden - the tomatoes have mostly succumbed to blight, sigh. And I got to spend a bit of time playing Half Life 2 with a portal gun. Mostly it's new and interesting ways to die, though. Hey, I also caught Jeff Lewis's routine from Blizzcon a couple of years back, thanks to YouTube:
Hey! (Thank you) How is high school like World of Warcraft? You start off weak, and everyone beats you up every day. You go away, then come back with a sword and kill everyone. (Thank you)
Heh.
Our condolences to the families and units of the eleven fallen warriors reported by DoD this week.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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