Today at the gym I finished my current book the
Alexlit eBook of The Wild Blue and the Gray by William Sanders. After
spending so long on A Fire Upon the Deep, I’ve read
this and Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom in something like 10 days. I actually
preferred the Sanders to the Doctorow. This book is right up my alley
– the tale of the only Cherokee pilot flying for the Confederate
States of America in World War I. I have actually always enjoyed that
era of aviation, loving stories of Eddie Rickenbacker and the Red
Baron. I don’t know why, but I do. One of my favorite games of all
time was Ace of Aces
from Nova Games. Sanders did a nice job of showing how the pilots life
differed dramatically from that of the doughboys on the ground with
several harrowing scenes of Amos Ninekiller on the ground following
crashes. It is a read that I highly recommend.
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I remarked recently that dealing with all these aggregation tools,
Bayesian filters, machine learning, RSS feeds, object persistence and self-organization and such was making my
head hurt. “I feel like John Nash, only not nearly as smart” is how I
put it. It seems like I am near the breakthough epiphany point on a
lot of this but just shy enough of it to feel frustrated a lot. I also
feel like I am one tiny insight from turning all of this from a mess
of unafilliated data feeds and disjoint tools into one solid, lean
mean data organizing machine. Think of it as a “federated system”,
where the various data streams in and out of my knowledge sphere are
somehow tagged, remembered, correlated, indexed and otherwise
organized such that what I need to know is always at my
fingertips. Even better, the things I need to know but didn’t know I
needed are there too. Data streams would not be segregated by protocol
(SMTP, NNTP, IM, HTTP) but by their intrinsic semantics – things about
science fiction, things about computers, things about my friends. What
an infotopia this would be!
For now, I address it with POPFilter, Zoe, CRM114, my newsfilter
scripts, Eudora filters, MT-Newswatcher filters, and all the of the
independent and unafilliated ways I try to get a handle on this stuff
that is bombarding me.
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In what is really unusual and sure to make the heads of Bulldog fans
explode, UGA’s
basketball team pulls out of the post-season. I can’t say I care
too much about them, but a key phrase jumps out at me every time I
hear it: “suspended with pay.” What I want to know is how I can get in
on this deal – screw up really badly, disgrace myself and my employer,
and then get a paid vacation. If I could think of an infraction that
would get me suspended with pay, I’d be getting right on that.
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Delivering a speech at Tufts University, George Bush Sr. seemed to be
delivering a message to his son about about
declaring war on Iraq. This link came via Boing-Boing.