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Here’s some of the links that I’ve been hoarding. Most were ones that
someone on Dueling Modems, SFF.net or Usenet posted and I thought they
were interesting enough to save.

Here is a link to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about White
House Officials putting pressure on the intelligence community
to
achieve the answers they want about Iraq.

Here is an
interview
from The Guardian with UN weapons inspector Scott
Ritter about why we know that Iraq is not near to creating nuclear
weapons. He goes out of his way to point out that Iraq are not
honorable, or that they are not desirous of weapons of mass
destruction, just that we know that they couldn’t have rebuilt in the
4 years since inspectors left without leaving tracks the intelligence
community could trace.

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I’ve been building up links that I wanted to put in this blog on my
Mac, but didn’t have a simple way to get them elsewhere. The easiest
way would have been to mail it to myself so I could read them on other
boxes. However, that has been problematic.

Here’s my mail system. I used to use Eudora on my Mac to check all my
various accounts. Now, I use fetchmail on my linux box to check all
accounts, collect them in one place, run them against SpamAssassin,
and then use QPopper to run my own POP server inside my network. This
way I just changed the POP server in my Eudora, and everything else
was transparent. I’ve been running this way since April, with my own
SMTP and POP servers.

A side-effect of this is that it became tricky to mail myself. If I send things through
the SFF.net SMTP server, it will bounce because I am not
authenticated yet I am both the sender and receiver. If I tried to
send it directly to my Linux box via the DynDNS address, it would fail
flatly for some networking reason relating to my Netgear box. If I
tried to do the same thing but using the internal IP address as the
hostname, it also wouldn’t work and I’m not sure why. Today it
occurred to me that I should try just not qualifying the address at
all, and only using my Linux account name. Damn it all, it worked! I
wish I had figured this out six months ago. Now I am able to easily
collect links on my Mac while reading news, mail them to myself and
blog them. Because of this, I’ll have a few more links in here than I
have lately.

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I don’t know if the novelty of the weblog is just wearing off or
what. I find that over the last few weeks I only log about half of the
days.

I’ve been listening to Dimension X in order while I do my cardio work
at the gym. I’m up to episode 15 or so, an adaptation of Robert
Heinlein’s “The Roads must Roll.” I’ll have to look up the title, but
the most disturbing one yet was an adaptation of a Jack Vance story
about colonists on another world and their interactions with the
natives. The fact that they were called “gooks” by the humans and
spoke with accents that sounds about half Japanese (no pun intendend)
and half American Indian lent an even more troubling racial air to the
whole story. With the casual suppression of an entire race because
they were incovenient to the colonists, the story had a lot of
resonance. I don’t know if it was deliberate, because it seemed pretty
gleeful and unironic.

In my other OTR efforts, I’ve been working on downloading the entirety
of the BBC series Round the Horne. I used to air this
on my comedy show on WREK 15 years ago. We had 8 or 10 episodes on
vinyl that I would play. When it’s done, I’ll have the full series
including Christmas specials and several documentaries in MP3 format
on a single CD. Sweet! I once sent Neil Gaiman (weblog here) cassette dubs of all
the episodes we had at the station, and in return he sent me a copy of the script to
the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” issue of Sandman.

The other OTR thing I’m doing is learning to use Otter, an OTR cataloging
program. Supposedly, it will allow you to check your collection for
completeness, rename files and do all kinds of other cool stuff. I’m
intrigued by the notion. will be interesting to see if it is as useful
as it sounds.

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Unless we get some heroics, we will be having game 5 in the division
series. The boys have 2 more outs to make up a five run deficit. I was
wrong about the game day, which is tomorrow rather than Tuesday. I
can’t go to that, since my wife is leaving for a few weeks in
Colorado. They’ll have to do it without me, I’m afraid.

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On Dueling Modems, the question arose whether World Fantasy Convention
was at Callaway Gardens in 1992. I was completely sure that it was,
but I looked it up to be sure. As I looked it up,
memory that the special award went that year to
W. Paul Ganley. The first night I was there, he and I were each going
to the restaurant individually to eat dinner, and they didn’t have
any tables for one ready. I turned to him and asked if he wanted to
share a table, and then they seated us immediately. I didn’t
previously know him, just introduced myself on the stop. He was a
nice guy, and we just talked books and fandom for an hour while we
had dinner. I’ve never seen him again.

PHP lessons learned

I did a little more work on the WREK web pages today. I do believe I’m
to the point where I can bat out PHP pages that do a number of DB
tasks pretty simply. I’m at the point where I have the hard won
knowledge. Here are a few of my nuggest that I’ve learned, all the
hard way.

– At least for Oracle and mysql, use the FetchInto type functions and
get your results as associative arrays. There is a runtime hit, but it
makes your code much much more readable than cryptic index based
functions like “OciResult(, 3)” that force you to count columns in
your original SQL statement to see what the hell is going on.

– If you are getting a number of results to present as a table or
list, save them off into an array of the arrays from above. This
allows you to do your own sorting which might be different from the
database’s “order by”. It also enables cool things like
allowing people to sort differently via HTML forms with minimal
coding.

– Create one or a set of files you include in standard pages. If you
have a utility type function that you find yourself cutting and
pasting into another page, don’t. Put it in the utility include
instead. Otherwise, you’ll one day find yourself fixing a bug and then
having to grep to find all the files you put that bug in. Past it in
the include and remove it from all your PHP pages.

– Use source control, even for your own trivial projects at home and
even if you are the only person touching the files. There is nothing
like having that history to fall back on, and just being able to avoid
having all those “file.old”, “file.backup”, and crap like that is
worth it. I’m on the cusp of installing Subversion to try it out.

Mike and Me and Tom Servo

The lady who took my picture with Mike
Nelson and Kevin Murphy was as good as her word, and she sent me the
photo in e-mail today. She sent it to me in 400 dpi, so you could
see every pimple and pore on all our faces. Note the clever product
placement of the WREK logo.

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Blood drive was a washout. I couldn’t park near the GT student center,
so I had to park halfway across campus and walk. By the time I finally
got over there, they were turning people away. Sigh. Maybe I’ll drive
out to the Red Cross place on Saturday. I’d like to be giving as close
to the maximum as I can, 6 times a year or so.

Since I’m on campus anyway, I’m now in WREK digitizing music into
automation. I’m exercising my personal agenda, and only spending time
on the Cajun and Zydeco things in the queue. I e-mailed a bunch of
Cajun labels to get them to send us stuff, and MTE Records was the
only one to really respond, sending us 20 releases or so. At least 6
or 7 of those were programmed, with more still getting worked on, so
it payed off for everyone involved, really. I’m rocking out right now
to Aldus Roger and the Lafayette Playboys. I met my share of Cajun
playboys in my time in Lafayette.

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No Linda Blair, she had already boogied. My convention went from being
“ehh” to a solid positive experience by the efforts to two men,
Michael J. Nelson and Kevin Murphy from MST3K. I went to their panel this
morning, which was hilarious. I had not realized that Kevin had a book
out,
A Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey
. I
must buy this. I wish he had brought a few boxes of them, I’d have
bought one and gotten it signed right there. As it was, I got them to
autograph my program book, had my picture taken with them and got
Kevin’s business card so I can send them the tape of the interview I
did with them in 1997 and never did send. They were so funny and
pleasant that they moved the whole congoing experience into the win
column.

I also bought the newest Changelings CD, some stuff from Top Shelf
books including a James Kochalka CD and some graphic novels, and a
Kevin and Kell collection, which Bill Holbrook signed for me. He’s a
great guy. I never assume that anyone remembers me and I try not to
put them on the hook with “remember me?” games. So I mentioned that
I’ve interviewed him and he said, “Yeah, Reality Break, right?” “Wow,”
thinks I. I also showed him and the Plan Nine publisher how I have
Safe Havens and On the Fastrack on my Palm every day, which they
thought was quite cool. They are looking at doing something similar,
and I had to tell them that what I do (use Sitescooper first, then run
Plucker over the resulting files, both on a timer) is not yet a prime
time, average user type deal. Fun talking to them.

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I guess I’ll be going back for a little while today. I’ll see what
closeout deals I can get in the dealers room. I might will pay for
Linda Blair’s picture and autograph, and there is a panel with Mike
Nelson and Kevin Murphy from MST3K at 11:30. Beyond that I have no
aspirations. The flyers for my eBook, Fictionwise and WREK seem to be
going nice and steadily. I like to come back and see some but not
many. If there are none, you never know if someone pitched them. If
there are a lot, that’s not good. I like to have 3 on the table when I
see if more are needed. I’ll be interested to see if Fictionwise gets
a bump from this. If I ask nicely, maybe they’ll tell me how many
people actually redeem the coupon.

Dragon*Con Shenanigans

Is yesterday the first day that I’ve missed since I started this?
Wow. Before we left north Georgia, we made a very brief trip through
Amicalola Falls Park, just enough to convince us that we should come
back some other time when we can do it justice. We power drove from
Dawsonville home and I suited up in my Mexican wrestler outfit. I was
trying to make it to the convention by 2:30 to see Diana Obscura. I
got there about 3:00 and she wasn’t playing, I guess she had
cancelled. Such is life at Dragon*Con.

I refreshed all the flyers, and made another circuit through the
place. I went to a panel on eBooks on which the only panelist was John Ringo (why wasn’t I on that one if there was only a single panelist?
Sheesh!) although Ed Howdershelt from Abintra Press also came up and
joined him by the middle. Ringo is one of those guys that I hate to
have on the same side of an argument as me. He was kind of a blowhard and didn’t have much logical consistency to anything he was saying, mostly a series of forceful assertions.

I drove home and took my wife to dinner, and then suited back up and returned for more. I went to an 8:30 panel on the “Hacker Work Ethic” which compared it to the “Protestant Work Ethic” and
described/defined it. This is a subject I care about, and yet the
presenter was so boring that I walked out. 30 minutes was all I could
take. I met up with the usual suspects for Dragon*Cons – area
writers Rob Sommers, Steve Antczak, Gary Kim Hayes and Jim “Hawk”
Bassett. We sat in the hotel bar for a while, a few of us went
upstairs to the guest VIP room (free drinks) where at one point Phil
Morris (Jackie Childs on Seinfeld), Lou Ferrigno (Incredible Hulk) and
Dave Prowse (Darth Vader) were all up there. That may be the best part of being a guest at Dragon*Con, drinking with the media guests. The
guy mixed rum and cokes so strong that I could barely drink them. You
couldn’t take drinks out of the suite (this must be new because I used
to) so I found myself trying to pound this cocktail and I couldn’t. I
went to the soda table and kept putting more Diet Coke into it in an
effort to make it drinkable. By the time I put it down and left, I was
on my way to being half-lit.

I went back to the prime table at the hotel bar – it was the best view
on the milling crowds in the whole place – where I sat with the guys
for a little while, and then went to see Jefferson Starship play. It
was a pretty good show, but I felt slightly cheated that Paul Kanter
wasn’t there. I was pretty sure all the promo stuff stressed that both
Kantner and Marty Balin were involved and that this wasn’t one of
those “single founder hires new band but uses old name” type nostalgia shows, which in fact it was. It was OK nonetheless. They played “Miracles”, my favorite of all the Airplane/Starship songs. They had a female vocalist in the Grace Slick role who looked to be in her 20’s, younger than Grace Slick was when she joined the band. That’s got to be a tough set of shoes to step into. She did really belt it out for
“White Rabbit.” It ended with some odd schtick of cops onstage cuffing
the guitar player and leading him off – I never quite got that. I
milled around for a little while past that and then dragged my tired
self to bed.

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Shirts seen at Dragon*Con yesterday, in and around the EFF area:

No I will not fix your computer

If you lick it they will come (several instances)

I read your e-mail

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A few weeks ago I posted about how my wife got me wrestling tights and
beautiful boots for my birthday. I thought they are awesome , but that
I don’t really have much use for them. Well, I’m going to wear them to
the con on Sunday. Why the hell not? Where else can I act the fool
like this? I’ve never in my many years as a dork worn
a costume to a convention. This year, I’ll be doing it. I’ll put on
the mask as well and make a big show of it. I had some issues about
the guest ribbon on my badge giving me away while I was in the
getup. Darlene pointed out that “who cares if I’m both a guest and in
costume?” The more I think about that, the less I can find a
disagreement. So, come Sunday I’ll be wearing the Senor Muerte (my
name for the mask) outfit to the con.

We’re taking a bye on tomorrow, and driving up to Dawsonville for a
one day getaway. We just came up with this plan in the last half
hour. Dawsonville is mainly known as the home of NASCAR driver Bill
Elliot, but also has water falls, attractions, and best for us, outlet
malls. With luck, we’ll be back in time to see Diana Obscura on
Sunday. Some years Darlene goes to some or all of the con with
me. This year, she has decided she couldn’t care less.

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So the first afternoon of Dragon*Con was OK. I left work around 3:30
(an hour after I wanted to leave because of course my boss didn’t
spring to life on this problem we have until I want to walk out the
door) and ran by Kinko’s where I printed up some flyers. These are
both for my eBook and for Fictionwise. I scattered them
around liberally and watched people taking both, so that was cool.

I attened one panel, on the Electronic track of events. The speaker
was Lee Tien, lead counsel for EFF,
talking about the various issues EFF is involved and some discussions
of how they decide what cases to take. It was a good talk, although
more like a presentation at a professional conference than a typical
SF convention panel. This is not bad, just different. He didn’t
actually take questions until 58 minutes into the hour
presentation. All in all, it was a pretty good use of time.

Other than that, I just milled around. I had completely forgotten that
Linda Blair was going to be there, so I think I’m going to pay
whatever outrageous fee it costs to buy one of her pictures just to
have it and to talk to her for a while. I might be the only person the
whole weekend who mainly wants to talk to her about the movie Ruckus. That was on the
first summer we had HBO in Kansas and I must have watched it 20
times. “What’s on TV?” “It’s Ruckus again.” “Cool! Let’s watch it
one more time.”

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I’m torn between being excited about going to Dragon*Con and still
being pissed about this programming stuff. I’ll admit to being
confused why I’m even accepted as a guest year after year if they
don’t want me to do anything. Whatever. Before Ed Kramer had his legal
troubles, he was always very nice to me and would help make things
right for the live radio remotes and things like that. I really don’t know
the guy very well – if I’ve spent 30 minutes talking to him ever, I’d
be surprised. He did give me a call and offer me the job as D*Con’s
head of media relations back in 1995 or 1996. I considered it, but I
didn’t think I could do it adequately from Louisiana. In retrospect I
probably could have and it would have been fun. Que sera. At least
with my guest status I got to register in under 20 minutes (from
entering to leaving the parking garage) when the attendee line was at
least 100 people long already and I can get into the VIP suite. What
else do I want, really?

I’m leaving work pretty soon to go by and scout things out. Sunday I
have decided will be my big day and I’m undecided how much time I’ll
spend there any of the other days. Jefferson Starship plays Sunday, as
does Diana Obscura (former band of the
day
). That’s also the day of several of the EFF track panels I am
interested in. It will be fun and I’m sure I’ll run across many old
friends as I always do. I think I’ll also be taking my laptop just to
see if there is any wifi access there. If there is, I’ll make a few
weblog posts from the con itself. What joy for every girl and boy!

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I’ll be attending two science fiction conventions this fall – Dragon*Con in Atlanta and Orycon in Portland OR. The Dragon*Con
schedule of panels is up, and for the umpteenth time in a row I’m not
actually scheduled on anything, despite filling out in excruciating
detail the programming survery. I’m about tired of this. I may only
attend Dragon*Con for a day or two now that I see how it is going
down. I’ve been declining other things for that weekend, but if I have
no panel responsibilities, who cares when I am and am not there? I’ll
wait until I check in – maybe I’m on programming and just am not
listed on the website. Uh huh.

I’m hoping for a little better at
OryCon. I moderated a panel there a few years ago on literary comics
that was the best panel experience I’ve ever had. It is also notable
for being the time when I gave my first ever autograph of my work,
signing a diskette of my Reality Break ebook. The autograph seeker? My
fellow panelist Larry Niven. He may have just done it to be nice, but
I got quite the kick out of it.

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Busy day. Darlene was phone banking tonight for
GARAL
, the Georgia pro-choice organization. I declined this one,
for my own reasons. Instead I ended up running a variety of errands,
including logging in to work to check on an urgent bug report. Sigh,
the life of the wicked includes little rest.

Just for my friend Shannon, I changed the logic of the perl script
that reposts the daily weblog entries to SFF-Net and DM. He didn’t
like the top-to-bottom organization. On the website it makes perfect
sense – most recent entry at the top. He didn’t like it in the
newsgroups, so now they are reordered there and only there. I am
nothing if not responsive to the needs of the several people reading
this.

Alice in Radioland

I skipped the band of the day yesterday as well, but not for lack of
trying. I wanted to put in
Randy Greif
but he gives away no MP3s on
his website. We have this album of his in rotation at WREK that is
fabulous – a five(?!) CD treatment of Alice in Wonderland. It has all
the dialog of the book spread out over 6 hours of tape loops,
industrial and electronic noises and really odd soundscapes. It’s $50
from Soleilmoon Records
(located in my old stomping grounds of Portland OR) and I’m going to
treat myself one of these days and buy it. It’s one of my more
favoriter things they play at the station.