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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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Technology TopicAlthough I should have done this a long time ago, I just got
around to setting up an account with
DynDNS
. I now have dave-slusher.is-a-geek.com pointing to my
house. Here is my
local copy of this weblog.
Pretty slick. If my NetGear router gets
a new IP address via DHCP, it is supposed to notify DynDNS of the new
one. We’ll see if that happens. I don’t think I’ve changed IP address
in the last year, but someday it will happen.

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I’ve been reading some of Paul
Graham’s
writings on Lisp. I had read some time ago his account of
how he used Lisp in Viaweb (later Yahoo Stores) to beat the
competitors. With this renewed interest in Lisp, I had it pointed out
to me that he is now giving away his book
On Lisp
for free. In one of his many articles, he talks about how
pointy-haired bosses always want you to use what they perceive as
being the “hot” language. Towards the bottom of his hilarious essay
Revenge of the Nerds
he includes this little nugget of wisdom:

If you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting you write
software in Lisp, you could try telling him it’s XML.

I’m enjoying his essays. I might as well give some Lisp a shot. My
editor program of choice includes a Lisp interpreter anyway, so why not?

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We went to trivia tonight, at which we mostly sucked. We came home to
find that Georgia’s two biggest embarassments in the House of
Representatives, Bob Barr on the right and Cynthia McKinney on the
left, both look as if they’ll lose in the primaries. And WREK is back
on the air, albeit it at 200 watts while they work on repairing the
transmitter. All in all not a bad night. If only I had known that Hank
Aaron never hit over 50 home runs in a year!

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So far, the
OpenCOLA stuff is not as
thrilling as it could be. I set up my folders and have gotten a few
recommendations of stuff that was slightly or not at all related to
what I was looking for. Yesterday I had a new person listed as someone
for whom I have interests in common, but other than that, not a lot of
action. I remain hopeful but we’ll see how it goes. I’m guessing not a
whole lot of folks are on the network yet.

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Here is an experiment mixing together some of my
recent stuff I’ve done in this log. I’ve been playing with
OpenCOLA
some today, and I’ve set up an Active Folder with all the
web pages and some of the MP3s of every group that has been a “Band of
the day” in this blog. We’ll see how that goes. If it works as
advertised, then I should start getting a feedback loop going where I
get new recommendations that I further bubble into increased
relevance. That’s what the brochures say anyway. For those on the OC
network, this is user “biscuithead” with folder “Indy Music”.

The OpenCOLA stuff seems pretty cool, but there is a definite learning
curve to even understanding the concepts. It’s not like Kazaa or
something like that where 10 seconds after you install you are
browsing away. Several hours after setting up my initial folders, I
got my first “peer revelance” recommendation, although he has nothing
shared so I can’t tell why OC thinks we have tastes in common. More to
come.

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Bittersweet night tonight. We are going to our first Braves game this year, and its
on the day they declare a strike date. How wonderful. I really think
the week preceding August 30th, everyone should return their tickets
to the box office. Don’t go to the games, don’t even watch them on
TV. I have little sympathy for either side of this situation, and I’d
like them both to realize that they are now tap-dancing on some
seriously thin ice. Cal Ripken and the beating of Maris’ home run
record aren’t happening again, so there is no deus ex machina to save
them from the antipathy of bans. See what the MLB organization has to say about
it. This whole thing just makes me sick.

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Today I got e-mail informing me that
Open Cola
is in beta. To be honest, I signed up for this so long
ago that I had forgotten about it. I tried to install it and get
registered but the registration server timed out. It’s quite possible
that they are overloaded from just getting fired up. I’ll try at 6 AM
tomorrow, when I’m sure fewer geeks are active. This is the company
that Cory Doctorow cofounded, he who writes good SF and also has one of
the
pre-eminent blogs.

Oh my god, Cory points out the Hello
Kitty USB hub
. Dear lord I want one. As you type on the keyboard,
Hello Kitty moves and shakes around. I’m an easy mark, aren’t I?

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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.

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I want to go on record with two terms I devised. Neither shows up on
Google, so there is a decent chance I created both. If anyone knows of
earlier uses, please tell me. The first is an Internet acronym for
those people who mean well but through their sheer disorganization and
position as nexii of chaos consistently screw it up. The term (which I
used for the first time to describe a volunteer organization that keep
e-mailing my wife not realizing they already had done it) is
HIRPHUA. It stands for “Heart In Right Place, Head Up Ass.”

The other is to describe the situation, such as at my current
workplace, where all top management are smokers. This means that many
times a day, groups of them meet out front of the building for 5 – 15
minutes at a time for what become defacto policy setting
meetings. Non-management smokers end up being present and having an
effect. Non-smokers end up mostly out of the process, and even if they
go down and hang out, it’s never the same. This situation is a
“nicotacracy.”

Here and now, I plant that flag of each of these terms. Use them as
you will. My goal is to see HIRPHUA used in an Usenet post
someday. That will be my success case.

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The BlogMax upload the month function is definitely screwed up. I’m
not sure what I did to make it stop working, but the calendar won’t
regenerate unless I explicitly open and resave every previous day. The
only day it continues to work for is the first day of the month. I
really don’t know Lisp well enough to do much debugging. I once heard
a comedian describe that act of looking under the hood when your car
conks out as “looking for a giant on/off switch in the ‘off’
position.” This is what I’m looking for in the Lisp code.

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I’m officially attempting to get into the Ponzi scheme – this morning
I registered with Blogdex,
so we’ll see what happens with that. It would be interesting to see my
band of the day picks start showing up in there. If so, I might run
back through them so as to get them all represented better.

I realized that my late-night, bleary eyed entry was the only one for
yesterday. I seem to have forgotten to make any more. I believe I’ve
made my last notice of when I miss posting the band of the day. I’ll
try not to miss it, but if I do it will pass without comment.

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Music TopicI’m up atypically late tonight. On Dueling Modems I got involved in a discussion
of what the best album of rock history is. Author Craig Shaw Gardner
was posting from MOJO magazine that cited the Beach Boys Pet Sounds as
holding that title. I’m not sure I buy that, and I proposed a list of
possible contenders – not that I say any of this is, but ones that
could reasonably be mentioned in such a discussion. They include:
Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street
Mothers of Invention – We’re only in it for the Money
Nirvana – Nevermind
David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
Beatles – Abbey Road
Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation
Everclear – Sparkle and Fade
Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks
Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
Captain Beefheart – Safe as Milk (or Trout Mask Replica [ or Bat Chain
Puller]) or …
Alice in Chains – Dirt
Liz Phair – Exile in Guyville
Pixies – Doolittle
Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks

And I cited my pick for the single most solid album of rock history,
Richard and Linda Thompson – Shoot Out the Lights

Then later on I added:
Velvet Underground and Nico
Television – Marquee Moon
The Ramones
Smiths – Meat is Murder
REM – Fables of the Reconstruction
Black Sabbath – Paranoid
Patti Smith – Easter
Grateful Dead – American Beauty
The Clash – London Calling
Neil Young – Harvest
Brian Eno – Here Come the Warm Jets (how did I miss this one first post?!!?!)

This is the kind of discussion I could have forever. I love it!

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One of the ultra-dorky things I do is enter my bills into Where’s George. I’ve been doing
it for over two years and have now entered over 3300 bills into the
system. Here is my
profile
. One thing people always are increduluous about is the
amount of time it takes to do this. Well, it takes about 1 minute per
bill and I’ve done 3300 bills in 800 days, so about 4 minutes a
day. I’ve been trying like the devil to convince people (at work, at
WREK, everywhere) that forward progress is the sum of lots of tiny
bits of work. People seem to be more comfortable with infrequent but
heroic efforts, doing nothing for a long time then working for 18
hours straight on something. It’s been my experience that sustained
and consistent effort always gets you more real results than
occasional bursts of enthusiasm.

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Movie TopicLast night we watched a great movie, Wet Hot American
Summer
. It’s broadly a parody of summer camp movies and teen
coming of age movies, but also includes much of the weird dark humor
that infested my favorite skit comedy show, MTV’s The
State
. Most of the cast members are there as are several of
the creative forces. And I’m serious that I think The
State
is a better show than Kids in the
Hall
, better than Monty Python. It is a
show that I’d buy every episode on DVD in a heartbeat. To this day, I
cannot hear the phrase “Porcupine racetrack” without grinning.

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Music TopicToday’s band of the day is one that I’m pretty new to. I found
out about them by hearing them on WREK in the last few months. They
are Woozy Helmet from
Texas. I like the way they sound, “Not Real” being my favorite of the
ones I’ve heard so far. They have a lot of MP3s up on the site. The
Macromedia Flash shit is really annoying, but artistic sorts and
musicians seem to love it. Anyway, check it out and listen. If you go
to the “Recordings” page, there are actually more MP3s that aren’t
listed on the downloads page. They rawk, dood!

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Technology TopicI have barely used this wireless card in the laptop, but I’m hooked
(or unhooked, depending on how you think about it.) Now I’m going to
look around for the very cheapest access point I can find. I know they
are coming out with bigger, better stuff all the time so rather than
pay a premium to get the state of the art as of August 2002, I’d
rather pay a discount to get the state of the art as of January
2001. They will both be out of date soon enough. I think $50 is my
price – if I can find one for that, I go for it.

There is a promotion going on at Fictionwise as part of their Open an Ebook
promotion
. Come get them while they are relatively cheap! I’m
constantly telling people about the electronic book experience and
slowly people are acting less skeptible. At some point the kneejerk
opposition to the entire medium can be replaced with simple consumer
dynamics – you might like it or not, but people won’t dismiss out of
hand something they never actually tried for themselves.

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This is my first every weblog entry via a wireless
link! It’s pretty spiffy. It’s not quite as dramatic as it could be –
I’m sitting right next to my desk and my wired, desktop
computer. Still, I am connected wirelessly. I hadn’t realized that –
at least on Win98 with the setup I have currently – it is still a
mostly manual process. I get the link via the wireless, but I still
have to explicitly release and renew to get an IP address. I’ll look
around, maybe there is a sexier way to do it more automatically.