Geek magic
Harry Potter and the Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
Hermione: Hey, I was thinking…
Ron: Not again!
Hermione: (ignoring him) None of us want to say You-Know-Who’s name because he knows when you do it, right?
Harry: Yes, he’s magically linked to the sound, it automatically draws his attention to you so he knows what you’re saying about him. Why?
Hermione: Well, back home this summer I was reading about a website called Slashdot…
Ron: What’s a ‘web site’? Not more spiders, ugh!!
Harry & Hermione: (Ignoring him)
One week later…
“Daily Prophet” barker: EXTRA! EXTRA! Harry Potter gets entire wizarding world to say Voldemort’s name at once! Dark Wizard found dead in lair with brain cells leaking out of his ears! Read All About It!
(inspired in part by the Luna-C performance at MarsCon of all seven books in 45 minutes, and by Starr)
Order of Battle
I’ve been sick for the last two days – sinus congestion, stabbing stomach pain, sore throat, fever… same old same old midwinter bug. Reluctantly, I took Tuesday off, which I think cut a couple days’ duration off this bug; it’s fading away as I sit here, leaving me with a scratchy throat and headache. I should be fine for the weekend; good thing too, as I had to do a bit of finagling to make MarsCon.
On the other hand, it means I’m woefully behind on my prep. I managed to get some studying in for the panels in which I’m involved, but my costuming took the hit, and I don’t know if I’ll have anything ready for the weekend. Since I’ll be leaving directly from work tomorrow, I have to get packed and otherwise ready tonight. Good thing I managed some laundry.
Sometime Friday afternoon, I will have to find time to take a nap if I want to do late night stuff. This is unaviodalbe, as my internal clock these days is currently set to a 5:30am – 10:30pm waking shift, and cons don’t run on that time. Considering that my Saturday panels hover around 10pm and midnight, I’ll probably need to do the same that day as well.
I need to do some restructuring of my life schedule anyway. One reason for my dryness of prose output in 2008 was that I had not made much time to sit, off by myself, and actually write something – the most I’ve gotten done in that regard is hiding in people’s offices scribbling on the Newton while monitoring their OS X Leopard installs. (Up to three hours of glorious undisturbed concentration!) It’s easy to journal in 5-minute increments at work, but I have not yet mastered the art of focusing on plot and character in those tiny chunks.
On the other hand, I’m slightly pleased with my attitude towards the problem. I’m doing better these days with creating plans of attack for my roadblocks instead of just whining about them and using them for excuses. I’m decades overdue on developing this skill.
Brief updates
- 14:27 Realized I’m glad that home ‘Net is working, ’cause I sure as Hades can’t research my MarsCon panels at work. My life is weird (good). #
- 20:36 Trying to find a sewing pattern which would be a starting point for Kyle MacLachlan’s House Atreides uniform. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Brief updates
- 21:04 Starr’s parents, sisters, and I just broke into “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” and sang the whole thing together. Kinda awesome. 🙂 #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Late celebration
Freaky: We have, on the downstairs TV: the satellite box, the DVD player, a PS2, and now a Wii. I have been thinking all week about getting a switch box so as not to keep yanking cables from the TV’s two RCA left-right-video connections. Yesterday morning, I mentioned this casually to Starr. Yesterday night, Starr’s sister gave me for Xmas an RCA input switching box that she’d purchased days ago, thinking maybe I might find a use for it.
Whoa. Telepathy.
Awesome: Starr is in the dining room playing “Hey Jude” from a Beatles piano book I’d given her for Christmas. This is one of the best “sit down, take a deep breath, and stop fretting about stuff because fretting’s the best way to blow it completely” songs ever written. There’s a lot going on in my life right now, much more than I’m used to trying to keep track of, but I just can’t get too messed up about it all when “Hey Jude” is drifting in from the other room.
Gonna make my award-winning mashed potatoes this afternoon to go with the pot roast Starr started last night at 1am. Should be an excellent Fauxmas dinner.
Come Sail Away
While driving to work this morning, watching the sunrise and listening to the Trance Euphoria podcast, I flashed on a fantasy that’s been with me since I could drive, if not before.
In that fantasy, I’m cruising down the Interstate at standard driving speeds, waiting for a nice gap in the cars before and behind me. At the right moment, I reach down to the center console and hit the switch that activates the repulsor pads in the undercarriage.
As the aft thrusters warm up, I feel the small jerk that tells me that the wheels have lost contact with the ground. I hit the button that folds them away into the fenders, bring the thrusters up to 200 MPH, and climb into the sky, arriving at work in 15 minutes instead of 50.
That little vignette hits me on almost any drive longer than 20 minutes. I love visiting all sorts of places… it’s the actual getting there that I often find so tedious. Needless to say, mine would be the only car that could do this, otherwise there’d be flaming wrecks scattered across the landscape. (And not always other people’s fault, either: last night I almost broadsided someone because I was thinking about my grocery list rather than the road. Bad Borg.)
From the corners of the ‘Net
Just had the odd experience of finding my fiction published on a web site of which I’d never before heard. It’s the Decipher WARS fiction I wrote, and it has their copyright tag on it, so perhaps it’s not ‘my’ fiction; but there’s no dispute that I wrote it.
Looks like they’ve posted all the released WARS fiction, including both of my stories. I have my own copies, of course, but it’s good to see them on the web. Hope they don’t have to pull them down anytime 🙂
Inside the Borg Studio
Yes, it’s Interview Meme time again. kittenchan asked the questions, and I provide the answers. For those who wish to play along at home, the rules are (c’mon, you know this by now):
1. Reply to my post asking me to interview you.
2. I reply to your post with five questions.
3. You post your answers and this meme on your LJ.
1. What’s the craziest (PG) thing you’ve ever done?
PG, huh? Probably in my teens, when I used to attend USS Heimdal meetings in Lynchburg, the other car in our convoy would race us there and back. 110-120 MPH speeds were known to occur. I wasn’t driving, but I didn’t exactly try too hard to talk the drivers out of it, either. I’m glad that we all grew out of that before something terrible happened.
2. Why did you first join VTSFFC?
It wasn’t really on purpose! When Tom Monaghan started attending Tech, he invited me along on a VTSFFC trip to Stellarcon. I rode with Scott Gosik, whom I had not met before that day, and weathered a barrage of cryptic anime references; witnessed a car accident in our convoy and spent an evening in an Emergency Room with a delirious Rosethorn (also a total stranger); and entered the con costume contest on five-minutes’ notice, using random items I’d happened to pack. The general consensus was that I had passed the initiation whether I’d intended to or not.
3. Do you still draw?
I have not drawn anything in 2008, I fear, besides some crude notebook sketches of my Legion of Liberty superhero. I have several drawings in my head, though, and 2009 will not be artless.
4. Do you ever miss working at the TN?
I miss a lot of the people I got to work with at the TN, but I don’t miss the late Tuesdays (even the abbreviated ones) or the desperate deadlines! Honestly, I wish there was a NASA facility in Blacksburg; the work I’m doing now is great, and I still enjoy causally saying “oh I work for NASA” when asked, but I miss my friends and family up there a lot.
5. What’s your favorite restaurant of all time and why?
After lengthy thought – there are two close runners-up – I’d have to say Sakura, over in Salem. The prices are moderate, the service is very good, the decor is attractive and simple, and the food is addictively good. I can name restaurants that have been better in one or more categories, but this is the all-round winner. I think a certain someone’s impromptu reception dinner was held there, as well 🙂 Stinks that I’m 5 hours away, now.
