Unimatrix Two

One more thing to clutter my friends page

For those users out there who don’t read the LJ news; now, if you are a paid user, you can add slashdot, the geek news site, as an LJ friend. Basically means you get the headline and links to each article.

I’m gonna try it for a while, but Iffen I don’t like it, gone it will be.

So, like, I had a long post almost ready yesterday… but I had to slot a Zip disk to check a reference. I should know better. The Zip driver for OS X crashes the desktop every time (no big deal, the process restarts automatically)… but this time it locked up the whole machine, I had to do a hardware restart. Lost my post, and just wasn’t up to re-typing it.

Anyway.

Figured out the last problem I was having with the special effect for my friend’s wedding video. Rain wants me to change the timing slightly, but that will just be an evening’s work. I’m learning a lot – maybe I can be meiran and raininva‘s special-effects tech when they are famous moviemakers.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is very hard in single-player. Hey, game designers – some of us don’t play Quake 3 Arena 40 hours a week. The easy setting is supposed to be… easy.

Yes, I enjoyed MiB 2… no, it was as good as the first one.

Got the final “Robotech: Macross” boxed set this weekend, thanks to Rain. It even has the “Robotech: Sentinels” pilot as an extra – a film that made Macross purists howl. Only four more boxed sets to go before I have the whole Robotech series… then I can get the UFO set… then Monty Python’s FC… then Thunderbirds… what do you mean they’re already released ST:TNG third season?

MPEG-2 is going to be very expensive to me, I can see that.

Ooops… my boss’ laptop is throwing a kernel panic… won’t boot off the hard drive or the CD. This oughta be fun…

On a Yahoo! mailing list I belong to, a couple people are being horrid and insulting to a woman because she won’t post topless or nude pictures of herself. Then another member leaps to her “defense”, telling her to ignore them ’cause they are obviously gay and that gay people just like to sit around harassing upstanding straight folk.

*sigh* Times like this, I just need to leve the computer and go watch something involving puppies, or kitties, or Hayao Miyazaki and childhood.

At work, they call me “The Oracle”

Hmmm… seconds ago I refreshed my friends page, and kittykatya had an entry up about her Sailor Senshi colors. Had to close the window before I could really read the entry… and now it’s gone.

Did the Matrix just glitch on me and I saw part of the simulation that won’t be up for a little while? Or am I just hallucinating again?

Dang, I dropped the Library of Congress again

Researchers at IBM have developed technology which uses dents in thin plastic film to store information. It’s a bit like the punch cards of computing history, except the dents are 10 nanometers in width. (A nanometer is one-millionth of the width of a piece of paper-clip wire.)

The researchers estimate that with this technology in practical use, a common multifunction digital wristwatch could contain 15 gigabytes of data… that’s about 23 CDs, or 2 or 3 DVD movie discs.

“I’ve backed up the ship’s computer core in this small MDM memory chip!” Brion Fields, Space Rogues

The more things change…

This train of thought began as I watched Adobe Photoshop go through a complicated scripting sequence without any assistance from me… I began thinking of Rick Deckard’s wonderful photo-processing “Esper” machine. (Yes, I want one.)

So, I’m thinking about Blade Runner and the fact that, in an unscientific poll of science-fiction fans, I’m one of the few viewers who prefer the theatrical release to the director’s cut. (Voiceover, less uncertain ending, and all).

I’m not going to debate the merits of the two versions here, though it has occurred to me that it is the theatrical release that made Blade Runner one of the classics of SF film (and made it possible to produce a director’s cut release, before DVDs made such releases common).

However, the discussion of the versions made me think about how we revise things in our heads. I watched hours of the old Robotech series last weekend, but used the remote to skip over the dull, boring, or actually painful parts. (Yes, I’m referring to Minmei.) The Internet produced the “Phantom Edit” version of Star Wars Episode I – in many opinions, a superior film. Douglas Adams himself wrote multiple variants of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – all official, and all contradictory.

Then, while looking up information on Apple’s “Final Cut Pro”, I found this web page that compares such revisions to the Bible itself, where the Gospels contradict each other and concentrate on the parts that the individual writers found interesting. And I realized that people have been arguing about this for nearly two thousand years.

So, the next time I go to a con and find an earnest discussion of how Enterprise has re-written the established history of the Star Trek universe, I’ll be less likely to jump in with both feet. If we’ve been revising our most sacred texts to personal taste for this long, Kirk and Picard don’t have much of a chance. *grin*

Ow. (Achoo.)

I have been moving heavy furniture and kicking up serious dust since Wednesday afternoon. Now, I have a cheap bargain respiratory tract which is allergic to everything, so by last night I was sore from the neck down from lifting and carrying, and my nose was plugged solid.

I can breathe now, but everytime I sneeze I still feel a burning sensation in the muscles of my back. And right now, everything I eat or drink tasts like dust.

On the other hand, now when meiran comes over to do her video editing, she won’t take one look in my office and refuse to associate with me ever again. So that’s a plus. Also, there’s now enough floor space that I can actually walk over to my desk, slide the chair out, and sit down normally, instead of doing the complicated “hop-hop-pirouette” I had to do before.

Now if only that @$%&* new hard drive would get here…

Yes, I have a lot of driving to do this weekend

Imagine a world where the Star Trek transporter had been absolutely perfected, to the point where it was as safe and as easy to use as a telephone. To go somewhere, you find the nearest booth, stick a dollar in the slot for a local trip, up to $25 or $50 for international travel, and punch in a 12-digit number. Before you have time to get your hand 2 inches away from the “enter” key, *blink* and you are there.

Telephone-booth-sized units are spaced every few blocks in urban and suburban areas – wider spread in rural and wild areas. If you live anywhere that has decent phone or Internet service in the real world, going anywhere is a matter of walking a block or two, using the booth, then walking another block or two. Show-offs have their own booths (in locked waiting rooms, of course – no point in inviting thieves into your home). The local super mega-mall has four or five. Large travel centers have dozens.

The SF writer Larry Niven wrote a half-dozen stories about this situation, and its effect it has on society. Private cars disappear. In crime, the idea of the alibi is no more – you can leave the dinner table to use the bathroom, kill someone in another state, and be back before anyone notices you’re gone. You can now work in New York City and come home every evening to your house in the Rockies.

There would be issues, there always are; but I’d like it. There’s so many people I want to meet, so many places I want to go – I’d just love to be able to phone a friend in Britain and say, “Hey, are you busy? I’d like to come by this evening.”

Like everything else in the 21st century, this desire of mine is the Internet’s fault.

quiz – *sigh* – can’t help myself, I guess

I find my lack of self convidence disturbing…

Since I’m feeling a bit like a lemming (as in, “c’mon, let’s all take another web test!”) tonight, I thought I’d work out and post my furry code here… but honestly, once I did it, I found that I just wasn’t comfortable revealing some of the personal info in it. Seems strange… maybe Mr. Exhibitionist is feeling shy tonight, I don’t know.

I know what it is, I just need food. Low blood sugar, no carbohydrates to speak of. Half a box of breakfast cereal would do the trick if I had any, but I’ll go see what else is in the pantry. I love the all-too-familiar headspace of having cabinets full of food and not being able to find stuff to eat.

I need to clear off more HD space for meiran tonight, too.