Unimatrix Two

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.

Internet Lesson #802.11:

People are much more interested in your webcam if you have mammaries.

That’s okay, I should put the camcorder away and get a real (cheap) webcam that won’t give me a heart attack if it falls off my desk.

Thanks to Technicon’s White Elephant auction, I’ve read nearly the whole Christopher Stasheff “Warlock” series in the space of a week and a half. Good books… “what if a bunch of SCAdians founded a colony world, forgot their technological origins, then developed enough psi to have some magicians lying around?”… but one really shouldn’t read 7 of the same author’s books in a row. It tends to dull the effect a bit, as I leaned a few months back when I read all the Frank Herbert “Dune” books at once. A bit of advice – don’t do that either.

Things to do with technology

Cool, an expensive Sony FireWire camcorder, and right now it’s sitting here playing webcam. I finally got that to work!!

Let me know if you want to play voyeur, and see an office so deep in books and papers that the government considered hiding the Ark of the Covenant here, knowing it would never be found again. I’ll pass along the link. Sometime I’ll be live, and sometimes not :p

Left the geeks alone in the lab again, huh?

Looks like some folks are doing early warp dynamics studies on the upgraded Constitution-class vessels…

You can check out the results at the University of Queensland’s Laser Diagnostics site.

Geek Moment!

So, I’m playing the 3D cyberpunk video game “Deus Ex” yesterday… I find a note that an engineer has left for his superior, alerting him that the new root password for the local computer system is “reindeerflotilla.”

I sit there and think, “That sounds so familiar… why is that familiar to me?”

Turns out it’s the internal level 6 password to the Emcon mainframe that Jeff Bridges uses in the movie “Tron.”

Why does my brain only store this stuff? Why can’t I remember anything useful?

Wow, the Internet really is vast and complex!

My Internet access is working again.

Yesterday: “It’s your Ethernet card.” “I have four machines here with cards from three different manufacturers. None of them are working. I don’t think it’s the card.” “Uh, okay, you don’t have your Windows Network control panel properly configured for TCP/IP.” “This is a local intranet consisting of two Windows machines, one Mac, and a BSD Unix box. What do you think I’m configured for, carrier pigeon?” “Uh, okay, your modem’s bad. We’ll send a guy over with a new one tomorrow.” “Fine.”

Today: “Hello, we aren’t going to send you a modem yet, the tech support person you talked to has been screwing up a lot lately. What’s the hardware address on your modem?” “Blah-blah-blah-blah-4C.” “Okay, that the problem, we have it here as blah-blah-blah-blah-4L.” “What? How can you have an L in a hexadecimal number?” “… Just reboot the modem and try again.”

So I’ve got access… and about 300 unread messages. 🙂

A quick comment on meiran‘s cosplay postings: I am still trying to find the picture I had from an old VTSFFC Halloween. It’s myself as Tuxedo Mask surrounded by the Katsucon 1 Sailor Senshi from Blacksburg. The anime freak where I work doesn’t believe me when I tell him I did that, though it’s funny watching him trying to decide whether I’m 1) lame for being in a Sailor Moon costume group, or 2) way cool for being in the company of five women in skirts that short.Interestingly, when you search the web for Sailor Moon cosplayers, you find a lot of men playing the senshi. A quote from one male Sailor Moon: “I get a lot of female attention. Apparently chicks dig the bows.”

Pre-lunchtime thoughts

The Macintosh SE gathering dust in my office is currently worth about $15 bucks on the open market. It was a $3700 system when it came out (thank Ghu I didn’t pay that.)

To prove my geek credentials, I got the Tron 20th Anniversary DVD a couple weeks ago. If that movie had nothing else (and many would say that it did have nothing else), it had great visuals that drew you in when the ‘story’ and ‘acting’ couldn’t. The art director for the film makes an interesting comment on the DVD, claiming “If we’d had the technology then to produce the realistic effects we can now, I’m not sure that the visual style would have been as memorable.”

Sometimes artistic beauty springs from limitations.

I’m also amused that the Light Cycle contest, a sequence took weeks of pre-rendering at the time, can now be rendered on the fly as a playable game by any competent desktop computer.

Ahhh… the technology curve.