Ringtones
I’ve discovered, to my surprise, that I generally prefer MIDI ringtones to MP3 ringtones. Perhaps it has a little to do with the tiny speaker they’re coming from, and in part because a MIDI just sounds more like a phone-ring sound to me.
My current favorites: katamari.mid – DoctorWho2006.mid – dune.mid
I like technology that beeps.
The Dream Is Alive
Last night, I heard that Virgin Galactic will be testing their SpaceShipTwo prototype this year, and expects to start its public, commercial, sub-orbital flights before the end of 2008 (possibly early 2009, depending on which part of their website you’re looking at). They expect to take several hundred people up to 100km (official Astronaut altitude) within the first year of the company’s operation.
Even after the success of SpaceShipOne, the whole thing still seemed a bit pipe-dreamy. “Maybe we can do this as a business one day.” Now, somehow, it seems real, and I hear the sound of Richard Branson buying himself a major turning point in human history. Not that I mean to be too dismissive of the man: it’s a much healthier way to establish a presence in the textbooks than trying to establish a 1000-year Reich, for example.
I cannot help but look at their promotional materials and realize that my dream of going up is about to change from “realistically impossible” to “currently impractical”. Don’t let anyone say that’s not an enormous difference. There was a time in my early 20s when it was “currently impractical” for me to walk unassisted. “Impractical” is a lot easier to change.
Steve Jobs is calling
I really don’t want to sound like an Apple fanatic, but frankly the iPhone is exactly what I’ve been waiting to hang on my belt.
Putting aside the widescreen iPod thing for a moment (I have a nice video iPod, thanks), what I’ve been looking for is a handheld cell network / Internet terminal, and this thing appears to have the goods. Voice calls, voice mail, text messaging, POP3, IMAP, and HTML. I further suspect that, depending on the sophistication of the web browser in the thing, there’s a lot of potential for useful or fun Flash and JavaScript applications. Imagine being able to access the office suite Google’s supposed to be working on – from your cell phone.
Two issues for me; Cingular (I have good reasons to stick with Sprint for the moment) and $499 for the base model. Not to mention that it’s a v1.0, and we all know the fun that can happen there.
Still, this is the device that might finally get my Newton fully retired.
To Fly
Today I flew an airplane. A real one, with me and 3 other people inside. It was incredible.
There is a local flight instructor who will let people take up and fly one of his planes for an hour, for a reasonable fee. (The instructor handles the actual landing part, which I was just fine with.) Our roommate Starr thought that would be a grand birthday present for me, and after delays caused by holiday and weather, I took the Piper Warrior into the air. Hampton Roads is pretty amazing from up there; Norfolk and Virginia Beach seem like one contiguous urban area when you drive through them, but are quite discrete from 2000 feet.
Working the yoke and the rudder pedals at the same time is a little more difficult than I’d expected, though I did get compliments from the instructor relating to my basic knowledge of planes and aerodynamics. He said that even a couple hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator or the equivalent saves him a great deal of explanation during one of these “discovery flights”.
Of course, the deal is partially an attempt for the instructor to sell me $6000 worth of pilot’s license training. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like the idea, and I might do so in the future… but not right now.
Nevertheless, the idealist in me had a grand time. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made their historic flight; just over 100 years later, a Trek geek with a few bucks (or with a friend with a few) can take a plane into the sky and fulfill the dreams of thousands of his ancestors.
It’s easy to forget how surrounded we are by miracles.
IMDB Justice and the STS
Wil Wheaton is reviewing old ST: TNG episodes for a website known as TV Squad. He’s just reviewed Justice, and my trivia sense tingled; Brenda Bakke, the half-naked actress who gleefully welcomes Worf as the “Huge One”, also played Nim, the Texas Air Ranger in Gunhed.
This, of course, contributes nothing at all to your day.
Slighlty more interestingly, astronomer Phil Plait has posted that tonight’s 9:35 launch of the Space Shuttle will be visible over most of the US’ east coast. A link to a similar opportunity from ’97 suggests that Norfolk viewers might be able to see the STS reach 12 degrees over the south-southeast horizon, while Roanoke area space buffs will only see the engine glow for 5 degrees (possibly discounting intervening mountains).
(I’ll probably forget to go look, though.)
Trick or Treat!
I was working on a journal post this morning, but my USB 2 expansion card freaked in the middle of that, ruining an iPod update and crashing the computer. So no post.
That’s kinda the tone for the whole month of October. Good things certainly happened, but it’s been pretty rough. My workload’s been amazing – I netted almost 120 hours in one 2-week period. As well, a carefully-arranged Halloween costume failed to materialize; then sickness killed a carefully-planned Halloween party trip.
On the other hand, I was too lazy to put together an interesting outfit for a later party, and wound up just attending in my Enterprise uniform… winning First Place (Men’s), to my surprise!
I’m really bummed about missing Rising Star this year. It sounds like they’re gonna have some fun! But we’ve dropped $700 on car repairs this month, and holiday gift-giving’s on the way, so we have to watch the budget like a hawk. (Here’s hoping I don’t have to replace that PCI card.)
Questionable Content – one of my favorite webcomics, and worth reading through from the beginning – is selling a t-shirt which proclaims, “She Blinded Me With Library Science!” which keeps bringing to mind a certain Yeager crew member.
I did in fact begin NaNoWriMo this week. I have no expectation of finishing in time – the demands on my time are manifest right now – but I’m starting it anyway. This is the closest my head has been in years to having a complete plot and interesting characters lined up, and I’m not giving up now. I may even get around to reposting my WARS stories to elfie, just for my own inspiration.
Taverncast – a WoW podcast – did a Halloween episode called “War of the Murlocs” this year. Despite the fact that I listened to it during the day at work, am closely familiar with the old Orson Welles broadcast, and caught many of the in-jokes, they still managed to creep me out a tiny bit. Maybe it’s my overactive imagination: judge for yourself at war-of-the-murlocs.mp3 if you like. I’ll be having fish for dinner tonight as my own strike back against the slimy rampagers.
Technomancer issues
After picking up SR4 last year, I’ve finally found enough people in my circle of friends to start up a campaign. We spent an entertaining evening last night working up character concepts and doing Build Point math. The veteran SR2 players were a little thrown by some of the changes, and not completely thrilled at first blush, though I suspect they may get used to them given time. That’s not really what’s on my mind.
Technomancers.
Now, from a game design standpoint, I love the idea, and I have no problem with any of my players building one. No, what’s driving me crazy is the logic behind them… it may not faze anyone else, but it’s bugging me. Here’s the thing:
When you use the Matrix, even if you are in Seattle and hacking a mainframe in Moscow, you don’t go anywhere. Your brain is still receiving nervous impulses as it sits there in your meat body, and the only places you go are in your imagination. In fact, skilled hackers can change the appearance and geography of the Matrix to suit themselves – the Matrix is nothing but documents on servers and pictures in your head.
If you are disconnected from the Matrix suddenly, your consciousness cannot “stay in” the Matrix because it never actually went anywhere. Your brain will suddenly resume taking signals from your sensory nerves instead of your interface, and you will be back in reality. It may be jarring, and unpleasant – I’ll even buy that the experience could kill some fragile folks – but there is no more Matrix signal fro your brain to process. There is nowhere, in fact, to be trapped in.
Given that, exactly what is a technomancer accessing? I’ll buy the idea that, though magic or genetics or both, his brain is now a Matrix terminal. No problems at all with that. But given that the only way to see the information in the Matrix is for your “terminal” to connect to a server somewhere, somehow, how is it doing so? Can your brain magically access any Matrix port nearby as if it were a juicy version of my hacker’s handheld PDA? If so, does that mean my technomancer is going to be SOL out in the Mojave Desert? (Or does wireless coverage in the Sixth World reach EVERYWHERE – Antarctica and the middle of Amazonia included?)
Perhaps there’s data in a late 3rd edition or early 4th SR supplement that would clear this up for me. But a lot of the writing in the base 4th SR rules implies that the Matrix is an entire plane of its own that exists independently of the servers and network through which we access it – that if every electrical source on the planet stopped functioning tomorrow, the Matrix would still somehow be there.
Which by the way, is not necessarily an uninteresting idea. But it somehow doesn’t seem to fit in well with the otherwise somewhat realistic nature of the Matrix so far.
Edit: This was supposed to go in the
Radio over Wires
I’m very addicted to podcasts now: working through the backlog of the cool ones I’ve found is really helping me get through my work day.
It’s all the fault of the Fragile Gravity podcast at http://unseenllc.com/feed/glidepath.xml – of course I’d want to hear what kittykatya and impink were up to.
Then, as I realized that one show per week or so wasn’t going to feed my addiction properly, I stumbled upon World of Warcast – a fun, casual hour of lvl 40s and 50s talking and goofing off about Blizzard’s little life-sucker.
A link from an astronomy website drew me to Slacker Astronomy, where you don’t have to be a hardcore space geek, but you do have to have a goofy sense of humor.
And now, well, I’m hooked. The iTunes music store offers hundreds of free podcasts, ranging from language lessons in Japanese to video podcasts of French Maids explaining XML coding. You don’t have to have iTunes or even an MP3 player – there’s lots of software which’ll let you subscribe and listen from your desktop machine.
So that’s the morning post; I need to finish loading Steve Jackson Games’ new Fnordcast onto the iPod and leave for work…
“Quick – put up some shelves.”
While watching the 2005 season finale of Doctor Who with Rain the other day, something struck me. The Doctor carries a tool he calls a “sonic screwdriver”. About the size of a regular screwdriver, this tool emits sonic (and perhaps other) waves which can manipulate small mechanical and electronic objects. It’s most commonly used as a lockpick, but it’s been shown as a welder / unwelder, circuit modifier, computer reprogrammer, medical scanner, and (on rare occasions) a screwdriver.
He started using it in the Sixties, in his second incarnation, and continued well into the Eighties, when it was destroyed by an enemy of the Fifth Doctor. Sources in the BBC production team revealed that the device was causing the writers trouble when they wanted the Doctor locked up or otherwise frustrated by mechanisms. While I can’t remember if the Eighth Doctor used one during his movie, the Ninth and Tenth do so regularly, and I think with good reason. Someone at the BBC seems to have realized a fact:
Locked doors are boring story telling.
The sonic screwdriver is in fact a boon to the program: when there’s only 45 minutes of story, it’s a wise move to get past the locked doors and computer codes, and move on to the part where the Doctor must deal with other people and nasty decisions.
Besides, since the tool’s never too clearly explained, you can always have the door that the sonic screwdriver just won’t open.
(Brion Fields of Space Rogues keeps a sonic screwdriver in a pocket of his jumpsuit. Where he got it, I don’t know; and it was intended to be a subtle in-joke, not fill half the frame in an early scene.)
Fandom
Okay, I really have to replace the fan in this power supply. Anyone out there have something from their computer graveyard that would help?
I need Apple part #661-2303 (power supply for a G4 AGP Sawtooth Power Mac). Sometimes the part # 614-0108 can also be seen on said power supply.
Of course, all I really need from it is the internal fan. If someone has a dead supply with a working fan, or already has the fan lying loose and still functional, that would be just fine too 🙂
