A mystery begins today. Or does it? Well, it seems like it probably does.
Category: Leonard Richardson
I just read my favorite girlsarepretty ever. I think the reason I like it so much is it’s like the best parts of GAP, plus choice morsels of Stephen, Leonard and Cody Powell. I want to write like that.
I’m glad I have a reason to talk about NewsBruiser again, because I’m on the front page! No, actually I want to talk about NewsBruiser because Leonard’s had version 2.0 (“Master Planarian”) out for weeks and I need to install it. Except I don’t want to install it, because a) NewsBruiser installations have traditionally been nightmarish for me (this is due to my hosts and my own incompetence, not NewsBruiser), and b) it has comments. NewsBruiser with comments! It’ll be anarchy!
Sumana and I had a conversation this morning about said comments, and about Leonard’s implementation of Bayesian heuristics in NewsBruiser. We agree that it’s capable of preventing comment spam, but I argued that it can’t entirely prevent tar pit syndrome, because it can’t filter out stupid. Sumana argued that it can. And then we jousted. No, actually we exchanged spam jokes.
(Yes, I know you can just turn off comments, I’m just whining. And yes, I do have a forum and am thus technically already sinking into a tar pit. However, you’ll note that the definition of the tar pit theory clearly states that “as long as no one actually uses the discussion forum, you are safe.” The only people who actually post there came from AZWP anyway, so I’m totally slopy.)
I do need to install 2.0, actually, so I can do trackbacks. I really don’t understand trackbacks, but they sound like they have something to do with RSS feeds or referrer logs, so I must consume them! Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m turning into an RSS evangelist like all the RSS early adopters, and I should be shot. And speaking of referrer logs, Cody Powell responded just as I planned to my goulash bait, and proceeded to write an entry about Cracked vs. MAD, which is a topic I was thinking about just this morning, during my pseudobreakfast. CODY POWELL CAN SEE INTO MY BRAIN.
Today I am terse.
Could’ve saved a line if he’d written it in C++.
Update 1636 hrs: Or five lines, in PHP.
Update 10.5.03 1745 hrs: And Leonard points out that unless he puts a newline character in at the end there, it won’t look right at all.
Yeah, this didn’t actually turn out all that terse.
The day went very well, actually. Object-Oriented Software Development is going to be hard and a lot of fun; AI and Algorithms are going to be hard and… well, basically just hard. I managed to buy my books and a lunch and backpack. Oh! That’s a great excuse for a gimmick, because I was actually buying said backpack for Maria, and I had biked to class and had only one way to carry it. That’s right: for a few hours, mine was a metabackpack.
That biking was the first time I’ve ever actually done a real bike workout, and it was pretty cool. (It’s also longer than I thought; now that I’ve scouted the route, I think I’ll mostly TARC it.) At times I felt like an escapee of TRON, whizzing through lightfields with limitless dexterity. At others, such as when I ran into a chain link fence within five minutes of leaving my apartment, I did not. And at still others, I tried to stop, ha ha, whilst riding with a misaligned brake pad and fifty pounds of new textbooks. The other thing I learned today is “inertia.”
Also! I returned Sumana’s call and ended up talking to Leonard, who was gentle and solar-powered, the way I imagine dimetrodons. I babbled a lot, at one point, I think, engaging in extended discourse on the subject of avocados.
Yeah. I lived through one day, and tomorrow it’s already my weekly Hump Day Vacation, wherein I do nothing but hang out with Ian and get excited about secret projects. Also, try to find a longer CAT5 cable so I can get Yellow Puppy out on the interweb. Ph34r! My… vastly underpowered new computer!
The Devil’s Dictionary: Heh and double heh. As a blogger-hating blogger, I think that whole thing is great, actually. I want to keep up with it, and wish it had an RSS feed (unlikely). Thanks to Leonard for the tip-off.
Apparently I define myself by bloggers
Coincidentally, my farewell lunch was scheduled for the same day as Emma’s, and my last day would have been the same too–except I’m not leaving after all. I’m going to keep working here part-time, Mondays and Fridays, with class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m counting on that break in the middle of the week forcing me to get some work done.
This wasn’t a decision lightly reached. I talked about it to three people I respect a great deal–Sumana, Maria, and (the other) Emma (from GSP 2001)–and finally came around to staying after a lot of thought. This isn’t my dream job, but it’s a good job. My next best option would be a possible opening at The Great Escape, a really neat comic / music store on Bardstown Road, but a) it’d pay less, b) I’d have to have a driver’s license and c) it wouldn’t look nearly as good on my resumé.
So I’m going to get to know the people here a little better, and I’m going to pay my crap-programming dues, and I’ll be able to breathe a little easier financially. I’m going to be putting a big chunk of my pay into a savings account every month, and that account is going to be reserved for exactly one thing–Amtrak, California, Comic Con, Stephen Maria Lisa Will (Ian?) Sumana Leonard Graham next summer. You gotta believe!
Leonardr like lightning!
Says Mister Crummy, regarding this last entry:
“The obvious thing that comes to my mind is ‘3001’ by Arthur C. Clarke, which is an awful book but which features, among other things, tame, semi-intelligent velociraptors who do menial tasks like gardening. This is just an incidental detail which is not important to the story, but it’s portrayed as a good deal for everyone including the no-longer-extinct dinosaurs…
Another one is David Brin’s Uplift series, in which one type of genetic engineering (making semi-intelligent species fully intelligent) is seen as a social good and a duty. Some of the characters in the books are genetically engineered chimps and dolphins.
If a piece of technology is central to a science fiction story then usually something has to go wrong or the technology has to be abused in some way, or there’s no story. I like Brin because he’s good at coming up with different drivers for conflict.”
He’s right, and that’s a common weakness of science fiction: Neat Idea Syndrome. My Creative Writing visiting professor, Nancy Zafris, told me when asked that yes, SF did have a pretty low standing within her literary circles.
“Why?” I asked. “There’s so much vibrant, progressive fiction out there.”
“I don’t know,” she said, distastefully. “It just always seems like there’s a problem, so they have to… do something with the computer, and that’s the end.”
Which you know is ridiculous, if you’ve ever read SF, but it does make a point: Neat Idea SF exists, and it’s perceived by the casual reader as a) all the same and b) boring. The casual reader is pretty much right, when the story doesn’t involve you with a character. When it gets down to it, a Neat Idea may catch your fancy, but eventually humans are only interested in reading about themselves.
So yeah, now I want to read David Brin, because what Leonard says makes him sound like exactly the right kind of character-focused writer. Unfortunately, my current bedside reading pile is staggering. I went to the library again tonight, with my newly repaired bike tires, and picked up yet more of my reserved books (Frank Miller, Diana Wynne Jones, Rob Thomas). I’m going to have to get a new box when I move on Friday just to keep my library stuff in. Is there a twelve-step program for this kind of thing?
The LeonardR writes:
“I made a doob-doob (http://www.crummy.com/2002/09/03/1) rendition of Xorph. I’d give you a picture, but I have no way of getting it to you.”
First, that makes me feel bad, since I haven’t updated Xorph in a long, long time. Well, no, first it makes me feel all tingly and flushed, as happens every time someone cool talks about my comic. Second it makes me feel bad. Third: Leonard has made fan art for Xorph; the fan art is made of paper; I have never seen this fan art; I have also never seen most things made of paper. The question this poses, obviously, is are all paper things I haven’t seen actually Xorph fan art?, but I kind of like it better unanswered.
So the design isn’t quite done yet, but here it is: NFD now bruises its news with some of the neatest software I’ve ever had the chance to yell at. The archive navigation is a lot different now, but one thing I’m actually pretty proud of is that all the old permalinks will still work–if I’ve done it right, there’s a little script that will redirect you right to the newly bruised entry.
I actually started working on this over a week ago, and once I’d started using NB to post I couldn’t go back (which is why there hasn’t been anything on the old NFD page for so long). Switching my journal software was like walking into a dealership with a wheelbarrow and driving out with a red Ferrari, so I’ve been writing, but in here instead. You can read like two weeks of the stuff starting on June 27 (although I think this next one is my favorite yet).
The front-page design has been trickier, since I wanted to finally have something on this site that was valid XHTML and built entirely with CSS. I think it’s pretty close now, but the design still looks better in IE than Netscape. I also tried to tidy all the old code in the conversion, but I’m sure I missed something; if you find broken links or funny-looking entries, let me know.
So enjoy the calendar, the searchability, the randomnymity and the category madness; pretty soon there should be something else up top, either a random quote or a Today in History feature. Expect entries to be rather more frequent but correspondingly shorter, as now updating isn’t such an ordeal that I feel I have to save up my material. Expect also at least two more of the secret projects I’ll be developing this summer, involving obsessions and imperatives.
I really do hope you like the new NFD (BC). And I’d love to stay and type more, but today is Blood Drive Day and I’ve gotta go faint.