….have reduced everyone’s access to the books that are subject to the extensions? I hope not – while there may be some benefit to living artists, I continue to believe that as a whole, this is such a huge net negative for civilization (and no, I’m not being overly dramatic) that we should be out in the streets throwing bricks around. Here’s a great piece on the atlantic that has a graph that captures everything you need to know – a whole era’s literature is falling into a black hole.
I switched to a standing desk several weeks ago. So far I’m loving it. My back does get a bit tired by the end of the day, but not so much that it dissuades me. I’m standing for most of the workday at this point, stopping for a rest for at most 45 minutes out of the day. I also do 3 2 minute sessions on an interval trainer I picked up. You can just barely see it tucked under the desk to my right in the photo. And yes, my office is generally as messy as how it looks in this photo.
Portrait of author William Gibson taken on his 60th birthday; March 17, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s available here, via the Paris Review. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he’s one of the most influential science fiction authors of his era. He coined the word ‘Cyberspace,’ helped popularize steampunk, and had a hand in bringing a particular vision of our near-ish future probably best exemplified in the film Blade Runner (which, he reveals in the interview, emerged independently, in parallel, and with an amazing level of similarity, from his imagination and Ridley Scott‘s – a fact they discovered years later). He’s also broken into the mainstream with his more recent novels.
I discovered a great parallel in our lives in this interview as well – like me, Gibson abandoned science fiction in his later teens, only to rediscover it some years later. Our reasons were very different. In my case, I began to conceive of myself as a ‘serious thinker,’ and spent a decade or so focused on history and the classics, despite the fact that I often struggled to take much pleasure from reading the classics. The beauty is that it was Gibson who brought me back to sci fi in the mid 90’s, when I somehow stumbled across Neuromancer, (via Wired magazine, at a guess), which blew my mind and sent me off on a multi-year scifi reading binge that included all his published works to that time. I’m still very fond of them, and have reread Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy it began multiple times since then.
Anyway, go read the interview, it’s fantastic. Then consider reading some Gibson – he’s everything he reveals in the interview and more. Or, if like me you’ve already read him, you might consider a re-read – I’m headed off to Lake George for vacation this week and tucked Neuromancer into my bag 😉
Pretty much this:
Coupled with 3 acres of land to look after and me wanting just a little bit of personal time at night. It’s all good – I’m not complaining, just explaining
Here’s how we celebrate asking to use the potty before an accident happens in the Hamilton household.
Your browser does not support the video tag
A quick followup on my New Year’s resolutions. So far I’m on track. Not buying any games has been easy – my gaming rig died on January 5th, and I just got its replacement up and (mostly) running this weekend. It’s hard to be tempted by the endless parade of Steam, Gamersgate, GoG and other vendors’ daily and weekly deals if you have nothing to play them on ;-). I’ll follow up again at the end of March.
No problems with the beer embargo either – I finished the month with nary a sip, then celebrated on the first day of February with some delicious Dales. Unfortunately the effect on my weight is hard to quantify. Prior to Laura’s birth I had been using an elliptical trainer as many days a week as I could manage while Susan put Brady to bed. That didn’t work anymore (I have to help with bedtime duties) so I bought a compact elliptical trainer to use at work during lunch, but the piece of crap broke after 2 weeks of use, meaning for half the month I was mostly failing to get enough physical activity in. Still, my weight has steadily hovered in the under 175 area, leaving me to conclude that removing the beer helped. My plan going forward is to return to a pattern I used to follow – no beer on the weekdays, but open season Friday and Saturdays. Meantime I’m weighing spending considerably more for a higher end compact step trainer. My kitty continues to grow – it’s at $150 now. I still haven’t decided what I’ll spend it on. I’m dropping the weekly contribution to $20 now that I will be drinking a few beers on the weekend.
So I’m making two this year. I held off sharing them because one of them was impacted by the steam sale that’s ending today.
My first resolution: no beer in January, with an option to extend it through the end of March if it has the effect I hope it does on my weight. Basically, doing what workouts I can has allowed me to get to 170 and more or less keep it there, but no lower. I’m not able to bring more activity into my life with a toddler and baby in the house, but I can experiment with my diet, so I’m going to forgo 300+ calories of delicious beer for a while to see if it works. So far the signs are promising. The goal is to get to 165 if I can. If I do on this no beer diet, I’ll assess next steps at that point. If at the end of January it hasn’t worked, back comes the beer 😉
My second resolution has two parts. First, no buying of videogames until April 1, with 2 exceptions. The first I mentioned – I waited until the end of the Steam sale, and I did buy a bunch of stuff on sale in the first week of January. The second is that I pre-ordered Nuni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch as a Birthday present for myself. Studio Ghibli teaming up with a Japanese game producer to make the jrpg of this generation (maybe…Xenoblade certainly makes a play for the same honor…I’ll draw my own conlusions after I’ve played both) was something I could not resist, nor risk allowing it to go out of print and become ridiculously expensive/out of my reach. The second resolution comes about because my game buying habit has become ridiculous. I have a backlog so long that I could play games all year and not finish all the ones sitting unfinished on my shelf and various hard drives. I’m going to stop buying them for a while, play what I have, and see how things go. The second part of the resolution extends through the whole year: after March, I cannot buy a new game until I have finished one I already have. This year I’m going to try and bring balance to this. We’ll see how it goes.
To help things along, and to make this fun, I’m going to use a trick I learned back when I was trying to quit smoking. I’m going to take the money I would have spent on beer and games and stick it in a jar, then use it to buy something fun for myself or the family once enough has accumulated. I’ve decided that amounts to $30 a week. I haven’t yet decided what I’ll spend the loot on, but I’ll report back here once I have.
Bonus content since I can’t resist hyping Nuni No Kuni – some footage:
Last year around this time I had one of the worst computer failures I’ve ever had, wherein an upgrade process for my server went south and I lost all my database tables, permanently. Some, I had backups for. Others I didn’t, and those included the photo galleries of my son Brady’s first year. None of the photos were lost, but all the comments, photo titles, etc were lost forever. I was so pissed off about this I abandoned Ubuntu and moved everything to other systems; for about a year I hosted everything remotely with site5.com, then when I ran into some limitations with that arrangement, I moved things in house. I also assessed photo hosting software and decided to move over to piwigo instead of sticking with menalto’s gallery, which I had been using for >10 years. I mention all of this because everything is now finally running, and more importantly we’ve been slowly refilling it with content. This includes many of my collections of AGCW photos, and a month’s worth of photos of my new daughter Laura. There’s lots more coming as well. It’s back at its original location, ie www.metamusing.net/gallery.
There’s not much actual video, this is all about the audio. It’s under a minute long. Things really get started at about 35 seconds:
This was the second night this week they showed up. They continually made forays into the yard to try and get at our chickens. I put a headlamp on, grabbed a broom handle, tied my dog Soolin on my waist, then went out to chase them off twice. It worked both times but it didn’t dissuade them from coming back. One of the times I’m pretty sure they didn’t even leave, they just went quiet and skulked around in the high grass and tree line on the verge of my property, this based mostly on Soolin’s reaction. We only caught sight of them once, when my headlamp caught somewhere between 3-5 pairs of eyes looking at us from near my barn. Meanwhile, the idiot chickens’ reaction to this was to burst into agitated clucking and crowing, which only served to further agitate the coyotes.
The video fails to capture them at full throat, but it’s still pretty impressive the racket you can hear. It’s a little intimidating. I wouldn’t say I was afraid, but there’s some primal reaction it caused in me along the lines of ‘caution man, this is not cool.’ I was a little worried for Soolin, mostly if she got off-lead somehow and ran off.
[Edit: update – they Coyotes stopped by 3 times this week – one more time after I posted this]
Just following up as promised. As our first snowfall of the season approaches, I can report that none of our apple trees produced fruit this year. Looks like as speculated the October snowfall last year which took so many of their limbs, killed 2 of them, and left the yard a wreck, also so damaged them that they produced no fruit. There was a spattering of blossoms, literally a handful of small apples that got no larger than golfballs, and that’s it. This from among at least 10 mature apple trees which last year produced a bountiful crop. Hopefully next year is better.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 