Saturday, 21 August 2010 at 12:27
Driving home yesterday evening I nearly jumped out of my skin when a bright flash of light reflected in my rearview mirror nearly blinded me, closely followed by what I can best describe as a cartoon-character-gets-zapped sound effect that I heard even through closed windows and the air conditioning going at full blast. In a move that probably says more about my sense of self-preservation than anything else, I threw the TARDIS into park, jumped out, and ran toward the source of the sound - a rapidly descending power company cherrypicker below what used to be a small transformer on the pole. Said former transformer had apparently shorted out and caught fire while undergoing maintenance. I saw that the people working over there seemed okay - everybody was walking, talking, not clutching any body parts, and not laying on the ground so I snapped a couple of pictures with my smartphone. When those suckers go up, those suckers really go up.
By the way, the default camera app in Android v2.0 sucks - they took out the zoom feature.
Tuesday, 17 August 2010 at 14:22
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 at 08:34
Not only is Christmas four months away, but the Christmas decorations store is open before the Halloween store.
Taken at Tyson's Corner Mall... 9 August 2010.
Monday, 09 August 2010 at 09:00
As promised, here are
the pictures I took at the
HacDC Spaceblimp prototype launch on Saturday.
Friday, 06 August 2010 at 08:34
I knew it rained while I was at work yesterday - not having any access to the outside anymore, I can't tell unless the power goes out. However, I was quite surprised to find trees down all over my apartment complex when I got home last night. The images here are of a tree that apparently broke in two places and fell almost into my parking lot. I didn't see any signs of injury or property damage so I think everyone's okay, but there are at least two car of my neighbors heaving sighs of relief because they had some near misses.
Friday, 06 August 2010 at 08:21
For whatever reason, this grasshopper decided to hitch a ride on the outside of the TARDIS for a couple of miles of my commute home on Wednesday night. He managed to hang on for quite a while at 25 miles per hour until deciding to carefully pick his way down the chassis to the roof, whereupon he took flight under his own power.
Friday, 06 August 2010 at 08:19
Tuesday, 03 August 2010 at 09:10
At long last, Starcraft II.
The front cover folds out to reveal more about the story.
DVD-ROM in its sleeve and what passes for the manual.
Bonus: a notepad bearing wanted posters for Jim Raynor.
We also ran into something all too common at lunch that Sunday whilst leafing through the contents of her just-purchased copy of
Starcraft 2. I happened to be leafing through what passes for the game's manual (which is largely a recap of what happened during the origial
Starcraft and
Starcraft: Brood War). At one point our waiter came up to refill our drinks and made a couple of comments to me about the game. In point of fact, the game isn't mine - it's Lyssa's. Both of us were slightly miffed by his offhanded assumption that my wife wouldn't have any interest in video games at all.
A word to the wise: it is neither wise nor accurate to assume that one's female companion is not a geek. Sometimes they will code circles around you, and sometimes they'll hand you your ass on the game grid.
Tuesday, 03 August 2010 at 08:28
Still in the 'on' position.
Tuesday, 03 August 2010 at 08:25
This one's expired.
Friday, 30 July 2010 at 08:33
The pictures I took at
The Next HOPE are now online. You can look at them
over here. Be warned, they're not particularly dialup-friendly.
These pictures taken by
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] have been placed under a
Creative Commons By Attribution / Noncommercial / Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tuesday, 13 July 2010 at 19:52
I hope
Paul gets a quiet retirement now that the World Cup is over, and I don't mean on my plate alongside some wasabi.
Friday, 09 July 2010 at 18:19
A few pictures taken from my car during the amazing (even for DC) traffic jam on the Beltway yesterday evening.
Cars, cars as far as the eye could see in triple-digit temperatures. Total driving time: three hours, three minutes. Distance from work to home: 32 miles
Thursday, 08 July 2010 at 21:41
Last week
Catherine Asaro and Donald Wolcott played a live show at
Stacy's to celebrate the paperback release of
Diamond Star
. Hasufin, Mika, Lyssa, and I had hoped to show up at Stacy's about an hour ahead of time to get the sound system set up and checked out but Dr. Asaro and Donald had beaten us by about twenty minutes; plus, we were running about ten minutes late. We spent the next half hour or so sitting around chatting amiably, settling in, and waiting for more people to arrive. They took their places behind microphone and keyboard around 1915 local time and the show began.
Their show began with a short introduction followed by one of Del's songs from the novel. The concert lasted a little over an hour, during which time Stacy's was filled almost to capacity by fans - young, old, and in between. They played a couple of original compositions and did a few covers as well, some Simon and Garfunkle and even
one of my favorite Patti Smith songs (famously covered in the early 1990's by 10,000 Maniacs). Dr. Asaro has an excellent voice and Donald is a highly skilled keyboardist and piano player. From a synaesthete's perspective, watching their music was just as much fun as listening to it. The book and CD signing lasted another hour or so, and it would seem that some old friends were also in attendance. I wasn't paying much attention to Dr. Asaro at the time because I was engrossed in a discussion with an older gentleman named Joel about
rapid prototyping and 3D printing. While we were coming from very different worlds on some technologies (he science fiction, myself hacking and reading the latest research when I have a spare moment) he gave me some points to consider: there are certain things, like engine mounts and brake pads which are probably not amenable to construction on a 3D printer, even an industrial one. He brought up the examples of ship foundries and wartime field factories manufacturing parts for equipment that adhere to very strict protocols and tolerances tighter than anything our equipment can manage at this point in time. As a physical engineer, he made some excellent points that I must confess I hadn't considered before. Truth be told I'm a pretty lousy physical engineer, as the wreckage that is my workshop can attest to, so I've got some blind spots in the field.
Around the time that Stacy's closed the usual suspects and Dr. Asaro headed off to Amphora, our favorite local watering hole for a late dinner. We wound up talking there until quite late - 0100 or therabouts - about writing, publishing, the musical arts, and copyright. One of our number, a member of the next generation, really stole the show with her encyclopedic knowledge of paleontology and her plans in life. It's one thing to read in a book that someone's socks were charmed off, but quite another to actually watch it happen, and I'm pleased to say that I've gotten to witness it first hand.
These photographs are licensed
Creative Commons by attribution/non-commercial/share-alike v3.0 (unported).
Thursday, 08 July 2010 at 21:04
Late last month,
Cory Doctorow stopped by a bookstore in Baltimore called
Red Emma's as the last stop on his book signing tour for his new YA novel
For the Win. So, Hasufin, Mika, and I piled into the car and headed for the fringes of Charm City and a tiny bookstore slightly below street level but surprisingly difficult to miss while either on foot or on wheels. We got there about an hour into Doctorow's presentation just as the line reached the front door and Doctorow answered a question about
Squidgate, then a question about the message that the next generation hopefully would have gotten from the book
Little Brother.
The answer, interestingly, was "Sometimes you need to work with the people older than you are."
The line stretched all the way around the store and (briefly) out the front door. It turned out that I'd overpacked by bringing
everything; I didn't know how big the store was and how much time there would be. So, in the interest of not holding everything up I asked Cory if he'd autograph my copy of
Little Brother. I also asked him if I could photograph
his wedding ring while he was at the bookstore, and he graciously allowed me to do so. Unfortunately the pictures didn't turn out very well so I'd advise you to hit the link in that last sentence to get a good look at it.
Oh, well.
These photographs are licensed
Creative Commons by attribution/non-commercial/share-alike v3.0 (unported).
Thursday, 08 July 2010 at 20:29
Late in June a couple of us drive into the depth of Pennsylvania to attend another Walking the Thresholds at
Four Quarters Farm. I didn't take many pictures this year, mostly because more and more people are beginning to dislike being photographed due to the encroachment of surveillance into the modern world. Being a privacy advocate myself I can hardly begrudge anybody's not wanting to wind up in a photo album online. Something that I found interesting, however, was the unusually large number of
butterflies all over this place this year. So, I practiced my photography a bit.
And now, butterflies.
These photographs are licensed
Creative Commons by attribution/non-commercial/share-alike v3.0 (unported).
Tuesday, 06 July 2010 at 13:00
Saturday, 03 July 2010 at 17:14
The box near the street where lines come in off the pole and are connected to the wires inside the building. I never could remember the technical term for them, I always called them 'punch downs', for the
punch down blocks inside them.
Bad phreak, no tone generator.
Saturday, 03 July 2010 at 17:11
Breakfast at the
Sea Pearl Restaurant, Falls Church, Virginia.
Saturday, 03 July 2010 at 16:37
If you've not heard of podcaster and novelist
Scott Sigler he's one of the luminaries of the new media movement. Before becoming a novelist who's taken the New York Times booklist by storm he recorded his novels as audiobooks
and gave them away for free on iTunes,
podiobooks.com and his own website, the idea being that if you liked them you'd send some money his way and possibly buy the novels when they made it onto dead trees. Lo and behold it worked and now he's on tour for the hardcover release of
Ancestor
, his latest novel.
I haven't read
Ancestor yet. I started listening to
Infected early in '07 as an audiobook and I had to stop listening after five or six chapters. Frankly put, every time Perry (the hapless protagonist of
Infected) started gouging at his flesh (which I won't go into because it's a spoiler) I started scratching. And scratching. And clawing a little bit more, until my cow-orkers got so freaked out that none of us could get anything done at the office. So, I can't rightly give his work glowing reviews because I haven't been able to finish of it, but I can tell you that he's got the body horror thing down to such a fine degree that if you're not careful you'll find yourself following along a little too closely. By all means, download a couple episodes of his podcast and give it a listen, and if it's up your alley get thee to the bookstore and buy a Sigler novel or two.
Sigler was hilarious at Border's that evening. After reading the first chapter of
Ancestor he talked a bit about the adventures he had while writing it (such as going on a snowmobile retreat during Snowpocalypse and accidentally running his laptop over), some of the side stuff he did with his fans that further fleshes out the stories (that's the new thing about writers on the Net - they interact with their fans in a direct manner), and some stuff about what it was like growing up. One can only imagine what he must have been like as a high school wrestler routinely taking something approaching the
LD-50 dose of caffine and making the other team wonder if they'd shot him up with PCP before the match. I got to hang out with some pretty hardcore Sigler fans at the pub afterward and we had a blast talking, swapping stories (horror and otherwise), and generally finding out what a small place the DC metroplex really is.
Under the cut, pictures from the book signing.
More under the cut...
