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
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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The DC metroplex is the only place I've seen to date in which the following sequence of events can occur within sixty seconds:
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When you have a workstation running some variant of Linux, the Gnome desktop and you have an nVidia graphics card in the box, do yourself a favor and install their drivers. Make sure that the "Driver" line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf reads "nvidia" and not "nv". And when you get around to configuring multiple displays on the same system, don't mess with Gnome's System->Preferences->Display utility, use the nvidia-settings utility to do it for you (it'll ask for the root password).
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punch down blocks inside them.
Bad phreak, no tone generator.
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Breakfast at the Sea Pearl Restaurant, Falls Church, Virginia.
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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 …
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