I read an article linked from someone's blog that suggested that the Zone could be achieved by anyone through drilling and training oneself to breath exclusively through the nose (assisted by the use of breathe-right nasal strips). Something to think about while you're gaming. I don't remember where it was linked; I saw it in someone's blog linked from the Is My Blog Hot or Not? page.
I think I managed to achieve the zone, or something like it, once or twice during typing tests in my high school typing class. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that concentration might have something to do with it too...
Or you can remove the Esc keycap, and then go, "Oh, no! There's no Escape!":)
Incidentally, you can often find those old keyboards at local computer salvage shops, if there are any in your area. I found one selling them for only a couple of bucks apiece, so I bought two...one for just in case.:)
In Missouri, at least, you can go into a bar if you're underage, but you can't order alcohol. At least, that's the case at all the bars I tend to visit. (But then, all the bars I tend to visit are also restaurants, so it stands to reason they'd let families, with underage people, in to eat.) Two of the people at our LJ meetup were underage.
Nobody showed up to the Springfield, Missouri one, either. Geez. I mean, the Livejournal meetup we had met in a parking lot, but at least it got four people...
Well, I headed up to the Springfield, Missouri Slashdot meetup location, The Bar Next Door/South Avenue Pizza Co. Put a sign up on the table and everything. Waited 'til 7:30...and nobody had shown up, so I called it quits and came home. 14 people registered, 4 RSVP'd...and I'm the only one who showed up. Oh well, maybe next month.
If you had signed up early enough--a couple of weeks ago, for instance--you would have had a vote in choosing where the meeting would be. They give a list of three choices, and all the registrants get to vote on each one. As it is, if you sign up you'll get to vote on the next one. (And if you give them your real email address, they'll even send you a reminder of when you can vote.)
Well, the site says they try to provide a venue that's within about an hour's travel of everyone.
Anyway, the venue was chosen because the most people on the list voted for it during the voting period of the last few weeks. You had plenty of opportunity to cast your vote for the other two alternatives...
Perhaps you should email them with your concern. Given that they're just a couple of people, trying to provide the same service for a variety of localities without ever actually having been there, there are bound to be a few glitches. Perhaps it's something they can adjust.
As I said elsewhere, they cancel meetups that don't get a minimum number of users--users who not only register, but who come back to the website a few days before the event after receiving an emailed reminder and click a link to say "I'll be there."
So if you think you might attend at all, you're doing everyone else who'd like to attend a favor by signing up and RSVPing...otherwise, the meeting might have to be cancelled.
I find it easiest to put at least a little trust in a site like this--especially one that was created by just a couple of guys who the LiveJournal admin knows and vouches for. If you're not willing to trust them that far, why trust them enough to provide a service in which you want to participate?
But then, I've long since come to the conclusion that unless I'm living under a rock, there's no way my Internet address is ever going to be completely spam-free anyway--especially since I was using it before the whole spam scene exploded, so there's no way to keep it from being found out. So I installed Spamassassin, and now I can devote all that fret and worry to looking for a job instead of trying to take up arms against a sea of troubles.
Well, they can't exactly tell you where it is if they don't know where you are, can they?
And they can't know where you are if you don't register.
So if you don't register, you're out of luck.
I know that sounds harsh, but they have to have a minimum number of people who have certified that they are willing to show up, or else they cancel the meeting. And in order to prevent ballot box stuffing-type abuses, they require that people be registered in order to provide this verification.
They want your email address because they use it. They send you reminders: "Hey, don't forget to RSVP for the meeting so that we won't cancel it when not enough people say they're going to show up" or "Hey, don't forget the meeting's tonight."
Look on the bright side...it could have been at a McDonald's or a Hardee's. From what I've been able to make out from scoping out the venue choices in my home town, going to a Meetup held in a parking lot, and thinking about it, they must have populated their venue list by grepping on keywords in the online yellow pages.
The best way to turn the trend around? Submit some really cool local places using their new venue submission form.
...or your venue might turn out to be a parking lot.
The Livejournal Meetup was on Tuesday. Here in Springfield, Missouri, the closest of the three venue choices to me turned out to be something called "Farmer Brothers Coffee." I checked the map, and it seemed kind of odd that a coffeehouse would be far out on the east side of town toward the expressway, where mainly office buildings could be found...but I figured the Meetup people knew what they were doing, and voted for it.
Enough other people also voted for it that it became the selected venue...and when I got there, a half hour early (since I was the host), I discovered that it was not, in fact, a coffeehouse...it was a suite in an office building, for a restaurant coffee supply firm. Closed, of course.
So I waited out in the parking lot for the other confused souls to show up, we all had a good laugh about meetup sites that apparently pick their venues by grepping online yellow pages, and then we went somewhere else. We had a good time, all things considered.
Still, I wonder how many other meetups have taken or will take place in parking lots?
It didn't look to me as though they were so much attacking the search engine per se, as they were simply commenting on it. Or that they were "attacking" anything, really--that's just the story submitter's slant.
The problem is more far-reaching than just search engines, anyway; after all, nobody could find the stuff if all the individual websites didn't have it on-line. Personally, I find it kind of reassuring...if I have descendants, they'll be able to find out all about me long after I'm gone by browing through the old web files, reading my livejournal entries and USENET posts, and so on.
I have always been aware that search engines could turn up things you'd rather not have seen...back when the search engines first came out, a friend of mine was chagrinned to find, when he searched on his own name, the majority of the results related to an old piece of Vampire fanfiction that he'd sent to a mailing list with about four people on it, and had thought to be safely dead and buried--and hardly anything was linked to his more recent, more professional writings. That taught me a valuable object lesson right then and there...if you're going to do something on the 'net that you don't want people linking with your name, do it anonymously. Web email services come in very handy for that sort of thing...
Oldfield is awesome, though it's worth noting that Tubular Bells was not originally written for The Exorcist; its producer (or was it director?) listened to it and liked it so much that he adapted the music for the soundtrack. Oldfield did get to write a fully original score for the movie The Killing Fields, though. Oldfield also wrote the song "Family Man," later covered by Hall & Oates, and his Tubular Bells was remixed into the X-Files theme for the movie soundtrack. He also wrote an album called "Songs of Distant Earth," based loosely upon the Arthur C. Clarke novel of the same name, which was one of the early uses of multimedia on an audio CD-ROM. My personal favorite Oldfield album so far is Tubular Bells 3.
Speaking of Alan Parsons, it's also worth noting that he did the score for Ladyhawke
Not a question for Anthony per se, but just a note that people who find Incarnations of Immortality interesting might also dig the Nobilis roleplaying game, which riffs on similar themes. It's been getting rave reviews, one of which can be found here.
Firefly involves sex with a five? seven? year-old girl. (Is that underage enough for you?) And in fact we're supposed to empathize with this Lolita when she is cruelly tricked into incriminating her lover, who then dies in prison. The point is driven home by the author's note, which talks about a pedophile convict with whom Anthony was in contact and makes the point that is it really so bad to have sex with little kids as long as the little kid wants it?
This is all from memory, mind you, as it's been several years since I read Firefly and it was not one of the ones I actually own. But I think it's close enough.
Either Piers must approve of ebooks (or not oppose them) to some extent, or his publisher must...because his Xanth books are available from Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press.
Someone please moderate the parent up...this is just the question I wanted to ask, but phrased in a much better way than I could think to.
For further pedophilic evidence, see Firefly, in which he all but comes out and says that it should be okay to have sex with little kids, as long as the little kid wants it. That was about the point where I finally became fed up with Mr. Anthony and his apparent fetishes, and shoved my two big boxes full of Anthony books deep under my bed.
It's sad, too...he did write some pretty good stuff back in the early days. Early Xanth, early Apprentice Adept...I think that Bio of a Space Tyrant was what first caused me to start questioning the political views that my parents had handed down to me. I thought the firewood-splitting short story ("Wood You?") was cute, Prostho Plus and Hard Sell were inventive, and Macroscope was amazing. He had some great ideas, back in the day.
And it's not as though the original Doctor Who ever had bad scripts, anything gratuitous (the Beatles, anyone?), car chases, or any of that rubbish, is it?
Or it could just be that the books didn't circulate at all, and the store(s) where your son found them bought the inventory of the one that went out of business.
It's funny the submitter should mention this...because I remember when the people who archived it started archiving it in the first place. A rather big to-do was made about it, as I recall; it was archived as a side-project of the folks at Alexa--you know, the ones who provide the "what's related" technology to Netscape? At the time they started, they didn't know for sure what they would do with it except store it for future generations...but they clearly had some ideas, judging from what they've done with it recently.
As to the poster's complaint about his old stuff being archived...my immediate response is to say, "Well, tough...you should have thought about that before you put your content out there in the open for anybody who wanted to look at it."
I mean, seriously, if you do something in public, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy thereafter.
Slashdot Mirror
I read an article linked from someone's blog that suggested that the Zone could be achieved by anyone through drilling and training oneself to breath exclusively through the nose (assisted by the use of breathe-right nasal strips). Something to think about while you're gaming. I don't remember where it was linked; I saw it in someone's blog linked from the Is My Blog Hot or Not? page.
I think I managed to achieve the zone, or something like it, once or twice during typing tests in my high school typing class. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that concentration might have something to do with it too...
Or you can remove the Esc keycap, and then go, "Oh, no! There's no Escape!" :)
:)
Incidentally, you can often find those old keyboards at local computer salvage shops, if there are any in your area. I found one selling them for only a couple of bucks apiece, so I bought two...one for just in case.
In Missouri, at least, you can go into a bar if you're underage, but you can't order alcohol. At least, that's the case at all the bars I tend to visit. (But then, all the bars I tend to visit are also restaurants, so it stands to reason they'd let families, with underage people, in to eat.) Two of the people at our LJ meetup were underage.
Nobody showed up to the Springfield, Missouri one, either. Geez. I mean, the Livejournal meetup we had met in a parking lot, but at least it got four people...
Oh well, maybe next month...
Well, I headed up to the Springfield, Missouri Slashdot meetup location, The Bar Next Door/South Avenue Pizza Co. Put a sign up on the table and everything. Waited 'til 7:30...and nobody had shown up, so I called it quits and came home. 14 people registered, 4 RSVP'd...and I'm the only one who showed up. Oh well, maybe next month.
If you had signed up early enough--a couple of weeks ago, for instance--you would have had a vote in choosing where the meeting would be. They give a list of three choices, and all the registrants get to vote on each one. As it is, if you sign up you'll get to vote on the next one. (And if you give them your real email address, they'll even send you a reminder of when you can vote.)
Well, the site says they try to provide a venue that's within about an hour's travel of everyone.
Anyway, the venue was chosen because the most people on the list voted for it during the voting period of the last few weeks. You had plenty of opportunity to cast your vote for the other two alternatives...
Perhaps you should email them with your concern. Given that they're just a couple of people, trying to provide the same service for a variety of localities without ever actually having been there, there are bound to be a few glitches. Perhaps it's something they can adjust.
As I said elsewhere, they cancel meetups that don't get a minimum number of users--users who not only register, but who come back to the website a few days before the event after receiving an emailed reminder and click a link to say "I'll be there."
So if you think you might attend at all, you're doing everyone else who'd like to attend a favor by signing up and RSVPing...otherwise, the meeting might have to be cancelled.
I find it easiest to put at least a little trust in a site like this--especially one that was created by just a couple of guys who the LiveJournal admin knows and vouches for. If you're not willing to trust them that far, why trust them enough to provide a service in which you want to participate?
But then, I've long since come to the conclusion that unless I'm living under a rock, there's no way my Internet address is ever going to be completely spam-free anyway--especially since I was using it before the whole spam scene exploded, so there's no way to keep it from being found out. So I installed Spamassassin, and now I can devote all that fret and worry to looking for a job instead of trying to take up arms against a sea of troubles.
Well, they can't exactly tell you where it is if they don't know where you are, can they?
And they can't know where you are if you don't register.
So if you don't register, you're out of luck.
I know that sounds harsh, but they have to have a minimum number of people who have certified that they are willing to show up, or else they cancel the meeting. And in order to prevent ballot box stuffing-type abuses, they require that people be registered in order to provide this verification.
They want your email address because they use it. They send you reminders: "Hey, don't forget to RSVP for the meeting so that we won't cancel it when not enough people say they're going to show up" or "Hey, don't forget the meeting's tonight."
They do have a privacy policy, you know.
Look on the bright side...it could have been at a McDonald's or a Hardee's. From what I've been able to make out from scoping out the venue choices in my home town, going to a Meetup held in a parking lot, and thinking about it, they must have populated their venue list by grepping on keywords in the online yellow pages.
The best way to turn the trend around? Submit some really cool local places using their new venue submission form.
You go to the Slashdot meetup website, register with your email address and zip code, and the site tells you where the meetup is in your area.
...or your venue might turn out to be a parking lot.
The Livejournal Meetup was on Tuesday. Here in Springfield, Missouri, the closest of the three venue choices to me turned out to be something called "Farmer Brothers Coffee." I checked the map, and it seemed kind of odd that a coffeehouse would be far out on the east side of town toward the expressway, where mainly office buildings could be found...but I figured the Meetup people knew what they were doing, and voted for it.
Enough other people also voted for it that it became the selected venue...and when I got there, a half hour early (since I was the host), I discovered that it was not, in fact, a coffeehouse...it was a suite in an office building, for a restaurant coffee supply firm. Closed, of course.
So I waited out in the parking lot for the other confused souls to show up, we all had a good laugh about meetup sites that apparently pick their venues by grepping online yellow pages, and then we went somewhere else. We had a good time, all things considered.
Still, I wonder how many other meetups have taken or will take place in parking lots?
It didn't look to me as though they were so much attacking the search engine per se, as they were simply commenting on it. Or that they were "attacking" anything, really--that's just the story submitter's slant.
The problem is more far-reaching than just search engines, anyway; after all, nobody could find the stuff if all the individual websites didn't have it on-line. Personally, I find it kind of reassuring...if I have descendants, they'll be able to find out all about me long after I'm gone by browing through the old web files, reading my livejournal entries and USENET posts, and so on.
I have always been aware that search engines could turn up things you'd rather not have seen...back when the search engines first came out, a friend of mine was chagrinned to find, when he searched on his own name, the majority of the results related to an old piece of Vampire fanfiction that he'd sent to a mailing list with about four people on it, and had thought to be safely dead and buried--and hardly anything was linked to his more recent, more professional writings. That taught me a valuable object lesson right then and there...if you're going to do something on the 'net that you don't want people linking with your name, do it anonymously. Web email services come in very handy for that sort of thing...
Oldfield is awesome, though it's worth noting that Tubular Bells was not originally written for The Exorcist; its producer (or was it director?) listened to it and liked it so much that he adapted the music for the soundtrack. Oldfield did get to write a fully original score for the movie The Killing Fields, though. Oldfield also wrote the song "Family Man," later covered by Hall & Oates, and his Tubular Bells was remixed into the X-Files theme for the movie soundtrack. He also wrote an album called "Songs of Distant Earth," based loosely upon the Arthur C. Clarke novel of the same name, which was one of the early uses of multimedia on an audio CD-ROM. My personal favorite Oldfield album so far is Tubular Bells 3.
Speaking of Alan Parsons, it's also worth noting that he did the score for Ladyhawke
Not a question for Anthony per se, but just a note that people who find Incarnations of Immortality interesting might also dig the Nobilis roleplaying game, which riffs on similar themes. It's been getting rave reviews, one of which can be found here.
Firefly involves sex with a five? seven? year-old girl. (Is that underage enough for you?) And in fact we're supposed to empathize with this Lolita when she is cruelly tricked into incriminating her lover, who then dies in prison. The point is driven home by the author's note, which talks about a pedophile convict with whom Anthony was in contact and makes the point that is it really so bad to have sex with little kids as long as the little kid wants it?
This is all from memory, mind you, as it's been several years since I read Firefly and it was not one of the ones I actually own. But I think it's close enough.
Either Piers must approve of ebooks (or not oppose them) to some extent, or his publisher must...because his Xanth books are available from Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press.
Someone please moderate the parent up...this is just the question I wanted to ask, but phrased in a much better way than I could think to.
For further pedophilic evidence, see Firefly, in which he all but comes out and says that it should be okay to have sex with little kids, as long as the little kid wants it. That was about the point where I finally became fed up with Mr. Anthony and his apparent fetishes, and shoved my two big boxes full of Anthony books deep under my bed.
It's sad, too...he did write some pretty good stuff back in the early days. Early Xanth, early Apprentice Adept...I think that Bio of a Space Tyrant was what first caused me to start questioning the political views that my parents had handed down to me. I thought the firewood-splitting short story ("Wood You?") was cute, Prostho Plus and Hard Sell were inventive, and Macroscope was amazing. He had some great ideas, back in the day.
And it's not as though the original Doctor Who ever had bad scripts, anything gratuitous (the Beatles, anyone?), car chases, or any of that rubbish, is it?
Or it could just be that the books didn't circulate at all, and the store(s) where your son found them bought the inventory of the one that went out of business.
It's funny the submitter should mention this...because I remember when the people who archived it started archiving it in the first place. A rather big to-do was made about it, as I recall; it was archived as a side-project of the folks at Alexa--you know, the ones who provide the "what's related" technology to Netscape? At the time they started, they didn't know for sure what they would do with it except store it for future generations...but they clearly had some ideas, judging from what they've done with it recently.
As to the poster's complaint about his old stuff being archived...my immediate response is to say, "Well, tough...you should have thought about that before you put your content out there in the open for anybody who wanted to look at it."
I mean, seriously, if you do something in public, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy thereafter.