I watched Miami Vice when it aired, caught most of the episodes, and still like the series. I would also cheerfully buy the entire series on DVD>
I'm still waiting for my paperless office
on
What's Always Next?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm still waiting for my paperless office. It hasn't happened yet: no matter how much I cut back, my coworkers always want to print repeated drafts of documents to review interim versions, print emails and notes for archiving where they can find them, and so on.
Sure, those seven will be revered and treasured, but we want MORE books about ordinary kids doing magic.
As a suggestion of somewhere else to start, you might want to try Diane Duane's Young Wizards sequence of fantasy novels. Like Rowling's stuff it's ostensibly written for young adults, but there's some nice work in there even if you're not in your teens anymore.
If you are using electronic formats of whatever: term papers, calendars, etc. Figure out very early on how you're going to handle having your laptop or computer stolen, lightning powersurged into oblivion, or virused, or your roomate deleting your user folder. For example, if you have an Apple system, get an iPod and use it as an external Firewire drive to back up your papers, class notes, whatever, or use the autobackup feature included with the iDisk on a.Mac account. If you have network storage available, use it, but consider what you've got where and who can get to it. Lots of places have variably good power, so consider a good surge protector or line conditioner, maybe included in a UPS, as a very good idea.
Thinking about these things before they happen is sometimes boring, but a lot more pleasant than losing a week's worth of work on a term paper.
Oh, and backing up, like security, is a process not a product. Don't forget to backup your work.
With 2600 audio CDs and a growing but comparatively small (under 100) DVD collection, I just started buying Boltz racks. Sheet steel, assemble yourself, really easy. The CD racks hold 55 CDs per shelf, have 11 shelves in a 5'8" high unit for 605 total. The expansion racks are simply a rack without one side, and bolt through the side of what you've already got. Different finishes, matte black industrial or satin finish for that cyber/Gattaca look. Their TV/component stands are heavy enough gauge steel to be bulletproof, at least to standard pistol ammunition (haven't tested it with.308 armor piercing, but they should stop most standard pistol ammunition). Shipping's free as i recall, at least in continental US.
One big advantage of these racks is since they're sheet steel with holes, and narrow dowels, that half-full racks don't look like the monolith from 2001 - you can see through them. Their open design also helps with airflow in the room, even when loaded with CDs. (just a customer, don't get anything for endorsing, etc. etc.)
In the late 80s and early 90s I was interested in artifical languages: Esperanto, Volapuk, the loglan/lojban thing, and so on - the head of my thesis committee was a linguistics professor, and so I spent a lot of grad school doing linguistics-oriented work. I spent about a year studying Klingon at the time. Around 1994, a friend called me at work asking if I'd gotten the job, but I had no idea what he was talking about as I hadn't read Sunday's want ads. Apparently the local community college had advertised for instructors in the Continuing Education department, and in the list of twenty or so things (auto repair, Indian cooking, etc.), they'd listed "Klingon language and culture". So I called, found the head of the con ed department was a Star Trek fan and wanted to see if there was anyone around who could teach the class. She hired me by the end of the phone call for an evening class. The class was offered under the foreign language section of the continuing education divison, not the pop culture section. Interesting sidenote: community colleges here are part of the county/state government, so salaries are set by law and aren't negotiable. Since I had a master's degree in a relevant field, my per-hour pay for teaching Klingon was higher than what I was making per-hour as a technical writer. I taught for one semester, once a week. Some of the students who showed up seemed disappointed I was actually teaching a language, as some had signed up thinking they'd spend the entire time talking about that week's episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. The ones who stuck with the class surprised me at how fast they learned. There weren't enough pre-registrations to offer the course a second semester, so we only did it the one time.
Since I noticed this article a couple of days late and enough people have mentioned my other favorite answer to this (Daniel Keys Moran) I'll mention M.A. Foster. Thoughtful, complex stories of ideas, if you like Frank Herbert's works you'll probably like these. All of these were published by DAW Books in paperback (remember the SF publisher with the yellow spines?)
Two trilogies: The Gameplayers of Zan The Warriors of Dawn The Day of the Klesh
The Morphodite Transformer Preserver
Waves (a standalone novel in the same universe)
Owl Time (four novellas)
Owl Time was published in 1985, and was one of his last published works. I spoke with M.A. Foster around that time, and he said he had a novel-length manuscript sequel to "Entertainment" (one of the four novellas in _Owl Time_) that he hadn't been able to sell. I've been meaning to track him down and ask him if I can read that.
I'd play this even in single-player mode if I can have new vehicles added. No, I don't mean sportscars as tough as tanks or any "cheat" kind of vehicles, I have several friends who are vintage car fans, and it'd be cool to play GTA3 the day of a classic car convention in the game, and have 1937 Hudson Terraplanes, the old Mini-Coopers, '40s and '50s Cadillacs, hearses, etc.
For a better value of "a long time ago" than _The Diamond Age_, Larry Niven wrote "Flash Crowd" in 1973 and "The Last Days Of The Permanent Floating Riot Club" in 1974. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/bo oks/n/n iven.htm
I like his work a great deal. I reread _The Last Dancer_ around July 4th for a couple of years, and would really really like him to finish _The A.I. War_ some year.
is my personally defended origin of cyberpunk: check out The Stars My Destination (1956). It's got the "high tech/low life" feel that tends to characterize cyberpunk for me, physical enhancements (synthetic silver nervous systems as speed/reflex boosts), style, machinations, etc. Great book, even if you don't agree with me about it and cyberpunk.
A friend at an open-source-based software company mentioned the possibility of having a sound-based art installation at the offices. What I came up with was use textto speech conversion. One voice recites the linux kernel source, Another reads "the cathedral & the bazaar", the original halloween documents, other open source core docs, etc. Another recites a local User Group maillist, by using/home/user/mail/$USER/$LIST as the source (given that splitting messages to folders is trivial with procmail). Another recites the kernel maillist. Find some way to change voices, either to other voices or add/remove effects on the lists at "To" headers. The point was to represent the community of open-source. However, I had no intention of broadcasting the result. Thanks to these guys I know it'll take two years to finish voice/channel 1: so it's unlikely it'd be there for two years, but that's not the point. I haven't worked on this for a bit, but should get back to reading the Linux sound docs and developing specs to do text-to-speech conversion on four text streams simultaneously and output on four mono audio channels. Then I want to try doing this kind of thing on an OS X platform.
Here's two links to within the Bat Conservation International's website that address the relative lack of danger of rabid bats, despite a lot of bad movies: Info chart list It's US oriented, while the article you provide is Scotland, but still hopefully informative or at least relevant.
She did a sequence of short stories (not too many) focusing on a group of sysadmins in training to admin huge data banks of a central computer, where everyone, regardless of age, class, etc., could access the computer and keep diaries, notes, etc. It's been a couple of decades since I read them, but as I remember much of the stories focused on ethical responsibilities of the admins similar to lawyer-client confidentiality or the sanctity of the confessional.
the company is to you. Working for free after being laid off gives them something and you nothing. At one time, I was hired to work at a company where I knew and was friends with several of the people in the division I'd be working in. A while later, the company had a financial crisis only the senior management was aware of, and the CEO called people one night with no warning to lay them off. During the call, he told me he was sorry friendship desires and business needs had to diverge, but that business needs won when the two conflicted. I answered followup emails and calls during my severance pay period, and forwarded email directly to me from clients to the approapriate people who took over responsibility for those clients then and afterwards. The company hasn't asked me to do anything for them since my severance period ended. If they did, my friendship for them would lose to my business needs, and I would set a reasonable hourly rate for my assistance.
cool 3wheelers that aren't vaporware
on
Landshark
·
· Score: 2
While waiting for the Landshark to transition from 1/3 clay model to working prototype to production, you can pass the time tooling around in a Corbin Sparrow electric car. Or for pure brute speed order a Merlin Roadster from Corbin.
After I saw the Electri-Clerk link on memepool.com last week, I went by the local State Auction Surplus warehouse and found a Mac SE w/keyboard that boots up fine for $1 and an Underwood Number Five manual typewriter (I'm guessing 1960s/1970s, but can't find any actual data on its age) that also works for another $1. So I've acquired two of the core parts for $2. The Fresnel lens will run more, and replacing my Dremel will be a lot more than $2. See how it goes. Universities, at least in my area, also have surplus warehouses of gear they sell cheaply. If you're doing something a bit (or a lot) retro, check them out.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably be short, but what the heck.
I watched Miami Vice when it aired, caught most of the episodes, and still like the series. I would also cheerfully buy the entire series on DVD>
I'm still waiting for my paperless office. It hasn't happened yet: no matter how much I cut back, my coworkers always want to print repeated drafts of documents to review interim versions, print emails and notes for archiving where they can find them, and so on.
Sure, those seven will be revered and treasured, but we want MORE books about ordinary kids doing magic.
As a suggestion of somewhere else to start, you might want to try Diane Duane's Young Wizards sequence of fantasy novels. Like Rowling's stuff it's ostensibly written for young adults, but there's some nice work in there even if you're not in your teens anymore.
Ken MacLeod keeps an active weblog at
http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/
If you are using electronic formats of whatever: term papers, calendars, etc. Figure out very early on how you're going to handle having your laptop or computer stolen, lightning powersurged into oblivion, or virused, or your roomate deleting your user folder. For example, if you have an Apple system, get an iPod and use it as an external Firewire drive to back up your papers, class notes, whatever, or use the autobackup feature included with the iDisk on a .Mac account. If you have network storage available, use it, but consider what you've got where and who can get to it.
Lots of places have variably good power, so consider a good surge protector or line conditioner, maybe included in a UPS, as a very good idea.
Thinking about these things before they happen is sometimes boring, but a lot more pleasant than losing a week's worth of work on a term paper.
Oh, and backing up, like security, is a process not a product. Don't forget to backup your work.
"getting there fastest with the mostest" is a quote most often attributed to Nathan Bedford Forrest (US, American Civil War, Confederacy side).
Brings an interesting variation on smart mobs and swarm concepts.
With 2600 audio CDs and a growing but comparatively small (under 100) DVD collection, I just started buying Boltz racks. Sheet steel, assemble yourself, really easy. The CD racks hold 55 CDs per shelf, have 11 shelves in a 5'8" high unit for 605 total. The expansion racks are simply a rack without one side, and bolt through the side of what you've already got. Different finishes, matte black industrial or satin finish for that cyber/Gattaca look. Their TV/component stands are heavy enough gauge steel to be bulletproof, at least to standard pistol ammunition (haven't tested it with .308 armor piercing, but they should stop most standard pistol ammunition). Shipping's free as i recall, at least in continental US.
One big advantage of these racks is since they're sheet steel with holes, and narrow dowels, that half-full racks don't look like the monolith from 2001 - you can see through them. Their open design also helps with airflow in the room, even when loaded with CDs.
(just a customer, don't get anything for endorsing, etc. etc.)
In the late 80s and early 90s I was interested in artifical languages: Esperanto, Volapuk, the loglan/lojban thing, and so on - the head of my thesis committee was a linguistics professor, and so I spent a lot of grad school doing linguistics-oriented work. I spent about a year studying Klingon at the time.
Around 1994, a friend called me at work asking if I'd gotten the job, but I had no idea what he was talking about as I hadn't read Sunday's want ads. Apparently the local community college had advertised for instructors in the Continuing Education department, and in the list of twenty or so things (auto repair, Indian cooking, etc.), they'd listed "Klingon language and culture". So I called, found the head of the con ed department was a Star Trek fan and wanted to see if there was anyone around who could teach the class. She hired me by the end of the phone call for an evening class. The class was offered under the foreign language section of the continuing education divison, not the pop culture section.
Interesting sidenote: community colleges here are part of the county/state government, so salaries are set by law and aren't negotiable. Since I had a master's degree in a relevant field, my per-hour pay for teaching Klingon was higher than what I was making per-hour as a technical writer.
I taught for one semester, once a week. Some of the students who showed up seemed disappointed I was actually teaching a language, as some had signed up thinking they'd spend the entire time talking about that week's episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. The ones who stuck with the class surprised me at how fast they learned. There weren't enough pre-registrations to offer the course a second semester, so we only did it the one time.
Since I noticed this article a couple of days late and enough people have mentioned my other favorite answer to this (Daniel Keys Moran) I'll mention M.A. Foster. Thoughtful, complex stories of ideas, if you like Frank Herbert's works you'll probably like these. All of these were published by DAW Books in paperback (remember the SF publisher with the yellow spines?)
Two trilogies:
The Gameplayers of Zan
The Warriors of Dawn
The Day of the Klesh
The Morphodite
Transformer
Preserver
Waves (a standalone novel in the same universe)
Owl Time (four novellas)
Owl Time was published in 1985, and was one of his last published works. I spoke with M.A. Foster around that time, and he said he had a novel-length manuscript sequel to "Entertainment" (one of the four novellas in _Owl Time_) that he hadn't been able to sell. I've been meaning to track him down and ask him if I can read that.
I'd play this even in single-player mode if I can have new vehicles added. No, I don't mean sportscars as tough as tanks or any "cheat" kind of vehicles, I have several friends who are vintage car fans, and it'd be cool to play GTA3 the day of a classic car convention in the game, and have 1937 Hudson Terraplanes, the old Mini-Coopers, '40s and '50s Cadillacs, hearses, etc.
For a better value of "a long time ago" than _The Diamond Age_, Larry Niven wrote "Flash Crowd" in 1973 and "The Last Days Of The Permanent Floating Riot Club" in 1974.o oks/n/n iven.htm
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/b
I like his work a great deal. I reread _The Last Dancer_ around July 4th for a couple of years, and would really really like him to finish _The A.I. War_ some year.
is my personally defended origin of cyberpunk: check out The Stars My Destination (1956). It's got the "high tech/low life" feel that tends to characterize cyberpunk for me, physical enhancements (synthetic silver nervous systems as speed/reflex boosts), style, machinations, etc. Great book, even if you don't agree with me about it and cyberpunk.
A friend at an open-source-based software company mentioned the possibility of having a sound-based art installation at the offices. What I came up with was /home/user/mail/$USER/$LIST as the source (given that splitting messages to folders is trivial with procmail).
use textto speech conversion.
One voice recites the linux kernel source,
Another reads "the cathedral & the bazaar", the original halloween documents, other open source core docs, etc.
Another recites a local User Group maillist, by using
Another recites the kernel maillist.
Find some way to change voices, either to other voices or add/remove effects on the lists at "To" headers.
The point was to represent the community of open-source. However, I had no intention of broadcasting the result. Thanks to these guys I know it'll take two years to finish voice/channel 1: so it's unlikely it'd be there for two years, but that's not the point.
I haven't worked on this for a bit, but should get back to reading the Linux sound docs and developing specs to do text-to-speech conversion on four text streams simultaneously and output on four mono audio channels. Then I want to try doing this kind of thing on an OS X platform.
similar to bit reduction decimation (look about halfway down the page for a quick explanation of decimation as an audio effect).
At least according to Terence McKenna.
Here's two links to within the Bat Conservation International's website that address the relative lack of danger of rabid bats, despite a lot of bad movies:
Info
chart list
It's US oriented, while the article you provide is Scotland, but still hopefully informative or at least relevant.
My two favorite endangered animals donation sites are the Bat Conservation International and Duke University Primate Center's Adopt-A-Lemur program.
She did a sequence of short stories (not too many) focusing on a group of sysadmins in training to admin huge data banks of a central computer, where everyone, regardless of age, class, etc., could access the computer and keep diaries, notes, etc. It's been a couple of decades since I read them, but as I remember much of the stories focused on ethical responsibilities of the admins similar to lawyer-client confidentiality or the sanctity of the confessional.
the company is to you. Working for free after being laid off gives them something and you nothing.
At one time, I was hired to work at a company where I knew and was friends with several of the people in the division I'd be working in. A while later, the company had a financial crisis only the senior management was aware of, and the CEO called people one night with no warning to lay them off. During the call, he told me he was sorry friendship desires and business needs had to diverge, but that business needs won when the two conflicted.
I answered followup emails and calls during my severance pay period, and forwarded email directly to me from clients to the approapriate people who took over responsibility for those clients then and afterwards. The company hasn't asked me to do anything for them since my severance period ended. If they did, my friendship for them would lose to my business needs, and I would set a reasonable hourly rate for my assistance.
Umm, Rendezvous?9 /25/1754218.s html?tid=177
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/02/0
While waiting for the Landshark to transition from 1/3 clay model to working prototype to production, you can pass the time tooling around in a Corbin Sparrow electric car. Or for pure brute speed order a Merlin Roadster from Corbin.
After I saw the Electri-Clerk link on memepool.com last week, I went by the local State Auction Surplus warehouse and found a Mac SE w/keyboard that boots up fine for $1 and an Underwood Number Five manual typewriter (I'm guessing 1960s/1970s, but can't find any actual data on its age) that also works for another $1. So I've acquired two of the core parts for $2. The Fresnel lens will run more, and replacing my Dremel will be a lot more than $2. See how it goes.
Universities, at least in my area, also have surplus warehouses of gear they sell cheaply. If you're doing something a bit (or a lot) retro, check them out.