It was a tough day, overall. I’ll go into details later, maybe. But here’s a happy story, even if it’s a few years old. It’s the story of Popsicle, a puppy found wrapped in a plastic bag in a freezer.
Popsicle was saved, and went on to be awesome. So, yay, Popsicle!
I’m at Stanley’s right now. It’s a bar that sits high above three of the four rinks at Sharks Ice, where as you might guess the local NHL team would be practicing right now were it not busy not playing.
I came here to get some writing done, but that’s proven difficult. Below me the ice is filled with tykes in hockey gear, skating, falling, getting back up, and moving pucks around. It’s awesome!
Truth be told, those six-year-olds are better hockey players than I am. There’s an odd combination of clumsiness and grace, where a kid will lose the puck, spin, reach and collect the puck, and once on his way again fall over for no reason. Right now the bunch of kids directly below where I sit is running a drill that involves carrying the puck around obstacles, turning back and putting a shot on goal. The coaches provide very light resistance to those ready for it. One kid put a shot on goal, the coach deflected it, and that kid dove after the rebound like it was game seven of the Stanley Cup. Get that kid’s number — he’s going places!
A whistle just blew four times, and all the kids shifted to the next station. There’s a new guy below me who may be the smallest dude on the ice (assuming it’s not a dudette — no telling with all that gear). He is not graceful with the puck. But here’s the thing — Little Guy falls down a lot, but he gets back up. This is probably the best lesson Pee Wee Hockey teaches a kid. (As I typed that he had a harder time than usual getting up, and a coach came over and helped him until he was steady over his skates. His shot went just wide of the goal, which bummed me.)
But back to the falling down/getting up thing. I’m not a parent, but if I were I think this is a lesson I’d want to teach my kids. For my hypothetical daughters soccer would be an option (those kids are tough), but for the boys there’s no alternative at that age. Honestly, I’d prefer that my daughters played hockey as well; it’s safer. And none of the alternatives have ice. You might get knocked down in soccer, but in hockey you will fall, without any help from anyone, over and over. There’s no making excuses, no blaming someone else. Nothing to do but get back up. You’ll fall again, but that’s all right. You’ll get up again. That’s what I’d want my kids to learn.
Ah, the Internet, with its almost magical ability to give you what you’re looking for — even if you didn’t know you were looking for it. Through a series of links that started with a Web comic, I learned of a little comet that just played chicken with the sun and lived to tell about it.
The best summary is on this page, which at the top says “it’ll be interesting watching this comet flame out as it passes through the million-degree corona of the sun.” As it gets close the discussion talks about new and interesting things about this comet and what it can show us about the sun, then suddenly the author says (mildly paraphrasing here), “Holy shit! It came round the other side!” A decent video of the comet shooting out the other side is here.
The comet actually left its tail behind as it whipped around the sun, and there’s really cool footage of the comet streaking toward the sun, leaving a trail (probably) whipped around by magnetic storms. It’s all pretty cool.
Part of what’s interesting to me about all this is just how many devices were available to observe the course of comet Lovejoy. In the coming days, as more data comes in from other observers, we stand to learn a lot about our home star. You know I’ll be checking in.
[Edit] Let’s try embedding this youtube video, shall we? It’s a little wider than my format, but I think that will be all right this once.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPJ3Xbl9nZM
I don’t actually have any use for this device, but I can still marvel at the amazingness of it:
Magic!
Remember when we had WiFi cards that we could stick in the side of a computer with the antenna poking out? That was pretty cool. Now this tiny chip does the same thing, only it integrates with your photo software. Holey Moley.
Technical quibbles: it only works with JPEGs (even sharing on your own network, which strikes me as odd), and the SD form factor doesn’t work in all cameras. There are adapters, however.
Back when they thought we’d have atom-powered flying cars, they didn’t think of this stuff.
Astronomy Picture of the Day is one of my favorite sites, but yesterday’s edition was even better than most. I’ve always wanted to see the aurora borealis, and I will, dammit, but now I also want to see the northern lights from space.
Can someone hook me up?
It was my quiet way of marking the passing of a great man.
Ask yourself this: at the company where you work, would they offer grief counseling if your former CEO died? You’ve probably read plenty about Steve Jobs’ accomplishments in the last 24. I hesitate to add to that, but I think a lot of pundits and journalists are missing the mark on what made Steve great.
Steve didn’t invent personal computers. He didn’t invent the Graphical User Interface. He didn’t invent smart phones or tablet computers or mp3 players. His genius was making all those things useful. He’s been called a visionary, and I’m not going to argue that, but his vision was “If this stuff was intuitive to use, it would be a hell of a lot better. And I can fix that.” Macintosh was “the computer for the rest of us.” It was the first personal computer with a GUI, with point-and-click and drag-and-drop, the first computer that made an effort to make tasks you accomplish with technology more similar to things you do in the physical world.
He stole that idea (with permission) from Xerox. Xerox had, to paraphrase some pundit whose name I can’t recall, spent huge amounts of money to see the future. Then they gave Steve a tour of their facility, and he went and made their ideas useful. Steve himself has regrets about that fateful day; he was so blown away by the GUI that he didn’t appreciate the network and the new approach to programming Xerox had developed.
Xerox gave Steve Jobs a peek at the future of computing, and he was just the guy to take that glimpse and revolutionize the way humans and machines interacted, and just the guy to bend a successful company to his vision.
Almost immediately after the Mac was introduced, Steve was wedged out of Apple. The two events were probably related; to say that Steve was brutal on the development team would be an understatement (“Insanely Great” was his mantra; his unwillingness to compromise on the little details his curse), and he was neglecting the very successful Apple II. But the Apple II was the past. Computing the way it used to be done. Mac was a world-changer. Steve knew that. The board of directors wasn’t so sure.
After his departure Apple continued to refine and improve on his vision, and try with increasing futility to protect those inventions from imitators. To this day, Apple is ready to throw down a lawsuit at a moment’s notice, but the biggie, the one that got away, was the one against Microsoft for copying the windowed operating system. Losing that one almost killed Apple.
Then Steve came back. FiRST step: quit refining the OS and overhaul it. The competition was improving quickly. Next step: follow the power. The computing power, I mean, which was moving into smaller and smaller packages. I was pretty excited about Mac OS X, but I was dead stoked when I heard the phrase “A thousand songs in your pocket.” I bought one of those first iPods, and on airplanes and in bars people would ask me about it. The thing was, in a word, awesome. (“Insanely Great” has long been retired. The phrase is kind of like the Great Wall in China, I think – much more fun for people who don’t remember the cost.)
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the first digital music player, but when it came out, something fundamental changed. This was the first player that was useful, that carried enough music, that you could fill up almost thoughtlessly, that was simple to use, often without looking. All the details were right, the little things that others compromised on. That was Steve’s genius. Do it right. He had the unwavering belief that he knew what right was, even if no one else did. Do it right, and people will agree with you in retrospect. I cringed when Apple got into the phone business. Don’t they know what a cutthroat, small-margin business that is? They did it right, and I stand corrected (provisionally).
I think this is why I enjoy working at Apple so much. Most of you out there will never see the fruits of my labors (except perhaps as a microscopic price reduction in Apple products), but always I strive to put that little bit of extra rightness into everything I make. It’s noticed here. The spirit of Steve, his uncompromising attitude, is still alive.
God: Welcome, Steve. Did you enjoy the heavenly choir?
Steve: They were awesome! Really stirring. But…
God: But what?
Steve: What if everyone could hear their own music? I mean, not music they wrote, but music that was perfect for them, right at that moment.
God: That’s kind of what we do…
Steve: Let me handle this.
I was going to spread the word today that fuego is selling an authentic mask used during the production of Aliens vs. Predators back in ought-4. I figured that someone out there might know a movie collector who would be interested in shelling out a pretty hefty price for it.
Well, that’s moot now. The thing went before I could even start pimping it out. The copy fuego wrote for the listing, together with the signed photo of the actor wearing that very mask didn’t hurt I’m sure.
Still, wow.
So by now you’ve probably heard of “the cloud”, but you might be vague on what the cloud actually is. That’s OK, the cloud is by nature vague. In short, it’s just a name that applies to what the Internet has been trying to do for a long time: information without location. You put a photo up in the cloud, and it’s just “out there”, not on any particular server, not in any particular data center, not in any given country. Could be there are copies of it all over the place, and when someone wants to look at the picture, The Cloud serves up the copy closest (in Internet miles) to the person who wants to see it.
This requires a lot of expensive equipment. Google and Amazon are the biggies in the cloud, but there are others as well, who, for a price, will host your data in a ‘cloudy’ way. In return, people around the world can load your stuff faster.
This humble blog is in the cloud. When you load a page here, roughly half the time the request doesn’t even reach my server (protected in a bunker somewhere in Nevada), but is instead served up from one of CloudFlare’s data centers around the globe. It’s pretty sweet, and has reduced the strain on my server (not that it’s working that hard anyway) while improving the Muddled Experience. The cost for this service? Nothing. It’s free.
I totally win.
CloudFlare also blocks a few hundred spammers each week, before my server has to go to the trouble of blocking them. They compile usage stats and provide other interesting information, and cut the load time for the blog about in half.
They’re a friendly bunch, too; when I suggested upgrades to their interface they wrote back with specific questions as well as thanks. A site they hosted was attacked from China a while back, and it brought down part of their network. They were right up front about the issue and what they were doing about it, and advised people on how to ‘de-cloud’ until the crisis was over. Not everyone was happy, but I was impressed. Soon after reading those communications I signed up.
How can they offer something like this for free? It’s the upsell, of course; they offer premium services. In addition they create a platform for other companies to sell stuff to me. Some of those services are pretty cool, too, though I haven’t dipped my toe in those waters yet (for instance, there’s a free service that checks your site now and then to see if it’s been hacked).
Overall, I can’t think of any reason NOT to use CloudFlare. Check ’em out and tell them Jerry sent you!
Just a quick note to those who might have been waiting to start reading Allison to make sure there would be an end. I understand completely; I rail consistently about stories with no clear scope yet they expect me to join in and follow every word. And when you throw in my irregular update schedule, all the more reason to not get caught up.
I’m happy to announce that Allison in Anime: White Shadow is wrapped up in a neat little (anime-style-inscrutable) package. It reads like a not-bad first draft; there are plenty of opportunities I see looking back, but overall I feel pretty good about it.
I hope you enjoy.
I’m sitting in a bar right now, laptop open, Jane’s Addiction stomping through my ears, thinking I should take advantage of this little slice of me-time to write a book review. There is a big pile of books for me to review at home, but The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson is insisting that it be the one. In fact, I can’t even remember what the other ones are (with one exception, but I have ambitions for that review – I hope to discuss the changing landscape of the publishing world and embracing the digital age, a review that requires research, facts, and perhaps even an interview with the author. Facts are hard.)
I mentioned The Fox Woman a while back; after reading for an hour I went to sleep and the world of the book filled my dreams all night. That’s some pretty potent imagery at work.
Note: Kij is a friend of mine. My unavoidable bias is reflected in the fact that I would not post a review of her work if I didn’t like it. I liked The Fox Woman.
It’s not a complicated story, really, though it seems desperately difficult to the characters involved. Two women love the same man. One of the women is a fox, and for her love is simple and all-consuming, an animal interpretation of love, and she is willing to take human form (and bring her entire family along) to get what she wants. The man’s wife is a sophisticated noblewoman of the Japanese court, bound by tradition and honor, forced to limit her expressions of love to poetry (on carefully-chosen paper) passed to her husband by servants.
The wife fears the foxes living on their estate. She knows well the enchantments they are capable of.
Two women love the same man, and each has an entirely different world to offer him. The fox woman’s world is an enchantment, a world built with magic, tailored to be perfect for her lover. The man’s wife offers a precocious son, and a life of wealth and ease. She could offer him so much more, if she could find a way to tell him.
The man, for his part, is restless. He loves his wife, and wishes there were a way he could express it to her. They communicate through poetry, but what should be the language of lovers has become shrouded in imagery, obscured behind metaphor. Both long to say “Meet me by the pond and let’s rut like crazed weasels in heat,” but it’s hard to make a proper poem (one that will withstand the dictates of propriety) on that theme.
Our fox woman, Kitsune, longs to understand poetry, but it is her ignorance of the artifice that is her greatest strength. She is a fox and foxes just don’t think that way. Not, at least, without a lot of suffering first.
There is a time when everyone but Kitsune knows that her magical world is crumbling, that it cannot last. We all aware as readers that a crisis is coming, and I found myself getting impatient for the shit to hit the fan. I had foreboding, but I think a specific building threat would have given the coming events a vector; rather than “this can’t last” I would have been thinking “holy crap when the priest gets there anything can happen.”
Even as the crisis unfolds, however, we have few clues about the outcome. In this magical, spiritual world, suffering seems certain and death is possible, even for the main characters. What does it say that I entertained the idea that a first-person narrator might die during the story? To answer my own rhetorical question, it says that the writer had me all the way.
I felt the pain, I felt the love. The story meanders, but then again so do I. It’s a good read.
I don’t want to give anything away, but the end was perfect for me. I closed the book and stayed in that world for a while, thinking past what Kij gave me, satisfied but not glutted.
Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle
My sweetie and I both woke up with Christmas songs stuck in our heads. For me, the song was “Toy Jackpot” by Blackalicious, with its super-catchy chorus “Is it time yet? Is it time? I can’t wait” in a smooth hip-hoppish vibe. My sweetie emerged from slumber with “10,000 Watts” by Crystal Antlers, a high-energy song about Christmas lights, made to be turned up loud.
Now I have “10,000 Watts” in my head, too.
While very different in sound, these songs have two things in common: They are both really cool, and they both came from Target. In fact, you’ve probably heard parts of the songs already, along with a bunch of others, in Target ads. It was after watching an ad with a song called “You’ll Never Find My Christmas” that the light of my life encouraged me to go in search of the original music to download.
Well, what do you know? There’s a whole Christmas album for download for free at Target.com, and there’s not a dud in the bunch. Target found a bunch of different up-and-coming bands and gave them a great opportunity, and got themselves some fun advertisements built around the music at the same time. To me, this seems like exploitation done right.
For the Ebenezer Scrooges among you: Yes, Target is a big, giant retail corporation, and I’ve just become a shill for them. Lighten up, would you? It’s Christmas! These are good songs you wouldn’t get to hear otherwise!
So hop on over and give a listen — you just might find your new holiday favorite.
Hey! Are you familiar with Hyperbole and a Half? Now would be an excellent time to check it out. Perhaps those already well-versed in hyperbolic lore could recommend particularly choice archival stories for newbies to peruse.
And as long as you’re looking at other sites that don’t take six years to load the way mine does, the November 24 Astronomy Picture of the Day just reinforces the growing urge inside me to head north in the next couple of years. APOD is awesome more often than not – I’m tempted to write a little program that turns each day’s picture into my desktop image. Not sure how that would fly on days like this one, however.
If I’m going to get a draft of Munchies done by the end of October, I’m going to have to get crackin’. I am way, way behind.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, two new kinds of banana bread out of the oven today, varieties never before imagined. Oh, yeah, life is good.
I’m trying to think of the last time I saw a movie that was advertised as an ‘event’. Maybe never.
My sweetie carries a copy of the constitution in her purse. Awesome.
