Category: Personal

Not that long ago I read The Sky Road and only found out it was the fourth and final volume of Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution sequence. But, library inventories being what they are, when I saw The Star Fraction, the first book in the series and his first novel, I picked it up anyway. He’s a good enough writer and I’ve read enough books in the intervening time to make this a non-issue. And I was right, it was worth reading and now I need to find The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division (so if you have a copy I can borrow…).

Macleod is a socialist, something he discusses in a brief “Introduction to the American Edition,” and he clearly forecasts a larger role for that and similar ideologies in the near future; I have yet to read a book of his which isn’t based on this social development. My personal beliefs are not so cut and dry but it hasn’t got in the way of my enjoyment, and he’s close enough to libertarianism to include that huge segment of science fiction fandom as well.

These novels are set in the years after a more or less global war known as the Fall Revolution, which happens in the late 2040s; twenty years before that is the Third World War (or “the War of European Integration, as its instigators call it”). Between them, they leave the world a set of fractured mini-states, the UN an American puppet organization and in the skies a Space Defense controlling satellite laser weapons whose primary mission is to prevent–with any means necessary–deep technology such as true artifical intelligence and weapons of mass destruction.

Unfortunately for these Men in Black, their systems cannot detect everything. In fact they missed a key achievement a generation earlier, though they thought they caught it by killing a key (Trotskyite) software developer. Josh Kohn had been able to release his nascent AI into the wilds of the Net but it was missing certain necessary codes which, as it happens, his now-grown son had stored away in the mists of memory. As this story opens the son, grown up into a hard-edged leftist mercenary leader, encounters a drug in a research lab he’s about to start protecting that releases the memory to the much-evolved software.

What I’ve written up to here is all setup and backstory. Macleod unleashes a wild amalgam of future tech and politics built around an intriguing quartet of main character, a compelling bit of writing. Makes me wonder what they had in the water in Scotland in the ’70s and ’80s.

recommended

It’s a sad night for Bloggers when Blogger.com goes away:

It’s been awhile since I mentioned a Jewish High Tech Community meeting but, after waiting on a process that never seemed to reach its own event horizon, I organized a new meeting myself. Last night a hard core group of ten showed up at Congregation Kol Emeth (thanks, Betty!) to hear Shelley Hebert talk about the Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life being built on the old Sun Microsystems HQ parcel in Palo Alto. Talk about coincidences!

This is a really exciting, unique project which will create a focal point for Jewish social life in the South Peninsula area, though it won’t open until the beginning of 2009, mixing senior and affordable housing, state of the art fitness and entertainment facilities, a pre-school, office space for related organizations and more. Assuming they get the plans through the so-called Palo Alto process intact. A very positive editorial in yesterday’s Palo Alto Weekly should help and then construction can start at the end of this year or very early next.

10 people may not seem like a lot but I was happy. After a 15 month layoff that never seemed to get a good explanation, I got tired of waiting and so made a few emails to arrange the use of the facilities and the speaker. I lost a couple of weeks waiting on an answer for the use of a different space so the announcement only went out three weeks ago, not much warning at all, and there were a few conflicting events.

The next meeting will probably be on either the second or third Tuesday or the third Wednesday in May. I need to look over the local community calendar maintained by the Federation, which I just found out about last night, and also see about a meeting place and speaker. The two months will definitely give us more time to publicize it and hopefully give members more time to arrange their schedules.

Very cool!

Officials seeing red over MetroStars’ name change and I don’t blame them. It’s bad enough that two NFL teams have played in my home state for 30 years without ever officially acknowledging it but for this MLS franchise to try and pull the same stunt is just sad. Especially the weak ass justification offered by team president/GM (and Rutgers alumni) Alexi Lalas:

“There are companies all over the world that recognize this point about New York,” Lalas said. “Other teams that play in Giants Stadium also reflect this.”

Yeah and when your team can build a beautiful new stadium for itself without feeding off the New Jersey taxpayers, let’s talk again. The club plays in New Jersey because in the entire Metro area, that’s where the fans are. And if you think people outside the US (and why should what they do or do not know matter anyway?) don’t recognize New Jersey then you better hire some pollsters who know how to do their job.

All this stupidity means is the MLS is deader to me than last month’s uneaten banana. You can have your Red Bull New York and Houston Dynamo. Liverpool forever, Anfield rules!

We’ve been on the veg plan for ten months now and frankly I don’t miss meat. The closest thing really is when we want to eat out and go somewhere with a limited non-carnivorous selection. A few restaurants have sort of become our regular choices but every now and then I like to try a new place. I should know better.

Two nights ago we ate at ViVe SoL on El Camino which we’d seen on our occasional after dinner walks. Tucked back 40 or 50 feet from the street and no prominent signage makes it easily missed, but the exterior is colorful and the location is convenient. Unfortunately our expectations were too high.

1. The only entree we could have is the $11 vegetarian burrito–really $11 for a burrito!
2. The interior is all hard walls creating terrible acoustics that amplify everyone’s conversation even on a night like this one where only half the tables or less were occupied.
3. The service was very poor consider the number of empty tables. Specifically: we asked for side salad instead of rice and beans, but the plates came out with the rice and beans, and the waiter essentially ignored us so after finishing and waiting about ten minutes we had to ask for the check ourselves, he never came by to see how we were doing or if we wanted desert even though our dishes had been cleared.
4. Final straw, of course, was that the food wasn’t even that great. Nicer than a fast food burrito maybe but not by much and their so-called nuevo sauce tasted like melted mild cheddar cheese.

What restaurants do we like and even recommend in town? That’s easy:

• Indian: Shiva’s on Castro Street, where Viv especially enjoys the Bharawan Mushrooms and my choice is between Shahi, Kadhai and Palak Paneer
• Thai: Amarin Thai, also on Castro, Viv gets the Rama Thai and I go for a curry.
• Pure Veg: Garden Fresh on El Camino next to Baskin-Robbins, this place does many normal Chinese dishes by replacing the meat with flavored tofu or textured wheat. It’s not just on our list but considered one of the best veg restaurants in the Bay Area.
• Mexican: Los Altos Taqueria which, oddly enough, is on Old Middlefield on the far side of the city from the town of Los Altos but makes a great, messy $5 veg burrito that’s good for the occasional treat.

YMMV.

[Previously: 2005, 2004, 2001]

Official site. I’m looking forward to Jon Stewart though otherwise not so much.

Award	Bill’s Picks	Vivian’s Picks
Best Picture	Brokeback Mountain	Capote
Actor	David Strathairn	Philip Seymour Hoffman*
Actress	Reese Witherspoon*	Felicity Huffman
Supporting Actor	George Clooney*	Matt Dillon
Supporting Actress	Rachel Weisz*	Catherine Keener
Director	Ang Lee*	Steven Spielberg

Last year we both got Best Actor and Actress, I got Supporting Actress and Viv got Best Director.

Update: * is the category winner, so I got four this year and Viv one, though neither of us had Best Picture.

As previously suggested, I picked up one of Iain Bank’s non-science fiction novels. Also quite good and wisely relies on technology to enable him to focus on the thrills and laughs. The Business features Kate Telman, a rising globetrotting executive, as she reaches a new level of understanding of the organization for which she works. I quite enjoyed her story though most of the humor, except for some really good one-liners, passed me by.

Kate works for a global group of capitalists known, internally, as The Business. The similarity to the CIA’s nickname of The Company is not unintentional but perhaps more to throw readers off the scent in the early going. The group has existed in essentially the same form since the days of the Roman Empire, where it originated and which it still rues owning for 66 days. Though not unknown to the public (Banks has her list several recent media exposures) the normal operating process of its widely disparate components keeps it under the general radar. Telman joined after catching the eye of childless female executive at the age of eight and being adopted, first informally and then formally after her real mother’s death, by the older woman though nepotism is not generally the way things are done; The Business is a meritocracy and even democratic internally with promotions mooted by one’s peers and subordinates.

In fact Banks (definitely a member of the Scottish Socialist SF authors brigade) claims the organization tends to be less infected with the kind of corporate malfesance so often in the papers these days because its long history has shown that straightdealing generates a better return on investment; people still being people, there are machinations and underhanded dealings or otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a story.

The leadership has decided that membership in the United Nations is necessary and The Business should acquire a seat by purchasing control of a small nation. Telman, the youngest Level Three in recent years, is assured that taking the local leadership and sacrificing certain comforts and amenities to which she’s accustomed is the best path to setting a similar age record for Level Twos.

Yesterday another member of a messageboard I frequent suggested my sense of humor is deficient, albeit not in such polite terms so the sysadmins deleted first the comments and then the thread. While his characterization of the story being discussed was distasteful I will agree my ability to recognize a joke is below average. This is relevant because to me The Business was more a consideration of globalization and its relationship to politics than particularly funny. Though I think some of the humor will stay with me for a long time, like this response by Kate to one man’s attempt to pick her up: “I did my impression of the Roman Empire, and declined.”

recommended

One of the drawbacks to WordPress, for me at least, is that you pretty much have to install–and maintain–a copy of the software for each blog published. So any updates, themes, plugins, settings all have to be managed separately for each. So far I have two WP blogs on this server, Bill’s Movie Reviews and bill:politics.

The other day, a team at ibiblio (Fred Stutzman, John Joseph Bachir, and Sayan Chakraborty), released The Lyceum Project. Here’s their description of it:

Lyceum is a stand-alone mutli-user blogging application, designed for the enterprise. Utilizing the fantastic, intuitive WordPress blogging engine at its core, Lyceum enables stand-alone, multi-user blog services for small and high-volume environments. Lyceum is GPL-licensed, under active development, and free to use.

Now, you might ask, what about WPMU? I kept looking at it, every few months but there just never seemed to be much progress. Certainly the team never released any documentation and the whole ‘Warning, warning, danger Will Robinson’ cautions were the most significant factors keeping me away. Given that Lyceum has no meaningful documentation and the FAQ gives a similar position on status, I’m not terribly sure why I reacted differently. Maybe it was the rain or just their blog’s open tone of voice.

Anyway, I told John I’d at least install it and give him feedback. And so I did. From a unit testing perspective it seems pretty strong. I was able to install without any real trouble, created a regular user with a blog, installed the theme from Bill’s Movie Reviews and a few plugins, wrote, edited, and deleted posts, added a page. All good.

There are two key deficiencies that hold me back, for the moment, from switching. First, there’s no migration utility to bring over content from an existing blog. Second, the base blog URLs are not pretty (the project do not appear to be using the software for their own blog, just plain WP, so don’t just by it’s address); the sample I created gets a URL like example.com/lyceum/src/lyceum/1 and I need it to be like example.com/blogname.

So definitely worth keeping in touch with the effort. I asked John if he has an answer on the URL, maybe some .htaccess magic, and offered to help with a migration script. For first public release, have to give the guys two thumbs up.

I haven’t mentioned RawSugar lately but that’s because I get so wrapped up in it during the day that I need the evenings to unwind, recharge and do my own thing for a few hours. But seeing Rob’s sweet post today, Mike Arrington’s post on TechCrunch and Garret’s increasing use reminded me it was time to catch you all up.

The company’s doing quite well. We had our official launch a few weeks ago at DEMO 2006, you can watch Ofer’s presentation at that link, and so the BETA label is gone. No perpetual betas for this web 2.0 crew. You can get our fancy new Firefox extension, complete with toolbar, at the new lab. Also featured on the lab is extensive documentation on our very comprehensive API and you can see it put to good use in Rob Fahrni’s add in that lets you tag to your directory right from within .Net-based RSS aggregators like SharpReader and RSS Bandit. I just finished preparing a Help system so new it’s still with the developers but trust me, it’s much cooler than three day old cheese pizza.

Haven’t been to RawSugar lately? You owe it to yourself to stop by and see why I’m happy to be coming up on my one year anniversary working there in two short weeks.

Walter Mosley is generally known for writing detective stories about strong, imperfect black men set in Los Angeles between the post-WWII years and the recent past. He’s also done a few science fiction novels, the latest being The Wave. Mosley’s a good writer, I’ve enjoyed a few of his Easy Rawlins books and I enjoyed this too.

The Wave is set in the present day and for a long time reads almost like a good writer’s effort to recapture a weird, hallucinogenic dream from the night after lying out in the sun too long and eating some spoiled fish. Errol Porter is getting strange phone calls in the middle of the night. Finally he meets his caller: a strapping healthy 20 year old who claims to be Errol’s father and knows things he couldn’t possibly know, but his father died nine years ago at 61 of cancer.

Instead, this man is a recreated shell, built off of Arthur’s DNA and memories by an Earthly lifeform older than anything we’ve ever encountered. The XTs are tiny things but are a group mind and built to share memories from generation to generation. Driven into the planetary core by a meteor a billion years ago they never developed a need for violence or to compete for resources with another species; they learned to listen to the universe and heard and answered the song of a far off entity. To meet the Farsinger they began a long, slow journey to the surface.

The American government became aware of the returned to life and assigned a team, led by a deranged military plastic surgeon, to investigate and neutralize the threat. The XTs enlisted Errol to help them understand humans but he was captured by the General. Stuff happens, the details are sort of irrelevant–though I will mention he doesn’t take unnecessary side trips and puts all of the 200 pages too good use in advancing the story and tension. What matters is that Mosley writes like few other science fiction authors and creates compelling characters and imagery.

recommended

Yesterday the pain in my mouth reached a crescendo that could no longer be ignored and so I overcame my irrational fear and call a dentist. This was probably a good thing since he found that the back of the last molar on the bottom right of my mouth had broken off, causing a nasty infection and finally inflamation in my gums. He also suggested it could be responsible for how extremely tired I’ve been feeling the last few weeks as my body overspent energy trying to fight off the infection. So now I’ll get to experience for myself the joys of Root Canal.

The sixth, latest installment of Kage Baker’s excellent series about the immortal cyborg servants of Dr. Zeus Inc., The Children of the Company moves the unifying story along sharply while bringing some of the big players out of the shadows and onto the main stage. Unfortunately, sort of, I once again let my eagerness to read a book put me out of the proper sequence since I have yet to read The Life of the World to Come, book number five. Oh well.

Really it isn’t as much of a problem with this series than it might be with others because the attraction is the way Baker inserts her people into the shadows of real history and because most of the books are short stories melded together. There is a bigger arc but, unlike the Haldeman book discussed in the previous entry, the components make sense rather than being an occasion for writerly muscle stretching.

Mortals never really learn the true nature of the cyborgs who, having the benefit of history books, can pinch doomed treasures before fire or flood destroys them and preserve plants and animals before true extinction. All to be sold or used at company headquarters up in the 24th century. Immortality alone, as Baker makes clear in every volume, doesn’t protect its possessors from emotional pains and the human condition and there are enough willing servants to keep dissidents and the disaffected in line.

Children focuses on Executive Facilitator General Labenius. Born in prehistoric times–with nothing recorded, operatives are free to do nearly anything in Dr. Zeus’s interest without violating the allegedly unchangable nature of history–Labenius loathes normal humans and, whenever he can without jeapordizing his leadership position, dispatches death and misery. Meanwhile he decides that in the mysterious future year when the history books end, the strictures imposed by his employers can come off. The book is structured as a series of reviews and remembrances of operations he lead or instigated.

recommended

Joe Haldeman is one of the most acclaimed members of the post-Vietnam generation of American science fiction authors, making his debut in 1976 with the all-around classic The Forever War. Not that he’s rested on his laurels, winning several more Hugos, Nebulas and even a World Fantasy Award for the 1993 short story Graves and a new book about every year, but he doesn’t get mentioned much in the current top lists.

Old Twentieth is probably indicative of why that is. An enjoyable read, well-drawn protagonist and a twist for the ending, the bottom line is this was essentially a novella stretched to minimally acceptable novel length; if not for economic requirements this should have been 80-100 rather than 257 pages. Haldeman is capable of compositions that engage and groove but cannot expect us to accept repetitive virtual excursions to our own recent past that serve little narrative purpose. I suppose this is the other side of trilogyitis, that anything other than book-length works are rarely viable publishing projects.

Interspersed with the brief virtual reality visits, the main plot framework concerns the interstellar flight of 800 (or 1,000, I’m still not sure) survivors of a war forty years from now between the wealthy who can afford a new drug treatment conferring immortality and everyone else. The conflict ends when the putative immortals release an agent which kills everyone who hasn’t undergone the Becker-Cendrek Process within hours. The novel itself begins 200 years later, the horrors and hardships of the war’s aftermath are breezed through in a few words in the first chapter, and the flight is neither a panicky response nor a solution to anything except boredom and economic doldrums.

Faster than light travel is not part of Haldeman’s imagined future, though, and so the few lightyears’ flight will take 1,000 years with no solid prospects of a viable home at the destination or secure plan for return. Jacob Brewer was seven at the war’s beginning; he joins the expedition as chief virtuality engineer, responsible for the systems that provide the trip’s most desirable form of entertainment. Not that people lose themselves in the made up worlds since only four can participate at the same time and then for no more than 20 hours at a stretch. Something goes wrong inside, Manhattan in the 1930s smells just a bit off to Brewer and his fellow techs.

Tracking down the reason leads us to the denoument. Even with just a dozen pages left I couldn’t figure out how Haldeman was going to wrap things up. I believe that the technique he used is called deus ex machina.

not recommended

According to Rolling Stone, Springsteen is recording a new CD to be released this May called The Seeger Sessions, a tribute to folk grand master Pete Seeger. Again laying aside his electric guitar and backing band, this album feature acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin and violin and will be the first to consist of songs not written by Bruce. Instead he covers the now 86 year old Seeger’s classic compositions and other traditional American folk. While I support an artist’s right to make the music which makes him happy, and though I’ll surely buy a copy, I don’t think this will reach even the modest sales of Devils and Dust.

Not being one to miss out on an Adam Kalsey visit to the Valley, I went to last week’s Ning visit and was surprised to find KRON4’s blogger/journalist Brian Shields there with a video camera. He must be good at it because I completely forgot he was there until Adam posted the result of the work in Ning visit on TV. If you watch the clip closely I do appear two or three times but got no lines and once again missed my chance to earn a SAG card. Showing that I am not always the aware and observant geek you see here, I completely didn’t realize the tall guy talking with us was none other than Marc “I made the first useful web browser” Andreeson.

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? is a much more detailed way of putting it but more or less is how I’m thinking about the nature of existence lately. Though the whole turtles all the way down aspect leaves something of a bad aftertaste.

A couple of friends of mine, Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle, have created an interesting new way to do market research testing using gaming in place of the traditional survey questionaires. I wish the Feds, or at least one of the software companies like Intuit or H&R Block would do the same for taxes. Hey, there’s a Web 2.0 company idea I’m throwing out there for anyone to pick up on, free of charge. Well, you should give me a copy but other than that free.

I used H&R Block’s TaxCut this year, 1/10th the price of the CPA charged me each of the last few, and while the interview style process is a lot better than doing the work manually it still has no style or flare and doesn’t even do as much for the user as it could. For instance, there are places where information can be reused (company names, addresses) or easier access to forms provided (filling in previous year data). In the end I can only hope their software doesn’t have bugs affecting the calculations because it says I have a whopper of a federal refund coming. And I’d hate to have to give it back.

Lots of bloggers and other folks have picked up on the Getting Things Done strategy (philosophy?) but not me; my mind just doesn’t work that way. But I did start doing one thing that lowers the number of interruptions: I stopped running SharpReader all the time. Trimming the feed subscriptions wasn’t enough, the tray icon was still turning yellow far too often and the OCD in me couldn’t resist alt-tabbing over to see what had come in. So now I’m trying to limit myself to twice a day, reading the new and then exiting. Will it last? Not sure yet.