Category: Personal

Well, all sports streaks eventually end and the Reds’ EPL shutout streak is no exception. Congratulations to Pepe Reina, Jamie Carragher, Sammy Hyppia and the changing assortment of fullbacks and holding midfielders who kept the ball out of our net for nearly 12 1/2 hours of English football. Despite allowing crosstown rivals Everton to score in the 42nd minute of today’s match, Liverpool did continue the more important streak and won for the ninth straight time, 3-1, on goals from Peter Crouch (check out this great photo of Crouch taking keeper Nigel Martyn completely out of his shoes to score), Stevie G and Djibrille Cisse (who did get the start I was hoping for).

If you look over in the sidebar (if you’re reading this from the RSS feed, click through to the real page) you can see that both bill:politics and bill:moviereviews have Last 5 links. Clicking opens up a block on the main page containing titles of the five latest entries in that blog and, just to keep things tidy, clicking the other Last 5 with one already open simply replaces rather than adding. Of course you need to allow JavaScript for this to work…

I brought these gifts for you
They’re up in my bum
Bum bum.

  — Peter Griffin, Family Guy, Xmas 2005

Double Feature Finder, so you can find an enjoyable way to extend your movie going dollars. Handy.

President Bush Addressing a Group of Vets – cartoon by Mr Fish

Generate your own laughs with Carl Tashian’s Lost in Translation. Been around for awhile but can still tickle.

Deidre’s Year in Brief, for the list of purchased music.

RawSugar: fun, holiday, RubyOnRails.

RadRails 0.5.2 0.5.2.1 is out. Gets better with each release.

You are going to tell me what I want to know. It’s just a question of how much you want it to hurt.

  –Jack Bauer, 24: Day 5

I added Bill’s Movie Reviews to the new kritX review aggregator, will be interesting to see if any traffic flows from it. To do it I had to add a custom field (I used Jonathon’s RhymedCode Custom Field GUI to add a Ratings field) and use the hReview microformat in the WordPress template, which wasn’t too hard except that the instructions for getting custom fields is weird. Since I don’t want to show this extra info, I used CSS to set their display attribute to none. Very clever, I know. I tried out the new Structured Blogging plugin but it’s not what I need, too heavy and to hard to control the output. I wonder if any other crews are scanning for hReview formatted material…

Guy is like on fire or something. Working full time for RawSugar is not enough for Mr. Ambition, no, so yesterday he whipped up Buzzingo, Your daily buzz dosage. A web 2.0 mashup of the Yahoo! Buzz index, web search and Google Images. You can also see the list for music, movies, sports, games TV and what’s moving up. It was written with Ruby On Rails and the Yahoo! API, “which proved sooo much easier to use than Google’s API.” Befriending Guy has been one of the major perks of working where I do.

Finally remembered to process the few photos we shot on the trip two weeks ago and which you can see for yourself in the new gallery: Orlando Vacation, 2005. My favorite is this shot of TS1 having her caricature drawn:

[via] Last year I made several predctions that now seem ridiculously sleazy. But a few ideas were pretty close. I’ve got a feeling that 2006 will be a big year, and here are some of the reasons why:

1. A Mt View startup is going to open our eyes to some new ways that Ruby on Rails can influence culture. Analog SF will pick up on this and run several cover stories on the founders.
2. Larry Ellison will be in the spotlight for his decision to support CSS. This will upset Adam Kalsey, and the blogosphere will react baldly. The noise will quiet before the end of the year and it will all be forgotten soon after the shock.
3. Excite@Home will see their stock skyrocket after their eyeballs business starts taking off. We’ve seen it coming for a while now, but 2006 will be the year it really kicks into gear.
4. Either eBay or Chemdex will seek to expand their mashup business by acquiring RawSugar. NetDynamics will be overlooked in the process, and they will see a management shakeout later in the year.
5. One of the big leaders in the Newspaper industry will wake up to the opportunity in the Internet and the Web 2.0 trends. After months of speculation, they will make a key acquisition that will shake up the landscape for years to come.

Note: I clearly misunderstood the intended use of some of the fields in Mike’s post generator.

The so-crappy-some-people-would-like-you-to-believe-its-good (so-they-can-laugh-at-you-behind-your-back) movie Napoleon Dynamite was actually set in Idaho. Thanks Maddox!

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens have written quite a few Star Trek novels, including partnering with William Shatner on all nine of his Kirk novels, though two stand out as personal favorites among the hundreds I’ve read over the lasr 25 years: Memory Prime and Prime Directive. I had no hesitation when I saw their 1994 effort STAR TREK: Federation on the shelves at MV Public Library. An aside to any of you readers: the local public library is a great place to get free reading material, you don’t (always) have to pay $7.99 for a paperback or $24.99 for a hardcover!

Federation, written before the movie First Contact and published soon after, focuses on a different Zephram Cochrane than we see in the film so don’t be thrown by that; Paramount has always maintained that while the books must treat the TV episodes and movies as canonical, “the real history,” the reverse is explicitly not true. So when we meet the warp drive inventor, just prior to his first interstellar test drive, he isn’t a 60 year old rock and roll misogynist living in the wilds of Montana but an early 30s respected scientist funded by one of the Solar System’s richest men.

The conflict driving this story is between Cochrane and Col. Adrik Thorsen across three eras: 2061, as Thorsen and his leader, the notorious Col. Green, are attempting to make the Earth over based on their Optimum movement; 2267, in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s transport of Sarek and other ambassadors to the Babel Conference (TOS episodes: Journey to Babel plus Metamorphosis and Requiem for Methuselah); and, 2366, just days after Picard and the Enterprise-D crew completed the Legara IV mission, in which Picard had to provide Sarek with mental support to hold off the effects of Bendii Syndrome and from which Picard’s mind is still a bit overwhelmed by Sarek’s mentality (TNG episode: Sarek). The conflict is simple: Thorsen is convinced that Zephram Cochrane’s superimpellor, the forerunner of the warp engine, can be used as the most devestating, yet controlled, weapon ever deployed but beyond the incredible distaste the scientist has for the concept he knows that such a bomb is physically impossible.

As with most Star Trek novels, the authors must fit their science fiction concepts and character conflict ideas onto the starship platform and novels like Federation, where more than one crew is used, more than double the difficulty IMO. Throwing in the third era, in this instance the earliest chronologically, actually simplifies things since we have very little ‘knowledge’ of them. The Reeves-Stevens do a very good job, even managing to use the The Guardian of Forever as a framing device and insinuating that one of the 2061 era characters, Cochrane’s benefactor Micah Brach, is in fact the same man Kirk and Spock meet as Flint in Requiem for Methuselah.

recommended

Following on from The Neanderthal Parallax, I picked up a slightly older (1998), standalone novel by Robert J. Sawyer called Factoring Humanity from the library. While it’s a decent read and not particularly outdated by the passage of time, I’m glad this is not part of a trilogy because it barely deserves to be a single full-length book. Too much of the story focuses on soap opera-ish social interaction which end up being a platform for Sawyer’s SF speculations and then there’s just a bunch of plot recap, story points that drift off into the ether, and dodgy interior monologues.

Think Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the quantum computing that Sawyer would reuse in Neanderthal Parallax and a tepid evil corporate espionage subplot plus a semi-dramatic parent-child conflict and you’ll have the gist. Economics, of course, are a key consideration and this hardcover edition’s About the Author end note opens with the line “Robert J. Sawyer is Canada’s only native-born full-time science fiction writer.” I’m sure in the seven years since there are a few more native-born full-time Canadian science fiction writers but even so one doesn’t get to that status by writing short stories and novellas, there aren’t close to enough cash paying magazines and anthologies, but I don’t have to be happy about reading financially stretched stories.

not recommended

“I thought there was a monster in the potty.” This was a line of dialog Bart said during the episode of The Simpsons I watched tonight. In the car section of the paper this morning, a review mentioned that the new Dodge Megacab pickup truck has a list price of over $50,000. Now you tell me where the monster lives!

I can’t explain how it happened, though I’m sure going to be asking TextDrive for an explanation, but all the tables in my main database got emptied overnight. This means that a bunch of pages, like the book reviews index and all the photo galleries, are offline until I can correct this. #$#*!!@#!

Update: I think I recovered about everything from files leftover from the recent hosting transfer, though without any help from TextDrive despite filing a support ticket 12 hours ago.

Wired News reports on Siemen’s E-Paper, coming soon to packages near you to turn the “cereal aisle at your local supermarket [into] the Las Vegas strip” with flashing digital films covering the mundane cardboard. As if shopping at the market wasn’t annoying enough already, right?

I’d really like to know more about the energy consumption of this material. The article says that the display has limited animation capabilities, meaning an ongoing power draw, though I’m guessing perhaps with a switch so that it doesn’t use any until reaching the store shelf. Hell, maybe they’ll build in RFID so all the boxes can be switched off when the store closes. Still, this stuff has to use more energy just in manufacturing than current packaging and you’ll have to work pretty hard to convince me that selling more sugar and cornstarch crap to kids justifies it.

Seriously people, this is the best use of the R&D capability of a powerhouse like Siemens?

My friend and co-worker Guy Tavor has pushed a new sharing site called Bibli.ca to the live web. On Bibli anyone can publish and share text creations, the same as one can share photos on Flickr or search on RawSugar. I added a few of my existing poems to the site and it would be great to see more people get into this early. You can post any of your own writing, poems, stories, lyrics, essays, or anything that’s public domain like some older texts Guy added such as Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War. Very cool look, very easy to use.

A co-worker of mine was chatting yesterday with me and our boss and said she’d spoken with over the weekend. This is a name anyone would recognize, he lives in the mid-peninsula area and has been making great rock since the mid-’60s, but I don’t think it’s necessary to name names. But I’m telling this here because it’s a perfect explanation for why I’m not now and have never been a salesperson.

So my co-worker and her husband are hanging out with a fairly well-known inventor and good friend of theirs. As they talk the inventor mentions he just did some work with , who also happens to be a bit of a geek. She jumps on this and says let’s call , she’s sure he would be interested in RawSugar. I’m not saying I disagree, but the thought of doing this would just never occur to me.

So the inventor says okay and forks over ‘s cell phone digits. Lo and behold, the man himself answers and is well-mannered enough that he doesn’t even hang up on my co-worker. She quickly explains our service and suggests that he ought to build a directory around the geek hobby that the inventor had worked with him on which, to be clear, is nothing to do with music. says “Are you kidding?”

My co-worker, though, is a very good salesperson and so doesn’t give up after just one try. She gives him some more of the schpiel. Finally, says he’ll check out the site. I see all the new user registrations, so you can be certain I have my eyes wide open in case he does log on.

Aside: Not quite the same cache as but not bad either, we did have James ‘Father of Java’ Gosling create an account and try out RawSugar today. He even sent a trouble ticket in and politely sent back the additional information I asked to get for debugging.