chris t

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family.

Beholden as always to my literary antecedents, I cooked a goose for Thanksgiving this year.

It was interesting. I rate it a fair success, although not something I'd want to do again in the next few years. My kitchen is covered in a thin layer of the very best goose-grease. I lost most of a night of sleep and had a terrible headache for Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone was very impressed, though I think the cranberry-almond stuffing, laden as it was with goose fat, was tastier than the bird itself. On balance, it was worth doing.

Actual copies of the damned thing arrived in printed form. I guess now I've got no choice but to believe it. My coauthor keeps joking about the second edition, and occasionally notes that I don't wince at the idea quite as much as I used to.

(Seriously, if the publisher is willing to forgive us for missing so many deadlines, I'm willing to work on something like this again. That is a pretty big if.)

Regardless, we're going to hang out and celebrate (read: drink) at the Hacker Dojo on Saturday, 10/24, 7PM. Apparently there is even some kind of web 2.0 calendaring thing. Come by, Bay Area people, and meet your fellow geeks. I'll miss you if you don't. Yes, you.

November's coming up, and I'm looking forward to it. I've been tossing around novel ideas in my head. National Novel Writing Month is silly, but it's the kind of silliness I respect.

Spent my Sunday getting my printer working. And I did.



Here's my test print, which was about the second thing I printed, after the configuration page. (Don't ever do that on an HP plotter, by the way. Damned thing is five feet tall.)

I wasn't actually expecting it to be fixable, which is probably why I took so long to get around to working on it. (See also my Xerox DocuCentre.) I mean, let's list here:

• I literally bought it out of a dumpster for a literal five dollars.


• At the time, I was very poor and could not afford ink.


• So I kept it in my living room and ignored it.


• Then I moved.


• And I stored it outside for a year.


• This is the part I am most ashamed of.


• Then I put it in storage for a year.


• Then I brought it to LA with me.


• And I kept it in my garage for another year.


• But I bought ink in the meantime.

By now the printer is covered in cobwebs, dirt, dust, and spilled ink. Some of the plastic is cracked (from the initial dumpstering) and scraped (ditto). Bits and pieces are bent out of shape. I don't have the legs (they were a casualty of some move or other). Truthfully, I feel guilty just thinking about it.

So I took it out today, scrubbed it down with 409 and rubbing alcohol, and started working on it. Oiled the rails. Cleaned the sensors. Bent some metal bits back into shape. Worked my way through a bunch of error messages with the aid of HP's forums. Made some stupid mistakes. But I got it working in the end, which I can only credit to the goddess of victory. I'm not sure why I have such luck with electronic goods, but I am certainly grateful.

Sometime this week I'll have to figure out why the alignment isn't working.

Several thousand copies of the book got printed this week. Look for it at a store near you! (Also, we're having a release party in a few weeks at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. And by "party" I mean "excuse to drink heavily", which I really shouldn't even have to say anymore.) I guess that makes me a published author, which is, to be fair, one of the things I always planned to be someday.

Writing a technical book was the hardest thing I've done in my life. It took forever, and now it's done. We made a lot of mistakes and had to do a lot of revision, and it'll all be obsolete before it hits the shelves. But people who have read it seem to like it. ("Distractingly readable" is my favorite review.) In some ways I am very proud of it. In others I can't stand the thought of people reading it.

Disabling comments, just this once. The book is done, this post is done, and I have some insane superstition that if I avoid referring to it too directly, or talking about it too much, everything will turn out all right.

Went to the optometrist today. Prescription's a little worse, but not as much as I thought. Apart from flirting with blindness, my eyes are in good shape.

But what really bothers me is having to get new glasses. I haven't changed mine in five years or so, and I hate picking them out. My sister suggests that I get something thick and plastic, in the current mode, but. . . Yeah, I don't know. I'm not really feeling it. And I can't imagine going out and shopping. I mean, it's not as if I can see what I look like.

Words you don't want your dentist to say: "Wow, are you sure that doesn't hurt?"

Truthfully, it went better than I expected.

Noted a chalk drawing of a penis on the road while biking home from work.

Scarcely remarkable, I know, but still I found it compelling. I was struck by the elaborate, hieratic stylization of the glyph -- it was a simplified version of the Penny-Arcade "canonical dong", as seen in http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/02/ . A stark and elegant scrawl, really quite classy in its way.

I stopped and tried to take a picture, but some kids came out of the nearest house and frightened me away. I wanted to ask them if they'd drawn the graffito, and if so whether P-A was responsible, but in the end I decided that waylaying schoolchildren and ranting about penile orthography would be unwise.

Wrote a sentence for the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:

It is generally reckoned an incontrovertible truth that hot dogs remain safe and wholesome in their packaging long past the sell-by date, but we four intrepid men and women -- Harry the brave, Jane the eloquent, Charles the indomitable, and myself of no particular qualities -- have set out to prove the matter, one way or the other.

As commentators on the contest have often mentioned, writing deliberately bad work is hard. It's got to be ostensibly bad, but at the same time well-crafted enough to be funny, and, for this contest, there's the additional handicap of needing to seem unintentionally bad. That is, this has to be a plausible opening sentence for a genuine and sincere overwrought novel.

So yeah. It's not great, but I labor under substantial constraints. I think it's already barely keeping its bathos in check as is. Making it any sillier would destroy the entire effect. (On the other hand, this is a rule that the contest winners seem to ignore, and I think they come off better for it. Ah well, maybe next time.)

I seem to have been adopted.

It's not that I actually have a cat; I just buy catfood once in a while. She's learned this, and so waits by my door until I get home after work.

I have decided to call her "Von Clawsewitz", in recognition of her sublime operational awareness.

(Stop groaning, goddamnit.)

At a fast-food place recently, my comrade made the mistake of ordering a "medium" drink, which turned out to be some kind of gigantic basin, after the accustomed fashion of American fast food.

"What, you weren't expecting that? Always order the small."
"But these places don't even have "small" anymore."
"I think, if you say small, they'll give you the smallest available size."

Of course, today I received my comeuppance. Got told, "We don't have small. Is medium okay?" I think the guy took my studied pause, dismissive gesture, and comment of, "Yes, I would like the smallest available size" as an insult -- but really I was just struggling to assimilate this new evidence that the universe is a giant engine directed toward keeping me humble.

Noticed today that they've changed the penny. If you haven't seen it, it might be worth a quick glance.

I think it's really quite good -- a nice 3/4 rendition of a log cabin, several layers, some nice detail work on the ends of the beams and pile of wood. Stylistically, the decision to include the ground and incise the "E Pluribus Unum" into it lends the coin a bit of a rustic look that works well with the log cabin motif. I also kind of like that they've updated their fonts a little -- sans-serif all the way, with the "ONE CENT" markedly bolder. It's not a huge change, but I approve of that sort of little shift, just for change's sake. I do think the Lincoln Memorial was better, but not so much as to make me outraged or even unhappy at the change.

I'm grateful, though, that they didn't change the profile of Lincoln. That profile might be as good as anything the mint has ever put out -- it has an almost Roman quality -- and it would have been a travesty if it were replaced by something like the "zombie Adams" on the new (at least new-ish) nickels.

"Imagine the smell of a feed store. That's how this tastes."

And he's right, I think to myself after I've poured a bit down my throat and gotten over the retching. It starts with a fairly strong scent of corn. Taste of corn, machine oil, faintly minty, or is that the acetone? Long, earthy and bready aftertaste, but there's something a bit off about that too. Mouth feel is light and thin, like spring water over corroded metal.

In other words, I still think the still is awesome, but cutting out more of the heads and tails and maybe some charcoal filtration would go some way towards improved drinkability.

I've always had trouble recognizing faces. Let me put this in context by talking about the movie Adaptation. Not only did I not recognize that Nicholas Cage played the main character -- I didn't realize that he also played the main character's identical twin brother. The same problem shows up in my day-to-day life, but I usually get enough other cues to muddle my way though. Sometimes I mess up, and it's quite embarrassing.

So anyway. People have always kind of all looked the same to me, there's an element of existential horror to it, let's move on. Today I took the Cambridge face perception / facial memory test, available freely online, and I'm kind of curious to see how other people do. It's not a meme in the classic style, but it's close enough.

As it develops, my score was 69% -- average is 80%, 65% "may indicate face recognition difficulties." So, yeah. I have some trouble, but it's not exactly disabling. About as expected.

Bought and read Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein.

It doesn't quite live up to its opening line. Nothing would live up to that. Nothing with plot, anyway. Nothing you could read and parse more than a page at a time. But it's pretty damned good. The thing basically opens with the main character attending the "only genuine and authentic Godzilla Bukkake night in America" and goes from there. (Same page: "The door guy entered the room, carrying cages of thirsty-looking monitor lizards, long tongues flickering.") It's obscene, gleeful -- and most of it is actually stuff that is familiar to us depraved denizens of the intertron. I actually find that kind of scary.

If you want to sample that atmosphere, the best place I know to start is with Ellis' The Dinner of Cathcart Zen.

Today I had a strong sense that the word "sabotage" was visibly fading from the language, becoming as dead as the term "sans-culottism". As dead, indeed, as the wooden shoes from which the word is said to have sprung.

"Terrorist", however, which I believe dates from the same time and place, is alive and well.

Got one of those irritating cellphone spams today, for the umpteenth time. "This is the second notice that the manufacturer warranty on your vehicle is about to expire." Particularly funny, of course, in that I don't own a car and never have.

I've seen other livejournal posts on the subject, but they center on legal remedies -- complaining at the FCC, using the federal "do not call" list, etc. I don't think that legislation is the best approach here. As Gaiman points out, the law is a blunt stick, and a very dangerous first-line treatment.

Anyway, I got to thinking about a scheme to generate and distribute one-time cellphone numbers. Basically, you'd overlay a secondary dialing system that relies on very large phone numbers to uniquely identify links between people.

(slave_to_anime suggested a much more plausible version of everything after this line, which generates random extensions. I'm seriously thinking of building the iphone app and setting up the asterisk server to make it happen. . . except that cellphone spam isn't really a big deal for me.)

As an implementation, you might get a keyspace from the phone company, which is permuted using one of the readily-available cryptographically strong hash functions (to make guessing valid numbers difficult,) use the phone itself to generate and "validate" new numbers, and distribute them via text messages. These text messages would be the totally open side channel used to exchange identifiers. If that became problematic, we could move to more radical methods.

This would have the advantage that, when a number became compromised, you could revoke it -- the UI would say "never accept calls from this number again." (It goes without saying that, until you manually generated a number from your keyspace, it would be useless.)

( And so forth )

Dear sky: Note that the common saying is "Après moi le déluge". Please adjust accordingly.

Regards, ct.

Gentlefolk, I present you The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis.

Scary thing is, I'm about halfway through, it's still just as terrible, and I think it may be doing permanent damage. I'm beginning to doubt the essential validity of words, if they can be made to do these things.

If not for his keen auditory organs and lighting steeled reflexes, Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed hell-pits of the Grim Reaper. He had unknowingly stumbled upon an ancient, long forgotton booby trap; a mistake which would have stunted the perusal of longevity of one less agile.

That is literally a random pair of sentences. They're all that bad.

Read and re-read Nimbus, by Alexander Jablokov.

Jablokov's madness manifested itself in a consuming fascination with the construction and articulation of increasingly-elaborate symbol-systems, which grew until it crowded out all other facets of his work. Several characters in Nimbus communicate by arranging precisely chosen objects in intricate spatial relations -- I think of it as Jablokov's way of expressing frustration with the components of his stock-in-trade.

The moment that hit me most strongly, though, is when one character, whose daughter had suffered brain damage that left her unable to communicate, describes the implant that gave her a measure of speech:

He looked at me, his eyes appraising. "Not everything we deal in is useless."

Even the elves of Santa's feared reindeer cavalry may pause to admire the fall of a snowflake. Merry Christmas, all.