Fellowship

By Evan — — SF

Well, I saw a midnight showing of the Fellowship of the Ring last night
(or this morning, rather). Me, Nancy, Mike, Eric, Byron (holy crap, Byron!),
Randy, Don, Nicole, Christina, Berkeley, Nate, and the inestimable
Barbara. Nancy, bless
her heart, got the tickets and arrived early so we could stand in at the
front of the line and get the good seats. Yes, we were the jerks who took the
entire front railing row. Ha ha.

The film was unbelievably good. If there’s a better fantasy movie out there, I
haven’t seen it.

Not only does the film do the big details well (the Shire, Isengard, the Balrog)…
but again and again it casually tosses off smaller details that blend in seamlessly.
Legolas’s demonic speed with the bow. Centipedes and crawling things boiling
out of the earth as a Ringwraith looms near. Saruman hauling down the trees (oooh,
you’re gonna pay for that later…) I was riveted, wide awake all the way
to 3am. Although that might have had something to do with the vast quantities of
Skittles I consumed.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to seeing it again with my family. It’s going to be
our Christmas Day movie. Some Jewish families get Chinese food on Christmas Day. We
see a movie.

Long ago, this was a kind of special tradition. Crowds were sparse, and it was almost as
if we had the theater to ourselves. But in recent years all the frickin’ goyim
have caught on, and the theaters are as crowded as ever. Oh, well. Perhaps
you can only open presents for so long. After that, everyone’s kind of sitting
around the house staring at their relatives… wondering what there
is to do besides talk…

At least that’s just my guess.

Posted in SF

Waiting to Compile

By Evan — — Tech

Mom informs me that her excellent computer-repair instincts had nothing to do with
her education in biology or her experience in analyzing medical literature.

My model for my suggestion for your computer was starting a baby on
solid food. You start with one food at a time, wait a few days, and then add
another, and then another. That way, if something causes an allergy, you know
what it is. Simple really.

Today at work I was really bored, so I tried downloading and installing
the Dada Engine. This wonderful
software generates random text from a “grammar”, which is just a text file consisting
of rules. There are a number of fun examples of the Dada Engine in action,
including the Postmodernism
Generator and the Random Adolescent
Poetry Generator. I was really looking forward to inventing my own scripts.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t compile the software at work. It requires GNU make,
and at work we use Solaris (duh). I should have known this would happen… I had the
same trouble with the Apache webserver last year. Now,
even a dumb tech writer like me can install gcc and GNU make eventually,
but my knowledge of C is so weak… I’d rather not spend hours and hours trying to graft GNU-stuff
onto Solaris. I managed to do it once before, but it was singularly unpleasant.

Maybe some bright enterprising young person should rewrite the Dada Engine in Java.
Just as an exercise.

Fiendish Genius

By Evan — — Tech

Two items of good news:

First… it looks like I’ve finally isolated the problem that was causing
poor Spenser to freeze up. After three months of despair and false hopes, it looks
like there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
And who is the computer genius that deserves the credit for showing me the way?

Why Mom, of course.

“Honey,” she said the other day, after I subjected her to my latest sad-sack tale
of scouring message boards and downloading random drivers and why-oh-why didn’t
I just buy a Mac, “why don’t you try dealing with the problem systematically?”
Uninstall as much stuff as you can and see if your computer works. If it does,
start adding things back one-at-a-time until the problem re-appears.”

From the mouths of medical writers…

So it’s the sound card. Pull the sound card out, and everything is super. Put the
sound card back in, and there is the freezing (and the moaning and the kvetching
and the tearing-out-of-the-hair and the oy gevalt…) There are a couple of reasons
why this could happen, and a number of things I can do to fix this. But that can
come later. Right now, I’m just basking in the knowledge that I can
write this without the fear that at any second, I’ll have to do a hard reboot.

Second… I’ve signed a lease on a new place. My philosophy is, if I’m living by
myself, I should pick a small, cheap place and try to save money.
As long as the apartment complex doesn’t have a green pool
that’s filled with rotting leaves. I just see that as a Bad Sign for some reason. If
that makes me effete, a yuppie suburban boy, so be it.

Eventually I found a studio and an apartment that were cheap and clean.
I almost went with the studio, until I realized how absolutely flat-out stupid
that would have been. The one thing about the studio was that the name of the
building was “Melrose Place”. I think that was what was clouding my judgment.
Or it could have been the 20% savings in rent. Hard to say.

As for writing: I’m dropping the thud-and-blunder novel for now. I guess I’ll
stick with the short SF fiction to try and stay sharp. The
“Why I Hate Aliens”
theme is pretty fruitful, actually. (Although it’s apparently not as straightforward
as it sounds… M’ris informs me that
about 30% of the submissions don’t have the requisite hatred of extraterrestrials,
and about 12% don’t have any extraterrestrials at all.)
Anyway, I hope to have a couple more drafts in the next few
days — not for the anthology, of course. But for what, then? Well, last Friday
cousin Michael
told me I should submit to Strange Horizons.
Sounds good to me. And if they say no… well, this site needs a Fiction
directory, doesn’t it?

Finally, I have discovered The Dialectizer.
I looove this program. The only problem is that it doesn’t handle stylesheets
very well. No matter. It’s still a work of fiendish genius. Or as The Dialectizer
might say:

Finally, ah have discovahed Th’ Dialeckizer. ah looove this hyar program, dawgone it.
Th’ only problem is thet it don’t han’le stylesheets mighty fine. No matter. It’s still
a wawk of fiendish junius.

Armorers of God

By Evan — — Personal

M’ris is right:
Creed is awful. Just awful.

Well, I’m on the hunt for a new apartment. Got a few places I’m looking at tomorrow.
I’m feeling pretty optimistic. Besides, if I fail, I still have a place to live,
courtesy of Fred Holy. So not a lot of pressure.

Speaking of new places, Nancy and Mike invited everyone to a holiday party. It
is officially the “Smith-Holy residence”, not the other way around as you might expect.
Nancy rightly points out that she and Mike are not the Armorers of God.
And good thing, too. They might have room for one anvil in there at best.

I still am having trouble installing stable graphics drivers for my ATI card.
I keep trying to install the new drivers, but no matter what I do, the old drivers
keep springing back from their coffin and leering at me. Fortunately, I’ve finally
found an FAQ site that explains how to expunge the old drivers once-and-for-all.
This involves a little surgery on my Windows registry. Fortunately my physics
education instilled in me an unhealthy lack of fear of messing with technology
that I don’t understand.

I’ve been having awful trouble with my writing. Trying a little semi-traditional
fantasy. But it keeps coming out like, “Long-ago-in-the-days-of-high-adventure…”
Ugh.

Crotchety Old Fogey

By Evan — — Personal

A couple of days ago on the radio I heard a mysterious cover of Linkin Park’s
“One Step Closer”. Instead of an angry young man screaming at the top of his
lungs, this version involved a pleasant sounding woman with an acoustic guitar.
Disorienting, to say the least.

So I strained to hear who the artist was, but all I heard the DJ say was,
“Dean and Naroyan”. Ok, type that into Google… nope. Hmmmm, maybe he
said “Deena Naroyan”? No dice there either… but Google asks, “Did you mean
‘Deena Noroian‘”? Why, yes, as it turns out, I did.
And there she was! And if you
send her an email, she’ll even send you a free mp3 of her cover of “One Step Closer”.
Now, I’m not quite sure who her target audience is — besides possibly me
— since how many Linkin Park fans are also into Lilith Fair guitar music?
And vice versa? But maybe her new album will sell like hotcakes. What do I know?

Speaking of mp3s, I’ve been having a lot of fun ripping all my CDs onto my computer. This
was all accidental. I was just playing around, trying to get my sound card
to work properly. The install CD included a supremely crappy media player.
I got distracted with it… ripped a couple of CDs… and realized, “Hey,
this is pretty neat. I can store all my music in one place… organize my
collection… make my own playlists…” Welcome to 1999.

It’s like when that kid called from Harvey Mudd,
trolling for alumni donations. Well, after I coughed up the money we started
chatting, about NPR of all things. I mentioned
This American Life, and he said,
“Oh, I love that show. I listen to it all the time when I do my homework.”

Hmmmm, I thought. Maybe things have changed a bit since the Dark Ages when I
went to school, but I don’t recall noon on Saturdays being prime time for
doing E&M problem sets.

“No,” he said patiently. “I go to the website
and listen to the archived shows whenever I want.” Like, duh, Grandpa.

Am I turning into Abe Simpson?

I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Now, what I’m with isn’t
“it,” and what’s “it” seems weird and scary to me.

I can at least console myself with the fact that I never was with it. So I don’t
feel like I’ve lost any ground.

Finally, today happens to be the tenth anniversary of the
first
web page in the United States, at SLAC. I think there were a couple of
websites up before then, but they were
Swiss or
something, so who cares?

UHaul, WeBitch

By Evan — — Personal

We moved Mike and Nancy on Saturday. Phase I (moving Mike) went smoothly.
We were just moving him from his apartment on the 7th floor to the one
almost directly below. The only hitch was that the auxilliary elevator had broken
that very morning, which made the trip four times as long as it should have been.
(“We apologize for any inconvenience,” the sign on the elevator said.) But with
help from me, Don, and Pat, it wasn’t so bad. Even Mike’s
secretary Audrey helped. (And they say it’s hard to find good help these days.)

Phase II did not go as smoothly. We backed the U-Haul truck into Nancy’s
driveway. Then we realized that we had to pull forward a few feet. So Pat
turned the key… nothing. The battery was dead. Not wanting to try
jumping the truck with my Sentra, we called U-Haul. They had nothing
available at all, naturally.

So until tomorrow night, Nancy is sleeping on her couch and fishing through
boxes for clean underwear. I guess it could have been worse. We could have
loaded up the truck and then discovered the problem.

Nevertheless, let us not be too quick to curse U-Haul and swear eternal fealty
to Ryder. Ever heard Sam’s story about the time he tried to
pick up a Ryder truck on the weekend? Closed on Sunday, the sign said —
right next to the sign with the company motto, We’re There When You Need Us!
“As it turned out,” says Sam, “they weren’t there when I needed them.
They could have at least taken that second sign down.”

Ah well, on to Good News and Bad News.

Good news, from AndrewSullivan.com:

So after a good long time at the helm, the old cleric finally decided to surrender
his last remaining fortress – the place where it had all begun not so very long ago.
What should we do with him? Capture? House arrest? Public humiliation? I think we
should let Pat Robertson get on with the rest of his life in peace, don’t you?

Bad news: looks like my good housing deal has fallen through, sort of.
I can live there for two or three months, but then I’d need to move again.
Hmmm… the price is right… but as we’ve seen, moving stinks. But on the
bright side, my longing to haggle over the rent (see sidebar) might become
a reality. Be careful what you wish for…

Great news: I’ve sold a short short story, “Watercooler”, to the Bay
Laurel Ebooks anthology,
“Why I Hate Aliens“.
Now we’re not talking a lot of money here… my story is only 1000 words, which means
that according to my calculations I’m entitled to roughly $0.04 per copy sold.
But the important thing is that I wrote something and
someone else liked it enough to publish.
So hooray for me! Besides, all the other books I’ve written in the last few years
have had titles like, “Lucent Computer Telephony Products Utilities User Guide” —
smashing blockbusters for which I have gone lamentably uncredited. High time
we turned that around.

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good. And fired up, too. Time to turn in, and get
cracking on another story tomorrow night, right after work! No wimpy freewrites,
no journal, no tinkering with the broken HTML tutorial — no,
the real stuff. A bonafide story.

Except… I can’t. I’ll be helping Nancy move. Arrrggh.
We hates U-Haul. We hates them forever.

Dancing on Graves

By Evan — — News

Doing some more reading, this time on the
Holy Land Foundation, which had its assets
frozen by the US government a couple of days ago. The group had some
choice words on the matter, calling it an “attack on Islam”, among other things.

Well, today an
FBI memo
came to light, describing various ties between the HLF and Hamas. My favorite part
was the snippet from a 1995 fundraiser in Los Angeles, where a Hamas military leader spoke:

“I hope no one is recording me or taking any pictures, as none are allowed…
because I’m going to speak the truth to you. It’s simple. Finish off the Israelis.
Kill them all! Exterminate them! No peace ever!”

The event raised $207,000, some of which went to reward the families of
suicide bombers. It took us six years to shut these people down?

Ok, let’s turn to some happy news: Enron has now come
begging
us for power.

“We don’t want to dance on anyone’s grave,” said Oscar Hidalgo, spokesman for the California
Department of Water Resources. “But this is sort of ironic.”

Nonsense, Mr. Hidalgo! Dance, I say, dance!

We’re also being treated to a number of sad stories about poor rank-and-file Enron employees,
whose retirement funds melted away as Enron’s stock fell from $90 to
change-under-the-couch-cushion levels. Looks like the
Labor Department is even getting involved. You’ve got to hand it to the U.S. government — even if
you’re a bunch of arrogant manipulative trash-talking middlemen, the plodding old Labor
Department will cheerfully step in to save your ass. That’s duty for you.

But let’s face it. Enron and the other energy traders simply took advantage of the
massive loopholes in our own “deregulation” scheme. We Californians wore a short skirt
and asked for it. After all, in 1995 we allowed ourselves to be distracted by the
burning issues of the day, such as whether or not to provide cheap preventative medical care to
illegal immigrants. Hmmm… sexy issue with lots of people screaming on both sides,
or complex arcane issue involving huge transfers of money and power? Guess which one
penetrated our consciousness? Fortunately, we had plenty of experts (Gov. Wilson,
legislators of both parties, and hordes of industry lobbyists) to decide the tough issues for us.

Not to beat this Enron thing to death, but a few days ago I heard an “industry analyst”
on NPR assuring the public that despite the debacle, energy production would continue.
“Power plants will continue to create electrons,” he said.

Arrrgh. All together, now: power plants don’t create electrons. And
while we’re on the subject, power plants don’t move electrons, either. Neither
do computers. If we’re talking AC power, electrons just shake back and forth. That’s about
it. And DC power? Well, you crack open your Halliday and Resnick and
calculate the electron drift speed for typical values of current and wire diameter. Then
call ZDNet
and let them in on the secret. I’m sure they’ll thank you for it.

Heroic Freedom Fighters

By Evan — — News

I’m going through a “can’t read the news anymore” phase again, after reading up
on the massive wave of suicide bombs going off in Israel. A particularly nice
touch: the Saturday night bombing in Jerusalem had a
second bomb placed and timed to kill panicked, fleeing and injured civilians.
And if that weren’t enough to turn my stomach, check out
this
apologia for the murderers by Peter Preston in the UK’s
The Guardian — published Dec. 3, mere hours
afterwards.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve seen more than one smarmy pundit make the argument
that suicide bombers aren’t cowards. The pundits lecture us that see, there we go again, unthinkingly
slapping people with the label “cowardly”. A “rent-a-response”, as Mr. Preston calls it.
In fact, they tell us the terrorists are very brave — after all, don’t they die too?
Well, sure. Facing their date with paradise and 72 virgins with steely-eyed resolve, no doubt.

Thus we are treated to one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book: implicitly
define a term the way you want it to be, and then castigate your
opponents when their definition doesn’t match up favorably with yours.
Mr. Preston, Susan Sontag,
answer me this: how is it that your definition of “bravery” includes murderers of
innocent noncombatants who can’t fight back? Are you somehow muddled about the fact
that the suicide bombers died also? Confusing that for bravery, eh? A rookie
mistake at best. If someone hates his own life and longs for the eternal bliss of
the afterlife, how is he brave if he commits suicide? You’ve got it backwards: it
would be brave of him to to stay alive.

But I should not extend Mr. Preston the courtesy of thinking that perhaps he is
merely muddled — his atrocious timing and poor taste speaks for itself.
In any case, I need to spend less time reading extreme-left wing British
newspapers. There are only so many lectures on morality from Bizarro-world
that you can take in one sitting.

Elana, Adiv: keep yourselves and Mom as safe as possible. I love you always… and
it breaks my heart that the peace you and everyone else in the Middle East deserves
is still yet to be found.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

By Evan — — Culture

Last night Nancy and I had dinner at Bill Fredlund’s
house. You can always count on Bill for good food, great wine, and excellent conversation.

You can also always count on Bill to invite interesting young people.
There was Andy (the heartbreakingly handsome South African), Erin (Andy’s drop-dead
gorgeous girlfriend), Jenny (cute… and possibly Jewish, if you go far back enough),
and Melanie from class (who claims to be 42… if so, she has a rapidly aging
portrait hanging somewhere in her attic).

At the last dinner (which Nancy and I missed), Andy had apparently made a few
predictions about the war in Afghanistan — all of which turned out to be
spectactularly wrong. Andy was good-natured about it though, and when Bill
put him on the spot he cheerfully made a few more predictions. Here’s hoping
he’s wrong again.

Bill also described his experience living in Italy in the 80s, when the Red Brigades
still had the country paralyzed with terror.
I’m trying to imagine how it must have been to live in Italy back then. Assign
a tough new anti-terrorism czar? Boom! he’s blown up in the middle of a piazza. Elect
a competent prime minister? Kidnapped, murdered, and left in the trunk of a car.

Eventually Italy managed to break the movement (with a little help from us).
In the end, it turned out that some of the ringleaders were extreme left-wing
university professors. Everyone knew that these professors were vocal
communists… but no one had any idea that they were directly responsible for
violence.

I find it interesting that while the Italian professors did awful, criminal things,
they at least acted on their convictions. In contrast, our very own American and
British academic extremists merely prattle on about their ridiculous world-views,
knowing full well that they live in a masturbatory fantasy world; that nobody outside
of their tiny circle cares what they think. We should all give thanks, looks like
we got the better deal.

How Does the Piggy Eat…?

By Evan — — Personal

Well, it looks like poor Spenser might be fully on the road to recovery.
Temperature running steady at 48 degrees, new video drivers and patches for the
motherboard… maybe we are home free. Although who knows, we could freeze
up at any moment here. I keep having paranoid thoughts about that as I
write this. Stay on target… stay on target…

Thanksgiving week was excellent. Not only is Thanksgiving really my
favorite holiday of the year, I managed to get in at least four
homemade meals in a row this year. Always a good thing when you’re a
peanut-butter-on-a-spoon consuming bachelor such as myself.

  1. Tuesday night I went over to Brian Gee’s, for some homecooked
    Chinese food. The thing to understand about Brian is, he’s one
    of those guys who moved to the Silicon Valley and was shocked,
    shocked to discover that it’s sometimes kinda hard to meet nice
    girls around here. “Evan!” he’d cry. “This place is a
    wasteland.”

    Well, this year I arrived at the door to his palatial new
    San Francisco pad promptly at 7pm, to find Brian in the kitchen,
    surrounded by at least five or six reasonably attractive
    young women. Clearly Brian is not doing so badly for himself.
    Of course he is handsome, intelligent, funny, ambitious, a good cook,
    blah blah blah, so go figure.

    Anyway, it was refreshing to see Brian. I hadn’t actually hung out
    with him for a long time. How long? Well, when I mentioned to him
    that Amber and I had broken up, his sympathetic, heartfelt response was,
    “Ummm… Amber who?” Somehow I forgot to mention to him that I had been dating
    this very nice woman for the last ten months in the first place. Ooops.

    Apparently he feels this is a sign I need to be
    a bit more communicative about my social life in the future.
    I’m investigating blast-faxes.

  2. Wednesday night I had dinner with
    M’ris and Mark and
    Tim. And she served angelsuppa (“angel soup”, I think), which is a
    Norsk dessert of berries (“cloudberries”) and cream. Or for American
    palates, berries and ice cream. Good stuff.

    After dinner, Tim and M’ris and I got into a discussion about Harry Potter.
    Tim and M’ris pointed out that Harry Potter and his friends are all pretty
    one-dimensional — they’re basically good kids, they don’t go through any
    major internal struggles, and they all fit various boarding school stereotypes.
    They’re right — I had noticed this with the unredeemably nasty Draco Malfoy, but for
    some reason I missed it in the other characters. Anyway, on further reflection,
    I think the one exception is Snape. He started out a Death-Eater, but
    had a change of heart; he hates Harry Potter passionately, but dives in and
    saves him when necessary. That’s worth some points, I think.

    Tim also pointed out that J.K. Rowling snubbed
    this year’s Hugo Award ceremony for
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. If so, that’s pretty tacky.
    I certainly hope Rowling isn’t one of those authors who thinks she writes
    “lit-rah-chah”, as opposed to that blight on our civilization, speculative fiction.

  3. Thursday night was Thanksgiving. This year I decided that it was time for the
    younger generation to learn the family Thanksgiving secrets. I made the stuffing,
    made the gravy, and prepared, stuffed, and carved the turkey. The one thing I didn’t do
    was cook the turkey… so if Dad gets hit by a bus next year, his secrets
    with the Weber die with him.

    The meal was excellent (if I do say so myself). We ate with cousin David and
    some family friends, Susan Hennings and her daughter Anna.
    Anna is two weeks older than Sarah, and about a foot-and-a-half taller.
    They’ve been friends since they were crawling around on the floor… which
    pretty much puts me and Eric to shame.

  4. Friday night was Son of Thanksgiving. We finished most of the turkey, although
    we had to invite yet more cousins to do it. And their girlfriends.
    I made pumpkin pie, but unfortunately I misread the recipe and used 1/4c of
    brown sugar instead of 3/4c. Tee-hee! Everyone was polite about it though.
    “Mmmm, yes, you don’t want to oversweeten the pumpkin pie. It tastes sooo
    artificial.” Some of them even waited a full 90 seconds before reaching for the honey.

    I then went and dragged Nancy out of the house, and we hung out at a bar in Campbell
    (Katie Bloom’s) with Randy and Don and Nicole and Monica and Monica’s Boyfriend Who
    I Can Never Remember the Name Of, Even Though He Can Remember Mine Just Fine and
    Seems Like a Very Nice Guy.

All in all, a mind- and waist-expanding week! I suppose I have plenty more to prattle
on about, but I might as well save it for the near future. I’m afraid I’m going to start
sounding like Liz Smith, or maybe
Jackie Harvey, anyway.
Item!