Yarr?

>quiet day at work
>google up sum PDFz
>feel guilty about reading a stolen ebook from an author who is awesome and deserves to get paid
>realize I actually already own this book these books in hardcopy and just haven't gotten around to reading them

Geography vs Science Fiction

Eastern European SF is not the same as Western SF. Not better or worse, just different.

I don't know much about Asian SF. Will have to investigate.

Robutts

To any moderately advanced robot civilisation, wouldn't our pervasive use of computers look unnervingly like a society that keeps brains or hearts in jars?

Length is Relative

While I'm here, I might also reflect on the fact that I've always maintained a distance from the activity of blogging mostly because where I'm from, blogs are typically these long, laborious, self-indulgent and generally quite wanky series of articles. But I guess some exposure over time to the net has dulled these reflexes, because I am reminded that the length and nature of an article are not fixed properties.

So what I'm nominating is the concept of shorter, snappier pieces. They don't have to be much, perhaps 100-400 words, one or two paragraphs max.

I'm calling it microblogging, since it's snappy and arguably in tune with the mobile-yet-online lifestyle that has developed over the last couple years. Get an idea, throw down the basics, post it up and let the peanut gallery argue over the fine print. Sure, you could say that Twitter has already garnered this market, but after an abortive one-month stint using it I realised that my best thoughts are far too beefy to fit into 140 characters. That, I would call nanoblogging.

A Brief Sabbatical

Hello little blog.
Did you think I had forgotten you?




...well, I had. For a while, anyway.
But lately I've been streaming things through my mind that might be worth writing down, if only so I can consult them later. Had a few things brewing up in the back of my head that I should really get around to putting in action. Or at least put into words so I can hash out my processes a little.

Things to do:
1) Fix the boot.ini on my work laptop (eugh, maybe I should just backup and request a reimage).
2) Load up the other partition on my personal laptop with Snow Leopard again, and see if I can't track down a fix for the lack of Mac support for Intel integrated video chips.
3) Set up J's Chumby properly.
4) Level a toon to 85 in World of Warcraft so I can say I've at least seen endgame content.
5) Sniff around for some digital copies of the textbooks I'm going to need for SP1 of my OUA course. I have a horrible feeling that saving %25 by ordering from Amazon is going to burn me in the delivery window.