Jerry Pournelle comments briefly on Google Chrome, which he correctly sees as the third try for network computing. He further notes (in his column) that less than 30% of the US has access to broadband. Add the two together, and it says to both of us that much like the paperless office, we're not in the future yet where network computing actually works well enough to risk your business on it.
( A brief rant about businesses )

Jerry also comments on this article by John Derbyshire about the Apollo program. He has some interesting things to say about the program, and I agree: we should have done it Delos D. Harriman's way, taking a step farther out until going to the Moon was just another step from our L4 and L5 stations. Instead, it got tangled up with the Cold War and national pride, and we did it in one mighty rush. RTWT.

Spent some time yesterday getting rid of some of the boxes that have accumulated in the apartment over the last couple of years...pizza boxes, shipping boxes, boxes that bandages and tape have arrived in. It piles up over time. Going to do some more of that today and chuck out some other garbage too.

Got lazy last night and ordered in instead of going out after gyros, and wound up with a truly disgusting blood sugar reading this morning. Well, actually, it wasn't too far over 200, but any such readings are Bad. More moderation and vegetables today, plus a little more exercise (see above).

Not impressed by this virtual job fair so far.

Ganked from gohanvox's Facebook: Star Wars done by hand(s).

You know, I'm a big fan of the "Eat What You Want And Die Like A Man" proposition, but some things are just too disgusting even for me, enthusiastic consumer of Monsterburgers* (hold the mayo) and fried okra that I am.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present to you the nadir of American cuisine: the foie gras jelly doughnut.
Coming to a five-star restaurant near you, no doubt. How Professor Bainbridge can regard this as "the best trend ever" is utterly beyond me.
(Instapundit)

*Link chosen for extra-special irony. :)

Stop me if I've said this before...but it's time we all admitted that Honor Harrington has become Jack Ryan. Oh, not in every respect, but let's face it, she's not following the trajectory of Horatio Hornblower any more. The relatively slim novels of naval derring-do amidst the stars have become gargatious tomes laden with all manner of political skulduggery, diplomatic hoo-ha, and (God save the mark!) blueprints. All that remains now is playing the parlor game of figuring out who the John Clark and Ding Chavez of the Honorverse are, to say nothing of the Foleys; we already know who Admiral Cutter was played by.
( There's a book review in here somewhere, right? )

Now that the manifestly unqualified Steve Rattner has quit as car czar, who better to take his place than - dare I say it - the manifestly OVERQUALIFIED Dave Burge?

onsenmark is 37 today! Congratulations!

I seem to have fixed my sleep cycle problem to some extent by going to bed this morning at 0100 and rising today a little after 1200. The late rising was more out of sheer laziness than anything else, since I woke up roughly once an hour from 0700 onward, but with nothing on the schedule today I didn't see any reason to stir forth and do stuff.

I did finally go out and get the mail, which included drugs from the VA, the new (and horribly screwed up) Sprint bill, the quarterly statement from my brokerage (didn't want that retirement fund anyway) and a helpful letter with flyer from the VA about their suicide assistanceprevention line. I don't think I'll really be needing that, so I chucked it along with the rest of the junk mail. Sprint had done exactly what I asked them earlier in the month and switched the numbers on my phones, so that the Centro -my main phone- is in the 703 area code, and the Katana -my "home" phone- is in the inappropriate 301 area code. Unfortunately, they didn't switch the plans along with the numbers, so I got billed for some texting and data use. :( Fortunately, Sprint being Sprint, they have outstanding customer service which fixed this problem, credited me with the charges for the texts and data, and also credited me another $50 for extending my contract on one of these phones for two years. Ha! It's not like I'd ever voluntarily leave them in any case, so it was free money. :)

The Forgotten Army is a pretty depressing book. Granted, just about any book about the ARVN would be, but this one is particularly poignant since it's not only a once-over-lightly organizational/social history of that doomed army but also a biography of a pair of colonels who came from similar backgrounds, were acknowledged as two of the best young officers in the ARVN, and wound up in very different and tragic places. It's also depressing to see how our Army and the press screwed the ARVN out of the credit for winning the battles of Hue and Hamburger Hill, among many other dumb mistakes the US made in South Vietnam. I'm not done with it yet, but it's hard to keep going when you know how it all ends.
UPDATE: Done with it now. I need a drink, but I gave that stuff up. :(

Time to go out and replenish the groceries, maybe hang out with some friends if they're available.

God, I miss EVE. I'm not really cut out to be a forum whore, and reading the op threads is monumentally frustrating.

My ask/tell post about Anime Detour on the Something Awful forums.
So far I'm disappointed in the weak efforts of the trolls.

This is a reply to burnunit's comment here.
( Cut for the benefit of people who DGAS about smoffing )

So last night I got into the Kia, stopped by Chipotle for one of their excellent burritos, and rolled out for Silver Spring and the first meeting of the Potomac River Science Fiction Society that I've been to in...20, 30 years?
( Background info )
So after missing last month's meeting due to family drama, I went into the hinterlands of Montgomery County and attended a PRSFS meeting. It was mostly good (let's face it, some fans are annoying people) and I wound up staying after, chatting with the hostess and her two older kids about convention war stories until 0330 or something like that, after which I drove to Laurel, hit the Denny's for breakfast*, and then went home, where I logged on to find that I was off the Goonfleet purge list. Praise Lowtax! ;)

Drugs were taken, insulin was shot, and I crashed hard. Hello, Saturday night...

*No carrot cake and/or hot tapioca pudding were consumed as part of breakfast.

( Hyperion )
Related: Definitely going to the PRSFS meeting tonight to talk about SF. What a concept! A SF fan club that actually talks about SF! MADNESS!

Sort of related: Since my sponsor into Goonfleet had the bad grace to not only quit but get himself banned from the forums, I am casting about for a new sponsor and thinking glumly that I just might have to fork over my $10 to Lowtax and start posting at somethingawful.com. thaadd thinks I ought to do an ask/tell thread about Anime Detour. It could happen. UPDATE: It did happen.

Definitely related: Previous post about the League of Wonder provoked a lot of comments (props to burnunit for dropping by and responding) and if it does nothing more than put the LoW on notice that there's a lot of fans suspicious of the concept, then good. I don't know how much time I want to spend on the subject, since as I explained, whatever they do will have minimal impact on me since it's all going to happen in the Ninth Circle of HellMinnesota and not down here. Still, as one of the founders of Detour I feel some responsibility to keep an eye on "my" convention and occasionally stick my oar in, especially when major stuff like this heaves into view.

michaellee has been pimping this website aggressively of late, and I have some gut reactions. I'm posting them here because, well, I'm not really part of Twin Cities fandom any more. My future in fandom, such as it is, will be defined by whatever I do here in the Baltimore/Washington are. So I don't think it's my place to shit up League of Wonders with my comments.
( So what? )

Also pretty hilarious; at some points I had trouble breathing. Yes, I am an insensitive jerk; why do you ask?

...to chocl8fiend!

I'm on somewhat of a Vietnam War kick at the moment...
( Would you like to know more? )

Got a fresh box of needles today, and just in time, too, since today's outings included a trip to Wal-Mart to get some generic syringes. Stopped by Harris Teeter to cash in my Sub Club points (a fig on thee, Subway!), test their chili (mild, but not bad), and pay the ignorance tax for this week.

The online job fair I thought was today is actually next week. :(

Wound up doing my good deed for the decade by hauling a pizza out to P's place for various reasons she can explain if she wants to, but it was worth it to get caught up on all the Detour gossip/drama** as well as getting her take on this year's Convergence (now with 400% more SEX, LOL) which included pole dancing, go-go dancers at the Oddcon party, and a kissing booth for some worthy cause that featured increasingly scantily-clad young ladies as the weekend progressed. Judging from the photographs posted so far by verrant, among others, Allen Carpentier's criticism of femmefans* no longer applies, at least not at Convergence where, apparently, attracting da yoots of Minnesota is not a problem. :)

Nothing much of any consequence accomplished today otherwise; hope to change that tomorrow.






*"Half-pretty women half-dressed to show it." Inferno, chapter 1 IIRC
**Relax, stuckintraffik, it's all good. ;)

Yeah, you can't get away from annoying people who want to strike a political pose, even at the orchestra. (Instapundit)

Of course, one of the ways people can be an asshole in response to this kind of nonsense is to hit organizations like this where they live: not just in the wallet, but in the tax exemption. This is something I always worried about with in respect to Detour. I didn't want even the appearance that we were partisan one way or the other because of this, and I don't know that I was always clear to people about why. Putin jokes OK, maybe even jokes about the LDP (which would actually have been within our ambit) but for Kami-sama's sake, no campaign wear. It only takes one person to start a mountain of problems.

Woke up, checked morning blood sugar, washed hands and rechecked sugar (much better) and had a couple of phone conversations with different headhunters. One of them I'd talked to a couple of months ago, the other not; in any case, they both have possible jobs for me, but we'll see what happens. I'm trying not to be pessimistic.

Need to go out today and do some faxing since the Department of Commerce is still bogged down in the 1960s and can't read PDF files, or some such nonsense. Also need to mail in some forms to the VA to certify that I am a broke-ass veteran, and figure while I'm out I might as well see if I qualify for food stamps. In between all this, more job hunting and...I dunno. Garbage needs to go out, so some of that.