Check them out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pj/ This automated message brought to you by the letters Ü and Ø, and the number 1. Also if-this-then-that.

Check them out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pj/ This automated message brought to you by the letters Ü and Ø, and the number 2. Also if-this-then-that.

Check them out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pj/ This automated message brought to you by the letters Ü and Ø, and the number 1. Also if-this-then-that.

Currently I’m reading Vacuum Flowers, by the inimitable Michael Swanwick, for about the eighth or ninth time.  In it, people’s personalities can be temporarily altered by a type of programming called “wetprogramming”, since you’re programming the wetware of the person, ie, the brain.  You don’t need special training to be a dentist, or a bodyguard, or a courier.  You just need someone with a wetware programmer and the right set of wafers to imprint the skills you need on your persona.

In the novel, people’s faces are painted to indicate what they’re currently programmed as.  Surgeons might wear an orange butterfly, couriers a green triangle, pierrots a harlequin mask.

Today I saw this photo on Flickr:

…and part of me thought, I wonder what that paint might indicate.

Check them out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pj/ This automated message brought to you by the letters Ü and Ø, and the number 8. Also if-this-then-that.

What I’ve been up to lately:

Judo

Learning some Kodokan goshin-jutsu.

Writing

Not as much as I’d like, sadly, though I did go to the Tunnels of Moose Jaw on a research trip.

Work

Just waiting for the faculty to all show up again. After all, it’s the end of summer.

I went for a bike ride last night. I did about 17km in just under an hour and a half. I don’t know if that’s a slow pace or a middlin’ one; I wasn’t completely spent at the end of it, but I was sweating throughout.

At about the midpoint of the ride, I came across an area of new development:

Which is all well and good, but I found the choice of location rather interesting. Here’s the view across the bike path:

Here I though that luxury condos with a view of the Superstore parking lot would be a tough sell.

For those of you that aren’t in Manitoba, or in Canada: my city is flooded. (Well, my city would be flooded if it weren’t for a cunning system of permanent dikes, temporary dikes, sandbags, super sandbags, and good fortune. The powers-that-be are apparently referring to this as a high water event, since the word flood is double-plus-ungood.) We are currently under a state of emergency, initially declared for the city by the mayor and then extended to include pretty much the Assiniboine River floodplain by the province. Continue reading →