Ne-e-e-e-e-erd!

Whirlwind Weekend

Posted on by Patrick

This week­end I: saw, and had a brief chat with, William Gib­son; did nage-no-kata with the head of the Cana­di­an Grad­ing Board for judo, and also had a brief intro to the first set of ju-no-kata; drew Darth Vad­er in Cray­ola cray­on; and heard the cutest ver­sion of the ABC song I think I’ll ever hear.

Fri­day
I took the day off, since I want­ed to be able to get to the read­ing at 2:30 PM. I left town about 11:30 AM, a lit­tle lat­er than I meant to, but isn’t that always the way? Bar­reled down the high­way, got into the city at about 1:15 PM or so, then made my way through the tail end of the noon rush to Portage Place. The read­ing was at the McNal­ly Robin­son book­store on the main floor, in the lit­tle eatery there. I got into the store, and the food smelled so good. I regret­ted eat­ing at McDon­ald’s in Portage, but I’d been hun­gry.

There weren’t any tables free. There were, how­ev­er, quite a few tables with one per­son at them, and most of them looked like they were there for the read­ing. I was just try­ing to fig­ure out who I was going to approach when two women got up from a table direct­ly in front of the read­ing area and said they were leav­ing, and I could have their table if I want­ed. Uh, yes. Thanks.

So I sat down, and the wait­er came around, brought me a water and a menu. I ordered a root beer and wait­ed. It was 2:00 PM, half an hour yet to go. A girl showed up, look­ing like she need­ed a seat, so I offered her a spot at my table. We chat­ted about writ­ing for a while, then the read­ing began.

William Gibson and John Havelda
William Gib­son (L) and John Havelda 

Gib­son read from his lat­est book, Spook Coun­try, which I fin­ished read­ing last week, and thor­ough­ly enjoyed. It’s set in the present day; as he’s said in recent inter­views, the present is pret­ty much sci­ence fic­tion these days. After he and the poet John Havel­da did their read­ings, there was about a half an hour Q&A with the audi­ence. Some good ques­tions were asked, on the nature of lan­guage (both authors like to play with lan­guage; Gib­son, after all, coined the term cyber­space back in nine­teen-eighty-what-have-you, and Havel­da is (IIRC) a Hun­gar­i­an poet, raised in Eng­land, now liv­ing in Por­tu­gal with his Por­tugese wife), on the future of books, and the like. After­wards I was one of the first in line, and I got my beat-up old copy of Mona Lisa Over­drive* signed by Gib­son.

to be continued…

________

* I could­n’t find my copy of Neu­ro­mancer.

The three most frustrating words in the TV world…

Posted on by Patrick

…are to be con­tin­ued.

Watch­ing an episode of Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca, my one TV addic­tion, and all the play­ers are in place: The Cylons have arrived, the humans are on the ground, about to be over­run by the ene­my, and in orbit, Galac­ti­ca has six nuclear weapons aimed down at the planet.

And the screen goes black and those three lit­tle words appear at the bot­tom of the screen.

Gaah!

Thirteen irregular word uses

Posted on by Patrick

To quote Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame): “Verb­ing weirds language”.

  1. Impact is not a verb, no mat­ter how often peo­ple say “the plane impact­ed into the mountainside”.
  2. Irre­gard­less is not a word. Regard­less of what you I might think. (How­ev­er, I still think it’s a point­less word mean­ing­less ver­bal bas­tard. (Thanks, Doug!))
  3. Unthawed means to freeze, not to make not frozen.

    4. Con­tin­ue read­ing “Thir­teen irreg­u­lar word uses” →

Update

Posted on by Patrick

It’s been a lit­tle while, has­n’t it?

Tonight I have judo. Next week­end I may be head­ing into the city for a coach­ing tech­ni­cal class. Yes, the two of them are related.

I’ve been work­ing on Every­thing that nev­er hap­pened, but not enough. I need to get some seri­ous writ­ing done tomorrow.

Face­book is, as I think I point­ed out ear­li­er, a bit like crack over DSL.

Xubun­tu still rules, and still runs my nerd-box upstairs. It’s even lost its WiFi net­work con­nec­tion less fre­quent­ly and less cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly than the Win­dows box that it has replaced.

And that’s all I can think of now. More updates when I have some­thing to say.

yrs,
-pat

Nerd alert

Posted on by Patrick

I’m writ­ing this entry on my new nerd box.

The oth­er day I bought a sur­plus com­put­er from the local school divi­sion. It cost me all of $35. It’s a 1.1GHz machine with a 20-GB hard dri­ve and 128 MB of RAM. I brought it home, burned Xubun­tu to a CD, and slapped in an extra 256MB DIMM and a wire­less net­work card from my (dead) pre­vi­ous nerd box. My friend Kevin (who’s anoth­er com­put­er geek) came over, and we fired her up. After a cou­ple false starts (most­ly involv­ing the onboard video, which was­n’t capa­ble enough), we got Xubun­tu running.

Kevin had to leave, and I had some fid­dling left to do (most­ly with the wireless–I had to fig­ure out how to enable WEP so my neigh­bours can’t leech inter­net from me, not that they would), and by 9 PM tonight I had it hum­ming along just peachy freakin’ keen.

So the moral of the sto­ry? I’m awe­some. Maybe as awe­some as Xubun­tu, though that might be push­ing it.

The intent is to use the nerd box as a writ­ing and surf­ing machine. From what I’ve seen so far, it should be more than capa­ble in those roles.

Fun, but not productive

Posted on by Patrick

So my wife bought me Lego Star Wars II: The Orig­i­nal Tril­o­gy a month and a half ago, for my birth­day, and I’m addict­ed. I played tonight for a while (about an hour and a half, I think–time gets slip­pery when I’m in the throes of a nerd-game), and I man­aged to fin­ish the “Sto­ry” play of The Empire Strikes Back.

The neat thing about the game, though, is that once you’ve played a giv­en lev­el through in Sto­ry mode, you can re-enter the lev­el in Free Play mode, which allows you to take in any char­ac­ters or vehi­cles you’ve unlocked or “bought” in the Mos Eis­ley Can­ti­na (which serves as a home base). So I decid­ed to try the first chap­ter of Empire again, only this time with some dif­fer­ent vehi­cles: a TIE Inter­cep­tor and the Mil­le­ni­um Fal­con, among others.

Then, as I was cruis­ing along the icy wastes of Hoth, fir­ing tur­bo­laser can­nons with glee­ful aban­don, I thought, Hmm, I won­der if I can get a screen­shot. I pushed the Print Screen but­ton, and lo, I end­ed up with this:

What I did tonight

Awe­some, I thought.

Then: I am such a nerd.

And… I got near­ly zero writ­ing done tonight. Maybe I burned out the oth­er night when I did 3200 words in three hours, stay­ing up way past my bed­time to do it.