The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Paul Graham’s latest essay mentions his style of work: isolated from non-physical interruptions. All the communications paths to him require intentional interruption. You can call him on the phone or walk into his office, but he won’t interrupt his work for e-mail. It strikes me that Knuth describes a similar mode for different reasons:

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux. Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.

I’ve certainly found it helps my own work to have no browser open, no biff running, no chat room or running IM conversations. My door’s open and my phones are on the desk, but I have open just those papers or windows relevant to the task at hand. I read e-mail a few times each day, when I’ll already be switching contexts. I see around me that much work is lost by conformance to the default many-windows approach of modern office automation systems, or by insistence that upper-management e-mail is answered within minutes of receipt.

In case you missed it, the Phoenix lander made it to Mars on Sunday. The landing was picture-perfect, and we have the pictures to prove it! The MRO’s HiRISE camera was aimed at Phoenix’s landing, and got some really cool pictures of the parachute deploying.

Yes, that’s right. They caught the parachute deployment from our satellite around Mars. SO COOL!!!!

Closeup:

In context:

Thanks to Emily at the Planetary Society

Dungeon Twister is roughly in the genre of Talisman or DungeonQuest, the Game That Hurts. A couple teams of classic adventurer types loot an abandoned ruin. It’s nice to leave with the treasure, but it’s pretty good just to make it out alive. I’m ridiculously hopeful about this genre. I buy or try game after game, but they all share a series of problems: low interactivity, excessive randomness, and low replay value. Talisman can be played solitaire without much loss of fun. Frankly, it can be played with no players at all. DungeonQuest is equivalent to a coin flip. Heads, the dragon eats you. Tails, you get the treasure and then the dragon eats you. Edge, you make it out OK.

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The excellent game Weapons of the Gods has some neat systems. I’m not playing WotG right now, but I am playing Exalted. I’d like to use some of these ideas in my Exalted game. Some of the ideas translate easily. Others require more work. The games use different dice systems. When a WotG book says “made a Moderate (20) roll,” what difficulty do I use for Exalted?
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As my birthday present to myself a few weeks ago, I bought a guitar.
It’s beautiful. It’s also apparently Canadian (La Patrie, so it’s actually Quebecois and probably speaks better French than me.) Oddly, I can’t find a picture online of one just like mine—it came with steel strings, which I replaced with new steel strings, and all the La Patrie guitars online have nylon strings and different patterning around the sound hole.

Anyway, I am having a lot of fun. My left-hand fingers still hurt whenever I play, (and somewhat the rest of the time—I don’t really have callouses yet) but over the last three weeks I have gone from barely being able to play anything to being able to play at least one song, at least five chords (G, Eb, D, A, and C, in order of how good they sound on average) and being able to change between chords often fast enough that (if I had more songbooks) I could play songs at speed.
It makes me *so happy* to tune my guitar. (I have a pitch pipe to tune the low E, and then tune by ear from there. It works out pretty well, since I have a good ear.) Its also really loud, so I bet I could play outside or in crowds and be heard.

Once I get non-lazy, perhaps I will take some of the folk songbooks I have from when I did vocal solo singing and write out some chord accompaniments for them. I bet they will be pretty easy to play, they just don’t have chords (and certainly don’t have guitar tab). The one songbook I have *with* guitar tab is Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” album, which is really really hard and has a lot of F chords, which I can’t currently even fake. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Piano Man’s music is hard to play on guitar…

Left on an answering machine:

"This message is for *name*.
If you are not *name*, please hang up or disconnect.
If you are *name*, please continue to listen to this message.
There will now be a 3 second pause on this message.
By continuing to listen to this message, you acknowledge you are *name*."

The answering machine is clearly insufficiently voice-activated.

I’ve been experimenting with variations off my grandmother-in-law’s lemon bar recipe lately. It started relatively innocently! Although I’d never seen her do it, her recipe had an option to replace most of the lemon juice with lime, so I tried it. Meanwhile, in the lemon recipe (since I needed lots of bars to bring to a pot luck) I tripled the juice and then reduced it to the right volume of liquid. These both turned out great, though the crusts were a little bit too crumbly for my taste and I used too much lime zest in the first batch. The second batch of lime got less zest and less juice, so they were weak but okay.

So, this week I decided to experiment with grape bars. I bought some grape juice, and decided to try a peanut-butter cookie crust. I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for classic peanut-butter cookies, and started with 1/2c of grape juice. That wasn’t very grape, so I added more—eventually, 2 cups. (It was too late to reduce it, by this time, so I just hoped it would boil off.) 25 minutes later, I had something that looked a lot like brownies—from the top. It was very dark, so though it was purple it could’ve easily been mistaken for brown. The underlayers, though, are very clearly brown, and full of bubbles like a bread pudding. Here is a UFO-spotting quality picture:

It is, alas, almost entirely peanut-butter flavor. The grape is only detectable if you have a very subtle palate, or if you eat some of the top purple layer alone. Otherwise, it’s mostly peanut-butter.
Where did I go wrong? My guesses:

• I didn’t bake the crust enough: If the peanut butter cookie was still quite soft, the liquid would have soaked in rather than staying on top.
• Too much liquid: There are supposed to be four eggs per 1/2c of liquid. Maybe if I use 2c of liquid, I need 12 eggs?
• Pasteurized juice: I used fresh lemons for the lemon bars, and fresh limes for the lime bars. Maybe pasteurized grape juice is missing important enzymes?
• Acidity: Grape juice is way less acid than lemons, and the lime bars have one part lemon to six parts lime. Maybe that matters? I can try half grape and half lemon…
• Sugar: The lemon and lime bars call for 2c of granulated sugar. I left that out because the grape juice is so much sweeter than lemon or lime. Maybe I needed those crystals?

My test audience (gamers will eat anything) seemed to quite like it. One even asked for seconds!
So I will probably try this one again, especially since it lands me with half a batch of peanut butter cookies even if the recipe itself is an epic failure. (I also bought 100% cranberry juice, which I will certainly use the sugar with, and probably cut with fresh lemon juice. I will also not put that over peanut butter. Ew.)

This set of photos of Hiroshima in 1945 were recently released by the Hoover Institution Archives. Apparently the photographer is unknown, but I imagine him (or her) to be like some of the others in the background of this one—normal people, caught up so thoroughly in a situation so horrid that they can’t help but stare.

Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, these are pretty graphic. Not for dinnertime or the faint of heart. I think they are still worth viewing, especially for those of us who far post-date the only use of atomic weaponry. In 1945, when these pictures were taken, my grandmother was nine years old. As a schoolchild, I learned that the atomic bombs ended the War in the Pacific, and I learned about the legion of hard-working scientists, hidden in the desert, who developed those weapons. Lest you think my education was entirely one-sided, I also learned about radiation sickness, and I understood intellectually that thousands of people had died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now, I work for a defense contractor - I’m not a nuclear physicist, but it doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch to compare my work to that of the Los Alamos scientists. The culture I live and work in says that it’s vital to keep America strong, safe, and preeminent—at least partly through superior technology. It is important, therefore, that I remember what that superior technology can do if we ever have to use it.

I will admit, right up front, that it is easy to be seduced into liking a heroine who bears your name.
Especially if she spells it correctly.
However, keeping that bias in mind, this book is still delightful—my favorite since Swordspointe.

Panegyric done with, for now, the book is written as a sequence of letters between two girls (Kate and Cecy/Katherine and Cecelia) in a post-Napoleonic England where magic is real. The setting is very similar to that of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but since the narrators are female (and therefore wrapped up in the upper-class social scene rather than the academic) it also feels a little like Jane Austen. Cecy and Kate’s adventures are more… well, more adventurous than any of Austen’s heroines. Without losing any of the characteristic femininity of the setting, they manage to explore a very convoluted scheme. (It does not hurt that both Cecy and Kate are cast from the tomboyish-for-the-time, scholarly, intelligent mould, rather than the “delicate flower” one. Since all the narration is first-person, and our heroines are very busy with the plot, only a very little time is dedicated to the goings-on of Society.)

Interestingly, the authors’ notes in the back indicate that Wrede and Stevermer wrote this novel entirely by accident. Apparently Wrede “badgered” (her words) Stevermer into playing a Letter Game. Both women got caught up in the lives of the characters (who can blame them? Kate and Cecy are neat!) and, when they reached the obvious conclusion, realized that they had written a book. They admitted to only light editing, which is impressive if true—the letters read very well together, and there is some very elegant foreshadowing.
I was Not At All Surprised by the ending, though many of the ways they arrived there were quite surprising and enjoyable. My only complaint is that the climaxes of the two halves of the story arrived right on top of each other and seemed a little rushed. I’m not sure what could have gone between them without disrupting the ending, though, so it’s a minor nit to pick.

I am quite looking forward to the sequel, “The Grand Tour”. I picked it up first, browsing at Pandemonium, and only thanks to a friend browsing my bookshelves at a party did I discover that it was a sequel before I spoilt myself by reading them in the wrong order. I am exceedingly grateful to have discovered them this way, and I strongly recommend reading this one first.

These two paperbacks were a birthday present from my Dad, who is awesome.
The books are sort-of awesome. I will clarify.

These are brain candy. Sugary sweet read-until-you-run-out candy. But, like candy, they were really fun to read, if not quite high-quality literature. I was a little irritated by the huge print and margins—a better typesetter could have made them a 250 page mass-market paperback, instead of a 340 page paperback.
The author also has a weird habit of referring to people by their full names *all the time*. I suspect this, as well as the large print, may be signs that I am not in the age group of the intended audience.
Maybe there are people who would not track pronouns for half a dozen characters, or remember that “Charley” is “Charlotte Pine” if not reminded every few pages. Coonts lives in Colorado, like my family, so I was amused by some amount of local nods. I was pleased that he kept them sparse, though—one saucer over Coors Field during a Rockies game is sufficient.

I actually really enjoyed these. There are some lovely fighter-pilot moments (unsurprising, given Coonts’ background) and the pseudoscience behind the flying saucers and antiproton weapons isn’t too terrible. Coonts political leanings may be showing in his depiction of the unintelligent, self-serving, cowardly president, but it doesn’t interfere much with the story—the scenes with politicians are grating but soon over. Saucer is the better book—Saucer the Conquest was better than I expected from the title, but not as good as I would have hoped. I did keep reading until I finished both, mostly because the characters are intriguing enough that I wanted to know what happened next. Charlie Pine, Rip Cantrell and his uncle Egg remind me a bit of the main characters in the Lensman series—they’re just *so cool* that you have to keep reading to find out what they do next.

I recommend picking these up from the library if you are home sick, going on a long flight, or otherwise have a few hours to kill. I probably wouldn’t buy them (if I didn’t already have them) since I am very unlikely to reread them. I am, however, happy to lend them out.