All posts by keith

General

A thing

The black ship strode through the charcoal night. It carried no cargo except the horrid crew, made up of the riffraff of many worlds. Big, small, short, tall, one-eyed, three-eyed, no-eyed… Dressed, and undressed in various costumes of their native worlds.
It criss-crossed the world bringing strangeness with it, and it had but one purpose on this night, and ran full speed for the bright lights of the nearest port.

The ship hit the shore, and the crew streamed down the gangplanks, and ran up the streets.
Everywhere could be heard the sound of fists banging on doors, and the cries of TRICK OR TREAT!!!!
It was a good night.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

system76 computer

The new laptop

So I’ve had the new laptop for 2 weeks now, and I ‘m loving it.
Here’s some pics of the unveiling:
Packaging
The box it came in–it was packaged nice and safe.
All the stuff that came with the laptop
All the stuff that came in the box. Powercord, etc. It included a CD for the drivers for the laptop–handy if you want to put Windows on it, but useless otherwise.
side view
Side view showing the dvd-rw/cd-rw.
The lid
The lid–note the lack of system 76 logo. I was kinda disappointed by that, because I wante people to know where I got this monster of a laptop. I emailed S76 support, and they are printing up lables of their logo, and will send me one when that’s done.
keyboard
Here’s the keyboard. Very nice, and responsive. The extra buttons work, unless you screw them up, like I did. On the top, one launches browser, one launches email, one launches totem, one launches rhythmbox, and one mutes the sound. Since I can’t stand totem, or rhythmbox, and took both them off my computer, those ones don’t work anymore, and, I’d like to see something that launches the default players instead. (I’ve found out that you can actually do this yourself, using gconf, and may be that S76’s way is fine for most users.) On the left side there’s two buttons, one of which supposedly charges your battery faster, and the other lets you charge usb connected things (like personal music players) while the lpatop is powered down–now that’s a cool feature.

This is a widescreen laptop, and I’ still getting used to that, it’s actually pretty sweet. The problem with that is that the ubuntu live CD needs some extra config to get it to display a gui, since the screen dimensions aren’t picked up in xorg.conf (because the live CD doesn’t have the drivers for the chip on the Pangolin). It’s a pain, but not a real big one.

Other than the aforementioned bugs my other complaints are that they use an LVM file system with one partition (I like to partition my drive so that the /home partition is separate from the root partition, so that it’s easier/safer to reinstall/upgrade), the reason for that is to make suspend/hibernate work, but it does make repartitioning a bitch.
Also the card reader doesn’t work, but I have it from good authority that it will real soon.

Health

Lobes of Steel

Exercise helps regenerate neurons in the brain
You wanna be “better, stronger, faster”, smarter? Forget bionics–exercise for an hour a day and all that will happen for you, according to new studies.
According to the article neurogenesis is also aided by moderate alcohol consumption, marijuana, socializing, a lot fat-low suger diet; and chocolate (as well as blueberries, grapes, and black tea) helps aid in improving spacial memory.
Stress (as well as high fat, and sugar diet) is a big factor in deterioration of the ability to produce new neurons.

books, SF

Locus Online Features: Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Robert A. Heinlein

Locus Online Features: Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Robert A. Heinlein
An interesting review of several of Heinlein’s books, and his influence on the SF genre.

Heinlein’s stories are arguments about what shape the new Americas might take and about the kinds of virtues that the men creating those new Americas should have: independence, determination, scientific knowledge, distrust of dogma. And just as American exceptionalism argues that the USA has a special place in the community of nations because of its people’s relationship to history, so you can see Heinlein arguing in this quotation for a kind of human exceptionalism. Unlike some of the alien species encountered in “Methuselah’s Children”, we humans shall not cease from exploration. We’ll want, like Stevenson, to be buried under alien skies.

It’s fair to say that the stories in The Past Through Tomorrow showcase Heinlein’s strengths and weaknesses in ways that were not to change much throughout his career. He was always a dialogue-driven writer, for instance, and one can see that influencing a contemporary writer like Connie Willis. He was not much given to depicting reflection divorced from action or action not resulting in progress. So he doesn’t show much of characters’ inner lives. (He would have said, I guess, that nothing matters about a character except what they say and do.) You feel that his stories are always on the side of the future, that whoever lives or dies in them, the future he wants to talk about will win. So he can feel like a bully if you don’t accept the terms of the debate he knows he’s going to win. And — the flip side of bullying — he can also be sentimental, as for instance he is in “Requiem”. He tells you that you’re supposed to feel sad on being told about certain events; and if you don’t, you’ve failed to read the story properly. But that trait and others are far less pronounced here than they would be later. I don’t think there’s any book more central to the creation of genre SF than The Past Through Tomorrow, and I’m simply astonished that it now seems to be out of print in the UK and the US.

I disagree with the author about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (he thinks that it’s bogged down by aphorisms, and an unrealistic view of how people act, and it’s politics) I think the politics are central to the plot, and that while, yes, the aphorisms get a little much, they help move the story at a faster pace. As for the views on human nature, I feel they are quite appropriate, and seeing that Heinlein based the structure of the story on penal colonies (like Australia) that they are plausible. (But, then, maybe I have a less cynical worldview than the author of the article–which is hard to believe 😀 )
I also disagree that the later books, lke The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, and, the Number of the Beast, where “savage solipsisms”. Solipsistic, yes. Savage, no. I believe the Heinlein was having fun and tying up the loose ends of his future history.This period was, arguably, not his best (although I’d put Friday, and Number of the Beast up against any of his earlier books, and any other SF author’s books), and that he was past his prime as a writer, but I say he did pretty well considering age, and brain surgery, wouldn’t you?