"Out Of Ambit": Diane Duane's weblog

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Monday, August 29, 2005

Katrina
I have never seen language in a National Weather Service statement like this before.

I'm thinking of all you folks down there (and in Mobile and Biloxi and all along the coast to Pensacola...)

Wherever you are, please be safe...

As for the rest of you who're concerned: Please don't just sit there -- do something. The American Red Cross is going to need a lot of donations to their national disaster relief fund. Here's the form where you can make one.

A few other useful links:

StormTrack
StormDigest
NOAA National Hurricane Center (with RSS feed for Katrina info)
Webcams at Nola.com
Weather Channel hurricane center
posted by Diane: 8/29/2005 08:30:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, August 28, 2005

So now things get real
In more ways than one. First of all, the fog of painkillers has lifted, thank heaven. (I like what they do but I hate how they do it. I've been useless, the last couple of weeks.)

But also, a little earlier than I was expecting to see them, the author's copies of Wizards at War have arrived.

The book's now real for me. Weird, how after (I took a count the other day, and I still have trouble believing it) more than forty novels, they still seem absolutely ephemeral to me until I hold the final product in my hands. (Advance reading copies don't seem to count, no matter how pretty they are.) And this product's pretty hefty: five hundred fifty-two pages.

The books will be shipping from the warehouse now: looks like some retailers may have stock in hand as early as the first week in September, even though the official release date is October 1st.

Me, I'm just going to sit here and drink tea and grin for a while. Then back to work...
posted by Diane: 8/28/2005 03:10:00 PM | link to this post

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Adding a new "life department"
...the Department of Things I Wish I Hadn't Seen Quite So Early in the Morning:

(eyeroll)

If you insist on going to http://www.bumpernuts.com, that's your business. Enjoy.
posted by Diane: 8/17/2005 11:15:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, August 14, 2005

One of those headlines that makes you blink

How a cow from 1937 caused the Iraq war

...I really need another cup of tea.

posted by Diane: 8/14/2005 12:50:00 PM | link to this post

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Glasgow Worldcon again: and An Unfortunate Event
When we first knew that we'd be going to Interaction (about two instants after the bid was declared), Peter and I immediately made an agreement that we wouldn't be doing any programming whatsoever. Last time we were at a Glasgow Worldcon, in 1995, as ToastMr. & Mrs. we spent so much time rehearsing for the Hugos, and rehearsing for rehearsals, and doing programming, and squiring Peter's mother here and there, and generally running around going nuts, that we came home too exhausted for words, and without having seen anything like as many friends as we'd hoped to. This Glasgow Worldcon, we swore, was for chatting and lounging and hugging people.

And sure enough, after the madness of '95, '05 was much more about the chatting/lounging/hugging dynamic... though we still didn't get to hug as many people as we wanted to. Some Worldcons (last year in Boston, for example) have some space or well-trodden area where, if you just sit there long enough, everybody in the convention will eventually pass by. If there was one of these at Glasgow (possibly in the SECC?), we missed it. Never mind: we saw a whole lotta people. And had the intense pleasure of knowing that a number of friends had won Hugos, (congrats, Sue, congrats, Charlie, congrats, Ron, congrats as usual, Dave!...), giving us reasons to hug them all over again.

There were a number of good dinners (with Peter's editors at DAW, with the noble Neil Walker and the excellent Alan and Colette, with Brian Nisbet, with Jim and Abby...) and a whole bunch of long chats in the Moat House bar, and also many, many pints of real ale: good stuff for Peter, but maybe not so much for me (in that the yeasts associated with the Reality of the ale usually leave me with a condition Peter kindly describes as "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing". I relapsed to wine pretty quickly). Nonetheless, if the ale produces effects like those shown in the Flickr photoset I'll link to shortly, in which P. is repeatedly seen to be in congress with the fan lounge's inflatable shark, I guess it can't be all bad.

Our stay was shorter than previously expected, as previously blogged: Pip the new kitten was too small to leave alone at home with the other cats as yet, and we didn't want to leave him in the kennel for any longer than absolutely necessary. So we arrived only on Saturday and headed home again on Tuesday -- sad not to have seen everybody we'd have liked to, but happy enough to have seen those we did.

And thereby hangs a tale about which I'll have to add more details later. While waiting for our luggage at Dublin Airport, a small child doing a LeMans number with a loaded luggage cart lost control of it and slammed the low front of the cart into my left lower leg, crunching it between his cart and our own, which was at that point braced against one of those curved metal shields they've just erected around the ends of the luggage carousels. I'm getting X-rayed tomorrow. But the consensus is already that, whether anything's actually broken or not -- and on sight of the way the ankle almost instantly swelled up, both the emergency medtechs and our own GP made that sucking-in-the-breath sound that plumbers and auto mechanics make when something is seriously wrong and is really going to cost you -- there is certainly some external bone damage typical of a crushing injury, and also crushed and possibly torn ligaments: so that I'm going to have to stay off the left foot/ankle as much as possible for the next six weeks. (Which, considering how I feel at the moment even when the painkillers kick in, is not something I'm much going to mind. At the moment I have to go up and down the stairs sideways, hanging onto the bannister like a two-year-old.) I said to our doctor, "But I have to be in Seattle in September...!" and he just shook his head at me and said, "Out of the question."

So...so much for CascadiaCon, which we were really looking forward to. So much for the September West-Coast microtour for Wizards at War: that's going to have to be rescheduled into October sometime, the parts of it that still can be (and some parts, like the Pacific Northwest booksellers' conference, can't). So much for our nonrefundable tickets (which theoretically our travel insurance will cover, but not without the usual interminable delays). Dammit. Fooey. Argh.

(sigh) At least the kitten is in good shape. And (the slightest sour amusement) at least they've taken the bloody charge-you-a-Euro slots off the airport luggage carts.
posted by Diane: 8/11/2005 09:21:00 AM | link to this post

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Has anyone seen this?
Zazzah.com is supposed to be a way for people interested in doing freelance courier work to match up directly with shippers hunting couriers...thus cutting out the middleman in such transactions. Fascinating. (via John Resig's weblog)

(Oh, yeah, and Worldcon was fabulous. More details, as promised, here.)
posted by Diane: 8/10/2005 02:39:00 PM | link to this post

Friday, August 05, 2005

Apples and oranges

...This really is an issue of fruit.

In one hand, you've got an orange (evolution). In the other, you've got an apple (Intelligent Design).

If you engage in a broad discussion about fruit (why we exist), it's proper to weigh the two. If you're talking about citrus fruits (science), you steer clear of apples.

Why? The apple isn't a citrus fruit. It's a fine fruit - it's kept many a doctor away, and knowledge of how to pie it made mom all-American - it's just not a member of the citrus family.

The president, however, looked at both and said, "I think this apple just might be citrus fruit."

...The laugh-out-loud line, though, comes at the end of the article. (With an "ouch!" attached.)

posted by Diane: 8/05/2005 12:11:00 PM | link to this post

Fantasy invades technology yet again

Ogg Vorbis is claimed to be a patent-clear, fully-open general purpose audio encoding format standard that rivals or surpasses the “upcoming” generation of proprietary coders (AAC and TwinVQ, also known as VQF).

...Vorbis is named after High Priest Vorbis, a character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld: Small Gods novel.

And some of us know who "Ogg" is, too. :)

posted by Diane: 8/05/2005 10:55:00 AM | link to this post

You *go*, Jacksie!

All the world's wiseacres in arms against them
Shan't detach my heart for a single moment
From the man-like beasts of the earthy stories--
Badger or Moly.

Rat the oarsman, neat Mrs. Tiggy Winkle,
Benjamin, pert Nutkin, or (ages older)
Henryson's shrill Mouse, or the Mice the Frogs once
Fought with in Homer...

(Love the fountain in the right-hand column, too...)

posted by Diane: 8/05/2005 09:53:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Footnote to a footnote
As noted in the weblog of the noble and wise Neil Gaiman:

...the BBC article formerly entitled PRATCHETT ANGER AT ROWLING'S RISE has now transmuted into a much milder article entitled Pratchett takes swipe at Rowling, which no longer accuses Terry of very much at all, apart from "poking fun".

...It's definitely a good thing that online journalism is capable of revising itself to agree with reality, although it's going to puzzle the hell out of all the people in the future who click on the links to the BBC page and are unable to discover what they're meant to be outraged about.

Meanwhile, to everybody who's visited Out of Ambit in the last couple/few days of this kerfuffle and friendslisted or otherwise bookmarked it: you're entirely welcome. Please make yourselves at home.

posted by Diane: 8/04/2005 11:36:00 PM | link to this post

Uh oh, they've noticed us...
Sci-fi fans gather for convention

Meanwhile, I wish I understood why the Java applet for the SECC webcam takes so long to load...

(A few other Glasgow webcams:)

Buchanan Street
Georges Square
View from the Moat House Hotel: looking east toward the Clyde and Glasgow city center

posted by Diane: 8/04/2005 08:52:00 AM | link to this post

You read the morning news, you roll your eyes...

A high street bank has said sorry to a customer after sending him a debit card containing the words "Dick Head".

...I need another cup of tea.
posted by Diane: 8/04/2005 08:44:00 AM | link to this post

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Nice little old sub-notebook computer for sale
"Allegra" has been with me since 1999. (Yes, that's a long, long time in computer years...) Several novels have been written on it: its first real job was to be taken to the source of the Rhine (at Sedrun in Switzerland) for the outlining of the project which eventually became the feature/miniseries "Ring of the Nibelungs." (Hence the computer's name, which means "Hello!" in Sursilvan Romansch -- the dialect of Switzerland's fourth language which is spoken around Sedrun.)

But as newer, hotter hardware came along, Allegra was eventually put aside, relegated to "spare room" use. And now we're at one of those points where there are just too many computers piling up around the place, and it's time to let some of them go to people who will get some use out of them. So if you'd like a little machine that isn't too fast or too smart, but is lovable, reliable, and easy to haul around -- and has served a hard-working writer long and faithfully -- maybe you'd think about giving Allegra a good home.

It's an Acer Travelmate 312T, containing a Pentium 233 MHz processor with MMX, 32 meg of RAM, a bright TFT screen, and a massive (wait for it!) 3 GB hard disk. The computer is about A5 size, or about an inch smaller around than a sheet of US letter paper: the exact outside measurements are 24 cm / 9.5 in by 17.5 cm / 7 in by 4 cm / 1.5 in, so that it will fit very comfortably inside a purse, or with plenty of room to spare, in a briefcase. It weighs 1310 grams / 2 lb 14.5 oz. It comes with external CD-ROM, 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a soft Velcro-fastened faux-leather envelope/case. (See this Flickr photoset for multiple images.)

It has Windows 98 installed at the moment. I have heard that these machines run Linux well, but I wouldn't know enough about the subject to be able to verify the claim. I/O ports include DB-9 and RS232, 15-pin video, RJ-11 jack for a 28K "soft" WinModem, slots for 2 PCMCIA cards, IR port, USB 1.0 (one), and a PS2 jack for mouse or keyboard. The hard drive is removable, though I've never removed it.

Physically Allegra is in pretty good shape: a few scratches on the cover, no more. It's been kindly used. Its one weakness right now is that its battery doesn't hold a charge for very long. But replacements are still available: or if you want to run the machine at home, plugged in, as a spare-room machine, then you have no problems.

Obviously, for a computer that is now of "a certain age", I'm not going to overcharge. But if you think you'd like to acquire this good little machine (and along with it, who knows, maybe a little writer-mojo -- or -mojesse?), I'll be putting it up (along with all other pertinent technical details) on eBay sometime this evening. Alternately, if by chance you're attending Worldcon in Glasgow and you're at all interested, let me know and I'll bring the machine along for you to inspect. Otherwise, if you're interested or have questions, please email me at the "contact" address in the center column.

(Update: The computer's found its new home. Thanks for your interest, everybody!)
posted by Diane: 8/03/2005 01:33:00 PM | link to this post

Once again, Victorian inventiveness makes my brains hurt
Ready for this? The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway"...otherwise known as "The Daddy Longlegs Railway"....

...A railway that needed a sea captain.

Because it was travelling over the sea, the only way the Pioneer could obtain a licence was to have a trained sea captain actually operating it or being available at all times. He knew whether the sea was safe to travel over. The Pioneer had to have a lifeboat on the back and a number of lifebelts round the edges so that if there was a problem people would be able to get away. In effect, it was treated almost as though it was a ship.

Just plain astounding.

Everyone who's read cyberpunk will have been here before me. (And ever so briefly, I've been there myself.) But the thought of that time's crazed inventiveness, coupled with today's materials and energy technology...what an alternate universe that would be.
posted by Diane: 8/03/2005 11:16:00 AM | link to this post

A cool thing discovered
For those of you who use Windows and also have a Gmail account: check this out.

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

I've been using Gmail this way for a while now, as a backup tool -- mailing myself copies of what I'm working on from time to time during the day. Now, using this great little tool, I should be able to automate the process so I don't even have to think about it any more. Whoopee!

There are some minor limitations: the shell doesn't like filenames longer than forty characters. But this isn't a problem for me.
posted by Diane: 8/03/2005 10:55:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

His name is Pip
And he's a trip.

Like the vast majority of our cats, he was a rescue. We were walking down to the pub a couple of Sundays ago, and (as usual) passed a neighbor's house just outside the village. In their yard, as usual, were a couple of dogs: a terrier and a basset hound. Also there -- not as usual -- was a dead kitten.

We "tsked" at this and then made some inquiries when we got to the pub. The family was on holiday: no one was sure whose the kitten might be -- whether it was theirs, or had wandered in from the barns of the farm next door. Peter managed to find the guy who'd been taking care of the property while the family was away, and let him know about the dead kitty: the gent was properly shocked, and went off to bury it.

Some hours later we headed home from the pub, glanced in through the yard's gate again...and were horrified to see another kitten being chased by the terrier, which was plainly intent on killing it. (Possibly it thought the kitten was a rat: he was about the right size...)

We got into the house's yard over the wall, extracted the kitten, and took him home. There we kept him isolated from the other cats until the following Thursday, when the family down the road were scheduled to come home from their vacation. Those few days were kind of sleepless: the little one didn't seem too clear on some of the finer points of toilet training, and the sheets on the bed got changed a lot for the first day or so. Thursday, when the family down the road got back, we made contact with them and asked, were their children really attached to the kitten? -- because we were. (When Peter male-bonds with somebody, he male-bonds. Me, I'm just a sucker for those big eyes. Probably the reason for my fondness for anime.)

Fortunately, the folks down the road weren't all that attached as yet, and they understood the situation. So now he lives here, and his name is Pip. (Since we also have a Squeak...)

Here's a little photoset of pictures of him over at Flickr. (We'll add more later: Peter has more pics of Pip than I do at the moment.) Meanwhile, behold the reason we're only going to be at Worldcon in Glasgow for three days. He's too small, as yet, to be left home alone with the other cats (even if they were all used to each other by now, which they're not: there's been a certain amount of slapping around and growling going on). So he has to be kenneled for the long weekend...but we don't want to leave him there too long, at such a tender age. (The vet thinks he's about twelve weeks.)

He's another vocal kitty, like the late lamented Bubble. When excited, he makes a truly hilarious "Rowr!" sound which is completely out of scale to his size. He bounces up to everybody as if he's on springs... especially to Squeak, which is both a tactical error and hysterical to watch, kind of like a lamb attacking a lion.

What a kid.
posted by Diane: 8/02/2005 05:05:00 PM | link to this post

Monday, August 01, 2005

"Let's You And Him Fight"
Eric Berne describes the game in Games People Play: the title describes the dynamic well enough. Berne suggests that the game (in its relationship-based form) may be the source of a great deal of the world's drama...real or fake.

Sometimes you get to see it played in the media mode, rather more obviously than usual. Today would be one of those times.

A journalist did an interview with J. K. Rowling for Time Magazine. The article is perhaps more interesting for the things that aren't said than the things that are -- some of which, are, frankly, pretty dumb...

It's precisely Rowling's lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness, her refusal to buy into the basic clichés of fantasy, that make her such a great fantasy writer. The genre tends to be deeply conservative -- politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves...

Yeah, right. At any rate, Terry Pratchett -- mild-mannered reporter for a great occasionally-metropolitan alternate universe, and former journalist in this one -- happened upon the Time article, noticed that paragraph, and rolled his eyes. Then he did what people in the UK have done approximately since movable type was invented: he wrote a letter to the Times.

Not surprisingly, since one out of every hundred books published in the UK has Terry's name on it, they published the letter. And lo, various people started having snits -- claiming that Terry was attacking Rowling,or disrespecting her (the letter was published on her birthday! Of course Terry made them do that on purpose...), or was just jealous of her. And many of them got this idea because of the BBC's move in the "Let's You And Him..." (or in this case, "Her") game: just look at that title.

...So it goes. Well...here's what Terry has to say:

Let's take it a bit at a time. You know what I wrote, because I think the entire text has been quoted here somewhere. No, in fact not the entire text -- the original letter sent to the Sunday Times referred to JKR quite politely as Ms Rowling; a small courtesy, but deleting it makes the relevant sentence twice as harsh, which may be why it was done.

And the BBC website put a nice little spin on thing on things with a headline suggesting I'm directing a tirade at J K Rowling, rather than expressing annoyance at the habits of journalists and specifically one telling phrase clearly used by someone else.

As soon as the Harry Potter boom began, journalists who hadn't read a children's book in years went "Wow, a wizards' school! Wow, broomstick lessons!" and so on, and generally acted as though the common property of the genre was the entire invention of JKR. This continues, sometimes quite ridiculously. And now we have Groomsman's 'knights and ladies Morris dancing to Greensleeves'. With such an easy wave we can dismiss, oh, Ursula leGuin, Diana Wynne Jones, Jane Yolen, Peter Dickinson, Alan Garner...fill in the list.

Pointing this out is, apparently, an attack on JKR. I don't have any problem at all with her rise, only with such third-party silliness such as the above, which insults good authors who wrote great books at a time, not long ago, when advances were always low and hype was unknown.

No, I do not think these words originated with her. It's self-evident in the article that they are the voice of the interviewer, who is very visible in the piece. The tone and presentation make it obvious. Read the paragraph beginning 'It is precisely Rowling's lack of sentimentality...' He's giving us his opinion, and the guy just had a nice line he wanted to use. Read the context and say I'm wrong.

And remember: what I was doing was apparently the right of every Englishman, which was to write a letter to The Times -- for an audience that can be assumed to have read, with some intelligence, the article in question. Believe me, if the ST guys had read it as an attack on the lady herself, it would have been an article, not a letter.

But out there now, I believe, are various morphs of the BBC piece, with extra venom. You don't have to think about it, just react. 'Pratchett Attacks Journalist' just would not be as much fun. Every story needs a villain, right?

And then there's my question. Why didn't the interviewer ask it? Here's the world's best-selling fantasy writer who has just said she hadn't thought she was writing fantasy and also that she doesn't really like the stuff. She goes on to say that she didn't finish TLOTR or the Narnia series and has issues with Lewis. No problem there, but all this revelatory stuff just floated past, apparently unexamined. I'd like to know how an author can write in a genre she doesn't like -- really. I'd like to know what she thinks she is writing.

I'm jealous? Well, that saves having to have any discussion at all, right?

It will for some people, that's for sure. They'll continue to react to what they're being told was said, without ever going to see for themselves whether it actually was or not.

Tsk tsk...
posted by Diane: 8/01/2005 07:05:00 PM | link to this post

Hacking the 10th Planet...
If this is true...how interesting.

Michael Brown, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, announced the discovery over the weekend. But according to the South African Sunday Telegraph, here, the briefing was hastily arranged after Brown received word that his secure website containing the discovery had been hacked. The unnamed hacker was threatening to release the information.

Goodness me...
posted by Diane: 8/01/2005 02:30:00 PM | link to this post

And one other thing...

Wizardry powers Blogger. But you knew that!