GRABBINGSAND

It’s coming. For all of us. Really.

Otherwise, you might not get the full effect of this bit of video that Nikki took over the weekend.

We visited Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry. I’ve some photos of my own, but Nikki has beat me to the punch on getting them online. One of the exhibits was called “Disasterville” and it was all about being prepared for the very worst that Mother Nature has to offer. Floods, wild-fires, earthquakes … and hurricanes. Given the opportunity, Vince and I had to step into the 80 MPH wind machine.

I could never write fan-fiction about a single television series or one particular book. Where’s the fun in that? No, I’d have to write nothing but cross-overs. So if I had the time and inclination, I’d write something like this:

Quantum Leap / Enterprise

This one writes itself, doesn’t it? The final episode of Enterprise was horrible, even regrettable. For a series that had suffered so much already, they had to go and frame the last hurrah in a contrived holodeck scenario involving Next Gen’s Commander Riker and Counselor Troi. Shameful and stupid.

So why not do this instead. Bring the whole series to a close with one last big episode, something massive and epic that will determine the course of Federation history from that point forward. And then, once the dust has settled and all of the conflict has been resolved, we cut to Captain Archer on the bridge of the original Enterprise. He looks around, surveys his crew and sees that everything is as it should be. The look on his face lets us all know that he has never felt so content. And as he cracks an honest smile, his body is enveloped in a Quantum glow.

Next, we cut to an interior shot of some kind of storage closet. Or maybe a cave. The man we’ve known as Archer is crouching over a ticking time bomb with a Swiss Army Knife in one hand and an empty roll of toilet paper in the other. At his left shoulder, looking on anxiously, is a young girl (probably blonde) with big hair. “What’re ya waitin’ for, Mac? Stop the bomb!” Former Archer glances at a pair of wires on the timer. One is red. One is blue. Looking up from his task, he says to nobody in particular:

“Oh, boy.”

The hardest part of writing a Ficlet isn’t the writing. The challenge lies in the editing. 1024 characters doesn’t give one much room for rambling, redundancy and so on. I love so many words, often for the way they sound one after another as much as for their meanings. Writing in a limited space goes against my loquacious nature. But Seth threw down the gauntlet ever so politely some time ago. And Rusty published his second ever, just this morning.

So today, I decided to step up to the plate and swing over lunch. I called it “Yesterday Girl.”

As it sits, I’m not sure entirely that the idea in my head made it entirely into the story. But it will do. Contributing audio influences included, but were not limited to: Burial’s Untrue (the track “In McDonalds,” especially), The Roots’ “Rising Up,” John Coltrane’s “Too Young To Go Steady” and James Taylor’s “Another Grey Morning.” The story’s title is also the name of a Smithereens tune, but one really has nothing to do with the other.

And now that I’ve completed one, another should be a walk in the park. Shouldn’t it?

I’ve had a Vox blog for about a year and a half. I didn’t need another blog, but I was fascinated by the advertised “LiveJournal-for-Grownups” that Vox was meant to be. It would have all of the social interactivity, little or none of the bad design and clique-fueled drama. Seemed like a good idea. So I fired up a Vox account, deemed it a “reading blog,” and …

Then I proceeded to enter into a cycle of occasional posting between long bouts of forgetting the Vox blog even existed.

This is not to say that Vox was a total loss. Several of the MetaChat faithful — a Metafilter spin-off — started up Vox blogs of their own. But like me, they started to drop off in their posting frequency. Before long, posting to my Vox reading blog felt like shouting my literary habits down a deep well … or down the long hallway of a mostly vacant hotel.

So I’m making it official. Until today, my last Vox post was back in October. Today, I’m posting one more time to link back over here.

It’s been interesting Vox, but I’m moving on.

Now, brace yourself, because I’m going to look like a hypocrite for a split second. Ready?

I’ve been playing with a Tumblr blog for a couple of weeks.

I signed up on a lark, having seen some of my neighbors doing the same (Amber has one, for instance). What makes Tumblr different is the simplicity of it all. No comments. No post titles. Just post after post, photos with or without captions, quotes presented as typographical art. To me, it feels like a slow-stream-of-consciousness Twitter. Where Twitter is all about what you’re doing at a given time, Tumblr is more about relating just what’s on your mind from day to day, from hour to hour. And like Twitter, you can opt to “follow” the meandering thoughts of your fellow Tumblrs.

Like I say in my Tumblr sidebar, if Grabbingsand is a motorcycle, my Tumblr is a sidecar. It’s a bonus track for my regular blog, a place to put random bits of awesome or the occasional odd thought. And if frequency of use is any indication of successful adoption, then Tumblr is defeating my history with Vox handilly.

So check it out.

And make your own, should you feel so inclined.

I’m not buying a PlayStation 3. Not today, tomorrow or anytime soon. And yet, I am loving this international print campaign (developed by BBDO Chile). Sure, there’s a “boy” version, but this “girl” version is so much better. Why?

The boy looks like he’s just playing. The girl looks like she’s winning.

(Found on JoyStiq.)

Dieter Rams was director of design at Braun from 1962 to 1995. He designed watches, clock radios, cigarette lighters and countless other products, and all according to his own ten principles of design.

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Simple. I think I’ll print this out and put it up at work.

Let’s see … what else is going on?

Spent part of the weekend with my hands in the maw of a PC case. As frustrating as the rebuild process can be, I believe still that doing it yourself is the smartest way to go. With just a few simple rules to remember, an understand of just what will and will not lead to disaster, piecing together your own box is a simple enough process. This weekend, what I did was less of an upgrade as a total conversion. The last build I did was good for the time, but not future-proof in the least. Within a year or so, the interface I used for my graphics card was nigh obsolete. The motherboard had bizarre memory restrictions that didn’t become apparent until much later. By then, the mobo’s manufacturer slowly morphed out of the motherboard business, then later became quietly notorious for bad capacitors.

Geek Factor is about to increase. You’ve been warned.

The new machine is Intel-based, not AMD. I’ve been a staunch AMD supporter for years, but Intel has made some great improvements in the last year or so. No longer is AMD the most efficient chip for the money, so going with the Core 2 Duo (E6750) was the best choice. The chip sits on an Intel P35 motherboard from Gigabyte. The board has enough SATA slots for not only the pair of drives I have (one old and one new), but for another couple should I decide to do such a thing. As with the previous build, on-board audio and networking eliminated the next for extra PCI cards. For video, I stuck with the NVidia chipset. The 8600 GTS from EVGA is not the fastest or burliest card on the market, but it is most definitely a grand step up from my old 5900 XT, particularly for just under $100 (less than half MSRP).

Basically, this machine is better, faster, smarter, more expandable and unlikely to become obsolete before the London Olympics in 2012. (Not that I or the computer will be competing in said Olympics, but I like a good temporal landmark when such is available.)

I’ve gone another week without posting an Obscuriosity tune. But now that I’ve a machine back up and running, I should be back in the music-slinging business in no time.

Speaking of music-slinging … a new little game is being offered via Steam (Valve’s software distribution system) called Audio-Surf. The accompanying catch phrase is “Ride your music.” And you can. Basically, it is a racing game where you speed along in a little rocket on tracks designed to match the characteristics of songs you select. Before racing, you can pick any audio file from your local machine, or pick a favorite song from the Orange Box soundtrack. Along the way, you pick up colored blocks to make clusters. Bigger clusters of brighter colors result in higher scores. And that’s it. The demo is free to try, though limited to only five songs, but the full version of the game is a mere $9.95.

Another thing … the new Threadless shirts are out today, as they are every week. And with them this week arrives the new pricing scheme, now based on the number of inks employed. While I’m going to miss the $15-for-anything pricing, I understand that more ink costs more money. And frankly, I don’t care how many inks it takes, I can’t wait for Attack Of Literacy — detail at top of post — to make the transition from “submission” to “product.”

Wait … just tried updating this entry and it looks like my site is hanging on Technorati’s sidebar widget. Don’t tell me that old problem is back? I thought they’d fixed that issue, years ago. I don’t want to comment them out, but this is ridiculous.

Update: It’s not Technorati. It’s Lijit’s search widgetr. Damn shame, because I like them well enough. Maybe they’ll get their act together shortly.

Really.

Just been so busy. (Doing science, of course.)

We spent the weekend in New Jersey. For the first time, I arrived at Newark Airport for the sole purpose of visiting the state that hosts it, rather than just using it as an often cheaper access point for New York City or even Philadelphia.

(And trust me … if you’ve not figured this out yet for yourself, do your life a favor and just pretend that LaGuardia and J.F.K. don’t even exist. With the ready availability of New Jersey Transit from EWR right into the heart of Manhattan, why bother?)

We were in Edison, NJ, to bear witness to a wedding. Two of the nicest, smartest people we know, in fact. Their wedding was one of those things that was a perfect and pleasant inevitability from the moment we met them both. Sooner or later, they’d confirm publicly what they’d known privately from day one. Congratulations, Kevin and Jen.

(I took pictures.)

The return flight was harrowing, I must admit. While the flight up was aboard a rather comfortable MD88, the flight back was via a much smaller CRJ700. And if that wasn’t enough, right when we were boarding, it started to snow. Flurries at first, but these little flakes were soon joined by many, many others. So by the time we’d pulled away from the gate, it was an actual snow shower. This was made all the better by the swirling gusts of wind that sent the snow flying up from the tarmac and into the side of the plane, filling the window frames with clots of ice. The pilot came over the intercom and told us that we’d get some turbulence during the climb to 30K feet. He was not lying. Honestly, it felt like New Jersey had decided that Nikki and I were not to leave the Garden State. But after the roughest take-off I’ve ever known, we plained off and were relatively steady until we got back to Atlanta.

In other news … (more…)

Person 1: Hey.
Person 2: Hey, how’ve you been?
Person 1: I’m great. Just finished reading a great book on my Kindle. You ought to read it sometime.
Person 2: Oh? Cool. Can I borrow it?
Person 1: Yeah. About that … I can’t.
Person 2: Can’t what? Can’t let me borrow the awesome book?
Person 1: No. Jeff won’t let me.
Person 2: … Who’s Jeff?

Jeff Bezos steps out from behind a nearby ficus.

Jeff Bezos: Hi! I’m Jeff Bezos.
Person 1: Hey … Jeff.
Person 2: You’re Jeff? And you won’t let him let me borrow the awesome book?
Jeff Bezos: You can’t borrow the awesome book because your friend promised me that he wouldn’t let you borrow the book, no matter how awesome. Says so right in the terms and conditions. He can’t let you borrow it.
Person 2: Maybe I’ll just buy it from him. Or just owe him a beer later or something.
Jeff Bezos: That’s good. But no, you can’t buy it, not even with beer.
Person 1: Hey, what if I just read it to him. Out loud. You know, like an old radio drama or something.
Person 2: That’d be cool.
Jeff Bezos: It would be cool, if it were possible, but it’s not, so it’s just not cool at all.
Person 1: Oh.
Person 2: Oh.
Jeff Bezos: Glad I could clear that up. See you around.

Jeff Bezos steps back behind another ficus.

Person 1: See what I mean?
Person 2: Yeah. Hey, maybe you could just leave your Kindle at my place accidentally, you know? That way, I wouldn’t really be borrowing it.
Person 1: Huh. That might work. I’ll just leave myself logged in and forget to …

Jeff Bezos drops from the branches of a nearby banyan tree.

Jeff Bezos: Hi. I’m still Jeff Bezos.
Person 1: Hi, Jeff.
Person 2: Hi, Jeff.
Jeff Bezos: Yeah. The accidentally-leaving-your-Kindle idea? Can’t go for that one either. One of you would circumventing our security and the other would be encouraging the aforementioned circumventing.
Person 1: Circumventing. That’s bad, right?
Jeff Bezos: Very much so.

With a wink and a raised eyebrow, Jeff Bezos drops a smoke bomb and disappears like a ninja.

Person 2: :cough: Well. :cough: Look, I don’t want to make Jeff mad again.
Person 1: Me neither. It is a good book, though.
Person 2: I’m sure. I’ll just go buy my own copy of the awesome book.
Person 1: You sure about that?
Person 2: Yeah. Thanks, anyway.

And in the shadows, Jeff Bezos smiles.

(Inspired in no small part by this post at Dive Into Mark.)

Wil Wheaton was this year’s keynote speaker at PAX ‘07, the annual Penny Arcade fan festival. He does what he has come to do best. He reminisces about the glory of arcades, a foundational component to his (and my) generation. He’s 35 now. So am I. And he goes on to say how video games, no matter how violent they might’ve been, did not lead to a life of crime. Instead, they were key to our social upbringing.

Arcades were to my generation what Xbox Live and World Of Warcraft are to this generation. They were social gathering places as much as anything else, and I really miss them. I miss the flickering neon on the walls, the wierd smelling smoke, the stained casino carpet, the Van Halen and Joan Jett on the jukebox and the times we had to choose between one more game of Tempest and a can of Coke from the vending machine. There was actually a time when you could get a cold can of Coke for a quarter. I would tell you how much we paid for movies, but I’ve made enough people cry this month.

Even to a vehement loather of Wesley Crusher like myself, the speech is incredibly good. At the end of the day, Wheaton is a mighty geek who relishes his geekery, and I applaud the brilliance of placing him in front of a massive and appreciative crowd — a crowd that cheers like hooligans at a soccer match when he makes an Oregon Trail reference.

Listen for yourself and see.