Quinn’s grandfather just had a stroke. We’re not sure of the seriousness of it yet (mainly because for cost reasons, he’s been moved to a hospital that doesn’t have anyone to do any tests until Monday. God, I could wave my little NHS card in the air and have it work its kindly magic here.). Anyway, we’re about to fly up and might be a bit incommunicado for the next few days.
Donations of spare luck gratefully received.
“We”, in this case, meaning both Blogger and me. I’m sitting in the new home – because home is where the homepage is – using the Net for the first time, thanks to Gilbert‘s late-night net-fu. I ended up doing NTK in a local cafe at six this morning, stopping occasionally to filter the latest blogger news. The nomadic net life is giving me flashbacks of being hunched over underpowered Macs in cold Edinburgh flats, handcoding bits of the Guardian’s first Website. Weird, and ancient.
With the new house, we’ve had a PC cabinet reshuffle. Gilbert’s got a brand new thang, so I got his old 1Ghz machine, which I’ve been regutting to form my new Debian desktop. Rather than just copy over my old machine’s hard drive, I started with a fresh install, and have been adding the useful bits of code from old backups as I go. Like anyone else, I’ve collected a lot of cruft over the years, and this seems to be a good way of paring it down to the essentials.
One can go a bit too far.This is my desktop right now, as set up by default on a minimal Debian install. A bit too barebones. It’d be interesting (well, interesting for me anyway) to compare what it looks like in say a months’ time, when the cruft is drifting back.
okay, I’ve set up a QuickTopic for this. Remember you can subscribe for email updates on the discussion.
One of those stories that is, by it’s nature, a bit hard to get out (especially as Metafilter is down right now too). Mr Tom Plasticbag Coates reports:
A good proportion (over half of the people I’ve asked) passwords has changed, and everyone who has been part of the attack has now had their e-mail address, site URL and password changed. No one can publish. We can’t add new users either because the database is full and has crashed. All the content appears to be intact at the moment, but we won’t know for sure for a while yet. No one can get in touch with Ev…
I’ll post a link as soon I find out (or someone tells me) where the refugees are gathering to pool news.
I’m really sorry if you’ve been trying to get hold of me for the last few days. We’re in the middle of moving house, and while it’s going pretty well, it does involve me doing most of my Net work within a two hour window in our old but still-wired house. Our old house is empty of anything but a Web server, a wireless AP, and house-moving sheddings, so I feel like I’m hacking from a squat. Again.
Still, relocating is one of those perfect excuses to do a mass re-re-re-re-organisation of one’s life. And thus I imagine that I will have much more free time, just as soon as I have scanned in all my books’ barcodes, re-installed Debian from scratch, and bought a bunch of useless boxes from Organised Living.
Yeah, right. Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it’s actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes – she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.
I feel somehow safer knowing that as I sit here, surrounded by crap, writing crap, somewhere else in town my new home is being cleaned by a small beeping robot.
… for not updating: I’m doing the guestblog at Boing Boing. Now to find an excuse for missing last week.
There are a few net innovations that have far greater ramifications than you would, at first hearing, expect them to. Napster, at heart just IRC with a UI, was one. Google News is another.
In its first day, I’ve already noticed:
Doc has the info on my close encounter – it was a Minuteman III missile launch from Vandenberg airbase. The bowl-shaped scattering patterns came from the first and second stage separations, I suppose. Greetings from the heart of the military-industrial-entertainment complex!
Want to brighten up your dull grey box? PC fans with colour LEDs, fifteen bucks.
We just saw the weirdest thing in the dusk sky above San Jose. Initially, it looked like a very brightly lit jet, with a thick vapour trail behind it. It seemed pretty high, but was far brighter than it should be that altitude. I thought perhaps the setting sun was catching a plane-wing at an angle. Then as we watched, a bowl-shaped vapour plume formed around the dot and behind it (a bit like the vapour blanket you can see forming around the plane halfway down this page, but I guess larger given the apparent distance). The dot carried on for a bit longer, then formed another bowl-shaped cloud. That bowl then appeared to contract in on itself, there was what looked like a scattering of debris from the dot, and the dot disappeared. The whole thing was over in less than a minute.
It was a pretty big deal – the vapour trailed crossed a sixth of the sky or more, about 40° from the western horizon. I’m sure we weren’t the only people to see it. I always wonder where to look for discussions of these geographically constrained phenomena online. Guess I’ll keep an eye on the local papers for a while.
