When I was visiting England over the Fourth of July many, many years ago, a British radio announcer interviewed visiting Americans to ask what the Fourth of July celebrated. I missed the interview, but the host at the bed and breakfast I was staying in at Drumnadrochit by Loch Ness asked me the next morning. I'm embarrassed to say it took me about thirty seconds to say ... "the signing of the Declaration of Independence". As it turns out, I did far better than the average tourist.
Well, uh, umpteen years later, things aren't any better ... even in our homeland. From Jay Leno's 4th of July episode of Jaywalking:
As a friend said, scary stuff.
I was sitting on my porch while my wife was rooting succulents and when she heard the video play she said "uh uh!" and ran over to watch. I think we got all of the questions except the Minutemen, and our "guess" (that they were an elite group of colonial soldiers who were our first line of defense against the British, essentially Revolutionary War special forces) was apparently spot on.
Afterwards, all we had to say was: "Go Grandpa!"
-the Centaur
Posts published in July 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2010/07/06/worlds-fastest-car-crowned-mph/
The 0-62 mph sprint still takes about 2.5 seconds but 0-124 mph comes up in just 7.3 seconds and 186 mph passes in just 15 seconds. However, the number everyone wants to know is how fast will it go? Bugatti and its test driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel have already taken care of this, posting top speeds of 265.9 mph and 269.8 mph in a Guinness world record attempt. The final number for the record books was 268 mph, a figure that even hit Bugatti's engineering team by surprise.If there was a straight shot lane from here to work, this car could do it in 6 minutes. My normal commute is closer to 50. -the Centaur UPDATE: A friend pointed out that at top speed the car would run out of gas in 13 minutes. That's there and back to work, right? Surely, a friend asked, one tank for a round trip to work ... that's green enough, right? Anthony can handle that guilt, no? Uh ... no. For the record, my Prius gets approximately 48 miles per gallon, with the average often approaching 50. That's closer to 20 trips to and from work. Much more green for my taste, and much less green out of my wallet. Of course, if I had $1.8 million to drop on a car, my fuel prices would be the last of my worries. That having been said, a $1.8 million would buy me a house in Mountain View with a solar roof and a Tesla, so this Bugatti STILL wouldn't be my next car.
... leaving only 2083 messages in my "1. Active" pile and 460 in my "5. Blog It!" pile.
Sigh.
Expect a large number of stale, no-longer topical posts over the next six months as I reduce the above numbers to something manageable.
-the Centaur
I'm a big free speech advocate, and I'm strongly against most well-intentioned attempts to protect us from ourselves - or, more cynically, to protect some people from people whose preferences are different - so this is worth mentioning.
The Independent Game Developer's Association is filing an amicus brief in the court battle over California's attempt to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. Details on the case are here:
http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/04/court-to-rule-on-violent-videos/ The Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on the constitutionality of a state law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. The Court accepted for review an appeal by the state of California, urging the Court to adopt a new constitutional standard that would enable states to ban such games for those under age 18. The case is Schwarzenegger v. Video Software Dealers Association (08-1448). The Court apparently had been holding the case until it decided another First Amendment case involving violent expression — U.S. v. Stevens (08-769). In that ruling, issued last Tuesday, the Court struck down a federal law that banned the depiction in videotapes of animal cruelty. In that ruling, the Justices refused to create a new exception to the First Amendment free speech right. The Court could have opted to send the California case back to the Ninth Circuit Court to weigh the impact of the Stevens decision. Instead, it simply granted review; the case will be heard and decided in the Court’s next Term, starting Oct. 4.From IGDA's call to action:
The IGDA in partnership with the AIAS, is working with the ESA to put together an AMICUS brief to support the decision to revoke this ban and declare this law unconstitutional. With the concept that video/computer/electronic games are a new form of media and art form, our industry should be afforded the freedom of speech protections that have been fought for and won by print, audio and video groups from newspapers to rap artists to filmmakers across the country. We need your help in securing powerful arguments that explain how this industry has evolved into a true profession over the years, and a medium that touches children and adults around the world every day.So, if you care about your rights to buy videogames, or about giving government yet another tool to control what we see and hear, you might consider weighing in - if not on this court case, if to your elected representatives asking them what on Earth they were thinking in the first place. -Anthony
Warren Ellis's comic Red is being made into a movie, and a friend of mine commented how reasonable Warren Ellis seems to be about adaptation (as opposed to, say, Alan Moore, who is of course entitled to his own opinion). From Warren Ellis's blog:
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=8099 The tone: no, the film isn’t as grim as the book. The book is pretty grim. But it’s also pretty small. When I sell the rights to a book, they buy the right to adapt it in whatever way they see fit. I can accept that they wanted a lighter film, and, as I’ve said before, the script is very enjoyable and tight as a drum. They haven’t adapted it badly, by any means. People who’ve enjoyed the graphic novel will have to accept that it’s an adaptation and that by definition means that it’s going to be a different beast from the book. The film has the same DNA. It retains bits that are very clearly from the book, as well as, of course, the overall plotline. But it is, yes, lighter, and funnier. And if anyone has a real problem with that, I say to you once again: Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle. I mean, if you don’t want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I’m not sure I want to know you.Amen to that. -the Centaur
So I'm a fan of the highly obscure but highly funny comic "Bear and Fox" - with cute characters, a wry sense of humor, and a nerd factor of approximately 9.0 on the Geek Hierarchy scale, it's right up my alley. Well, Randall Christopher, the creator of Bear and Fox, is at it again, and is looking from some help kickstarting the project!
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Hi everyone, The first two pages of the new Bear and Fox comic book are posted online! I am still trying to raise the funds to get the comic book printed. I've raised a little over a third of the amount needed with three days left to go. Thanks to all who have pledged so far! If the funds are not raised by midnight monday, the project will go unfunded and no one will be charged. The new comics! http://www.bearandfox.com Where to pledge: http://www.kickstarter.com ps. if anyone wants to help me out by blogging this, stumbling it, diggin it, facebooking, friendstering, etc by all means, yes |
UPDATE: The Kickstart was successful! Here's to Bear and Fox 2!
Avoid the cloud, the device. Eats my posts and notes, they do.
-the centaur
UPDATE: Now that I have a keyboard, here's the story. I'm reading Twilight as an audiobook, and wanted to do a quick "story so far" review. (In 11 words with punctuation: Twilight isn't bad - it's delightfully concrete - but I'm not it's demographic.) That's short, so I thought I'd try a quick review while I was leaving the campus of The Search Engine That Starts With A G.
But the voice recognition got HILARIOUSLY bad. It was actually comical, like the phone was fighting my review of Twilight - at one point the phone confessed that it WAS Twilight. Go figure. Finally I got to the car, sat down, and in the quiet tried to finish the review - and lost the connection to the voice recognition server. Sighing, I started to type the last line - and then the screen went kazoo, the app went away, and the phone returned to the home screen. Frantically, I returned to the app.
Every. Word. Gone.
Now, that's in part the fault of the WordPress Android app; it should have saved intermediate versions, like the WordPress web interface is doing every few minutes or so right now. But this isn't limited to the WordPress app; it's happened to me on other apps, in particular a note taking program. And in this case, I blame Android; from what happened to the screen and my experience with the software, I'm almost certain it was something in the main Android OS and not in the app itself that caused the app to go away (with the caveat that, again, it was the app's responsibility to save versions.)
So: pfui on you, as Nero Wolfe might say. I'm still going to stick to Android, as I can in theory write my own app with its own save behavior and not have to give somebody a stevejob just to get it accepted into the App Store. (Note: the iPhone is a high quality piece of hardware and I no more dispute Steve's right to mess it up with weird conditions than he disputes my right to use a buggier phone).
...if this was a real post, I'd say something substantive, like that I suspect if the top post has an image in it, it can cause the header to move up and be covered by the banner image, which is wrong. Stay tuned...
-the Centaur
UPDATE: No and yes. If a post has a WordPress-style image in it, it can chomp its own header, regardless of whether it is the first post. Got a little bit of debugging to do...
UPDATED UPDATE: Teh problem wasn't that the image had a theme error, the problem was the post had no title. Easily fixed: add a title, OR update the theme to write "This Post Title Unintentionally Left Blank" in the box... :-)
UPDATED UPDATE POSTSCRIPT: And I award Chrome's Developer Tools (themselves based on the WebKit Inspector) the prize for helping me find this bug by giving me an easy way to navigate down to that element and see that it wasn't just squeezed out (which had happened in an earlier iteration of the theme I'd tested locally on my laptop via MAMP) but was indeed missing its content. Hm. Another fix for hte bug would be to set a minimum height on the div for the title of the post ... interesting ...
More Frost Moon news ... the Amazon $0.99 promotion (in turn, caused by the iPad $0.99 promotion) is having good effects:
http://ireaderreview.com/2010/07/01/some-interesting-friday-kindle-book-deals/ There are lots of good kindle book deals doing well on the charts today ... 7.Frost Moon by Anthony Francis has made its way into the Top 100. It’s rated 4.5 stars on 30 reviews and is just $1.It's almost like my hard working publisher's efforts to promote my book are, uh, working. Yaay Bell Bridge Books! -the CentaurIn an alternate Atlanta where magic is practiced openly, where witches sip coffee at local cafes, shapeshifters party at urban clubs, vampires rule the southern night like gangsters, and mysterious creatures command dark caverns beneath the city, Dakota Frost’s talents are coveted by all. She’s the best magical tattooist in the southeast, a Skindancer, able to bring her amazing tats to life. When a serial killer begins stalking Atlanta’s tattooed elite, the police and the Feds seek Dakota’s help. Can she find the killer on the dark fringe of the city’s Edgeworld?Quite a collection of deals.
Almost easy enough to do when taking a walk.
Easier to use voice input.
Almost. It didn't successfully read the previous sentence (or this one) but it was close.
- the centaur
Clipped by a friend:
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #58 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)Wow. I'm flabbergastled. Rest assured, though, Blood Rock is at the publisher and Skindancer:Liquid Fire and Spellpunk:Hex Code are underway! -the Centaur
#22 in Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fantasy #4 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy
Actually it was quite an adventure just getting this far, for which I've taken notes that I plan to blog. But I thought I should make the following points:
- Yes, I know a number of widgets on the site are broken.
- Yes, I know a number of parts of the theme are messed up.
- Yes, I know there are parts of the theme that are messed up, that I don't yet know are messed up. :-(
...same bat domain, different bat fully qualified URL, different bat RSS feed. The Library of Dresan blog is now at http://www.dresan.com/index.php (actually, http://www.dresan.com/ should work). Please update your RSS feeds to: http://www.dresan.com/?feed=atom ...
-the Centaur
BWAH HA HAHAAHAA!
Posting to the blog is LIIIIVE again.
And for those that don't get it, "The Dawning of Val Mar" is a private in joke that about 3 people on Earth will get ... that was originally the "first post" on my WordPress blog before I had to delete it.
The post is gone, but the in joke lives on. Massive flurry of posts to follow, God willing. Peace out.
-teh Centaur