Linkstew

Reason: Neal Stephenson's Past, Present, and Future: The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America

A pretty interesting interview with Neal Stephenson that makes me want to go back and finish The Baroque Cycle. I was only halfway through Quicksilver when I got a car and stopped commuting on BART + CalTrain.

I finished Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams on the train Friday, and while it was quite obviously popular science, I still enjoyed it quite a lot. I particularly enjoyed all the metaphors he used, and all the time he spent dissecting his personification of the endangered animals he saw. And of course, it also really made me sad that Douglas Adams is gone.

It was definitely a little shallow in the actual science department, but it did serve its purpose of piquing my interest in animals, and obviously endangered species in particular. Once we get DSL (which of course we still don't have), I'm want to go do some research and see how all the endangered species he saw are doing today. And once we get cable (Or Direct TiVo sounds kind of appealing, actually, especially since I'm still mad at Comcast), I think I'm going to start recording some Discovery shows.

And on top of all that, it really made me want to travel. I admit I haven't gone very far: I've never been east of the Mississippi, have only been in Mexico by accident, and have spent about two weeks in Canada total. In back of my head, I've long had a list of places I want to go someday, and now that I have a job, I'll more realistically be able to afford to take some trips some day, so actually writing them down seems more realistic.

• Within the U.S.:
• New Orleans (I should really go there before my sister and brother-in-law move away).
• New York.
• Washington DC.
• Boston.
• Hawaii.
• Alaska.
• International:
• Japan.
• Australia.
• New Zealand.
• England/Ireland.
• Greece.
• Sweden.
• Denmark.
• Hell, most of Europe, really.

I'm sure there's more, but that's a plenty long list considering it'll probably be at least a year before I get things sorted out enough to go anywhere. And that's not even counting all the places I'd like to go snowboarding some day.

eBay Listings: School Yearbooks

I jokingly suggested to Kevin that I might try to sell my yearbooks on eBay, only to discover (with a bit of horror) that not only does eBay have a separate category for "School Yearbooks," and not only are a lot of people trying to sell yearbooks on eBay, but some of them actually have bids on them. I have no idea what to make of this, honestly.

Read: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

I finally found it at Moe's after looking at Barnes and Nobles and Cody's. It's short but good, and reminded me of a cross between Hogfather, Alice in Wonderland, and Labyrinth.

Gah, I put this entry off back when I should have written it, because I was really busy with a combination of work and school and fun and games. And then I put it off longer and longer, and now I've forgotten a lot of the summer, and at this point all I can do is respond to my stated goals in the Summer 2002 Future post. So here it is:

• Whew, I read a lot in the first half of this summer, but I haven't actually read anything since July 10th. It added up to something like 5000 pages in a little more than a month, but I forgot the exact number. Anyway, in no order, here are the books I read before July 10th: Microserfs, House of Leaves, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, The Dark Side of the Sun, Smoke and Mirrors, Coraline, and, I'm very embarrassed to admit, five Star Wars novels that I got cheap used.
• As much as I read, though, I didn't actually get around to reading Ender's Game or Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think like I wanted to.
• Game-wise, I only actually finished Jedi Outcast and ICO as planned, though I also played Pikmin. Everything else in my queue, including (most notably) Golden Sun and Eternal Darkness remain unplayed.
• In the second half of the summer, I ended up watching more TV in the evenings than I would have liked. In particular, I watched all of Babylon 5 on reruns, and seasons 1-4, 6 of Buffy. I also saw a few assorted episodes of season 5 Buffy, leaving the other 2/3 of season 5 for me to patiently watch on the painfully slow weekly rerun cycle. Stupid syndication.
• I don't really know how to measure how successful I was at saying "hate" less, so I'm not not going to comment on it either way.
• I fixed what was broken with Linkstew.
• Uh, I didn't study for the GRE, because I haven't registered for it yet. And by that I mean I still haven't done either. I should get on that.
• And overall, I think I was fairly less successful at work than I was hoping to be. In particular, LDAP kicked my ass.

So, in case you can't tell, I've totally had music on my mind for the last couple of weeks. I think that's because music is the only form of entertainment I've had time to worry about with all the time I've been spending at work. I can listen to music while working, but books and games tend to suck me in much more with that infernal contraption innocently called "plot."

In the last couple of weeks there have been at least half a dozen music related posts I didn't write. There were several shelved reviewlets about TMBG's No!. There were my ramblings that basically amounted to me being excited about the Cake concert I'm going to on the 10th. There was the one about my sudden realization that I like Radiohead much more than I knew. And there were several others.

For some reason, focusing that heavily on music didn't feel right, so I curtailed that line of discussion before it got even more out of hand.

Besides which, August is now upon me, which means that my time will now be even shorter. So sorry for the disappearing act, but at least I feel less guilty now that I've explained what's going on.

Enjoy August y'all, because I'm certainly not going to have time to.

Tonight at Neil Gaiman's reading of Coraline, he mentioned that the Coraline movie adaptation would be directed by Henry Selick, the guy who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas.

This news was met with much enthusiasm by the audience, because, well, The Nightmare Before Christmas didn't suck.

What no seemed to remember was that Henry Selick's last movie was Monkeybone, which, uh, did suck.

So we'll see.

Tonight I saw Neil Gaiman read his new book, Coraline. Yes, all of it.

I got to the church at about 5:20 and found Kevin waiting in line, saving a spot for me. While standing outside and waiting, a man in a wheelchair asked me who was speaking tonight, and what he'd written. It was an awkward question, because I knew there was no way the man would have heard of anything Gaiman had written. I rattled off Gaiman's books, and then the man asked what he primarily wrote about.

That was an even harder question. "Stories," I decided after a pause. "The stories people tell, and how stories affect people, and how people believe in stories."

And to my confusion, the man in the wheelchair said "Well, he may have another fan," as he rolled off.

The ticket said that the doors would open at 5:30, but we didn't get in until about 5:45. At 6:30, someone came out and announced that, at the author's request, we would be starting 15 minutes late, because many of the will-call tickets hadn't been claimed, and "there are lots of people coming in from out of the area who don't know what parking's like around here."

The place was pretty full, though there seemed to be adequate seating for everyone. Kevin said that out of 800 tickets, there were only 45 tickets left for sale at the door.

A very nice touch was that the first three rows were reserved for people who brought children with them. Especially nice, considering that the book is as much a children's adventure as anything. And about two of the three rows actually had people with children in tow, which was very cool to see.

Another very nice touch was that they were piping a multitude of the more mellow Magnetic Fields songs through the church before the reading and during the intermission.

So Gaiman came out at around 6:50. "Here's what we're going to do," he said. "I'm going to very quickly answer a few frequently asked questions right up front to give commuters a few more minutes to get here, and then I'm going to read Coraline to you. And then about halfway through we'll take a break, and then I'll finish reading Coraline to you."

For the record, the frequently asked questions that he pulled out of his head to answer were:

• A little news about a Corline movie (to be directed by the guy who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, and staring Michelle Pfeiffer as the Mom and the Other Mom, apparently).
• "Tori's new album is wonderful, and that's all I'm going to say about it."
• And news that he's currently writing some new Sandman stories that will come out as a hard back volume next February as part of Vertigo's 10th anniversary.
• And those were his faqs. Of course, if you read his journal, you probably knew that already.

So then, he read us Coraline, and we had an intermission, and then he finished reading Coraline, just like he said he would.

He did a remarkable job, and only had one real slip of the tongue, when he accidentally said "Caroline" when it was supposed to be a "Coraline." Though later, he subtly referenced that by improvising and having one of the characters who gets her name wrong say "Caroline, Corline, Whatever your name is, ..." where the book only had a "Caroline." (I was following along in my own copy occasionally, and since that character calling her Coraline (instead of Caroline) was out of place, I double checked and noticed the improv.)

As for the book itself, it was good and short and fun. It is, after all, a children's/young adult novel. It's got a lot of Alice and Wonderland aspects to it, complete with a sarcastic cat... It was cute and I enjoyed, but the ending left me a little irritated in a niggling details kind of way. Considering that Gaiman read it *out loud* in 3.5 hours or so, you could probably read it in an hour or two yourself.

We got out of there at about 11:05. You do the math.

But it was a fantastic evening, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was well worth my time and money.

When it was all over, someone shouted "Read it again," to which Gaimain paused briefly and then simply said "No." It carried that strange quality of finality that only a british accent can.

Inspiration struck me tonight, and realized why I blog: I'm backing myself up.

Now stick with me for a moment while I explain this, because there were a number of steps involved in my reaching this conclusion.

When I find myself explaining the difference between "RAM" and "hard disk storage" to someone who doesn't really know computers, I always end up using the metaphor Computer Memory is Human Memory to help him understand things.

"RAM is like a person's short term working memory he uses when he's actively thinking about something," I tell him. "RAM is that 7+-2 you hear so much about. RAM is where your computer keeps what you're typing until you save the changes, just like short term memory is where your brain keeps what you're thinking about until you make the effort to 'commit it to memory.'"

"Hard disk storage, on the other hand, is like where your brain keeps your memory of your first kiss," I continue. "You have access to it when you want it, and the rest of the time it just sits in your brain until you need it. When you hit 'save,' the hard disk is the memory to which what you typed is committed."

"A person can only think about a few things at once with his short term memory, but by buying more RAM, your computer can think about more things at once. And a person can remember a lot more than he can think about, and by buying a bigger hard disk, your computer can remember a lot more." I explain.

But in Microserfs, a comment is made that "We've reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies," and that statement stopped me in my tracks.

In a flash of insight, I turned the metaphor Computer Memory is Human Memory around, switched Human Memory to Human Knowledge, and ended up with Human Knowledge is Computer Memory.

Looking at it from that direction, I realized how amazingly volatile and short term all of human memory really is. We don't "save" things to our "long term" memory. Long term memory happens to be a little less volatile than working memory, but both of them will be lost if we crash.

I realized that if I don't externalize myself, then when I "shut down," my unsaved changes will be lost. I blog in order to save me. I'm backing myself up so that once I'm turned off, my data will still live on.

Through the looking glass of Human Knowledge is Computer Memory, my short term memory becomes registers for my CPU, and maybe a little cache, while my "long term" memory is just my main memory. It's all volatile, though. My blog is my hard disk.

And sprinkling in a little Douglas Adams for good measure, the human species becomes a massively parallel processing computer. Every human experience provides our internal computers with more data that, in combination with data each one of us has acquired by accessing stored human knowledge, produces more data that can be added to the human experience.

But to be part of the human experience, that information has to be saved, by blogging (or other means). Catalogued and indexed in computers, human experience is preserved and available for future generations to build upon, eventually synthesizing the question whose answer is 42.

That last paragraph is awfully human centric, but it's humans who save their changes for later humans to synthesize into still more complex ideas. Like this one.

I read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland this weekend, and in it, the narrator distills his roommates and co-workers into what their seven dream Jeopardy! categories would be. And I thought to myself "Man, what a great way of describing someone."

The question isn't just asking what you like, but rather, it's asking what you know better than anything else -- what you grok. It's not asking who you want to be, but rather, who you are. It's not something that most questions really get to.

So, if my life were a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:

• They Might Be Giants.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld Universe.
• Stupid UNIX tricks.
• Stupid perl tricks.
• The Macintosh Way.
• The writings of Kurt Vonnegut.
• 'Bop' as a prefix, infix, and suffix.

If your life were a game of Jeopardy!, what would your seven dream categories be?

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I didn't buy this book until nearly eight months after it came out, and even more ashamed to admit that I had the book for a month before I could make time to read it. Some Pratchett fan I am. I was busy with NACHOS and finals, etc. But once I finished my last final, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents was the first fourth book I read.

Though this story is set on the Discworld, it isn't officially "A Novel of Discworld." Rather, it's a stand alone story that's targeted at young adults, and in this capacity it works very well. No knowledge of the events that have taken place in the 25 Discworld novels to date is necessary to enjoy this book. In fact, the only time where I found myself drawing upon my previous Pratchett reading was when I knew there was more to Pratchett's ideas than were presented in these pages. But it's not that the ideas in The Amazing Maurice lack depth -- it's just that they're a different aspect of the ideas that Pratchett fans already know and love.

The story introduces us to "the amazing" Maurice (a talking cat), who is the mastermind behind a scam in which a group of educated rodents (former residents of the trash heap behind the wizard's university) run amok in a town for a few days. Then a "stupid looking kid" named Keith plays a tune on his whistle and leads the rats out of town for 30 gold pieces. Maurice, the rats, and Keith split the money three ways. It's the pied piper gone horribly wrong.

The town of Bad Blintz was to be their last heist, but when they got there, everything went wrong, and that's the tail tale told in The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which I read from beginning to end without putting down.

Though Maurice, Keith, and Malicia (the mayor's daughter, and a teller of so many tall tales that no one would blink twice if she started talking about talking cats) are all interesting in their own right, it's really the rats who steal the show. For starters, there's something immeasurably endearing about their names, from "Peaches" to "Dangerous Beans," to "Hamnpork" to "Additives," the rats' names (which they picked off of labels they found in their trash heap) just left a huge smile on my face. Next, the philosophical development of the young rodents and their existential questioning demonstrated just how skilled Pratchett is at looking at old questions in new ways while at the same time forcing us re-examine ourselves.

My favorite quote from the book, on one of the primary ideas in the novel, was "If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story."-- Malicia Grim

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that it didn't even occur to me that Death of Rats would make an appearance in this book until the young rats started hypothesizing that there was a bone rat that would come to get them when they died.

Besides, how could you not like a story that has a bungie jumping rat named Sardines?

I give it a 5/5, because it did perfectly what it set out to do.

I'm such a horrible student. I've got a final in 23 hours, and I haven't even looked to see if there are any practice finals available on the course website. Instead, I'm sitting here thinking about what I'd rather be doing:

1. Go snowboarding. Of course, this is only reinforced by my friend emailing me this morning to let me know that 2002-2003 Kirkwood season passes are already available. Gah, it's so far away!
2. Read more of the book I started last night.
3. Go jetskiing. On the bright side, I'll get to go jetskiing in July and I don't even have to pay for it.
4. Finish up Jedi Outcast, which I've been playing for almost two months now.
5. Figure out what's wrong with Linkstew.

::sigh:: I suppose I'll start studying now. Well, after I go to three hours of meetings this afternoon. And as much as I want to watch the Enterprise season finale tonight, I'll be a good boy and leave it on my TiVo until tomorrow.