Still Alive: The Video

Portal - Still Alive typography from Trickster on Vimeo.

Ha ha! I miss GLaDOS.

RIP Rick Wright

Rick Wright, keyboardist in Pink Floyd, has passed away. I hope he's giving a spectacular performance in the The Great Gig in the Sky. This news made me very sad for about half a day when I heard.

Neal Stephenson

Last Friday I went up to Kepler's in Menlo Park where Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors, was speaking. Traffic sucked, so I got there a bit late and missed part of the reading. What I did hear was a bit confusing because he was reading from his new book (more on that shortly). The Q&A section was pretty cool. Neal revealed that he did not, in fact, invent Steampunk. Yeah, someone asked if he were responsible for Steampunk.

So, the reason Stephenson was at the store was to promote his new book, Anathem. I'm about 185 pages in and it's very interesting so far. It's about a planet called Arbre, which is like Earth, but is definitely not Earth. In this world where the protagonist Erasmas is member of monastic-like society which like in a sanctuary called a concent. I write monastic-like, because the Fraas and Suurs inhabiting the concent are devoted to mathematical knowledge like monks and nuns (Fraa is similar to Friar and Suur to Sister, I believe). As you might infer, there's a lot of language that is similar to, but not exactly like English or Latin words. There's even a glossary at the end of the book so you can figure out what some of the words in the sentences mean. This description sounds like it might be hard to understand and Stephenson himself seemed somewhat concerned that people were not going to like his book. However, I found that after a while I began to grok the specialized words and even relate them to Earth history (the planet's history has a lot of parallels to Earth history, if you know what you're looking for). Anyway, if I had to compare it to something, it'd be a sort of like The Name of the Rose, except the monks are devoted to Mathematics instead of God (They are referred to as avout instead of devout in the book.). I'm still waiting to see where the story is going, so perhaps that will turn out to be an inaccurate analogy, but so far, so good.

I Coulda Been Rich

Holy crap, I saw the other day that some idiot news stringer reposted a 2002 story that United Airlines was about to go bankrupt. This story was picked up a newspaper and eventually Reuters. Around that time, the stock market responded, um, adversely. UAL's stock dropped from over $11 a share to a penny a share before the market stopped trading. After people figured out the mistake, the price went back up to over a $10 a share. Man, if I could have gotten in on that I could have literally made millions of dollars and retired. Sigh, someone made a killing, I'm sure. [article]

The Large Hadron Rap

A nerdy grad student at CERN made up a rap about the Large Hadron Collider and what it's for. Notably absent from the lyrics is how they're going to cause the end of the universe.

What The Man Doesn't Want You to Know About RFID

A clip of Adam Savage of Mythbusters talking about how they will never do a show about the myths about RFID (e.g. how hackable it is) because the credit card companies leaned on the Discovery Channel.

NIN

A bunch of us went up to Oakland to see Nine Inch Nails Friday night. Noelle scored us some fantastic seats: incredibly close to the stage. One of the things I love about NIN shows is that they always seem to have so much variety. I think I've seen about half a dozen shows in the past couple of years and they've always been different. This show, like the last time I saw Trent and the boys at Oakland had a really outstanding set of visuals. I like this venue because it's large enough to have cool special effects, but not so large that you're really ever far away from the stage. The sound was also exemplary, perhaps the best of any NIN show I've seen. I thought Trent would do a few songs from The Slip, which he did, but I was surprised that that they also played several songs from the Ghosts albums (which are all instrumentals). The fans seemed surprisingly tolerant. Of course they played pretty much all of the classic NIN songs, although the arrangements for some of them were unusual. Anyway, it was a great night out, definitely one of the better concerts we've been to this year.

I Learned Something New Today

Besides the two types of Sequoia I already knew about: Sequoia Sempervirens (Coast Redwood) and Sequoiadendron Giganteum (Giant Sequoia), there's another species, Metasequoia Glyptostroboides (Dawn Redwood) that lives in China. The more you know!

Weekend So Far

Worked really late Friday night trying to get some junk functioning properly before the holiday weekend. Bleh. Played video games late.

Played video games Saturday morning and afternoon. Mowed lawn in back yard. Got groceries since supplies were running low. More game playing. Finished almost all of the major Oblivion questlines. Blocked by scratches on the disc that prevent me from advancing on the last one. Played a little Rock Band. Taking a break from the 360 for a while. :-D

On Sunday Carl and Erin were having a small BBQ over in Walnut Creek, so I went over there. Carl made some tasty burgers as usual. Went swimming in their pool for a while, although it was (surprisingly for Walnut Creek) not a furnace there yesterday. Met their friends Jim and Tessa, who I like. Jim's first question to me was what board game I like best. Tessa was wearing a Comic-Con t-shirt. My kind of people. Learned how to play dominoes, which was surprisingly entertaining. Enjoyed a chlly ride home in the Z. Glad the temperatures are abating, if only for a few days.

BTW, roaring over the Sunol Grade on 680 with Hotaka by Juno Reactor blasting with the stars overhead is fantastic experience that I recommend highly. :-D