Orange Bowl
In several hours time I'll be heading south for the Orange Bowl as something of a mini-vacation, so consider me incommunicado for the time being. See everyone when I get back. Which, when I get back I expect things to go plaid (ludicrous speed) very shortly thereafter.
Book of the Moment: The Forever Machine, or They'd Rather Be Right
I decided that I hadn't read enough Hugo award winners, and so I started somewhat arbitrarily with the book I'd heard the least about. It also appears to be the Hugo award winner that has been the least reprinted over the years. Originally a serial in Galaxy Magazine, it is very full of "classic" science fiction themes; themes that I most connect with Heinlein, Asimov and even Spider Robinson.
Set "some 40 years after the atomic bomb" it does have a certain alternate history documentary feel today. Here's the alternate history documentary pitch:
Imagine a 1960s in which the "AI Revolution", instead of, as our history witnessed, fizzling beneath it's own monstrous spending and weirder business plans, was quashed for moral reasons; the politicians and populace afraid of anything that sounded like "artificial intelligence", just as today moralists seek to conquer and besiege phrases like "stem cell research" and "abortion". Add to the mix a set of legislative policies collectively known as "opinion control" that force government-approved Fox News-like spin down the throats of the American populace as the only media left standing. The late 1970s and early 1980s that result are then inherently different from the ones we knew. The crippling of the AI Boom and the subsequent stifling of similar techniques kept away the later Personal Computer boom that we saw. Computers remained large, unweildy things locked in the ivory towers of corporations and academia. Then, leave it to academia, when presented with a locked door with neon signs saying "Keep Out" to continue to be secretly fascinated with artificial intelligence. With the right catalyst, an unusual student with the rare gift of telepathy, a university, under a Government grant resembling B. F. Skinner's work for the army no less, sidesteps the "pedestrian ...
Library 2.0
I've been a book addict for a long time. In middle school and high school the public library was a short walk away. Around the height of this period I would often have 3-5 books on loan at a time and would generally drop off read books and pick up new ones once or twice a week. One of the cool things about a library is the connection into larger systems and alliances of libraries. I got to the point where I generally had at least one book on reserve most of the time.
As I started to have more "disposable income" I slowly start amassing my own mini-collection. Sometimes I miss that connectedness, but I also love how the shelves make an overview of the majority of the things that I have read in the last few years. I wish that I had kept better track of all the books that I had read at the library, in hindsight.
LibraryThing is an attempt at something of a "Library 2.0". Small collectors like me can compare collections with larger libraries, are given the tools to sort through and keep track of our libraries, and then the fun part is the social aspects: share reviews, contribute tags, talk about books. The pages for a book list the Amazon suggestions and then link to "Unsuggestions": lists of books that statistically are not owned by people with that book. I got a good amount of my library plugged in, which you can see here or there.
The LibraryThingtegration I quickly added to my blog is pretty cool. For a demo, check the sidebar "Referenced Works" for the post, and to keep it on target, here's the quick review I wrote for one of the more eccentric book in my collection ...
Max and Sam's Holiday Bourbon Cookies
After making two batches of cookies today my brother and I were in a bit of an experimental mood and hybridized the two recipes plus a few new "secret ingredients". Here's the recipe we came up with:
1 cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup sugar 1 shot Bourbon
Cream together the butter, sugars and a fine Bourbon of your choice. Suit the amount of bourbon to your taste. Mix:
2 cup flower 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, ginger, cloves) 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 1/2 cup crushed cornflakes 1/2 cup chopped walnuts 4 ounces finely ground chocolate chunks
Add the cream. Ball and bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 6 minutes in a convection oven or about 10-12 minutes in a more conventional oven.
You may also add a small amount of oats (maybe a 1/2 cup to a cup) if you favor them. The chocolate and nuts are intentionally short in the recipe. The traditional bourbon desserts (bourbon balls and bourbon fudge) are all heavily chocolate-based and it's hard to say no to chocolate, but we wanted something where the bourbon was given more room to flourish and chocolate can overwhelm the other flavors. In a similar fashion we didn't want this to be a very nutty cookie because that wouldn't work as well with the bourbon, but a hint of nut works well here. On the other hand the cornflakes serve to add both a non-nutty crunch as well as to enhance and interplay with the corn taste of a good bourbon.
Without being told that bourbon is used in the flavoring an average person should taste a wide variety of tastes that he/she might not be able to place, but on the ...
Jordan Weisman
I think I'd love to meet Jordan Weisman (Jordan Weisman Escapist Interview). He shares several of my crazier interests (telling stories in weird and amazing ways), started FASA and WizKids, and contributed greatly to BattleTech/Mech*, Crimson Skies, The Beast, I Love Bees and Last Call Poker among other things. Those last three, for those that know me, are of particular interest to me and a big reason why I think 42 Entertainment sounds like a really neat place to work. My only complaint against them is they play themselves off too much as a marketing company. Certainly they have the right attitude for a marketing company (marketing today isn't about in your face advertising, it's about making connections and reaching out to communities), but they certainly could use their knowledge to create non-marketing-campaign gaming experiences.
Anyway, Jordan Weisman sounds something closest to a role model for the types of things that I'd love to do if given the chance. FASA's properties, particularly BattleTech and more often Crimson Skies, are very common for me to use in hypothetical game design dialogues involving MMOs. The Beast, even though I didn't "play" it, is an oft referenced game in my gaming vocabulary and I think there are so many directions that ARGs point the way towards (for instance, my LARC plan), they just need to be pursued.
Has it been too quiet lately?, or What's going on with that Mysterious Project?
I realize I haven't posted in a while. I also realize that because of that my website was down for a week. I seem to have a memory throttling issue and haven't taken the time to track it down. I'm running on a Virtual Machine with a soft memory limit and I'm thinking that Postgres and Apache 2 are having a hard time staying within that limit... If anybody has any ideas I'd love to know.
I've been working on a project that I believe should hit "critical mass" shortly. Once the contract is signed, and I'm hoping it may be soonish (I'm waiting on my dad to have the chance to review it so that we can go over it), I'll probably put more effort into dev-blogging the work. Right now I'm in a bit of a lull as I do research quests and internally debate some of my next steps.
It's been slower going than I originally hoped, but partly that is because I forgot about the destabilizing force of Holidays. The next few weeks could be worse (Xmas), but I have a few ideas to keep that from happening. Then I just have to worry about the interruption of my mini-vacation (going to the Orange Bowl for sun and sports), and the interactions with a full course load in the Spring. I'm torn between the idea of cutting the course load for the Spring for the project and the realization that I may hopefully be only a busy Spring away from the long sought first diploma... I continue to debate bringing in a few more "employees" to help with the work load.
So far I've mostly been working on the model ("business logic") for ...
