So in my reading of of The Four Horseman of the ScifiBlogalypse, I’d put John Scalzi at the top of the list for entertainment value, and then a big dropoff to Charles Stross, Neil Gaiman, and Cory Doctorow. The latter two I pretty much don’t even bother with any more, despite their continuing presence in the feedreader. Gaiman is too precious for my taste and Doctorow is thin on anything outside of digital rights/free software. Stross’ problem is that he doesn’t post with the same frequency as Scalzi.

But Charlie’s been closing fast.

His series on Common Misconceptions About Publishing is a great inside look at the writing and publishing industry. Especially from the perspective of an author that knows a bit about technology. If I take one thing away from this series it’s that, “a manuscript is not a book.”

Now he gives the inside scoop on two books he highly recommends. Deep State by Walter Jon Williams is a sequel to This is Not a Game, which I highly enjoyed. I’m all in for this one. Meanwhile, I’m actually a bit scared by Stross’ description of Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief. Greg Egan already made my head explode once, and Stross is slotting Rajaniemi in that same “hard sf” bin as Egan. Not to mention that Stross thinks Rajaniemi may be a better writer than…Stross. Yikes!!

I’ll also take this opportunity to pump up This is Not a Game and Stross’ own Halting State. For whatever reason, a number of people I know and/or respect didn’t cotton to Stross. Worse, a couple of them are touting Daniel Suarez’s Daemon as some great work. Sorry folks, Daemon was dreck. Beautiful black female math genius working for the NSA gets blinded and falls in love with the heroic white identity free hacker. Does not compute. This is Not a Game and Halting State just did the near future combination of ARG, VR, and RL way better than Daemon. With actual developed characters to boot!

Just had to get that off my chest!

In a former life, I made a prediction about Amazon putting together computation, messaging and storage in a utility pricing framework. This was before Amazon EC2, and Amazon Web Services more generally, came into being. My prediction, if not dead on, was pretty accurate.

At that time, it was a little unclear what the impact of Amazon’s offerings would be. A little less than four years later and now the White House is deploying systems to EC2. And it’s not just some piddly site, but Recovery.gov. Not to mention there’s now a whole “cloud computing” industry in which EC2 is the standard bearer.

To this day, I still think EC2 is one of the coolest things to happen in computing in a long time. We overestimate the impact of change in the short run, and underestimate the impact in the long run.

I find myself using LaunchBar much more for search queries and opening URLs. And when I do I often TAB select my way into using Chrome. Might be time to switch my default browser. And who needs Choosy?

Macworld’s review of LaunchBar 5.0.2 gets to the heart of my favorite launcher. Mind the user reviews as well. I’m also using LaunchBar’s clipboard history features more and more.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta seems to be working out well so far. Dock icon madness may have been solved.

I really like Robert Hodgins’ Hello, Cinder introduction to programming with Cinder. Makes particle systems in C++ seem damn easy.

So the details of my potential next phone are out. Hardware cost is pretty reasonable for a front line smartphone: $199. I was hoping for a little better plan pricing though. Forced into a $70 “premium” smartphone plan. Then a mandatory $10 for 4G that I can’t even get? Thank god my mother in law lives in Chicago, so I might at least get an occasional taste. Sprint better roll out that 4G in DC quick. Add $30 for Mi-Fi capability and I’m looking at $110 a month.

Hmmmmm. Some serious financial analysis will be the order of the day.

But apparently the HTC Evo 4G handles video like a champ.

This may arguably be one of the worst National Basketball Association postseasons in recent memory. To wit:

• Earlier in the season, I thought the Denver Nuggets might be the only team that could take out the Lakers. Then they lost George Karl. Then they went out to the Jazz in 6 uninspired, undisciplined games.

• Oklahoma City, the most exciting young team in the league, failed to force a game seven against the champion Lakers.

• The Dallas Mavericks at least looked like a contender. With Caron Butler and Brendan Haywood they seemed a little tougher. They reverted to their typical soft form and went down in 6 to the ancient Spurs.

• There was only one game 7 in the first round. A scintillating matchup of Atlanta vs Milwaukee. In that series, Atlanta managed to get blown out on the road multiple times and lose game 5 at home.

• The conference semi-finals featured 3 sweeps. The team of the league MVP, and the best regular season record, was ousted in 6 games including an inexplicable home blowout in a “must win” game 5. The Cavaliers basically gave up with a minute to go and down less than 10 in game 6. Now all we’re left with is a frenzy of LeBron free agency speculation.

• There have been 4 sweeps total and two 5 game series. Half of the 12 series this year have been complete mismatches.

• I may be wrong about this, but there have been no overtime games so far. If there have been, they weren’t all that memorable.

To top it all off the favorites in the conference finals, Los Angeles and Orlando, are prohibitive. The Lakers have way too much size for the Suns. Boston might give Orlando a challenge, but the Magic are hot and have beaten the Celtics three out of four times this year. If form holds, we get a rematch of last years finals, with essentially the same rosters. Okay Vince Carter, Jameer Nelson, and Ron Artest might stir things up a little, but I wouldn’t predict a different outcome.

Yawn!! Jeez, the Bulls vs Celtics series last year had more excitement than this year’s playoff games combined. My only real rooting interest now is to see Steve Nash in the finals.

The NBA, where disappointment happens.

I’ve told you I like Mark Farina and of my Dieselboy fixation. Recently I’ve started putting an additional DJ in my steady iPod Nano rotation. Another Chicago House music icon, DJ Heather.

It started with Fabric 21, and it’s great sequence of Puffin Stuff, Feel Alright, and Acid Jack. I wore that CD out when I first got it, and it’s still a go to mix when I’m looking for a guaranteed foot tapper.

Picked up Dancefloor Principles which isn’t quite as good, but still definitely listenable. Por Que Amor is the highlight, while Mile High Club into Wrong is bumpin’.

Heather’s disc for House of OM, the other belonging to Colette, might be just as good as Fabric 21. I love Tracy Cooper’s Uptown. The Dopeheadz Now I Got makes a strong contribution as well.

And lastly, the DJ Heather mix on OM Summer Sessions 2 doesn’t have any spectacular moments, but I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit lately. I especially like the tail end of the mix including the sequence of Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Zoooom, Free Your Mind, and Don’t Clap Your Hands.

I would link to her web site, but it’s a heinous Flash only destination. You’ll have to settle for @djheather.

Memo to self, purchase the Tangerine and DJ International Allstars mixes.

I know about and use virtualenv for Python quite frequently. I’ve had an off and on relationship with pip, allegedly “… a replacement for the (outmoded) easy_install command.” My main issue has been key packages that don’t install over the network, requiring a fallback to easy_install. Adam Charnock has a couple of pip tips that might improve our arrangement. Also includes a link to a handy guide on pip and packaging.

The Thunderbird dock icon in Mac OS X shows a count. Of what, I’m not sure. But the count doesn’t jibe with what I expect, that being the number of unread messages in my Inbox. It’s unclear whether this is a bug or poorly understood default, but it’s driving me up a wall.

I’m desperate enough to give a Thunderbird 3 beta a test drive.

If there was any NBA team in this year’s playoffs that could blow a 3-0 lead it would be the Phoenix Suns. Except this isn’t the same old Suns.

Los Suns went into San Antonio last night and completed the sweep over the Spurs, winning 107-101. What’s remarkable to me is the resiliency of this Suns team. Robin Lopez out for the series? No problem. Down 18 points in Game 3? No problem. Steve Nash whacked in the face, oddly reminiscent of Robert Horry checking him into the scorer’s table? No problem.

The old Suns typically laid down when faced with adversity. These guys recover and battle back. I’ve always liked Steve Nash and would be really happy to see him in the NBA Finals.

But with the Lakers in the way (probably) I wouldn’t bet on it.

You know, Facebook has really been bugging me recently. It’s not only the progressively disappearing privacy. The interface tweaking is driving me up a wall. I pretty much don’t post to Facebook, but I’m friends with a few folks and don’t mind reading their status updates. But I need filters. Every time I get some decent ones set up, Facebook goes and tweaks the interface and/or obsoletes my filters.

Marc Smith’s Data Banks vs Data Pimps succinctly captures my unease in a sweet analogy. Generalizing to all social media sites, he asks whether they will be like banks, honoring commitments to “security, confidentiality, and reliability” in perpetuity, or pimps, ready to violate their “relationships” at a moment’s notice for a quick buck?

I would add that along with personal data, user preferences are currency as well. Social media sites would do well to highly value that currency and not devalue it easily.

If this report of Clearwire, and presumably Sprint, widely expanding its WiMAX footprint is true, this summer means D-Day for a new smartphone for me. A reasonable combination of HTC Evo price, acceptable MiFi fee, and decent Sprint data plan, means I’m on board with them. Otherwise, I’ll be looking at Verizon’s Palm offerings with their free tethering.

The current rumor has the release data for the Evo being June 6th, with the phone costing $200 under contract (probably 2 years). If the monthly bill is south of $100 I’d likely go for it. But I’ll wait a month, catch the early reviews, and let the initial bugs shake out. End of July and I’ll be a new phone owner.

Great night of playoff action in the NBA and NHL:

• LeBron James and the Cavaliers tee off on the Celtics and blow them out in Game 3 on the parquet floor.

• Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers tied at 3 well into the third period. The Broad Street Bullies trying desperately to avoid the sweep and stay alive.

• Los Suns, surprisingly solid in the half-court and leading 2-0, visit San Antonio in the second half of the NBA doubleheader. Good on Los Suns for standing up a little against Arizona’s ill-devised immigration laws.

• And Chicago resumes its battle with the Vancouver Canucks to round out the NHL twinbill.

Bonus action: Yankees vs Rd Sox, and the Nationals playing halfway decent against the Marlins.

So I think I’m going to declare failure on my 100 hours project. While I did announce Mission Accomplished, and got peyote done as a decent first step, I subsequently lost all enthusiasm for the project. Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I logged 100 hours, shortly after mission accomplished I completely fell off the wagon. I was hoping it could spark a flame and lead to a long term continuous effort.

Some culprits, in no particular order:

• Performance. I got peyote to perform decently, but I don’t think I can retain the processing model and achieve processing’s frame rates. The major culprit is that Numpy is poor at location by location array access. Not Numpy’s fault, just not quite the right tool. And I’m not really into doing the deep dig needed to speed things up, if it even can be done.

• Work. Over the last month and a half we’ve had some big pushes at work, with about another three weeks to go, at least. Makes me want to just sleep on the way home.

• Family. My wife was out of town for a couple of extended stints (3-5 days) which means I wind up driving in to work a little more than usual, or having to take the bus during more crowded trips. Throws off my short hacking windows. Not to mention I have a little guy I have to try and keep up with right after getting home.

• Opportunity. I could only work on peyote on my laptop. Limits the opportunities to do little micro hacks.

• Lack of Vision. I thought getting into creative coding would come naturally. At the end of the day, I really didn’t have anything concrete I wanted to work towards.

Summer’s coming on, so I may get more consistent time to work on a new personal project. Some things I’ll be looking to do next time around:

• Better Task Management. I’ll probably use some kind of issue tracker or todo list to help retain little micro tasks that can be knocked out quickly.

• Streaking. No not the naked kind. Setting a goal of n consecutive days of working on the project. I’ve been doing that as a personal goal on another venture. I’m now amazed at how the thought of missing a day seems sacrilegeous.

• Web Oriented. Just so I can get the satisfaction of seeing something living, breathing, and publicly accessible. Also, not being desktop based should allow for opportunities to make progress from a wide variety of machines.

• DVCS. I think I’ve learned enough of git to be halfway dangerous. Using a distributed version control system (DVCS) should also increase progress opportunities.

• Sports. If it’s one thing I follow religiously, it’s sports. Might as well take advantage of the enthusiasm.

But enough of my bitching.

Blame no one. Expect nothing. Do something.

Okay, so this is the time of the year I’m really missing living in Chicago. The weather’s starting to turn from Winter to Summer (no, there’s no Spring in Chicago). “Wait until next year,” is not yet applicable to either the Cubs or Sox. And if you’re lucky, playoffs in the NBA or NHL.

I was lucky enough to arrive in Chicago at the tail end of the Bulls second threepeat. The Cubs Bartman catastrophe was tragic, but I felt the full impact of the Curse of the Billy Goat. I got to experience the 2005 White Sox World Series run. While I was cutting out of town, headed for DC, during the Bears 2006-07 Super Bowl run, there were a couple of NFL playoff disappointments thrown in.

The great thing about playoffs in Chicago is that every day feels like either party time, on game day, or party eve, on the off days. When the game is on, if you don’t have a ticket you stroll up to your favorite watering hole, grab a stool, and cheer for the home team.

I’d love to be out there rubbing shoulders with Blackhawks fans during this year’s Stanley Cup run.

Don’t know who benderTV is, but he or she has a nice collection of short tip videos posted on vimeo. They seem quite well done and currently most of them are related to LaunchBar.

That’s where I learned that LaunchBar actually lets you select a non-default browser when opening a URL.

I use MarsEdit as my blog writing and posting tool. While it’s been serviceable, I can’t say I’m in love with the tool. In an ideal world, I’d have an Emacs mode that interfaced to MovableType.

Now there’s a new version of MarsEdit out. ArsTechnica has a good overview of the latest edition. The big feature is WYSIWYG style rich text editing. Since I write posts using Markdown formatting, I don’t really have a big need for rich text editing. I’ll have to give the trial version a test drive to see if there’s a noticeable difference, but at $14.95 for an upgrade, I may wait a little bit.

Branching out from a Dieslboy dominated DnB collection, I picked up Gridlok’s Break The System. The DJ mix part of the album has been in pretty solid rotation.

Break The System starts out strong, with an interesting spoken word, futuristic, manifesto regarding humanity needing to “break the system”. Wake Up, Bottomfeeder, and Watching Us bring a lot of energy and seem to be working towards a great peak.

Then Break The System sort of plateaus. I can’t say any of the subsequent tracks are weak, but a little more variation was needed. Also, the initial manifesto was never followed up on thematically, as far as I can tell.

Infected is the track that keeps me coming back. I’m a sucker for a really strong close to a mix. However, it would have been great to have this as a mid-mix peak, and then close with something just as strong. Halfway through the listener is “infected” and then by the end he becomes a tool for breaking the system.

Or something like that.

In any event, Break The System isn’t off the charts great, but it’s a good listen.

Frankly, I was thinking there would never by anything that would ever draw me back into C++ programming. Java is about as far as I’m willing to descend into systems level programming these days.

The Barbarian Group’s Cinder is actually tempting enough to make me reconsider. Cinder is a C++ framework for creative coding, ala processing. From the project’s About page:

CINDER PROVIDES A POWERFUL, INTUITIVE TOOLBOX for programming graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry. Cinder is cross-platform, and in general the exact same code works under Mac OS X, Windows and a growing list of other platforms — most recently the iPhone and iPad.

CreativeApplications.net also has a good summary of Cinder’s capabilities, with a nice gallery of sample projects.

With my increased usage of Chrome, I send URLs between browsers more frequently. This just at the time my trial license of Choosy has expired.

The thought occurred to me that maybe this is a problem that LaunchBar could solve, if I just dug in a little bit. Turns out LaunchBar is easily up to the task. Here’s the sequence:

• Copy the URL to the clipboard (Control-click on the link in the browser)

• Option-Command-\, should bring up the clipboard history with the copied URL first at the top of the list (Key sequence may have been customized in your LaunchBar, check under Preferences > Clipboard)

• Tab, browser selections come up

• Return, opens in the selected library

One more gesture, link to clipboard, than Choosy, but it’s a start.

I’m also thinking there’s probably a way to use scripting to send the currently selected URL to LaunchBar’s “Open Location” action. The key part is to get the URL to a point where you can actually select from the various installed browsers. Turns out LaunchBar’s provision for browser selection (you can just Tab when a URL is the current target object), works pretty well. And it’s handy all throughout LaunchBar.

Thanks to 1Password working in Google Chrome, I’m starting to use Google’s browser more and more often. Not quite ready to make the full time leap, but here are some reasons I might.

Overall performance is pretty good, but not lights out amazing. This might be my net connection, even though I’ve got fiber. Often when opening new URLs, the Chrome retrieval indicator will spin for a bit. But then pages render almost instantaneously.

I like Alt-Return to open tab in foreground, Option-Return to open tab in background.

The Chrome address bar is a decent equivalent of Firefox’s Awesome Bar. Even better is the fact that Chrome combines search across your browsing history, Google search, and keywords. Turns out to be pretty convenient.

Well that sucked! Talk about not winnin’ time. The Capitals blew a 3 games to 1 series lead over the Canadiens, and lost game 7 in their first round series. Best regular season NHL team. Seeded #1 in the Eastern Conference. At home no less. Out!

The really sad thing is that we are now left with the awful dregs of the Washington area sports scene: The Nationals okay, so they’re above .500, it’s still April, the Orioles, you can already lock in another losing season, the Redskins offseason, Joey Galloway? Bobby Wade? Yeesh, and the NBA lottery for the Wizards, Here’s looking at the fourth or fifth pick.

Actually the NBA draft might be fairly deep this year, so there could be a bit of excitement in this region. Otherwise, dreck as far as the eye can see.

Looking forward to Red Wings versus Sharks though! Go Datsyuk!

So what to make of a film sequel that has to rely on the original’s supporting actor? Not to mention the fact that it’s a sequel of a fairly unintelligent street racing flick. And the new supporting actor is a B-list actor/model/rapper.

Don’t know why, but I always enjoy 2 Fast, 2 Furious. Some reasons?

• Paul Walker. He’s got just enough acting chops to play the laid back surfer/skater/racer type and make you believe he’s not faking.

• Tyrese Gibson hamming it up, especially when he’s confronting the cops and jerking Verone’s henchmen around.

• Ludacris as an illegal street race organizer.

• And of course, lots of eye candy. Special shoutouts to Eva Mendes and Devon Aoki.

The plot is beyond ludicrous. The setup defies suspension of disbelief. The climax and denouement are strictly by the numbers formulaic. But in-between the start and finish, 2 Fast, 2 Furious is good old dumb action fun.

I’ve talked about the key/datastructure store Redis before. There’s been a lot of interesting progress over the past few months leading up to a stable 1.2 release.

Simon Willison put together a great presentation on Redis for a European NoSQL conference. On the web, it’s essentially his slides + the notes he used for the presentation. The really excellent aspect is his focus on practical examples of how to use the various features of Redis. Really good stuff.

Sparked by his slide on redis-cli, I had an idle thought about how it might be fun to trick out IPython with a bunch of extensions for interacting with a Redis DB. One of these days when I get a round tuit.

Running across Matchure gave me good vibes regarding the utility of pattern matching in higher order programming languages. Pattern matching is still an undervalued mechanism in modern programming. A kissing cousin of Lisp macros, pattern matching is a nice high-level way to express tree structure matching and binding of matched substructure to variables. It’s simultaneously easy to decompose structures and immediately compute over the decomposition. Similar to regular expressions over strings, functional style patterns tend to look like the structures they’re trying to match.

I have a soft spot for pattern matching because in my dissertation I suggested that they would be a powerful addition to multimedia scripting languages, especially languages embedded in Web browsers. The pattern matching would be handy for dealing with the tree structure of HTML pages.

I was both wrong and right. Functional style pattern matching never did wind up in the browser. But XPath in JavaScript bears witness that tree destructuring is actually pretty useful. Every language could seemingly use pattern matching, but it’s exceedingly hard to embed in languages with Algol-style syntax.

It’s been a pretty full buffet of NBA playoff action the past couple of days. Thursday and Friday showcased three games. This weekend we got four games on Saturday and four more on Sunday. The only downside for me is that most of the good games have been the Western Conference late nighters. I’m an early riser these days, so typically don’t make it past the first quarter, if that, of those games.

Some quick observations:

• Thought Miami was going to give the Celtics some trouble, but the C’s have demonstrated much better winnin’ time experience.

• The Lakers are in a little bit of trouble. A couple of bad bounces here or there, or an inconvenient injury, and they could be put out by the OKC Thunder. Kevin Durant, The Slim Assassin (TM).

• I don’t know how the Utah Jazz are doing it against the Denver Nuggets. George Karl taking a leave for cancer treatment seems to have really put the Nuggets off kilter. Going into the playoffs I thought Denver was the only team with a chance to take out the Lakers. Now I’m not so sure about either the Lakers or the Nuggets.

• Suns vs Trail Blazers seems like the most fun series going.

• The Bulls just don’t have the talent to stay with the Cavs. Hope that free agent thing works out for the Bulls this off season.

Oh, and living near the nation’s capital I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Stanley Cup playoffs. Rock the Red! Ovechkin and the Capitals are stringing out this series with the Canadiens a little longer than necessary, but I’m pretty sure they’ll get the job done. I stupidly dipped out of yesterday’s Chicago/Nashville game, right after Hossa got his penalty, thinking the game was over.

Another really useful Dashboard widget is Deep Sleep, which allows you to easily send your Mac into a power saving hibernation. Ed Hunsinger has the best explanation of Mac sleep modes that I’ve seen so far.

The nice thing about Deep Sleep is that it can supplement your default suspend activity for when a Mac laptop lid is closed. You can have the close go to the basic “sleep” mode and clicking on the widget lead to a “hibernate”. Very handy.

And the Deep Sleep widget is free to boot.

The fine folks at Bjango have updated iStat Menus. There’s a whole raftload of improvements and fixes for my favorite Macintosh status monitoring tool. Unobtrusively located in my menu bar, iStat menus does its job efficiently and quietly.

Two of the major changes appear to be that first iStat Menus is no long donationware. If you want a license, ante up $10. Second, instead of a preference pane, configuration is now done through a full fledged application. Seems reasonable to me, although over at Macworld, a few folks seem upset.

Also, even though it looks abandoned, iStat Pro is a nice Dashboard widget version of the monitors in iStat Menus.

I’ve been following [DJ Mark Farina’s Twitter stream][2] and it’s been pretty entertaining. Poor guy went over to Dubai, then Europe, and got stuck on the continent thanks to the volcano eruption. Had to come back to SF via Munich to Rome to NYC. Then on his next trip out, to gig in El Paso, TX, he gets stuck in Denver due to tornados!! Poor guy. He also dropped a tweet on this recent [interview][1] he did with [Radio4by4][3] *(music autoplay warning)*. This may be the first time I’ve actually seen or heard an interview with him. A little softspoken, but interesting stuff about his new label, Great Lakes Audio; EP, Geograffiti; and the Winter Music Conference. Best of all he said three words that are music to my ears… **Mushroom Jazz 7**, Looking like a Fall drop for North America. I’m all over it. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD_Tgkn3MAw [2]: http://twitter.com/djmarkfarina [3]: http://www.radio4by4.com/

Still searching for the perfect desktop search application on the Mac, I ran across Alfred. Relatively new, released on Feb 28th 2010, Alfred seems more oriented towards quick launching of applications. Sort of square in the LaunchBar, Quicksilver, Google Quick Search Box arena. Initial reviews highlight that Alfred’s main goal is to be simpler and faster than those alternatives.

Well I’m pretty happy LaunchBar, but I thought I’d log Alfred here just for future reference. Still searching for search on the Mac.

Gang Starr, was definitely a distinctive part of the late 80’s-early 90’s, positive hip hop movement. Besides DJ Premier’s great mixing and cutting, Guru (seen at right in the adjacent photo) had both a unique lyrical style and unique vocal sound. Together Guru and Premier epitomized the intersection of Hip-Hop and Jazz.

Herewith, some of their best tracks:

• Words I Manifest

• Jazz Thing

• Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? (I was raised like a Muslim / Prayin’ to the East)

• Step In The Arena

• DWYCK (Leaving the bodega I say suave / Premier’s got more beats than barns got hay)

• Take It Personal

• Mass Appeal

Guru has passed on, after a long battle with cancer. He was my age. His death, along with Malcolm McLaren’s, seems like the beginning of the end for an era of Hip-Hop that highly influenced me. An era before pimps and hoes, n*s and b*s, ghetto fabulous and bling, took over the main stage. An era when Hip-Hop held a little more dignity for the Black man.

Godspeed kind sir.

And whatever this beef is between Guru, Solar, and Premier, it’s whack! Kill the noise.

Spoke too soon about the death of the writer’s advice posts that io9’s Charlie Jane Anders had been delivering. A new one popped up today with a list of 4 basic writing tips. I find it hard to believe that anyone seriously aspiring to be published didn’t already know these basic hints for avoiding lifeless, limp writing.

What do I know though? The post seems to be attracting a decent number of views and comments, at least relative to some other posts currently on the front page. I guess there must be plenty of wannabe authors in the io9 audience.

Color me skeptical, but…

Ridley Scott directing a version of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War might actually turn out halfway decent. Agent Orange’s post on io9 would intimate that this might happen. A little better sourcing would be helpful though.

One can dream can’t they.

Previously I had mentioned that I was “fiending for some NBA playoff action”. Well the playoffs are here and I’ve got a veritable cornucopia of NBA with 4 games today and 4 tomorrow. The first couple of games, Eastern Conference I might add, were duds. The Cavs smoked, then coasted on, the Bulls. Meanwhile, the Hawks ran away from the Bucks. I don’t expect much out of either of those series, but the Heat might give the Celtics some heartburn. They’ve been leading for most of the game in Boston.

But there’s also the NHL playoffs getting started too. The Washington Capitals being the only winning team in the DC area, and the best regular season team in the NHL, are generating a lot of excitement. They slipped up in game one of their series with Les Habitants, but game 2 was a roller coaster, overtime thriller victory. Forget Ovie, Backstrom is the man. Rock the red!!

A late comer to hockey, I’ve finally figured out at least one of the really distinguishing feature of the game. In many other sports, the game slows down at the end. Football? Get out of bounds, throw an incompletion, spike the ball, the clock stops. Basketball? Foul or call timeouts to extend the game. Baseball? Keep bringing in relievers or keep fouling it off until that 27th out. In hockey, due to continuous play and limited time outs, it’s hard to slow the game down. So the players work harder, faster, and with more desperation in the amount of time remaining. A hockey game accelerates at the end, a refreshing change from other sports.

Ran across Joost de Valk’s Quix, a bookmarklet that pops up a dialog box and then provides a bevy of commands that work within the context of the current browser page. Plus it’s extensible with your own commands.

Quix is an extensible bookmarklet, that allows you to easily access all your bookmarks and bookmarklets, across all your browsers, while maintaining them in only one spot. All you have to do is remember the shortcut for the bookmarklet, so, basically, it’s like a command line for your browser

Quix reminds me of the currently napping Mozilla Ubiquity experiment, which put the command line right in the browser’s URL bar. If I wasn’t so into LaunchBar as my command launcher, I’d probably really dig into one of these command line in a browser extensions. While I’m sure Quix and Ubiquity are good for running macro style one-liners, I’d be interested to see what a real browser shell language looked like. Sort of how Shivers describes the UNIX shell languages.

Unix shells, such as sh or csh, provide two things at once: an interactive command language and a programming language. Let us focus on the latter function: the writing of “shell scripts” — interpreted programs that perform small tasks or assemble a collection of Unix tools into a single application.

Unix shells are real programming languages. They have variables, if/then conditionals, and loops. But they are terrible programming languages. The data structures typically consist only of integers and vectors of strings. The facilities for procedural abstraction are non-existent to minimal. The lexical and syntactic structures are multi-phased, unprincipled, and baroque.

Scheme for driving a browser. Hmmmm. Now there’s a language design I’d like to see.

Via MetaFilter

Now this is the kind of content I really enjoy from io9. A nice, in-depth review, by Charlie Jane Anders, of Ian McEwan’s book Solar. Solar, a tale of a physics anti-hero that’s part speculative fiction, part satire, and from a literary star seems right up my alley, cf. Margaret Atwood.

The problem for me is that Solar is currently only available in hardback. I’m really avoiding those editions these days due to the bulk. No, I don’t have or lust for a Kindle or iPad. I’ll be waiting for a trade paperback version, which we might never get here in the US.

P. S. I wish Anders could spend more time on book reviews, as opposed to all the other electronic media related posts she generates. At least that ill-fated writing advice theme bit the dust. Too inside baseball.

As someone who has adorned his MacBook with a number of stickers, and a long time fan of the free software movement, I wholly endorse the open source sticker campaign. openstickers.com is a free as in beer and free as in freedom collection of images that you can print on adhesive paper, cut out, and stick wherever you like.

Now where do I get adhesive photographic paper?

In the continuing effort to ramp up my Drum ‘N Bass experience, I’ve been really enjoying Dieselboy’s The Human Resource. The mix from this CD doesn’t have quite the highs (or lows) of The Dungeonmaster’s Guide but it’s really consistent high energy DnB. Technically mixed by Evol Intent, highlights include Styles of Beyond’s Subculture, Evol Intent + Ewun’s The Rapture, and Dieselboy + Technical Itch on Atlantic State (Gridlok Remix).

Just a good, hard, dark, twisty ride over some rugged beats and some nasty synth lines. Gets the feet tappin’ and the head noddin’

I spent the better part of eight plus years in the great city of Chicago. I had a lot of Chicago style hot dogs while I was there and enjoyed 90% of them. I got to a lot of the iconic hot dog places around the city. The Wiener’s Circle (for a late night harangue no less), Chicago Dog, Portillo’s, Gold Coast, Maxwell Street, etc. Hot Doug’s closed before I could get to it and I never did make it to Superdawg.

So it is with great pleasure that I discovered Windy City Red Hots, right here in Loudoun County, VA. Living in Loudoun means driving up and down Route 7, past a flower nursery where the Windy City truck is parked. For the longest time I thought this had to be a sad, cruel joke, so I didn’t make time to stop and check it out.

Boy was I wrong! These guys are legit. I’ve only had a Polish, but it looked, smelled, and tasted straight from a Chicago city block party. They’ve also got red hots, Italian beef, and pizza puffs (?!?!). The Washington Post has a good article on Windy City Red Hots. Sorry, if it’s behind a pay wall. Now if they’d only add a small selection of brats, I’d be in heaven. Highly recommended and I plan on giving them my regular patronage.

I have to admit though, I’m a bit of a heretic. I like ketchup on my dogs. Sue me.

Sky1 is doing an adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s book Going Postal. I quite enjoyed the adventures of Moist von Lipwig and maybe one day I’ll get to see this production. I noticed from the trailer though a lack of von Lipwig’s gold suit. What gives?

Ran across this word while reading David Denby’s excellent review of Clint Eastwood’s career. Was instantly struck by a certain elegance and the clear Latin root.

inamorata, via Wiktionary

1. n., \in-am-uh-RAH-tuh\, a female lover or love interest

Seems like a word apropos of Elle Driver’s fetish for gargantuan.

I’ve always liked that word… “inamorata”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.