( Being a meandering account of an inaugural triumph in making that classic summer libationCollapse )

My 2006 Civic 4-door automatic is getting up towards 70k total miles, and while in many ways I'm as happy with it as I was with the 1997 version that preceded it, I've become aware of a few problems. Worse: as far as I can tell these are not problems with my specific vehicle, but inherent design flaws with the model. Feh!

( gripe gripeCollapse )

A number of my friends seem to like Charles Stross, and a couple of his novels came into the bookstore recently, so I gave them a go. Massive spoilers below.

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It's official. I gave notice today at Openwave, and will be starting at Google on 3/31.

Miscellaneous youtube videos for songs I've been listening to lately below the cut. I expect some of these to appall various family members, but to them I have only one thing to say: Ed McCurdy.

( Six videosCollapse )

I just learned that one of my coworkers was once in a band (Annwn) that toured with one of Emma Bull's bands (Flash Girls).

Funky.

A friend of mine, Andrew Plotkin, has undertaken a monumental task: annotating and cross-referencing John M. Ford's masterpiece of alternate history, The Dragon Waiting. The fruits of this labor, Draco Concordans, just went live. Here's his announcement to the Nielsen-Hayden weblog Making Light:

( The AnnouncementCollapse )

It's magnificient, and illuminating. After reading through it [and rereading the novel afterwards] I can't believe that this book was not shortlisted for the Nebula in 1984.

Go read it, everyone who hasn't, then hit the concordance and revel in just how much depth there is! Puns, quite subtle thematic ties across the whole book, actual versus Ford's history, sly references to contemporary SF... it's just dizzying. Mr. Plotkin has done a wonderful job.

Inspired by recent conversations on IFmud, I've been tearing through my collection of Jack Vance stories in an orgy of rereading. Vance doesn't seem to be widely read nowadays, but I've always been fond of his work. He was successful and indeed decorated in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery—one of only three writers I know of to win both a Nebula and an Edgar Allen Poe award.^†

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Everyone remembers which story Valentine Michael Smith is in, or Paul Atriedes, or Sarah Connor. But do you remember...?

Name the F/SF story in which these less-prominent characters appear. Only one correct guess per person per day please, to give everybody a chance to play. As usual, some are more obscure than others. More than one work by a given author may be represented. Struck-through entries have already been guessed. (I'll also be adding more characters for the tough ones as they go unguessed.)

Final update: Answers provided for the 4 that went unguessed. Thanks for playing along, everybody!

( On to the quiz...Collapse )

This is probably old news, but oh my. A marble-based 6-bit binary ripple carry adder.