Well, we’re going on vacation tomorrow. We’re driving, so that means leaving early, and little or no sleep for us. At any rate, it should be fun, as long as the van doesn’t break down. It’s going to be really good to get away from work for a while, and just chill.
I’m hoping to find some hotspots, so that I can email and blog from down there. More, hopefully, later.
Big fire downtown today, in the abandoned building across the street from Grex. I stopped by on the way home from work to see what was going on. I wish I had a camera, but I didn’t . Anyway, the building has been fenced off for a month or so, and I seem to remember squatters being busted there some time ago. The part of it facing Huron was a raging inferno when I was there. The whole roofline was ablaze. Pretty cool. The firemen were mostly lobbing water over the top of the building onto the fire, which doesn’t seem like a very effective tatic. It’s been my experience that you have to get into the fire and shoot at the base of it. But then, since it was an abandoned building in the process of being torn down, maybe they were only working to contain it, figuring that it wasn’t worth risking life to actually put the fire out, and they could let it burn out instead. That makes a lot of sense to me.
Anyway, later this evening, we went downtown to go to the book store, and there was this miasma of smoke over the whole downtown. Kindof makes you glad you don’t live in LA, and that we don’t use open woodfires and torches for heat and light. The smoke was odd, because it was relatively odorless. I mean, you could smell it, but it didn’t even smell as strong as a woodfire, and was nowhere near as bad as someone smoking near you. The other day, for example, we got home and the entire parking lot reeked of marijuana. Much much stronger than this. And, it didn’t smell like chemicals or plastic burning, just a wood smoke smell with a faint overtone of fireworks. Definitely quite interesting overall.
It was still going buring when we came home about 11. We don’t have fires like this very often around here.
Okay, take two. I made this entry earlier today, but it’s not there for some reason. Anyway, here it is, as much as I remember.
Here’s another link post. Yeah, I know it’s cheating, but it’s an easy entry. Anyway, here is a list of cliches from science fiction. I agree with most of the, but some of them I think are okay, and I disagree with the catagorization of some of them, but on the whole, the list is pretty good.
Of course, the coolest thing about this post, is that the computer, Enphilistor, is named after an Arisian from the Lensman books… 
Check this out! There’s an actual entry in the jargon file for this:
binary four n.
[Usenet] The finger, in the sense of `digitus impudicus’. This comes from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e. 1=00001=thumb, 2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb, 4=00100. Considered silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of finger, sense 4.
Janette and I’ve used this before.
Okay, this is really cool. This guy is making a lego Star Wars space ship for each letter of the alphabet not already done. These are really awesome, and some game company should hire this guy to design their ships.
W00t! I just discoverd convert(1) from the ImageMagick suite. Command line image resizing goodness! Quick resizes for images from the digital camera, coming right up…
Most bloggers seem to be women. Young women, too, generally in high school or college. I know, this is not a scientific study, if any survey studies are actually meaningful, but I’ve been reading random blogs for a number of weeks now, and most of them are women.
I was going to wax philosophic about why I think this is, but suddenly I’m feeling lethargic about this entry, so I’m not going to write any more. Tough, deal.
I saw this on slashdot today. To save you from reading it, it’s an analysis of copyright registrations, and how the changes in copyright law have affected them over the last century. That part’s not very interesting, and the conclusion is that the huge copyright extensions haven’t caused any rise in the number of copyrights obtained.
The interesting part is an analysis of the music industry. There’s apparently a linear correlation between new albums released and number of albums sold. That’s not particularly surprising, at least to me. Albums will quickly reach saturation in the market, and sales will fall off to basically nothing.
What he discovered is that new releases dropped 8.7% in 2000, and the model he created predicted a decline in sales which was actually greater than the actual decline in sales. So, the RIAA actually came out ahead. This validates my previous opinion that the decline in record sales is directly related to the release of fewer (and worse) records, and has nothing to do with online trading.
So, I’ve noticed that orchestral stings are everywhere. Presumably, they’re not real orchestral stings, but done on a synth, but the idea is the same. For example, almost the entire music for Who Wants to be a Millionaire consists of OSs. I guess they think they’re dramatic. I’ve noticed they’re in a lot of songs, since I’ve started listening. Savage Garden, for example, uses them a lot. Now, I just saw a Dodge comercial that featured heavy use of OSs. Fortunately, Norah Jones doesn’t use them.
At any rate, it makes me wonder. Why this huge use of OSs, and why didn’t I notice this before? Granted, it’s a rather neat sound effect, and it’s really easy to make with a synth, but why so common?
Okay, it’s a stupid entry, but it’s what occured to me.