I have never seen language in a National Weather Service statement like this before.
I’m thinking of all you folks down there (and in Mobile and Biloxi and all along the coast to Pensacola…)
Wherever you are, please be safe…
As for the rest of you who’re concerned: Please don’t just sit there — do something. The American Red Cross is going to need a lot of donations to their national disaster relief fund. Here’s the form where you can make one.
A few other useful links:
…the Department of Things I Wish I Hadn’t Seen Quite So Early in the Morning:
(eyeroll)
If you insist on going to http://www.bumpernuts.com, that’s your business. Enjoy.
When we first knew that we’d be going to Interaction (about two instants after the bid was declared), Peter and I immediately made an agreement that we wouldn’t be doing any programming whatsoever. Last time we were at a Glasgow Worldcon, in 1995, as ToastMr. & Mrs. we spent so much time rehearsing for the Hugos, and rehearsing for rehearsals, and doing programming, and squiring Peter’s mother here and there, and generally running around going nuts, that we came home too exhausted for words, and without having seen anything like as many friends as we’d hoped to. This Glasgow Worldcon, we swore, was for chatting and lounging and hugging people.
And sure enough, after the madness of ’95, ’05 was much more about the chatting/lounging/hugging dynamic… though we still didn’t get to hug as many people as we wanted to. Some Worldcons (last year in Boston, for example) have some space or well-trodden area where, if you just sit there long enough, everybody in the convention will eventually pass by. If there was one of these at Glasgow
(possibly in the SECC?), we missed it. Never mind: we saw a whole lotta people. And had the intense pleasure of knowing that a number of friends had won Hugos, (congrats, Sue, congrats, Charlie, congrats, Ron, congrats as usual, Dave!…), giving us reasons to hug them all over again.
There were a number of good dinners (with Peter’s editors at DAW, with the noble Neil Walker and the excellent Alan and Colette, with Brian Nisbet, with Jim and Abby…) and a whole bunch of long chats in the Moat House bar, and also many, many pints of real ale: good stuff for Peter, but maybe not so much for me (in that the yeasts associated with the Reality of the ale usually leave me with a condition Peter kindly describes as “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing”. I relapsed to wine pretty quickly). Nonetheless, if the ale produces effects like those shown in the Flickr photoset I’ll link to shortly, in which P. is repeatedly seen to be in congress with the fan lounge’s inflatable shark, I guess it can’t be all bad.
Our stay was shorter than previously expected, as previously blogged: Pip the new kitten was too small to leave alone at home with the other cats as yet, and we didn’t
want to leave him in the kennel for any longer than absolutely necessary. So we arrived only on Saturday and headed home again on Tuesday — sad not to have seen everybody we’d have liked to, but happy enough to have seen those we did.
And thereby hangs a tale about which I’ll have to add more details later. While waiting for our luggage at Dublin Airport, a small child doing a LeMans number with a loaded luggage cart lost control of it and slammed the low front of the cart into my left lower leg, crunching it between his cart and our own, which was at that point braced against one of those curved metal shields they’ve just erected around the ends of the luggage carousels. I’m getting X-rayed tomorrow. But the consensus is already that, whether anything’s actually broken or not — and on sight of the way the ankle almost instantly swelled up, both the emergency medtechs and our own GP made that sucking-in-the-breath sound that plumbers and auto mechanics make when something is seriously wrong and is really going to cost you — there is certainly some external bone damage typical of a crushing injury, and also crushed and possibly torn ligaments: so that I’m going to have to stay off the left foot/ankle as much as possible for the next six weeks. (Which, considering how I feel at the moment even when the painkillers kick in, is not something I’m much going to mind. At the moment I have to go up and down the stairs sideways, hanging onto the bannister like a two-year-old.) I said to our doctor, “But I have to be in Seattle in September…!” and he just shook his head at me and said, “Out of the question.”
So…so much for CascadiaCon, which we were really looking forward to. So much for the September West-Coast microtour for Wizards at War: that’s going to have to be rescheduled into October sometime, the parts of it that still can be (and some parts, like the Pacific Northwest booksellers’ conference, can’t). So much for our nonrefundable tickets (which theoretically our travel insurance will cover, but not without the usual interminable delays). Dammit. Fooey. Argh.
(sigh) At least the kitten is in good shape. And (the slightest sour amusement) at least they’ve taken the bloody charge-you-a-Euro slots off the airport luggage carts.
Zazzah.com is supposed to be a way for people interested in doing freelance courier work to match up directly with shippers hunting couriers…thus cutting out the middleman in such transactions. Fascinating. (via John Resig’s weblog)
(Oh, yeah, and Worldcon was fabulous. More details, as promised, here.)
…This really is an issue of fruit.
In one hand, you’ve got an orange (evolution). In the other, you’ve got an apple (Intelligent Design).
If you engage in a broad discussion about fruit (why we exist), it’s proper to weigh the two. If you’re talking about citrus fruits (science), you steer clear of apples.
Why? The apple isn’t a citrus fruit. It’s a fine fruit – it’s kept many a doctor away, and knowledge of how to pie it made mom all-American – it’s just not a member of the citrus family.
The president, however, looked at both and said, “I think this apple just might be citrus fruit.”
…The laugh-out-loud line, though, comes at the end of the article. (With an “ouch!” attached.)
Ogg Vorbis is claimed to be a patent-clear, fully-open general purpose audio encoding format standard that rivals or surpasses the “upcoming” generation of proprietary coders (AAC and TwinVQ, also known as VQF).
…Vorbis is named after High Priest Vorbis, a character in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Small Gods novel.
And some of us know who “Ogg” is, too. 🙂
Rat the oarsman, neat Mrs. Tiggy Winkle,
Benjamin, pert Nutkin, or (ages older)
Henryson’s shrill Mouse, or the Mice the Frogs once
Fought with in Homer…
(Love the fountain in the right-hand column, too…)
As noted in the weblog of the noble and wise Neil Gaiman:
…the BBC article formerly entitled PRATCHETT ANGER AT ROWLING’S RISE has now transmuted into a much milder article entitled Pratchett takes swipe at Rowling, which no longer accuses Terry of very much at all, apart from “poking fun”.
…It’s definitely a good thing that online journalism is capable of revising itself to agree with reality, although it’s going to puzzle the hell out of all the people in the future who click on the links to the BBC page and are unable to discover what they’re meant to be outraged about.
Meanwhile, to everybody who’s visited Out of Ambit in the last couple/few days of this kerfuffle and friendslisted or otherwise bookmarked it: you’re entirely welcome. Please make yourselves at home.
Sci-fi fans gather for convention
Meanwhile, I wish I understood why the Java applet for the SECC webcam takes so long to load…
(A few other Glasgow webcams:)
A high street bank has said sorry to a customer after sending him a debit card containing the words “Dick Head”.
…I need another cup of tea.
“Allegra” has been with me since 1999. (Yes, that’s a long, long time in computer years…) Several novels have been written on it: its first real job was to be taken to the source of the Rhine (at Sedrun in Switzerland) for the outlining of the project which eventually became the feature/miniseries “Ring of the Nibelungs.” (Hence the computer’s name, which means “Hello!” in Sursilvan Romansch — the dialect of Switzerland’s fourth language which is spoken around Sedrun.) 
But as newer, hotter hardware came along, Allegra was eventually put aside, relegated to “spare room” use. And now we’re at one of those points where there are just too many computers piling up around the place, and it’s time to let some of them go to people who will get some use out of them. So if you’d like a little machine that isn’t too fast or too smart, but is lovable, reliable, and easy to haul around — and has served a hard-working writer long and faithfully — maybe you’d think about giving Allegra a good home.
It’s an Acer Travelmate 312T, containing a Pentium 233 MHz processor with MMX, 32 meg of RAM, a bright TFT screen, and a massive (wait for it!) 3 GB hard disk. The computer is about A5 size, or about an inch smaller around than a sheet of US letter paper: the exact outside measurements are 24 cm / 9.5 in by 17.5 cm / 7 in by 4 cm / 1.5 in, so that it will fit very comfortably inside a purse, or with plenty of room to spare, in a briefcase. It weighs 1310 grams / 2 lb 14.5 oz. It comes with external CD-ROM, 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a soft Velcro-fastened faux-leather envelope/case. (See this Flickr photoset for multiple images.)
It has Windows 98 installed at the moment. I have heard that these machines run Linux well, but I wouldn’t know enough about the subject to be able to verify the claim. I/O ports include DB-9 and RS232, 15-pin video, RJ-11 jack for a 28K “soft” WinModem, slots for 2 PCMCIA cards, IR port, USB 1.0 (one), and a PS2 jack for mouse or keyboard. The hard drive is removable, though I’ve never removed it.
Physically Allegra is in pretty good shape: a few scratches on the cover, no more. It’s been kindly used. Its one weakness right now is that its battery doesn’t hold a charge for very long. But replacements are still available: or if you want to run the machine at home, plugged in, as a spare-room machine, then you have no problems.
Obviously, for a computer that is now of “a certain age”, I’m not going to overcharge. But if you think you’d like to acquire this good little machine (and along with it, who knows, maybe a little writer-mojo — or -mojesse?), I’ll be putting it up (along with all other pertinent technical details) on eBay sometime this evening. Alternately, if by chance you’re attending Worldcon in Glasgow and you’re at all interested, let me know and I’ll bring the machine along for you to inspect. Otherwise, if you’re interested or have questions, please email me at the “contact” address in the center column.
(Update: The computer’s found its new home. Thanks for your interest, everybody!)
