geekdom – Page 31 – Wis[s]e Words

Swine flu

Published on April 27, 20094 Comments

I was somewhat surprised at the wall to wall hysteria about that outbreak of swine flu on display in the free newspapers here this morning. SARS and bird flu has us primed for worry about any novel flu epidemic, but is there really any reason to get so panicky about it? Especially when so far there haven’t been any Dutch cases whatsoever, nor all that many in Europe. So much tosh is talked about these “pandemics”, when the death rates even in Mexico are barely hitting three figures. It’s just embarassing how quickly we get paniced by these stories.

Some people may have ulterior motives for getting all het up about swine flu though, a certain kind of science fiction fan for example. Let Dr Elmo explain:

It is anthropologically interesting that SF fans are among the most eager hand-wringers. I think this is probably because it’s the kind of thing that allows an SF fan to demonstrate how Heinleinian they are–how prepared they are, how authoritative their flu kit is, how they reduce their chance of catching it, how exemplary is their (self!) treatment when they do catch it, compared to the mundanes, who are ignorant and incompetent.

Neal Stephenson on science fiction, geeks and literature

Published on October 9, 2008

Is this your life?

Published on July 17, 2003

I expect this job ad has been blogged all over the world by now, as it has shown up in #afp already, but it’s too funny not to post. This could’ve been my life, if things had worked out a little different… I still got the Adminspotting t-shirt.

So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the “correction”. Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of “Unclean! Unclean!” is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile. There’s a good chance you listen to either Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus or elaborate Paul Oakenfold remixes, with a bit of bootlegged Chemical Brothers thrown in for good measure. Maybe you find yourself missing the ashtray completely, and your ESC through F3 keys are thoroughly clogged up with burned, cancerous grey flakes. For better or for worse, you’re familiar with such repugnant images as goatse.cx and know what STFU means. In all probability your beverage of choice is Jolt/Columbian Cola, and you have the weeping stomach ulcers to prove it. You give copies of Photoshop 7.0 to your friends, thereby depriving a fat CEO somewhere of a heated driveway. You have a world-crushing collection of MP3s. Your author of choice: Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. You have every volume of Gaiman’s Sandman series, though you decided after Volume III that it`s all a bit of a wank. Sometimes, you pretend you are in The Matrix. Your half-elf mage/rogue is at Level 9, and has actually worked out how to put a Bag of Holding within another Bag of Holding without imploding Ravenloft. You can pronounce “Urotsukidoji” without hurting yourself, and can rocket-jump better than anyone you know. You have a bit of an attitude when it comes to Windows XP, and you like to recompile kernels.

No Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus, but lots of KMFDM and Rammstein, as well as more “classic” metal. Don’t smoke but did drink more coke than is possible for a healthy body. Yes to goatse.cx and STFU or RTFM even, no to giving away copies of photoshop and indeed my mp3 collecting style cannot be beat. (three words: off-site backup storage) Don’t do roleplaying, always knew there was more to comix than overpraised goth boy and Gibson only wrote one good novel, while Stephenson is excellent but annoying at times. Can pronounce “Urotsukidoji” though and yes, I do have an attitude about XP. Until the fucker fucking stops fucking up, I fucking will.

Google buys blogger

Published on February 16, 2003Leave a comment

From a story done for the San Jose Mercury News and reported on Dan Gillmor’s weblog:

But now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company’s director of corporate communications, called “a global self- publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation.”

“We’re thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies,” he said in a statement on Saturday. He didn’t elaborate further on what those synergies and opportunities might be, but said more details would emerge soon. Users of the Blogger software and hosting service won’t see any immediate changes, he added.

For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service more reliable and robust.

That last is good news at least. For the rest we’ll have to wait and see, but if there’s one company I trust not to fuck things up, it’s Google.

Something’s gone horribly wrong

Published on May 21, 2002Leave a comment

Huh. It seems every second weblog I try to read today is having trouble — and they had all created with Blogger. Seems to me this has been happening a bit more lately. Just shows how important it is to have control of your weblogging sofware, I guess.

Fortunately what I use is Blosxom which is no more then a clever Perl script developed by Rael Dornfest, a researcher at O’Reilly. It’s lightweight, easy to use and adapt and open source. Check it out.