More new features since the last time I came here; for some reason it thought I wanted to see the interface in Portuguese, which was briefly entertaining ( Read more... )

RIP to two people I never met, but who have had an impact on my life and the world ( Read more... )

Checking out lj again; let's see. Life events. At my annual stress test this year, my doctor spotted something unusual in one of the traces, decided to send me for a nuclear stress test. This is largely a boring but more involved version of the normal stress test. In a normal stress test, you get instrumented with various and sundry leads for an ( Read more... )

I don't post here very often; scattershot update. Almost nobody that I used to post on Usenet with is here anymore -- they're on Facebook, mostly, and that's a better fit to my needs. Even R hasn't posted for a good year; no obituary, so no news is good news I guess. People have been dropping like flies. Relatively sturdy, long-lived flies... okay ( Read more... )

City of Heroes is going away. I've been playing that game for over 8 years, with friends both old and new; thousands of hours. For one or two friends, that was the last place I saw them alive. It almost feels like a death in the family. I'm going to miss it a lot ( Read more... )

Saw the new Batman movie, thougt it was prtty good. Not as good as the second movie in Nolan's trilogy, but still up there. Recommended. Not going to post spoilers, because it's so new, but if you likethe darkittydark Dark Knight you should like it ( Read more... )

Last week, a group challenged the Internet to crack Agrippa, which was an art-book-with-self-destructing-diskette. The program, which ran on Macs, slowly scrolled a poem by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) and wrote over part of the disk with a sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts like an ASCII chromosome, after which the program would never run ( Read more... )

Took a weekend jaunt up to the in-law to check out a comic book exposition in Asbury Park. It is the first year for this event, held in an apparently-defunct bowling alley. It was small, with minimal lighting, loud rock music, and a small number of vendors, but there were a few interesting items acquired. Maybe in future years this will grow, but ( Read more... )

Apparently my dad had a heart attack Tuesday night, or some kind of coronary event. I found out about it because he called me this morning (Saturday) to tell me he was home and doing great. So I suppose I should look on the bright side. Sure, nobody in my family up there saw fit to call, but I didn't need to get tracked down as the next of kin. The ( Read more... )

I finally bit the bullet today and unfriended someone on Facebook. On the one hand, I feel like a bit of a coward. On the other hand, he's someone I didn't know very well in high school who has become a Reichwing blogger, every single status update made me want to shoot him in the face, and I don't want to feel that way when I'm trying to be social ( Read more... )