Sometimes, when looking for a book to read, I just look at the Hugo and Nebula award lists and pick one. Recently I read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, which I had been warned by cxi162 had some flaws, which I can now agree with. It's easy to see why it won the Hugo, the ideas are great futurist thought, but the actual storyline is pretty simple, and ( Read more... )

Well, Elon Musk learned the hard way that rocket science isn't easy, but on the fourth try, they made it to orbit. So a hearty congratulations to the SpaceX team (as if they read this).

As of yesterday I have 5 years as a state employee under my belt. Yay, just 25 more and I can retire. And where's my damn plaque!

Oh, as a corollary to a post I think I made a while ago (when I rediscovered the library - free books; who knew?) the local regional library system is very nice but somewhat limited. In my selective blindness about libraries, I also was for some reason forgetting that the VT library has quite a bit of fiction available. And we're talking years ( Read more... )

Has anyone read any of Iain M. Banks' The Culture books? Did you enjoy them, and if you know me well, do you think I'd enjoy them?

Well, as expected, Joe Horn won't be indicted. Next they'll be letting people shoot each other for jaywalking no doubt. Mr. Horn should be thanking God that the burglars he shot happened to not be American citizens, because I have no doubt that he'd be in real hot water if there were crying wives and children on TV ( Read more... )

Services on vond.net (specifically, the vond.net domain, I haven't done any others yet) are now available over IPv6. Note that there are currently no "glue" records for the vond.net domain at the root level so IPv6-only hosts still won't be able to connect. I have no ETA for the glue as I haven't even bugged my registrar yet, and even then I don' ( Read more... )

Swiped from my wife's journal for those that don't read it:

Baby Girl is here :)


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We saw Iron Man today. Good movie, as everyone's said. Definitely looking forward to the next two weekends of movies (Prince Caspian and Indy) as probably the last theater movies for us (together anyway) for a while ( Read more... )

I'm quite amused. In this WIRED article about the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM) that Endeavour will install on the ISS shortly, the author made a really clever vocabulary joke, I presume intentionally. The robot (which will ride on the end of the station's robotic arm to do repairs and inspection) has been named "Dextre", which is ( Read more... )