Monday, August 31, 2009
a short reading list of short stories; for mental scratch & dent work.
been running across some really good scifi short stories & related items in online collections lately, thought I'd pass on a few:
- they're made out of meat - terry bisson
- classic, apparently; pretty straightforward. fermi's paradox solved - one way.
- the singularity - t. bisson
- (essay) what i've been saying for years - hey, people - it's all over ! and the bit about collective infinite regress navel gazing as well (of course).
- a canticle - t. bisson
- (story background) bisson's comments on the completion of miller's "canticle" sequel. whets one's appetite, all right.
- tva baby - t. bisson
- holy cvrap. surreal violence, or violent surrealism ? your choice. personally, i think the whole thing is in his head. or mine.
- the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away - cory doctorow
- doctorow's themes seem to stay consistent. this has echoes of all kinds of classics. very nice, a few plot & dialog inconsistencies, though. computer style geek ? this one will resonate.
- understand - ted chiang
- mind blowing. pun? what pun? i can remember a story with a similar theme but completely different context; lost in the mists of memory, ironically. got a few sigma under your hat ? then you'll "get" this.
- we haven’t got there yet - harry turtledove
- if you like theater & especially shakespeare, you'll love this. very high quality work. well, of course, look who's done writing.
- --and he built a crooked house - robert heinlein
- an old crusty classic from an old crusty classic.
many more here (where those came from):
- the old scifi.com shorts collection - classics & originals, from the internet archive's wayback machine. there are apparently more than is listed; the heinlein one above, from this site, doesn't show up here.
- tor.com stories online - i was surprised to run into these, on a publisher's site. some (most?) have audio available.
- infinity plus - huge collection of authors & stories.
- and don't forget 365 tomorrows - daily scifi short shorts for several years now, has outdone itself.
Friday, August 28, 2009
a round-up of recent trash, events and dead or dysfunctional things.
from: the depths of the dust bunny graveyard in the land of dysfunctional devices
to: perhaps not-so-interested parties
via: dial-up (woohoo! we're blazin' now!)
subject: update on internal landscaping; circle of life; and, wtf?
message follows.
not sure what's with roadrunner lately. for the last several months it seems every little rainstrom drops my cable modem connection. for years this was only a rare event. then yesterday evening, after some storms passed through, same thing. the poor little modem went through it's usual frantic gyrations to call home. except this time, after about an hour of trying, poof - all lights went to black. trying power cycling, only the ethernet indicator light comes on for a few seconds, then goes away. no power light. modem is hot, so is the power supply. i'm thinking, dead supply. well, ok, there's something to be said for consistency - now everything is useless in this place - tv, self, modem, washer, dryer, ... whatever it is better not be contagious. on second thought - too late.
self has been doing a little bit better, though. removed six thirty+ gallon trash cans of beer bottles over the last week. plus two little recycle bins full. sad that they won't take the contents of the trash cans for recycling too. it would take months to get rid of all the bottles in that puny little bin. it cowered in the corner when it saw the task that lay ahead, so the trash cans and i took pity on it. when will they make recycle bins for dedicated beer drinkers / bottle hoarders ? whaddya mean, "no demand" ?
found seven mini-kegs in the rubble. those are gone now too.
the newly freed dust bunnies have been attacking my toes. i mean, perhaps they are just trying to show their gratitude for their new found liberty, providing nice, soft, gritty instant felt slippers as they tend to do, but i find this unnecessary in the summer. i have had to walk outside fairly frequently to clean my feet. glad it had rained; no telling what the neighbors would have thought had they seen the fuzzy footprints on my driveway.
anyway, back to the dead modem - remember the dead modem ? well, i called support after laughing at their online live chat feature sputter incoherently as it tried to load over a dial-up connection. the nice young lady on the phone actually seemed to know what she was doing, and - biggest surprise, come to think of it - she was a local person. either that, or they've started giving excellent american regional accent & micro-geography lessons overseas. after giving me the location of their nearest store where i could trade in the broken modem for a working one, she mentions that she was there the other day, and that the store is between a maternity shop and a victoria's secret. i found this hilarious, and she didn't get why. not really something you explain to strangers over the phone. clearly a young'un, this one. she had called my modem "old" at four years (i still think it's five), and she had not seen this type often before. her youth was not shown so much by her lack of familiarity with somewhat aged equipment (heh), but by the lack of temporal context exhibited in her comments.
continuing on through the piles just a bit, i managed to open some birthday & christmas cards & gifts from the last year or two. thank god there was nothing perishable that would have evolved into something alive. i had my trusty letter opener ready, though - just in case. oh - and thanks, everyone ;-)
speaking of life, something seems to have died in my garage, at least if one can go by smells on this sort of thing. damned if i can find it though, and that's the cleanest space here. well, whatever it is, it will eventually mummify and stop stinking. like last time...
at first i thought maybe jeep was, you know, having - issues - so i pulled out all the carpets and scrubbed those for the first time in years, then took him down to the power wash for a bit of attention: engine, interior, underbelly, everything. strange, though, how that mummified bat stuck to the middle of the radiator just won't come off, even under xxx psi of water pressure. (yeah, most vehicles get insects; jeep gets bats.)
but no, whatever the smell is still remained. i'm afraid to look too hard, though. a few weeks ago the neighbor was worried about her missing cat...
well, that's about it for now. still a lot to do. time to go pick up that new modem.
end of message.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
something is sending information to feedhub about my browsing, and it's not me... spying on myself, unawares.
update:
all right, this was a big doh! moment. while puzzling over this particular item i had forgotten about my published browsing history feed, which normally i keep pretty constantly aware of. i was just not making the connection for some reason. so it's not so much that something here is calling feedhub, it's just feedhub having a reference to that history feed - which, through a feedhub - newsgator connection, i may have inadvertently created myself.
how did i discover this, you may ask ? well, it wasn't me - someone at feedhub is apparently suscribing to one or more blog search feeds for their product (i'm guessing), and my post showed up, and they promptly sent me an email explaining the above. i needed to have considered that someone (me, or anyone) could have been using feedhub with that feed.
so, out of fairness to feedhub, and the desire to spread humor even if it's ay my own expense, i have updated this post. so there.
caveat moron.
strangest thing. i've been running a new website this summer on google app engine, providing a niche webservice. it has been seeing significant usage, so i've been keeping a close eye on things in case the gae free quotas are approached.
at times when looking at one of the server log analyzer reports, i notice a particular user agent: "FeedHub MetaDataFetcher". only sporadic access by this, and very low volume, it shows up under unknowns. i haven't bothered to categorize it as bot access, or a user of the service yet, since i haven't been able to associate it with a particular account's behavior.
and then, strangely, i saw an address showing up on another report, one that only appears on a page that only i personally should have access to, on an https only page, and only when i'm logged in [only, for good measure]. and no, it wasn't me using it - it was the feedhub bot. what the hell ?
i had used the link once, five hours before, while testing, from my primary machine. so how did feedhub get hold of it ? that page can't be accessed by bots - externally. the clincher is that i found the feedhub bot accessing another similar link - one which i had only created manually & pasted in the browser address bar.
so something must be on my own system - and i don't mess with shady apps on this box. i try and be very careful about what i install, where i browse, and i always have (that damn resource sucking) anti-virus & firewall software running. ok, it's been a while since i've run specific anti-spyware software, but the completely up to date version of av that i'm running is supposed to take care of that too.
a brief search around the web reveals no mentions of this sort of feedhub behavior; it seems not to be associated with malware in any way. but i've never used their rss aggregating product. the only rss software i've used on this box is was newsgator, which i've long since stopped running, and windows live mail. and then there's that kludgey msfeedsync process that runs as part of ie8 & integrates with live mail.
but there's no particular reason this situation would necessarily be associated with an rss reader (although it seems most likely). checking browser add-ins - google toolbar is most notable, and a few bookmarklet scripts - nothing looks remotely suspicious.
something pretty clearly is calling back to feedhub when i access links to xml files, and then the feedhub bot goes & crawls them. i only noticed when the link in question happened to be on my own site. maybe i can catch this with some sort of netmon tool. kind of a bitch to do, and i'm only making assumptions about its behavior, which, if wrong, will mean i don't even know where to start looking.
so: how long has this been going on, and why, and how can i stop it ? and what else might be happening that i don't know about ?
damned unknown unknowns.