fractalnavel

Look round our world; behold the chain of love.
Confirming all below and all above,
See plastic nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace.
See matter next, with various life imbued
Press to one center still, the gen'ral good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again;
All forms that perish other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole;
One all-extending all-preserving soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made beast in aid of man and man of beast;
All serv'd, all serving: nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

(via "The Gripping Hand")

that excerpt fits pretty well, i think.  that's all that was in the book; the final text.  now i'm thinking i should probably read the whole poem. but i haven't been in that sort of reading mood/mode in a very long time.

ah well; time to finish my coffee and perform some (more) vegetation dissolving in the backyard.

• ReverseHttp
  cool - and scary. run a javascript webserver from within a browser - ! first thought: trivial p2p browser chat. second thought: live talking to website visitors, individually, or in groups of one or more. been done - but with plug-ins. think: twitter gone mad.
  (tags: web development javascript http reversehttp architecture)

self appreciated this little poem (pic).

(from C. Bowyer Vaux: Canoe Handling , retrieved from the wayback machine)

• MagicCube5D
  delicious madness; explore the site, & go to the home page for the gravitational stuff.
  (tags: math visualization software game puzzle)

• Is Your Resume Hurting Your Job Search?
  a number of these points come off as more appropriate to job applications, not resumes. methinks the line has blurred. it's a sorry world where the ignorant rule the day, yet face facts we must.
  (tags: employment tips)

• Promotional Calendar: Holidays, Events and National Awareness Days, Weeks & Months
  sorry, i just find this hilarious ;-)
  (tags: marketing humor)

what the hell happened to ...

• ... 'summer' ?  not just this one, but the season of 'hot'.  and what happened to 'Summer', in a personal or cultural sense ?  aging is part of it.  global realities are also.
• ... google app engine: maybe they felt that cutting free quotas by 90% earlier this summer wasn't generating enough revenue.  recently there was a datastore operation 'anomaly' that lasted twenty-two hours, at the beginning of which the cpu costs associated with certain common data api calls more than tripled.  and it has remained that way, without explanation, despite numerous inquiries by gae developers. 

gave up on yet another forum.  most people don't seem to really want help, they're there for some other reason.  a lot of people seem to need help, though.  i am not your online therapist.  anyway, one to go.  and maybe the game one, too.

i was reading a story of poul anderson's the other day in a largely forgettable and forgotten scifi anthology i found at the internet archive.  It (the anthology) is still decent reading, containing a few classics, and now carries a bit of historical interest as well, in terms of its contemporary contextual cultural referents.

anderson's story "the man who came early" is about a modern u.s. soldier stationed in reykjavic who is mysteriously thrown 1000 years into the past.  the story proceeds from the perspective of the icelandic chieftain that finds him.  vintage anderson work, in the historical detail, mood and characterization.

and it's - depressing.  the soldier's modern skills, even those he thought were archaic, are useless.  not too long ago i was reading a thread on some forum somewhere about "what would you do if you were thrown a thousand years into the past".  and in among the usual silliness, there were a number of folk who realized, yes, most modern humans would be largely useless in that situation, and they would be doing well if they could just keep their mouths shut, avoid getting immediately killed, and survive through performing hard labor in exchange for the charity of necessities provided by a contemporary inhabitant.  there may be some extraordinary individuals who could thrive in that context; seems doubtful.

and no, my thoughts don't stop there.  but this post does.

• Baen Free Library
  another excellent source of free scifi books online - again, by a publisher. i think some folks are starting to "get it".
  (tags: scifi books free online)

This American Life 354: Mistakes Were Made (57min)

very surreal, this one.

“It’s the late 1960s, and in the new technology of cryonics, a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still was admitting to the family members of people Bob had frozen that he’d screwed up. Badly.”

rss: i don't subscribe to much, and most aren't very long term, being related to transient interests, but here's a few that i find useful in various ways.  copy / save / import the opml in your favorite feed reader, if you care to.

<opml version="1.1">
    <head>
        <title>fractalnavel feeds</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <outline text="ACME Updates" xmlUrl="http://www.acme.com/updates/updates_rss2.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="AWS  Product Advertising API" xmlUrl="http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/rss/rssmessages.jspa?forumID=9" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Backreaction" xmlUrl="http://backreaction.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="ClubOrlov" xmlUrl="http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google Analytics Blog" xmlUrl="http://analytics.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Blog" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppEngineBlog" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Downtime Notify Google Group" xmlUrl="http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Google Group" xmlUrl="http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml?num=50" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Michigan Tech University Jobs" xmlUrl="http://sowacs.no-ip.com/rss/scraped_rss.aspx?src=mtujobs" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="NCZOnline" xmlUrl="http://feedproxy.google.com/nczonline" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Peter's Blog" xmlUrl="http://peter.michaux.ca/feed/atom.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Planet OLPC" xmlUrl="http://planet.laptop.org/atom.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Predictably Irrational" xmlUrl="http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?feed=rss2" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="The Bottom Feeder" xmlUrl="http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="The Way the Future Blogs" xmlUrl="http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/feed/" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="xkcd.com" xmlUrl="http://xkcd.com/rss.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="_The Alternate View_ columns of John G. Cramer" xmlUrl="http://sowacs.no-ip.com/rss/scraped_rss.aspx?src=altview" type="rss"/>
    </body>
</opml>

i have cleaned a few out that are only useful to me administratively.

no, really - that's pretty much it.

beginning without ending is neither
ending without beginning is death
after the beginning the void is mere curiosity
before the ending it is infinite unknown

• left over garlic bread, toasted & buttered, fresh coffee.
• couple hundred pounds of old magazines - gone.  more to go.
• yahoo: replaced nyt with washington post.
• ninety days without tv.
• old unread books are that way for a reason.
• i am my own bot.

a couple of years ago i noticed aol appending advertising to my email, and i sent them a note, and got back nonsense.

now, we get more nonsense in the form of what any reasonable person would have to assume is a pathetic joke - a class action lawsuit over that practice.  and here's how the proposed settlement works out:

"... AOL has agreed to pay up to $250,000 in fees and costs, in addition to the $103,000 in charitable donations, and the costs of administering the Settlement, including the notice process. ..."

are you fucking kidding me ?!  and it gets better:

"... The Settlement provides that all current AOL Members will be provided e-mail notice of the footers and their ability to discontinue the footers via AOL Keyword: Footer and http://footer.aol.com, and that, if AOL continues to append footers to its Members’ e-mails, such notice will be provided both to all new customers upon their registration of an AOL account and to all current AOL Members on a regular, periodic basis (every six months for two years). ..."

so here's the plan: aol can continue this practice - as long as they spam us even more !

you just know these jackasses are having a good laugh over this one.  this shit isn't even pocket change to them.

i went to fight a speeding ticket once.  the same sort of mindtwisting bullshit ensued.  the cop said i was doing 25 in a 15 zone, for ten over the limit.  i said no, the limit was 25 there.  the judge said well then, you must have been doing 35, since the cop said ten over.  i shut up & stood there. **

assholes.

------------------

** or did the cop say 35 in a 25, i said i was going 25, and the judge said then the speed limit was 15.  whatever it was, my head swam as reality shifted.

so they manage to get away with years of advertising on our dime, and then their settlement is to contribute a paltry amount to charity.  oh - and court mandated spam as well.