Julia is reading "The Rough Guide to New Zealand", and is reading out selected snippets.

Worthwhile walks off the access road include the Circular Douglas Walk past Peter's Pool, a serene lake, left by a retreat in the late 18th century, and the Alex Knob Track.

Comment spam:
2009-11-28 14:03 from 125.14.63.124 in Roman
2009-11-28 14:04 from 125.14.63.124 in Roman
2009-11-28 14:05 from 125.14.63.124 in some Japanese script

Tags: subjected to comment spam

こんにちは！ I'm new here and I'm in desperate need for help.

Can anyone help me translate this Egyptian Proverb into Japanese?

"Know the World in yourself. Never look for yourself in the World, for this would be to project your illusion."

I tried to translate myself but I have a feeling there's something wrong...

"自分自身の中で世界を捜しなさい。世界の中で自分自身を捜すとは決していけません、これはあなたの錯覚を写し出すことである。"

Any corrections are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! :)

From my Twitter page:

( twitterings )
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Like facetube.com (a real site as it turns out) and thnardswackleofsequiumwa.com (thank you Sam.)

On the other hand, what do you think of:

www.likeyoulikeme.com -- Any strong opinions?

<falls from chair into a deep slumber>

I haven't been posting lately because I haven't been writing for like a week. This sux. The timing is poor. However, Thanksgiving went pretty well, I think, and the house is cleaner than it's been in a long time, which is good. We had over a dozen people and hit that critical mass where you have multiple active groups being involved with different discussions and activities and stuff. We also invented Variable Skew Distortion Jenga, which those of us playing it enjoyed.

Anyway, I have a new song which currently is an instrumental and untitled but is a little shy of 4m performed as such right now, but rounds up to four. It'll get lyrics sometime but right now doesn't have them. (The lyrics it currently has seem to involve nattering on about how fat George the Cat is. These lyrics will not ship.)

But instrumental or not, lame or not, rounding up or not, it's 4m in Nano terms, so! Currently: 28 minutes. I have now written five minutes more music than my previous nanotewrimo attempt! I am not currently on target; to be on target, I needed by EOD today to have 45 minutes. I will not make 50 minutes on schedule.

Still, I do have like six new songs so far, and hope to have seven or eight, and I can live with that. ^_^

This post originated at ソラバドのおん: Solarbird Makes Noises, on Dreamwidth.

Tags: music
Current Mood: sleepy

To my astonishment, I seem to have won the Endeavour Award!

Space Magic was selected over worthy competitors Anathem by Neal Stephenson; Ill Met in the Arena by Dave Duncan; Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Stories by Ken Scholes; and A World Too Near by Kay Kenyon by judges Joe Haldeman, John Helfers, and Sarah Zettel.

Thanks to the judges, everyone who read books for the award, members of the Lucky Lab Rats crit group, mkhobson for suggesting I try to get a collection published, wheatland_press for publishing it, and kateyule for love and support.

The award comes with a $1000 check and an engraved glass trophy. I really did not expect to win it.

In Utah, staying at my parents. Wasted most of the day sitting in the SEA airport, because I missed the gate change of my flight. My parents now have THREE cats. Jaysee is a little black skittish thing that technically belongs to some irresponsible neighbors, but actaully lives in the workshop. I had wondered why my dad was suddenly intent on insulating that building, after N years of letting it be cold...

My mom still uses the ReplayTV, even tho it no longer can change channels to catch OTA broadcasts, what with the end of NTSC transmission. She just uses it to pause whatever show she's watching.

Network television hasn't gotten any better.

Utah is still the weird little bubble. It's not the same weird little bubble it was 20some years, but it's still a weird little bubble.

Dad broke his foot yesterday morning, doing stuff out in the workshop getting ready for my arrival. 4th metatarsal. He was remarkably lucky, of the 3 ways it could have broken, he picked the one that is 8 weeks in a boot cast, instead of one of the ways that would send him to an ortho surgeon. He would have been even better off if he had gone to the clinic right away, instead of a few hours later. Sigh, my parents....

I got AT&T to give me the unlock code for my Sierra Wireless 885 wireless modem. But I can't get it to connect to T-Mobile. Got to just LOVE how Apple evicerated all the useful logging and detailed configuration files of PPP. To make it "more user friendly" and "less confusing", I'm sure. Mac's are great, they Just Work. Until they don't, and then there is no way to make them work.

Thanksgiving Day went rather well.

Wednesday afternoon I completely forgot an appointment at MassageFreek. I got deeply involved in stuff I was working on. Crud. And I had been looking forward to that appointment for a week.

My life is more interesting than it sounds, but a great deal of it goes into my personal journal now, not into my lj.

We will see what tomorrow brings.

The "ice cream" that was on sale turns out to be on closer examination "frozen dessert".

The change in inclinations through the section indicates that North America moved almost 30 degrees - around 3000 kilometres - southward in just 11 million years of volcanic activity. This means that the plate that it was located on was travelling at a speed somewhere between 20 and 40 centimetres a year, which is significantly faster even than India prior to its collision with Asia.

( These are my tweets for the past day... )

Tags: tweets, twitter
Current Mood: twitterpated

Poll #1491288
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

What do you want?

After getting totally fed up with the poor Wi-Fi range on my MacBook Pro, I picked up an external Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N. Of course, Linksys doesn’t provide Mac drivers for this product, but it’s a Ralink 2870 and Ralink provides drivers for MacOS X in their support section. I downloaded the RTUSB D2870-2.0.0.0 UI-2.0.0.0_2009_10_02.dmg driver.

There is a driver inside USBWireless-10.6 for Snow Leopard, and it will complain during installation that the RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext failed to install. This is expected, just ignore it, the installation will complete successfully.

At the time of this writing, the WUSB600N v2 isn’t included in the Info.plist for the kext, so I had to edit /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist in a text editor and add the appropriate bits. Search for “Linksys – RT2870 – 2″ and duplicate the <key> and <dict> elements, renaming the key to “Linksys – RT2870 – 3″ and the idProduct integer from “113″ to “121″. Here’s what it should look like after the changes:

        <key>Linksys - RT2870 - 3</key>
        <dict>
            <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
            <string>com.Ralink.driver.RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
            <key>IOClass</key>
            <string>RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
            <key>IOProviderClass</key>
            <string>IOUSBDevice</string>
            <key>idProduct</key>
            <integer>121</integer>
            <key>idVendor</key>
            <integer>5943</integer>
        </dict>

After making this change, unload/reload the kext or reboot your machine, and then plug in your WUSB600N and you should get a window popping up telling you that a new network device has been detected.

I hope this helps someone, as I was totally disappointed when I learned that Linksys wasn’t supporting this device on Mac “out of the box.”

Originally published at Dossy's Blog. You can comment here or there.

I was trying to scroll up on something and the screen kept jerking back down to the bottom. Close examination of the mouse (a cheapee I don't much care for) I determined that

( Read more... )

I am doing unexpectedly well here in hospital. Per this post from calendula_witch I do believe I'm up to visitors today and tomorrow. Also, looks like I may be here til Sunday despite earlier hopes.

Tags: calendula, cancer, health

Noticed from jbsegal that Google Wave appears to be opening up, which is nice, because the fraction of people I knew who were on it had been minuscule. I now have 28 invites.

Gimme a GMail address if you want one. Comments screened.

If I am reading the figures right, there were about 370,000 babies born in Canada in 2008. Our infant mortality rate is about 5 per 1000 live births so presumably something like 1850 babies died soon after being born in 2008. The US infant mortality rate is about 6.9 per 1000 live births so if we adopted the US system and then had similar infant mortality rates, the net effect would be similar to if we kept our current system but began tossing 700 viable babies into the hyena enclosure in the nearest zoo. Sorry, that should be 700 per year.

[It was pointed out in comments I forget the financial benefits]

Instead of spendigng 11.9% of the GNP on health care, we would get to spend 17.6%. This means that we'd get much the same benefit from adopting the US system as we would if we kept out current system but set fire to a stack of currency containing about 88 billion dollars. Per year.

[Added later]

In comments it is suggested the actual figure would be closer to 100 billion dollars.

Why are infant mortality rates increasing in Nunavut?

Folks have been wonderful with their input on my recent polls / research questions, thank you all. It will take me a while to collate and integrate everything, but it's already clear to me that your feedback has improved the website design immeasurably. ^_^

I'm finished with the most recent round of database design, and am back to actually writing features. I am steeling myself to not get distracted by perfectionism and hammer out a bunch of functional code, and quickly. I'm currently writing the core of how profiles, privacy, messaging and the compatibility functionality all relate to each other.

It's so nice, simply enjoying the work and making this project happen. By comparison I've never been productive or focused before, this is a *very* nice feeling.

<waves cheerfully>

Nobody will want to what her again?

That's a mistranslation, right?

[added later]

That page is safe but the one immediately following it may not be work-safe.

Actually, what I am curious about is the basic timeline in SF publishing for the use of arcologies as Soleri envisioned them. I know there are precursors to arcologies (Diaspar and Asimov's Cities, to name two) but I am curious about works inspired by Soleri (and to some extent, Arcosanti).

Current rocket technology can not send the spaceship very far, because the amount of the chemical fuel it can take is limited. We try to use dark matter (DM) as fuel to solve this problem. In this work, we give an example of DM engine using dark matter annihilation products as propulsion. The acceleration is proportional to the velocity, which makes the velocity increase exponentially with time in non-relativistic region. The important points for the acceleration are how dense is the DM density and how large is the saturation region. The parameters of the spaceship may also have great influence on the results. We show that the (sub)halos can accelerate the spaceship to velocity $ 10^{- 5} c \sim 10^{- 3} c$. Moreover, in case there is a central black hole in the halo, like the galactic center, the radius of the dense spike can be large enough to accelerate the spaceship close to the speed of light.

Someone alert Mike Brotherton: his interstellar rockets in Spider Star also exploited Dark Matter: they used something called a Bully to push WIMPs around.

I note that the abstract is wrong when it says "Current rocket technology can not send the spaceship very far" (at least depending on what you mean by far [1]). What our rockets can't do is sent payloads to their destinations very fast. As long as we didn't mind waiting tens of thousands of years, we could send probes to the nearer stars.

1: A lot of potential targets are completely out of the question for delta vee reasons: a probe leaving the Solar System at 20 km/s still has pretty much the same orbit around the galaxy as the Sun does.

Linking is not advocacy.