dream slices

Participating in a mediæval battle, using a longbow, except where you'd normally expect to find a nice bit of Yew there's ... a painting. In a gilt frame. WTFF?

Hanging out in a town I don't recognize with an exgrilf, now regrilfed (to coin a phrase), but sporting some sort of painful-on-contact skin irritation that makes it difficult to put my arm around her. For some reason there's a little black kid first with a tree-branch baseball bat and later with a small cannon that causes her to get upset. Hard to explain without writing a ton of description, to be honest, so I'll handwave that. I can partially understand the skin irritation bit since I finished reading Involution Ocean last night, but, ah, the rest, well, jeez. HELLO BRANE PLEASE REPEAT YOUR TRANSMISSION WAS GARBLED.

ARISE SIR DORK

Well, this tells you all you need to know about the value of a British Knighthood.

book meme musings

I was discussing the book meme with Lockhart over the weekend, and came to the following conclusions:

• I can't remember much of what I read 20 years ago. I can name three books that I know I read before I was 12 - Islands in the Sky (thanks, Lock!), The Alligator and his Uncle Tooth, and The Hobbit - but I was a member of a book club, and we had a fairly crammed bookshelf in the school, and my dad is a marginally less avid reader than I am, so I've always had a slew of books available to me for as long as I can remember, but I can't recall the individual titles.
• I don't think I've ever really been shocked by a book. Some of Robert Anton Wilson's stuff opened my head a bit more than I expected, and Zen and the Art... had a pretty big effect on me, but I read The Wasp Factory and American Psycho, to name but two, without blinking, so to speak.
• I'll read pretty much anything. I have a small stack of books on my pile at the moment that I've been reading for at least a year now; Burrough's The Soft Machine, a miserable sociology book called The Hacker Ethic, a Baudrillard title, and a book on the workings of the brain, all of which have stalled for various reasons. But I've always finished books, no matter how long it's taken - Godel, Escher, Bach took me two years, and I've never reread it fully - and no matter how distasteful I find the books I'll stick with 'em until I'm done.
• My current sense for what I like in a book is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago, with a single exception: P.J.O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell made me laugh in 1992, and disgusted me several years later with its parochialism. And that was before I started following American politics.

And that's all the memery you're getting.

(no subject)

Hey, why not crank up the Cold War again?

briefly striking fear into my heart

emacs: command not found

/tmp: filesystem full

Mars rover stalled by filesystem overload. I wonder why they put "hunch" in scare quotes, though?

we're following our original plan

...to screw the customer over AGAIN, say Microsoft.

I'm trying to figure out what exactly they're patenting here. Parsing XML is pretty trivial due to its highly analstructured nature and well covered by prior art; they're "committed to openly sharing the XML schemas used by Office"; and the products themselves are protected by copyright which, thanks to Congress and Sonny Bono, is far longer-lasting than any given patent anyway.

I also note they've filed the patent application in Europe where, as yet, we don't actually support software patents. I'm sure we will now that Sir Billy's pushing 'em.

All this waffling aside, is the use of XML in Office really that big a deal? I mean, are people really using the XML goop that Word produces, or are they sticking with the old method of simply attaching multi-meg documents complete with embarassing revision histories to whatever chunk of software comes to hand?