wiredfool

• Traffic jams can be fun. There’s lots of good music in my cd changer.
• Traffic jams feel really good when they evaporate in front of you – allowing for pure acceleration to crusing speed.

***Clear and Present Danger

HP is ending calculator development. This could be one of the most damaging thing that they could do to the engineering capability of this country. In my previous life as an engineer, 11 of the 12 people in my department used HP calculators. Most of them would be lost if they had to deal with a different model, let alone one that did not do RPN.

The only consolation is that almost all of the HP calculators were already ancient and still going strong. Mine was several years old when I got it in 1991. Of course My 28S was the pinnacle of calculator development, as close to perfect as I need a calculator to be.

In the left corner, Nichols, who has mismanaged Sound Transit. In the right corner, Mark Sidran, who tramples on basic rights. And asleep on the couch is King Friday Meow Meow, who’s sole platform plank is that he will sleep on the job.

It scares me that a cat could be the better choice for mayor…

It’s over. All I can say is: I bet the Yankees are truly sick of seeing Randy Johnson come in in relief. That’s two postseasons that have ended for them with the Unit on the mound.

*** Linkage

I go and post a bunch before I go to a webloggers dinner, then post once in the week following it while they’re driving some traffic. Chalk it up to timing.

*** The Fool

Those of you who don’t know me may be interested in the face behind the website. Those of you who do, well maybe you’re interested in my halloween costume.

According to legend, the veil between worlds is the thinnest around Halloween. Passages between the worlds draw wakes from one to the other.

Mine is the world of light and darkness, one where rationality is the order of the day. The other side is the chaotic mix of irrationality, shades of grey and color that mix in no predictable pattern. So it is that the world of light and darkness is getting swrils of fractal color thrown off by people leaping the boundary of rationality.

I’ve seen things lately that have only previously been the domain of dreamers, artists, and authors. Patterns of events ring of cyberpunk, nanopunk, or simply the dark rantings of a street musician.

Raven’s goal was to nuke the US through the minds of the hackers and a modern infestation of an ancient religion. The hardest part of writing about a nanotech future is envisioning a scenario where everyone isn’t dead. It’s very difficult to get educated westerners to pull together. An education is a thin defense against a large number of well armed peasants. There is a nodal point in the dataflow around here somewhere, a point where the flow changes and congregates. A ship of maniacs with knives play blackjack with our lives. Beware the ides of March, for the worst comes not at the darkest, but when you can just taste the light.

Fiction can paint a bleak picture of the future. Perhaps a storyteller will come through and fight the dragon as our avatar. Perhaps the worlds will receede back into themselves. Or perhaps the winter of out happiness will be prolonged by a late, dark spring.