Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

WorldCon is big. Very, very big. And yet it’s like Boskone ate the little cake that said “Eat me” and grew to fill the Hynes. (The AC at Hynes was nasty; I think I caught something.) The schedule is similar to Boskone’s, but with more of everything.

Everything doesn’t seem to include TV fandom, unfortunately. If only I could find a panel of Stargate fans, I’d be in fan heaven. Instead I’ve been going to writer-oriented events—writing tips and general info (e.g., elves in mythology, cool science, etc.). I even ran into a fellow non-fen.

I went to a couple of readings: Connie Willis, who filled a small room, and Walter Jon Williams, who had just a handful of people in the same room. In a perfect world, WJW would be as popular as Connie Willis. I’d love to write like he can, and yet, it would be depressing to write like he does yet have so few people show up to my WorldCon reading.

Ballot stuffer of the day: Diebold

Mac links, old and new:

• Did you know you can wall-mount that new G5 iMac? I’m still waiting for the rumored Tablet Mac, myself.
• Crazy Apple Rumors has a fun take on the Paris Expo.
• Skype has come to Mac OS X.
• Camino is up to version 0.8.1.

It’s moving time again in Boston. Every spring and fall the dumpsters fill up with discarded furniture and the other detritus of migrant student life. Permanent residents pick through the leavings. Neon tickets for overflowing dumpsters collect on the doors of apartment buildings, though how they get back to the absentee landlords is beyond me.

This year, however, there’s a new participant in the dumpster-picking ritual: bedbugs. Allston is the hotbed of bedbug activity, but I spotted the new bedbug warning label [bottom of the page] on a lovely blue loveseat as far east as Back Bay. Somehow I doubt the Allston bedbugs are that close to Beacon Hill.

Gnomi provides a guide to Boston for the newbies, but she leaves out both the bedbug risk and another vital piece of information. As explained previously in this very blog, the wooden ties with long steel rods laid across them are train tracks. Trains run on them. If you are on the tracks when the train comes, you get squished. Surly T employees will have to scrape you off the rails, and that only makes them surlier.

I mention this because a New Zealander electrocuted himself at Haymarket station this weekend. The NZ news and the young man’s mother blame inexperience with the third rail of Boston transit. I fully admit that the DANGER THIRD RAIL signs are small and poorly-lit, and that they date back to a time when Bostonians were expected to read, understand, and obey simple English imperative sentences. Yet the unfortunate Kiwi does seem to have had a rudimentary knowledge of the English language—certainly enough to handle “no trespassing” and “danger,” if not up to the subtlety of “third rail.”

In any event, the argument from ignorance is bosh. Matthew Gallagher died because he was walking on the train tracks. The third rail was merely a complication—a bonus, if you will. The MBTA cannot save people from their own stupidity. Bad Transit should be recommending a Darwin Award for Gallagher, not a lawyer.

Tasteless Toy of the Day: the 9/11 toy (via Backspin)

Magister Mundi sum!

Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
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Seema blogged recently about what makes a successful blog, but I think a bigger question is What makes a successful blogger? Forget about the fame - what makes one blogger happy and the next one frustrated?

I was writing to a friend who’d burned out on blogging about the flood of information that any blogger faces. Even if you’re just blogging about your own personal life, there are 24 hours a day of that to be distilled into a few paragraphs of blog. The secret to blogging joy is being able to write exactly as much as you want to write to convey what you want to convey.

Maybe you have deep ideas or maybe you have cutesy links, maybe you want to keep your finger on the weak pulse of the MBTA or be an alpha geek content provider. But there will always be more ideas, more links, more T derailments, and more geeking. You have to draw the line somewhere, and do it without guilt.

That’s where the little psychopathy comes in handy. Once upon a time, blowing people and responsibilities off was considered impolite. Now it’s expected and necessary. The internet is a world of procrastinators, where only the most interesting things get done, and whole websites, fandoms, and people fall by the wayside when the interest wanes. You won’t be happy on-line unless you can put off answering email or blogging that so-so blog entry indefinitely (which is to say, forever). You need to be one with the asynchronous nature of the net, which is to say, you have to be able to procrastinate your troubles away or you’ll get an ulcer.

The net belongs to the slackers.

Disease of the day: Bird flu in swine.

And you thought Scotty was making the whole thing up! Physics Web reports a glass breakthrough:

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a “flame-spray” technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties.

Thanks to MarsNews.com for the link. Also via MarsNews: the ESA wants to build pretty Space houses on Earth.

Question of the day: Why does the MBTA have schedules? (by way of Boston Common)

Many thanks to Eric Talbot for reminding me of the “dramatic derailment” of yet another Breda train this Sunday. I have been remiss in not blogging about it, considering that I saw the wreckage with my own eyes.

Veronica and I were at the MFA Sunday morning for the Art Deco Exhibit. Sometime after noon we made our way to the MFA stop on the E line to head back downtown. No train came for a while, but on the E line you think nothing of that during rush hour, never mind on a quiet Sunday in August. But then a woman walked down the platform telling people there had been a crash.

On the other branches of the Green Line, if the T breaks down or goes out of service for repairs, then the MBTA puts up signs and runs replacement buses. Free replacement buses. Not so on the E line. We wandered over to a nearby bus stop and waited for the 39 to show. The first bus was full—not surprising, since it was carrying all the displaced subway passengers. The driver let on a few folks, then shut the door in our faces.

The next 39 to come along had some space on it. We had to pay, and we spent most of the ride speculating about the route of the 39, where it might leave us, and what had happened to that corpse of a Breda car we’d passed at the Northeastern stop. It looked to me like the far side of the car had been shorn off—I had bought the “accident” story—but it turns out that it just derailed. All over the rails.

Take a look at that bottom picture [BadTransit.com, same link as “the wreckage” above]. I’m surprised there was only one hospitalization. Imagine if we’d been standing on that platform at the time. There were little tourist kids at the MFA stop with us (not to mention my mother and a friend riding the T for the first time).

The stop pictured (Northeastern) is a really nice one. Most trolley stops are only a few feet wide, with (if you’re lucky) a low concrete barrier between you and a busy street (Comm. Ave, Beacon St., Huntington Ave.). Picture with me a Breda train derailing and scraping 25 people (or worse, students) off the platform into oncoming traffic at rush hour. It would be the end of the entire trolley system, and everyone would be taking the 39 or the 57 downtown from then on.

And none of it would have happened if we’d just bought the 100 new trains from Kinki Sharyo.

Codepoetry reveals the deep secrets of the Mac OSX color picker in The Colors! I’ve always wondered how to capture a pixel’s color (answer: with the magnifying glass) or get a color into the swatch list at the bottom of the color picker (answer: drag it from the swatch next to the magnifying glass). Note the link to HexColorPicker, exColor and Painter’s Picker.

Codepoetry also asks the eternal question: If I throw a cat out the car window, is it kitty litter? (one of the random quotes you get at the top of each page) and links to the cool tool LanOSD. I’m not sure what it does, but I’m sure it’s cool.

A couple of random kitty links:

• Mustang Sally writes LJ fic about Spike and her cats
• Mark Pilgrim uses googlefight for a kitten fight.

I tried the latter at home.

For a regular googlefight:

Number of results on Google for the keywords J/C and C/7:
J/C (1 930 000 results) versus C/7 (2 720 000 results)
The winner is:    C/7

A kittenfight yields:

Number of results on Google for the keywords J/C kills kittens and C/7 kills kittens:
J/C kills kittens (21 results) versus C/7 kills kittens (32 results)
The winner is:    C/7 kills kittens