My friend Rob MacDougall has a nifty new blog, which I cannot recommend strongly enough if you are interested in the history of technology. Share and enjoy.
Category: General
Does anyone (I’m looking at you, Harvard affiliates) happen to have floor plans for San Simeon hanging around? I know I could get a peek at ‘em if I were at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and I know that Thomas Aidala’s Hearst Castle, San Simeon has some. So I could always just snag a used copy, but I figured I’d plumb the depths of the Lazyweb first.
I just realized something about how I play My Life With Master. I don’t ever particularly care about getting to the endgame, in which the players take down the Master. In fact, I always kind of don’t look forward to it, because it sounds like it’s going to be a long drawn-out process in which success or failure of the mandated goal depends entirely on a lot of tough die rolls.
During the remainder of a MLWM game, my definition of “success or failure” doesn’t depend on dice. For me, success comes when something interesting happens with a connection or with another minion; success or failure on a die roll just guides me towards the exact nature of the interesting something. Or lack thereof.
Every now and then I use my cell phone camera, meaning to upload the picture and share it immediately. The sharing part never happens. This, then, is housekeeping.
It’s tough to make out, but this sign (which was on a gas pump) wants me to “click www.87rewardme.com.” I tried, but I couldn’t find a mouse. Or a screen.
Arrr! Pirates, me hearties! A game of Pirates of the Spanish Main under (heh heh) full sail.
My car hits 100,000 miles. This actually happened as I pulled into the parking lot at work; this picture was not taken while driving. In case you were worried about my sanity.
Salam is back, in self-deprecating mode. Also, he’s risking his life to tell people what’s going on in Iraq, which is somewhat more than you can say for most bloggers. Via Jim Henley.
Current Gmail users have a couple of invites to the beta to give away. This has resulted in many offers of firstborn. In order to organize these offers, a clever person invented gmail swap, where people can post offers and the lucky few with gmail invites can pick the cream of the crop.
For the record, this one is the cream of the crop. But only if you’re an Asheron’s Call player who’s easily amused.
While driving home along Mass Ave last night, right after the Virgin Megastore and right before Longfellow Bridge, I notice one of those big LED official traffic billboards with some unexpected messages on it. The first one, I’m thinking, “Well, that’s a bit odd but maybe it’s some nice gesture for some cop who’s retiring or something.”
Then I see the second message.
Then I pull around and stop and get all these pictures. (The better ones are after I figured out that I should turn off my flash.) The kids doing it are messing with the thing while I’m taking pictures; changing the messages and so on. It looks like someone left the control panel unlocked.
I worry a little bit about my plans to blog this, but hey, if they didn’t want their names known they perhaps would not have displayed them to a few hundred passing cars on Mass Ave.
Happy Saturday night, Boston. I do love this city.
OK, but I will take a second to note that my respect for Pat Tillman grows more and more the more I learn about him. Sounds like he thought a lot. Sounds like he didn’t care much about convention. I already knew that he turned down big money to go fight for his country, and I already knew that he turned down a large contract earlier in his career so he could stay in Arizona with his team. I didn’t know he attended a christening in drag, or that he read as much as he seems to have.
Also, as noted progressive economist Max Sawicky notes, Ted Rall sucks.
Here’s something I didn’t know: in 1974, Portugal’s forty-eight year old dictatorship was overthrown bloodlessly. There’s more detail, not as well written, here.
So you hand out a bunch of disposable cameras with stickers on them. The stickers say “take a picture, pass the camera on, mail it here when it’s out of film.”