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The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest has been run again and the winners are in!

What’s the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest?

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Check it out here.

My favorite was the winner in the adventure category…

As the hippo’s jaws clamped on Henry’s body he noted the four huge teeth badly in need of a clean, preferably with one of those electric sonic toothbrushes, and he reflected that his name would be immortalized by his unusual death, since hippo killings are not a daily occurrence, at least not in the high street of Chipping Sodbury.

Tim Lafferty
Horsell, Woking, UK

Finally! 5400 RPM 2.5“ SATA drives over 200GB are available.

I found a good deal online for a Western Digital 250GB model and ordered it last week. It arrived today and with the help of an external hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner, in just 5 hours, I have completed duplicated my old MacBook drive onto the new one and was up and running.

134GB Free! The free space is slightly more than the entire capacity of my original drive. I wonder how fast I can fill it up?

One potentially bad thing: It might be that I need to re-calibrate my battery, but prior to installing this drive, if I kicked the plug out while not doing anything, my time remaining would be about 4:45. With the new drive in there, the time is only 3:30.

I’m re-calibrating now and will post an update when I have it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook

Those wacky Japanese aerobics girls are at it again… This time, how to exercise your way through an abusive argument.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Japan, Japanese, Video, YouTube

It’s not flooding like in Britain, but ol’ mother nature really gave it a good try today in a 6 square mile area around my house.

Between 3:00 and 4:00PM, water levels rose over an inch above the sidewalks.

Technorati Tags: Arizona, Blog

Just a tip that I found useful.

When I first purchased Parallels Workstation (back when it was beta), I setup my VM Windows XP installation and I decided (unwisely) that I needed a very small virtual disk drive because I didn’t want to waste space on my MacBook. I didn’t realize that the virtual drive doesn’t take up the entire space, but expands up to that limit. Consequently, I set my drive to 8 Gb. This has proved a bit problematic from time to time.

In the latest update of Parallels they re-supplied they re-supplied the Parallels Image Tool (which had been removed earlier.) This tool allows you to expand the virtual HD.

What it doesn’t do is expand the virtual C: drive, all it does is provide unallocated space. Using Windows alone, this means all you can do is either reformat, or create a second drive. Neither option was appealing. On a “real” hard drive, I’d grab a partitioning to and expand the drive, but I was not so sure that’s a good idea on a virtual drive.

To make a short story long, I decided to grab gparted, a linux-based tool available for download. gparted comes as a bootable ISO image. I made a couple changes to my VM configuration – telling it to boot to the “CD-rom” first and also telling it to treat the gparted ISO image as the drive.

It worked flawlessly. Linux booted, and gparted expanded my NTFS volume without a single glitch. Very cool.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook

Logopolis has been released as part of the “New Beginnings” boxed set which also includes The Keeper of Traken and Castrovalva.

Writer Christopher H. Bidmead takes Computer Science 101.
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When I bought my MacBook (actually, when I bought my iBook before it), one area of concern for me was the white color.

If you’ve ever worked tech support on computers, you know how disgustingly dirty a taupe keyboard can get. How awful must a gleaming white laptop get?

In all the time we’ve had the iBook, it’s still quite clean, and I’m very pleased with that. When I got the MacBook, I expected much the same cleanliness; however, I couldn’t help reading on the net how some people’s MacBooks got filthy brown and others didn’t. That really worried me because, when I was in drafting, no matter how clean I kept my hands, I couldn’t keep a clean drawing to save my life.

As time went by, the MacBook really didn’t get dirty. That is, until I took it to Taiwan. Once I got there, it started to get filthy, and, like so many other people on the net, it just wouldn’t clean up! What kind of weird plastic is this thing made out of?

Anyway, after trying every non-destructive cleanser I had at home (and a few I had to improvise) I was ready to give up. Instead, I broke down and bought some iKlear at the local Apple store.

I have no idea what is in it, but it cleaned up the MacBook without any problems. Kudos to iKlear.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Computer, Mac, MacBook

My previous post praising BBC documentaries wasn’t just brought on by having watched the fantastic Earth Story.

As part of my never-ending battle against the forces of darkness, I don’t just watch good television. I also get to watch a lot of seriously disturbing nonsense. As it happens, at the same time I was watching Earth Story, I was also watching a videotape of a “seminar” by Kent Hovind.

Kent a particular pet peeve of mine because he setup the Dinosaur Adventure Land in Florida. That was a “museum” aimed at children, which foisted a lot of really, really bad science on unsuspecting children brought in by their equally gullible parents about the Earth only being 6,000 years old and dinosaurs coexisting with mankind.

A federal judge saw fit to put him in jail for 10 years. Sadly it was just on tax charges, not for child abuse.

Anyway, despite Hovind being locked away, his videos are still making the rounds and I had the “opportunity” to watch a tape of him explaining the Hovind Theory to an audience.

It’s complete bullshit, of course, but I have to give the guy credit where it is due. He is an effective speaker to an audience and he can spout complete nonsense with authority. He peppers his narrative with enough scientific jargon that, if you didn’t bother research what he was actually claiming, you could (particularly if already inclined) walk away believing he had something meaningful to bring to the table.

…and so there’s the negative aspect of television/video: The convincing misinformer.

I’ve mentioned the major points of his theory before, but, I’ll just lift the current summary of the Hovind Theory right out of Wikipedia because, no matter how many times I hear it, it’s good for a both a laugh and a cry of righteous indignation.

From the Wikipedia entry on Kent Hovind (7/22/2007) [with a couple clarifications in brackets by me]

The theory includes a literal reading of the Biblical account of Noah: Noah’s family and two of every “kind” of animal (including dinosaurs) safely boarded the Ark before a minus 300° Fahrenheit (~-184°C) ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space.

Some of the meteor fragments became rings [around the outer planets] and others caused the impact craters on the moon and some of the planets. The remaining ice fragments fell to the north and south poles of the earth.

The resulting “super-cold snow” fell near the poles, burying the mammoths standing up. Ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep [the mid-oceanic ridge], which in turn caused certain ice age effects, namely the glacier effects. Also this made “the earth wobble around” and it made the canopy [a whole lot of water that was in the Earth’s atmosphere in the pre-flood days] collapse that used to protect the earth.

During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals and plants were buried, and became oil and coal, respectively.

The last few months of the flood included geological instability, when the plates shifted. [Apparently the continents were not sitting on the mantle, but were floating upon water, which was forced out when the mid-oceanic ridge was formed, then the continents slipped away at 45 MPH until the ended up mostly where they are now and slowed down to their current speed of 4 or 5 cm per year.]

This period saw the formation of both ocean basins and mountain ranges and the resulting water run-off caused incredible erosion — Hovind says that the Grand Canyon was formed in a couple of weeks during this time.

After a few hundred years, the ice caps slowly melted back retreating to their current size and the ocean levels increased, creating the continental shelves. The deeper oceans absorbed much of the carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere and thus allowed greater amounts of radiation to reach the earth’s surface. As a result, human lifespans were shortened considerably in the days of Peleg.

There’s also some good stuff in there about plants not actually being alive, too. (And, insects may not be alive, either.)

Sick, Sick, Sick.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Geology, Loonies, Paleontology, Psuedo-science, Rant, Science, Television, Video

I really love the BBC.

Oh, not the horrid gardening shows, nor the two-old-ladies-clean-your-house shows, nor the insipid trash like Hotel Babylon and Footballer’s Wives, nor the rigged phone-in competitions – not even for the great entertainment programs like Doctor Who.

No, I love the BBC for documentaries.

There is no place else that produces such a fantastic collection of documentaries. I’m not talking about the big budget blockbusters like Walking With Dinosaurs (although, those certainly warrant special mention.) I’m talking about the fact that they can make a documentary on the history of fabric dye or on the construction of ancient Viking villages and they can make it factual, informative and interesting.

I can think of no higher accolade and no higher calling for the filmmakers art.

For the vast majority of you who read this blog but aren’t either (a) in the UK or (b) British ex-pats (that would be four people) let me point out why I think the BBC has got a significant advantage over our own meager attempts at documentaries, and in particular, science and history documentaries.

Now, I may be grossly oversimplifying this explanation, so, Brits, feel free to correct my interpretation.

In the UK if you own a TV, you pay for the BBC. Not through an allocation from your normal tax dollar, but from a direct annual television license fee levied against every television-owning household. (If you don’t pay, the Cat Detector van… sorry… TV Detector vans find you and you’re deported to the Falkland Islands for 6 months and forced to watch Argentinean TV.)

That money is given to the BBC to pay for the majority of operations. The BBC is overseen by the the BBC Trust (which replaced the previous Board of Governors) who act as the guardians of the public interest and try to ensure that the public are getting proper value for their license fees.

Of course, the BBC also makes money from other things, such as syndication of programs to other countries (like Doctor Who) or the licensing of merchandise (like Doctor Who). It’s also part of the Trust’s job to make sure that the BBC doesn’t over-commercialize and concentrate solely on money-generating programs (like Doctor Who.) The Trust is also supposed to protect the BBC from political interference.

That’s a gross over-simplification because no process that involves taxes and public funds is that cut-and-dry. The non-subsidized networks claim the BBC has an unfair advantage. Some people in authority think the BBC should be more commercial to keep the license fee down. It’s a whole complicated business, but, in spirit, I hope that’s a fairly concise explanation.

What that ultimately means is that, somewhere along the line, the BBC produces programs that simply wouldn’t be commercially viable. Documentaries about viking village construction comes to mind. While these sorts of subjects could be incredibly dry, they’ve undertaken to make them as interesting and informative as possible, and to a large degree, have succeeded.

So what brings this bit of praise up?

Earth Story.

I’ve just (about) completed this 8-hour, 1998 BBC documentary and it is one of the finest television shows I’ve ever seen.

The bulk of the program is almost exclusively about Geology. The program does the best job I’ve ever seen of explaining the science and the history of geology in terms that a layman can understand. (My five-year old understands enough of it that it brings joy to my heart.)

At the same time, it provides enough explanation and historical perspective to show how the mistakes and failed theories of the last centuries are science’s greatest strength – the ability to be self-correcting and self-refining – not the weakness that the forces of darkness and superstition try to portray them as.

Thinking back to my own early education, programs like this do a far more comprehensive job of informing people about the topics and science than did any classroom lecture or studies. That is the power and potential of television. When used in this way, it is the most powerful and compelling means we have of education and yet it is mostly wasted on reality TV, sensationalist news, celebrity watching, Three’s Company and most heinous of all, abused and perverted by shows like the 700 Club.

Documentaries like Earth Story are the kinds of things we should be exposing our children to, and yet we have no meaningful mechanism in the US to accomplish this. PBS is a sadly underfunded and half-hearted attempt and networks like the Discovery Channel are still too tied to the commercial constraints of television broadcasting.

Perhaps I’m just a disillusioned, cynical old man because I live in a world that doesn’t put Creationists in jail for abusing the minds of children – or at the very least a world that doesn’t laugh them into a closet like the Flat-Earthers or the Earth-At-The-Center-of-Universers, but we simply don’t make the effort to put the facts out there for fear of offending someone.

It pleases me in some small way that many BBC documentaries now make it to the US on the Discovery Channel (or their sub-channels) (even though they’re frequently re-edited or re-narrated in an American accent) and that some small portion of my cable fees might be going back to Discovery and then in turn being financed into the BBC to co-produce some of these documentaries. I’m doing my small part to educate the world.

Earth Story is not available on Region 1 (US) DVD, but is available through amazon.co.uk on Region 2 DVD if you have a multi-region DVD player. Even though it is 10 years out of date, it’s still a great introduction to Earth’s geology and I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Geology, Science, Television, UK, Video

It’s been a perfectly dreadful week, today was the first time I’ve been out of the house in a week – apart from two trips to the doctor’s office.

As I mentioned earlier, I woke up Sunday with Conjunctivitis (or “Pink” eye, although mine was fiery red) and by Monday was could barely keep it open. Despite being put on ophthalmological antibiotics Monday, it had spread to both eyes by Tuesday night and by Thursday morning had become a very painful sinus infection complete with high fever. So, it was back to the doctor for more general antibiotics and the wost of the fever broke Friday afternoon.

Today, although I still feel awful, I thought, “I could go for some fish & chips.” Which is, I suppose a good sign that my appetite is slowly returning.

On our way back from the chippy, we stopped at Costco to pick up some supplies and I finally have all the missing pieces as to what’s happening up at Rectum… er… Spectrum Mall.

In the meantime, it also gave me the opportunity to play around with Skitch, a new beta program for the Mac. Skitch is on an invitation-based beta program right now, and I have a couple if anyone is interested.

Skitch is one of those programs that, on the surface, doesn’t really float my boat – it’s basically a screen capture, photo annotation, web posting application. Of course, it’s fully integrated with your iPhoto library and tied to your iSight. It also has hooks to work with myskitch.com, flickr, .mac, FTP and SFTP sites (and others).

Nonetheless, it seems very good at what it does and it makes it very easy to illustrate something visually and share it. It’s absolutely painless to snap, annotate, resize and share via web, IM, e-mail.

For part of my evaluation of Skitch, I decided to mock up what’s happening at the mall.

For those not immediately impacted by it (like I have been, everyday for the last year or two) Phoenix is constructing a long-overdue mass transit system based on light rail. While the system under construction is probably woefully inadequate, I try to be a bit forgiving. Phoenix is not an optimally laid-out city for a rail network. With an urban area (including the surrounding cities that are really part of Phoenix, but would scream and stamp their little feet if you tell them that.) I estimate at least 500 square miles of city, and no clearly defined center of commerce, it’s hard to imagine anything other than a massive gridwork of trains accomplishing the task of reducing auto traffic.

Nonethess, I’ve ridden the buses in the areas that are being replaced by the rail and they are the ones I’ve noticed the heaviest use of. I’m sure the planners have all the statistics of all the bus routes and took that into account.

As it happens, I live near the north-western terminus of the initial rail system and am right in the heart of the construction, which continues until December 2008.

The rail comes no closer than one mile to my house and 2.5 miles from my office, which, when it is 114º makes it less than optimal for my commute, but I’m more interested in the growth anticipated around the route. While my area is not depressed, it isn’t new and all the interesting businesses and restaurants tend to concentrate of the outskirts of the metropolis.

There’s certainly lots of expensive condominium construction happening all along the route. I’m in hopes that the businesses will follow for these people who obviously have too much disposable income.

Spectrum Mall, one of, if not the oldest remaining mail in Phoenix could hardly be called “upscale” but, as it happens to be at the terminal station, has been seeing a lot of investment and new construction. They’ve been tearing it down and rebuilding parts of it for a long time, but the names of the new businesses have not been well-publicized. Today I finally filled in all the pieces and have used Skitch to annotate this (months old) satellite image.

JC Penney (a store I never shop at) abandoned this mall first 10 or more years ago and their old location was torn down to make room for the Costco that went in. Montgomery Ward went completely out of business and the store remained empty for years. Walmart built into the east side and then, in a move that surprised me, it was expanded into what was once the largest WalMart Supercentre on earth. Both those events were several years ago and the mall was nearly dead when they moved in. They did not revitalize it all and the rest of the mall (especially the parts not directly in a line between Costco and WalMart) became an empty wasteland.

Once the light rail got going, someone obviously decided that this was viable commercial property and started tearing the dead areas down and rebuilding them again.

In a bit of irony, JC Penny is the first to move back in, with a new location at the front of the mall which opens August 3. The Harkins theatre which has been there for as long as I’ve been in Phoenix (25 years) sat immediately in front of the rail station was torn down, but a newer, bigger one, which just opened this weekend was constructed on the backside.

Meanwhile something large and unnamed has been under construction on the west side of the mall. Today I learned it is some form of Target Supercentre. Are they insane? How can they support two virtually identical stores in one mall? WalMart is so well established in that area, I find it hard to believe Target can thrive.

I just hope the whole thing drives some good restaurants into that area. There isn’t even a food court left in the mall as it was demolished for the new theatres. Right now all there is a KFC and Taco Bell on the perimeter. Yuck.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Light Rail, Phoenix, Railway, Skitch