Author Archives: Bill Humphries

Th’ proprietor.

Badger Hockey Represent

May 3, 2008 – 12:18 am

Pavelski!

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ob. Jonathan Coulton Reference

April 30, 2008 – 8:37 pm

Regarding Game Four of the NHL Western Conference Semi-Final:

We do what we must because we can.

The Sharks still have science to do. See you in San Jose on Friday night.

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That Kid vs. That Guy

April 25, 2008 – 12:48 am

The management at the Moscone Center try to prevent a panelist at the Web 2.0 conference from bringing their 4 month old child with them. Kirrily Robert comments:

Yeah. If given a choice between a crying kid who can be taken outside and out of the way, let alone a well behaved kid, and that bearded [...]

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Actually, we did this before comments

April 20, 2008 – 12:03 am

Jens, I think it’s fine to reply to someone’s blog post with a post in your own blog, rather than a comment:

If your readers don’t read the other blog, then your readers won’t know about the post.
Replying to a contentious post on someone else’s blog, by posting it to your own blog is like counting [...]

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Mobile Maven

April 19, 2008 – 9:22 pm

Jan Chipchase has one of the best jobs: traveling the world, and understanding how people use their mobiles. [via RC3.org]

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2007 Tiptree Award

April 17, 2008 – 12:03 am

Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (published in the US as Daughters of the North) won the Tiptree Award for the best work of science fiction or fantasy dealing with gender published during 2007.
Also of interest to readers of this blog, Charlie Stross’ Glasshouse was on the short list.
More details in the press release. Waiting for [...]

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“What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?”

April 15, 2008 – 1:39 am

John Archibald Wheeler, contemporary of Einstein and Bohr, died this past Sunday.
When he was at the University of Texas, he taught a non-major survey course on relativity and quantum mechanics. It was one of the best classes I took there. Professor Wheeler was witty, patient and a great teacher. Every lesson was designed to build [...]

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Ephemeral Line Noise

April 12, 2008 – 11:32 am

Liz Henry: A reg exp is a thing of beauty but it is not a joy forever.

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Saturday Music: Virtual Electropop and Missed Synergies

March 29, 2008 – 5:41 pm

I just bought music off of MySpace from a band that only appears in a virtual world.
But to do that, I had to sign up for yet another vendor, Snocap. Fortunately, they use PayPal, so I didn’t have have to give them a credit card.
However, I wish that MySpace would had struck a deal with [...]

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文字化け

March 28, 2008 – 7:37 pm

The word of the day is Mojibake, and I am not happy about it.

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Wear Your Tiptree Shirt, You Might Learn Something

March 22, 2008 – 2:04 pm

At the local coffee place, the barista asked about the Tiptree Award t-shirt I was wearing. The shirts, designed by Freddie Baer, are beautiful and always attract compliments.
I told her about Tiptree being the pen name of Alice Sheldon, who wrote science fiction in the 1960s through the early 1980’s.
She said her grandfather also wrote [...]

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“I’d eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.”

March 15, 2008 – 12:09 am

You may have heard that Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld books, recently learned he had early-onset Alzheimer’s.
A couple of days ago, he gave the UK’s Alzheimer’s charity a half a million UKP donation. When Pat Cadigan, an expat American science fiction writer living in the UK, heard about that she kicked in a few [...]

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When Blogs Compete, Fandom Win

March 10, 2008 – 11:06 pm

Looks like Charlie and Annalee are going to have some competition. Two science fiction blogs with great production values? Excellent.

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Martian Avalanche

March 4, 2008 – 1:21 am

The HiRise camera on the Mars Surveillance Orbiter caught an avalanche in progress on the edge of the northern polar cap. Awesome.

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Book on the history of virtual worlds available for free download

February 28, 2008 – 12:22 pm

Julian Bell released his book Tiny Life, about the text-based LambdaMOO virtual world of the 1990’s, as a free PDF download. LambdaMOO is one of Second Life’s ancestors.
He wanted to release it under a Creative Commons license, but ran into complications.
Thanks to Aleks Linden for the heads up.

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