Author Archives: Bill Humphries

Th’ proprietor.

Smoke

June 13, 2008 – 8:39 pm

Smoke from the forest fires around Santa Cruz Mountains King City to the South, and a burning foam factory in Fremont to the East have made for dramatic skies this evening.

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Musical Interludes

June 13, 2008 – 12:07 am

A mention of Brian Eno results in three out of five people in the car breaking out in a chorus of Backwater.

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LAT In Orbit

June 11, 2008 – 11:56 pm

My friend John worked on the Large Area Telescope, part of the GLAST spacecraft which rode into orbit on a Delta rocket earlier today. The LAT will look at a large swath of space, detecting gamma ray bursts from exploding stars and other cataclysms. And yes, people use wikis for these projects.

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Cyberselfish, Again

June 8, 2008 – 11:17 pm

Paulina Borsook comments on the hipster-contrarian vibe of Wired magazine’s 15th anniversary issue. Borsook wrote a parody of Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian culture for Suck, back in the day, which remains one of my favorites.

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I hate it when the Ship’s Mind blows off office hours.

June 5, 2008 – 11:28 pm

Taken at Purgatorio, while wearing the Steam Sparrow Robot avatar by mochi Rokocoko.

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Scale

May 27, 2008 – 10:56 pm

As if the image of the Phoenix lander parachuting towards Mars was not awesome enough, the Mars Recon Orbiter team released the full image where the spacecraft is a little white speck in the foreground of an enormous crater.

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Chute’s Out

May 26, 2008 – 11:58 am

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught an image of the Mars Phoenix Lander after it had deployed its parachute just before its landing on the plains of the Martian Arctic.

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Overheard at WisCon

May 25, 2008 – 12:26 pm

Alan Bostick: I want to see a new MMORPG, Kingdom of Mary Sue.

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A Day that will Live in Infamy Forever

May 23, 2008 – 10:10 am

On Twitter, Brad Graham noted that this is the anniversary of Peter Merholz referring to weblogs as “wee-blogs,” and destroying life as we know it.

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Robert Asprin

May 22, 2008 – 10:13 pm

Sad news from Kevin Standlee, who just flew out to Cincinatti for MARCON. Robert Asprin, author of all those pun laden MythAdventures books about Skeeve and his demonic friend Aahz, died Friday. Asprin was to be MARCON’s author guest of honor.
I’ll remember those books for Kelley Freas’ covers, which were as full of visual gags, [...]

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Rock Math

May 17, 2008 – 1:58 pm

Gogol Bordello + Joe Strummer = Firewater.

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Your RDA of MLB Awesome

May 15, 2008 – 4:11 pm

Manny Ramirez catches a fly ball, high fives a fan in the bleachers, then makes the double play on the O’s. Damn, that’s how to play Baseball. [ thanks, Sam K. ]

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Life is a PKD Novel, the rest is just details

May 12, 2008 – 10:26 am

No better way to start the week than Torely’s list of life lessons from Philip K. Dick.

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Damn.

May 4, 2008 – 11:47 pm

Nabby and Turco had career games tonight in-net. Chuq will have wise things to say later, but still, damn.
Going from the assumption that the Sharks and Stars were evenly matched, then we had a one in sixteen chance of pulling it off.
We’ll get to the Cup final, one of these days.

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Making Light Needs Your Help

May 3, 2008 – 9:27 pm

Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s fantastic group blog, Making Light, had a major server failure, with data loss.
They’ve recovered the bulk of the missing posts, but plenty of the comment threads are missing, and Making Light, unlike most blogs, has good comments.
If you’ve subscribed to Making Light comments in your feed reader or Planet, check [...]

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