Journal Journal: Want. 2
The Ultimate Off-Grid Computer.
Too cool.
The Ultimate Off-Grid Computer.
Too cool.
When an inmate at the Riverhead County Jail in Southampton, NY, commits a crime, they are arraigned for it at the Southampton Town Hall. Concerns about overcrowding the Town Hall with prisoners awaiting arraignment, and the fact that it is next to a school, have led to a plan to conduct future inmate arraignments via Internet-based video conferencing.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be arraigned over a webcam. I never look good in those things.
This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .
I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.
I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?
After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.
"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.
"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.
"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.
"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.
I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.
I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.
After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.
Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.
Just finding a safe space for the link to my local Slashdot party, since it'll scroll out of my recent threads soon.
I look forward to it, I'm always happy to put faces to screennames.
I wrote this up for the IMDb message board for the film Hackers, which I hang around on. On the off-chance any folks around here are anywhere near as much of a shameless fan of that particular b-movie as I am, I'll repost it here..
If you're like me (and I know I am!) you like to collect novelizations of movies you're into. For those unfamiliar, the novels have to hit store shelves near the movie's release date. So, they're often adapting the movie while the crew are still making it. The novelists are usually given an earlier draft of the script to work from than the final product. The novel will also lack last-minute changes made by the director, and often contain alterations or whole new sequences of the writer's own creation to flesh things out.
So, I finally got around to reading my copy of the paperback novelization of this movie, by David Bischoff (incidentally, the same guy who novelized WarGames.) I thought I'd mention some of the differences between the book and the film it was based on, and other assorted trivia, in case anyone else finds it interesting.
In the novel...
And there's this one particular Scooby-Doo scene before Kate and Dade's date, after they are released. It's so mind-boggling I'll just transcribe the whole thing here. I swear this is exactly how it reads in the book. I am not exaggerating any of it in the slightest.
This takes place in the book directly between Plague leaving on a jet plane, and Kate preparing for her date with Dade...
Cyberdelia and Beyond
Look Out, Algonquin Round Table, thought Dade Murphy as he sat on the glossy vinyl couch at the Cyberdelia, surrounded by his buddies, sodas and coffee and junk food sitting in front of them. Here's the F.O.D.
Friends of Dade!
"So what'd they slap you with, Kate?" a newly self-confident Joey asked.
"Two hundred hours of community service," said Kate. She was sitting right by Dade, and he liked it.
"Me too," said Joey. "But I'm happy." He pulled out a snazzy-looking laptop. "Meet Mindy!"
Cereal put his wedge of pizza down. "Joey, you got a handle yet?"
Joey grinned significantly at Dade. "Yeah. I got one handed down to me. Zero Cool."
Cereal nodded. "That'll work."
Sitting by Fantom Phreak was a beautiful young woman with long lashes and a killer smile who spoke with him in Spanish. Kate leaned over and asked him, "Is this your girl from Venezuela?" Phreak nodded.
"Who paid for her flight?" Kate asked.
"Frequent-flier miles." Phreak shrugged eloquently. "I can't help it. Airline computers are so choice."
Nikon knocked back a hit of espresso. "You guys apply for college on time?"
"Mertz got me a late application," said Dade.
"Nah, man," said Cereal. "I never made it to the S.A.T."
"Oh, I forgot." Kate pulled a letter from the inside of her jacket, handed it to Cereal.
"What's this?"
"Your S.A.T. You scored 1540."
Dade untucked another letter from a book. "Also, in appreciation for your excellence in trash diving, you've been accepted to Harvard."
Nikon had a bigger envelope. "Or if not . . . here's a degree. You graduated with honors."
"Thanks," said Cereal, clearly underwhelmed with emotion. "I don't know what to say, except, uh, what did I major in?"
"What else," said Dade. "Communications."
Just, No.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/1626243
Nothing needs to be said. Writing should not be a crime.
FYI, the text of what he wrote is at the chicago tribune
Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.
So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.
The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.
I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.
Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?
Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart