out of the blue

Just remember this, kids: No matter what magical drivers you have installed, Windows doesn't REALLY understand Linux file systems. They may be civil to one another, might even share some good times, but at the heart of it, they're incompatible. Especially when it comes to symbolism. Those symbolic links will confuse Windows every time.

I have my main Linux partition mapped to the G drive. Linux can use something called a "symbolic link", which acts like it's a folder or a file, but is actually a link to another folder or file. They can also refer to themselves.

Which explains why during my virus scan it got to 99.8%… and then stopped. It was on 99.8% for about 35 minutes before I realized, hey, it's looking at /usr/X11R6/b/X11/X11/X11…. 78 times.

Just to be clear, that's /usr/X11R6/bin/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/, if I did my pasting and counting correctly.

If I ever get around to making a comprehensive and carefully-thought out set of tags to use for my site, geek_fail may very well be on there.

(This is too geeky for just about all of you, but I have to let it out every once in a while.)

I've been using WordPress to host my blog out of the blue for a while now. I post both to my blog and to LiveJournal (because community is good stuff).

Today I discovered a plugin that does the cross-posting automatically. Hooray for laziness enablers! There was a slight edit necessary to get it to work on WordPress 2.5 (I just upgraded), and I hacked it a bit for my own devious purposes.

But don't worry, this doesn't mean that I will start ignoring LiveJournal. I will still receive e-mails when you comment, and I will still follow my friends page. The comments will happen where they will. Probably here, because you're all lazy like me. Well, probably not quite as lazy.

(I don't know if any of you saw my test posts. They were mostly up for less than a minute while I ironed out some bugs. But you might see more, if I feel that further customization of the plugin is necessary.)

You can find the LiveJournal Cross-Poster here: http://lj-xp.com/

Tonight I've been working on my book tracker. I changed the database to have a table for authors, a table for books, and a table for readings (and a table to connect authors to books, but you probably don't care to know that). This means I have a lot more power to generate statistics about my books.

Here they are:

books read: 250
books per year: ~128.0
books per month: ~10.7
unique books: 244
unique authors: 120
unique books per author: ~2.0

top authors

Steven Brust: 22
Roger Zelazny: 21
Neil Gaiman: 7
Charles Stross: 7
J. K. Rowling: 7
Ray Bradbury: 6
William Gibson: 5
David Eddings: 5
Jack Kerouac: 4
Philip K. Dick: 4

see this page

I just randomly picked up The Great Gatsby. I hadn't read it, and thought I ought to. But as I was reading, I came across the term "football" and failed to think of American football; I came across the term "East" and thought of Asia, rather than the East coast. I've been substituting them for too long, it seems.

Tomorrow I take Sarah to Heathrow Airport to see her off.

I read Neil Gaiman's journal today and noticed that he was in the UK for Eastercon, a science fiction convention. For kicks, I looked at the convention's web site.

It is this weekend. At a hotel 1.6 miles from Heathrow airport (I could walk there in less than half an hour). A day membership is only 25 pounds (compared to hundreds of dollars for many conventions). Two of my absolute favorite writers are going to be there as guests of honor: Neil Gaiman and Charles Stross. I go with Sarah to the airport at 7, and I take a bus to Norwich at 1. Six hours to kill.

I won't do it, because 25 pounds is 50 dollars and fannish settings like that disturb me slightly. And because I want to spit in the eye of Fate, of course.

But it makes my head spin a bit.

On the way back from Norwich a few days ago, Sarah and I climbed the cast-iron fence that encircled a cemetary. It was a singularly pleasant place with lush green grass and a large avenue of regal trees down the center. We sat on a bench and ate fudge we had bought at the market. The birds sang all around us. Gray clouds moved in and began to sprinkle lightly. We climbed back over the fence and were walking the last half mile back home when an old lady in a dressing gown and nightcap called down to us from her open window, "Shouldn't've been in there, should you?" I called back, "Prob'ly not", and we walked on. She sounded disapproving. We had been nice and respectful, and obviously didn't damage anything, so I can't see what the problem would have been. Probably the British tendency to follow rules and expect them to be followed, versus the American tendency to only follow them if they make sense or there's someone to enforce them.

Sarah is here and it is wonderful. I may not post much over the next two weeks.

Where was this photo taken? What might live there? Do you want to visit? (I certainly do.)

(Click for a larger version. And don't bother with metadata. It has been stripped by Photoshop.)

So, this girl in my flat has had a rather small box of tea bags in her cupboard since September. She mentioned it today when I was brewing some cheap Assam, saying that she thought that she drank tea all the time. Apparently not. I think the British don't so much adore tea as drink it to prove their very British-ness. Interesting holdover from colonialism, really.

(I'm not really serious about this assessment. It just struck me.)

Today's weather was unpredictable. The sunny afternoon was interspersed with furious hailstorms and pelting rain. After one such outburst died down, I started walking into town with the vague hope of getting to a bookstore before the next one began. I made it, but as I walked into the bookstore I could see another front of dark clouds moving inexorably across the city.

I was at the bookstore to purchase Odd and the Frost Giants. Neil Gaiman wrote this book for World Book Day, an event designed to magically transform stuffy little television-watching U.K. children into voracious-and-enlightened readers. It only cost me a pound, which made me feel something of a thief. After all, I'm already voracious and somewhat enlightened, and I'm no longer a child in any sense but the deepest.

Clutching the book beneath my jacket, I made my way towards The Tea House. I failed to reach it before the leading edge of the storm dumped hail in waves on the streets around me. It was exhilarating and harmless — I was wearing my rain jacket, which holds down a second job as a hail barrier.

Although I failed to dodge the hail, I did manage to avoid the heavy rain that followed it. While the rain darkened the polished Elm Street cobblestones and washed the colors from the buildings, I was inside enjoying a pot of free-trade Assam tea and breaking into Odd and the Frost Giants.

It's a simple book but a good one, filled with matter-of-fact magic and fabulous adventure. Odd is a cheerful and unlucky boy possessing no small amount of charm. He travels with his companions (a fox, an eagle and a bear) to Asgard, hall of the Norse Gods, in order to win the city back from the Frost Giants. Luckily, he's a special boy.

I finished the book and my tea and happily made my way homeward. Gaiman stories and quick-change weather make for incredible sky vistas. They took my breath away.