It's my turn to visit Nathan. That's about a week in Amsterdam, starting in two hours when I begin the six-mile walk to the airport. Then up, across the Channel, and down into Schliphol where Nathan should be waiting. Lots of pictures when I return.
xkcd is great today, but most of you probably won't understand. I wouldn't either, except my combinatorics teacher last year told us stories about Paul Erdos. (Look at the hover text on the comic image.)
Paul Erdos was a mathematician famous for being prolific. He wrote (according to Wikipedia) over 1,500 articles with 511 individual collaborators. If you wrote a paper with him, you have an Erdos number of 1. If you wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him, you have an Erdos number of 2.
This just in: Tom Lehrer and Noam Chomsky have the same Erdos number. (Here is a tool for calculating Erdos numbers; it is not exhaustive.)
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
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.)