gothwalk | Recent Entries

When you see this, quote from Shakespeare in your journal.

Juliet: You kiss by the book.

- Romeo & Juliet, Act I, Scene V.

For all my usual command of Shakespearean dialogue - and I've never had any trouble with the rhythm, the words, or the patterning - I can never quite decide what Juliet means here. It's plain elsewhere that she's impressed with Romeo, but to my ear, this has always sounded a bit insulting. It follows a whole chain of banter about pilgrims' lips and hands, so could be a biblical reference, I suppose.

Any enlightenment, before you take off your heads to recite Shakespearean quotations?

So, one of my colleagues is starting out on a large new project here. One thing he has to do is collate information about the client's website, which contains something between 200 and 1600 pages. Is there any piece of software out that that will spider through a site, and at the end, provide a listing - ideally, a CSV or something - containing all the page URLs and titles?

He's not overly technical, so nothing TOO involved, if it can be helped.

( Cut for swearing )

List, no exposition...

( Food Meme )

Some discussion of that list at some point over the weekend...

A scanned photograh of me, in or around 1997, on a family-and-friends trip to the Saltee Islands. I have no memory of the kid's name; she was the daughter of a guy who owned a holiday cottage near our house. She's probably in college by now. Photograph thanks to

brucius.

(Click for larger, even grainier, but slightly less distorted version; I cannot be arsed with the maths for a non-distorted size for here.)

All resemblances to The High are coincidental; I am not actually a Majestic-class superhuman.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics is a fascinating read, particularly if you're into economics. I commend it particularly to

giftederic,

sares2000,

olethros and

nhw.

I reckon he's completely right, for what it's worth.

There's a babble of noise - some people assuring the creature that as it's their king, they can't possibly hurt it, some casting defensive spells, and some standing still. The creature begins to look less apprehensive.

"Will you do what I say?", it asks. There's reassurance from several members of the group that indeed, they will, and an expression of something like glee crosses its face. It turns, spinning on its heel, and points, away across the landscape. "There's a big boy out there, and he hurt me. Make him hurt!"

[Poll #1258446]

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inannajones remarked earlier that she can't keep up with the amount of writing I do. This makes me think that there are probably plenty of other people who can't, either. So to make it easy for y'all, here's a list of my main feeds and outputs. This, of course, does not include my game writing, most of which is not for public viewing. I think my current average daily output, not including the day job, or emails, but including that game writing, comes to something around 4000 words.

dukestreet is the feed for The Wizard of Duke Street, which is about science fiction, fantasy, and gaming.

houseinireland is the feed for House in Ireland, which is about home improvement, gardening, and vegetables. It includes photographs whenever I can.

rockinggrass is the feed for

inannajones' site, Rocking Grass. I write articles there, which aren't as good as hers.

isleswinter is the feed for How to Survive Winter, a guide to winter in the British Isles.

politicaledu is the feed for my sporadically updated political blog, A Political Education. Mostly it consists of me saying sensible things and other people pointing out that the world doesn't work that way.

fireflymmo is the feed for fireflymmo.com, a news site for the (currently "delayed") Firefly MMORPG by Universal.

woodworkie is the feed for Woodwork Ireland, which would be updated much more frequently if I was more involved in woodwork.

And there are more in development, including one about wild food in Ireland, and possibly one about Warhammer Online tradeskills. Maybe.

I love my job.

On tomorrow's task list is "Research World Heritage Site promotion". Essentially, we're looking into how various World Heritage Sites (and less high-profile ones, too) are promoted online, with a particular eye to constructing websites (or other things - Second Life locations, podcasts, streaming video, whatever) that allow visitors a feeling that they've "been there".

So, I know a bunch of you have visited various places, and presumably looked at them on the web as well - point me at resources!

This has just been posted to the igaming list:

"In addition to the Charity Auction, this year, courtesy of Drew Shiel, Gaelcon will be running a Bring and Buy stall!

Get rid of your old gaming stuff, make money (and give some to charity)! Bring in old games, parts of games, or anything else game-related you think might sell, to Drew, at the bring-and-buy stand. He'll set a price, of which you'll get 80% - the other 20% going into the charity auction fund. Anything not sold must be collected by Monday at 17:30, or it all gets rolled up into one big bag for next year's auction.

Drew can be contacted at gothwalk@gmail.com for further information"

So if anyone reading this has gamerish stuff they'd like to get rid of, for cash and charity - get it to me at Gaelcon, or even better, beforehand.

An Post (client of my employers, and the Irish post office, for those not familiar) are running an art-by-postcard thing, and it's kinda cool, but it's not getting NEARLY enough attention. Go here:

http://www.anpostcbothsides.ie/index.php?item_id=11

... and do some voting, or even send in art of your own.

And feel free to repost this!

If you live in Ireland, or know a bit about the place, what do you think of as "Irish Food"?

If you had to provide a recipe for "something Irish", what would it be?

This is the project formerly known as So, It Begins. It now has a proper name, for reasons you'll see below. My apologies for the long gap; new jobs will do that.

The creature stares, mouth still open, for a few seconds. Defensive spells go up, weapons and offensive spells are readied, and a few people step forward with the intention to speak. Then the creature says, in a language that is unfamiliar, but words that are all too clear, and it says "Don't hurt me!"

There's a moment of clear, perfect silence. And then you're filled with a steady, pulsing rage, that anyone, anywhere, would considering hurting your King and Master. For it's perfectly clear that this creature, unfamiliar, small, and strange as it is, is your King, and you are compelled to obey it. The anger is familiar, though. You've had it all the years you've worked for the King, and while it burns, it's good to have it back.

[Poll #1249637]

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This is great.

For those of you who said you'd come to

inannajones' birthday dinner, El Bahia is booked for dinner for 15 for the 4th of September at 19:00. There may be drinks somewhere beforehand depending on timing; watch this space for details.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Seth Godin is a bloke I have a lot of time for; he gets a lot of things very right. However, I’ve rarely seen anything I agree with more than this post about patience and persistence. Read it, it’s really good.

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random

So, if you could request from a web development company any website at all, to do anything (within the bounds of current technology, mind) what would you ask for?

These are some questions tied into my current research for game world development. If anyone can answer them, fantastic. If not, some speculation is welcome. It doesn't have to be logical, or even meaningful.

1) What governed the conduct of warfare in the Enlightment era (18th century)? There were plenty of them, and there seem to have been accepted ways to fight them, but obviously they weren't governed by, say, the Geneva Convention, and chivalry, if it ever existed in that context, was if not dead then well forgotten.

2) What is the major (historical, pre-trains) barrier to overland trade from Europe to China? Is it down to the terrain between here and there, the people along the way, or just the fact that it's a bloody long way?

3) Are there credible, or even semi-credible alternatives to the Westphalian nation-state system in the modern era?

I'm going to do the dishes, and I expect some entertaining answers by the time I get back. Sunny weather is no excuse.

EDIT: Woah, answers! Thank you all. Individual replies to follow...

There's a sudden blaze of daylight, and one wall, some distance away, swings down to form a ramp. Sunlight pours in, illuminating the stone chambers. It's not clear if someone opened it, or it happened automatically.

However, standing at the end of the ramp, where it reaches the ground, is a peculiar creature. It's humanoid, dressed in plain, undyed linen clothes. It's too small to be an elf, and its features are too smooth to be really human. Its mouth is open in an expression that could be astonishment or naked aggression - you can't really tell.

[Poll #1225838]

(Feel free to email me if you'd like to do something secret)

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In the growing light, you can see other people - other creatures - around you. Each of them is fastened by strapping and buckles into niches in the stone walls of the passageways. You do recognise some of them as allies, but others are unknown to you. Some are moving, some look to still be unconscious. It's time, you feel, to do something, to serve your King in some way.

Do you:

[Poll #1219412]

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The voice continues, "Alright, so I'm not the Commander, but I don't know where she is, or if she's still alive. We'll settle who's in charge here in a short while. In the meantime, can we have some light?"

Someone incants, and light creeps into existence, just a glimmer, but enough to show you your surroundings. The space you are in is made of stone, but shaped by tools. You're in one carved niche in a corridor or passageway, along with your tools and weapons, and around you, you can see the outlines of people in others. Some of them are of shapes that seem unfamiliar, until you realise that you don't know what is familiar, and look down at yourself.

[Poll #1212822]

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Any WoW players in the Dublin area interested in being interviewed / talking about MMOs / voicing their character for a short film?

http://www.tribune.ie/arts/article/2008/jun/22/another-shooting-spree-in-dublin/

Particularly looking for players with dwarf, elf, orc, troll characters, and players who are not from technical backgrounds.

Anyone who's interested, mail me at gothwalk@gmail.com, and I'll forward it on to the guy doing the film. I and Wormson are interviewing for it tomorrow evening.

There is darkness, pain, and a growing sensation that something has gone very, very wrong. You're just not sure what. You remember that you're a Legionnaire, that you serve the King - and you know what you can do. They must really have drummed that into you, though, because you can't remember a damn thing otherwise, not even your name.

There's movement around you - other people waking up too? - and then there's a man's voice that reaches down into your guts, and pulls you to attention. "For the King!" it roars, "Legionnaires! We've crashed, we have memory problems. Call out your section, and we can start sorting things out!"

[Poll #1202642]

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Sometime this month - the exact date escapes me, and defies my historical research capabilities - the 20th anniversary of my picking up a gaming book will happen. It was the summer of 1988, and during the Strawberry Fair in Enniscorthy, I acquired a copy of a book called Fighting Fantasy: The Riddling Reaver, which was an expansion of the Fighting Fantasy game, based very closely on the choose-your-own adventure style solo games. It's gone from there.

To celebrate the anniversary of this, I'm going to be doing some interesting stuff in my campaign world. I invite you - anyone who's reading this - to have some influence on it. I'll be presenting a number of options for you, and you can take up any you want. The first and simplest ones will be a series of LJ polls, with the option to comment. For this, I'll be shamelessly ripping off

mytholder's methods in his Now We Are Here game.

At a step up from that, I'll talk you through describing a character in the world, and some of the decisions that character can make as the events unfold - sort of a play-by-email/comment-lite.

For people who're interested, I'll be offering a slightly more intensive play-by-email game, playing through a number of events.

Interaction between your character and the world will also be available by IM, should you have some ideas you want to follow up on.

For those latter two forms, if you had a character in Threshold of Ages or The Big Easy, please drop me a line letting me know roughly what your character would now be up to - or you can come up with a new one, I don't mind. If you played in Kingfisher's Way, and your character was one that might be around 4600 years later (and we haven't already discussed this), fire me a similar mail.

The idea of all of these is to let all of you have some input to my campaign world. There are no obligations for you; I'll extrapolate as I need to.

And finally, this will of course impact on some or all of my present and future tabletop games, and if things go the way I expect them to, there will probably be some one-off tabletop events.

The first LJ poll will appear either later today or tomorrow, and we'll go from there. If you've an idea for a character for any of this you want to talk about now, or if you have any questions, fire them into comments here.

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20years

Being a short series of observations about a recently concluded trip to Portugal.

Doing Nothing Is Sometimes Completely Necessary

I have developed a mental metric for how much I needed a given holiday. This is measured by the time after which I get bored of "doing nothing" (which is actually reading, but text intake for me is so easy that it's essentially nothing), and start to look for something to do (usually writing). On most holidays, this happens after two or three days. In this case, from the 1st right through to the 8th of June, I did not get bored. At all. I read a lot, but also spent a lot of time really doing nothing; staring into space.

The Iberian Landscape is Different

This is something that's really obvious when you say it directly, but it's something I forget. It's not just the different plants, it's the shape and colour of the land itself, the feeling of the air, and a good few other cues that I recognise, but can't describe. I spent a good bit of time watching this difference, and trying to find ways to pin it down, so that I can use it later. I wonder, too, if it's a climate thing; if California or Mexico might seem similar.

Oddity of Language

Portugese looks very similar to Spanish, in text. It sounds completely different, and depending on the speaker, makes me think instead of Russian, French, or something completely unfamiliar. It does not sound like Spanish, though.

Portugese Architecture is All About The Details

We looked at a number of houses around the hotel where we were staying, with an eye to picking up details we liked. And I discovered, they're almost nothing but details. The way they're built, on hillsides with the entrances at the top, and steps going down to doorways, and small courtyards, it's very hard to see all of the house at once, and as soon as you're far enough away to try to take in a lot of it, there are trees or cacti or bits of landscape or something in the way. No two chimneys are the same. No two roofs look quite the same. All the places we'd expect angles, there are curves. Even in blocks of houses clearly built as a unit, there are variations in the way window and door spaces are formed, in the way external stairs climb - and then there are the tiles - glazed ceramic tiles used as wall decorations, adorning the risers of stairs, for house names and numbers... mostly in white and blue, and invariably gorgeous.

That was a really good, and very much needed holiday.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Daniel Dociu is Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, who make the Guild Wars game. There’s an article on BLDGBLOG featuring his art. You need to see it. Go look.

I don’t think I’ve my mind as thoroughly lit up by artwork in years.

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We spent a good chunk of the weekend in Maynooth, getting to know the place, moving over a few boxes of stuff, and rather usefully, unpacking them at the other end so that they can go back and get refilled. We also bought a lawnmower - the self-propelled kind for reasons of environment, exercise, and not having to buy fuel for it - and some gardening tools. And we got a microwave, which will make the process of eating while we move more stuff a lot easier.

I dug a sort of test vegetable bed, which I think totals about four square feet, but it'll be enough to get some planting done - more can follow. I'm starting to give some more consideration to raised beds, since there are trees in the hedge whose roots come a long way out, and one tree in the middle of the back garden. I had to use an axe for some particularly tough roots in my test bed. It looks like good soil, though I'm no expert, neither sand or clay, and a good few earthworms and such.

We also mowed some lawn. It should be easier next time; there were some patches of grass long enough to choke up the blades. The back lawn is full of daisies, and I can't bring myself to be bothered about that. I'm leaving a stretch at the back long, and will see about getting some more wild flowers into it at some stage, although some of it will be sacrificed to more vegetable beds.

It's very noticable that it's Not In A City - you can hear birds all the time, even inside with the windows closed, and there's a definite difference in air quality. The cats are going to love it when we move them, once they finish sulking.

Today, I've managed to contact Eircom and the ESB, and am trying to get onto Bord Gáis to get everything changed over and hooked up. Their phone system seems to be lightly b0rked, and the options which should let me talk to them about it keep cutting me off, or on one occasion, announcing in Very British Tones that the "specified number has redirections active", before cutting me off.

We don't really know yet when we'll be Moving Properly - at the moment that's dependent on things like broadband, transport, time, whim and chance.

So, we've bought a house in Maynooth. We got the key yesterday evening. I've just sent the we're-moving-out mail to the landlord of the current place.

This is still in the realm of the not-quite-believable, so we won't be posting the address or any pictures until we've had a chance to go there and establish that it is, in fact, ours. That'll be happening over the weekend.

Our head designer is heading off to South-east Asia for 6 weeks. We need a designer to pick up the slack, so for about 2 months. Are you, or do you know anyone, who could do this? It'd be from pretty much ASAP.

There are times when I really regret having passed through the Irish education system, but none more so when I have to resort to a dictionary to understand a message from a friend in a language I studied for fourteen years.

So, someone from Buffy's hometown is reading me. A lot... does anyone have any idea why 382 people, give or take Google Analytics' margin for error, in Sunnydale, California, would punch in "www.dukestreet.org" to their browsers? This happened on March 20th, and caused a visible spike in my traffic.

EDIT: Further analysis shows that it wasn't the site root they were hitting, it was a wide variety of pages on the site. Even further analysis says they were all in the "jarvis universal purchase company", which is so unlikely as to be pretty near impossible. I'm guessing it was some piece of software reading the whole site, then - even though it claims to have been Internet Explorer, it was either masquerading, or not accepting cookies and/or sending referer data correctly.

Weird, anyway.

We have arrived at Orbital. The con itself looks great; I'm not so impressed with the hotel. The "double" bed is of a size that made us go back down to reception to check that we hadn't accidentally got a single. And the buffet dinner wasn't a long way above canteen standards. (Later edit: and there's only one towel).

However, the convention is off to a good start by giving us free drinks pretty much as we came in the door. We've seen the art room, where there's some stunning stuff - I'll be bidding on a few pieces. And there are no less than three tables piled high with free fanzines, many of which are vintage if not antique - the first one I picked up was from 1966. I have a pile two inches thick here, and that's a tiny fraction of what's there. We're going to trot down shortly and see if we can find anyone we recognise, and assault a few people we know by name if nobody familiar is about.

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eastercon

This summer, I will have been playing RPGs, in some form or another, for twenty years. In that time, I've run games all the time. I've played a few one shots, and a sum total, I think, of five campaigns, none of which really got to finish up. I would like someone else to run a game, but because I'm a picky bugger, there are a few things I would like to set out.

I'd like it to be either extra-crunchy with extra crunch, or pretty light on the numbers. The in-between stuff bugs me. For extra awkward, even if you're going with the numbers-light option, I want the numbers to make a difference. For anyone who's trying to estimate where this falls, I've played games with

dualpurpose and

eng_monkey, and both of them did the numbers-light option to perfection.

I would like the other players to be reliable people who can focus. That is to say, if a game is arranged, I'd like them to be there, and to actually play when they're there. Life's too short for games that don't happen.

I don't want to be railroaded. In fact, I abhor railroading, and although I'm a well-behaved player with regard to picking up plot points and so on, I like having the feeling that I could go haring off across the planes of existence in order to build the Platonic Bicycle.

After that, I'm not picky. I have a preference for home-grown settings over pre-written ones, and I'd prefer to play with rules I know (2nd Ed AD&D, D&D 3.x, Fate 2.0) or ones I think I'd like (Burning Wheel, SOTC, Monte Cook's World of Darkness).

So. Anyone got anything? I currently have Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and alternate Mondays available. I'll travel, or you can come here to run a game.

So, this year's Eastercon is Orbital, which is conveniently happening in Heathrow.

inannajones and I are going, who else is?

I don't think I have ever been out in weather that unpleasant before. The only thing that could have fallen from the sky but didn't was frogs, and some of what fell wasn't so much falling as travelling horizontally. Rain, sleet, snow, sharp pointy hail, high winds, all in the 35 minute walk home from work.

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Thanks to

olethros' efforts, my PC is up and running again. The problem seems to have been some bad sectors on the hard disk. Over the next few weeks, though, I'm going to be transferring a lot of data to online storage of some kind, as some bad sectors can be a bad sign for a disc.

Peculiarly, I got on fine without it. Most of my current projects are already online, via Google Documents, Gmail, LJ, blog software, and various message boards, all acessible via the laptop, and the only things I missed were installations of EVE and WoW. Further, WoW was playable on

olethros' Mac Mini (fast becoming the designated emergency computer), and I have an installation of EVE in work so that I can change skills.

There are ongoing discussions wrt to backups and remote storage - mainly for images and media files. A lot of these are large files, work in progress, or just plain archival stuff, and as yet, I don't know of anything like Google Docs for images.

Brief Note: My home desktop machine has manifested a mysterious malfunction, which involves it not booting (or, indeed, looping through a partial boot over and over again). The hard disk seems to be ok -

olethros was able to look at files on it when he booted from a Linux CD - so I'll be able to retrieve data, and I can get online from the laptop, but I won't be on WoW or EVE for a few days until we work out what needs to be done to get the desktop running again. I'm hoping it just needs a reinstall of Windows, but it might yet be a hardware problem. We'll see.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Whenever I’m interested in a new area, my first reaction is to hit the web. Usually, I find what I’m looking for not on wikipedia or about.com or any organised information site, but on various blogs. My next reaction is to acquire as many books on the topic as I can, but I’m trying to go for the library option on that instead. The latest interest to get hit this way is gardening, and specifically what I consider to be real gardening - herbs, fruit and vegetables.

So here are some of the blogs that I’ve been reading and enjoying over the last couple of weeks.

My Tiny Plot details the progress from a small allotment plot up through several more plots of land, to the current series on landscaping a garden for food production. There are plenty of photographs, and a good bit of useful and encouraging detail.

Henbogle deals with hens, woodwork, recycling, and gardening - a solidly interesting mix.

Future House Farm has similar topics, and a bit more emphasis on fruit.

One Straw: Be The Change deals more specifically with sustainability, both in farming and in the wider world. It’s fascinating reading.

Tiny Farm Blog deals with organic market gardening. There’s a post a day, regular-like, and I’m particularly enamoured of the pictures that have deep snow and cold. Not that I’m going to have to deal with that anytime soon…

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My ability to concentrate seems to have completely vanished. I can do alright in work, but once I'm out the door, it take direct interaction with other people to keep me going on something. I tried during the week to sit down and do some work on my various websites, and really couldn't hold it together. Again today, I got in a few necessary updates, and then found myself reading back over a gardening blog instead. Earlier in the week, I thought it was because I was trying to work on the desktop, which gets used for games, but today on the laptop, no different. I need to do a chunk of writing in the near future for various games, and I suspect it's going to be a very hard slog.

EDIT: Sod this web thing for a lark. When in doubt, cook.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Something I fervently wish existed is a standard “unsubscribe” method for mailing lists - both discussion and broadcast. Something that an email client could hook into, in order to display a great big “unsubscribe” button in the interface.

I’ve been cleaning up a few mailboxes during the early part of the new year, and looking at email tactics for our own marketing efforts. It’s becoming clear that the plethora of unsub methods is not a good thing. Some systems just want you to click on a link. Others want you to click on a link, then fill in an email address and hit submit. Some want one of the above, and then they send you an email which you reply to, or further still, click on another link in to fully opt-out. Some have a range of tickboxes about remaining on their alert list rather than their newsletter list, and so on, and so forth.

An awful lot of people resort to hitting the “report spam” button instead of making their way through the maze, and that doesn’t help anyone. The trouble is that with at least one major newsletter out there, I tried for months to unsubscribe - and eventually had to mark the thing as spam to stop it appearing.

I assume there are technical issues with introducing an unsubscribe standard - so what are they? Is there a way to get around them?

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Perhaps it should bother me that I can barely get words to rhyme when I'm being me, but an NPC who hasn't even appeared yet in any of my campaigns gets to produce this.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a fascinating article by Walter Kirn in November’s Atlantic Monthly, called The Autumn of the Multitaskers. It basically argues that trying to do multiple things at once is a fad of the current era, possibly caused and definitely accentuated by conceptualising the brain as a computer. And further, it seems it’s not good for you. There’s a level at which this appeals to me, because I’m very bad at multitasking. Unless I carefully prepare myself for it, I have difficulty switching from one task to another without a few seconds of blank staring in between. And if I do the preparation, then neither task is really done to the best of my ability.

There’s an argument that this is a problem most men have; women seem to multitask better. I can barely walk and engage in a sensible conversation at the same time; many women seem to be able to do both as well as, for instance, send a text message. I don’t know many men who can multitask well.

This is somewhat belied by the fact that as I write this, I have earphones on and am listening to my current favourite genre of epic metal music, and am holding two IM conversations at the same time. The music, however, isn’t really a distraction; it’s partly in use to block out surrounding conversation and noise from the workplace, and partly to make me comfortable - I’m not actively listening to it. The two IM conversations are about prosaic, day-to-day items in the workplace. Neither of them is requiring much from me other than quick bursts of information I have no trouble recalling.

Part of the Getting Things Done method that I’ve been trying, with some success, to stick with, is a principle that having other stuff in your head, background tasks, prevents you from getting on with the ones in hand. The solution there is to dump everything you can think of out to a set of lists, where you can come back to them later. In other words, you can concentrate better if you’re not multitasking.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator is a bit horrified by a motorbike repair shop where it’s clear that the employees are doing more listening to the radio than concentrating on their work, with poor work being the result - and moreover, it’s poor work that they’re not aware of; they think they know what they’re doing, and doing a good job.

I don’t know if I believe that multitasking is bad for you, but it’s an interesting line of thinking.

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The airship images I posted yesterday brought to mind a cover illustration for Dragon that I had seen, a long time ago. I finally found it online, and you can see it after the cut:

( Old Dragon Covers )

Hats, I am discovering, make an unreasonable difference to your experience of weather. Yesterday, there was a vague attempt at rain while I was walking home, with no hat. I felt chilly, rained on, somewhat soaked, and rather put out, despite the fact that I was heading home for a few hours of EVE before watching the first episode of the new season of Torchwood (review coming up on

dukestreet later today).

This morning, I wore my winter hat, a black trilby-sort-of-thing, through the driving rain and nasty winds walking to work. I was warm, comfortable, and felt dry, despite the fact that I was, well, walking to work in the rain.

And yet, a good half of the people I passed had wholly inadequate hoods, scarves tied over their heads, ineffective umbrellas (many of which turned inside out at each street corner), or the old classic of a newspaper over the head. The people who were wearing hats were black, oriental, Polish, or quite old. Hats are not that hard to get - why do Irish people not wear them?

Manned Cloud is a flying hotel proposed by French designer Jean-Marie Massaud.

I want this to be built. For one thing, it looks exactly like the space whales on the cover of Dragon that made me buy Spelljammer, yea, these many moons ago.

I'm sure someone out there has dealt with this before, so here goes. We have a process that outputs, once every half hour, a CSV file of the last X lines from a given log. The activity recorded in this log has peaks and valleys, so the last X lines might only cover the last hour's activity, at busy times, or might cover the last six hours, when things are quiet. The end result is that the output CSV files overlap unpredictably.

Is there a tool, script, process, or anything of that sort - anything in Windows, or shell scripts in Unix - that can unify a bunch of these CSVs into one CSV file? I can do it manually in Excel, but it's a pain.

I can probably work out something in the shell script line with diff and head, but it would be nice if someone has already got one knocking around.

( First Set of Answers )

So, ask me some questions. Try to make them ones I can answer interestingly, rather than "yes/no/last Tuesday", but other than that, fire away. No set number, not set topic.

Current Mood: contemplative

Here are some links I said I'd post for people over the holidays. This is while I wait for 4565 work emails to download... actually, no, that's 12676.

BLDGBLOG: For the special attention of

bluedevi, this is the speculative architecture site I mentioned.

io9.com is the good new science fiction blog I was talking to someone about.

... and I'm sure there were more. If I said I'd post something for you, and I haven't yet, this is your chance to remind me.

Current Location: harmony court

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In the last hour, I have had my entire train of thought looped through Mornington Crescent with a phone call, and am awaiting the public posting of the news. Your brain, too, will melt.

We did it all for the Glory of Love

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