Month: December 2003

damn genres, anyway

Found via my referer log: this whole concept of genres is maddening. Some people want to be genre authors and don’t want mainstream types to crash the party, while others resent the mainstream types for writing about ideas they claim as theirs.

yix’s Friends

What is SF?
I was going to write a long and thoughtful response to this entry about science fiction and its comments in Paul’s journal, but it turns out whoever runs Daft Dystopian has alread done it, and better than I would have: draft and later version.

[Interestingly, I recognized this as something that showed up as contextually relevant, via the WayPath engine.]
Continue reading “damn genres, anyway”

nature’s artwork

First day of Winter Break from school: a trip over to Carkeek Park yielded some nice sights, of which these are worth sharing.

birds nest

the eye (of what?)

The alt tags are as close as I’ll get to captioning these.

working around [slow] adservers, updated

In an earlier entry, I mentioned some simple steps to prevent slow loading ads from blocking page loads. I neglected the one step that makes the others effective. You need to make sure you look up any hosts in the local file you just updated.

So to finish this task, vi /etc/lookupd/hosts and make the file’s contents look like this:

LookupOrder Cache FF NI DNS DS

Feel free to make a backup. What this tells the networking infrastructure is to look in the cache (names we have already looked up), the NetInfo database, the local flat files (like /etc/hosts), our local DNS server(s), and any Directory Servers we have configured. Since you have now equated some adservers with the loopback interface, they’ll never be looked up again.
Continue reading “working around [slow] adservers, updated”

ooh, someone touched a raw nerve

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

The promo copy contains this grotesquely patronizing bit of gratuitously insulting analysis of science fiction, apparently aimed at ensuring that any science fiction fans who enjoy the work are put firmly in their place and instructed that this is different from that crappy rocket-ship stuff that they’re accustomed to. I thought that this kind of thinking was dead and buried, but apparently, it’s alive and well at A&E’s marketing department.

Gee, it’s alive and well here too . . . .

I read a lot of science fiction in my formative years but moved on (to say I outgrew it would be needlessly inflammatory). I have picked up a couple of examples of the genre lately (Shockwave Rider (sorry, no cover art available)) and I have ordered Snow Crash from the library, since my only exposure to Stephenson is his epic “hacker journalist” piece in WIRED a few years back.

What I seem to be missing is where science fiction crosses over into mainstream or literary fiction: I have yet to meet an ardent science fiction reader who loves Faulkner or Garcia Marquez, who can talk about “Mrs Dalloway” or “The Iliad” with the same fervor.

And of course, this whole notion is a huge and, by definition, inaccurate generalization. But the A&E promo piece does say that science fiction is “typically seen as non-literary.” This should be news to no one, especially someone who is an active practitioner. The unduly shrill tone of the comments undermines their content: rather than give A&E credit for taking a chance on bringing “non-literary” content from an arguably ghetto-ized genre to a national cable audience, Cory attacks them for trying to find some way to tie the quality (with awards and sales as evidence) of the author’s catholic ouevre with this new production.

Perhaps next time, they’ll think twice: if screeds like this keep people from watching it, is that what a fan of the genre would want?

throbbing reminder

Textism

Dean Allen likes his iBook perhaps as much as I like mine, but we do share a common gripe . . .

UPDATE 4: Oh! Oh! I forgot the most important missing thing of all — a way to turn off the damned glowing HEY I’M REALLY ASLEEP light that, in the pitch-black rural night, can seem like a neon motel sign forever blinking vacancy.

I just lean my iPod or some other piece of dressertop detritus up against it. But yes, it is somewhat annoying and perhaps counter-intuitive . . .

one for the LazyWeb

I’m looking for a way around the anonymous posting/public email dilemma.

Here’s my wish . . .

Alejandro posts a comment on Beata’s weblog. Beata doesn’t permit anonymous comments, but doesn’t want her audience to be spammed by having their email addresses publicly displayed nor does she want people supplying well-formed but bogus email addresses. She wants some accountability.

So when Alejandro presses the submit button, he receives an email at the address he used with an href in it: when he activates the href, the post is approved but his email address is never made public.

The mechanism for this is similar to how one manages their subscription to a Mailman list, if an example would help.

making a tax more understandable

Educated Guesswork: December 2003 Archives

Why don’t we just tax gasoline more?

Interesting ideas, and as usual, Eric musters a lot of good information in support of his position.

But as discussed in an earlier thread, I’d like to see the whole idea of car taxes rethought.

We tax two things: the privilege to drive on public roads and the gas it takes to do that. As we see in every state, it seems, these two levers are never pulled in concert. We play with the gas tax (or the CAFE standards) or we monkey with license fees (license plates, car tabs: usage varies by state). In some cases, like Washington and California, the license fees are cut to the bone.

I agree that per-gallon taxes (essentially usage fees) are regressive: you drive more, you pay more, especially if you drive an older, less efficient car. And while I agree that a per-gallon tax makes a lot of sense, I still think we should connect the license fee and the usage fee as part of the overall funding of our transportation system. That’s why I suggested in the referenced post that we institute a per-gallon tax/usage fee based on curb weight. If the increased axle loads of these increasingly enormous SUVs is wrecking the roads, their owners should pay a proportionally larger share of the upkeep: long-haul truckers are familiar with this already.

The bottom line is that there should be a more direct link in the taxpayer’s mind between the
the price for access to some good and the decisions they make that set that price.