"Some days Omaha wakes up grumpy..."

"... but usually she lets him sleep in."

Yeah, that's me this weekend. Nerves frayed, children loud (but happy). Nothing really there to explain the sudden loss of all energy. Friday, fallenpegasus stopped by for dinner and general socializing. I don't even recall what we did after dinner. All of us were so beat that we could barely move; Pegasus fell asleep on the couch with his laptop in his lap. Omaha and I went to bed at a "reasonable" hour.

Saturday, after waking up and feeding the kids, we kicked them out into the back yard to play while I ran around town in my car, picking up Omaha's medicines and then some bug bomb for a wasp nest I'd found under the carport eaves. When I got home, I tinkered with my computer for a while, then helped Omaha move some dirt around to fill in a corner of the yard where the rain keeps silting away our ground into the greenbelt behind the house. I also managed to get the wheelbarrow fixed-- I'd blown the tire helping kendaer's household muck out their pond. No big deal; it reseated and reinflated. We spent the evening watching television for a while, then played some games with the kids before heading to bed.

Sunday, more of the same. I had to run back to the hardware store to replace a broken draner basket for the sink, then back home where we sat around and made plans to run out for the monthly and weekly grocery run. I spent a healthy amount of time sorting through a ton of ancient email that I'm responsible for but haven't had the time or energy to sort through. Some of you may be getting emails from me in response to things you sent me in 2001; sorry about that.

After doing the grocery shopping and dropping Yamaarashi-chan off at her mother's house, by which time Omaha and I were dead tired and snapping at each other-- and I'm not sure why, we hadn't done much and had no right to be tired-- we got home, where I mananged to defuse a ton of the tension with a dozen pink roses that I had managed, somehow, to sneak away and stash in the car while we were at the grocery store.

It worked. I also cooked dinner-- tacos, which let us use up the lettuce in the 'fridge. (Let's see if I can remember the recipe--- a half cup of onion flakes, a half teaspoon of garlic flakes, three tablespoons of cumin, 1.5 teaspoons chili powder, cayenne to taste... that's our standard taco mix; use two tablespoons and 1/2 cup of water per pound of ground beef, cooked and drained, and let simmer for ten minutes. If you have a baking stone, preheat it to 375 degrees in your oven, turn off oven, and then heat tortillas on it, 15 seconds per side.)

I installed the Iomega ZIP drive in my machine. Linux recognizes it but I'm getting timeouts and "not ready" errors on the privileged console. It works fine under windows. *Sigh*. Also, the second CD-ROM (A Sony CD-RW) drive works as a burner, but I can't read anything with it under Linux. It also works fine under Windows, but I can't burn anything with it. I can't get the SPDIF connectors on the sound card to work without a second floppy power connector, which for some bizarre reason this machine doesn't have. I don't even know if the main floppy drive works.

Ah, well.

Anyway, Omaha and I have a date set for replacing the retaining wall. It's Saturday, September 27th, starting at 11:00am. As you can see from the terrible composite photo, it's not really that big a job. ( The Wall. )

But we can really use all the help you can offer. It's about ten meters long and less than one high at the top, but we need to tear it out, dig the hill back far enough to put in proper drainage, install the wall, then put all the dirt back in-- correctly. We'll be handling stone, so bring work gloves.

And man, I am just dragging today. I wish I knew why. I'll survive. I slept well enough last night. Maybe it's the weather.

News you can use.

First, Doonesbury this past Sunday was pulled from several newspapers. Apparently, despite everything else Trudeau has mentioned, masturbation was too much for some editors. One editor went so far as to refuse to use the word in an interview, referring only to "that m-word."

Secondly, this Monday Doonesbury sent out the largest flash mob notice in history. And it's happening Saturday. In Seattle. "Flash Mobs For Howard Dean." Enjoy.

The Guardian has a story about the Bush "Abstinence Only" education policy and the way it's working, or not working, depending upon to whom you speak.

And finally, the "other shoes drop" in Connecticut for the "No Child Left Behind" act. Apparently, the Bush plan is to "fail" schools that don't meet the act's requirements-- but because there's no money to bus the kids to better schools, and no room at other schools, they stay at those schools, which are punished by being denied federal funds. Those schools are then closed because of their failure to improve. Because there's no money provided in the act, those schools will then reopen with new administrations and teachers, but the same system that made them fail in the first place. Finally, the act provides that parents, as a "last ditch" effort to help their kids, are provided with vouchers, which cannot possibly cover the cost of secular private schools, but can cover parochial schools. The writer claims that the No Child Left Behind act is a grand plan to de-fund public education and funnel money to religious institutions.

It should come as no surprise that, of the eleven "most endangered historic places," six are houses of worship. While I have no doubt that such places do have a historic significance, I can't help but cynically observe that naming such places will get the attention of an administration willing to pander all it can to the religious instincts of Americans.

Corrupting the flash crowd phenomenon

Oh, great Cthulhu. Not only has the cynicism reached new heights, but it has reached new depths as well. Turn Flash Mobs into Flash Customers is an article about harnessing the "Flash Mob" phenomenon to drive flash mobs to your brick and mortar store, under the guise of doing something flash-mobby like, in the hopes that some of the poor schmoes who show up will actually buy something.

Schedule for September

What follows is a tentative list of what I'm doing and where I'm going to be in September.

• September 9th (a Tuesday): Doctor's appointment @ 3:30 for the wrist.
• September 13th (a Saturday): Taking the kids to the Puyallup fair. This is one of three possible options: the other two are the Kelso Highlander Festival, where Heather Alexander and her new rock band, Uffington Horse, will be performing, and the Gypsy Arms is hosting an men's only play party. We have Yamaarashi-chan this weekend.
• Septmber 16th (a Tuesday): Election day.
• September 19th-21st (Friday through Sunday) Foolscap is on. I'm only sorta looking forward to it. Yeah, a lot of my more obscure friends will be there, but I can't help but wonder how much more I could get done if I had the weekend at home, alone. Of course, Omaha will always tell you that I quail at the thought of socializing, so reluctance here should be no surprise. No Yamaarashi-chan this weekend.
• September 23rd (a Tuesday): Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson's new novel, comes out.
• September 24th (a Wednesday): The HTML Writer's group is hosting their monthly meeting. I will be giving an introductory lecture on Cascading Style Sheets.
• September 26th (a Friday): Conifur opens. I'll probably only spend one day there, probably Friday, as I have plans for the rest of the weekend.
• September 27th (a Saturday): Digging up the retaining wall along the southern edge of our property, moving stones, etc. No Yamaarashi-chan this weekend, although I may ask her mother if she can come over that Saturday; when she and Kouryou-chan are together, they tend to stay out of the grown-up's hair.
• September 30th (a Tuesday): Half-Life 2 is scheduled to be released.
• October 1st (a Wednesday): The next Dean meetup happens. This one will be Omaha's turn, and I'll be watching the kidlet.

Updates as events warrant. Every Wednesday (except the 17th-- that'll probably be moved to Tuesday), I have Yamaarashi-chan from 5:30pm to 8:30pm over for dinner. Every Monday, Omaha has her radio show so I'll be with Kouryou-chan by myself, for most of the evening. Thursdays look like the only days free for Omaha and I, so that's our parent night (i.e. Do Not Disturb). It looks like Friday the 12th is the only evening I have in the next month where I'm not actually doing something.

Grief.

Monday: The Future Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Still tired. Still not sure why. An average day with the wrists... didn't do much writing but they still ached on and off. Better than the first few days of the injury, though, and I think they'll heal completely soon enough.

I decided finally to clean out my mailbox. I had nearly nine hundred emails in there, and now I'm down to about 130 or so. But they're the hardest to respond to, because each of them deserves an honest and serious response. That's a few hours of work. If you've sent me any mail in the past couple of months or years, I'll be replying as soon as I'm able.

Anyway, WarStoke made a response to my post about flash crowds, wondering aloud how soon it'll be we're all living in the future. It reminded me of Spider Robinson's recent rant about how too many "SF" fans are really just fantasy fans pining for a "good old days" that never were and that damned little science fiction is about "the future." The same point was made in a recent article in the Toronto Globe and Star, about the latest WorldCon, called A Genre In a Time Warp. The author of that article states, "Today, it is hard to imagine science fiction shaping or challenging social conventions, particularly when its core fans seem increasingly ritualistic and intent on celebrating aging giants whose best work is decades behind them."

There's a reason for that. The future is scary. It used to be that the future was hopeful-- that we'd have really neat starships, and robot servants, and meet nifty aliens, and stuff like that. Or the future was desolate, a wasteland, an apocalypse-- but these were warnings, meant to scare us off and discourage us from these toxic, radiological, biological disasters.

Now, neither of these seems that likely. Instead, we've got the computational future: the human species will separate into three groups: the Statics, who eschew all artifical modifications biological or otherwise, the Exuberants, who accept biological modifications and some mechanical but stay essential true to the brain evolution gave us, and the Uploaded, who decide, screw it, what really matters is my consciousness, the pattern of stimuli and response that makes up me and my me-ness and who, for whatever reason, move into completely computational realms.

Either that, or somewhere the combined computational capacity of the Earth goes asymptotic. There's a lot of unused computational capacity, and much of what is being used is used poorly, or repetitiously, while the overall number of petaflops of processing power available on the surface of the Earth doubles every two years-- without, mind you, a corresponding increase in power consumption. Despite the heat and power problems of modern machines, comparatively they're incredibly efficient compared to their predecessors fifteen years ago. When that happens, it'll happen so fast that we'll have no idea how to handle it-- what happens the day next will be different from anything happening now that we, here and now, will be as capable of comprehending it as a mouse is capable of understanding us.

Very few people want to hear these things: because those are the only valid possible futures we see right now. Well, there's one other: that we halt everything right now, stop all forward-looking development, jump with jackboots on anything that could lead to those possible futures, and wallow in our "sacred humanity" until the sun goes out.

Which is why the reporter probably missed those stories. Unless he want to the Singularity panel, he missed them. Instead, he gets things about how mainstream S/F reflects our current fears, or our understanding of feminism, or whatever other blather he ran into. He gets the history of the future-- and it's a good history; it gave us computers and waldos and space ships and yes, even communicators. But for most people, the really forward-looking science-fiction isn't fun, it's frightening. It's about giving up all cherished assumptions, about our inevitable extinction, it's about an open-ended future with no ending.