They have me surrounded!

There are a dozen police cars at the base of my office building, cutting off access to the side streets. They're not pointed at me; there's an investigation going on that seems to center on the front door of the apartment complex at the corner. Still, there's a lot of police activity in my neighborhood this morning. I wonder what's up.

Writing, Rewriting

I think I've got Kaede & Eshi 2.3 worked out and finished, although I'm not sure about the final result. It's not quite the meditation on immanent parenthood I meant it to be, but then few of my stories ever really go in the direction I intended.

On the other hand, I seem to have wandered into a fourth episode of the Meigi Dyaus series, and I'm having a hard time living up to my responsibility as a writer here. I've clearly created a conflict, and a bad one, between two pre-Encompassment AIs, with about a dozen Pendorians caught in the conflict between them. I'm afraid I'm too nice a guy, and will end with everything being "okay" in the end, but it really shouldn't happen in this case. I've written, and deleted, and written again, about a thousand words of this story, only to delete it again. I'm into my third re-write. Sigh. I'll figure something out.

Why can't I ever get a normal computer?

According to the savage manual page, the problem is related to "a chip bug in the Savage graphics engine that causes a bus lock when reading from the engine status register under high load". Also according to the same source, "the bug affects about 4% of all Savage users.

The same site lists a fix.

Guess who got one of those "about 4%" video cards?

Y'know, the last Thinkpad I owned was one of the "about 10%" of Thinkpad 600E's that had the DMA wires for the sound card reversed and you had to specify at boot time the "dma=reversed" flag or sound didn't work at all.