Category: Weblog

I finished one of my birthday books today.
Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan
This novel is mix of old style detective novels and cyberpunk. In the future the technology exists to move a person’s consciousness from body to body. Death is avoidable for a price and bodies are regularly sold as ‘sleeves’.
Takeshi Kovacs is a specially trained warrior/diplomat known as an Envoy that is pulled out of storage work on a case for a weathly man from Earth. The story launches into a firestorm of action and plot twists.
The author doesn’t let the technology get in the way of what is really a detective novel. Piece after piece is laid as you discover what is going on along with the protaganist from his point of view rather than seeing everything from the omniscient POV that is common in many Sci-Fi novels.
If you like crime and detective novels, this book is for you. It’s a quick read, and the pace is good for reading a chapter at a time.
Tivo
Over at PVR Blog, Matt was talking about video extraction. He mainly talks about the difficuly of doing it on the Series 2 boxes. I decided to make up a page about how you do the extraction on a Series 1.
You can read it here: Video Extraction from a Tivo
As usually, I put in some highly detailed graphics….

Friday I took the new Gold Line to work. I got on at the Mission station and rode it to Union Station, where I switched to the Red Line. From the Red Line station at Universal City I took bus 96 to the office. $3 for the fares. I had plenty of time to read my book and I didn’t have to worry about anything.
I was quite pleased. I only wish LA had an even more extensive rail system.
That night I took the train back to Hollywood & Vine to meet up with Michele to have dinner and see a movie. The girls were with our great, new babysitter. After dinner we saw the movie Buffalo Soldiers. The story takes place in Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few people are worked up that the story shows the US soliders in a bad light surrounded by drugs and crime. Unfortunately, there is much truth in the portrayal of that era. I had several friends that joined the Army after college and were stationed in Germany. They told me stories about the rampant drug use and the low morale.
The actors in the film did a good job, but the director couldn’t seem to make up his mind about what the story was. A romance? a crime story? the fall of an anti-hero/ You don’t really feel for any of the characters and don’t care a tremendous amount about what happens. The action switches direction in someplaces for no reason, and there is no follow-up the what happens to several of the characters.
It’s worth a DVD rental, but it wasn’t worth a a pair of $14 Arclight tickets.
On Saturday I took the train up to Arcadia and did some shopping. I actually got to the shopping place faster on the train than if I would have taken the car. I’m getting hooked on the train.
Today I went down to my parent’s house with the girls. I introduced them to Model Rocketry. Last week I picked up a set of Micro Maxx mini rockets. The only pack 200 milli-newton/seconds of thrust so they only go up 50-75 feet. The quiet street my parent’s live was perfect.
The girls loved the rockets and wanted more. I only had three mortors, so I have to order more. Good times.

Yesterday I was confronted with a weird technical problem. I’m going to talk about it here so that any other poor bastard faced with the same thing might find it in google.
Martin was having trouble connecting his laptop via wireless to our hub. He has an HP Ze4430 with the W450 54g 802.11g wireless chip built in to the computer. The computer could see the access point and attach, but no traffic would flow.
I tried all kinds of things to get it to work to no avail. I remembered that the day before I had flashed the firmware of the access point and changed the SSID and the channel. Other laptops had no problem connecting afterwards, and with an external card, Martin’s laptop connected fine.
I switched the channel back from 11 to 7 and amzingly, the connection worked fine. The 802.11g chip doesn’t like channel 11 for some reason. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the solution. 802.11g just ain’t ready for primetime.
Daredevil
I watched Daredevil tonight on DVD. The movie was good, but lacked that connection that made you feel for the characters. The relationships weren’t that believable. As many can attest, I don’t demand alot from a movie and are generally forgiving, but Daredevil didn’t give me a lot of great things to help overlook the bad things.

Thanks to Technorati’s search capability, I found a few more places where the strange email I mentioned below popped up.
Sledgeblog
DOHIYI MIR
sam o’rama
And Lindqvist has been following this for some time.
I wish I was near Woburn, MA, so I could go check out what that location is. Anyone nearby able to help?
I’m sure it’s probably just a address check for bounces by some spammer, but you never know what kind of story lies behind this spam.

Today I turn 36. Woot!
I would like to take this time to say thanks to all the loyal cruft readers for your comments and email throughout the year. If there was no one reading this page, it wouldn’t be much fun. Thanks for visiting!
Time to head off to work now. I’m a bit worn out from yesterday’s party, but that’s nothing a cup of coffee won’t fix. 🙂

Yesterday I got this email:

Hello,
I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.
I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.
In terms of payment:
I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Sunday July 27th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Stand Time. If you miss this timeframe please email me.
42.4845467 & Longitude -71.1576157 and the ground is 101.3′ above sea level.
Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. There is a good chance that sombody will try to redirect the signal. The unit must be teleported directly in a way that nobody will be able to interfere with the transference.
After unit has been sent please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com
with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.
Thank You
uncertainty
g bab iert ayottsn bfnh

Huh? The lat/long mentioned is Woburn, Massachusetts
Is this just another form of email harvester? Anyone else got this particular spam?

It’s late on Sunday night and I have a few minutes.
On Saturday, the grils and I took the new Gold Line train to Pasadena. It was opening weekend and the train was super crowded. After the train ride, we drove to Toluca Lake and saw Rapunzel at the Falcon Theater. The 5 actors did a great job and the girls loved it. We’ll be back.
Today, Michele had a party for my birthday and friends and family came over. As usual, it was a good time. The highlight had to be 300+ lb. Martin doing a cartwell on the front lawn. Pictures below.

The girls waiting for the train ride.

The train approaches from Pasadena.

Martin doing a cartwheel on the front lawn.

Zoe and Casey after eating blue candy.

I’m tired. Time for sleep.

After John C. Wright, author of The Golden Age & The Phoenix Exultant, commented on my brief review, he and I exchanged a few emails. I thought other fans of his work would like to read the information and news. With permission, I quote from our emails.
I wrote:

Thanks for posting on my web site. I usually write brief reviews of the books I read, but this is the first time an author has commented. Last night I posted my brief review of The Phoenix Exultant.
I finished the book this weekend sitting outside keeping an eye on my daughters playing in the pool. As I turned to the last page and realized that you once again left me in a cliff hanger, I loudly said, ‘Damn!’ My daughters looked up concerned and I had to reassure them it was a good damn and not a bad damn.
I hope your books get the recognition they deserve and the sales roll in, prompting you to write many, many more books.

Mr. Wright replied:

My dear Mr. Pusateri, naturally, I am dismayed that any exclaimation caused by my cliffhangers startled your daughters!
Allow me to shift the blame to my publishers: I wrote and submitted GOLDEN AGE as one manuscript, but my editors (wisely, I think), decided no reader would pay forty dollars for one monstrously thick novel from an unknown author, but might buy the same tale in two or three slimmer volumes.
The original plan had been to break the story into two volumes, not three, and so the author’s note at the end of GOLDEN AGE, promsing that the story would be “concluded” in PHOENIX EXULTANT, went to print before the decision was made further to separate PHOENIX EXULTANT into two volumes, and the promise was made false.
However, the end the story is written, and I sent off the final galley proofs yesterday, so even if I am run over by a street-car, you will still find out how the tale concludes.
Last I heard, the planned release date for GOLDEN TRANSCENDENCE is November of this year, not March of 2004.
I also wrote and sold a fantastic novel set in the modern day, LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS; I am told my publisher has also decided to buy ORPHANS OF CHAOS, a tale about five orphans raised in a strict British boarding school who begin to discover that they may not be human beings. If all goes well, over the next two years, these books may grace the bookstores to tempt any future readers who may be amused by my humble works. These are both fantastic books (and may not sell as well as science-fiction), but I am writing another SF space opera even now, a tale of war and intrigue set among several very alien species, set in the same background as two of my short stories.
Rest assured that I intend to write many books, whether the sales are generous or niggerdly; but my creditors, and my beloved wife, would prefer the sales be generous. Thank you again for your encouraging words.
Yours, John C. Wright

From what I can tell you can pre-order The Golden Transcendance. I don’t think that The Last Guardian of Everness or Orphans of Chaos are available anywhere to pre-order yet. The publisher, Tor Books, doesn’t have any info. Perhaps a phone call is in order.

The page I wrote a bit ago about Trackback got linked to again. This time by Dave Winer on his Weblogs At Harvard Law page. So I’m seeing an increase in hits to the page.
I’m glad to be of service. I wonder what other explanations people need that go unanswered on the net. What question has always vexed you?

7:21PM I’m at the IHOP in Pasadena for the SoCalWUG Meeting.
7:41PM Just finished my chicken caesar salad. Mmmmm. Time for bacon…
7:43PM They are saying that 802.11g is the suck.
[time lapse]
At this point the meeting broke up into discussion and many people came over to look a the cantenna I brought along. I didn’t have much time to blog so I’m actually sitting at home now.
James went and chatted with the guy who wrote Macstumbler. Martin and I hung at the table talking to people about the cantenna and other stuff.
Talking to people about things was fun, but we were kinda boxed in by all the people and didn’t get much chance to wander around and see things.
At the end of the night, I head outside and bumped into Sean Bonner, who had been talking to James earlier. Sean mentioned he was going to blog the meeting so when I got home I googled him up. It seems he’s also connected to Wil Wheaton in some way. Small world.
Yeah, a sucky meeting report, but you already know how geeky I am.
On Tuesday I went with Brad and Yoshi to see Cake and Devo. Cake was great but only played for 45 minutes. They played good stuff and tried to get he crowd involved. Unfortunately the crowd was mainly a Devo crowd and they weren’t so into singing along with Cake. I knew every song and enjoyed singing along with the band. For my first live Cake show, I was happy.
Devo came on and blew through a great set of hits in a rapid fire succession. I like Devo, but have never been a huge fan. I was suprised that I knew every song that Devo sung as well. The crowd reacted well and was on it’s feet the entire set. Devo encored with Freedom of Choice and it was excellent.
The people at the show were my people, the Generation X. We are now in our 30s and while we still want to be young, hip, and good looking, we aren’t. I had time to look around and my generation is aging. Our hair is thinning, we are getting wrinkles, and the middle age spread is upon us. As Mick said, “What a drag it is getting old.”