Moe Lane

My wife’s getting her Laurel in the SCA, so I’m gonna be busy from here on in.  This may mean that the weekly stuff is late. If it is, it won’t be for more than a half-day or so.

Fall starts today.  I like the beginning of this season, when it’s all about leaves changing and brisker mornings and harvest foods; and there’s something delicious about chilly moonlit winds coming through the window during the week of Halloween.  But it doesn’t last, alas. Eventually you have to have winter, and I don’t like being cold.

But now may start the days of hot cider and baked ham and crunchy leaves. As the philosopher said: I shall enjoy them.

Sort of.  I’m driving the kids up halfway to hand them off to their aunts for the weekend, because of the thing going on.  Fortunately, they have a four-day weekend because of a combination of Jewish holidays – oh, hey, Happy New Year! – and a teacher’s conference thing or whatever.  I dunno, I don’t really care, my sisters want to spoil my kids in peace and quiet for a couple of days and that’s fine with me.

So, anyway, that’s pretty much the middle of the day blocked out now. And it just gets busier from here. So posting as catch can, and don’t expect to hear from me at all on Saturday. Everything’s fine, just kind of hectic.

Also, the most nerve-wracking.  I mean, you only get one shot at making something like this.  Mess it up, and there’s no way to fix it.

This Acheulean handaxe was deliberately knapped so as to display a fossil shell of the Cretaceous bivalve Spondylus spinosus at its centre. pic.twitter.com/yYxflflISu

— The Ice Age (@Jamie_Woodward_) September 20, 2017

You also have to wonder if the guy who made it ever actually used it. Probably; they didn’t have much margin, back then. But it’s one of those artifacts that you know had extra care lavished on it.

Friend of a friend is running this one: as you can guess, Dragonlock 3: Dangerous Lairs is the latest in a run of Kickstarters for 3D printing RPG/miniatures terrain.  …And my twenty year old self simply would not be able to understand why I don’t own a 3D printer.  It’s not the money, 20 Year Old Me; it’s not the money, although a couple of hundred bucks isn’t chicken feed.  It’s the household space/time ratio.  I’m not going to spend enough time at the 3D printer to justify the space it’d take up in the craft room*.

Anyway: check it out. It all looks really, really pretty.

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‘Tis tradition to note this date here, by the powers! Although, alas, it’s more of a previous-decade sort of holiday these days.  None the less: enjoy yer piratical shenanigans today, me hearties. Fer at the crack o’dawn tomorrow, yer old lives will return.

Wit’ a curse.

It’s just been pretty quiet. I mean, today I didn’t do anything more interesting than go food shopping, take the kids to the library, and apparently come within thirty seconds of setting fire to the kitchen.  Too much olive oil on the potatoes, it would seem.

OK, so today was more exciting than I thought that it was. But I’m not exactly ticking over with ideas right now.  So, I dunno: anything interesting going on on your end?

It won’t be perfect, but the news that “Chrome is to block automatic play of videos with sound unless the user has indicated they are interested in such clips” is welcome anyway. It’s a trickier problem than you’d think to do anything except a flat ban of the process.  Particularly since those who inflict autoplay videos on the rest of us in the first place are also the sort of people who will actively try to get around any restrictions.

I don’t want to judge people who code autoplay videos into their pages.  There’s been a time or two where I didn’t have a choice but to put up something that autoplayed, although I always tried to put it up after the fold. But if you’re one of those advertisers or content providers… please stop, OK?  You’re increasing the amount of grimness in the universe.

They’re calling it the Grand Finale, which is actually not a bad name for what’s going to happen to the Cassini Saturn probe early Friday.  They’re going to use the last of Cassini’s fuel to send the probe into Saturn’s atmosphere, then watch as it transmits data until the planet kills it.  And Saturn will most assuredly kill the Cassini probe. That’s the idea, in fact; there’s an chance that a couple of Saturn’s moons may not be entirely hostile to life, so better to send Cassini right down the pipe than to risk having it contaminate a future potential exo-biological site.

All in all, there are worse ways for a space probe to go out. (more…)

Don’t know where the boot disk is, so it’s off to the shop. Hopefully they’ll be able to do something with it.  Dagnabbit, I’m never going to see this movie, huh?

[UPDATE] …Well, at least it was still not working when I got it into the shop. Turns out that the computer got it into its fool head to look at the CD-ROM drive first in order to boot up anything.  And no, I have no idea why it thought that.  Neither did my computer guy, who is a living saint when it comes to this sort of thing. If you live in Howard County, MD, the Computer Shop is well worth your patronage.

I thought about it, but I haven’t been impressed with Apple’s products since the Toymaker died.  There’s just something missing there, now. So I replaced the Amazon Fire Phone (yeah, I bought one of those) with a Samsung Galaxy J7* and put in a SD card for an extra 64 gigs.  Why? Because I am now transferring all of my music to my phone, and iTunes can go whistle.  I’m tired of dealing with their nonsense.  After I get everything cleaned up, I’m resetting both the old phone and the iPod, parental-controlling them, and handing them off to my kids to play with.  They’re both perfectly good video cameras for small children, after all.

Alas, all of this means that I had to miss the movie. I’ll go see It tomorrow.

Moe Lane

*The one that doesn’t explode. I made sure to ask.

The symptoms are mostly sleep-related; I didn’t get much last night. I might have picked up something from WashingCon; I’m not sure.  Either way, I’m going to take the hint that my body is giving me and go get more than five hours tonight.