Sunday, February 15, 2009

Something else lost


"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

-- Neuromancer, WIlliam Gibson, 1984

And what will become of the image thus conjured when all the world's tv is digital? Unnecessarily backlit-black or kaleidoscopic random, swiftly stuttering and Lego-like? No faint observance of ghosts in the distance, of partially formed transient stories around which you add your own dialog but never concern yourself of the ending. Pixelation is a poor substitute for the monochromatic-spectrum and white noise of that which cannot be further from the definition of 'static'. And how does it feel to awake at 2:00am, lying on a sofa with the tv tuned to a dead digital channel? Can you awake?

Sunday, February 01, 2009

I feel like a Military Academy...


...Parts of me keep passing out (goes the joke), however it's recently become more true - part of me is now in use by the Military.
"The US Department of Defense, which has been flirting with open source for years as a way to improve software quality and cut costs, has finally burst the dam on Defense-related open-source adoption with Forge.mil, an open-source code repository based on Sourceforge.
It's based on SourceForge Enterprise Edition for which I was responsible when I was running engineering at VA Software / SourceForge. Nice to know some part of me will be contributing to to military systems given I'm too old to be drafted.

The oobject of my lust


Oobject lists the top Gerry Anderson vehicles. The Captain Scarlet Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle (SPV) has to be my favorite. They drove that sucker while facing backwards. OK - I always wanted an RV based on the SHADO 2 Transporter and who could not want to fly in an Eagle transporter but it's the SPV that would satisfy my every dream. Missing from the list are Stingray and Fireball XL5 and all of the Thunderbirds sans deux. But otherwise I'm happy.