A virus…

…contracted from mtfierce. When you see this on your Friends list, quote Shakespeare.

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!

Shelly and I were just talking about Shakespeare on Saturday, at Busch Gardens.

Brilliant man, that Shakespeare. It’s a pity the language barrier keeps people from really appreciating him.

Sex and math, and sex

Ugol’s Law states that no sexual fetish is unique–that is, if something turns you on, then someone else, somewhere, is turned on by the same thing.

Shelly is currently in school, pursuing a degree in chemical engineering with an eye toward using it to get a doctorate in biomedical nanotechnology. More and more universities are offering graduate-level degrees in nanotechnology, mostly interdisciplinary degrees that bring together people from medical, physics, and chemical engineering backgrounds.

As you might imagine, her coursework involves rather a lot of math. And, as it turns out, Shelly is uncontrollably aroused by math. No, there isn’t a word for it (I looked), but math gets her hot. Really hot.

And she’s started doing her homework on my body, using a fine-point marker pen to work out problems on my back. Which is beyond hot. By the time she’s finished with her homework, she’s usually uncontrollably aroused and very aggressive. I won’t bore you with what happens afterward, except that it involves numerous implements, floggers, and other things which might offend those with delicate sensibilities. In fact, I went in to the office today with a complex problem in analytical geometry written on my back.

So it should come as no surprise, then, that the Intellectual Sexiness Test meme that’s been making the rounds these days says:

That “Advice to my 16-Year-Old Self” meme

Okay, okay, c’mon. Everyone wishes they could go back in time–“If I knew then what I know now”–except that the experiences you had because you didn’t know then are the reason you know now. Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement.

Which is not to say that there aren’t things I’d tell my 16-year-old self. If I could go back in time, the things I’d tell my 16-year-old self are:

– When Microsoft goes public, convince your parents to mortgage the house and spend money on stock.

– When Apple goes public, wait ’til after the release of the //c, and buy stock. Sell it just before Steve Jobs gets forced out, then buy a bunch more just before he comes back.

– All that time you spent teaching yourself everything about CP/M? Spend it learning more about Unix instead. Pay particular attention to networking. Pay extra special attention to IP networking; in a few months, the Arpanet is going to change over to TCP/IP, and the new network will be dubbed “the Internet.” It’s going to be a big deal, I promise.

– The Illinois Lotto numbers on the week of your sixteenth birthday will be 09-11-36-37-39-40. Buy more Microsoft stock.

A post about music

I have a couple of posts brewing, about AI and Turing machines and human consciousness and drunken goth chicks, and about common misperceptions in polyamory. However, chipotle tagged me to do a “six favorite songs” meme, so I’m doing that instead. Without further ado, and in no particular order:

Evanescence, Lies

Evanescence is an interesting group. It’s rare to find a female-fronted pop band that has anything interesting to say, or that does anything novel lyrically or musically; it’s rarer still to find a female-fronted pop band that can successfully combine elements from many different musical genres and create something novel that still hangs together well. Their first album, Origin, is virtually impossible to find in the United States (Fallen is billed as their “first album” here in the US, even though it’s the second). Lies is a meld of old-fashioned pop and thrash metal, which works better than you might think.

Linkin Park, In the End

A lot of the music I like lives on the intersection of what seems to be radically different genres, and creates novelty out of the chaos. Linkin Park combines rap, alternative, and a dash of metal, and does it brilliantly; everything they do is good. They’re rather like Shakespeare in that regard–they really are quite good, in spite of all the people who say they really are quite good.

Sisters of Mercy, Driven Like the Snow

No list of mine would be complete without some old-school goth, and you can’t say ‘old-school goth’ without also saying ‘Sisters of Mercy’ in there somewhere, unless perhaps you’re saying something like ‘I don’t know a damn thing about,’ but I digress. I was introduced to Sisters of Mercy by an old friend’s girlfriend, during a time in the ongoing slow-motion trainwreck of his romantic life she took a moment off from cheating on him, getting engaged to someone else, breaking up with him, getting back with him, cheating on him again, cheating on him yet again, breaking up with him, getting back together with him, cheating on him again, and marrying some other guy without telling anyone, just long enough to make me a mixed tape of Sisters music. I never did thank her properly for that. Sisters is smart, danceable, witty, and takes incredible glee in playing with language.

A Perfect Circle, 3 Libras

Shelly and I have been spending a lot of time lately talking about (and she’s been writing about) what it means to be “seen” by your lover–what it means to have a partner who really gets you, who sees past all the surface stuff and right down into your superhero soul. That’s precisely what this song is about–or rather, more precisely, this song is about a person whose partner doesn’t get it. To be fair, I’d venture a guess that the overwhelming majority of the human beings walking, crawling, and driving around the surface of this planet also don’t “get” it, and have never really seen their partners or been seen by them, which is why people will say such insipid things as “Well, if you’re poly, then that makes it easier to lose a partner, because you still have another partner to fall back on, right?” But then again, on my more cynical days I think a walk through the ocean of most people’s soul will scarcely get your feet wet.

Front 242, Headhunter v1.0

What can I say? The best song to dance to ever written, by anyone, in any genre, in the entire history of humankind, period.

Apoptygma Berzerk, Burnin’ Heretic

Sometimes a little too close to home in the Theocracy of Ayatollah Bush the Second. I first heard this song some time after dumping the contents of datan0de‘s iPod onto my laptop during a party one evening, where it sat gathering (virtual) dust for some months before I listened to it, which is about the way it goes with music and me. When I did finally listen to it, I leapt from my chair and roared, “Hear me! This is the best fucking song EVER!” (Well, actually, I didn’t. But I did think “Hey, I really like this…”)

Now, according to the rules of the game, I’m supposed to tag three more people and get them to do the same thing in their journal. So, just for the hell of it (and because i do so love exercising power), I tag datan0de, latexiron, and sarahmichigan. You’re it!

So there’s this “book meme” floating around…

Apparently, you’re supposed to

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

What’s amusing about that is the only book within reach of my computer right now doesn’t even belong to me; it’s a copy of The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels, a history of Gnosticism.

The fifth sentence on page 123 reads, “For gnostics, exploring the psyche became explicitly what it is for many people today implicitly–a religious quest.”

In the view of one particular sect of Gnostics, the “Valentinians,” human beings are on the top of the divine pecking order, because human beings create the language of theology, and religious expression, without which the will of God can’t be known. Which is kind of an interesting way to look at religion, when it comes right down to it, though I somehow suspect exactly the same moral lesson could probably be drawn had the book closest to hand been one of the Calvin & Hobbes anthologies we have kicking around the place.

Back to posting again…

…after a rough couple of weeks in which Shelly and I were very, very, very sick in rapid succession. All manner of nastiness, misery, vomiting, and so forth, which resulted in the two of us missing movies with the Smoosh and camping with smoocherie…suck!

Shelly is an angel, though, and even put up with me whining and throwing up a lot. 🙂 phyrra is also an angel, and called often to check up on us. She and nihilus even came over to keep us company, which was very sweet.

And to watch Lexx, which I still don’t know how I feel about.

In any event, all better now, so without further ado (from femetal via phyrra and khepra)

Banned Books, with snarky comments Clicky-clicky, you KNOW you want to…

Civilian Space Exploration meme

Ganked from happypete:

In honor of the launch of SpaceShipOne for all the marbles on Monday, I’ve got a meme.

Add “civilian space program” to your Interests, and post about it. Let’s see how far it goes. See if we can generate some interest in Boldly Going….

To add “civilian space program” to your interests automagically, click here.

Quote for the Day, courtesy Deke Slayton, the late NASA astronaut, from the book Moon Shot; he’s quoting Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the first human to envision rockets for space travel:

“Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

Amen.

Whew! Another convention, another %#$@ hurricane…

What’s the deal with hurricanes landing on Tampa every time we go to a convention?

Anyway, we’re back from FetishCon, which was huge fun–much, much, much better than either of us had anticipated (and Shelly got suspended!). I’ll be posting some decidedly not work-safe pics later.

Since the convention hotel was about ten minutes from home, we didn’t get a room, but drove back and forth to the con. We weren’t counting, of course, on getting clobbered by the latest hurricane, so by the end of the weekend, things were getting a bit tricky…we were, quite literally, dodging debris in the road (including fallen traffic lights, road signs, trees, and the like) each way. We didn’t suffer any real damage, and didn’t even lose power, thought the hotel did. My office got a bit flooded, too.


Good news: Logged on to one of the net-admin newsgroups I read this morning (where I had posted this saga of a spammer named Art Schwartz and my dealings with his Web hosting firm), and discovered that the resulting backlash against Hopone Internet was great enough, and enough people chose to blacklist Hopone as a result, that Hopone threw in the towel and terminated Art and his Web site permanently. Y’know, I wonder if he realizes I would never have made such a big stink of it if he hadn’t started emailing me death threats.


And just for fun:

I amNyarlathotep!

The 999 forms of Nyarlathotep are a point of meditation for the true initiate. It is through these manifold faces that the secrets of the universe are made known. Called “The Crawling Chaos”, Nyarlathotep is the disembodied ego of Azathoth and thus the universal “I” of known reality. Some of the many documented forms are; Father of Knives, Nephren-Ka, the Black Man, the Beast of the Lashing Tongue to name a few.

Which Great Old One are you?

Oh, so THAT’S the problem…

So I’m up beating my head against my Linux box, which I’ve been struggling with all evening. I have Samba and atalkd installed, but I can’t reach it from the Macs or the PCs in the house–can’t can’t can’t. i can see it, but I can’t log on…

I was heading to bed, about to concede defeat after four hours’ bloody struggle, when i had a flash of inspiration. Maybe I couldn’t log in because the …firewall …was …preventing …network …access?

Checked the firewall settings. The AFP and SMB ports were open. Nope, that’s not it…

…but what the hell, I’ll disable the firewall completely and see what happens.

Bingo.

Goddamn goddamn goddamn. Seems like when you tell Fedora Core 2 to open ports in the firewall, it doesn’t actually open the ports, it only says it does. (Err, mostly–it really did open the http and ssh ports, wtf?)

Well, there’s four hours of my life I’ll never have back. Fuck Linux in the ear with a jagged metal dildo, anyway. At least with Windows, you expect it not to work.

So anyway, it’s working, and I’m off to bed, with a weird sort of smug self-satisfaction at solving a problem I shouldn’t have had to solve in the first place.

Oh, and by the way… Apparently, I’m a strange attractor, whatever that means