Panhandle visit

July 31st, 2012

Driving to the panhandle:

I shot the sheriff (in a tepid cover version); I wandered down this lonely street on my own because, like a drifter, I was born to walk alone; I went nowhere and exhorted somebody to help me, to cherish his or her love, and to hit me with his or her best shot; and most of all, I wished I’d brought some music with me.

I was five hours into the drive–about 20 minutes from Milton–before I used the f-word in muttering about traffic. Not bad at all, for me. The drive was mostly intensely boring, which I decided was better than if it had been intensely interesting.

Visiting family and friends:
Mom and Amy and I went to see Brave, which we all enjoyed, then went to Taste of India, which we would have enjoyed a bit more if the waitress hadn’t been giggling and gossping about us and if we’d ordered the dishes milder. The food was good, though, and the owner? cook? was very nice.

Mam-ma recognized me and we had a lucid conversation for awhile, then she invited me to visit her at her home for dinner some day. She told me she’d sold her house, then moved into somewhere that was too small for her, across the street from Leah, and kept moving until she’d found a good place. She thought she was visiting the nursing home, and said that she’d seen the man across the hall a few times and he was nice. She wanted me to come visit her again soon.

Mrs. Nichols wasn’t in either time we stopped by. I’ll try again today.

Uncle Andy was mildly antagonistic, trolling for an argument. I didn’t take the bait. Mom tired of it quickly and we left.

I haven’t seen Tara or Meagan yet, though I want to before I leave.

Random notes about the area:
This is the buckle of the Bible Belt. Part of the directions to Amy’s place from Highway 90: Turn right just after the First Baptist Church of Milton, go down about a mile (left at the fork, over the train tracks, over the bridge), take a right just before the First Baptist Church of Bagdad.

It’s raining today so I haven’t gotten the pictures I’ve wanted. I’m stopped in at hte library to use the wifi. It was sprinkling when I arrived and is pouring down buckets now.

They’ve changed the library a lot since I was a kid: an entire row of shelves has been removed, there’s a designated teen area, and they’ve added a lot of genealogy material. They don’t limit it to the Southeast, though, as ACLD does, but they do have some very interesting stuff like microfilms of correspondence with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

They also have a folding table with a checkerboard designed into the top: kind of a minor detail inviting gamers. I would have expected a table like that in the teen area, but it’s in the genealogy section–which probably doesn’t mean anything except that I don’t understand the groups of patrons and their interests.

minor observations on Dr. Who

October 13th, 2010

I started watching Dr. Who with the 9th Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, and have really come to like it. I’d seen parts of episodes before, years prior, while sitting down to dinner, and even the odd full episode, but with no frame of reference they didn’t impress me much (and, even with a frame of reference, I still can’t believe the TARDIS “falling through a crack in time” in that one Cybermen two-parter–utter baloney, that).

Some time towards the end of David Tennant’s tenure (near the end of Season 3, I think) I started watching the William Hartnell years, though slightly out of order. Netflix has the discs out of order, and the page I looked up which supposedly sorts it all out still has some of the discs out of order. So far I’ve seen the intro arc, the cavemen arc, the first Dalek story (when the Daleks and the Doctor first meet each other, and the Daleks aren’t constantly seething with rage), the one where they’re trapped on the TARDIS, the Keys of Marinus, and the Aztec arc. The Marco Polo arc should have been in there but wasn’t yet, leaving me a bit puzzled when Ian showed up at the start of the Keys of Marinus in an Asian outfit.

William Hartnell’s Doctor is, at first at least, apparently not very smart. The first person he outsmarts is a caveman, and (unless there’s a mystery in the Marco Polo stories) it’s not until The Keys of Marinus that he solves a proper mystery.

The Dalek arc shows The 1st Doctor susceptible to radiation poisoning though the 10th Doctor, in the episode where Martha and the hospital are taken to the moon, can absorb and discharge low level radiation at will.

The sonic screwdriver hasn’t yet made an appearance, unless it was the small pen flashlight that the Doctor gave Ian to use in the Aztec tunnel (Ian only used it as a flashlight; the Doctor didn’t mention any other capabilities, and only referred to it as “this”).

There has been no use of psychic paper yet. I suspect that’s something created for the 9th Doctor (and its use is inconsistent in the new series–the 10th Doctor used the paper, rather than the sonic screwdriver, to convince the double decker that he’d paid bus fare).

The studio sets are painfully obvious; people frequently are meant to be out of earshot of each other but plainly are not. Many of the backgrounds are obviously paintings, sometimes even with folds and drapes visible. Scenes of the TARDIS disappearing are plainly shot with models (and the Dalek city was obvious a model as well).

The pacing on these earliest episodes is abysmal–incredibly uneven, with a tendency towards the very slow.

Actors fumble their lines a lot, especially William Hartnell. I wonder if the BBC were so pressed for time and/or money that they couldn’t do takes until people got it right.

In the Aztec arc, some of the people pronounce Tlotoxl “tl-TOX-l” and others “l-TOX-l.”

The TARDIS has several rooms, not just the one.

The Doctor has, in just these few episodes, been puzzled over why the TARDIS does some of the things it does, and doesn’t seem to know how to work it very well. Yet, although he’s the only one working it, the ride is much smoother than it was (will be) with the 9th and 10th Doctors. (And the 11th Doctor indicates that rides in the TARDIS are always bumpy because it’s meant to be operated by an entire team of people.)

The Doctor has a last name, and a granddaughter!

The Doctor has, quite possibly, changed the course of history in the cavemen arc by showing someone how to make fire. Later in the Aztec arc he tells Barbara she can not stop the Aztecs from making human sacrifices, since nothing at all must be changed about history. Then later he makes a pulley to help open the tomb door, and he lets Cameca see him making the pulley although he knows the Aztecs didn’t have them and she recognizes it as something new and interesting.

So far in the early episodes there has been little in the way of ethical quandaries, though the writers came close with Autloc asking “Yetaxa” (Barbara) if she would save her friend and destroy the Aztecs. That’s only close to an ethical quandary because saving Ian wouldn’t actually destroy the Aztecs, since the series has given no indication that the Aztec gods actually exist and that they care what the Aztecs do. The ethical quandaries that the Doctor and his companions face are one of my favorite things about the latest episodes.

The Doctor starts off as really kind of a jerk, though he’s warmed up a bit by the Aztec arc (and does, at least a little, seem to regret leaving Cameca).

The Doctor doesn’t know his history and culture nearly as well as he does later–he does not, for instance, know that making cocoa and sharing it with Cameca is the same as proposing to her.

The Doctor and his companions know how to speak the Dalek language although the TARDIS has never encountered them before. The 9th Doctor tells rose that the TARDIS gets into the companions’ heads and that’s why they can speak languages they’ve never encountered–because the TARDIS has.

Computer updates

October 24th, 2009

The C: drive on the old computer is completely toast.  Any time I tried to boot it it reported a disk read error–it couldn’t even get far enough into the booting process to offer the option of booting into Safe Mode, and the drive also wasn’t responsive enough to allow reformatting it and making a clean install.

I took the old C drive out and moved the D down the cable, removing that tiny plastic rectangle making it the secondary internal drive (I just can’t get into that whole “master” and “slave” terminology), then reformatted the drive and reinstalled Win2000.

After that I changed my mind and decided I’d send it out with Ubuntu on it (I’m giving the computer to a local school to use for parts in their tech classes), but the Ubuntu disc kept taking me to the login screen without any install options.  I poked around a bit, tried various options, and finally gave up without finding how to install Ubuntu from the CD I’d burnt.  I’d expected the installation to be intuitively obvious, not forgetting my last experience with Linux so much as hoping that it was no longer representative:  I’d heard many good things about Ubuntu, especially about how user-friendly it was.

Maybe the actual UI in Ubuntu is a big improvement over the typical Linux interface (at least for people who don’t build their own boxes and “sudo make me a sandwich”), but the installation process is actually harder than it was for me with Caldera Linux way back in 2001.

Global Swarming

November 28th, 2008

It’s very crude (and short), but here‘s the game I’ve been writing as a way of learning Actionscript.  Kongregate.com wrote up some tutorials on how to make Flash games, and then held a contest for games entered based on the tutorials, so that was as good a hook as any to get started learning.

I spent about 11 hours on the game today, programming new features, fixing things and breaking other things, and got super tired of it.

I’ll probably continue working on it in a few days, adding the final boss, more enemies, tweaking the difficulty ramp, etc.

graphic novels presentation

July 31st, 2008

The thing at UF for Dr. Lamme’s class went well, though Dr. Lamme couldn’t make it because she was sick.  Her daughter showed up, took roll, and read a chapter from a very interesting book (whose title I forgot to get) about a boy and a girl whose parents argue a lot and whose father is impulsive and temperamental.

I started my presentation at 5:30 and wrapped it up at 5:50.  There were a few questions after, one about Alan Moore’s disparaging of Marvel and DC (I explained that he was known for being a good writer but also cranky and opinionated).

That was a good question which led into a question about Marvel and DC’s place in comics history, which was something I chose to leave out of the exceedingly short section on comics history.  In short–yes.  Marvel and DC are both very important to comics history in the U.S.: for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Hulk….  They’ve certainly helped popularize comics; no question of it.  I left their works out of the recommendations as well because most people in the group I first presented to had the idea that comics consisted almost entirely of tights, capes, and biff-bam-boom.

The final question was about Calvin and Hobbes (I explained that I loved it but decided that, in addition to leaving out manga and almost every superhero comic, I should also leave out comic strips).

The final slide in the presentation was about other sources for reviews of comics and graphic novels, which typically include the subject matter, recommended age groups, and a few panels of art.  I hope that it served as a decent reminder that a 20-minute presentation on such a big subject is no more than a Cook’s tour, and certainly not a decade in Europe.