Self-referentially awesome

So I’m reading Reamde because I happened by the CBPL and against all odds they had it on the shelf. The benefits of being one of the few cyberthriller readers in the metro area that didn’t pre-order on Amazon or just torrent the thing I guess.

Anyway, there is a part where the main character is talking about the splash screen of the MMORPG his company is making money off of and Stephenson throws out some gratuitous smack. I don’t have the book in front of me but he basically says that the splash screen is a ripoff of Google Earth but that he (the character) didn’t feel bad about ripping it off. This was because Google Earth was a ripoff of an idea in some sci-fi novel someone wrote.

The joke being, Neal Stephenson described an internet application simply called “Earth” that was a real-time, 3-D, user interface for accessing any knowable data about the planet. For values of ‘knowable’ that are equivalent to the information in the Library of Congress, which in Snow Crash had evolved into a for-pay information access clearinghouse.

Now some people who would be better suited to make this claim than I say that Neal Stephenson is kind of an ass…or at least ballsy in a socially uncomfortable way. I’d love the chance for him to prove me wrong though. Word-for-word, one of my most favorite authors, Stephenson has some serious capacity for digesting information and trends and turning them into gripping narratives.

I really only wish that he didn’t ultimately make everything in to an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it conflict about 2/3rd the way through every novel. Smaller problems can be at least as gripping as planetary revolution. So, Neal, in the event you stop by, consider yourself advised. Also, if you want to share beers, the porch is always open.

Mez more ees

Listened the heck out of this album yesterday. I think I made it through the album, front-to-back, three times in one afternoon.

The flashbacks were more than I had bargained for. Still being attacked by random bits of nostalgia today. It’s funny the way some bits of music have such deep triggers in the brain. And the music is usually accidental. I’ve never owned this one and only heard a snippet on some podcast driving in to work.

One in a series

Memo to self:

When doing a google image search for comical Austin Powers catchphrase related clip art at work, don’t. Unless you’re pretty strictly filtering your results list. Because, well, a whole panoply of macro images of young fillies in various states of undress isn’t really appropriate to be flashing up on one’s monitor.

Pretty sure no one was walking by at the moment, but, well, you never want to be known as “that guy” in the cube farm.

LiveJournal rev2

It’s probably not the most brilliant observation but it just came to me today that Facebook is basically LiveJournal, only with more adults and fewer kitty animated gifs. The more they play with friends and groups, the stronger the correlation becomes.

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug.

Also, the upcoming profile thingers due to arrive on Thursday are pretty much what would happen if you put the entirety of web 2.0 hype into a blender and put it on chop for a few seconds.

Again, not a novel insight.

Not clairvoyant yet

Another in a series of passive-aggressive comments aimed at various co-workers.

I still haven’t perfected my clairvoyance skill set. Please keep this in mind when handing off tasks that only you have worked on. This will expedite task completion to levels hopefully everyone involved finds acceptable.