HSU IT Department

I like this article about Law & Order because it manages to work in the word Thersites; I can't decide if that's a tribute to the NYT or L&O, but either way, I give props to them.

This week was what I like to call a Sprinkler Week. You know those automated sprinklers with the little lever that goes chk...chk...chk...chk each time whacking the sprayer into a slightly different direction, and then eventually it gets to the end of its rotation and goes chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga back to its original starting point? These things.

My entire week was like that. chk...an email comes in, I fire off a paragraph about this...chk...another one comes in, I send off an approval of that...chk...another one, I shoot off my best effort at a list of the other things...

By the end of the day I'm my brain is spinning round and round going "chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga!!"

Wine....where is my wine...

Finally back from (and recovered from) SAA! A good time was had by all, many interesting presentations, and -- bonus! -- I was able to meet up with the very talented ennyousai ::waves:: Among other things, we compared notes on favorite books (yay Pride and Prejudice!!), the ending of Deathly Hallows, and Why We Love Fans. On her recommendation Spouse and I made a point of visiting the Folger Shakespeare Museum -- although we were disappointed not to see any costumes on show, their current exhibit (Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550–1750) had some truly beautiful and unusual pieces, so we thank her sincerely!

The conference was here, which means we felt underdressed every time we left our room.

Most interesting session was this one, on archives and international justice. The first presenter outlined a project being undertaken to digitize all records from the UN genocide trials in Rwanda -- something like 500 terabytes of data, audio in three languages, redactions of audio/video to preserve anonymity of protected witnesses...the sheer scope is overwhelming. The second speaker gave a historical overview of archival evidence used in various cases; he touched briefly on Nuremberg but spent more time on some lesser-known cases like Klaus Barbie and Ivan Demjanjuk. A bit inspiring to think that your chosen field can actually support international justice. He ended by suggesting that perhaps archivists ought to be more active in this area -- for example, if someone wants something classified for political rather than security reasons, should we push back? Food for thought.

Our session went well (C-Span filmed us!) despite being at an ungodly early hour; on the plus side that freed up the rest of the day for Spouse and I to hit the National Zoo. Yay pandas! Yay komodo dragon!! Yay otters!!!

And of course we ate and ate and ate and ate.

I should be fully recovered by Friday, and possibly able to look at food again by Saturday.

Working my way through Neil Stephenson's Anathem. Holy cow. Talk about a demanding read -- mathematics, religion, linguistics, music, philosophy, astronautics, physics, metaphysics, not to mention herbology, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and change-ringing!! This book has it all. For the first hundred pages I floundered along in a daze, feeling rather like someone in a language immersion program trying to live and breathe a completely alien communication medium, until suddenly it clicked around page 250. So far I've recognized Plato and a few other core philosophical approaches (though I don't know them well enough to put a name to them -- what, or who, is the opposite of Plato?).

Fraa Erasmas' descriptions of the urban youth, with their "caps with beverage logos," made me giggle, while the enormous expanse of time that is the backdrop to the mathic view of the outer (extramural) world is breathtaking. It's reminiscent of Asimov's Foundation series, only the Foundation is looking forwards while the maths have a multiple-millennia perspective on the past.

Stephenson must be a terrifyingly intelligent person. The most complicated concepts are presented so simply, and yet without the slightest sense of shallowness; there's a depth of comprehension behind it that's staggering. And I want a sphere!!

OK, on the plus side, I discover that Goodreads has added a "stats" feature. Click on this and it shows you a nice bar chart of how many books you've read in a given year. Click on "details" and you get a pie chart breakdown by category (your own categories). Click on "pages" and it changes to give the number of pages you've read.

It's kick ass. I've updated my info for last three years based on the paper lists I was keeping, so it's pretty impressive ;)

Plus, they answered my question about how to be able to include different language versions on your list, rather than having them collapsed into a single title. So I now have both Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone and Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers, along with both Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter et la chambre des secrets. w00t!!

Finished a new bio of Anne Boleyn yesterday. Being accustomed to Genevieve Bujold in Anne of the Thousand Days, Mr Bernard's Anne was something of a startlement since he assumes she might actually have been guilty of the charges of adultery brought against her, but as historical analyses of primary sources go, he's on pretty solid ground. Given that the earliest biographers (not detractors, but biographers) of Anne were writing during the reign of her daughter Elizabeth, it's not surprising they would have inflated the power, piety and Protestantism of the mother of their beloved queen. Bernard does some scrupulous deconstruction of contemporary sources to demonstrate that in fact Anne might simply have been a beautiful sexy woman who engaged in a few indiscretions and then had the appallingly bad luck to be found out. He still makes some large-ish assumptions, but his logic and his deductions hold up pretty well.

I always thought Genevieve was so beautiful. Until I googled her tonight, however, I had no idea she was the original choice for Capt. Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager!!

And people say the internet isn't useful for education...

Agh, agh, agh. How is possible to be reading not one, not two, but THREE books at the same time?? Not to mention breaks for The Economist, Newsweek, The Hedgehog Review, and my local paper. It ought to be impossible. The sheer number of words beating on my skull ought to somehow cancel each other out, or the most interesting ones ought (by the law of survival of the fittest) to beat the %&*^ out of the other ones until they limp quietly away. And yet it does not happen. I lug multiple books to work with me, in the insane belief that in a 45-minute lunch hour I can somehow inhale all of them, or at least some of each of them. I pile them next to my bed at night, in the happy delusion that in the half hour between the time I lie down and the moment at which my eyelids acquire a weight of roughly 2.6 earth normal, I will wade through a chapter or two of each.

I need an intervention. Or an external hard drive I can plug into my head. Or something.

Currently I'm working on a ginormous behemoth of a book, Neil Stephenson's Anathem, which in addition to weighing about eight pounds has the dubious distinction of more made-up words per page than anything I've ever read anywhere, including Clockwork Orange. It's so brain-straining that I have to take breaks and work on the next Sandman volume. Which is short, so in between those I've got a new bio of Anne Boleyn -- yay! At least that one's vaguely topical since the Ren Fest is going on and we're there every weekend in garb. ("Say it now and say it loud, I'm a Rennie and I'm proud!")

So there you go. A little TMI about my addiction to the written word. Go stories! Go words!! Go narrative!!!

The Old Spice guy gives a thumbs-up for libraries -- huzzah! Sexiest library spokesperson ever :)

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Here's the third, and longest, of my contributions to the hp_uk_meetup -- a nod to H.P. Lovecraft. Enjoy!

( Shadow Over Wiltshire )

My other two contributions are here and here.

Well, another hp_uk_meetup has come and gone, and I have permission from the hard-ass Head Nurse, who apparently managed the thing to perfection, to now post the little drabbles I wrote for it. Since one of the them is longish I'll put them in separate posts. Hugs to my recipients chthonya, croatoan6000, and daiseechain -- hope you enjoyed them!!

Herewith, drabble the first!

(Author's note: Full credit goes to my spouse for this one. He came up with the truly awful pun and I just ran with it.)

( Lucius and the Long Arm of the DMV )

My two other bits of silliness are here and here.

So I read One Second After over the past weekend and have to admit I was totally freaked out by it. I'd really like to know whether the US government is doing anything to address this issue -- a Google on "EMP hardened" or "EMP hardening" turns up a bunch of survivalist sites and not much else. I'd like to grab my local gov and police by the collar, wave this in their face and shout, "Have you thought about this?!?!?" but I suspect it would be counterproductive.

Returning to literary rather than emotional analysis, however, the book was very well-written (but the dogs! why must dogs always die? why???) and definitely gripping - I started it around 8pm and was up until 3am. I thought the juxtaposition of a Christian school having to turn into soldiers was an interesting choice.

Above all, it made me ponder how incredibly vital the mere fact of communication is, and how disorienting the lack of information can be in an emergency. Much of what happens in the book is not due to direct damage (very little is actually destroyed) but rather to indirect damage -- individuals are cut adrift from accustomed structures of law enforcement and society and therefore run wild. For example, if police can't communicate, they can't be called on at need, they can't enforce the law. If people don't know what's going on, they assume the worst and act accordingly.

At bottom, all that happens in the book is...the power goes out. This happens all the time (well, in my neighborhood it does, anyway). But it goes out everywhere, all at once, and in every conceivable place including car radios. Because so much of what we are/do/need relies on that one simple utility, when it happens nationwide things spiral out of control. Like scientists isolating a germ, the novel isolates a single taken-for-granted feature of our day-to-day lives -- electricity -- and explores what happens when that one thing is removed. It's engrossing and distinctly thought-provoking. Two thumbs up.

Oh, and your microwave is a Faraday cage so store a radio in there.

Hahahahaaa!! Take THAT, Victorian male-dominated power structure!

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