Mad Times

Our IT guys have been rearranging the network at work the past few weeks. I got an email asking if it was okay to change the IP address on the machine named “hugo”. Hugo is a Sun Sparcstation 10 that was assigned to me in about 1993. It runs SunOS 4.1.4 which was the last BSD-based Sun unix before the SysV-based Solaris took over. The machine has been running in a rack in our computer room with no keyboard, mouse, or display since about 2002.

I told them to go ahead, but they were unable to access it. It was responding to pings, but wouldn’t answer to telnet. There are a handful of other machines of similar vintage in the same rack so I logged in to one of them to see how long it had been since it was last rebooted. 764 days. That’s over two years running continuously without a reboot for systems that are 15 years old. (These systems are all on UPS power backed by a big old diesel generator)

Since there was no display handy to show what was going wrong I tried power cycling it. It didn’t come back. The system hadn’t been in active use for a while so extreme measures weren’t called for. Time of death was 2:51pm 6/26/08.

I just didn’t think its passing should go unremarked. How old is 15 in computer years?

The kids got lolled again. Actually I think this is Theo’s first time on icanhascheezeburger.

God and the Devil make a wager over whether the Devil can corrupt God’s chosen champion with the fate of the world as the stakes. The good news is that God cheats. Or at least interprets the rules creatively. Joby is a little boy obsessed with King Arthur. Joby is God’s chosen champion. The book follows Joby through three periods of his life, grade school, college, and early adulthood. In each he faces new challenges. The book is way too long, especially in the late section where Joby finds his way to a little corner of Eden that God has hidden away on the north coast of California. Ferrari is obviously a little too enamored of his characters and setting and the resultant stretching of the story feels overindulgent.

This book appeared on my chair at work one day. I later found out it landed there because a friend found it in the company cafeteria, started it and didn’t like it. It wasn’t bad. It’s the third book in a series about a guy who’s part alien and uses his secret powers to find missing persons. There’s lots of violence and lots of sex and lots of car (and motorcycle and boat) chases. Basically a men’s adventure novel with some scifi thrown in for flavor. I got the first two books from the library but other stuff looked more interesting until they came due and I returned them unread. Probably won’t try again. If it sounds like your thing it might be your thing.

Wilson won the Hugo for best novel for this book. If you’ve read any of his other books you know the basic structure of this one: baffling technology indistinguishable from magic mysteriously appears throwing society for a loop with the story told by a person conveniently placed to learn more about it than the general public. The remarkable thing is how much better each successive telling of Wilson’s story is. In Spin he has struck a fine balance among interpersonal, political, and alien influences resulting in a novel of a future stranger than we could imagine but still somehow familiar in a way that feels almost nostalgic. This is science fiction that pushes the buttons that made me a fan. It bent my brain quite agreeably. I just learned while writing this that there is a sequel out and another on the way, but Spin stands alone just fine.

This is a young adult fantasy loosely based in the Arthurian tradition. I finished it back in February and my recollection of the details is dim. A female member of Arthur’s family fled or was banished to an island where she rules as queen over a small population. The book is from the point of view of her daughter who for reasons that become clear in the course of the book has one finger that looks like that of a dragon. Dragons being nasty peasant-eating creatures, she hides this fact from all but her mother. The daughter goes through a hero’s journey coming-of-age kind of plot line. Dragons are involved. Also dashing young men. But while the basic shape of the story is almost boilerplate, Carey does enough interesting things with the texture and details to make the book rise above the conventions.

Becky took these two shots back to back. I did the animation. A good illustration of the challenge of feline photography.

That is actually Alice’s water dish. For some reason she prefers to drink from that instead of any of the many cat dishes around the house. And even though she has her own cup she still prefers to drink from one of ours. When you have a CRF kitty you are just happy she’s drinking.

Saw this while getting my lolcat fix at icanhascheezburger.com yesterday. The picture originally appeared here last year.