April update
Blue faded from the sky. The air was suddenly cold as deep dark night. And the sun's color was a gray luminescence, like a faded moon. Less. Pilgrim was back from the hatch. He interrupted Ravna's incoherent panic with a matter-of-fact, "The sun just went out." His heads bobbed in an expression she couldn't fathom. Pham answered, "That's temporary. Something has to power this maneuver."--Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon The DeepIt's exactly that time of year. Some part of me is tesseracted away, thrumming busily on some project I may never comprehend. Thinking's not nearly as clear as it should be. But that's alright. Today was Skirt Day, the day when the unexpected warmth trumps modesty.In lieu of a coherent thought, I've at least got a couple scattered ones from the past month.I'm currently drinking a 2003 Jackson-Triggs Proprietor's Selection Smillon-Chardonnay, because with Smillon there's always the chance of delicious botrytis. But I'm kinda disappointed; even though its big brother won Canadian White Wine Of The Year, I wasn't particularly impressed. Maybe I just need to work on my palate for whites; I'm almost always drinking a red. You lucky Winnipegger folk have got the Winnipeg Wine Festival coming up at the beginning of next month. The imminency of my project at work means I can't attend this year, but I'll be hoping for next...I was peeved at the open sewer that the trails at the Cascades had become. Truly, it was difficult to navigate there, having to watch every step, never being further more than three feet from the nearest dungheap. I wrote half of a Letter To The Editor on that subject, but decided that phrases like "the spastic anii of ten thousand untamed curs" would go right over the heads of those responsible.SOHO is out of keyhole. This means plenty more sun pictures to stare into! This ain't no olden days where you lift your head to see what the sun's doing. Incidentally, it's letting off a pretty thick stream of particles from a coronal hole on the northern hemisphere. Good aurora last night, possibly some good stuff tonight.An excerpt from a dream: "I just saw a spider the size of my head crawl out from behind the pinball machine with two rocket engines and an RPG on its back. It went up the wall, opened a door and left. Tell me I'm not fucking insane.""We call it Thing. Don't mess with it."Massive wave of celebrity death and debilitation. The Pope, Terry Schialvo, Mitch Hedburg, the Prince Of Monaco; Peter Jennings got cancer and Neil Young had an aneurism; 3 close relatives of friends have either died or are close to it. This certainly blows the Rule Of 3s out of the water, unless there are 2 or 3 simultaneous waves of misfortune. As for me, my great-grandfather's brother's daughter's husband's sister's son's wife died. Due to a certain anomaly in my family tree, she was also my great-grandmother's sister's daughter's husband's sister's son's wife. If I've figured it right, that makes her my second cousin once removed, twice over. She shares the same last name with cogent, but I don't know enough about his ancestry to know if we're related. Shows that we're all connected somehow, though.In the next 20 minutes, I'm figuring on either going to the bar or switching operating systems. If your webbrowser is using 1gb of ram and doesn't actually have any pages open, you may have a memory leak.I'm looking for the kind of music that you'd want to hear if you were shot in the gut at the top of a cliff and jumped into your fighter jet and flew at Mach 3 towards the hospital, hoping you'd be able to eject in time. Anathema's Pulled Under At 2000 Meters Per Second is the only song I've found that really gets it, but Muse has got a lot of stuff that comes very, very close.