Who Is Ozzy Osbourne? Or Bloggers, Objectivists and Ozzy Fans, Oh My

I really hate the fact that livejournal does not provide visitor logs. I am very interested in my readership, but too lazy to put up some tracker pixels. Well, I have been looking at the image logs and found some very interesting things.

For instance, it appears that my photography has a very broad appeal. This “Sara Beth” blogger who used this blackout photo I took (without giving me any credit) appears to be a fan of Ayn Rand.

Sara Beth, Ayn highly disapproved of using copyrighted material without giving credit of any sort.

But then there’s “El Chupacabra” who posted this image (also with no credit to me) in the Ozzfest 2004 section over at siN’s Metal Forums with this heartwarming quote: “Each time I look at that Incubus pick, the metal is just sucked out of me. lol”
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This could be a good photo cover for Atlas Shrugged, but instead it turns on Ozzy fans. Go figure.

In case you missed them, blackout photos are here and here.

Hmm, I think I should try to sell at leas one of my photos to a respectable publication of some sort. I wonder what it takes to do that. Hmmm, maybe I should invest in this.

Jeff-O

Jeff Bezos from Greznte, Slovakia has a scary Amazon wishlist featuring “Special Forces Guerrilla Warfare Manual”, “Total Resistance”, “150 Questions For A Guerrilla”, “On Guerrilla Warfare” and “Everyman’s Talmud”. Please don’t buy him anything. He’s probably up to no good.

Jeff Bezos from Seattle, WA who works at Amazon.com, is known for his laugh and Austin Powers costume likes Aunt Lizzie’s Zero Carb Cheese Straw Bites so much that “[his] mouth is watering as [he writes] this”. I bought a box of them too, and Jeff did not lie. They are pretty damn good. I wonder, if I’ll buy him something from his wishlist, will he send me a “thank you” email? Then again, he must have a better discount than I do…

Also sometimes he time-travels.

The Fug

I think of my life as one long developing and debugging session. I try to improve my software and hardware, fight bloat, load more data in my databases, find new algorithms for doing things. And of course my life is full of little bugs, inefficiencies, crashes and weird behavior. Instead of making coding my way of life I try to make my way of life be more like coding.

There are three classics of the genre of the heroic computer geek saga. First there’s Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul Of a New Machine“. Second is Douglas Coupland’s “Microserfs“. Third is G. Pascal Zachary’s Show-Stopper!. Pascal’s first name which he hides behind the initial “G” is Gregg. Yep, Gregg.

Now I would like to add another book to the list. It’s Ellen Ullman’s “The Bug“.

To describe what these books are about I need to borrow a name of Cordwainer Smith’s short story – The Burning of the Brain. Or Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Those are the things that come to mind when I think about the heroes of these books.

Also comes to mind the episode of NYPD Blue where a doctor tells detective Simone that there is a possibility that the LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) balloon pump might start “chewing up” his body. A poor choice of a metaphor in that case, but a very good one to describe what happens to the bodies and minds of the heroes of these books, be they real life superhuman engineers like Dave Cutler and Steve Wallach or more human but fictional protagonists of “Microserfs” and “The Bug”.

“The Bug” has three main characters. A tester on her way of breaking out from the cocoon of useless liberal arts degree holder and becoming a QA engineer not only in title but in life; a miserable antisocial software engineer in a fight of his life; and a software bug called The Jester.

At work I use Joel Spolsky’s most excellent bug tracking application called FogBugz. My project manager started calling especially nasty bugs “fugs”. Well, The Jester is a “fug” to the power of 10. To get the feeling of vertigo, the sense of spiraling into an abyss that “The Bug” invokes, i suggest listening to a piece titled “Spiral” on John Coltraine’s famous “Giant Steps”.

And here’s my favorite quote from the book:
“Look, Levin. Programming starts out like it’s going to be architecture–all black lines on white paper, theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head. Then, right around the time you have to get something fucking working, it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing.
“No, no. Lemme think,” Harry interrupted himself. “It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?”
“Why the fuck did they?” Ethan said.
Which appeared to amuse Harry to no end. “Oh, you know,” he went on, laughing hoarsely, “they didn’t understand whatever the fuck had come before them, and they just had to get something working in some ridiculous time. Hey, software is just a shitload of pipe fitting you do to get something the hell working. Me,” he said, holding up his chewed, nail-torn hands as if for evidence, “I’m just a plumber.” “

Ok, It’s a Quick Meme. And I Can’t Sleep.

The way this works, you cross out authors not appearing on your bookshelf and add new ones as needed.
:: ::
G. K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis Cordwainer Smith
Terry Pratchett Tom Clancy Henry Kuttner
J.R.R. Tolkien
Kurt Vonnegut
Octavia Butler Robert Nozick John C Wright
Dorothy Sayers Milan Kundera Erich Maria Remarque
Richard Dawkins Søren Kierkegaard Cyril Kornbluth
Jaroslav Pelikan F.A. von Hayek Rudyard Kipling
Neal Stephenson Robert A. Heinlein
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Ayn Rand

And Then There Were None

I have been hunting for Henry Kuttner’s autograph for a very long time. Henry Kuttner is one of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time (see my article about Kuttner). Kuttner died early and his signatures are very rare, fetching upward of $500. I keep a request for a book signed by Kuttner in hope that some ignorant bookseller might sell a signed copy cheaply. A few days ago abebooks wishlist emailed me a really weird item:

“henry kuttner
His personal baby book
his very first book starts on april 7th 1915 and includes his first photograph, mother’s as well as his nurses’ signature, and documents his first 3 words (please nobody take offense) nigger, nigger, nigger. It was in the possesion of author C.L. Moore but now it could be y
ISBN:
Bookseller Inventory #22224
Price: US$ 2500.00 “

I hope nothing bad happened to Kuttner’s wife and co-author, C.L. Moore. Why would a thing like that end up on the market?

Now, that’s a rather weird choice of first words for a baby. But the year being 1915 and everything, my guess is that little Henry must have been rather fond of the nursery rhyme that Agatha Christie used for her whodunit masterwork. Here’s a write-up from Rosetta Books, and eBook publisher:

.. A note about the title — Christie originally called the novel Ten Little Niggers, a reference to an old nursery rhyme that she places, framed, in the guest rooms of the ten characters in the story. Each dies in the manner described in a verse of the sing-song rhyme — e.g., “Ten little nigger boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there nine.” The rhyme ends with the words, “… and then there were none.” The offensive word, which carries an extra dimension of ugliness in American culture, was replaced with “Indians” for American publication. Ironically, “Indian” is now also a politically incorrect term, so the novel has officially been retitled And Then There None. As Charles Osborne points out in his delightful and indispensable study The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, the shift in the old American title creates a bit of confusion. For Americans think it refers to another nursery rhyme that begins, “One little, two little, three little Indians …” The nature of the original title reflects the time in which the novel it was written and the world in which Christie became an adult and a writer, one shaped largely by the British Empire and the racist thinking of the past. The cosmetic change of title to And Then There Were None is merely that, however. It erases a troubling shadow from an extraordinary, hugely entertaining achievement.

Some somewhat related links:

Straight Dope : In whodunits, it’s “the butler did it.” Who did it first?

A complaint to Canadian Broadcast Standards Council :

This case is, in the experience of the CBSC, unique; it marks the first occasion on which a Regional Council has been asked to review the title, as opposed to the content, of a television program. The broadcast in question is a cooking show entitled Gwai Lo Cooking which is aired by CFMT-TV (Toronto). The source of the complaint is the historic Cantonese expression “gwai lo” which is used as a material component of the show’s title. In its etymological background, “gwai lo” translates as “foreign devil” or “ghostly fellow” and it continues to be used by some Chinese to refer to “pale-skinned” Westerners. In the context of the title in question, “gwai lo” refers to the show’s host, who, although of Caucasian, rather than Oriental, much less Chinese, descent, speaks Cantonese and is able to offer North Amercian and European cooking recipes to the Cantonese-speaking Chinese Canadian community. …

A Living Classic

Another little pearl from my collection.

Before the anthrax scare Kurt Vonnegut used to have a special PO box for fan mail. He also used to sign books sent there. And, apparently, he even read the letters. I sent him my tattered copy of “Cat’s Cradle”.

I don’t send brand new books for authors to sign. Only the ones that I’ve abusingly read a few times.

Imaginary Dragon is A Square Root of a Negative Dragon

I’ve been fooling around with Amazon.com SDK today. I’ve always wanted to write a wishlist manager. I tried to export my wishlist out, but not all records are being returned. Looks like it’s a known bug according to their bulletin board. Ok, I guess I’ll have to extract it page by page (it seems to be working a page at a time).

At the same time I discovered a silly bug in the way wishlist results are displayed. To reproduce” modify “registry.page-number” part of the query string in the url, to jump a few pages forward. Then press “previous button” : numbering of items will turn to negative numbers. Yeah, pagination is usually tricky to code right. But if even I can do it, so should Amazon programmers.

Regular shopping cart pagination uses “pg” token, and works ok with this manual jump.

Right now I am in the process of consolidating all of my information in a hyperlinked map. The tool I am using is called Treepad. But it’s late, I’ll write more about that later. Good night.