Devin on Earth

Oh, hell yeah!

Fujitsu Laboratories has produced prototype electronic paper. They hope to have it out in production in 2006.

Thanks to Chrissy for the link.

I am reliably informed that people without Asperger’s Syndrome or some other form of autism will have trouble grokking the inherent rightness of the following statements:

1. Without considering any of the other criteria such as sound quality, archive durability, or storage capabilities, CDs are inherently superior to cassettes because they are random access rather than serial access. That is, when I am listening to a CD I do not have to listen to an entire side; I can skip directly to the desired song and just listen to that.
2. Going to see doctors in the middle of the day inevitably causes difficulties because if they prescribe medicine, they tend to prescribe doses per day. A prescription of four capsules 3x a day is especially annoying; you need to wait until the next day to start the medicine.

Don’t waste the time to post the logical fallicies in these statements. I’m smart enough to know them. This is the bitch of Asperger’s; I am simultaneously smart enough to effortlessly fathom Automatic Music Search, the concept that it’s okay to listen to just a portion of a side of a cassette, the virtual day consisting of 24 hours from the present time, and other measures people take for granted. I still find that it requires a lot of energy and effort to put those into effect. Sometimes I don’t bother; I have to pick my battles with my brain.

Oh, and do not call me an Aspie or whatever the fuck it is some Asperger’s folks call themselves. I loathe it. I am a person who happens to suffer from Asperger’s; I am not the mental equivalent of some fucking Trekkie who needs a special name and recognition badge to feel special. I am not the sum of my flaws. My Asperger’s does not define who I am or why I am interesting.

I cannot believe the idiocy with which our governments equip themselves these days:

http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=2989614

Since this seems to be the year where I meet one professional goal after another, I took the next step in my plan of world domination and submitted proposals to speak at the Fall 2005 Exchange Connections conference in San Diego. Here are the sessions I proposed:

• Preventing Sender Domain Spoofing with Sender ID
• Using AD/AM for Edge Mail Sanitation
• Maintaining a Custom DNS Blocklist
• Solution Accelerator for Consolidation and Migration: One Year Later
• Using UNIX solutions with Exchange
• Workshop on UNIX solutions with Exchange

It will be interesting to see which ones are accepted (if any); they won’t accept me as a speaker unless they take at least three of my sessions. I am looking foward to seeing how this plays out.

I gave up dryer sheets for Lent.

Steph and I are on the phone with our friend Andrew and he was telling us about some of the latest doings he’d heard about on Garrison Keillor’s radio show. The most interesting bit was the impending publication of a detailed examination of President Clinton’s years in office. The book is named “The Johnson Years.”

Time to patch again! MS05-012 (Vulnerability in OLE and COM Could Allow Remote Code Execution (873333)) has been released for pretty much every version of Windows, Office, and Exchange, since they all use the component. It’s rated severe, so don’t wait; grab it now, get it into testing, and get it into production.

Note that if you’re using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) faithfully, you probably already know about this patch. If you’re not running version 1.2.1, go download that and start using it. It helps you figure out exactly what you need.

And if you were using Software Update Services (SUS) or its currently in beta replacement Windows Update Services (WUS), you’d automatically be notified about this patch and be able to control deployment throughout your organization.

It is horribly difficult to get work done when you get four phone calls in a row.

I love Saturdays, especially today. I got a decent amount of work done last night, including turning over two papers that came back yesterday for edits. Additionally, Robbie (my O’Reilly editor) got Chapter 7 edited and passed it back to me last night, so I’ve got some rewrites to do on that. But first, I need to finish up Once Upon a Time in Seattle so I don’t keep having that hanging over my head.

Breakfast was a new dish that has quickly become one of my favorites: Baked Amish Oatmeal. I don’t really like oatmeal, but Steph found this recipe in one of her cookbooks (The Best of Country Cooking) and gave it a try a couple of weeks ago. Everyone likes it. The contributor claims that it tastes “just like a big warm-from-the-oven oatmeal cookie” and she’s right. It’s pretty simple to make: mix up one and one half cups of quick-cooking oats, half a cup of sugar, half a cup of milk, a quarter cup of melted butter (margarine if you absolutely must), an egg, a teaspoon of baking powder, three quarters of a teaspoon of salt, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Once you’ve got it thoroughly mixed up, grease up a baking pan and spread it in evenly. You don’t want a thick layer, so make sure your pan is a decent size. Put it the oven for 25 -30 minutes at 350 degrees, making sure your edges are golden brown, and damn – your mouth will love you forever. You can eat it as it is (which is the way I like it) or crumble it up and pour milk over it and top it with whatever you like.

Now that I’ve got cuisine tips out of the way, I’ve got to work on writing. Once I get some time in on the adventure, I’ve got a book review to write and a political essay running around my head. And never forget editing Chapter 7.

[Editor: I've removed the content of this post because it really doesn't need to be here in public.]

Yesterday I finally got my hands on John Scalzi’s debut novel, Old Man’s War. I ordered it from my local bookstore earlier in the month; it took them a week or two to actually get a copy, and then I was out of funds.

Since .Text has the nifty ability to create non-syndicated posts (known as articles) which must be directly linked to, I’ve created a new article with my review. I’d have reviewed it here but it contains spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book, you may not want to read my review right away.

If you don’t mind spoilers, read away. I very much like the book, but I go into a bit more detail (and I even tell you the one part of the book that broke my suspension of disbelief).

Good Lord in Heaven, I think my “favorite sci-fi authors list” just got another entry. OMW, weighing in at a svelte 316 pages of text, is the first book I’ve read since Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky that was literally so compelling that I stayed up to finish it. In the current market where so many hardcover books are the literary equivalent of marathons, OMW is the biathlon: it sticks together two unlikely subjects (military sci-fi and old people) and drops them in the snowy wastes of freshman novels. The result is a tightly written story that gives the reader a lot of action to enjoy, surprises to savor, and implications to ponder long after the book is placed on its shelf.

The plot is fairly simple: John Perry is a widower. On his seventy-fifth birthday he heads into the big town of Greenville to finish the process of signing up for the Colonial Defense Forces, a process he started with his wife ten years before. Not much is known about the CDF or their parent organization, the Colonial Union; they control all travel off-planet, they control the colonization of new planets, and they (through the CDF) provide military support for their colonies. There are aliens out there and they, too, want colonies; there are constant fights over territory. CDF recruits are declared legally dead on Earth and can never go back; for this reason they only recruit elderly people. We follow along with John Perry from his last graveside visit with his wife, through the recruiting office, into space, through boot camp, and into memorable battles in various star systems. Along the way, we learn more about the CDF, humanity’s somewhat precarious situation, John Perry, and ultimately ourselves.

In any normal army, recruiting 75 year-olds is a great way to ensure you’re going to get your asses kicked. The CDF is quite smart about a lot of things, so finding out the truth behind the rumors of age rejuvenation treatments is the first major secret of the book. In order to set us up for the proper impact of this reveleation, Scalzi has to do a bit of infodumping. Unlike most rookie writers, he does a damn fine job of showing us his world, not telling us. We get quite a lot of information about the relationship between the CDF and the Earth in the recruiting office as Perry is completing his enlistment; Scalzi intersperses the actual text of the agreement with relevant commentary. His chatty, personable style keeps it moving and presents the salient points without belaboring them; Scalzi does the reader the courtesy of assuming they will be smart enough to grasp the implications of what they’ve just read and start to wonder about the the clone bodies of those who fail to follow through on their enlistment or who die before they reach this point (like Perry’s roommate).

The secret of the CDF rejuvenation treatment is also simple: there is none. Instead, the CDF has spent the past ten years force-growing a genetically engineered clone, into which they will transfer their recruits’ consciousness (thanks to some advanced technology). Again, Perry learns what’s going on about a second before we do and we have as little prior preparation as he received. Even though I’d already listed cloning as a possible option, Scalzi’s treatment of it was deft enough to leave me nodding in appreciation of Perry’s surprise. This scene provides what I think is one of the finest bits of writing in the book:

“Wait,” I said. “I forgot something.” I walked over to my old body again, still in the creche. I looked over to Dr. Russell and pointed to the door. “I need to unlock this,” I said. Dr. Russell nodded. I unlocked it, opened it, and took my old body’s left hand. On the ring finger was a simple gold band. I slipped it off and slipped it on my ring finger. Then I cupped my old face with my new hands.

“Thank you,” I said to me. “Thank you for everything.”

Wow. As a reader, I live for those passages.

Ironically, Perry’s boot camp experience was the only scene that strained my sense of disbelief. The CDF drill instructors have genuine reason to be the sons of bitches that everbody expects drill instructors to be, and Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz is no exception. Although Scalzi gets him right — I had more than one flashback to Dr. Death, my own company commander — there is one mistake. Perry is the one recruit who does not provide immediate offense to his new drill instructor, a man who is an expert at finding reasons to hate his recruits. As his reward, Perry is made platoon leader. So far, so good. However, at the end of boot camp, Perry is still platoon leader. Sorry. No fucking way. Every platoon screws up; every drill instructor knows this. The whole point of assigning recruit leadership from the very beginning is to have visible and tangible object lessons. Recruit leaders will pay for the follies of their fellow recruits, but at some point they will be relieved from command so they can learn how to be a regular grunt too. In the meantime, some other hapless victim inherits the nightmare of responsibility without authority. The typical unit goes through 3-4 recruit leaders before settling down on a stable recruit command team, even if that means that likely candidates have been quietly redeemed from their earlier failures and reinstated. It is an important part of the boot camp process and I cannot believe the CDF wouldn’t follow it.

Having said that, though, that’s my biggest fault with the book. Nothing else strains my suspension of disbelief, not even some of the incredible coincidences that come Perry’s way. He’s our viewpoint character precisely because he is placed to reveal secrets we would otherwise not see. Through Perry’s eyes, we find out more about the Ghost Brigades (CDF’s special forces), the Consu (a highly advanced alien race with an odd notion of force parity), and the forces that are arrayed against humanity.

I don’t have enough nice things to say about this book. I read through it last night and immediately handed it over to my wife this morning. She finished it up before dinner and handed it back, so I can now begin a slower, more thorough reading, which is something I rarely do. I’m already looking forward to the sequel, too.

Buy this book. If you don’t like it, you’re a freak of human nature, but that doesn’t matter, because you’ll have bought a copy of the book and generated sales for John. Tell people about this book. Make them buy it. It really is that good.