A few months back I did a poll on books published in 1959, 1909, 1859, 1809, 1759, 1609 and 1509. For the publications to be commemorated in 2010, I found the pickings much slimmer for the older set of anniversaries, but on the other hand 1960 appears to have been a rather good year (indeed, deserving a poll of its own). Here are the top books from 1910 and 1860 (again ranked by LibraryThing popularity).

( poll )

I'm in the middle of Framley Parsonage at the moment.

These 50 books were all published in 1960. (I have selected them by the scientific method of identifying the top 46 from that year on LibraryThing, plus another four that I happened to have read myself.)

( poll )

NB some of these I wasn't sure of myself and had to check, as follows:
For Your Eyes Only - is a collection of James Bond short stories
Jeeves in the Offing - is the one which starts with Bertie discovering that he is engaged to Bobbie Wickham (when her mother phones up, sobbing, to ask if "the dreadful news" is true); also features Aunt Dahlia, the psychiatrist Sir Roderick Glossop and the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, but not much Jeeves
A Burnt-Out Case - is the particularly depressing Graham Greene set in a leper colony in the Congo
Dorsai! - an episodic book about Donal Graeme, warrior extraordinaire
The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding etc - is a short story collection mainly featuring Poirot
False Scent - is the one with an aging actress who is murdere with ehr own insecticide
The Clue in the Old Stagecoach - is the one where Nancy Drew searches for an antique stagecoach that, according to legend, contains something of great value to the people of Francisville

Happy to clarify any other cases where confusion is possible...

A letter of 22 September 1590 from Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin, to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, recommending fines and imprisonment as a method to force the Irish to accept the Reformed religion. Noted here because Sir Nicholas Whyte is mentioned as a dangerous liberal.

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From State Papers concerning the Irish Church, ed. W.M. Brady, 1868.

One of the early Torchwood books - set just before Cyberwoman, I think. Andy Lane has written some good Who novels and this too is excellent; good depictions of all the team (not much Ianto, but lots of Owen), and of how alien tech threatens to infilltrate Rhys and Gwen's relationship. I was also impressed by the first season Torchwood novel Border Princes, and on the basis of that and this will now be looking out for more of them.

Another dip into the sub-genre of African-American romance, as told by Beverly Jenkins, whose books are among the highest-rated on LibraryThing. If anything I enjoyed this slightly more than Jewel. Most of the action takes place in 1897 Philadelphia, with the last section in a free black town in Kansas (the fictional settlement of Henry Adams, where a lot of Jenkins' other books are apparently set). There is not much to the plot; former bank robber Teresa July and businessman Madison Nance are obviously destined for each other, and some detailed and well-written erotic passages explain how they make up their minds to accept this destiny. Jenkins does throw in a fair bit of political commentary as well - the dispute between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, corrupt Republican party bosses, feminism (Teresa's sister-in-law is mayor of Henry Adams), certainly enough to keep me happy and maintain my interest. It's really not a type of book I would normally read, but I'll look out for more Jenkins in the charity bookshops.

and to all a Happy 2010!

We had a pretty good Christmas yesterday, if a tad tiring, and had a very enjoyable day with friends and family. Prime rib for lunch, and a succulent ham and yam Christmas dinner.

We got a couple hond-made ornaments, a Yule log, and a three foot craft snowman. Carol got several very nice pictures, a cute paisley outfit, an automobile thermometer, and a gorgeous Christmas sweater-vest. I got a Star Trek DVD game, four DVD movies (WOO-HOO!), the complete Star Trek Animated series on DVD, a BBQ kit for salmon, two hiking kits, and two watches.

We done good.

C-ya!
Leroy

Flamsteed is currently transcoding and transfering Torchwood's "Captain Jack Harkness" to the Tivo with a load average of 2.75. Not bad for a 500MHz Pentium III!

I also have "Everything Changes" in the queue.

So, I manage every-so-often to download shows off the Net. That's fine as far as it goes, but I've never liked watching the shows on Ananda (my MacBook). Call me spoiled ("OK, Doc! You're spoiled!") but my TV, as ancient as it is, has better sound at least, and a larger screen. Say what you want about how much the angle subtends the eye comparing a small screen up close with a big screen farther away, but I like the bigger screen. (Up to a point. We've established that I don't find IMAX movies any "big" shakes.) Being able to watch such programs on the TV is one of the motivators toward building the MythTV server.

But now it seems I have a workaround until then.

There are methods of transcoding and transferring video from computer to TiVO, but with what I found in the past the transcoding took hours and really caused Ananda to work up a hell of a sweat. I hate it when his fan runs continuously. That's fine for a desktop, but on a laptop I've never liked it. So, while I toyed around with those methods I never more than toyed.

Playing around with Vuze, a bitorrent client last night, I noticed it has a "TiVo option." Playing around with that I couldn't get the videos to show up on the TiVO, although the share folder was mounted. Looking around the Net, while this option in Vuze could - sorta - be made to work with a Series 2 TiVo (like mine) it was really meant to work with a Series 3. Further reading turned up a program called "pyTiVo" which would transcode and transfer video to the TiVo.

I looked and versions were available for all platforms. I installed the Mac version on Ananda and tried it out. I easily cross mounted directories and started a test transcode/transfer - Battlestar Galactica's "The Plan."

Nothing happened.

Or, rather, nothing appeared to happen. I expected Ananda's load average to go up and it didn't. I checked the outgoing network flow and it was significant. Going over to the TiVo I found the video was transferring.

No work being done on Ananda in any real sense. This couldn't be working. I hit play on the TiVo expecting either nothing, or just blackness and silence.

I got perfect video and sound! I was amazed.

I reconfigured things and am now successfully transferring "The End of Time, Part 1." Since virtually no work seems to be done by the CPU I'm going to install this on Flamsteed and see if I can get the same functionality.

What's nice is that this will enable me to transfer Torchwood's "Captain Jack Harkness" to the TiVo so that Ryan, Kyle & Rourkie can see one of the two most romantic sequences ever put to video!

Well, I enjoyed it. RTD tends to do much better with penultimate episodes and then fumble the climax, so I hope that doesn't happen again this time. Particular comments below the cut, but if you want the collected wisdom of (part of) the internets, check here.

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...I could never get the missing line.

Yes, I know what the canonical version is, but I don't really believe it. What should it have been?

(And I never understood why it was always listed as "Boss Cat" in the BBC TV schedules, but that would be an ecumenical matter.)

Top Cat! The most effectual Top Cat! Whose intellectual Close friends get to call him TC... [dah dah dah dah diddle de dee] Top Cat! The indisputable Leader of the gang! He's the boss! He's a VIP! He's the championship! He's the most tip top - Top Cat!

Young F got this jewel in his cracker yesterday:

Q: What kind of relationship does coral have with algae?
A: A symbiotic relationship.

Now, this answer turns out to be perfectly sound biology (so I at least learned something) but doesn't seem to me paticularly funny. Am I missing some point about, perhaps, two popular celebrities or fictional characters called Coral and Algy? Or is it just meant to be funny because coral is generally hard and algae generally squishy?

Antoine de Saint Exupéry was a pioneering aviator in the early part of the last century. Among many other things, he worked for the Aéropostale (No, not the clothing retailer!) between Toulouse and Dakar on one of the first air mail routes.

One Xmas time Saint Exupéry and a co-pilot were running the route between Dakar and Toulouse across the Sahara. The night had grown foggy, and time had slipped. Over the featurelessness of the desert they had no way of knowing where they were. The stations at Dakar and Casablanca, among others, couldn't tell them either. "No bearing," they reported. "No bearing." Saint Exupéry and his copilot Mary went onwards, at one point actually leaning out of the plane to see if they could get some sort of indication of where they were. Nothing. Nothing. The radio stations themselves had gone silent.

In the silence Antoine and Mary flew above the fog and prayed to the stars. They didn't know where they were. They didn't know how far away their destination, Toulouse, was. They didn't know how much fuel they had before they went on reserve. No station could give them a bearing. They were going to crash in the middle of the Sahara.

Slowly, one by one, stations came back on the air: Dakar, Casablanca, Algiers, all expressing worry about Exupéry's plane. They gathered round the plane like doctors round a patient on life support. Then, loud and clear, cut a signal - their first - from Toulouse. No words of greeting, just a simple, direct, and very needed message:

"Your reserve tanks are larger than you realize. You have two hours of fuel remaining. Proceed."

They'd been saved.

Memorize those words: "Your reserve tanks are larger than you realize."

-From the 24 December 2009 Sermon of Rev. Kim Crawford-Harvie
Arlington Street Unitarian-Universalist Meetinghouse, Boston, MA

---

I got to the Meetinghouse around 1630. I met Rev. George Whitehouse, our Campanologist, immediately and we climbed the Tower together. We rang as I expected us to ring all night with George and I alternating on songs, and with me making sure we also chimed the time. The first 1700 service featured our regular ASC chorus, which George is a part of, so he left the Tower to have me play the last piece.

The 1700 service had all the elements needed, but it was geared to the kids. The service ended and, as he came down the center aisle, George gave me a thumbs up telling me to scoot up back into the Tower. I did, and we were soon joined by Woody, our Senior Bellringer. Before I knew it, we had guests - Ben and Joe.

Ben rang like a boy possessed! He could actually do 16th notes! Ben had started ringing when he was 10. Now in graduate school he was among the few former Bellringers that came back for special events like Christmas service. Joe, also now away in college, had been ringing for 10 years and had rung in the Millenium at Arlington Street, as well as ringing for the Olympic Torch.

Together they told me Lore of the Tower that I'd not heard before. I learned of a secret key to the Tower. I learned that if you were in the Tower after midnight you were stuck there until the next day due to the alarm system. Ben & Joe were great together. They would collaborate on pieces, one of the playing the melody, another making up a harmony for it on the fly - four bells being sounded simultaneously at times!

We rang until exactly 1900 when the next and most filled of the services started. As I climbed down from the Tower after chiming the hour my cell phone chimed as well with a txt.

"I'm downstairs." -Ryan

This was what I had wanted - somehow - to share this with someone from the family I'd been building in Boston! Ryan, my roommate and Dungeon Master, had been working until 1830 in Prudential Tower and had walked down to the Meetinghouse after work. Amazingly with the standing room only crowd I found him just inside the Sanctuary. Grabbing and greeting him, I took him up to the Organ Balcony at the back of the Meetinghouse - what he correctly termed were the best seats in the house that night!

The Boston Gay Men's Chorus, along with Kim and the other celebrants, entered the Sanctuary via the center aisle, singing as they came.

After hearing Kim's sermon Ryan said, "You've mentioned her a couple of times. Now I see why."

Then came the most dramatic part of the Xmas Eve service - the Traditional Unitarian-Universalist Candle Lighting.

Starting from a single source - the Unitarian-Universalist Chalice on the Pulpit, this single light is propagated to every single member of the congregation throughout the Sanctuary. The light spreads slowly to the soft organ accompanyment of "Silent Night." Once the light is distributed the congregation joins in singing the carol. Trumpets come into play at this point. Three verses are sung. Then, in silence, everyone raises their candles high for several seconds. Finally, led by Kim, simultaneously, the candles are blown out putting the Sanctuary in darkness for a few seconds as the lights come back up.

The service ended with the Boston Gay Men's Chorus singing their signature tune - "Everything's Possible" - appropriately written by Fred Small, now Rev. Fred Small, currently holding the Pulpit of First Unitarian-Universalist in neighboring Cambridge, MA.

There are girls who grow up strong and bold
There are boys quiet and kind
Some race on ahead, some follow behind
Some go in their own way and time
Some women love women, some men love men
Some raise children, some never do
You can dream all the day never reaching the end
Of everything possible for you.

You can be anybody you want to be,
You can love whomever you will
You can travel any country where your heart leads
And know I will love you still
You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around,
You can choose one special one
And the only measure of your words and your deeds
Will be the love you leave behind when you're done.

The Chorus then walked out with the rest of the celebrants to a standing ovation!

---

I brought Ryan up to the Ringing Room and we were joined by several boyfriends and wives of the Ringers. Another hour of round ringing was done. One or two ringers doing a piece while another picked the next. A quick switch at the ropes, and the carols continued to ring out over the Common and across Back Bay!

The last service was started at 2100. I'd heard it before at this point and so soon secreted myself at the arch window at the base of the Tower where I could look across the Garden and the Common and see through the bare branches of the December trees the gold dome of the Statehouse to call my parents. Dad was actually home for a visit for a week. He sounded stronger and less confused than he had during Thanksgiving. Mom sounded well, as well.

I was the last one in the Tower, ringing everyone out of the last service. At George's direction the last carol played was three verses of "Silent Night," getting softer and softer as it went on, building to a strong finish for the last two measures.

I locked up the Tower and started back to Norfolk Flat.

But my night wasn't over.

---

I got to Downtown Crossing. While moving to the train I was stopped by an Indonesian boy. "Excuse me," he said. "My friend is coming in from CT. Do you know where his train would be?"

"CT?" I said. "He'd be coming in by Amtrack."

"Yes, Amtrack."

"Well, you're in Downtown Crossing. The Amtrack trains would come into South Station."

"South Station?"

"Yea. Come here." I led him to a map. "You're in Downtown Crossing. You need to go one stop south to South Station. There you need to go upstairs to the Amtrack area." He looked at the map and slowly seemed to be getting it. English was not his first language. I looked at my watch. It was 2230. "When is your friend's train coming in?"

"11:00."

"OK, you gotta get to South Station. Come on, I'll take you there."

"What?"

"You have a half hour until your friend gets here. You're not exactly used to the system. You have a Charlie Card, right?"

"Yes," he said, showing it to me.

"OK, come on!"

I led him to South Station and we found the train his friend was due to come in on 10 minutes before it arrived. "There you go. This is his train. Should be about 10 minutes."

"Thank you," he said, wearing this semi-confused/bemused expression on his face. I don't think he ever quite believed I'd actually brought him to the train.

"Happy Christmas," I said.

"Thank you," he replied again.

---

With that I got back to Norfolk Flat to watch Midnight Mass from the Vatican, and go to sleep to Forsyth's "The Shepherd."

This afternoon will see me at Andy's, my fellow dungeoneer, with his husband, Steve, and I'm hoping a few more members of the family I'm creating in Boston - my roomate, Ryan, and perhaps my boys Kyle & Rourkie.

Not a bad day. Not a bad day at all!

Yep, I have read the first of my Christmas presents: a nice half-dozen Tenth Doctor stories, originally published as separate comics and here as a single volume by IDW. I really bought it to read the first story, "The Whispering Gallery", which is by Leah and John, and am glad to say that I enjoyed it and most of the others (the exception being a typically cliched cute robot story in the middle). The standout, however, is Tony Lee's "The Time Machination", featuring Ten teaming up with H.G. Wells against Torchwood, with lots of other pleasing references to both New and particularly Old Who. Lee's The Forgotten was also excellent, and I shall look out for more of his work. And the collection as a whole is excellent value.

It has been a magnificent night. Details will be written about tomorrow morning.

Its funny - I've seemingly become the most religious person I know on this night: three Unitarian Universalist services where I rang bells, and now I'm watching His Holiness Benedict XVI celebrating Midnight Mass from Rome.

After this I'll be going to bed listening to "The Shepherd."

For those in general - Happy Christmas.

For those WEFPuBians among us - Happy Karamas.

For Greater Boston - Happy Isaacmas!

and for the next twelve months.

Since Halloween, there have been seven police officers gunned down in the line of duty in Western Washington. Five died outright, one is about to be released from Madigan, and one is unconscious (rumor is brain-dead) in Harborview hospital in Seattle.

I ask again: What the HELL is Going on Here?!!!

Halloween a guy walked up beside a police cruiser in Seattle whose occupants were doing paperwork and blew away the driver. The Sunday morning after Thanksgiving a convicted felon about to be sentenced to life imprisonment executed 4 police officers in Lakewood drinking coffee. And Monday here, 4 miles north of our son and family, between Eatonville and Spanaway, a red-neck got drunk, his family called the sheriff, two came out, and he shot them 10 times.

What the HELL is Going on Here?!!!

Governor Gregoire should issue the following proclamation: All Washington citizens west of the Cascades shall see a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist for a minimum of one hour by February 1, 2010.

Period.

C-ya!
Leroy

I have a web page detailing all the computers I've owned in my life. ("I'm a nerd. There's nothing I can do about it.") Amazingly this page now documents over 25 years of history.

The trends are interesting, both technically and sociologically. We start out exactly 26 years ago with the TRS-80 Model 1, a time from a PC standpoint when there was no such thing as a common operating system and operating systems, such as they were, existed in ROM. Computer memory was measured in kilobytes. Storage was measured on cassette tape.

It's interesting to see that that situation - the scrappy fight of operating systems - extended to the early 90s with CP/M, Apple, DOS, AmigaOS, & the Commodore KERNAL, among others fighting it out. By the mid-90s, while upstarts continued to enter the ring, the acknowledged OSes became Windows and MacOS. For the personal computing scene, this would remain the environment until 2004 when the Ubuntu Linux distribution finally began to make inroads into the PC OS market.

As the page shows, I jumped into the Apple camp, at the same time moving largely, but not exclusively, into laptops for day-to-day use. Computers had become powerful enough that, since I wasn't doing the special effects for Babylon 5 (a metaphor I really need to update!), I didn't need the power of a desktop.

Luke in 2005 seemingly started an interesting trend that I have just started to see, or at least acknowledge. From 1993-2005 my computers were almost exclusively MacOS. Certainly the day-to-day use was exclusive. The only outlier was Zaphod who ran BeOS, among other operating systems. Then in 2005 something changed. I expected it to be an outlier, but it somehow has not turned out that way.

Luke was meant to be a testbed - a Linux testbed. An experiment. But taking a look at the page indicates that 75% of the computers I've owned after 2005 have been Linux systems, not Mac. Now an argument might be able to be made that while the number of computers have significantly increased to Linux since 2005, the time spent on MacOS has commanded the lion's share of my computing time. And you'd be dead right.

Until this year.

Today I realized with a shock that the only program that is keeping me on MacOS is...Quicken. My financial data in Quicken format goes back 15 years. But that's it. Everything else has been transferred either to Linux or - to some degree more terrifyingly - into the Cloud.

Now with Moore in the office I realized with surprise that Ananda has not left Norfolk Flat in a week. Now accompanying me on my day-to-day travels is Linus. He's in the backpack. He's with me in Boston Public Library. He's with me at Traveller games calling up data and keeping track of my characters (and this may well happen at the D&D games, too).

I see this trend as increasing. The upcoming MythTV server will obviously be running Linux - Mythbuntu. While the current TiVO box, of course, runs a Linux kernel, its a special purpose box which I don't count as a computer, per se. The MythTV server will be a general computer that will be not only serving out TV audio/video, but will also be hooked into the stereo system to do music and radio streams. Furthermore it'll be taking over web serving duties, largely replacing Flamsteed. I also expect to be running a few games on the machine. It, unlike the TiVO, will be a general computer.

And while I've been talking about the MythTV server for over a year now, now I can state that its arrival is soon. Why? Well, I've started a name list. And anyone who knows me knows that when the name list has started for a new computer, its on its final countdown. :-)

So, after 16 years are MacOS's days numbered with me? I wouldn't go that far. But its "market share" has certainly deteriorated.

Apple to Demo Tablet in January. Asks Developers to Get Apps Ready

I've been waiting for this, in some way, shape, or form, since Jobs killed the Newton. I have never believed it would take place (and I'm not at all 100% sure now). An Apple Tablet has been predicted by major news outlets every year since the Newton's demise. It's all been bull.

This time feels different, though, for some reason. I'm not sure I like the reasons why it feels different.

The iPhone and iTouch are specific devices. Yes they have the power of traditional computers, but they don't have the flexibility of traditional computers. Their size is a part of that problem, but it is the smallest part. The largest part is that Apple has created, in the iPhoneOS, the most closed operating system on the planet, bar none. It is a Capitalist's wet dream - all packaged, monitized, and shackled. I fear they'll end up putting the same operating system in the Tablets using their usual "quality customer experience" excuse when, of course, the real reason is to drive the online Apple Store. If so, I fear the device may well be useless.

Despite its closed nature the iPhone is useful because of its size. It's not a full computer, but its a phone, PDA, and GPS unit, so its useful. Without an unshackled operating system exactly what will the Tablet be good for? It'll be too big to claim size as a virtue. It should be too expensive to claim it's an effective e-book reader (one of the prime uses the tablet could be put to).

So, if Apple actually makes a Tablet, if it puts the iPhoneOS on it, i'll be a piece of expensive junk that won't interest me. If they actually put MacOS X on it, then I'll have some interest. MacOS X may well be a closed operating system, but its not a shackled operating system, if you understand the difference.

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
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Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

Rereading this classic, which combines the horrors of the 1945 bombing of Dresden with the sfnal captivity of the hero by the aliens of Tralfamadore. Having first come to Vonnegut via Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan as a teenager, I wasn't really sure what to make of this. Coming to it again a quarter-century later, I have a much deeper appreciation of Vonnegut's savaging of the surrealism of war, and of how trauma throws the rest of your life into a weird perspective. But I also find his attitude to women much more annoying - at least, to the women in the main part of the story, the mothers of Billy Pilgrim's children, Valencia Merble and Montana Wildhack (and Pilgrim's daughter Barbara). Having said that, the sanest character in the book is probably Mary O'Hare from the ostensibly autobiographical foreword; and it must also be admitted that most of the male characters are pretty unpleasant too.

Anyway, I can't think of many other sf novels which take the Second World War as their subject, and this is probably the best in that rather small set.

This particular incident/quote Sunday night when we were at the Boston Gay Men's Chorus has stuck with me for days. I must share.

Kyle: "This is the most Gay I've been surrounded by since I saw Brokeback Mountain. You can smell the Gay! It smells like...lavender!"

Rourkie (deadpan): "It is lavender."

All I have to do is think about that and I smile.