Now that I've got a gallery, I'm giddy with power! I've put up some pictures of the Wreckyll in Jeckyll, which are suitable for framing. Or blackmail, pick your poison.

UPDATE:

And it only got worse; the second gallery is here.

Hey, there, folks! As you might have noticed, You Bitch! got a new coat of paint. I've been cobbling together a new blogging system in my spare time, using Python and the Django web development framework. If you like, you can see a few technical details over on the Impressum.

It's not quite finished, but it can already do several things that I was hoping for:

• Full metaWeblog, Movable Type, and Blogger APIs implemented, for use in desktop blogging clients like Ecto
• Gallery2's Gallery Remote protocol¹, for uploading image galleries out of iPhoto or another program with a Gallery2 plugin
• Photocasting support
• Comments
• Pingbacks
• Akismet anti-spam²
• Wordpress import script

Some of the things I'm still working on are:

• Podcasting stuff, which you may have noticed doesn't work
• Some online services, like to-do list and calendar, for internal use
• Monthly newsstand-style editions in PDF format, mainly for a lark

This is my second big Django project. The first project was an online software activation and license management server for a customer of mine. Even though I don't really know much about programming, I was able to pack actual functionality in to a few hundred lines of code. I'll probably put the source up, as soon as I've taken the cuss words out of it.

I'm amazed again and again at how easy Python makes it for a talentless hack like me to make things that don't suck.

A female friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, is busy at the moment taking the final exams for her master's degree. For the past two weeks, she's been running to the university and back, making copies of her study materials at about 5 cents per page. Check out the pile of tree pelts that's accumulated on my beloved colonial dining table:

There are probably hundreds of students over at the university right now who are doing the exact same thing. All told, that's about 5000 pages, at a cost of over $100 in processing and copying fees, for each student taking the exams. Now, I wouldn't presume to tell an institution of higher learning that they're full of shit, but I can't help think that it might have been a better use of their resources to distribute electronic versions of these materials. I mean, as long as they're letting people copy them, why not try to keep the rainforest from getting chopped and cleared at the same time? Note the USB stick at the bottom left of that picture, which would hold 200 times as much information as the stack of folders it's leaning on.

For purely scientific purposes, I combed a few BitTorrent sites to see if any of the textbooks my anonymous girlie was copying were available in E-Book format. Almost all of them were.

(plonk)

Technorati Tags: higher education, Workflow

Everybody from Elisson to Michael Heilemann is memeing this list of 50 science fiction and fantasy books. Not being above using other people's ideas as my own, I'll be posting it as well. I'll spare the 50 lines, and just leave in the ones that I've actually read.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

I like lists like these, but I think this one's misnamed. Tolkien's books, for example, are not within the 50-year time span any more (the original list is from 2002), and shouldn't be there. And although I'm sure they're all good, I don't know if I'd consider some of them all that influential. Electric Sheep, for example, is nowhere near as good or influential as Dick's paranoium opus Vulcan's Hammer. The only reason anybody still knows about it is because of Blade Runner's hat tip.

Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, both of whose successes inspired, in their times, a return to 'hard' science fiction (although its science wasn't quite as hard as Crichton made it out to be).

Dungeons and Dragons first edition by Gary Gygax, as long as being a 'novel' isn't a prerequisite–I mean, how many people derived works from that? It completely redefined the way people thought about the fantasy genre. And bathing.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. It's still Heinlein's best book, in my estimation, and hey, it gave us TANSTAAFL. Better than Starship Troopers, which is probably fightin' words with a lot of people, and number two on my Why the Hell Ain't They Made it a Movie list, right after Satanic Verses.

Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite Vonnegut book; it's basically the same as Slaughterhouse-5, just a bit more screwy. I think it's a pretty good bet that drugs played a wee part in the making of this one.

Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman. Although ripped root and branch right out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ass, this book had more sequels than most of the other books on this list had imitators.

Some I'd remove from the list:

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I like this book; I've read it at least a dozen times; but it's kind of cheesy. And I think you'd be hard pressed to say that it had a lot of influence in the sci-fi/fantasy world. There's about a million books out there that left a bigger crater than this one.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. I'll give them The Man in the High Castle, but Electric Sheep is crap, and all that Mercerism mumbo-jumbo can kiss my ass. Sounds like somebody thinks it's still hip to over-represent Philip K. Dick. His stuff wasn't bad, but give it a rest already.

Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I remember reading the Shannarah books as a fat, lonely teenager. Even then, it seemed derivative.

Technorati Tags: Books for 30-Year-Old Virgins and Cat Ladies, Hobbies

• Mom going outside and ringing a huge metal triangle when dinner was ready
• Having to shoot my faithful hound as a coming-of-age event
• The ol' Tongue-on-the-Flagpole Trick (not really a problem in Georgia)
• Being washed at birth with boiling water by a deaf-mute midwife
• The Dunce Cap