When I get a call from my parents' house at an unusual hour, I worry that this will finally be the call when I learn that one of them has died.

After I hear the voicemail, which is invariably just a request to call back about one minor family matter or another, I worry about having to talk about the Obama administration with them.

Attended the wake, with classicaljunkie. I spent most of the time talking with another O'Reilly person there ( Read more... )

My friend and colleague Erik T. Ray, with whom I worked at O'Reilly and co-authored the Perl & XML book, died suddenly at the hospital last night while recovering from a traffic accident. He was a good guy, and showed up on an episode of The Gameshelf. I still have the strange Korean novelty pen he gave me at the studio that day.

The Bad Astronomer got a great piece of spam I haven't seen before, basically saying "Send me money or I WILL KILL YOU." With a great little story that the author is an assassin who's been paid to whack the recipient, but decided to give them one chance to outbid the client before he follows through. Awesome ( Read more... )

I discover that DEFCON - Everybody Dies has been ported to Mac; you can download a free demo at that link. For me personally, it is without a doubt the most powerfully and purely negative computer game I've played lately. I get very emotionally involved playing this, to the level where I feel real discomfort, almost to the point of literal nausea. ( Read more... )

Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard, has passed away. LA Times obit, with photo gallery.I mist up a little, not of sadness but of good memories from my childhood. I watched him on Nickelodeon in the mid 1980s, and his show was a bright spot during a very patchy time. He didn't make me into a scientist, but he did help wedge me onto a trajectory of ( Read more... )

A paramedic's view of why you should always wear a seatbelt, over on Making Light ( Read more... )

I had just invoked Vonnegut in conversation tonight, too.

He was to me what Tolkien was to many of my friends. When I was in high school and my head needed rearranging, Breakfast of Champions was there to help.

Sad and interesting is Wikipedia's summary of wrong media reports about the Sago mine disasterFrom that article, I just now learned for the first time what really happened. My most recent information was that 12 of the 13 miners had survived, and that the ordeal ended days ago. I thought that I had slipped into an alternate universe this afternoon ( Read more... )

On some nights I am harassed by "boogeymen", which is what I call obsessively morbid thoughts that insinuate themselves on my conscious mind while I'm in bed but not quite asleep. Since I am operating at a low runlevel, I don't have much control over them, and generally have to let them batter me until I finally shut down ( Read more... )