Random post is random. Also, recs!
Sometimes I feel like I am possibly the most stupid sentient being in the Galaxy.
Stupid thing the first: My internet died on Thursday. I was distraught. I am waiting for a replacement router that hasn't shown up, and have had to face how boring and futile offline life really is. Today, two days into my purgatory, I remembered that I pay shocking amounts of money for mobile broadband, and that there is a perfectly working sim card located in the back of my laptop. D'oh. It's not as fast as my home broadband, but luckily I like my porn in text form.
Positive result of this bout of idiocy: my house has never been cleaner.
Stupid thing the second: that code I spent a week trying to get working, then left running overnight on Thursday? Worked. Only...I forgot to write anything into the code to actually return the array it was calculating. So when I got in yesterday morning, there was a teasing message saying it had calculated a 5x500000 array, and then the program ended and it's all lost. GAH! So my day's work yesterday consisted of adding one more line of code, setting it running again and waiting. It finally finished at 6pm, by which time I'd had too much wine to care.
Positive result of this bout of idiocy: I spent pretty much the whole day in the office reading fic. Hence, recs:
(These have all been added to my monster recs post of d00m.)
( Lotd of recs over on DW )
Finally, some astronomy, just because.
In astronomy can be porny too news: We have a lunchtime talk every Thursday from someone in the department, and then an external speaker every Friday afternoon (hence the starting on the wine so early in the day). Thursday's lunchtime talk featured bisexual dolphins (which is relevant to astronomy, honest guv), and Friday's seminar included stripping and strangulation, because galaxies are kinky buggers.
And this is one of the most awesome things ever:
Watching this got me chatting to Pothead about the ways that SF deals with the vast distances involved in space travel. Most SF cheats in some way, with warp drives and wormholes and so on, but there is some that keeps it grounded in known physics, e.g. by using relativistic time dilation (the Ender books come to mind, but there are others). It's not that I have a problem with hand-waving dodgy physics for plot purposes, but I still kind of get off on good science. So if anyone knows any good character-driven SF (the only kind I enjoy) that restricts itself to sub-light travel, I would really appreciate recommendations.
Comments diverted to Dreamwidth
Stupid thing the first: My internet died on Thursday. I was distraught. I am waiting for a replacement router that hasn't shown up, and have had to face how boring and futile offline life really is. Today, two days into my purgatory, I remembered that I pay shocking amounts of money for mobile broadband, and that there is a perfectly working sim card located in the back of my laptop. D'oh. It's not as fast as my home broadband, but luckily I like my porn in text form.
Positive result of this bout of idiocy: my house has never been cleaner.
Stupid thing the second: that code I spent a week trying to get working, then left running overnight on Thursday? Worked. Only...I forgot to write anything into the code to actually return the array it was calculating. So when I got in yesterday morning, there was a teasing message saying it had calculated a 5x500000 array, and then the program ended and it's all lost. GAH! So my day's work yesterday consisted of adding one more line of code, setting it running again and waiting. It finally finished at 6pm, by which time I'd had too much wine to care.
Positive result of this bout of idiocy: I spent pretty much the whole day in the office reading fic. Hence, recs:
(These have all been added to my monster recs post of d00m.)
( Lotd of recs over on DW )
Finally, some astronomy, just because.
In astronomy can be porny too news: We have a lunchtime talk every Thursday from someone in the department, and then an external speaker every Friday afternoon (hence the starting on the wine so early in the day). Thursday's lunchtime talk featured bisexual dolphins (which is relevant to astronomy, honest guv), and Friday's seminar included stripping and strangulation, because galaxies are kinky buggers.
And this is one of the most awesome things ever:
Click to viewWatching this got me chatting to Pothead about the ways that SF deals with the vast distances involved in space travel. Most SF cheats in some way, with warp drives and wormholes and so on, but there is some that keeps it grounded in known physics, e.g. by using relativistic time dilation (the Ender books come to mind, but there are others). It's not that I have a problem with hand-waving dodgy physics for plot purposes, but I still kind of get off on good science. So if anyone knows any good character-driven SF (the only kind I enjoy) that restricts itself to sub-light travel, I would really appreciate recommendations.
Comments diverted to Dreamwidth