Yesterday I went to a party at
Lawrence's house, following a Turkey City science fiction writing workshop. (I wasn't at the workshop, of course, since I haven't written anything I wouldn't be embarrassed to show to others. :-)) Most people at the party, however, were Lawrence's coworkers and Austin science fiction fandom regulars, with a sprinkling of writers who made it back after the workshop.
Some people I was hoping to see were not there, among them was a star writer and the former Turkey City workshop host Bruce Sterling, who came down with a flu or something earlier in the day. Not a big loss, since I've met Bruce on many occasions before, but I was curious to see if life in Belgrad with a new wife has changed him even a little bit.
With the people who were there, I chatted about:
Lawrence introduced me to one of the guests, his coworker, and tossed an off-hand remark: he thinks SCO will win the lawsuit. It turned out the guy who was talking to me is quite interested in the SCO lawsuit, because he works for a company that was, until 5 years ago, headed by Darl McBride, currently of SCO, and a lot of people in his company have SCO stock. I remembered the conversation I had a couple of years ago with
landley in which he said he did extensive work going through Linux source code and collecting evidence that Linux did not contain SCO intellectual property! Given that
landley sometimes came to Lawrence's parties when he lived in Austin, I pointed out to Lawrence's coworker that he is lucky
landley moved away. :-)
Then we move to a less incendiary topic of comparing programming languages.
One guy said he came up with suggestions on how FEMA could improve communications at the time of disasters, when electricity and cell phone towers are knocked out. To him, those ideas are "obvious". Such as to use portable mini cellphone towers, like what Sprint sets up at Austin City Limits music festival, so that festival-goers would not overwhelm the existing cell phone networks in that location. He said he passed his suggestions to a senator, but they were ignored because he is not a Republican.
I wandered off after somebody uttered a phrase "when we went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the world was on our side". Not because I find political discussions offensive, but because I'm not too interested in listening to someone preaching to the choire.
But not before somebody told an interesting tidbit about one person's search for Greg Egan. Greg Egan is one of the "hardest", most intellectually challenging, and most interesting hard science fiction writers, and he is famously reclusive. He does not go to conventions, sign books or give interviews. But apparently he does not hide his trail so thoroughly that some dedicated people could not find out where he works. So, as the story goes, another Australian SF writer, Sean McMullen, went to Perth where Egan lives, to discover whether Egan really exists. He somehow was able to track him down at work. And... well, there is no story. No interesting words were exchanged, at least none that were reported back. Egan was judged to be "a nice enough guy who doesn't really like people". And apparently that's that.
So I wandered off and hung out in the kitchen for a bit, where there was so much food that the tofu-tabouli salad I brought felt completely redundant and so embarrassed for its existence that it did not even want to come out from under its foil wrap. There in the kitchen, another merry group of people discussed pros and cons of various drugs to use while writing. Fairly innofensive ones, I must say, like a decongestant. Apparently a decongestant helps some people write! I must be terribly old-fashioned in that I hardly ever use medications, even over the counter. I probably miss out on some enlightening experiences.
The most "risque" mind-altering drug I ever used was probably nitrous oxide at the dentist's. I pointed out, semi-jokingly, that nitrous oxide makes me feel as if I come up with brilliant thoughts, except I don't remember them afterwards. Good thing, because I probably would be embarrased afterwards at the fact that they felt brilliant to me at the time. :-) Then others started comparing effectiveness of nitrous oxide you get at the dentist's versus nitrous oxide from the can. One guy concluded the stuff at the dentist's is much better simply because you keep get a constant, steadily released dose, versus a spike of rush you get when inhaling it from the can.
Of course, I wouldn't know about the latter.
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