Sunday, June 29, 2008

RIP David Caminer

I discovered, through surfing to Boing Boing this evening, that one of the pioneers of my profession passed away earlier this month. David Caminer, in his work for British tea shop chain J. Lyons and Company, was the first "corporate electronic systems analyst".

Quoting from his NYT obituary: The result was LEO, its name derived from Lyons Electronic Office. The Economist magazine called it “the first dedicated business machine to operate on the ‘stored program principle,’ meaning that it could be quickly reconfigured to perform different tasks by loading a new program.”

“LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer,” Computer Weekly said last year.

LEO performed its first calculation on Nov. 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output. At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of I.B.M. and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.

“Americans can’t believe this,” Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

Wall*E

Number one at the box office on its opening weekend, with a take of $62.5 million. Not one bad review. Excellent animation. A story good enough to make you forget whether it's animation or live action. A sweet love story. A totally believable environmental message. Brief homages to 2001 and Star Wars.

Pixar has done it again. This studio is the closest thing Hollywood has to "can't miss".

Three personal observations - 1) you know a movie has done something really special when it causes my wife to feel sympathy for a cockroach. 2) Wall*E is heavier on the poignancy and lighter on the laugh out loud moments than any previous Pixar feature. 3) There was a moment in the movie when I was strongly reminded of the most powerful SF story I've ever read, Flowers for Algernon.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Little Brother

This is Cory Doctorow's latest novel. It's a cross between 1984 and The Hacker Crackdown. It's being marketed to the Young Adult market. This is the bookselling segment that Orson Scott Card and John Scalzi have been singing the praises of lately, and if Little Brother is truly representative, that's the part of bookstore I should be shopping more than the adult SF section.

The book is set in San Francisco. It's protagonist is 17 year old Marcus. He and his friends resent their school's intrusive surveillance, and like many a teen from Tom Sawyer on, figure out how to get around it. They're gamers and hackers, and they skip out of school to play an ARG, an Alternative Reality Game. While they're playing, they're almost at ground zero of a terrorist attack as deadly as 9/11. They're definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting caught in a Department of Homeland Security sweep.

What happens to Marcus, how it changes him, and how he fights back makes for one of the most exciting and thought-provoking books I have read in ages. It has a smoothly written first person narrative, and the frequent info dumps do not interrupt the flow of the story. In fact, the info dumps remind me a great deal of the long bull sessions my best friend and I used to have when we were teens.

The most amazing thing, to me, is how Little Brother pushes the old "sense of wonder" button that only comes from the best of science fiction. If this book does not take the major SF awards next year, and I mean wins, not nominations, then there truly ain't no justice.

By the way, this book, like nearly everything Cory Doctorow writes, is available as a free download. Check out his website for details; then, it's worth looking at the blog he co-writes, Boing Boing. And then, help make sure Mr. Doctorow can continue writing such novels; go out and by a copy. No, buy two, one to keep and one to give to a teen in your life.

270

I weighed myself yesterday morning. 270 lbs. I'm six feet tall, so this makes me obese. And this is also a reason to celebrate.

Why? Because three weeks ago I weighed 280. Lisa and I have joined SparkPeople, which is a combination weight loss and fitness site crossed with a social network. It has lots of nutrition and fitness information, even more motivational tips, and lots of community opportunities. I'm using the food diary and exercise journal pages extensively.

So far, so good. We're having more success than we did the couple of times we started South Beach, and I intend to keep a record here as we progress.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The Man with the Golden Torc

These days I read more space opera and urban fantasy than anything else. There aren't many authors who can pull off both. Meet British author Simon R. Green, author of the Deathstalker and Nightside series. Confession: I have not yet read Deathstalker, but the Nightside series is a particular delight. The Nightside is the dark, hidden heart of London, where it is always 3:00 am. The series protagonist is private eye John Taylor, who can find anything. Green takes just about every mythology you can think of and runs them through a blender with hardboiled humor, over the top violence, and just a dash of romance. There are eight volumes in this series, all around 250 pages long, and the characters are really what drive the stories. The plotting is uneven, but all of them are worth the reading.

I've just finished the first volume of Green's new series about a man whose street name is Shaman Bond. His real identity? Edwin Drood. He's an agent of the Drood family, which has been keeping us safe from supernatural threats for millenia. Yes, it's a James Bond pastiche, with all that implies. This book shares the main ingredients with the Nightside, with sharper humor, more appealing characters, a superior plot, and much better writing, at nearly 400 pages in length. Highly recommended, and I expect to pick up the second volume in the series, Daemons Are Forever, very soon.

RIP George Carlin

We've lost one of the sharpest wits ever. I did the teenage boy thing and snickered the first time I heard the Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television. In fact, I still laugh at it, even when I know that its influence had a lot to do with the coarsening of public discourse. It's a double standard I can live with.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The Last Lecture

Want an uplifting hour-and-a-quarter? Watch this. You've probably heard about it: Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and expert on virtual reality, gets a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer and gives the talk of literally a lifetime. It's really as good as has been billed.

There is now a book out, also called The Last Lecture, that expands on the speech and amplifies its theme. I bought it, have almost finished it, and recommend it highly. It's about how to live your life, which is of course a cliche. But, as Pausch says, "I love cliches. They're cliches because they're true."

One Amazon.com reviewer, a former hospital chaplain, decries the fact that Randy Pausch didn't spend the book expounding on some deep philosophical revelation brought on by his impending death. He even acknowledges that Randy says the book is about living, not dying. He missed the head fakes.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Congratulations, Andy


We're celebrating a new high school graduate. Andy, I'm proud of you. Purdue University is a excellent next step for you, a great choice for an aspiring electrical engineer. I have no doubt that you'll succeed there; indeed, that you'll thrive. I've never seen you set your mind to something and fail.

Remember where you've come from. Roots run deep in both the South and the Midwest, but those roots are never meant to hold you down. They're meant to to give you a solid launching pad.

That leads to my promise to you. The song in this video is probably meant as something a faithful lover says to one who may be leaving, but I think the chorus especially works as a message from a father to a son. Here's When You Come Back Down, by Nickel Creek.



When you're soaring through the air,
I'll be your solid ground.
Take every chance you dare,
I'll still be there,
When you come back down.