Teleidoscope

Fri, Oct 13, 2006

A General Introduction

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Who I am and where I am...

I am a geek. Female. Solitary.

INTP (in spades) if you are into Meyers-Briggs.

I am technically a spinster librarian. I have an MLS and worked as a librarian for four years, and I own a working spinning wheel and a couple of drop spindles which I know how to use.

But I've spent most of my professional life working on software and I currently make my living as a software engineering consultant.

I used to go to SF cons and Worldcons regularly. I attended some of the huge Star Trek conventions in New York in the early to mid-seventies, and attended the very first ever filk-con. I was a member of the SCA for several years through about 1982. I was involved in anime APAs in the late 80s and early 90s and sold Tarot cards and other divination tools at Worldcons in the the middle and late 90s (Astral Trading Company). I've been lurking on rec.arts.sf.written since 1985, with occasional gaps when I lost USENET access.

My education includes a linguistics major, an astronomy minor, WAAAYY too much reading on every subject under the sun (except modern professional sports, blech) and some formal classes in the Japanese language during my first
round of anime addiction during the late 80s and early 90s.

My house is in Boulder, Colorado, and holds several thousand books, about 5000 comic books, several hundred dvds, a well equipped kitchen, and my fiber-arts stash and craft supplies. I have only spent about half of my time there since the tech bubble popped: right now I'm in corporate housing in Quincy, Massachusetts, 5 months into a 7 month consulting gig. The kitchens in corporate housing are never designed for actually cooking anything real in. I brought a bookcase with me. (I've run out of places to put bookcases at home, and they are all shelved two and three books deep.)

My life for the past 5 years has been depressingly mundane and routine because of being away from home so much, except for buying books and dvds (Anime -- crack would be cheaper) and a couple of GeekCruises.

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Categories

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The posts in this weblog will be assigned to several categories.

Technology This will include articles about computers and software. Also fiber arts, cooking, and possibly gear clocks and pipe organs. Some science articles will probably end up here, since I tend to be more interested in how the pieces fit together in practice than in the details of theory.

Code Software I'm working on. I've done most of my recent work in perl. (Complaints about customers making me write Visual Basic belong in technology.)

Media Comments, reviews or links about text, music, videos, images, comics, games, etc. created by people other than me.

Creative work Text, images, etc. etc. created by me. This will probably be mostly text pieces (the longer ones will be represented by links to other places on the website), but I'm working (sporadically) on a couple of original cross-stitch designs, and if I ever finish them they will be displayed here.

Current Events State of the union. State of the world. Occasional gossip. Legal matters, even when they involve tech companies.

Net of Mirrors The Net of Mirrors is a divination tool I created years ago. The original edition of the pamphlet I wrote about it is available online here. There are 160 image descriptions that need to be expanded and revised. 320 if you count reversals. (640 if you count rotations, but I don't think I have the energy to think about going there.) When the mood strikes (or I can't think of anything else to write about) I will select one of the Mirrors and write aboout it. I may program a way for the blog to tell me what image to write about next, but I need to get the rest of this blog working first.

Miscellaneous Anything (like this introduction) that doesn't fit one of the specific categories.

New categories will be added if I decide I need them.

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Net of Mirrors Intro poem

Posted at 10:09 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Thought and action spark
Time's current through spirit glow --
Light and shadows dance
Within a net of mirrors
ripples on a moonlit stream.

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Womanly technology: From braided rugs to hand-built computer

Posted at 10:01 pm MDT to Technology

My mother used to make wonderful hand-braided rugs while she watched TV in the evenings. My paternal grandmother worked in a coat factory and provided pre-sliced two-inch wide strips of scrap wool in various colors, so the rugs were actually made from strong new cloth, not worn out clothes. Rugs done in red, white, blue and camel look quite nice against hardwood floors.

I've played with various fiber arts myself, over the years. I haven't made any rugs, but I own a loom and a working spinning wheel, and I've taken classes in how to use both of them. And I've completed projects in macrame and crewel and counted cross-stitch and hardanger and needlepoint and latch-hook, and wirewrap.

I have tried to learn knitting and tatting and crocheting but I've never finished a project in any of those three crafts. I find there is something disorienting about them, and I don't think it's just the righthanded/lefthanded thing. Perhaps they trigger my output rotational dyslexia in some way that the other textile arts don't. I'll need to think about this.

The wirewrap project produced the first computer I ever owned. When I worked on my computer science degree, I had a choice of doing a regular written thesis or a design project. I chose to do a design project partly to get practical experience.

I spent many contented hours watching TV and wirewrapping the connections between the processor (Motorola 6809) and the video chip (6847) and the 16 kilobytes of regular ram and the 32 k of video ram and the 2k eprom containing the monitor program I wrote, and the few other chips that were needed to make the thing accept input from a keyboard and display stuff on a tv screen. I used multiple cards and a standard bus and backplane, too. It wasn't just an arbitrary layout on a single board.

About the time I finished my project, Radio Shack came out with their first Color Computer, which used the same chip set and generally functioned for more than the 30 seconds I needed to demonstrate to my advisor that my design actually worked (on reflection, naming the machine 'Eris' was just asking for trouble). I think the CoCos cost less than what I spent on my little project, too. And they almost certainly used less copper.

But the fact that I had created something in 6809 assembly language that worked got me my first techy job.

I've still got my little wirewrap project somewhere at home. Once I'm actually in my own home again, in 8 weeks or so, I will put a picture or two up on the data-raptors.com website.

Putting computers together with soldering irons (or by just plugging things together) isn't nearly as much fun. Even though the computers built that way usually keep working after you breathe on them.

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"Confessions of a Failed Clown" by Stephan Zielinski

Posted at 9:59 pm MDT to Media

It's not often I laugh out loud when I'm reading something. Actually, it's very seldom that I laugh hard at something at all, not to laugh so hard it hurts. This was painfully funny.

I will add Mr. Zielinski's book, "Bad Magic", sampled on his site, here, to my next Amazon order.

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Absentee Ballot

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Current Events

One advantage of being stuck 2000 miles from home, is that I get to use a paper Absentee Ballot. This is not. of course, a guarantee that my vote will actually be counted But at least I'm sure my selections will actually be recorded somewhere.

My new printer is also a copier. I'm tempted to photocopy my ballot before I send it out, just because.

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"Wilde Jagd"

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Creative Work

A March that Isn't

3/4 time
Phrygian or Phrygian Dominant mode
(The asterisks indicate drums only, or silence)

The high summons calls
Wind-driven souls
To the old contract.
Answering,
We yell! * *

Across the wild hills
With fire and steel,
Breaking mortals' peace,
Untiring,
We ride! * *

As sparks trail the torch
Of the Lord's will,
Through moon-dappled woods,
Unfading,
We rush! * *

With War's grinning face
To mock the foe,
Through terror and blood
Together,
Kinsmen, We Hunt!

7/31/2006
Inspired by GirlGenius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, folklore, and the wild geese

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This Blog

Posted at 9:57 pm MDT to Code

This blog is actually code I'm working on: blosxom is written in perl and some of the modules I'm using wouldn't be recognized by their original writer. I may translate pieces of it, or the whole thing, to perl 6 as a training exercise at some point

I'll try to report the time I spend dinking with the site code, once it goes live.

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