The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

I would be fairly serious in saying that William Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum is one of the best short stories you will ever read. In my mind it ranks up there with Joyce's The Dead. Gibson is an author that might well be grouped into a particular genre of the day, but will inevitably transcend such categories, and rightly so -- his work is too brilliant not to.

Pre-endgame Phase

Maven is the current best known artificial intelligence Scrabble player, created by Brian Sheppard. It has been used in official licensed Hasbro Scrabble games, and the downloadable Funkitron Scrabble.

Once again, thank you Wikipedia for giving my life meaning. What would I do all day if I couldn't sift through endless amounts of information, waiting for that random speck of data to glom onto my mind-tank for some cogitation.

Prosthetics in Fiction

What a concept for a non-fiction book. Thanks wikipedia.

Tie One On?

I don't like wearing ties, but at the moment I more or less have to wear one. Except on Fridays -- because Fridays, my friends, are "casual," and don't we all love the ambiguity of that term. What does "casual" actually mean? Business casual? Business formal with no tie? Casual casual (i.e. "this shirt I am wearing entails a floppy cotton collar that acts as a symbolic gesture towards what a collar on a shirt used to look like")?
I like dressing to my own style and comfort, but "casual" Friday is a horrible policy that only makes more vague the already murky dividing-lines of what is and is not acceptable in office-wear. I would prefer a hardline policy that allows little room for interpretation, because at least then you know where you stand.

Great day. I have "saints go marching in" stuck in my head -- not any particular redition, just the tune, kind of Casio keyboard-style. And it's been raining now for 36 hours or something.

New Old Media

USQ is a Train-drain

Relatively new to NYC, I'm still getting used to the subway system. Most of the time it's pretty straight forward. Then weekends come and the schedule gets all mucked up. And of course going to work in the morning can be chaos -- crowds so thick that it takes three trains passing through to accomodate the bulk of people. And inside the train everyone is smushed to within a few inches of touching their faces together, like a night club but everyone wearing trench-coats. Fun.