Null Space

Temporary Insanity

As some of you may be aware, I'm putting together the video stream for Swancon this year. While Grant helped me programme it, I'm pretty much in charge of the mass assemblage of what's on the piece of paper onto actual video tape, in the right order, to time.

Yesterday I did the musical midnight-to-dawn. Six hours worth of genre related musicals. Admittedly there was a small break in the middle while I worked on another section of the programme for an hour and a half, but otherwise pretty much continuous.

By the end of the evening, I had the weirdest medley of Buffy/Rocky Horror/Wizard of Oz/South Park songs chasing around my head.

I'm quite glad it's stopped.

Signs and Portents

Hmm. Large amounts of stress. Sleep deprivation bordering on inducing psychosis. Nausea, anxiety and edginess.

Must be a Swancon coming up.

No, no, no, no, no

At Grant's insistence, I watched the trailer for I, Robot.

Some of you may be already be aware that there is a movie adaptation of Isaac Asimov's robot short story collection due for release soon and may well have been looking forward to an intelligent film about the adventures of Susan Calvin.

Nope, sorry. Wrong.

The first half of the trailer shows our lead, Will Smith, who seems to be playing some sort of police detective turn up to interview a murder suspect. Along the way we are introduced to simplified versions of the Three Laws of Robotics - They cannot hurt us; They must do what we say; They can protect themselves. The murder suspect, unsuprisingly, turns out to be a robot.

Now the second half of the trailer - furiously edited, screaming people, rushing robots, fire, more running people, suspicious corporate executives and the tag line for the movie: Laws are made to be broken.

Huh?

What?

Let's read that again: Laws are made to be broken.

You have got be kidding. The original text is a series of intellectually engaging puzzles built up around interesting scenarios involving robots that can all be solved by the correct application of the Three Laws. The Laws are not broken. They can't be broken. They are the whole damned point.

Somewhere in Hollywood right now, there's a studio executive with the corpse of Isaac Asimov, their penis jammed in some particularly gooey bit, thrashing around shouting 'Yeah, baby, yeah.'

Or maybe the trailer is just horribly misleading. I know what I've got my money on.

Depressing is...
Depressing is putting your girlfriend of one and a half weeks on an aircraft to another city, from where she will not return until, basically, April.

Althought I suspect as not nearly as upsetting as having to take your girlfriend to hospital for another round of MS treatment. :(

Return of the Artful Blogger

Right, play's over (apparently the Xpres review loved my video, but hated the play). Swancon is screaming towards me like a big truck and work is still at insane-o levels. I know, I think I'll go and get involved with somebody.

Ah, so much to tell, still so little time. So here's some highlights

* Big Fish is great. Go and see it before it closes. Tim Burton is back!
* I'm conducting an experiment in running my car on premium unleaded. I think the marginal cost will be offset by the increase in mileage. It was all looking good, but I seem to have fallen foul of non-linearities in the fuel gauge.
* Callista Student Management System sucks. As does Oracle.
* Solaris 10 doesn't look like it'll suck at all. The Zones stuff (think many virtual machines), mixed with a storage area network may result in some really interesting fault tolerance and disaster recovery scenarios.
* Borderlands Issue 3 may one day make it to the printers.
* I seem to have gotten involved with somebody. Still early days, so I'm not crowing.