SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #127 New Moon of May 8, 2005 Contents copyright 2005 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* I'm moving the production of Silicon Soapware to a newer computer, thus allowing me to retire the old one, which I haven't used for anything else for a while. I think it'll be better that way in the long run, although any such move has its short-term problems. Those of you who are not techno-geeks can skip the next few paragraphs, down to the row of asterisks. On the old machine I edited Silicon Soapware with WordStar under MS-DOS. The machine also has Windows 3.1, which I haven't used for years. The new one (which I've actually had for several months) is running Debian Linux with the KDE desktop. There's a third machine, intermediate in age, running Windows 98. I did lots of other stuff on it, but never got around to migrating Silicon Soapware to it. I'm still in the process of deciding which editor to use for Silicon Soapware on the Linux machine. For this issue it looks like I'll be using a combination of KEdit and pico. I'm doing the main editing of content in KEdit, and will then use pico to format the file for uploading. I like GUI-based editors in general, but most of them do their paragraph formatting at display time and don't save soft returns in the output file. Their "print to file" or "Export to ASCII" functions often don't do what I want either. Hence the need to do the final formatting in a command-line editor. I also miss WordStar's ability to spell-check a single word, and to start the spelling checker at the cursor position rather than always checking the entire file. This is especially useful when I have lots of stuff I want it to ignore, such as email addresses and URL's, and just want to check a couple of newly typed paragraphs. I assume there are other Linux users out there. What are your favorite editors, and why? And which ones would you recommend for eventual plain ASCII output? ********************* There's a quote that made the rounds of the Internet a few years back: "When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean, I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." Although the person it is usually attributed to appears not to have really said it (see http://www.snopes.com/quotes/carey.htm), I believe its message still bears thinking about. The people at Snopes (see URL above) seem to think the popularity of the quote comes from the way it makes the pop singer it's usually attributed to seem shallow and airheaded. But I have a different theory. We in this society tend to romanticize the past and non-technological societies in general. We tend to ignore the fact that by our current standards they are full of "flies and death and stuff". On May Day, which many of us observed just a few days ago, we celebrated some of the ways our distant ancestors may have welcomed the coming of summer with fun and frolic. Most of us gave little thought to the downsides of our ancestors' lives, such as sexually transmitted diseases and the things that can go horribly wrong with childbirth in the absence of modern medical science. For another example, my high school mascot was Pirates. If we thought much about the details at all, we thought in terms of buried treasure and the freedom to sail the seven seas without anyone back home telling us what to do. We didn't dwell on how the pirate figures with which we decorated our school buildings and yearbooks and such got their eye patches and peg legs and hooks in place of hands. And we knew next to nothing about living conditions aboard sailing ships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Likewise, you may be familiar with The Society for Creative Anachronism (http://www.sca.org/). Although they spend quite a bit of time and effort re-creating the costumes and art and pomp and pageantry of the Middle Ages, they equip their campsites with modern portable sanitary facilities, their First Aid tent is well stocked with modern emergency medical supplies and equipment, and they know who among them has a working cell phone or Citizen's Band rig. Thus they too avoid most of the "flies and death and stuff" that were an all-too-real part of life back then. So I'd say a major reason that quote was so popular was that it hinted at an attitude many of us hold to various degrees, even if we don't give it that much conscious thought. And given that, the quote remains valid no matter who did or didn't "really" say it. ********************* As April wound down I got to thinking about how it was one of those months that the old rhyme says has 30 days. Then as the rhyme started going through my head again and again I got to wondering if there might be months that had other numbers of days besides 28, 29, 30, or 31. There don't seem to be any, at least in our usual calendar, unless there's some conspiracy to keep them secret or something. Then I got to wondering about whether there might be months that have no days at all. You could put one of those between two "normal" months and nobody would notice the difference, at least as long as months with no days don't get counted in the numbering of months, or they get fractional numbers rather than integers, or something like that. Maybe this could be a sequel to "On Beyond Zebra"? One problem: The author of that book isn't currently available. ********************* When somebody at a party I was at used the phrase "weird spices", it got me to thinking about the old science fiction and horror comic books of the Fifties, with titles like "Weird Science" and "Tales from the Crypt". So would a book named "Weird Spices" have science fiction and/or horror stories about food, with a recipe accompanying each story? And what would the food-based equivalent of "Tales from the Crypt" be named? "Tales from the Cook" doesn't have quite the right horror-story feeling. Neither does "Tales from the Cupboard". Is there a word with the right sound and connotations? ********************* Something that could be a song line or some such just sort of popped into my head. It's not one I recall hearing before. So assuming the line hasn't been used, what can I do with it? There may be lots of things, although they don't seem to be coming to mind at the moment. Maybe I'm not supposed to do anything with it? Could the line have been on its way into the head of another poet or philosopher and just snagged me by mistake? If that's the case, is another instance of it even now on its way to its correct destination? If so, then maybe I need not do anything. But what if I have the only copy? I don't know the muses' equivalent of dropping it into a mailbox marked "Mis-delivered to ...", assuming there even is one. Or do I not need to bother? Maybe the gods or muses or whatever have a good enough delivery tracking system that they can see these problems as they happen, and take corrective action? It is to be hoped. ********************* Have you noticed that when somebody says to knock wood because of that old superstition about talking about future luck, it's getting harder and harder to find wood to knock? I have several wooden bookshelves, but the rest of the furniture here is pretty much all metal and plastic. There are some wooden door frames and baseboards and such, but you have to look for them. And what of the work environment? If you're in a meeting room at some high-tech corporation and somebody makes a glowing prediction about the future of the company to which somebody else responds with mention of knocking wood, will there be wood to knock? If there is none, will the company be doomed? And could a lack of easily knockable wood in corporate meeting rooms have been a factor in the Silicon Valley business bust? If lower-tech companies in other parts of the country suffered less, could it have been because the less-trendy meeting rooms had more real wood available to knock? Has anybody tried to take a survey on this? ********************* Speaking of high-tech companies, they just decided a few days ago to put the new Center for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco. Even though the Center is not itself a laboratory but is just an outfit that gives out grants, those pushing for it hope that actual researchers will want to set up shop nearby, thus boosting the economy of the region. But all is not rosy. Some have expressed concern that this could bring increased traffic and higher real estate prices reminiscent of the peak of the dot-com boom. Might this drive some artists and such out of SF? How might we balance these concerns? ********************* You've heard the old saying, "Curiosity killed the cat." That may be why cats have nine lives. Since they are so curious, they get killed more often than other species, so the gods gave them the extra lives to make up for it. ********************* As some of the younger folks may not know, the US once minted dimes with a picture of the god Mercury on them. They were known as "Mercury dimes". Now imagine some clueless numismatist who has read too much science fiction but not enough about the gods of our ancient civilizations. What happens when he hears someone mention what sounds to him like "mercury dimes"? He might get to thinking about how such coinage may be OK on colder planets, but would not be too practical for use by Earth humans. For one thing, banks would need refrigerated vaults. That could get expensive, and if the refrigeration ever failed it would give new meaning to the term "liquid assets". And then you'd have people walking around with their pockets full of dry ice, and what with the gloves or forceps or whatever they'd need to keep their fingers from getting frostbitten, counting change would be much harder than it is now. And so on. Even if you ignore the possible toxic effects of people carrying that much mercury around, I don't think mercury dimes would be worthwhile. ********************* "That's what's wrong with these Cheetos: They're carrots." That was inspired by a bowl of those little baby carrot pieces right next to a bag of Cheetos Puffed. They're of similar size and shape, and pretty much the same shade of bright orange. So I grabbed a handful of the carrots, expecting them to be Cheetos. But why did they feel cold and damp instead of dry and temperature-neutral? It took me a few seconds to figure out what the problem was. Luckily I like carrots almost as well as I like Cheetos. ********************* Cloudy Concepts Two friends lie on a hillside Gazing at the clouds making pictures in the sky. This one's a dog, that one a car, Yet another one a saxophone. But there's one that doesn't seem to be anything. In reality it's a trans-temporal replorvinator, But since replorvination won't be invented for at least another three hundred years Today's cloud-gazers haven't a clue. That cloud has labored in vain. How many other clouds have made shapes of things that will be but aren't yet, Or might have been if only things had been different? Only the gods of clouds know, And they aren't talking. -- Tom Digby Written 8:40 a.m. April 21, 2005 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. When you receive an email confirmation request go to the URL it will give you. (If you're already on the list and want to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list posting you receive.) To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I currently do that one manually. -- END --