travel

Tuesday various

Thursday various

  • I like Doctor Who. I’m not sure I like it enough to have a A Doctor Who-themed wedding, though.
  • Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism:

    Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words.

  • A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London). [via]
  • You know, it is kind of funny that programs like Word still use a disk as the save icon when lots of computer users these days don’t even know what a disk is.
  • And finally, even qwerty keyboards are falling by the wayside:

    Like the “Enter” key that becomes a “Search” key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.

    As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things” — apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet. [via]

Wednesday various

  • Six degrees of literary separation? [via]
  • If nothing else, I think this elaborte fake ATM is proof that you don’t need a carefully designed forgery to fool a lot of people. [via]
  • The Cracked Guide to Fonts [via]
  • You know, I’m sure Tin House‘s heart was in the right place with this prove you bought a book somewhere before you submit anything policy, but it’s not hard to see why it’s upset some people.
  • And finally, an interview with Michael Palin:

    I’m very proud of the fish-slapping dance we did in Python. We rehearsed this silly dance where John Cleese hits me with a fish and I fall into Teddington Lock. We were so intent on getting the dance right that I didn’t notice the lock had cleared and instead of it being a 2ft drop into the water it was a 15ft drop. I’m very proud of doing that.

    The rest of the interview is pretty interesting too — he didn’t think A Fish Called Wanda was a good script when he first read it — although residents of his “worst place ever,” Prince George, British Columbia, might not love it.

Monday various

As a matter of fact, I do know the way to San Jose

Today was a day spent in airports, first in New York, then in Minnesota, and then briefly here in San Jose. I’m a little bit exhausted, though luckily, because of the time difference, I should still be able to get a decent night’s sleep. I’m not completely sure where the conference (and moreover our exhibit booth) is located in the hotel, and there’s some question about actually getting our books to the booth and some unexpected handling charges I need to square with our New York office. But the conference is in the hotel, so I don’t have far at all to go tomorrow morning.

I finished reading The Subtle Knife along the way and started reading The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories by Sinclair Ross, one of the books that Heather sent me for my birthday. I brought it along in no small part because it’s the lightest of the book, but I am really enjoying it so far. Here’s a little bit I liked from “Cornet at Night”:

For a farm boy is like that. Alone with himself and his horse he cuts a fine figure. He is the measure of the universe. He foresees a great many encounters with life, and in them all acquits himself a little more than creditably. He is fearless, resourceful, a bit of a brag. His horse never contradicts.

But in town it is different. There are eyes here, critical, that pierce with a single glance the little bubble of his self- importance, and leave him dwindled smaller even than his normal size. It always happens that way. They are so superbly poised and sophisticated, these strangers, so completely masters of their situation as they loll in doorways and go sauntering up and down Main Street. Instantly he yields to them his place as measure of the universe, especially if he is a small boy wearing squeaky corduroys, especially if he has a worldly-wise old horse like Rock, one that knows his Main Streets, and will take them in nothing but his own slow philosophic stride.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t really up to sightseeing this evening, though I am in a nice section of San Jose, and it looks pleasant enough, at least from my hotel window. I got some room service, and I’m getting ready to fall asleep. Actually, I was getting ready to fall asleep a few hours ago. I’ve kind of lost completely track of time in all the flying.