(Oh, and I thought Serendipity was good, too :) ).

Tuesday, October 16, 2001

[Posted 10/16/2001 02:50:22 PM by tilt]
Mmmmm -- digital convergence! I'm trying two new technologies at the same time. First, I'm trying the BloggerBot to post this via AIM. Second, I'm using Wayport in the Austin-Bergstrom airport to get connectivity.

Why, you ask, did I bother to get Wayport access (at the modest, but not dirt-cheap, price of $6.95 a day)? Simple -- after being told over and over again to allow two to two and a half hours to get through security, etc., at the airport, I got here and breezed through in ten minutes. Luckily, I found a powerplug nearby, so I'm surfing the 'net instead.

So far, air travel doesn't seem that much different since we've entered paranoid-nation mode. They made me run the laptop through the x-ray separately from the bag it was in, and they only let me through since I was holding on a ticket. On the other hand, the skycaps were still out front, and since I had a paper ticket, I didn't have to wait in line. So here I am, killing time...

Sunday, October 14, 2001

[Posted 10/14/2001 02:16:02 AM by tilt]
There's something liberating about trashing your Windows 98 system partition and upgrading it to Windows 2000. Unlike previous times when I upgraded or reinstalled, this time I only did the most cursory of passes at making sure I had all data off it -- basically, I copied my profile directory and my "my documents" directory.

Why am I not freaked out? It's not my main system anymore -- my mac laptop is :). This is just my game machine, and I've finally decided it's time to move to Win2K for all of my gaming needs. Weirdly enough, it's all the Windows XP hoopla that made me decide to do it -- I don't want to move to XP, and in fact, many reviewers are saying that XP (the home version, anyway) is a step backwards from Windows 2000. So there you have it.

Six years of files and crap, painstakingly moved from system to system, down the drain. I feel so free.

Saturday, October 06, 2001

[Posted 10/6/2001 09:30:58 PM by tilt]
I find it bizarre that TNN is reinventing itself as the Tits, Tussling, and Trek network. Nevertheless, I found the five day marathon of Star Trek: The Next Generation that they just finished airing to be extremely well-timed. It's been several years since ST:TNG went off the air, and I had forgotten the quality of the show. When I think of Trek, I usually think of a franchise that relies too much on covenient rubber science to set up and solve tensions in the show -- a flaw that I find emblematic of most televised science fiction. Most contemporary dramas must rely on human interactions to drive the tension; science fiction can rely on the crutch of "gee-whiz" to make up for uncompelling characters.

Except, this isn't necessarily true -- in fact, there's a lot of good science fiction in literary form that balances this tension between the possible and the mundane quite well. And I was reminded, in watching the ST:TNG reruns, that some television sci-fi does, too. While ST:TNG does rely a bit too much on phlogiston particles and amazing feats of discovery that tend to take years instead of minutes, it also features an incredible cast and wonderful writing. And more importantly, it features a wide-eyed hope and wonder that -- unlike in some later incarnations of the franchise -- doesn't seem forced or out-of-place.

And I've got to say, now's a good time for a big helping of that kind of optimism. My only regret is that I only watched the last few days of the marathon, and not the whole thing.