plutherus

I really like weird-looking computer commands.

Here's one I use frequently in vi:

:%s/\\/\//g

And, in Perl, this is fun, and very useful:

$0 =~ s!^.*/!!;

Anyone who writes a lot of perl scripts in vi will probably recognize both of these immediately.

Another good day.
Woke up late. Long leisurely morning of coffee, TV, and email.
Then did the week's shopping, washed the car, did a bit more packing, discovered there's an NWN tutorial, so downloaded and started going through that.
Then, finally, back to the game, and I killed Morag. Tough battle, made tougher by the fact that the only critter I could harm was the protection against fire one, and my NPC doesn't have any fire attacks. Had to do it all by myself. Just Janella, her fire arrows, and a couple of summoned fire elementals, while Daelen kept the henchmen off my back. Janella is a halfling 11th level Rogue/5th level Fighter.

I'm sitting in a hotel room in San Jose, taking a break from WorldCon. Spent last night at room parties and all day today at various panels. Learned the end of the DS1 saga, which I've been following at presentations at various SciFi cons since 1998, (some people follow Phish around, I follow NASA spokespeople :-)

Missed the "Who needs planets, anyway?" panel, as I had a major headache, came back to the hotel room to get some painkillers, lay down for a minute and suddenly an hour had gone by. Either I fell asleep or was kidnapped by aliens. Given the location, I wouldn't be too surprised at the latter. I've seen a lot more aliens than sleeping people around here.

First panel of the day was "When will my cave get cable", about techology in areas that aren't terribly technologically advanced. When someone mentioned that many countries simply don't have the infrastructure for widespread technology (computers, cell phones, gas stoves, etc.) I pointed out that in a few years they won't need to. You can recharge a laptop computer with solar panels, and soon connect it to the internet via Teledesic. After the panel, I hung around and talked to a few people, wowed them with my Geeks Without Borders stories and discussion of Iridium in Africa. (One of the major reasons Iridium failed was because nobody wanted to pay all that money for something that was, in the US, only marginally better than the cell phones that were already ubiquitous. A couple of months before bankruptcy, some smart guy in marketing discovered the existence of Africa - an entire continent that wasn't full of cell phone towers already, but by then it was too little, too late.)

Other panel was diversity in Science Fiction, where Star Trek was held up as the quintessential case of an ethnically diverse cast (kinda funny, given recent discussions on a certain mailing list I'm on). Someone brought up the "token Black man" and Steven Barnes commented that that's fine. It's gotta start somewhere. If a Black actor is just a token, at least that's one more person of colour in a visible role, and one more actor with a SAG card. It's not ideal, but it's a positive step toward true racial diversity. There were token gay characters on lots of shows for a while before producers felt comfortable enough to create Willow and whats-her-name on Buffy. I'd never thought of it that way before. After Bjo Trimble ("The Woman Who Save Star Trek") raised the issue of money, Barnes pointed out that once the makeup guys at Paramount discovered it was cheaper to make black people into Klingons than white people, they cast almost exclusively blacks, to the great boon of many struggling actors careers...

Talked a bit after the panel with one guy who still objected to Tuvok being a black vulcan, saying that there would unlikely be such a person. I pointed out that given what we know of Vulcan's climate, it's actually unlikely that there'd be any white Vulcans, and that Spock and his family were almost certainly genetic freaks who'd've died out if the Vulcans hadn't had advanced medical technology long before we did. I don't think I really convinced him, but he did change the subject after that :-)

Well, enough of this. Gonna go prepare for my game (Campus Crusade for Cthulhu 2: Shadows Over Babylon 5) for an hour or so, then off to room parties for the rest of the night!

Yeah, I'm a geek. Every couple of weeks (which turns out to mean actually every 2-3 months), I run a Dungeons & Dragons game. So tonight I'm going over the characters, trying to find editable character sheets on the web, and then I gotta worry about how to print them, and doing various other prep tasks for the game. Info on it here if you want it. I'm actually spending more time watching the TV show I have on to provide some background noise while I do the menial preparation tasks. It's about pyramids - both Egyptian and American. (That's in, "The Americas", not "the United States" version of the word "American").
Our good friend Zahi Hawass is speaking on it, (because he's always on these shows, since he's in charge of the Giza Plateau these days) referring to the newage wackos he calls "Pyramidiots" who make up all sort of nonsense about the pyramids. A lot of stuff is unknown still. There is enough similarity between the Egyptian Ziggurats and Central American pyramids to suggest one may have copied the other (along with various other evidences of trade between the two places a few thousand years ago.) But nothing is really conclusive that there *was* trade, let alone any of the details of an atlantian empire that various groups propose.
At Labna, in the Puuc region of the Yucatan, there is a sign at the entrance to the site that points out that "The Maya built these sites themselves. They did not have the help of aliens." And also "Also, there was no mysterious disappearance. We did not disappear. We are still here!"
The show is now showing Catherwood's paintings as they talk about Palenque. Or as it Uxmal? It looked like Uxmal, but I only saw it briefly, and now they're talking about Palenque. Hmmm. OK, back to work to prepare for Sunday's game.