Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Evil is not, as some people think, a large, outside force toying with our hearts and minds. That concept is just a convenient out. A dodge of our responsibility. Evil is simply this: a disconnect. Evil enters when we cease to pay attention. Evil happens when we forget our divinity. When we forget that others hold divinity. We need to be polytheistic in this way, at least. We need to know that we have divine natures, and we need to remember to connect to them. And we need to remember that others have divine natures, if only they could remember." -- yezida, 2005-11-02

Though some of y'all will be on your way to Philcon this afternoon, let me take a moment to look ahead a week to Darkover...

There will be two dances at Darkover with live music provided by pick-up bands. I'm recruiting folks for those bands. There will be a Playford dance on Friday and a Regency Ball on Saturday. Musicians, if you're going to be attending Darkover and are up to reading dance tunes without much rehearsal, give me a shout and I'll tell you where to download sheet music (we'll be adding two tunes to the Regency ball music from last year). Also, let me know which dance(s) you plan to play for so I'll have some idea how much I have to worry about getting enough musicians.

(There are two websites for the convention, http://darkovercon.com and http://darkovercon.org/. Where the two sites disagree, I'm not sure which is correct.)

The Playford dance will be Friday, 24 November, from 4PM to 6PM. Unsurprisingly, that's the one I'm most worried about getting enough musicians for. The Regency dance will be on Saturday, 25 November, from 5PM to 7PM (again, if the web info is right).

Also, The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be performing at the convention, as will Clam Chowder, cellio's band On The Mark, and maugorn.

Like most people*, I use spreadsheets to store flat-file databases, and like some other folks I sometimes abuse spreadsheets to store relational databases (that's what vlookup() and hlookup() are there for, right?).

But more and more often, I find myself contemplating data sets that really want to be arranged in a three- or four-dimensional matrix.

Hmm ... cheap 3-D glasses from the issue of TV Guide that came out before the 3-D episode of Medium last season, colour monitor, C compiler ... can my to-do list take the addition of a project like that without exploding?**

*Okay, maybe I'm projecting a little. Or extrapolating from a moderately geeky sample population. But maybe not.

**Yeah, I'll STFW to see whether anyone has put together a tool that a) I like the UI of, b) runs on the hardware I've got, and c) is shareware, open source, or cheap. Ugol's law tells me other people need such a tool as well.