Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[On this day I am contemplating the anniversary of the birth of Johann Sebastian Bach a few hundred years ago, the annual religious observation of the crucifiction of Jesus the Christ nearly two thousand years ago, and the recent death of Arthur C. Clarke a couple days ago. All three have affected my life and how I perceive the world.]

"One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories." -- Arthur C. Clarke (b. 1917-12-16, d. 2008-03-19)

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[If you are reading this quote at InsaneJournal after following a link from LiveJournal: 1) The automated entry you clicked on to get here will be my only post during the "content strike" and the "strike" is the reason it links here. 2) If you wish to comment here and do not have an InsaneJournal account, you can leave a comment under your LiveJournal identity using OpenID.]

([automated post] Today's quote)

An offhand comment in a phone conversation (actually hearing a retelling of a conversation with somebody else) culminating in the phrase, "It's not blue!" got my brain going in one of those sometimes-I'd-rather-it-didn't-go-there directions that's probably a symptom of being a filker or something, because I then started thinking about something I'd never considered before: Vulcan menstruation. (Has it even been established how often Vulcans menstruate? One the one hand, opportunities for reproduction must be relatively infrequent if the males only go into pon farr every seven years; on the other hand, female Vulcans must be fertile more often than that, because it would be problematic if the female of a couple were not ready when her mate went into pon farr, right?)

I was thinking about cats earlier, and a general statement about them (about cats' opinions about free fall versus negative g-forces), and it occurred to me that "cats are like guitars" ... in the sense that (like humans as well I suppose) for any nearly any general statement you can make about them, exceptions can be trivially found.

Cats don't like spicy food (except for two I've met who eat chili peppers). Cats don't go for fruit (except that I've met one who liked avocados and one who would go absolutely berserk for a chance to eat a nectarine). Cats don't like getting wet (except for the ones who like to swim or don't seem to care). And so on. Similarly, guitars have six courses of strings (except ukeleles and bass guitars which usually have four, and seven-string guitars, and harp-guitars), have flat backs and soundboards (except Ovations and deutshlauts which have vaulted backs, and archtop guitars that have carved tops and backs), have solid necks (except Hawai'ian guitars), are played with the neck slightly elevated and the thumb of the fretting hand behind the neck and the fingers approaching the strings from below (except lap-steel guitars, and conventionally-shaped guitars set up for bar-slide playing, which are approached overhand), and have a lower range in the bass clef (except for most ukeleles, renaissance guitars (or am I thinking of Baroque ones?) and tenor guitars).

Yah, the first thing my mind reaches for to make comparisons is the guitar. Surprised? (And yes, ukes are considered a subcategory of guitar, the last time I looked (as guitars are considered a subcategory of the lute family (except that occasionally, just to confuse things, the lute family is referred to as the guitar family even though it contains members that aren't guitars (and I must not have gotten as much sleep as I'd thought if I'm getting this deep in the nested parentheses (whoops)))).)

Feeling creaky and headachy, have things I need to do but am already behind. Going to try to pry myself out of the house to take care of those things, and get back to writing later.

First, because it's a question that I don't want overlooked at the end of the rest of the text: I forgot to change my InsaneJournal syndication settings last night to not post complete entries to the syndicated feed of my IJ account over at LJ (intended as a temporary change just for the day). I tried to take care of that just now but cannot find the page on which to make the change. Er ... can anyone help me out here?

Anyhow, on to what I was thinking about just before that:

Huh. The modification I made to my client last night doesn't agree with CrazyLife for some reason (which is why my QotD didn't post there at 5:25 this morning -- I just posted it manually using the previous version of the client (glad I renamed it instead of just writing over it!) after noticing that my most recent entry had failed there. I wonder what the problem is. (It's reported as "problems logging in", which is odd considering that the edit I made was not in the login module. The error-reporting may be off.)

Because I've been too lazy yet to hack Clive (the client I use) to crosspost automagically (I do have a plan[*] for that, but ...) I've got nine copies of the executable instead, each aimed at a different site, and I invoke them each from within a foreach() loop (I'm a csh/tcsh users). As a side effect, this made it easy to strip LJ out of the list of sites to crosspost to today: all I had to do was 'mv ljclive ljclive.real ; cp dummy ljclive' (dummy is a program that does nothing -- void main(){} -- that I've found surprisingly useful over the years). In order to automate the trick where this morning's quote-of-the-day was posted to LJ as a fake cut-tag linking to the InsaneJournal copy, I had to make a wee change to the InsaneJournal client so that instead of reporting success with the message, "Successfuly posted item [ITEMID] to InsaneJournal," it would report the URL of the entry it had just posted. (When I get a round tuit, I'll add a command-line switch to choose at run time between reporting the itemid or the URL on success.) Wanting to keep my computing environment a wee bit more tidy than my house (uh, actually, I fail in both places, but never mind), I went ahead and recompiled all the clients to have their code in sync. Hence the CrazyLife glitch which I'll need to debug later.

Of course, I completely forgot the reminder in the motd here, pointing out that my ISP upgraded the host I usually log in on to a newer version of NetBSD than the other hosts available to users and that programs compiled on this one might not work on the others ... and that cron jobs run on one of the other hosts. Luckily, despite my attempts to the contrary, I was still awake when the QotD script ran, eventually noticed that it was stuck, and recompiled the nine clients on the right computer and ran the script again by hand. (Which is why today's QotD showed up at 5:55 instead of 5:25.) I did test things beforehand, of course, but, you guessed it, I tested them on the wrong machine. I blame poor sleep. (Why yes, that is an awfully convenient excuse, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

So: glitchitude. But relatively minor stuff, annoying but easily worked around until I figure out how to fix it properly, or in the case of the compiled-in-the-wrong-place problem, trivially repaired. But not the completely smooth operation I'd hoped today would appear to be.

And I thought I had a similar problem with CommieJournal, but apparently that entire site is down today for maintenance/upgrade/something. (Maybe not the best timing for that, but if something broke and they had to fix it, oh well.) I'll try to remember not to overwrite the text files containing today's entries as I compose each next entry, to make it easier to post 'em all to CommieJournal once it comes back up.

And the Blurty client is reporting failure, but my entries are showing up there. Hmm.

Okay, now to go take care of those errands ...

[*] Actually three different plans. My question a few days ago about whether anybody else still uses Clive was to help me decide which plan to use.