Rain (when we get it) is usually silent four stories above ground, but today gusts of wind have been spattering it against the windows.
Author Archives: Kelson
Inbox 100
My email inbox is now below 100 messages. It’s kind of sad that this is actually an accomplishment!
I’m down to about 10 items from the past month, another 20 or so to-do items I’ve sent myself, 8 back-issues of This Is True that I missed the first time around, and a bunch of older stuff related to my Flash website.
The hard part isn’t the length of the list. The hard part is deciding, with each message, whether to toss it, file it, or keep it around so that I can act on it — and then actually following through!
I’m sort of hoping I can get it below 75 by the end of the month.
Earthquake Frequency
According to the USGS, the frequency of large earthquakes has remained constant over the last century. In a typical year, the planet has roughly 17 “major” earthquakes (measuring 7.0 to 7.9 on the Richter scale) and one “great” earthquake (measuring 8.0 or higher).
So, no, earthquakes are not increasing as a sign/symptom of the impending end of the world.
(via @2012hoax)
Update March 1: 2012hoax has a nice page showing how recent quakes fit into these statistics, including Haiti, Chile, and the one in Illinois a few weeks ago (which was really quite small — there are 130,000 quakes that size in any given year!).
Link: Fandom – There’s more than one way to do it
Worth remembering: Your fandom is not Fandom, by schmevil.
…everybody does fandom differently. Fandom is not fanworks fandom. It is not media fandom, SF fandom, or whatever fandom. It is all of these things and more. There exist fandoms and ways of doing fandom that you have never heard of. Fandom is mindbogglingly huge and varied – I’m constantly discovering new fandoms, and new fannish activities. All of these ways of doing Fandom are valid.
Car-Parts Predator and Soldier
Outside an automotive shop. As near as I can tell, the one on the left is supposed to be a Predator with a machine gun grafted to its arm, but the fish-like head gives it a faintly Lovecraftian look.
First CD Since…???
I’m burning an actual CD-ROM for the first time in…a really long time. With USB, fast Internet & external drives, I hardly ever need to. Even when I do need to burn an install disk for Linux, it’s usually a re-writable disc — and now that Fedora offers live upgrades, I don’t even have to do that very often.
Yeah, “Real Life Comics” is aptly named!
Y2K10
1. SpamAssassin has been marking mail from 2010 as “grossly in the future.” It’s been fixed in the beta for months, but they issued an emergency update over the holiday. Of course, if they’d done the test by using math instead of pattern matching, it wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. (via Pobox)
2. A 2010 bug has caused problems with German credit cards. It seems we got complacent after Y2K and stopped worrying about date changes.