It’s a battle between Man and Machine … and while the Man’s not winning, I’m not doing all that badly. My first encounter with trying to get my Perl scripts to execute on any Unix box was a brutal massacre that left bits of my geeky ego scattered across my desktop. Like any good general … Read more
This is why I love living down the street from a college (and heck, working at one for that matter). Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa. is holding — of all things — a dark future film festival and art exhibition. Called “Future Noir”, the show opened June 8. The art component of the exhibition is … Read more
I expected learning Perl to be challenging, but I never expected to have to work so hard to get a simple “Hello World” script running. Perl’s a server-side programming language, normally found on Unix servers, which is extremely useful for writing all sorts of programs, especially those involving text manipulation. I know some Perl, just … Read more
Just about every week, my gaming group gets together to play our ongoing Greyhawk-based Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It’s nearly seven years old (its anniversary arrives in September) and its a source of continual fun, camaraderie and unrelenting chaos. It’s not all about D&D, although it dominates our agenda. We also play a huge number … Read more
I’e been kicking over ideas over what Web sites I can review next, either for Nuketown or Science Fiction Weekly (Internet Archive) (and kicking around a new story idea for GreenTentacles), and decided to do a little surfing for Weblogs. After all, blogs are the “big thing” right about now, and one would expect that … Read more
It’s official. I’ve switched to the Mac. Long-time readers will know that I bought an Apple laptop – an iBook – a few years ago, but I’ve continued to use a Windows desktop machine at home. That machine was getting more than a little long in the tooth though, and it was time for a … Read more
Ok, so StarGirl’s almost three months old and this column is about three weeks late, but one of the lesson’s learned this month is how ever little free time you think you’ll have, divide it by at least half and you’ll have a number that’s still wrong, but closer to the post-baby-reality. You Say It’s … Read more
It’s funny how aspects of your past can come streaking through your present, unannounced and unbidden, but appreciated all the same. I subscribe to a newsletter called WebWord, which deals with Web site usability issues. The most recent edition included a link to a copy of Infocom’s classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text-based RPG, … Read more
First off, everyone’s ok — StarGirl’s fine, Sue’s fine and I’m fine. Or at least, we’re mostly fine.
I got a call at 3:30 Monday from Sue, who was in hysterics and was on her way to St. Luke’s in Bethlehem. Seems that StarGirl had turned absolutely white — no color in her lips or her extremities, and scared the crap out of Sue. She called our pediatrician, who told her to take her to the hospital immediately.
When I got there an hour and a half later, Sue and StarGirl had been admitted, and they were running different tests on the baby. Mostly they were trying to pin down her heart rate, which seemed high. Well, one EKG later, and they knew that it *was* high. Way too high. Her normal heart rate should be around 140-160, something like that. Hers was twice that — it was running around 250 to 280, with spikes to an absolutely horrifying 300.
The cardiac pediatrician was concerned — heck everyone was concerned — and they spent an hour or two trying to get an IV started so they could give her medication to bring the heart rate down. When they couldn’t get it started — and when other techniques failed to keep the heart rate down — they Medevac’d her to Lehigh Valley Hospital, which has a pediatric intensive care unit. That’s right. A freaking helicopter.
I never got into the whole song-stealing thing. I say “stealing” rather than “trading” because despite all the rationalizations, that’s exactly what it was and is: stealing. In the beginning, there might have been some folks who were sampling music or doing the modern day equivalent of dubbing a friends CD on to tape. But … Read more