Ansuz

Cross Product, chapter 15: The eleutherophobe

Again Mella returned to the tripod and lantern. There were faint clinkings. Maybe she was cooking up a stir-fry in the wok. That wasn't really a very amusing thought; I was getting bored fast. I was tempted to turn around and see what was going on, but I'd been told quite explicitly not to do that, so I didn't. That moment was when I first noticed, what, a shimmer? a disturbance? in the forest in front of me.

Satoshi Kon, 1963-2010

I was saddened to hear that my favourite anime director, Satoshi Kon, died last week. The link is to a goodbye letter he left behind.

The battle hymn of the Royal Dwarven Kilted Axemen

I got sick over the weekend, probably from all the stress, so for the past few days I've been working from home, and not working very hard. I've also been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress. This has involved a steady stream of exclamations along the lines of "Goddammit what kind of mother carries her baby into the extremely dangerous aquifer layer?" and "Caution. Siege engine practice area." After one fort got wiped out by goblins (the goblins only killed a few dwarfs, but then the others were so upset they flipped out and started killing each other) I decided that the next one would have a proper military, and that turned out to involve a unit called the "Royal Dwarven Kilted Axemen." So, naturally, I had to share the below.

Cross Product, chapter 14: In a midnight choir

Late on Saturday afternoon I was lying on a soft, mossy slope in the sun, looking up at the clouds and thinking of not much of anything. I had gotten so far into the whole thing of moving no muscles except my eyes, that I didn't even turn my head to look when someone came and lay down on the ground next to me, even though it was so close that I could feel all the moss along that side of my body depress slightly with the weight. When she spoke I recognized the voice as Taylor's. "What are you doing?"

Update

I've reached agreement in principle with people at the University of Manitoba for me to go there as a postdoctoral researcher. Details are still to be worked out, but it looks like that'll be my next career step. At least until I learn enough Japanese to pass the entrance exams for TouDai, thereby fulfilling a childhood promise.

Cross Product, chapter 13: Every possible Universe

Far too early and far too loud, Taylor was hip-checking me in my sleeping bag and saying "Wake up, sleepyhead! It's morning!" I pried my eyelids open and indeed it was. I didn't feel like I had been asleep more than ten minutes or so. She, of course, looked perfectly rested and satisfied. I should have requested lodging in a "non morning people" tent, or better yet convinced the others to help me tie her to the cold steel frame of the telescope support for the night as a sacrifice to the mosquitoes. Make her beg for a place in the tent, and behave herself when and if it was granted. I bet Jeff and Rick weren't awake yet.

Cross Product, chapter 12: Crimson and pearl

I stood on a bared mound of rock watching the yellow Sun sinking into the trees. It almost lined up with a straight row of hills, and I wondered if it would line up with them perfectly on some special day, like a solstice or equinox. I wondered if I would get to see the green flash. I've read that during sunrise and sunset there's a moment where the angle is exactly right for atmospheric refraction to bend the green part of the spectrum down to ground level, but you can only see it when the observing conditions are perfect, and I never have.

Disabling the "same directory as current tab" brain damage of KDE's konsole terminal emulator

So, you have a new laptop computer. You install the latest and greatest Slackware Linux on it, and it naturally comes with a newer version of KDE than what's on your desktop machine. You open the "konsole" terminal emulator as usual, work for a while, and then when you're ears-deep in /etc/acpi/events or somewhere, you open another tab and Whoa! you aren't in your home directory as you expected, your new tab is ears-deep in /etc/acpi/events or some such Godforsaken place.

Well, the first time you figure you just made a weird mistake and typed cd /etc/acpi/events/or/some/such/Godforsaken/place without realizing it (and then, fnord-like, didn't see the command in the terminal window), and you automatically type cd again to go where you meant to be and you carry on. But then it happens again.

So you resolve to lay off the crack pipe for a few days, grit your teeth and type "cd" again, and so it is only on the third time it happens that you finally decide maybe it's not just you, and you make appropriate experiments and discover the horrible truth: the KDE developers inflicted this on you as a deliberate feature! When you open a new tab it will pry into your bash process, figure out where you are, and put the new tab there to prevent your escape. Heaven help you if you weren't using bash.

That ought to be the end of the story, since they at least had the decency to put a check box for it on the "Edit profile" configuration dialog. Below the fold, what happens if you uncheck that box...

Cross Product, chapter 11: Whiteshade simple

Rick winced in pain as he eased into a kitchen chair, and Mella was immediately all over him. She tore the bandage from his leg and gazed alertly at his cut. Looking up at him, wide-eyed, from where she knelt on the floor, she said, "You're hurt! Let me heal you." "Well, I -" he began, clearly uncomfortable, but the witch wasn't listening. "I will make for you a poultice of wolf dock," she said with odd formality, "and covet my neighbour. Don't move." She stood, and dashed into the hall; before I could follow, she was back with a thick worn paperback book in one hand and a root in the other.