RIMMER: Mayday! Mayday! I wonder why it's "Mayday"?

LISTER: Eh?

RIMMER: The distress call. Why do you say "Mayday"? It's only a bank holiday. Why not "Shrove Tuesday" or "Ascension Sunday"? Ascension Sunday! Ascension Sunday! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost!

LISTER: It's French, you doink. It's m'aider — "help me". M'—ai—der!

After adding a couple of new administrative features and satisfying myself about its general stability, Godfrey's Bookshelf is now publicly available.

It contains PDFs of 27 28 29 books on various subjects, printed between 1484 and 1881; more books to be added soon. Adobe Acrobat Reader v5 or better (or anything which reads PDF files, such as GhostScript) is required.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, please give it a try, let me know if you find a way to break it, and email me if you have any suggestions for improvement. Thanks!

Edit: Added Tales, and quicke anweres, a book of wit and humor. A few of the jokes contained therein can be found here.

Edit 2: Added The English Dictionarie, with such pearls of knowledge as "Excrement, Any thing which naturally grows in the body, which may be taken away without any harm thereunto."

At my office, among my other duties, I act as front-line technical support. The following kind of exchange happens far too often:

"My computer gave me an error message this morning. Can you fix it?"

"What was the error message?"

"I don't remember."

At this point, I pick up a large 2-by-4 with rusty nails embedded in the business end, and proceed to beat the living tar out of the person. Well, at least in the privacy of my own mind. In the real world, I ask her to write down the error message if it happens again, like I've been doing since I started working here years ago.

In about 45 minutes, I begin a project. I'm taking part in the 48 Hour Film Project, an international filmmaking competition in which teams of amateur filmmakers have just two days to write, shoot, edit and score a four- to eight-minute film.

At the start of the 48 hours, each team is given a genre, a character, a prop and a line of dialogue which must appear in the film. The team I've signed up with, Dead Horse Productions, is making a computer-animated short.

This, to put it mildly, is insanity. Most animated features take weeks — or even months — of preproduction: modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting... all before the animation actually begins. Clearly, we don't have this luxury, so we won't be shooting for the quality of Monsters, Inc. We also won't be sleeping much.

I'm sure Karen would like me to mention what a wonderfully tolerant and supportive wife she is for letting me make her a computer widow for the weekend. So, uh, I'm mentioning it.

Man, I'm starving. And I don't know why.

Because I don't believe in limiting my input to just one point of view, I've been reading a small selection of political blogs (in the sidebar under "There once was a musical troupe").

Unfortunately, since things have been going very badly for the current administration, the conservative blog ("the one in the middle") has retreated away from current events into defenses of outsourcing and chronicling his own growing fame in the media, so I think it's time to replace him.

Does anyone know of a good conservative blog that deals in facts rather than rhetoric? I'm not looking for one that simply spouts the RNC talking points or makes ad-hominem attacks on the left, I want one that is rational, intelligent and intellectually honest.

The one that I had been reading was that way, but as I said, he's really shifted his focus away from current events.

I've thought about splitting the rightward-looking link into neo- and paleo-conservative viewpoints, but that wouldn't fit the lyrics.

If you have ever been owned by cats, check out J Grant's Two Lumps. I recommend reading the archives from the first strip (which, since it's relatively new, won't take too much time). It ain't Garfield, that's for sure.

I'd say more, but I had to sign an NDA.

Update: Okay, I'll say more. Whoa! Hahahahahaha! w00t!

Our entry in the 48-Hour Film Project is now online. From our Director's account of the premiere, it went over very well:

The dead duck appeared on screen and you could hear a slight laugh of surprise—and more so when the camera pulled back to reveal the two rubber duckie hoods. Then Zack's titles came up and there was just an audible gasp as people realized, "Holy [duck], they made a cartoon!"

It's not perfect, but I'm proud of it, warts and all. Those warts will be removed when we make the Director's Cut (tweaking the animation and soundtrack, fixing a couple of glitches that showed up), but I'm not embarrassed to show it now.

That's the official release site, based at the company which makes the 3D software we used. However, I've also put up a larger version here; it's big, but it should start playing within a few seconds if you've got a broadband connection.

As Webminister of the Trimarian Ministry of Arts and Sciences, I do my best to keep the site looking good and easy to use. A few weeks ago, it was brought to my attention that somebody was complaining that the site didn't work in her older browser; she couldn't navigate around the site or see the pictures. Not that she emailed me, the maintainer of the Web site, with her concerns. No, she preferred to gripe about it on an email list that I'm not subscribed to, where it wouldn't do any good. Okay, whatever. I figure if it's that important to her, she can email me directly. Still, I offered some suggestions to the person who brought it to my attention, who forwarded them to her.

As I discovered this morning, that wasn't good enough for her — and she'd rather email the Kingdom Minister of Arts and Sciences to complain, rather than email the person in charge of the Web site. While she didn't mention any problem navigating, she did complain that "some of use [sic] are using older forms of Netscape or explore [sic] and are having hard time [sic] opening and viewing" the pictures. Since she didn't provide any specifics, I had to take steps to try and reproduce her problem.

While Internet Explorer 1.0 won't run on my machine (I told it not to replace the existing DLLs, so as not to destroy the current version, and they're not backwards-compatible), Netscape 1.1 installed just fine. And, hey, look! Pictures!

Admittedly, Netscape 1.1 does have trouble navigating the site, since image maps weren't supported. However, Netscape 2.0, which is nine years old, manages to display the images and navigate the site.

But even if her complaint had any basis in reality, given that there are plenty of free Web browsers out there (including Netscape and Internet Explorer) and that other sites on the Web must also be giving her problems (since the Trimarian ArtSci site certainly isn't the only one which takes advantage of modern Web standards) wouldn't she be better served by upgrading her browser — which she acknowledges is old — instead of complaining?

Certainly not. For this is the SCA, where the squeaky wheel gets the attention.

The Dullest Blog in the World

Just got sent a variation on the Bagle virus I hadn't seen before. It consists of an HTML message containing a VBScript routine. This routine creates an executable file and then runs it. Because the message doesn't contain an attachment, it looks safe. But view it with Outlook Express (or any Windows email client that uses Microsoft's HTML rendering engine) and boom! you're infected.

Even more special, someone could easily infect users of Internet Explorer by adding this code to a Web page.

Can somebody explain to me why Microsoft felt it was a good idea to write a scripting language which permits complete access the user's file system? And why, after years of such security holes being exploited, they don't remove that capability?

I've heard that of all the senses, that of smell is the most evocative, but I'd never really experienced anything to confirm it until yesterday. I was in one of the newer courthouses in downtown Tampa, when I caught a whiff of... something. New vinyl tiles, I suspect, from the redolence of formaldehyde.

Immediately, my mind conjured up images of Copernicus Hall at Central Connecticut State University, through which halls I had roamed as a child just after construction had been completed (and then again years later as a college student). Not only could I see the hallways (from the vantage point of a child), I could feel their rough, corrugated cement walls as though I were running my hands over them in the present day.

The clarity of the memory was amazing, from the subtle pattern in the yellow third-floor tiles, to the chrome hinges on the door of the big walk-in refrigerator in the biology department hall. (When Star Trek: The Motion Sickness came out, I bought a book of stickers based on shipboard graphics from the movie; I gave my father a "Cryogenic Storage" sticker, which he placed on that door, under the small glass window. It was still there as of a few years ago; I wonder if it still is?)

As I get older and my earlier memories retreat further into the fog of time, it's astonishing to have one resurrected with such immediacy, by no more complex a catalyst than a faint, briefly registered scent.

I'd decided to go with the computer-rendered cartooning because my drawing skills suck. And then I see things like this which make me start thinking perhaps my skills aren't as bad as I thought they were. And then I remember that my silly little one-panel toon that didn't even come close to looking like the person I was trying to draw took two freaking days to make, so to do a decent strip would take all my free time and still only update once a week at best.

So I've got to get off my arse and finish re-animating scene five of Duck Sauce for the Director's Cut, so I can get back to building my characters with a clear conscience. I've got at least a year's worth of storylines planned out, but I can't articulate them until I've got the modeling done.

Of course, that'll mean staying away from Tribes 2, which I let myself get sucked into because the publisher started giving it away for free. Man, I love games with jetpacks. And AI that's actually smart enough to simulate the experience of playing against real humans when I'm learning the game, so I can get out of the n00b phase without embarrassment. But especially the jetpacks. I always have great flying dreams after playing a game with jetpacks.