Three Short Comments from Princeton

I. Many machines on Ix...*

Today as I went for dinner I saw a cardboard box, sitting by the trash at the bottom of the stairwell. A big Dell box, bigger than the one I found last time.

(Oh?... yes?)

So I took it. I have plans for it. Plans within plans. For storing things.

No laughing at my new box, now. It's a newcomer and doesn't have the history that the others do, but it will. It's strong. It's capable of eating the old box, as you can plainly see. I'm resisting saying that it can bend like a reed in the wind, because that attempt would likely destroy it.

* For many good reasons I translate any Latin that might come up, so why not Geek, which is still more obscure? Whatever you feel about the qualities of the adaptation, there are many wonderful things about David Lynch's Dune, and this snippet of dialogue is one of them.



II. More lock stories

I mentioned that I've not yet locked myself out. In truth when last fall I arrived on the contrary I felt locked in. The first time I put my key in the lock it became stuck; I had to brace myself against the door and hook two fingers in the ring of my key chain to wiggle/yank it out. This scene repeated itself. I began to fear that one day I would open my door and not be able to retrieve my keys. It would close and my housekey would just sit there. What would the lock do for me then?

But as often happens the problem went away by itself, or was helped by a little bit of use.

Now I have a different trouble. The lock is a deadbolt with one side tapered so that when the door falls into the frame the bolt draws back until it locks in place in the slot. I've noticed quite a bit over just the past 3 days -- already in the fall, irregularly, but often recently, right now, even -- the door not recessing the whole way. I've set my feet against the ground and pushed and the damn'd door doesn't fall far enough to let the bolt fall into place.

Just fiddling with the lock right now I've discovered that it has a second deadbolt, which can only be set into place from the inside, if you can make sense of that. (The key does draw it back, though.) It also has a little switch set into the side of the door which apparently toggles the autolock on the first deadbolt (the movement of the door-knob/handle draws that bolt back, and the switch releases or freezes the outside knob). Sometimes I wish I could live in an unlocked world, but my natural caution and my laptop make me think my wishes won't be like fishes.* Last year I left the door unlocked whenever I could, but those NGC buildings have a keycard entry system the OGC lacks.

I figure it -- the lock -- it's setting me up. When I stop compulsively jiggling the keys in my pocket every time I step through the threshold -- one day, somehow, I'll miss them and then it'll be click! like the assassin's blade. Sometimes, you know, I walk in and, carefree, drop my keys on the desk. They're camouflaged there. And then I think: that's just what it wants, and quickly replace them in my pocket. When those keys jingle on the desk, that to me should be like the sound of the nightingale floors of the Tokugawa fortress.

Apparently any life can be a little like an episode of The Outer Limits if you work hard enough at it. I'm thinking of the ones with a twisted set-up and diabolical reversal. Like the one about a (male) POW on an alien world who falls for the female human POW target of cruel alien interrogators and to whom he mentions, to cheer her a little, about the starships massing at the Lagrange point behind the sun that'll turn the war. Predictably (I always tried to figure out the most depressing ending possible consistent with the set-up, and wasn't too often surprised) she turns out to be an alien in human make-up, as it were. The next episode in this story line, by the way, has Wil Wheaton accidentally annihilating the Earth instead of the alien homeworld.


* "If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets" -- ancient Caladan proverb.



III. The end of credibility

I'm sure everyone's heard a story, probably many such stories, about someone who made trouble for themselves without quite realising it by posting something on-line. It might have been humourous or harmless, a little off-colour, a confession that shouldn't have been announced-in-principle to the entire English-speaking world, a phrase worded more strongly than it deserved, whatever. (Some of us are especially guilty of that one, multiple times per post, and a recent Globe and Mail column fairly took us to task. I've said it in passing, but just to be clear, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award is firmly ironic in character.)

Some pundits even remark that future political careers are being ruined by such seeming-harmlessness. This on the face feels unduly pessimistic to me. After all, the underlying problem, as it so often is, is about data organisation, and not capacity. Still, perhaps there's something to it.

More worrisome to me at the moment is the casual and accidental intrusion of someone making a serious inquiry and getting their Google returns clogged with my useless prose. It doesn't happen so much, and there's a little thrill in the search engine's compliment. But something I read recently elsewhere (you know who you are) brought me back to the subject. Apparently someone got here looking for the Monster sporadic group, and I'd apologise to them, but I looked myself and I wasn't in the first fourteen pages, thank heavens. On the other hand, someone with a light-hearted interest in Ed Witten discovered me buried only three pages deep (mostly behind other, more well-known math-physics blogs) repeating a rumour that he sometimes plays at the local chess club. (At the time it was to me a rumour, anyway.) Frankly, half the embarassment in this "http referrer" business (when you click a link your browser tells the new site what page was linking to them) is that I feel like I'm snooping on someone else's affairs.

Speaking of which, the good news is that I am no longer "south of zealots and smut-mongers". There are some strange things about that particular query (the titular quotation of this journal). For example, the third result is to a result page of another crawler that turns me up on a different query. My Blogger user profile is right below the afore-mentioned zealots but above an entry from oldpoetry.com, which error I now ameliorate. The smut doesn't make it into the first page, but truncating to just "sun-drunken delight" shifts things around -- now my user profile is below. On truncating yet further the good news is that we have considerable standing. The very bad, bad news is that there's an actual thing -- a thing with a website -- and, well, I didn't have the heart to pursue it much, but I suspect certain kinds of smut are unbeatable. I wouldn't mention it except that this has been an important source of incoming traffic for me lately. Oy.

[Predictably, I note in a brief update a little while after writing this, the presence of the keywords in this entry hasn't helped. Oh, well. Fight the fights you can win, they say.]

On a brighter note, and returning to the data organisation theme, if at the beginning of this year you searched a thing called IceRocket Blog Search (which I've never heard of until now but which site possesses a curiously Google-like layout) on a certain Dune-related theme, you might find your way here. The reason you'd have to do it then is that this search engine organises apparently returns first by date. I note with a hint of schadenfreude that someone else has mentioned this book in a parenthesis and thereby opened their own definitely-not-for-the-dinner-table discussion to public scrutiny. (Let's just say that I shortly determined that it wasn't grammatical ignorance causing all those first-person pronouns to be capitalised.) Fortunately for them, they're getting buried, day by day, by more of the same.