Eugene Fischer

Author: Eugene Fischer

As Monty Python Taught Us, SPAM = Instant Comedy

So I posted to Twitter/Facebook

Never tasted SPAM before, but I was just gifted a tin of it. Wild and ill-advised experimentation shall ensue.

I got many amusing responses.  First, from Nalo Hopkinson,

@glorioushubris Try frying slices of it. Also helps if you’re pre-menstrual, but that might be more difficult to achieve.

Then, on facebook where I can’t link to it, from John Scalzi,

Your spam virginity is gone! Now you will never catch the processed meat food product unicorn!

Finally, from Claude Ramey. the most unashamedly low-brow recipe I’ve ever seen.

Corn Patch Casserole:
2 cans of Spam
1 large can of corn
1 large bag of egg noodles
1 jar of cheez whiz

Boil the noodles, dice the Spam, and mix everything in a casserole dish. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

My mom used to make this for me when I was a kid. It’s delicious.

I ended up dicing it, frying it up with some yellow onions and eating it over white rice with aged soy sauce.  It wasn’t great, but it was edible.  I’d certainly take it over starvation, or a third consecutive meal of ramen noodles.

A Lot of Good News

To begin, other people’s good news:

  • First, and long run most important, Mary Anne had a baby!  Howdy, Anandan.  Welcome to the world.
  • Paul Berger sold one of his Clarion stories, “Small Burdens” to Strange Horizons.  It should be showing up next year in the Spring, and it is a marvelous piece of work.
  • Meghan McCarron also sold a story to Strange Horizons.  It will also be showing up next Spring, and is titled “WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!!”  My personal connection to Meghan is tenuous–I met her at WisCon and was probably creepily excited to do so.  But every one of her stories I’ve read has blown me away, so this leaps onto my list of eagerly anticipated works.
  • Sarah Miller put in the legwork to compile a list of Clarion ’08 publications.  It’s still incomplete, but we’re tallying in email, and it seems that in the slightly more than a year since we disbanded, we’ve sold 25 stories, 10 of which were written at Clarion, and 7 of which are to pro markets.  This counts as meta good news, in a “lots of my friends are doing awesome things” kinda way.

And now, my own good news.

  • I got a job.  After stringing together two consecutive months without losing a day to debilitating intestinal pain, it was time to stop living entirely off my parents.  I will be teaching the GRE for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.  This is part time work, and how much work is available depends on student demand.  I’ll find out how much of my costs this will reliably cover after I finish training.  I may end up needing another job in tandem, but after being on my back for most of a year, this is an awfully heartening development.
  • Another heartening development — I sold a story to Asimov’s!  It’s a hard-SF story titled “Adrift,” (I never was able to think up a better title for it than my working title.  It’s kind of boring, but whatever.) and I haven’t yet been told when it will run.  But when it does it will be my first publication that I can point at in a bookstore.  I’m pretty excited about that.
  • My website is working again. Hello website.

And What About The Tiny Computer?

The tiny computer in the trio was a Dell Mini 9, which I got for free from a friend who also got it for free.  (He was the head of IT for a local construction company, and for a while was a high volume Dell customer.  They were apparently handing out base system (4gig SSD, 512 RAM) netbooks as samples.)  It would be nice if I could use it for work, but unfortunately it has a keyboard with a nonstandard layout.  The quotes key is below the period key, and the top row of letters is not offset from the middle row.  So no easy typing.  But since I can’t use it for work, that frees me up to use if for fun experimental stuff.  I did this to it:

The little guy is now a hackintosh.  To make this work I had to get an SSD big enough to hold OS X, so I picked up a 16 gig for $60.  I also used a lot of information (not to mention a few different bootloaders) found on the mydellmini.com forum.

Samsung N310 (Go)

In that picture of two computers ganging up on another, smaller computer, the one in the middle is a Samsung N310, marketed in the US as the Samsung Go.  It’s an Intel Atom based netbook with 1 gig of RAM, a 160 gig hard drive, and some very nice industrial design.  A long time Apple customer, I’m kind of a sucker for a pretty product.

Samsung1Samsung2

It has rounded clamshell design with an easy to grip rubberized plastic case.  The keyboard is 93% standard size with textured, island keys.  The display is edge to edge glass, like the current Macbook line has, making it supremely easy to clean.  Physically, it is a lovely machine and would be a pleasure to use if I were willing to run the operating system it comes with and is configured for, Windows XP.  Unfortunately, I’m not.

The N310 did not want to play nice with Ubuntu Linux.  The biggest problem was, I suspect, with the power management software.  If I left the unit plugged in and set up not to go into suspend or hibernate mode, then it worked fine.  But, of course, that’s not what a netbook is for.  On battery, or whenever it went through suspend/resume cycles, hardware support became very spotty, and I got frequent disk I/O errors that necessitated rebooting.  Additionally, the screen brightness controls were eccentric to the point of being unusable, and the open source drivers for the Atheros wifi card never reported better than 60% signal strength on the occasions when they worked at all.  A power user might know enough to implement workarounds for these quirks, but I couldn’t figure out any fixes, nor find any in the community support fora.  There are enough equivalent, better supported units that I finally decided I didn’t want to bother with it anymore, I wanted a computer that would let me get work done.

I reiterate, none of these problems were there under Windows XP, so if that is a usable operating system for you then the Samsung N310 is a very, very nice unit (albeit not for people who want to mess with the internals of their computer; the case is hostile to tampering).  But for me Windows itself is a problem, and so my N310 is on its way back to where it came from.

I’m in the Middle of a Project

I will probably write more about it in the future.  But for now, a picture of what it looks like in progress.

IMG_0614

From left to right: DVD writer, Dell mini 9, Samsung N310, 13″ MacBook.  This is going to be fun.

“Advertising at the End of the World” by Keffy Kehrli

Keffy’s last publication was in the print magazine Sybil’s Garage, so I couldn’t link to it.  But this one is online at Apex Magazine.  This was another of Keffy’s Clarion stories, and has one of the best first lines that showed up that summer.  It is also, as so many of his stories are, suffused with dark, understated humor.  Go read “Advertising at the End of the World.”

David Robinson’s 71 Point Game

On April 24, 1994, David Robinson was 33 points behind Shaquille O’Neal for the NBA scoring title.  In the last game of the season, against the L.A. Clippers, he scored 71 points.  This brought his season average to 29.8 points per game.  Shaq played later that night, knowing how much he had to score to pass David, but only managed to score 32 points, for a season average of 29.3 ppg.  David took the NBA scoring title.  The next year he would win the league MVP award.

The game wasn’t nationally televised, and many Spurs fans thought that all footage of it had been lost. But the Spurs.com broadcasting department has managed to track it down, and now you can watch online most of David Robinson’s points in his 71 point game. This is a Spurs record, surpassing the 63 scored by George Gervin, also done in the final game of the season to win a scoring title.

Watching this brought back a lot of memories of just how special a player David was.  He will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame later this week.  For all his amazing achievements, The Admiral is still underrated as a player.  See sports economist Dave Berri’s statistical analysis of David’s performance, in which he determines that Robinson was the most effective center since Kareem Abdul Jabbar–surpassing both Shaq and Hakeem Olajuwon.  And it’s almost cliche to say, but Robinson has been as awesome off the court as he was on.  Since retirement, he has devoted his time to the school he founded for underprivileged children in San Antonio, a city he has done so much for that when he left the league the NBA renamed its community assistance award the David Robinson plaque.

Can you tell I kind of idolized David Robinson growing up?  It’s nice when your childhood sports hero is such an upstanding guy that he seems as cool under adult scrutiny as he did to your uncritical younger self.

I don’t care about football, but I love this tag, so…

From Ferrett, and confirmed and sourced at Deadspin, Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor had this to say in regards to why he wrote new Eagles quarterback and former dogfight organizer Michael Vick’s name in his eye black.

Not everybody’s the perfect person in the world. I mean everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me, whatever. I think that people need a second chance, and I’ve always looked up to Mike Vick, and I always will.

I’m sure I would get to use this tag more if my sports interest didn’t start and end with the basketball season.  Come on, Oct. 27.

CreatureCast Episode One: Squid Colors

Some clever people have gotten themselves a grant from the National Science foundation to make awesome hand-drawn cartoons of animals to pair with conversational interviews with scientists explaining their research.  It’s kind of like if This American Life was a charmingly low budget biology vlog.  It’s called Creature Cast, it’s creative commons attribution-noncommercial-share alike, and you can follow along with the episodes and related postings on the Creature Cast blog.  The first episode is about the colors of the squid loligo opalescens, which you’ve probably eaten if you’ve ever had restaurant calamari.  The concepts are communicated clearly and the drawings are delightful.

CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

And here is the best video I was able to find of some of the actual behavior discussed by the interviewed scientist.  It is a different species of squid, but I think the same principles are in evidence.

A Flyer Put On My Windshield

PROFESSOR BROTHER MIGUEL ANGEL

I give classes, heal mexican style.  Good luck for Bingo, help you find work.  I heal different from others.  Cure drinking problem.  Good luck for money.  Run away bad neighbors.  Bring back husbands and boyfriends.

For the first time at this addresss.
Work with White Magic
I take away evil.  I give names of persons.
Tell you of past, present and future.
CALL FOR APPOINTMENT

[CONTACT INFO]

I’m actually considering calling to find out if his rates are reasonable.  This sounds like a dose of fairly harmless craziness that it could be fun to invite into my life.

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