Garden Of Blog

… of Magickman, my first World of Warcraft character.

Dave just sent me this awesome high school flashback.

Also, Kirk and I returned from our trip to Montreal earlier this week. It was my first trip to the city and I got sore walking around so much. Plenty worth it, though.

It got me.

Here’s a piece published in the Wire today about the addiction, obsession, or whatever you want to call this phenom.

Gawd that’s cool.

…and another angle…

Some of you may know that I am a founding member of the seminal psychedelic band Cozmik Corkscrew. We rock.

Well it turns out that moving to Alton, New Hampshire some years ago has brought me to one of the corkscrew’s most historic places. William Rockwell Clough moved his corkscrew manufacturing to Factory Street (now Gilman Road) in 1903, and the company proceeded to crank out more than a billion corkscrews about 5 miles from where our home sits now.

In 1904, “Clough married his second wife Nellie Sophia Place, daughter of George Place, an Alton lumber dealer and businessman” according to chapter four of William Rockwell Clough, a book by Ron MacClean. This is all from that book, including the image of the corkscrews to the right. Look closely: yup, those miniature corkscrew samples are from Alton. There’s a lot more Alton stuff at the end of chapter four (scroll down) in MacLean’s book.

In other Alton/corkscrew synchronicity news, you may be familiar with Alton Towers, a huge amusement park in the U.K. In 1980 it added a rollercoaster called The Corkscrew which was the first coaster to invert in Britain.

This is interesting. Both my wife and I blog, so I am left wondering, additionally, “among people who blog, do women or men post more often?”

In our house, the prize goes to Jessica hands down, who has posted 893 times since 8/2005. I have “only” posted here 238 times since 4/2005.

Programmers: use Subversion? Ever tried TortoiseSVN on Windows (had you the misfortune to be developing there), and dug it?

Meet SCPlugin, a Subversion integrator for the Mac OS X Finder. I’ve put the brakes on evaluating new software lately, but this I’ve got to try. Even if I do see myself doing my commits on the command line well past retirement from coding for pay.

Jesus, Batman, who maintains this thing? Weak August effort.

Here is a wonderful article on the differences (or lack thereof) in human and computer reasoning. The topic is chess, but the implication, especially as phrased so eloquently at the end of the piece, is huge. I’ll reword it here with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke (whose “3rd Law” this is based on):

A sufficiently complex machine is indistinguishable from spirit.