With the number of servers that have caught fire or things that have needed sudden extra attention at work, I ask, in the words of Lyra Lackwit:

"Will things please stop happening now?"

…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Based on my experience of walking in SF, I suspect the actual percentages were 6.2% LGBT, 81.3% straight, and 12.5% “gimme a dollar!”.

So, the old Radioactive Panda site is mostly dead, but, as promised, Stone Clouds is back, this time on its own domain, starting with a re-release of the old material, with cleanup and color.

No, not like this, although the title is certainly Potterish:

Instead, I’m referring to a rather long bit of alternate-canon fan-fiction in which young Harry Potter was raised, not by the Dursleys, but by a science professor at Oxford. As a result, he grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, and learned to apply the scientific method to the world around him. The quite long story has finally been completed:

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

The ending is less satisfying than the beginning, or even the middle, but it holds together surprisingly well. And the author was very careful to not only use real science, but to cross-reference each chapter so you can follow up on any concept that strikes your fancy.

I think I can live with this performance on the new Comcast line.

[Bonus! My new static IP range is not blacklisted by Paypal. Both my old AT&T and Sonic.net ranges were for as long as I had them, and not only does Paypal silently treat it as “incorrect password”, their customer-service folks don’t even acknowledge that this is possible. For years, I’ve had to open a VPN connection to my office just to be able to log in to my account.]

“auditors” and “Perl script”

Shamus Young’s Project Good Robot is now on Steam Greenlight.

[Update: all switched over, and the only difficulty in the install was discovering that Comcast still ships routers that hang onto MAC addresses for dear life, preventing you from reusing an IP address on the LAN side unless you reboot the silly thing. This was dumb on a home line ten years ago, and inexcusably stupid on a business line today. On the bright side, it came with native IPv6, so I can get rid of my Hurricane Electric tunnel sometime soon.]

So on March 9th, I got email from sonic.net informing me that their current DSL service was going away on April 10th, and that I needed to call right away to upgrade to their new faster-cheaper-better service.

The person who answered the phone seemed surprised that I’d actually called right away. Then she put me on hold for several minutes while she looked at my account, then she said she’d call me back. She didn’t.

So I replied to the original email, which surprisingly actually went to someone, who answered and said someone would call me back. Today, I got a long, casual voicemail from someone who eventually got around to explaining that the new service isn’t offered in my area, and I’d need to find a new ISP. Yes, I was expecting this.

(short version: they had a contract with AT&T to use their lines for DSL, and that expired)

So now I’m waiting on a callback from Comcast Business to schedule an install. It will cost more, but even their cheapest plan is much faster than the 6000/768 I have now. Internet-only; I’ll keep the Dish for TV, and migrate the landline to an Ooma box.

(the only reason I still had the landline was that Sonic’s agreement with AT&T required it)