What if Roger Zelazny wrote a hard-boiled murder mystery, and no one knew about it for more than thirty-five years? Well, now you can buy it on Amazon…

It’s been out since last February, but it didn’t make it onto my recommendations list until a few weeks ago. And, of course, I’d never have gone looking in that genre.

How is it? Not bad. It was a complete manuscript, but it’s got some rough spots, as if he planned to go back and work it over again, but then moved on to something else. Their best guess puts it right around the same time as Nine Princes in Amber, and I can see some similarities (stylistically, that is) to the opening section on Earth, before Corwin recovers his memory.

Come on, really?

"We'd like to keep you informed via email about product updates, upgrades, special offers and pricing. If you do not wish to be contacted via email, please ensure that the box is not checked."

At least the box is not not unchecked by default, but this is stupid.

I confess, it’s been so long since I went through my slides that I simply forgot that I’d gotten Dita Von Teese and Lynn Thomas to cuddle naked on a sofa.

And when did I manage to get Vanessa Gleason outdoors for a quick (clothed) shoot? I sleeved the slides, so I must have looked at them at least once. Clearly I’ve been out of the game for too long…

I think all search results would be improved by the ability to exclude departments. Instead of forcing me to guess whether an item has been filed under “Home & Garden” or “Grocery”, let me instead exclude “Baby”, “VHS”, “MP3 Downloads”, and “Clothing & Accessories”. You already allow negative keywords in the search field, so this would be a natural extension.

This would be particularly useful for your “recommendations for you” list, which in my case is currently dominated by cookbooks, salami, and SF novels. If you want to sell me anything else, you have to give me a way to sort it to the top, and the current positive filtering system is trial-and-error, since most of the listed categories don’t actually have anything in them to recommend.

As a general rule, office firewalls do not have to be configured to cope with simultaneous incoming syslog traffic from 80,000+ hosts. Mine did. Sadly, the default limit for a particular element was only capable of handling about 3/4 of that, leaving our outgoing connections somewhere between unstable and “not” when things got busy.

Fixed now.

PS: syslog can be scary efficient at sending packets when a box is unhappy. Enough unhappy boxes makes for a quite impressive DDOS attack, if you haven’t previously discovered that using “no state” in a firewall rule does not, in fact, avoid filling your state table with crap, thus accelerating your approach toward that arbitrary limit.

…or will be in the state of New York, if the dumbest state legislators in American history can manage to pass their new bill.

Not kidding:

"No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises."

The “in any form” really puts the crown on these king-sized asshats. It’s amazing they managed to write a complete sentence, much less an actual bill.

One should never take this sort of story at face value, so I looked it up on Amazon, and my jaw dropped for two reasons.

1. The linked disclaimer that the contents of The Federalist Papers "does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today".
2. The publisher's claim of copyright on the material.

Both are most likely boilerplate, but they’re deeply clueless boilerplate. And they do indeed reflect a certain kind of modern values…

more...

I was looking up a Japanese word. I knew what it meant. I knew how it had been formed from the parent word. I knew the writer had used it correctly. It just wasn’t in my usual dictionaries, and I wanted to see if there was some nuance to the usage that wasn’t obvious from the construction.

The word was 偉大さ (“idaisa”). Idai by itself is in most dictionaries. As a noun, it means greatness, mightiness, grandeur; as a -na adjective, great, mighty, grand. The -sa ending converts adjectives to nouns, so idaisa should end up with exactly the same meanings as the noun form of idai, but it could emphasize one in particular, or it could simply be more formal. In this case, I think it’s a bit of both; formal, because it’s the foreword to a book about her youth, and emphasizing mighty, because her story is about Ultraman.

But the reason I’m writing is to mention the one dictionary entry that did list idaisa, and included among its meanings a word forged from the purest Scrabbleite:

honorificabilitudinity

Yeah, that helped, thanks.