Adventure Rocket Ship

Often, after the sort of traffic experience that generally makes other people burn off the excess adrenaline by some freestyle swearing and gesticulation, I wonder if what actually happened was that I died on the road back there and I just think I'm beetling on with the rest of my life out of inertia.

Yes, I have seen 'Jacob's Ladder.'

(Via bOing^2 and Coop)

Some tractor-puller with more Sherman engines than he knows what to do with builds one into a Mustang. An all-ally 1100 cubic inch plant that's coming out not much heavier than a blown Hemi...

Especially choice is the Youtube link to someone else's Sherman motor. Now that's Industrial music.

[ http://www.amazon.com/Death-Traps-Survival-American-Division/dp/0891418148 ]

Long silences are annoying from some people (I'm so angry with you, but you're going to have to work out what terrible sin you've committed yourself), rather pleasant from others (ditto) and cheerfully companionable when they involve nice people that I care about.

(Inasmuch as that notion of 'caring' is a positive thing for both parties. One-sided caring is rubbish and a waste of time. Don't do that. So anyway. Mutually beneficial positive regard. It's a good thing and I believe we can all get behind that statement, right kids?)

Obviously the 'cheerfully companionable' thing only really works in physical proximity. Perhaps while striding purposefully across hill and dale in search of Interesting Industrial Ruins, or while becoming enlightened by a particularly striking work of modern art. (I find purely representational art somewhat posby, to use a H-R internal word. Perhaps even reflective of a hierarchical state apparatus and thus somewhat politically suspect. A place for everything and everyone knowing their place. Plus ungood.) Whatever. I'm sure you've got your own examples.

So anyway. Long silence. I've tried, on and off, to be one of those people who bang out a post daily. However, it quickly descends into second-division observational standup, or 'Being Jimmy Carr' as we say in the trade. (That's the trade of not liking Jimmy Carr overmuch. A sometimes maligned but curiously popular calling.)

The SGI became near-complete yesterday when the monitor and mousemat turned up. Unfortunately, it looks like the boot-disk is toast, (Well, not actually toast. That would be stupid. Though there was this huge optical jukebox that we just threw out. The cartridges were about the size of medium cut sarnie-loaf slices, so it could have been pressed into service as a 120-slice toast archiving tool) so it's on with plan A: shell it, install a PC motherboard and happily irk the purists.

Oddly, or perhaps not, given the lack of writing here, I accidentally got into a state over the weekend that I'll call streaming. See, when you've got some measure of tape backup, it's all going to work best when you can shovel data at it just faster than it can compress that data and write it to tape, because the tape's going to be moving past the r/w head whatever happens, and if the sending kit can't keep up the drive will write zeroes while it's waiting and your backups will take up far more space than they should. And that was more or less what happened, I just got into the groove of putting words on the paper, which made my brain work in a happy way and emit more words to be put on the paper, just slightly faster than I could write. Result: a happy JH-R with a fizzing brain and an aching hand. Now, if I can do that more often...