There are few things more futile than a game of Candy Land.

A game of Candy Land followed by a game of Chutes and Ladders qualifies.

I’ve been trying to teach Eli to play Settlers of Catan, but he just hordes his sheep and makes baa noises.

Version 2.0 – 10 May 2007

• Lowered the thresholds on warnings and alarms significantly. While this may increase the number of false alarms, this should help prevent critical errors or program crashes.
• Added new audio alarms that sound when anything is in the output queue. Previously queue contents could accumulate with little to no notice, requiring users to perform a manual check.
• Increased the program’s sensitivity to potential buffer overruns on input. Excess data is now regurgitated during processing. This can take up to an hour, even on new hardware.
• Greatly improved the random number generator. The program now requests input at irregular intervals instead of the approximately three hour intervals of version 1.0.
• In contrast, the Karp sequence is now far more deterministic. Users wishing to reset error conditions and prevent additional alarms should use the swaddle, side, and swing functions in that exact order.
• Downgraded the swaddle function’s utility when used in isolation.
• When the program is in sleep mode, it will continue to process buffered input. If bad input or potential buffer overruns are detected while in sleep mode, a grunt-like warning will sound. Triggering the burp function will keep the program in sleep mode without requiring the user to re-run the Karp sequence.
• While prior versions of the program could be run concurrently with other processes at an equal priority level, version 2.0 is explicitly designed to run with other child processes. Doing so requires roughly four times the resources of either process running independently.
• Changed the default color scheme from blue and green to pink and yellow.

When I was about 12, I got a copy of “Dr. Who – The Game of Time and Space,” the board game from Games Workshop. In it, you moved around the galaxy, visiting worlds and trying to reconstruct the Key to Time. You had to fight classic Dr. Who villains like Daleks and Cybermen. In fighting them, you compared their strength to your defence. Ever since, I have trouble spelling the word any other way.

I have no idea when or why I started spelling the word as “grey”.

In junior high, I discovered that some people wrote their sevens with a horizontal bar across the vertical part of the 7, and that they wrote their 1 with a serif at the top instead of a plain line. I thought that was cool, and began doing it regularly. My math teacher in high school saw that I did that and asked if I’d been an Army brat.

I got a degree in theatre arts, and still have a tendency to spell theatre that way.

As part of that degree, I spent a semester in the UK studying theatre arts. Most UK phrases I learned never stuck with me, although I’m always on the lookout for a chance to use the phrase “panto horse”. One that didn’t is “with something in,” as in the sentence, “I don’t like banana bread with nuts in.”

The space community talks about things being on orbit, much as New Yorkers will talk about standing on line. I’ve written things for public consumption where I’ve mentioned “repairs to Hubble on orbit” and had friends say that it should be “in orbit”.

What are your affectations?

SF author Charles Stross crunches the numbers and explains how difficult space colonization is.

The long and the short of what I’m trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic — magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today’s perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics — interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won’t rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.

He also looks at colonization in the solar system and comes up with a similarly gloomy outlook. Based on my back-of-the-envelope fact checking, his reasoning and conclusions look solid. The comments are long and involved, but bear Charlie out as well.

The most entertaining bit of the comment thread are the people saying that he’s wrong, not because his math is wrong or his reasoning is flawed, but because science fiction authors shouldn’t be so pessimistic and should believe whole-heartedly in the colonization of space.

The first law: The ratio of finished projects to the number of posts and comments naturally approaches zero.

The second law: If the ratio begins at zero, it is unlikely ever to increase.

This helps explain the phenomenon where someone shows up on a forum for writers and starts talking about their fabulous novel which they never do finish.

These are the pinnacle of their various sub-memes.

I don’t know the attribute for the second one, and the third is a re-creation of one I saw on a 1980s-bands-themed thread. The first one, though, is from ghoti on LiveJournal.

Finally, the best lolcat ever, also with no known attribution.

God speed, indeed.

[tags]lolcats, im-in-ur, invisible, i-has-a-flava[/tags]

We^* fed Liza last night from about 8:00 P.M. to 8:30.

She next ate around 3 A.M.

That’s seven hours. Seven hours, I should add, that she mostly spent asleep.

I have no idea if she’ll keep doing this. I can only hope so.

^*This is, of course, an extremely generous use of the word “we”.

This is how I found Liza this morning. Her velcro swaddle blanket is suppose to stay closed and keep her snuggly all night. I guess it doesn’t work so well any more or maybe she’s Supergirl.

And a bonus baby product: the bumbo seat. Designed to keep baby upright, as long as she can hold her head up. (Stephen is just off camera waiting to catch when she pitches forward.)

We’re back, baby!

David Lee Roth: Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody (1985)

I swear, people used to think David Lee Roth was cool. I mean, he got all the girls, and guys thought he was something else. I still think he’s something else, only now it’s in a “holy cow he’s a goof” kind of way. Here he smirks his way through sub-Weird-Al-style parodies of videos from Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Poison, Billy Idol, Richard Simmons (!) and more. He also spends some time terrifying the “Censorship Bored” with his fringed chaps. This, kids, is what music videos used to look like. Oh, and don’t miss “Eddie Van Halen” cleaning the floor at the very beginning.

Van Halen: Right Now (1991)

I don’t think I can improve on Beavis’s take on this video: “Huh, huh, right now David Lee Roth wants his old job back.”