I’ve been listening to Queen Isabella off the album I bought recently. It’s really grown on me.

Here’s to Queen Isabella of Spain
Who was more than a little deranged.

It’s a song about the upside of Isabella, who, despite her other quirks, managed to fund Columbus out of her own personal wealth.

Queen Isabella, where are you today?
The new Chris Columbus is wasting away.

The song pointedly discusses some of the things we think are more important than space flight, including building more jails. Man, have we lost perspective or what?

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Well, Conkopelli had a few hiccups here and there, not the least of which was getting information to the right places on time. All that said, I really had a great time, even despite all the walking and being in Phoenix in July.

My favorite thing? I had fun on my web design panel and the tarot panel especially, though the other two were also interesting. But I really love to hang around with my friends, so I did a lot of that.
San Diego won the Westercon bid for 2006; it ran unopposed.
I’ll miss San Diego this year as unfortunately I have to skip Conjecture for Viable Paradise. Not that I’m sad about VP, quite the opposite, but Conjecture is one of the two small cons I attend each year.

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Managed to get all the references sorted out and a good chunk of writing done as well.

$ wc -w paper.xml
4266 paper.xml

I worked on it for a while, but there were a lot of other projects to be done at work as well.

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$ wc -w paper.xml
3486 paper.xml

Must. Sleep.

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Kevin recently made the switch to Debian. Like him, I also had reservations about old packages at first. deirdre.org has been running Debian for three years now and I couldn’t be happier!

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$ wc -w paper.xml
2978 paper.xml

..though it’s shaping up slower than I’d intended.

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Genetically engineered beer is now upon us.

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smykes continues a challenge for favorite sad songs. The first song that popped into my head isn’t really sad in the traditional sense, but hey, it’s a song about the loss of beer and it’s in a minor key, therefore it’s a sad song, right?

So I’ll vote for The Ballad of Transport 18, as sung on the Folk Songs for Solar Sailors album. There is another recording, done in someone’s living room in the wrong octave. Thus, it’s a really bad recording compared to the studio one. Nevertheless, if you must, there is an MP3 of that one on the web. However, it is Not Recommended. Ugh.

We were 38 crewman on Transport 18
The hour was late and the talk was obscene.

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I realize that word counts are more problematic than one might think, but I finally have a good example of machine word counts that differ significantly.

$ wc paper.xml
171 2212 15400 paper.xml

So, 15,400 characters and 2212 words.

BBEdit, however, reports 15,400 characters, 2509 words, and 351 lines. The last is pointedly wrong, since it shows 171 that wc does.

But why a difference of almost 300 words (> 10%) in the word count proper? Granted, I’m using an ancient version of BBEdit, but hey, it should still work.

Peculiarly, the new version of BBEdit shows 2409 words. Hmm.

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Colloquy is an IRC client for the Macintosh. Unlike many of them, it’s issued under the GPL, meaning it is free software (not just no-charge). I’d been using X-chat aqua, which hadn’t advanced as quickly as I’d liked — though I admit that I’m partly to blame for that, free software being what it is.

Some folks on #wordpress pointed out that Colloquy was pretty darn cool, so I downloaded a copy. Hey, it really is spiff!

There’s a few features I’d like (but hey, I can help, right?), but one really great one is being able to add an image background to your IRC conversation:

I’m happy!

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