In Bruce Sterling‘s wonderful novel Schismatrix (1985), the spaceship Red Consensus has an interesting feature:

The control room . . . had been designed by some forgotten industrial theorist who believed that instruments should use acoustic signals. . . . Bizarre at first, the sounds were designed to sink unobtrusively into the backbrain. Any change in the chorus, though, was immediately obvious. Lindsay found the music soothing, a combination of heartbeat and brain.

Now:

the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has created software that translates network and server activity into music. And, their IT department operators can interpret the music to detect problems in the system.

(Cited by Sore Eyes.)

An acquaintance writes:

Eudora remains my client of choice because

1. I’m used to it
2. My attitude is Augustinian: “Make me a LINUX user, but not quite yet.”
3. I love the splash screen, which looks like an insane mailman manically throwing people’s letters away over his shoulder.

I had a bitch of a time uploading files for the new version of WordPress. It’s my first update since migrating from the Linux box to the Mac Mini, and the ftp client I have is crap compared to gftp which came with Gnome.

And I see I’ve (partly) broken my theme: it can’t display single posts. Until I get around to repairing/rewriting it, you get this generic theme.

is that there are so many to choose from!

Elsewhere in the wonderful world of webtoons, how to stand out from the crowd.

My home address is of the form m Rivendell Lane, #n. Rivendell Lane (name changed) is a condo with multiple buildings; each building contains multiple dwellings, each with an outside door. When tradesmen come calling, most of the time their dispatcher omits the unit number n, and they go knock at the door of unit m, which happens also to be in building m. They then call their dispatcher, who calls me; I roll my eyes and explain. Without mobile telephones I’d never get anything delivered!

I can’t think of any functionality that would be lost if the buildings as such had never been given numbers. My address would then be slightly shorter and free of ambiguity.

If my new printer’s resolution is 1200 dots/inch, then a sheet of gringo-standard letter paper with half-inch margins can take an image of 9000 by 12000 pixels. As a test, therefore, I rendered one of my most complex Povray images at that size. It took 182 hours.

Now if I can find a program that will open an image that big . . . .

When symbol-space is arbitrary, whimsy sometimes happens.