Zippity Zip

In no particular order --

I tried to find a zipfile utility that preserves long file names (longer than the DOS standard 8.3), but nope. At least, not yet. PKWARE doesn't seem to sell one (maybe; I haven't tried their current PKWARE for DOS yet). The windows version surely doesn't.

I'm reading Tony Hillerman's The Sinister Pig in between other things. Not bad. Then again, Hillerman's stuff is usually good.

I dropped a line to Jack McDevitt to tell him that I was taking a long time to read Polaris, but that it wasn't because I was not enjoying the book, but because I'm enjoying it so much. I'm dipping into it from time to time, just enjoying the world he's created there. ( Okay, its a little tough to remember all the names and characters, since I'm not reading consistantly, but this is a truly fun book to read.) I told him it reads like a book about real people who just happen to live in a world that, in our terms, is magical, complete with aircars, AIs in your house and car, and semi-sentient holograms. He thanked me for my praise, and said that by coincidence he happens to be working on a sequel (I think that Polaris, itself, is a kind of sequel), and he was having some problems with the characters. So my timing was pretty good.

I wonder if laptops will ever have pop-up holographic displays? I wonder if AIs will ever really work?

Bus Ads leave me cold, as a rule. But I really like this one... so long as I never have to explain it to my daughter.

Dropped a line to a woman I don't know about her appearance in a recurring article in the Washington Post called DateLab wherein they hook up two people who sound compatible. I told her I was impressed by what I read of her -- that she sounded smart and interesting, and she didn't slime the guy after she decided they didn't have all that much in common. I don't read that article all that much, but it seems that that kind of behavior is fairly common, and she didn't. I liked that. She's a marketing manager for a law firm, so I asked her, in my reply to her reply, what that means. Hope she doesn't think I'm trying to pick her up.

Pando looks interesting.

I was surprised by some of the responses to my Islamic London and followon post. I think this is why I stay away from that kind of thing except in very small groups. I'm not good with confrontations. I much prefer quiet conversation. Plus, most everyone else seems to know more/have firmer opinions than me.

The chocolate cupcakes came out well. I didn't make the ganache, but I might, tomorrow. My wife's planning on making a kind of bread (one of those lives-forever starters that I've heard described as the baking equivalent of chain letters). She made it once before, and we (for which read: them, too, but mostly me) really liked it.

I like the new spell checker in Blogger, but it ought to be possible to teach it words -- like Ganache.

Went to the local township's Jubilee Day festival, which is TONS of people in a small space. Its not my idea of fun (then again, my idea of fun usually involves at most five or six people), but its not bad. And it beats the big city's idea, something they call Kipona, which is the same kind of thing, but way more people, and its even harder to find parking.

Warm out tonight. I think we'll be running the AC on industrial high.