Old-school space Lego had a lot going for it. While building completely new models from the basic parts was fun, one of the things that I always liked was that you could partially disassemble any model to simulate the ship being damaged by aliens, lasers, pirates, missiles, or whatever.

Troubleshot mount.cifs on Ubuntu yesterday at Steve’s. The real problem was one that I had never seen before, namely that mount tried to contact the remote machine on port 445. If the remote machine wasn’t listening on port 445, mount waited forever (much longer than the 30 seconds these things usually wait) for a response. This was reasonably easy to fix once we knew what the heck was going on, just make sure that mount had port=139 in its options.

Steve’s sons also gave me a nice gift. They had an older PS2 as well as a PS3. The PS2 won’t play DVD movies now, but it will play games. Since they knew that I wanted to play Guitar Hero and its sequels, they gave me their old PS2. This was very nice of them. Now all I have to do is obtain a TV, the game, and a guitar controller, and I’ll be . . . ready to waste a great deal of time.

Started reading Charlie Stross’s Halting State yesterday.  Didn’t get more than 50 pages into it, but it’s one of the only novels that I’ve ever seen that’s written in second person.  Most authors use omniescent third person for maximum flexibility, or limited third person for slightly less flexibility, or first person if they don’t need flexibility and are sure the protagonist can capture the reader’s interest.  Second person is not widely used, possibly because the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books were written that way, and those books are horribly gauche.  Maybe Stross has some reason for the person shift that will be revealed in due course.

Interview today with WePublishNews.  Here’s hoping.