This was an interesting piece of art. It was a bunch of charred remnants from a church that had burned down. The artist arranged the pieces of burned wood on wires, then strung the wires up in a rectangular array. In person, it looks like there’s some sort of pattern to the piece. There isn’t really any, but people’s minds are great at looking for patterns and finding them even when they don’t exist.

Took the bus again, it worked out well. I was able to do more reading this time. I think about half of the people on the bus were reading a book. I guess this means I’ll have to get more library books the next time I go there, so I won’t run out of books mid-week.

Speaking of books, The Impossible Bird is pretty good on the whole. Sci-fi has always asked questions like, “What would people do if limitations X, Y, and Z were removed?” and this book does exactly that. I don’t know whether most people would like the book as much as I did, though. Many of the topics the book addresses are things I’ve been thinking about for the last few years. Could you build heaven? What would a world without death be like? Who are you? What do you want? I don’t know why this book didn’t get more attention, but what the heck.

Work: I have to deal with an interestingly hard question soon. Do I let work pay for my Net access at home? The provider they’ve chosen is Cox, which doesn’t allow users to run their own mail, ssh, and web servers. I really need to have a general purpose box that I can get to from anywhere, and a reliable mail delivery mechanism, and a web server. I can do that with Deru, I can’t do that with Cox alone. I’d also have to do something like buy some hosting from the slicehost people, which is reasonably cheap, but I’d also need to register a domain name with somebody. Also, how heavily does work monitor/censor/control the service that they’re paying for? I spend time all over the Net, including parts that can’t be reached via port 80 and parts that may offend people.

Trivia: If you see this, it means I was too tired to update this page before sacking out.