Short Story : Precreation

"How, daddy?" she pleaded.  It was not that she could not be made to understand, but I didn't have time.  The ship was leaving soon and I had to go make sure all the equipment was packed and all the gene samples were stable.   But her senses were very fine tuned these days.  Since the educators had solved the major issues of learning it was my daughter's generation which had benefitted the most. They rapidly reach searing performance levels so quickly, so enduringly these days.  It's almost too effortless for them.  Emotional maturity is still an issue of course, but they learn that too. But it's so damn fast, it is simply not possible for any parent to keep pace with their children.  "Sleep darling. I'll explain everything when I get back".

That was a long, dry, airless age ago.  The "cel gel" inside me takes the longest to clear.  The training helps, but I'm still not used to it. I don't think anyone is. The immersion isn't long but the accelerations forces have gone way up as journey times are cut.  My organs all feel fine, the pressure was spot on, with a days rest, even my liver didn't hurt this time and getting the suit on is painfree.  Its annoying having to keep the ventilator on outside on this planet, but it has its advantages.  The animals have no chance of personalizing us. We smell and look the same, its perfect.

Today we make history here, but nothing here will ever know it.  All my training, my life has been focused towards this point.  Countless trials and successes with animal breeding and now this.  The evolution has been manageable for ages.  We know the animal blends are past the convergent threshold for the scale and profile to support the survival of the first of the new species.  I'm not volunteering for the monitoring crews and they won't need me, so I won't be back.  I'm overthinking this, just do it.  Clear my mind and press the button.  Except now it is our genes and these animals, specially chosen as they are to closest genetically to our race.  As I release it the system syncs with all the others, there's a small delay and then its done.  The teams are excited, lots of chatter on air.  I'm getting on the ship as soon as I can.  I know there is nothing I can do in the rest of my life (well the 78.3+ years I have left) that can get close to what I helped do here to make the first humans.

Short story : That nice juicy interior

I could smell the Kabluunak before my eyes saw him.  He is in some ice that is standing up, which surprises me, but I don't slow down.  I hear noises, not just from the mouth but also like a high wind.  He is not looking at me much but I will get him anyway.  My child will like him.  He is fearful but is not moving like the others. What is this thing?  There are gaps and I try and reach in but it is not opening up.  Once I get this strange ice open I will eat some before I drag him back.  I like Nattiq best but a change is good.  I see no black sticks, so feel little danger.  I cannot believe he is not looking at me! 



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20908471

Short story : Norovirus

The man had coughed almost wetly, a short gurgling cough, next to me in the carriage.  At the time I thought he might have that virus that was surprisingly widespread. Norovirus. I never remembered the spelling and had to look it up.  The day before the girl asleep in front of me, head on table, flat out in an odd way as everyone was leaving the train, had said on waking that she probably had the Norovirus.  I tried to be helpful by waking her, but I knew if she was right about the virus, then she was wrong to be going to work, which I let her know.  "It's ok, it's only one day in town this week" she said.  Afterwards I realised she shouldn't even be on the train. She should be home in bed, trying to get better.  But then, many people had tried that and look what happened. In the end it didn't help.  It spread too quickly.

"Norovirus is one of the most infectious diseases of man" Goodfellow, professor of virology at Cambridge had said. Things are relative, even bad things.  So how much?  "It takes fewer than 20 virus particles to infect someone.  So each droplet of vomit or faeces from an infected person can contain enough virus to infect more than 100,000 people". Gulp. Still as I read this it is shocking.  Almost everyone is gone, but no one saw this coming.  Even bird flu had more warnings.  The sheer speed of its spread had been shocking in the real sense of the word.  People were not reacting.  Some stayed home, in their beds, vomiting furiously into their toilets, but from the outside all seemed quiet.  At work, it was noisy, an odd rhythm of coughs and splutters that seemed to group together as though the people were even more effected when they heard those around them.  It was the first time anyone could remember people actually stayed home to avoid sick people at work.  It had never happened before on a large scale.  That should have been a clue.

When the end came, or at least when I realised there was no future, it was quiet.  The coughing had stopped.  But then they'd all stopped breathing.  The hospitals were long closed, shut full of the dead who could not be moved there were so many of them.  Everyone retreated away from everyone else.  People fled in cars, on foot, on bikes but mostly on foot.  Public transport had died, long before the majority.  It hadn't been real at first.  The news and alerts had sounded almost familar, like a film we were about to see. A disaster movie that was building itself.  It was when I heard a friend had died of the virus that it hit home for real.  Until then it happening to me, my wife, my family, my friends wasn't an option. It didn't compute.  The government was prepared. They had solutions. This virus was treatable. It would go away. Something would stop it.  It would peter out.  But then, people started dying, transport started failing, services stopped working. Society crumbled.  I was never a fan of science fiction books (although SF films intrigued me) but I'm sure they would predict that anything from the current world that was automated would last far longer in the final reckoning than anything that relied on human intervention.  And so it was.  The internet is still up, at least my end of it.  I write this in the hope I can post it to my blog, somewhere in the ether, on servers in the cloud so that others can read it. If not now, in the future. We can write our own epitaphs now. Perhaps even without the sadness that has plagued those few survivors you see who hide and run away from you.

I don't know what the future holds any more. Was I lucky enough to be part of the cleansed planet? Or simply by bad luck around to experience the worst that had ever happened to us. They managed to tell us where the surviving power was, where the food was, but we all know that sooner or later it is all going to run out. I realise we had learnt how to move forward, but how to live going backwards. I'm a sort of farmer now, my wife a farmer's wife.  We try to grow things, but in reality we're just harvesting, taking what is already grown.  And we have a lot of space around us.  I think we all have.  No one yet is moving and meeting up in significant numbers.  I haven't seen anyone since June.  It's just too risky.  The last advice, was it even authoritative?, was to sweat it out. That the Norovirus would die out.  Then it would be safe to gather together.  But they said that before, in the lull before the wave of deaths washed over us.

So we move further backward, losing our technology, using our hands, reading our books.  The days are getting lighter now and we can do more.  We sit in simplicitly, choosing our books.  Void of ambition as we knew it.  We wait out our days, hoping they are peaceful ones.  I enjoy turning the pages.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20903489

Adventures in language : Latin

Statement of Intent
Today I'm starting a blog post on my very personal adventure learning and using Latin. This is not a "how to" or advisory. It may help inspire folks (maybe you!) to follow their own path with language. I plan to append to this one blog post as I go along, whenever I have something to say.

Why Latin?
Having never being taught it at school, it was something other kids (and certainly not my friends) in some other kind of schools did. It felt implicitly a subject studied by a different class of person, very likely the kind that went to grammar and public schools, even minor ones. Latin also seemed dead apart outside churches and mottos, not very useful to me. But learning a little Mediterranean language and discovering their common root was Latin simmered away at the back of my mind til the other day when I saw this century old text book and was gripped by its style: "The Cases are six". "The Nominative names the Subject...
  The boy reads.--Who reads?--The boy.
   The fire burns.--What burns?-the fire.
Then boy and fire are Nominatives."
Enough for now. Time to stop talking and to just do it.

World Club Cup : why Chelsea lost

A number of reasons...
- they were up against a very good, on-form Brazilian Corinthians team
- there is a deep relationship between Japanese and Brazilian football (players go in both directions) which inspires Brazilians. The CWC is routinely held in Japan.
- only the Brazilian players in Chelsea  wanted to win the CWC very much. The vast majority of players (mostly non-Brazilians) not so passionate about winning it were in the Chelsea team
- Corinthians out-played and out-muscled Chelsea in midfield. They played with more force, style and assuredness. Witness the hesitancy from the three Chelsea players not attacking the ball which one attacker put past them. Rabbits frozen in headlights
- Chelsea as a team are in an  underperforming phase, given the player quality.

Is anyone at Chelsea genuinely over-performing?  Team spirit doesn't seem solid since Terry rose to prominence and influence.

Linux HTPC with OpenELEC, XBMC, DVB-T, PVR/DVR, HDMI-CEC, iPlayer and more

Stumbled across OpenELEC the other day which inspired me to create a new HTPC system.  I looked around for hardware and settled on a Zotac Nano AD10 box (here on ebay) with dual core AMD E350 (I wanted to try AMD having had a Intel Atom ION chipset HTPC for a while), 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD. What I liked about it was that it had eSATA and 2 x USB 3.0 ports, plus had a remote control that worked with OpenELEC and XBMC. All for £250. Sweet!  Here it is in action...

What it can do:

• play all my Movies, Music and TV Recordings
• watch TV & listen to Radio with crystal clear tuning
• schedule TV & Radio recordings, including series
• move TV recorded movies to my Movies folder (manual, currently)
• use my TV remote control to control totally my media centre
• one click launch for fullscreen iPlayer, ITVplayer and 4oD
• autorip DVD*

Hardware:

• HTPC : Zotac Nano AD10 2GB/320GB
• DVB-T : Hauppage Nova Win TV USB stick
• Drive : Seagate 2TB USB
• HDMI-CEC adapter : Pulse 8 
• TV : Samsung 46" LED UE46B7020

Here's what my system runs:

• OS : OpenELEC
• UI : XBMC
• Live TV & Radio : tvheadend (stations from 3 x UK transmitters)
• PVR/DVR : tvheadend (am not missing MythTV!)
• HDMI-CEC control (so my Samsung TV remote controls the HTPC as well as the TV)
• Recent TV : iPlayer, 4oD, itvplayer

The key mods I made to make the system how I like it:

• more stations : added 2 extra TV transmitters
• /storage/.xbmc/userdata/addon_data/service.multimedia.tvheadend/dvbmuxes/
• TV remote control works perfectly with some configuration tweaks
• /usr/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/remote.xml
• All my TV & Radio stations have nice icons, mostly from http://www.lyngsat-logo.com
• autorip DVD is a "rip and push" script on an Ubuntu box using halevt, HandBrakeCLIm then scp over to OpenELEC

If anyone wants to know more on how to do this, ping me on G+ in the OpenELEC or XBMC Community and, I'll try to help.

Posted as "Zotac AD10 / DVB-T / Pulse 8 CEC / Samsung TV : full RC over HDMI-CEC, autorip DVD" on the OpenELEC forum.

Ubuntu Tip : lock and suspend keybinding

This keybinding method works for any commands in a string and most UI actions have command-line options - just a matter of finding them.

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At work especially, I've finally got bored enough to fix this niggly problem, simpler suspend activation. Up to now I've done the usual thing: using the mouse to initiate suspend.  i.e. engage mouse, move it the top right power symbol, click, wait for the drop down menu, move mouse to "Suspend" and click it.  To save time I do it as quickly as possible, but very occasionally I have missed activating suspend, leaving my laptop without even a screenlock - leaving myself open to be "cheesed" by coworkers or worse.

So I wanted to find a method to lock the screen, then suspend the laptop from a few key presses.  I checked <Ctrl><Alt>S did nothing by trying it with the mouse pointer on the desktop background.  So far so good.  A bit of Googling and I found this:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=813387&page=5 .  My work laptop is running Lucid but, there are methods for other versions in that excellent thread.

I've used gconf-editor to put in keybindings before, but I didn't remember where, so after a minute or so, gave up and went to use the Compiz settings gui.

Howto

First check the command you've chosed actually works.  Open up a terminal and run it.  For me it worked first time, YMMV, so tweak til it works.

Then on the desktop, select: System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager

Then navigate to: General > Commands

Then add your command locking then suspending (mine works for Lucid) to a Command:  gnome-screensaver-command --lock ;  dbus-send --print-reply --system --dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend

Now the command is added click on the "Key Bindings" tab and choose your keybinding. Click on the matching Run command # "Disabled" button, then tick "Enabled".  Then "Grab key combination" and hit your choices and then save with "OK"

You can test your key commands now outside this window to make your laptop lock and suspend.  When your happy, close the app.  That's it.