Dirac Angestun Gesept

In Japan, Women Can Doze With Man Pillow

After a long night at work as a radio DJ, Junko Suzuki likes to snuggle at bedtime - and she says she’s found the perfect partner: a man-shaped pillow.

Apparently, it’s got some advantages over her previous solution:

For Suzuki, who is estranged from her husband, the pillow has definite advantages: It doesn’t squirm or thrash in the night, and you know it’ll be there in the morning.

“It keeps holding me all the way through,” she said in her home outside of Tokyo. “I think this is great because this does not betray me.”

Sarah McLachlan’s done a video for “World on Fire”. She was given a budget of $150,000 to do it with; she spent $15 of that on the video.

See the video, and find out where the rest went, and why.

A clinic, and medicine, in Kenya. An orphanage in South Africa. Schools in Afghanistan. Livestock. Building wells. No bling.

(via Mark Atwood)

Congratulations to all involved, from Scaled Composites and others, on the first of the Ansari X Prize flights.

Derek Draper’s story in the Guardian about his struggles with depression, and positing quite a bit of hidden-even-from-the-sufferer depression (or as he calls it “latent depression”) may be of interest.

Only by dealing with underlying depressive feelings will the mind be freed from clinging to its old patterns for warding them off. If latent depression is acknowledged and faced up to there is the potential to live in a fuller, richer, more meaningful way. For if depression is not just about a set of particular symptoms but is actually emotional - and psychic - deadness, the possibility held out by change is no less than life.

Read the article. If parts of it sound far too familiar, there can be help; medication, therapy, or a combination may be what you need.

Young people, as this newspaper reported recently, are more likely to die from depression than from Aids, cancer and heart disease combined.

It may seem hopeless, but there is hope.

Each of these probably should have been a full blog entry, but I was too busy doing things to blog about doing things. To catch up, here’s a quick run-through of the past few days.

Thursday:

I got to go to a wedding at Cambridge City Hall, and then dinner at a nearby Eritrean restaurant. It was a great day and much fun was had, with good company as well as good food, though several attendees had to leave early to make it to rehearsals for Iolanthe.

Friday gaming:

As one of the few people not playing Swords of Rome, I first got in a quick 3-player game of Can’t Stop while waiting for more people to arrive; once that happened, we played the hardy perennial Puerto Rico (which was lost when one of the other players had enough cash to wind up with Factory, Harbor, and Wharf…ouch). This was followed by a couple rounds on one of Carl’s designs, and the nightcap (or morningcap by that point) was Vinci, which I had not previously played.

Vinci was fun. I’d disliked History of the World for having too much dead time between turns for any given player; this fixes that by having the decline timing chosen by the player and not having the turn order done by random draws of the civilizations by epoch. Amusingly, just before my last turn my empire was cut in half; this would normally have cost me a huge chunk of points, but I declared it to be in decline–and therefore won. Heh.

Saturday:

To the Museum of Fine Arts for the Art Deco exhibition. We’d seen it in San Francisco, but the MFA’s version seemed to be less claustrophobic (better exhibit space) and had some new items (many of them from the MFA’s own collection). I still would have liked to have seen it at the original venue (London’s Victoria & Albert Museum), though.

Sunday:

The Boston By Foot tour of the month was a walk through Jamaica Plain, so we took the T down to Forest Hills, walked up through the Arnold Arboretum, then over to the Loring-Greenough House to begin the tour.

The tour was great fun, and gave us a chance to see a part of Boston we really hadn’t explored before. The weather cooperated, as well; though it was warmer than I would have expected at this time of year, there was enough shade and a cool breeze much of the time. After the tour, we took the 39 bus back into town, made a stop at Trader Joe’s for some things we needed, then off home to relax.

All in all, a good few days.

The Auto & Technik Museum Sinsheim, in Germany, was already on my list of places to visit due to the combination of a Concorde (hey, plenty of museums got one after service ended, but it’s still one I haven’t seen yet), the Soviet Tu-144 (not so easy to find in museums), and various other neat things.

Now they’ve gone one step further.

They’re getting the remaining Soviet “Buran” shuttle (article in German). Sadly, this is not the one that actually flew in space (that one was destroyed in a hangar collapse). I don’t know how long it’ll take for them to get it to Sinsheim and put it on display, but…dang, I really want to go visit once it’s done.

(First noticed at BoingBoing, but that was just a pointer to a picture gallery. I guessed it was Sinsheim, and was able to find the full Der Speigel article with a little searching.)

Yes, it has finally happened. My iPod is no longer capable of holding my entire music collection.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t holding the whole collection anyway; I’d configured it not to copy unchecked songs, which is how I manage duplicate copies of the same track. However, it eventually reached the point at which, even with duplicates removed, and even after heroic re-ripping of stacks of CDs into 128kbps AAC instead of 160kbps MP3 (hey, that’s 25% more music I can cram on)…the day has come.

I’ve now set up a series of playlists (see also previous playlist discussions) that are intended for copying to the iPod, leaving the rest out.

The net result is that the iPod contains the following:

• all 5 star songs
• all 4 star songs
• all 3 star songs not played in the past year
• no 2 star songs
• no 1 star songs (except the iTrip Stations files)
• all unrated songs

This has the useful effect that I’m going to be listening to 3 star songs faster than they come out of the 1 year “shadow” for quite some time, meaning that I’m effectively gaining space on the iPod each day.

Five years ago, September 11th and 12th were Saturday and Sunday, as they are this year.

Five years ago, a random, quick weekend trip to New York seemed like a good idea.

Five years ago, the CityPass for NYC included the museum we really wanted to see (the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum), several others that when added together made the package worthwhile, and tickets for both the Empire State Building and World Trade Center observation decks.

And so, five years ago today, I took these pictures. What is notable now, of course, is not what is in them, but what isn’t–the building beneath my feet at the time. All of these were taken from the observation levels of the South Tower. These, like so many other pictures, are from an unreachable past.

Tuesday night had one last con-related event, a birthday get-together for Feòrag NicBhrìde. Local friends as well as congoers joined the birthday girl at a local brewpub, and much fun was had by all including the Elder God in Attendance and the assorted Minions.

So, in the aftermath of Worldcon…I’m still dead tired (and today’s “fun” at work hasn’t helped). I enjoyed myself most of the time, but not all of the time. I didn’t meet all the people I wanted to meet; those I did meet I often didn’t get enough time with; I made one oops that cost me a great deal of energy in running home and back, and another which put me in a low mood for quite some time…and hit several of the drawbacks to commuting, but not enough of them to want to pay for four nights of a hotel room, especially since I wouldn’t have had any roommates lined up.

Lessons learned from things I did wrong (or not at all), for the future:

Get there earlier for stuff I want to do/see/have a seat for. Look for a line and find out what it’s for when something’s about to start (or signups for something are about to start). Plan meals with folks in advance instead of trying to line up dinner plans at 1700. Be less afraid to say hello to people, but try not to presume too much (for example, be aware of what they’re doing and don’t interrupt). Go to more parties. Print a map of how to get to the Zipcar and how to get the Zipcar back to the hotel once I pick it up, taking those damn one-way streets into account. Keep blister bandages where I can find them if I’m walking across the bridge every night. Don’t over-optimize by not bringing the books I really really want signed because the autograph session isn’t scheduled for that day; opportunities may arise. Put the camera back in the bag after copying off the photos. Swing by the con suite more often. Think about volunteering again (it’s been a long time since I last worked on a con) or even, perhaps, program. If I do get a room at a con, bring tea supplies and entice interesting people with them.

Things I did right:

I tried not to stress too much about missed panels, missed meetings, missed opportunities–mostly successfully. I was able to help people out in various ways, often small but meaningful (getting cups for tea, pointing them in the direction of a particular room, lugging a heavy bag through Government Center) and making the world that little bit better each time. Each time, feeling like I’d done someone a good turn helped as an antidote to some of my frustrations. I also tried to treat myself right with food (and chocolate as appropriate); while I delayed meals, I did get three each day at some point. (Of the 5-2-1 rule, the sleep was the aspect nearest to being missed each day.)

Future con attendance:

Next year’s Boskone is for sure, and Arisia is a possibility. I’m enticed by the thought of Minicon. Interaction (Glasgow Worldcon) is not looking probable; CascadiaCon (Seattle NASFiC) a strong possibility. LAcon IV, looking possible. Nippon 2007, tempting as all hell; maybe a round-the-world flight itinerary would work with it.

Up and off to the Hynes for the last day of the con. A quick pass through the ConCourse, then off to the Con Suite for the Michael Burstein kaffeeklatsch. It was lots of fun, especially since all five non-MAB folks at the table knew him (and were known to him) in one way or another (including his wife Nomi, of course); this meant that he got to introduce each of us to the group, explain how he knew us and/or tell a funny story about how he knew us, and then onward with the discussion. Michael and Nomi are great folks, and it was nice to meet other folks they knew–all of them interesting.

After that, I headed to the “Obsolete High Technology” panel, with Charlie Stross, Jordin Kare, Bob Metzger, and Bill Higgins. More fun, particularly Charlie’s comments about traditional British product design (like the ICL “One-Per-Desk” computer). Afterwards, Bill and I went for lunch and time to meet in person (since we’ve been USENET correspondents for years and years).

Another dealers’ room swing, then off to “TV Storytelling: From Arcs to Episodes”. I actually don’t watch that much SF TV (having managed not to get interested in anything since ST:DS9, and dropping that before it ended) but I still enjoyed the discussion, even if the examples were mostly missing me.

Off to the closing ceremonies, which began with fife & drum and ended with bagpipes. Lots of bagpipes, or at least lots of bagpipe volume. As they led us out into the ConCourse, I met up with someone I hadn’t talked to in 15 years (since, er, Noreascon 3) and then off to meet the LMB listies as they got ready to go to Toscanini’s.

We headed out to catch the #1 bus, and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited…as a bunch of four buses headed the other direction! Eventually I had to leave to make it to the airport to meet an incoming flight, so I made my goodbyes and headed for the T to go to the airport.

As I got to the platform, I noticed a fellow con attendee and old acquaintance trying to deal with a suitcase and backpack, both full of books (imagine that!). I provided some minor assistance getting her and her acquisitions to the airport, and thus extended my con-related activity by an additional half-hour or so.

I didn’t make it back for Dead Dog or any of the other later activities. Home, exhausted, and with work the next morning….