Came across this while searching Google for a paper:

hours on hours on hours
my timesheets like car models
spec signoff! relief!

Looking out of my office building, with the wind gusting, right now I can see the rain coming in from the right at a 45 degree angle, and from the left at a 45-degree angle, and straight over the top, as if all of it’s being drawn to a bare spot between clumps of trees on the soft slope of the hill.

… and now it starts to swirl.

I came across something online that claimed that diesel buses emit 200x the pollution of a normal passenger car. I looked into this, read some studies, and it’s not true.

The average vehicle on the road emits ~1# of CO2/mile (it’s higher for light trucks, lower for cars, but it works out quite well). I looked up some testing data, and a late-90s diesel bus on low-sulfur fuel (no trap, none of the new cool technology) puts out ~6.4# CO2/mile.

So an older diesel bus = about six cars, CO2-wise.

Caveats:
– There’s a lot of variance in how much pollution an individual bus generates
– This doesn’t account for the relative harm of the pollution generated by the different vehicles, and there’s a case to be made that the buses should account for non-CO2 products

But as a range… there’s just no way it’s 1-to-200.

I now possess a copy of the 1990 “Year’s Best Science Fiction” which contains the first sci-fi short to ever totally blow my hair back (“Beggars in Spain”) written by Nancy Kress, who is teaching the first week of Clarion West, where I’ll be in two weeks.

Woo-hoo!

If you’re curious, the two stories I applied to Clarion with were:
“Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush” and “Ember“. Both were a couple drafts off the early versions posted here, but not all that much.

You most likely want to be over on the Cheaters Guide blog

This is the new, rapidly-improving home of HLWT. I’ll be back in a minute.

This look is “Benevolence” and is, with a couple twakes, a theme that I desperately wanted to use for USSM. It was up on USSM for a little while on a weekend while I was tinkering and people flipped out with happiness.  It is a little hard-to-read, though. Anyway.

I look forward to being able to play around with WordPress plugins I can’t date tinker with on a much higher-profile site like USSM.

Hey, Hate Life, Will Travel is on the move, and should be up (and on a new, quite lovely WordPress setup) soon.

I finally got to play one of these, and I have a couple things to say:
– the control is a lot finer than I’d been led to expect from coverage
– Wii Sports is great fun to play
– I haven’t been that giddy playing a game in ages
– Playing games I felt more responsible for the results than ever
– Going back to my PS2 felt boring, like I wasn’t really doing anything

I loved it, and for the first time I really felt like I understood the schism people’ve been talking about: playing on the Wii is casual, easy to pick up, it’s fun and funny, in a way that I’ve never seen before. I don’t know if the novelty will wear off, or if developers will exploit it, but I’m unemployed and ever since I picked up the controller and swung a bat in Wii baseball, I’ve been even more obsessed with finding one. It’s so much fun.