Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to filkcook!! Have a great one!!

Walkies: legs? What are those?

(Cross-posted to healthy_fen.)

Set out for a walk around the Rose Garden, having decided to stay close to home in case the knees acted up. But in the end it was the shins that stopped me. Didn't even get to the Rose Garden before I had to drop down to a strolling pace and turn around. Guess I really needed a bit more recovery time from yesterday. Very annoying. Total time about 20 minutes.

I tossed my shoulder bag, a small water bottle, and the knee braces in a backpack this time. Definitely more clumsy than the bag when it came to getting things out, but also more comfortable.

Moon Song

For as long as I've known her, the flower_cat has been fond of quoting a couple of lines from a poem she heard as a child. It finally occurred to me to type one of the more distinctive lines into Google, which of course yielded the complete poem both by itself and in a blog post (which mentions that it appeared in The Golden Book of Poetry published in 1949), along with a discussion thread on The Mudcat Cafe. Apparently it has also been set to music at least once, and sung in a number of variously mangled versions.

Moon Song

Zoon, zoon, cuddle and croon--
  Over the crinkling sea,
The moon man flings him a silvered net
  Fashioned of moonbeams three.

And some folk say when the net lies long
  And the midnight hour is ripe;
The moon man fishes for some old song
  That fell from a sailor's pipe.

And some folk say that he fishes the bars
  Down where the dead ships lie,
Looking for lost little baby stars
  That slid from the slippery sky.

And the waves roll out and the waves roll in
  And the nodding night wind blows,
But why the moon man fishes the sea
  Only the moon man knows.

Zoon, zoon, net of the moon
  Rides on the wrinkling sea;
Bright is the fret and shining wet,
  Fashioned of moonbeams three.

And some folk say when the great net gleams
  And the waves are dusky blue,
The moon man fishes for two little dreams
  He lost when the world was new.

And some folk say in the late night hours,
  While the long fin-shadows slide,
The moon man fishes for cold sea flowers
  Under the tumbling tide.

And the waves roll out and the waves roll in
  And the gray gulls dip and doze,
But why the moon man fishes the sea
  Only the moon man knows.

Zoon, zoon, cuddle and croon--
  Over the crinkling sea,
The moon man flings him a silvered net
  Fashioned of moonbeams three.

And some folk say that he follows the flecks
  Down where the last light flows,
Fishing for two round gold-rimmed "specs"
  That blew from his button-like nose.

And some folk say while the salt sea foams
  And the silver net lines snare,
The moon man fishes for carven combs
  That float from the mermaids' hair.

And the waves roll out and the waves roll in
  And the nodding night wind blows,
But why the moon man fishes the sea
  Only the moon man knows.

                Mildred Plew Meigs, 1923 

( Note on copyright status )

Wikisource

I have been having altogether too much fun looking around Wikisource. This companion to Wikipedia contains original texts in the public domain, including darned near all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and Jules Verne. They also have an excellent help page on copyright, which is how I landed there in the first place.

I have way too much to do to be reading my way through Wikisource. I just have to convince myself of that.

BotTorrent?

This article about Bit Torrent, Comcast, and spam led me to briefly contemplate carrying BitTorrent traffic over email, which one might call "BotTorrent". Keep track of available and requested files using a mailing list. Break a file into chunks, forward them to a few friends who have indicated interest, let them forward them, and so on. Keep track of where each chunk has been so you don't send duplicates. Of course, everything would have to be base64 encoded, which makes it bigger. And big files would take a lot of chunks. So the carriers would figure out how to label it as spam, and block it. Nevermind.

There are, however, other protocols that are harder to block. Notably HTTP. And you can request a range of bytes from a file. So if you could locate a number of servers all of which had the file, you could spread your requests among them. Hashes are good both for identifying files and for randomizing requests. Alternatively you could just use the Coral content distribution network. I still think there's a pony in there somewhere.

Chumby

My chumby is on its way! I just got the availability email this evening, so of course I've ordered it. OK, I have a weakness for cute little linux-based gadgets. What can I say?

There are a couple of really unique things about the chumby. First of all, the user interface is based on flash (the flash player is the only component of the whole thing that isn't open source). Second, it isn't just the software that's open source: the hardware is, too. (They figure, if somebody can make it more cheaply than their Chinese partner, they've got themselves a second supplier.) Third, most of the "case" is leather, sewed on to the plastic housing. The pattern is, naturally, downloadable, and they expect that many, if not most, users will customize their chumby's appearance as well as its functionality.

Calling it a day

Not my most productive day ever, I'm afraid, but I've gotten a few things done. Mainly, I've updated my personal business cards and my album mini-fliers, which were last printed before CC&S came out and so had the pre-order URL on them.

I took the opportunity to start copying things over to steve.savitzky.net, which will eventually become my main site, over on dreamhost.com. At the moment it's just a mirror of theStarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, and there are a number of broken links. It's mostly useable, though. Hopefully I can get it totally up-to-date and functional by OVFF.

I also wasted some time partially disassembling the old panel PC I rescued from the discard pile at work. The plan was to see whether it could be silenced by replacing its noisy fans; the answer is a definite maybe. I couldn't get it apart far enough to replace the power supply fan, but I figured out how to disconnect it. Maybe I can add a large enough case fan to compensate for its absence. The CPU fan might be replaceable, but it might be better just to replace the heatsink with a fanless one.

Time for a bath, and then to bed.