Dry Ice Factory

The New York Times has an article about the technology scene in Seattle that echoes the one in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about Google that I posted about recently. It mentions the opening of the Google research lab in Fremont too. It also talks about the increase of venture capital coming to Seattle, and it talks about the importance of the University of Washington to what's going on in the tech sector here. Pretty good punchline, too: 'Mr. Etzioni says Seattle has at least one advantage over its storied counterpart in California. “People aren’t distracted by too much sunshine,“ he said. “They sit in their offices or garages and get creative.”' That was actually an argument used about the music scene back in the grunge era, come to think of it. I guess the weather explains everything that happens here. Or could it be the only thing people know about Seattle?

This morning I opened my e-mail and found a message from notification@powells.com.

'What the hell?' I asked myself.

'Psst!' said the e-mail. 'A book on your Notification List at Powells.com is now in stock or available for backorder.'

'What the hell?' I asked myself.

'Cinema of Josef Von Sternberg by John Baxter,' said the e-mail.

Oh, right! I must have used the Powells notification service on a whim because I couldn't find the book anywhere online, which I kind of remember. That must have been, what, over a year ago? I dunno, I forget. Computers never forget, eh? Or at least they remember longer than I do.

Score!

Interesting article in the Business section of the Seattle Times yesterday (did you all know that Boeing assembles jets in Seattle?) about an air transport industry discussion of carbon-emissions and the prospects of a zero-emissions jet. My impression is that the discussion is much more serious in Europe than it is here, or at least that British friends apologize more for their air travel than American friends do. Yet the article contains a claim that airplanes don't contribute all that much to global carbon emissions, at least percentage-wise:

Yet many at the Vancouver conference also portrayed the issue as one of perception rather than reality. Airlines now account for only 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, a share that will grow to 3 percent by 2050 even as air-travel demand rises, according to IATA data.

"While the facts say otherwise, it is clear that the perception is there that we airlines are a major contributor to greenhouse gases," Northwest Airlines CEO Doug Steenland said at Monday's meeting. ...

In a panel discussion, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, CEO for German carrier Lufthansa, said that weighing the total carbon emissions from the travel alternatives for a journey from Hamburg to Frankfurt, "from an ecological point of view, you should not take the train. You should fly."

Or, I suppose, just stay in Hamburg, which is probably more fun than Frankfurt anyway. I mean, did the Beatles ever play Frankfurt?

So in the comments to my previous post, I wondered whether non-SF zines were struggling with digital formats as well. Lo and behold, in the latest issue of David Burton's PDFzine Pixel, he comments on this very question:

Mainstream zines took their inspiration and concept from SF zines, and from what I’ve seen I don’t think they’ve done much innovation in the overall model, actually. Certainly they’ve moved it to other genres, and in some cases maybe taken the format in different directions. I’m not sure how healthy the “zine scene” really is these days. From what I can tell, it isn’t much healthier than our fanzine arena – if anything, mundane zines have shifted even more than fanzines to the paperless digital models. They seem to have by-passed the “digital/paper” idea I was talking about altogether and are either still deadtree or are published as Web sites or blogs – there doesn’t seem to be the middle ground (of PDFs substituting for paper) that you find in fanzines today.

He has some interesting things to say about design in fanzines too. The whole interview is worth a read, and he's certainly doing the most interesting design in the PDFzines I've looked at.

On Monday, when the laser printer at Toad Woods was crumpling paper, gerisullivan got out the vegetable steamer and steamed the air in the vicinity of the printer. It got the message and stopped crumpling paper. Who says that the threat of torture never works?

For the past two days I've been slaving over a hot mimeo copy-printer called Mr. G. I am Mr. G's bitch. It's a lot of fun. I'm not sure I wanted to know this about myself. I blame NESFA.

So the problem I mentioned a few days ago regarding Yahoo frustrations has blossomed into a situation where yesterday I was unable to do anything at all after rebooting the PC because the pointer turned to an hourglass whenever I dragged it over the Start button and wouldn't react at all to the icons on my desktop. This had happened occasionally previously, but this time even rebooting yet again didn't help.

The first sign that the system was having a problem came a couple of weeks ago when I'd try to shut down and would get a message that something called ccApp.exe was not responding. I discovered that ccApp.exe is part of Norton Antivirus and that updating Norton should take care of the problem. Yesterday before everything went tits up, I updated Norton but was told that Norton Antivirus was broken and should be uninstalled and reinstalled. Today I have read that the pointer turning into an hourglass is probably related to Norton Antivirus as well. It probably thinks my mouse driver is a virus or something. So I need to uninstall the damned program, but it turns out that uninstalling Norton is a five step process that includes installing other utilities and hand-editing the registry.

May I just say fuck these fucking fucks? I paid forty bucks for this nightmare? Thank you, Symantec! You have earned my undying loyalty!