Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Real Sweatshops and Virtual Reality

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The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer.

“Min leaned back and stretched, then set about the tedious business of resurrecting his character, a drawn-out sequence of operations that can put a player out of action for as long as 10 minutes. In farms with daily production quotas, too much time spent dead instead of farming gold can put the worker’s job at risk. And in shops where daily wages are tied to daily harvests, every minute lost to death is money taken from the farmer’s pocket. But there are times when death is more than just an economic setback for a gold farmer, and this was one of them.”

Via Slashdot.

Different Monday Night

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Gaeltacht Minnesota has gone to its summer schedule, so I have (roughly) alternate Monday nights free. I had planned on going to a class at Woodcraft, for which I had registered by a telephone conversation with wolfsword. However, I got a voicemail this morning that the class had been canceled for lack of students, and that my payment would be refunded.

So I ended up going into Minneapolis with mia_mcdavid for a session of the Speculative Readings Series at Dreamhaven Books, where haddayr read three excellent very short stories and another author read a single longer work, which was very different but also very good. Gaeltacht Minnesota was quite well represented there–All three teachers and several students came to hear haddayr.

Busy Day

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… but I think I did everything I really had to. mia_mcdavid is on her way downtown, where she will pick me up and we will drive to Northfield for my 35 Year College Reunion weekend. Yesterday I was in a bit of a funk, what with stress from work and other activities, and not feeling quite up to this. But going through the motions of packing, browsing the on-line schedule, and getting a good night’s sleep have changed that, and I am ready.

On the schedule I noticed that Boiled in Lead is scheduled to play tomorrow night. I wondered briefly how the College managed to arrange that, but the answer is simple: One of the members is a graduate. Connections….

More bad news for Pluto fans

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Eris is more massive than Pluto. After being reclassified from planet to “Kuiper Belt Object”, Astronomers have now determined that Pluto is not even the largest such object. Eris, being heavier and further away from the Sun, has the bragging rights, at least for now.

Looking at it the other way, if you insist that Pluto really is a planet, you now have to admit that Eris is as well.

Not pretty

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.,..when you have two devices on a LAN with the same IP address. The amazing thing is that it was not immediately and totally disastrous. Most of the LAN did just fine. However, this caused a lot of the recent trouble I had with my employer’s computer here at home. Still not out of the woods, but the remaining problem I can clearly refer to the Help Desk.