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The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and wastewater for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

– p. 553 Excerpt From Walkaway

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Yesterday, at work, I was waiting for my computer to install several software packages to install.

While waiting, I was reading several papers, one of which was Intercepting and Instrumenting COM Applications, which was reasonably easy to read, and very useful (bonus!).

The paper had, in my opinion, some of the funniest writing ever seen in an academic paper! To wit:

An Analogy for the Interface Ownership Problem

The following analogy is helpful for understanding the interface ownership problem. A person finds herself in a large multi-dimensional building. The building is divided into many rooms with doors leading from one room to another. The person is assigned the task of identifying all of the rooms in the building and determining which doors lead to which rooms. Unfortunately, all of the walls in the building are invisible. Additionally, from time to time new doors are added to the building and old doors are removed from the building.

Now, in their defense, that was a pretty reasonable description of the problem at hand. On the other hand, it seems silly in the extreme to simplify a problem by introducing multi-dimensional buildings with invisible walls and magically appearing doors. Luckily, I read a lot of Harry Potter, and (most) everything made perfect sense to me.

Now, I’m going back to watching Microsoft Visual Studio install (mmm. thrilling).

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NPR Guest (responding to an e-mail to the show): “Mr. Zoom Junkie had an unfortunate experience.”

I can only imagine what would happen if they didn’t screen the names of e-mails read on-air.