SF and Change

Whipped back from a comment I made here.
Perhaps what defines SF best is it's embracing of Change.  Change is _hard_ - it causes stresses and strains on people attached to the status quo, and may well kill off whatever lived in niches that are no longer there.  It's no mistake that the card in the Tarot that means Change is actually called Death.

In some ways, vast amounts of SF is about Singularities - those tipping points beyond which we cannot see without going over them, little deaths and megadeaths, deaths of personality and deaths of societies, interactions with the unknown Other, and with the unknown self.  It's about moving forward, encountering something we never expected and then seeing how that changes us.  That's scary, and it's not something most people ever think about - no wonder it's niche.

Oh, and great big rocket ships, of course.  With huge fricking laser cannons.  It's about that too.  But you don't get much change when you buy one of them.

New Orleans evacuation

There's a fascinating discussion here of the fact that New Orleans had no kind of organised evacuation of people who couldn't afford to evacuate themselves.  Scary stuff.

Long few days

We've finally hit the end of another iteration at work - the bugfixes are all in, the things that aren't vital have been rolled over to the next iteration, the change requests are in to have things rolled out to the users on Thursday night, and we've started planning sessions for the next set of changes.  The final problem was discovering that half the users had Service Pack 1 of the .Net Framework, and half didn't - as we depended on a fix in SP1, this wasn't good.  Thankfully they've agreed to update everyone tomorrow night, just in time for us to go out, so everything should be working.

This evening was a tad hectic - my parents bought me an amp and speakers for my birthday - and tonight I dropped by Richer Sounds to pick up the speakers.  Lilian had offered to give me a lift with them on Saturday, but frankly I couldn't wait, so I taxied them home instead.  Erin came over too, and despite Ed's claims he was going to head out for a few hours, he decided to hang around, so I cooked some food, played Robo Rally (finally winning a game, albeit against two people who hadn't played a whole game before) and tried to attach the speakers to the amp.

This didn't go at all according to plan - I'd not thought about the fact that the speaker cables might not be cut - I have been given about 15m of wire, in a single piece - and so didn't have any wire cutters.  I also didn't have anything terribly useful for connecting the SCART box to the amp.  I managed to fudge half of this, but in the process managed to dislodge various other cables from the system, and mess things up to the extent that merely getting everything plugged back in and in the working state it was before I started has given me a fair chunk of satisfaction.  The cutting of wires to size, running of them under carpets, and actual setting up of speakers will have to wait until I'm next in, which is Saturday.