Gotta love this one; it encapsulates the stereotype of the pajama-clad slacker-blogger so perfectly that I’m almost tempted to let it through as a comment. Almost. Instead, I’ll just quote it here, without its pages of accompanying links:

I haven’t been up to anything lately. I’ve just been letting everything happen without me recently. Today was a loss, but eh. That’s how it is. Oh well. It’s not important.

I first read Lewis Padgett’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” when I was about 12. At the time, scifi—preferably from the “golden age” period of the 40s and 50s—was about all I read, an obsession fed by my father, who had worked for Galaxy in the 50s, and kept a stash of old anthologies around the house. “Mimsy” fit squarely into that universe, as did its companions in the “Science Fiction Hall Of Fame Volume 1” anthology, which included Arthur C. Clarke’s “The 9 Billion Names of God” (still one of my favorites) and Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” (ditto).

With all of the hype over the movie adaptation of “Mimsy” (which I don’t have much interest in seeing), I recently decided to revisit the tale. Unable to find my old Science Fiction Book Club edition of SFHFV1, I picked up a copy from my local library, and reread the story. As with many other scifi stories from that period, it’s charmingly dated, with adult characters swilling martinis and exchanging Nick and Nora-style banter, and seven-year-old children wandering off alone with no adult supervision. Reading the story again, I could see why it appealed to me as a 12-year-old. The tale of two children who discover artifacts from the future that allow them to skip about a million years of evolution and enter another dimension sans parents is a perfect childhood fantasy. Not only do the kids get to vanish through the looking glass, but they do so by learning things that are incomprehensible to their dullard parents. Reading it as an adult, however, it’s a chilling story, with deep elements of loss—not just the parents’ loss of their children, though that’s the story’s climax. It’s also a meditation on what adults lose when they leave behind the openness of childhood and enter a world defined not by a boundless horizon, but by its limitations. It’s no accident that the magical toys arrive in a Box (yes, with a capital B). The adults in the tale—even the futuristic father who creates the time machine and sends it on its journey—live in boxes of their own creation, and can never escape. The children can, and do so, never looking back.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen the key players lie repeatedly to the media, spread misinformation and deliberately block efforts to uncover the truth. No, I’m not talking about Alberto Gonzales and his merry band at the Justice Department. I’m talking about Ron Moore, Katee Sackhoff and the gang at “Battlestar Galactica.” As is now quite clear, in the brief period between Starbuck’s “death” and her reappearance in the show’s season finale,  Moore and Sackhoff actively lied to reporters about the character’s fate. Moore gleefully recounted how the decision to “kill” her was developed in a writers’ meeting, and Sackhoff insisted she didn’t have any idea what her character’s fate would be, or whether she would even return next season. And just about everyone involved in the show played up the fact that Sackhoff might just be too busy to continue as Starbuck, thanks to a minor role in another show.

All lies.

And for that, I give my heartfelt thanks. In this era of “radical transparency,” of web sites that have built their entire business model around providing spoilers, of fans who consider it their mission in life to release said spoilers into the wild, Sackhoff and Moore should be praised for helping keep the suspense alive about the show’s season finale, rather than just giving in to the inevitable leaks. Of course, the downside of this is that viewers may never trust Moore again. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing either, since it only helps keep the focus on what happens onscreen, rather than on the random teasers cast by Moore and others into the waters of the net. So, sure, Ron Moore has “confirmed” that the finale’s Dylan groupies really are Cylons, and aren’t just suffering from an acid flashback. But I, for one, won’t be surprised if something else is going on—and I definitely won’t hold any grudges against Moore for lying. Now, about that Gonzales…

After using a DSLR almost exclusively for the past year or so, I’ve started to dabble with compacts again. Basically, it’s come down to the old adage that the best camera is “the one you have with you.” And since carrying a DSLR around constantly can be something of a pain, I’ve started carrying a compact at those times when I want to travel light but still be prepared to capture the moment. Of course, now that I’ve gotten used to using an SLR, it’s tough living with the compromises that compacts force you to deal with. My current compact, the highly rated Fuji F10 (pictured), does indeed take good pictures, and has decent high-ISO performance. But it also suffers from some shutter lag, takes forever to recycle after shooting with the flash, and has virtually no manual controls. So, I’m back in the market for a compact with decent manual controls, a good lens and the ability to go from shot to shot quickly. So far, I haven’t found it, though I’ve seriously considered the Ricoh GR Digital, which has something of a cult following in Japan. However, given that it’s about $600, I can’t see myself rushing out to buy it. So, for now, at least, I’ll stick with the Fuji for those times when pocketability is paramount, and await the Sigma DP1 (though I somehow doubt I’ll be able to afford it).

I’ve been spending way too much time lately playing with Yahoo Pipes. It really is one of the most addictive Web 2.0 apps I’ve ever seen. It also has the potential to be one of the most disruptive. As Yahoo adds features and users take advantage of the power of drag-and-droup remixing, I could see this becoming the engine for user-created services that rival Digg, Netvibes, Techmeme and countless other commercial services. Will this ever really happen? Probably not. Despite the fact that Pipes makes creating mashups and remixes incredibly easy, it’s still pretty geeky, and is unlikely to ever reach a Youtube-like critical mass. But that doesn’t really matter. To casual developers, would-be mashers and the like, it’s nothing short of a revolution. Oh, and I’ve already come up with one useful pipe. Consumer Reports on Safety now includes a Recalls sidebar that takes the latest press releases from the CPSC and  FDA, filters out those that aren’t recall-related and sorts the rest in rev-chron order. Very basic, but the kind of thing that would have been a pain to do pre-Pipes. With Pipes, it was done in about 10 minutes. Sweet.

Okay, this isn’t really a great app by the usual standards (whatever they are). But it’s still pretty cool. John Watson’s Writer is basically a web version of WriteRoom, the Mac app that rips out your entire GUI (not literally, of course, but you get the idea) so you can focus on writing. WriteRoom spawned a solid Windows imitator (DarkRoom) and even a cross-platform Java-based tool (JDarkRoom). And now, with Watson’s version, the glories of green text on a black background have come to the web. No, it’s not a perfect imitation, since there’s no way, even with fullscreen mode, to get rid of everything on the screen. But if you’ve been hankering for that DOS experience, you can now get it without having to install anything.  (And, yes, if you want to install a real classic, you can still get Word 5.5 for DOS for free from Microsoft.)

Om Malik has an interesting post up about how IM is the “last desktop app standing.” As he says, “the desktop IM clients, popularized by America Online’s AIM are still amongst the most used pieces of software, and have not only survived the Web 2.0 revolution but are thriving.” Om’s post got me thinking about how dependent I’ve become on web-based apps. For a lot of my work, I’ve replaced Word with Google Docs, ACDSee with flickr, Outlook with Gmail and Google Calendar, and so on. And as time goes by, I keep dropping more desktop apps. One of my last holdouts was FeedDemon, since I just couldn’t get used to the UI of any web-based feed-readers (and that includes Google Reader). But now that FD parent Newsgator is making some progress in the 2.0 direction, I may just drop FD as well (though NG still has a ways to go to match FD’s usability). And despite Om’s very good points about desktop IM clients, I recently switched from Gaim to Meebo, which I keep running within my Netvibes home page (and I started using Netvibes instead of the Google Desktop sidebar as my widget platform of choice). Of course, I don’t live completely in the cloud. I still use iTunes to download podcasts and Paint Shop Pro for image editing —  though I also stream music straight from the web withthe browser-based version of Rhapsody and do minor image edits with PXN8. And I still have to use Outlook and Word at work — though I increasingly use Google Docs to share documents with colleagues, and sync my Outlook mail with Gmail and calendar with GCal. Ironically, about the only desktop app I currently find indispensable is the one I’m using at this very moment: Windows Live Writer. Sure, I could work directly in Wordpress or Typepad. Or post straight from GDocs. But I find those methods clumsy and inconsistent compared with Live Writer, especially when it comes to working on multiple blogs on a range of platforms. Of course, I’d be more than happy to switch to a web-based app that does everything WLW does — and I suspect someone’s working on it right now. Give me that and Photoshop online, and I may just be able to function completely within Firefox, with little interaction with any other desktop apps.