OK, if you live badly in this life, you will find yourself in an Airport after you die.

Your flight will be leaving from Terminal One, which, due to a support-staff strike, is knee deep in trash and cigarette ashes (smoking’s allowed here). Your flight has been delayed. The terminal is crowded to overflowing, with people standing, sitting on the floor, doing everything but pitching tents. If your sins were relatively minor in the previous life, you get a seat, albeit a seat sticky with spilled milkshake, chewed gum, and other unidentifiable substances. You share your seat with your luggage, which is inexplicably heavy and bulky.

You wait, while a couple has a screaming fight right next to you. A child plays a portable video game that makes electronic beeps and chirps, just loud enough that you cannot sleep. The closest restroom is half a mile away, and you don’t dare visit it because you’ll lose your spot, and be forced to stand in the surly-looking throng over by the window, who are being tormented by the hot sun streaming in. And anyway, you have strong indications that the toilets in that restroom have clearly backed up.

Every few hours, there is an announcement that your flight has been further delayed. It’s always delayed by “just a few minutes.” Voices in many languages are broadcast over the fuzzy PA, thanking you for your patience during construction, warning you to look out for suspicious packages, announcing other flight delays and cancellations, and advertising the various concession stands. The concession stands are all closed due to the strike.

Every third day, or so, there is a gate-change announcement for your flight. You, and two hundred other lost souls, must pick up your belongings and rush to another terminal. Now, this Airport is a vast Airport, but not very well maintained. There are corridors that go off into dead-ends, there are elevators that trap you between floors for days on end. Your heavy baggage bangs against your legs as you frantically run, trying to find this other terminal. The new terminal is no improvement upon the old terminal — if anything, it’s smaller and more crowded. And, upon your arrival there, the flight delayed announcements resume.

Every third week or so, your flight actually boards. You and your weary, stinking fellow travellers crowd onto a airplane that doesn’t look like it’s been cleaned in years. The seats are very small and close together. Once everyone has completed the herculean struggle to cram their bags under seats and into the overhead, you sit. And wait. The air conditioning is not running on the plane, and the air feels like it’s been breathed and exhaled by a hundred tubercular people before it gets to you. After a few hours, the plane finally rolls back from the terminal, and waits in the queue for the runway. It’s positioned so that the hot sun streams through your window. The windowshade is jammed, and the tab by which you should be able to pull it down has been broken off.
After seven or eight hours, there is an announcement that, due to uncontrollable events, this airplane will not be permitted to fly, and that you will need to report to the replacement flight in Terminal Three. Once in Terminal Three, the standard terminal cycle repeats.

Every third month or so, your flight actually departs. Your seat is next to a morbidly obese individual who overflows into half of your seat. Right before takeoff, this individual ruefully mentions a propensity for motion sickness; this announcement is prophetic, as vomiting commences shortly after takeoff. The narcissist businessman in the seat ahead of you tilts back the seat as far as it will go, which leads you to discover that your seat is jammed and will not recline. His cologne was applied using the “more is better” philosophy, and he smokes through the whole flight while berating his trophy wife, flirting overtly with the stewardess, and taunting his wife with stories of his infidelities. She blubbers in misery throughout the flight. The woman across the aisle prays loudly for the whole flight. You discover that the book you had saved for the flight is misprinted, and after the first chapter, the pages are too blurry to read. The stewardess sadly informs everyone that there will be no food or beverage service on this flight.
Behind you sits the child with the video game, and he is so excited by the game that he unconsciously kicks your seat for the whole flight. His baby sister screams and shrieks from the moment you board the plan until the plane lands twelve hours later, and the captain explains that due to technical difficulties, you have been diverted to another airport. Your flight will continue from Terminal Six.

And this is your eternity.

Well, I can now state authoritatively that the problem was with Mac OS. I still don’t know what went wrong, or why, since I was originally able to sync a few times before it stopped working.

In any case, I upgraded the notebook to Mac OS 10.4 (“Tiger”), and lo and behold! sync worked with the cable right off the bat. And damn is the USB sync cable faster than bluetooth.

So if you’re having problems synching on a Mac, this might be a starting point for diagnosing the problem.

As the son of an Astronomer, it would be the height of heresy (not to mention treason) to say something along the lines of “but Astrology is scientifically defensible”.

I have, however, had a theory rattling around in my head for a while on this topic. My theory may be obvious and well known, perhaps even disproven, but I have yet to see any other references to the basic concept. A recent study on the factors determining the onset of menopause, however, shows a similar conclusion, so I felt like it was time to present the idea.

My assumption is that people’s personalities could be shaped by the time of year in which they are born, and that common traits may be found among people born in similar seasons. This is not to say that the boundaries are calendar months, nor linked to planetary or cosmic positions, with the exception of the relative positioning of the earth and sun. My thought is that the availability of vitamins and micronutrients in the diet have traditionally been seasonal, and that neonatal nutrition may have a subtle but real effect upon brain development. Obviously, there are a lot of caveats to this theory: primarily, it assumes that personality is (at least partially) a result of physical brain structure.

In any case, next time you hear someone rejecting Astrology out-of-hand with arguments about the relative gravitational fields of the planets and the doctor delivering a baby, this theory can be used to play devil’s advocate. And, after all, that’s where the fun is.

Thomas Malory, 1470, edition published by William Caxton, reprinted as an eBook from BlackMask.com

Top ten archaic words from Mort d’ Arthur that deserve to be brought back into the common lexicon:

1. dight: orderly, proper, or adorned. “And at the last he entered into a chamber that was marvellously and well dight and richly…”
2. maugre: in spite of, notwithstanding. “… yet had I liefer die in this prison with worship, than to have one of you to my paramour maugre my head.”
3. hight: to call or name. “It was a king that hight Meliodas, and he was lord and king of the country of Liones…”
4. liefer: prefer, rather. “…for there is no knight that I saw this seven years that I had liefer ado withal than with him.”
5. wood: mad, insane, raving. “Then was the king wood wroth that he had no knights to answer him.”
6. yede: past tense of to go. “Then he yede and armed him and horsed him in the best manner.”
7. siker: certain, secure. “So was there sikerness made on both parties that no treason should be wrought on neither party; …”
8. paynim: Pagan, non-Christian, especially Saracen or Muslim. “Then the damosel sent unto Corsabrin, and bade him go unto Sir Palomides that was a paynim as well as he…”
9. sithen: since. “Now tell me your name, sith ye be a lover, or else I shall do battle with you.”
10. chiertee: tenderness, affection, cheerfulness. “Howbeit it hath liked her good grace to have me in chiertee, and to cherish me more than any other knight…”

I have a strange mania, which comprises various and sundry thoughts involving reconstruction, reinvention, and rebuilding some semblance of structure after some unspecified societal collapse. Maybe it’s because I read too much post-apocalyptic science fiction at too young an age, or because I’ve succumbed to the fear-mongering of the news media, but I often find myself thinking about how I would implement key elements of infrastructure (or even obscure and trivial manufacturing) if the existing order were to fail.

This is not to say I’m a survivalist, or caching weapons, or preparing for The Tribulations. Frankly, living where and how I do, I’d be unlikely to survive a serious breakdown of our society. Maybe it’s merely a fascination with how things work.

This section will include some of these musings.

I’ll start with something trivial: how would I build a machine to manufacture pipecleaners?

The basic idea of a pipecleaner is simple: a large number of short, stiff bristles are held tightly together in a spiral formed of two or more wires. The puzzle is that the tight spiral of wire holds the bristles in position; before the wires are twisted, the bristles are free to move however they will. Using longer bristles makes it easier to hold them in position, but more difficult to twist the wires which will secure them. What’s more, that would require trimming the bristles after the twist is completed, which would be a complicated spiral cut, and would be wasteful.

My best solution thus far is to have a mechanism knot long bristles around one wire, which enables a simple straight cut to correct their length, and prevents wasted material. Then, the second wire is applied, and the two wires are twisted.