So I’m a huge William Gibson fan – his cyberpunk trilogy caught my attention in the 80s, and I’ve been a reader ever since. Today I was cruising his blog and noticed this post:
My new novel is being published as The Very Latest, The Most Recent And Terrible News. On the multiverse fork immediately adjacent , though, it’s titled The Mongolian Death Worm. Utterly different works, of course, in spite their texts being exactly identical in every regard. For you, though, it’s Spook Country.
Hmmm… so we jumped over to Amazon just for fun, and noticed this offering:
Untitled (Hardcover)
by William Gibson (Author)
List Price: $25.95
Price: $17.13 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $8.82 (34%)
Pre-Order Price Guarantee! Order now and if the Amazon.com price decreases between your order time and release date, you’ll receive the lowest price. See Details
Availability: This title will be released on August 7, 2007. Pre-order now. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Wow. A book with different names depending on which thread of the multiverse you happen to be experiencing. It’s The Very Latest, The Most Recent And Terrible News or The Mongolian Death Worm or Spook Country or Untitled, depending, and it’s identical but utterly different. Multidimensional publishing has arrived, apparently… but tell us, how many dimensions are there? Newton and Einstein thought there were four, but string theorists keep talking about eleven. I can only find four titles (so far)… significant?
If you’ve been following my struggles with updating our our LAN, you’ll know that DNS has been an issue. Earlier we had found a nifty product called DNS Enabler to turn on and configure the BIND servers lurking under Mac OS X’s hood, but there were some problems leading to slow browser page loads. I’m pleased to report that with this tip (and a little work to uncover Comcast’s DNS servers) all now appears to be well.
All the machines on the LAN point to our LAN’s twin DNS servers (2 Mac Minis) which resolve local lookups, and forward request to Comcast for addresses not on the private network or in the servers’ caches. Forwarding is now working correctly, and the presence of lightly-loaded DNS on the gigabit LAN makes for very snappy response for local or cached addresses.
So, now we can begin streamlining the LAN, and moving services onto more compact (and powerful) hardware (e.g. the Core Duo Mini). Our much-liked (and very reliable) G4 Cube and our very nice 64-bit AMD-based Linux machine may be retired and/or reassigned. A couple of new experiments that were in back-of-napkin or prototype stage can now proceed. This should be fun…
Not many can have read about the response of Amish families to the horrific events in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania without being touched by the kindness shown to the family of Charles C. Roberts by the friends and families of his victims. Theirs is a true Christian witness, one that is sorely lacking in our times, especially among many who rather loudly make a claim to being ‘Christian’, but whose witness is lacking…