They've got our future, damn it.It's not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills — oh no, that's not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they've got it and they're living in it, damn them. They've got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They've got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze — a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they're building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.

Charlie's Diary: Japan: some impressions I'm late in noting this, I kept shying around this huge and interesting entry until I had time to read it unrushed. But I think some blog readers will appreciate, and may not have this feed in RSS, so I link it. Charlie Stross' essay on visiting Japan for WorldCon - no WorldCon but plenty o' Japan.

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Tags: CharlieStross, Japan

It's been a hell of a week - and I haven't finished this week's fiction. Bad Tim, no biscuit! It's in progress. Maybe tonight, but I suspect tomorrow is more likely. But there will be one, honest. And it has characters this blog has seen before!

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Tags: Fiction, ThingAWeek, slack, delays

Geeks find many way to set aside the mundanity of the real world these days. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies compete for our time and our money, and we can find ourselves with more escape pods than ever before, an embarrassment of riches that can be overwhelming, with dire consequences if we choose . . . poorly.

SuicideGirls > News > Geek > Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: A Mind Forever Voyaging Look, just go read the whole thing OK? Yeah, yeah SuicideGirls NSFW, blah blah, blahdity blah. It's worth the effort. And when somebody asks me about the fact that I've gone over two years without setting foot inside a movie theater - I'm linking them to this article.

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Tags: WilWheaton, culture, movies, gaming

The qlmanage utility gives you direct access to many Quick Look functions; of specific interest is the -p flag. This option displays the Quick Look generated preview for any file. So if you tell it to qlmanage -p foo.png, the image immediately pops up in a Quick Look pane.

Terminal Tip: Use Quick Look from the Leopard command line - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) Quick Look is very nice - but it doesn't display Excel 2000 files completely correctly. I've seen empty cells, and cells that should have green numbers say [Green]<number> instead.

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Tags: QuickLook, terminal, OSX, Leopard

TV Guide.com reported that producers of NBC's Heroes are shooting an alternate ending to the Dec. 3 episode that will wrap up the second season early in the event an expected writers' strike prevents the show from continuing with new episodes.

SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel | SCIFI.COM The article goes on to say that the 12/3 episode was always supposed to wrap the current "Generations" storyline, so it's really just a question about whether they kick off a new story I suppose. Which brings me to question that they are wrapping the Heroes story in just like four weeks or so. This season has been an awful lot of setup and talkiness, compared to last year. I guess maybe they are just wrapping the one story element, leaving Claire, Hiro, and maybe in Mohinder's "inside agent" storyline still to carry forward.

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Tags: Heroes, television, WGA, Strike