The Den of Ubiquity

1. bob the angry flower:
   A fitfully excruciatingly funny comic strip from Edmonton(at least, it used to be, and I'm sure it still is in spirit), now mostly a webcomic, posted at angryflower.com, as well as via the angryflower feed. My friend Darren tried to get me interested in it for a while, but I wasn't interested, but "Coffee With Sinistar" really sold me.
2. cygwin:
   I tried installing Linux on my current computer, an HP Pavilion PC. My attempt to install LILO screwed up my boot sector so I couldn't boot to Windows, until I managed to read the documentation and use dd to fix it. It also couldn't access my 56K modem, so I had to dig out my 14.4 external one.
   
   Somehow I stumbled upon cygwin, which allowed me to pretend that I had Unix on my computer while still running the Windows software I'd grown attached to. I could use vi and everything. It's also proven useful at work, and someday when I have some spare time I aspire to actually contributing to the project.
3. fantasy hero:
   Fantasy Hero was the fantasy RPG spinoff from Hero Games' "Champions" superhero roleplaying game. My best friend and I were instantly captivated by the prospect of being able to build a balanced character, with exactly the skills you wanted, design your own magic system, and build spells from the ground up. It's still, in many ways, my ideal roleplaying system, despite my having lost everything but a photocopy of the first edition(the second edition being, arguably, better), and despite the fact that it's really a hell of a lot of work compared to rolling up a few characters and fighting some wandering monsters in D&D.
4. grande prairie:
   My hometown--I wasn't born there, but I spent all of my school years there, and despite having, by now, lived in Edmonton(where I was born)for longer, I still have a soft spot for it. I am sometimes reminded, though, of how many of my schoolmates, not to mention my brother, look on it as the Isolated Backward Town They Were So Happy To Escape From. My wife, having grown up in a much smaller town, laughs at them, because Grande Prairie at least has a college and bookstores. Having gone back and spent a couple of years there as an adult, I still like it, perhaps principally for the excellent community theatre. Besides, as long as I have Internet, I'm not fussy about what's outside the house.
5. java:
   Strictly the programming language here--never been to the island, and can't stand the drink. I've also never done much programming in it, but it has a lot of qualities that I like, especially after becoming a big fan of refactoring, test-first design, and generally writing a bunch of code without having to design it first. It also finally helped me figure out how object-oriented programming really works. Still, if I want something quick and dirty, I'll probably write it in Perl or Visual Basic, but I'll wish I'd done it in Java.
6. marvel comics:
   Back in the late 70's/early 80's when it was pretty much just them and DC, and they kicked DC's ass. I started out reading mostly the X-Men, Micronauts, Silver Surfer and Doctor Strange, because my brother did, but ended up reading Avengers, Alpha Flight, Defenders, Fantastic Four, X-Factor, New Mutants, and bits and pieces of many other series, before I gave them all up except for Silver Surfer in the mid-80's.
7. nethack:
   This is, perhaps sadly, the computer game that has best captured most of my D&D gaming experience. It often infuriates me, because I have never managed to finish it--not even in Explore Mode. (I could never manage to get past Juiblex.) Sometimes I think I need to go back to the earliest versions and try to finish them, and then upgrade. I've got a Windows version with pictorial tiles, and Simon seems to like it.
8. saaremaa:
   Okay, this one's a little hard to explain. Let's just say that there's an association in my mind between an Estonian island and Ackanomic, and leave it at that. I think I added this interest on a whim, frankly.
9. stephen gould:
   I never took Biology in high school, queasy as I was(and still am)at the prospect of having to dissect a frog or cat or something. Okay, once I cut up a pig's brain, but that was in a class for gifted children and didn't count. But I missed out on a bunch of other stuff, and a lot of that I've caught up on through Stephen Jay Gould. While he sometimes got a little long-winded, he was a very clear thinker when it came to explaining evolution, and should be required reading for anyone entranced by "intelligent design".
10. vim:
    Or, the reason why I installed Cygwin, Part 2. My first exposure to Unix came, actually, on a NeXT computer when I was working at the University of Alberta on a research grant in 1992. They had a lot of graphical tools, but I discovered the Unix command line and took a mostly self-taught crash course in how it worked. I have no idea if they had emacs or not, but I found vi first, and scrounged up a reference card of basic keystrokes. I soon became fairly proficient in it, and even started using it in preference to the windowing-based editor--probably about when I started using tin and elm for newsreading and email.
    
    When I got Linux intalled on my 486(the computer before the abandoned install), I started using vi, of course, and quickly discovered that it was actually vim. I got attached to a lot of the new features, and now I'd probably find it hard to go back to baseline vi. What I find vim/vi particularly indispensible for is the regular expressions and pattern matching. If I want to go through a text file and delete blank lines, or extract parts of lines, or switch the order of two elements, or any of a number of tasks which seem conceptually simple but are prohibitively difficult to do in Microsoft Word without special programming--I open up vi, type in some complicated regexp, and voila! Oh, sure, I could do that in Perl, too, but quite frankly I've gotten out of the habit, and have to go look up the commands, and vi is just quicker.

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