Walking on the Moon

• Will Eisner’s The Spirit #4 and #6
  • Still good to the last drop.  And it is Eisner’s Spirit, not really Cook, Bone, and Stewart’s.  They’re doing a remarkable job channeling Eisner and delivering all the ingredients in a singular genre – Spirit stories.  Even the visual tropes are Eisner, updated for the 21st century – #4 is really sharp in this regard, both the Spirit and Ebony and the Spirit and Dolan have a scenes where the dialog works because of the visual.  A great book; if you found the Spirit reprints off-putting because of the 40’s trappings and stereotypes, give this a try.
  • Sig Fodder: “I mean we have to draw the line.  No dairy, peanut free, donuts make you fat … fine.  But the coffee – all I’m asking is that my coffee taste like coffee, not some new age banana split for fitness freaks.” — Dolan with his finger on the pulse of the key to police work, #6
• Captain America #26
  • Brubaker seems to be trying to hold his story together with the storm of Civil War boiling all around him.  It’s heavy going at places, but though the deck’s pitching some, it remains enjoyable.  Bucky’s resolve at the end of the issue is the first wrong note for that character, and that worries me.  I’ll stick around a while yet.
  • Sig Fodder: “… some of his science is not science if you get my meaning” — Arnim Zola on Victor Von Doom (the attribution alone makes me a little tingly.)
• Batman and the Mad Monk
  • This is the second of Matt Wagner’s excellent retellings of Golden Age Batman storylines in the framework of Miller’s Batman: Year One.  If you’re a comics fan from the 80’s (like me) that’s an irresistable package.  Even if you’re not, this is great stuff.  Wagner’s plotting is clear and strong, and he’s got a really good feel for Batman.  He communicates Batman’s obsession without making him inhuman and builds up a vary plausible world about him.  It’s an joy for long underwear fans everywhere.

A few words about The Johnstown Flood are up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

I just finished The Penelopiad over in Bell, Book and Candle.

My reviews of At Canaan’s Edge and If the River Was Whiskey are up on Bell, Book and Candle.

Of interest to no one but me, I’m sure, but I’ve tweaked my OpenWRT configuration to do a couple new things.

• The router now runs ntpd constantly rather than just synching the time at boot up.
• The router now DHCPs the PXE parameters to the mp3 player I’m building. I had trouble with getting this working earlier and I’ve solved my condiguration problems. Running 2 DHCP daemons was messy and I’m happy to no longer need to.

My review of The Best American Science Writing 2006 is up in Bell, Book and Candle.

I’ve put my review of The Weather Makers up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

When I jumped up to WordPress 2.1.2, I also turned on Akismet, a plug-in that filters blog spam. If you’ve never run a blog, you probably can’t believe the volume of crap that gets autoposted to even the most backwater and benign of blogs. When I logged in after 3-4 days of not touching this blog, there were more than 600 comments all spam. At least I was forced to believe they were all spam; love comments though I do, I’m not reading 600 ads for unsavory, illegal “products” thinly disguised as comments to find the one comment that might be out there.

The 600+ set was a pretty big wakeup call. I think my blog has passed some threshold or some new set of comment spammers have appeared and there’s been a sudden jump in comment spam. At any rate, I was finally sick enough of it to get an application key and start using Akismet.

So far – after a few hours – things look pretty good. If you’ve been trying to comment and not seeing your posts show up, now’s a fine time to try again, as I’ll probably see them. If you do post a comment that doesn’t appear, send me a note.

I started Akismet up a couple hours before this post.  When I made the post, Akismet had blocked 10 bad comments.  You can see the current total near the bottom of most pages.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2. Let me know if anything looks too weird.

In addition to all getting the topology set up more sanely, I’ve moved the network allocation functions off onto the WRT54GL. Now computers connected to my wireless can continue to access the Internet even if ylum is down or off-line.

Practically speaking, I put the DHCP server and a lightweight DNS server up on the little router. These are actually part of the same program, dnsmasq, that comes with OpenWRT. The result is that even if ylum is sick for days, or I’m fooling with it, laptops and other local machines can still reach the rest of the world. Hmmmm. Might be a good time to invest in some MXes, though…

In any case all of this should be invisible to the outside world, but makes me a little happier.