Author: Rory

Remember the morning a couple of years ago when you went into the local supermarket and were startled by pre-teens passing you at high speed in shoes that, on closer inspection, turned out to have wheels on them? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back, because you haven’t seen someone below the age of thirteen in any sort of regular, wheel-less shoe since then. I’ll allow you a moment of quiet reflection about the good old days when you could walk down the street in safety before I spring the news on you.

Done? Quietly contented? Ok, cool. Now, did you know they make Heelys in adult sizes? Turns out there’s this place called “The Internet” where you can buy all sorts of things that show up at your house in a couple of days. I’m now starting the intensive training period in which I presume I will learn to aggressively skate past balance-challenged elderly people at a disrespectfully close distance. I can’t wait.

Now I know it all sounds great, but it’s not all fun and games. I should remind you that this new technology does basically require that you walk around all day on top of some tiny wheels. I’ll be back with a injury report tomorrow.

How much cardboard and other materials are used every day in shipping packages around the country and around the world? How much of that it reused or recycled, versus what’s just chucked in a landfill? I don’t know the answers to those questions but if I did I imagine it would make me a sad panda.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we did to postage what we have done to shopping bags? Replace one-use containers with more durable, reusable ones. They’d be more expensive than what we use now, but that expense would be spread out over multiple uses rather than just tearing the box off and chucking it on an ever-growing pile of trash. I imagine that if there were standards of size, shape, and weight it would even make it easier for the postal system to deal with packages, compared to having to deal with all manner of shapes and sizes now.

Ok, so there are some obvious difficulties here, and I’m sure a whole host of non-obvious ones. There’s the initial outlay, the solution to which is to grin and bear it. More damning is the problem that people on the receiving end would not necessarily be motivated to do anything but discard the newer packaging just as they do now, so there would need to be some sort of incentive system. That’s doubly so because most people only ever receive parcels and never send them, so there’s no natural way for the packaging to get back out into the system. You’d have to go to the post office to drop it off, or have it collected. Reimbursement for returned parcels, like they used to do with glass soda bottles? Who knows.

Problems aside, I think it’s at least worth thinking about this problem now that people are much more concerned than before about waste, and now that a lot of commerce is taking place on the Web so there are more parcels being delivered now than ever before.

I’ve been thinking (always a bad idea). There’s loads of scope for different stories that all use the same premise as the movie Groundhog Day—reliving the same day repeatedly until you do something right or find a way to fix whatever is happening. There’s the movie itself; the Stargate SG-1 episode where Jack and Teal’c continuously relive the same day; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with Kelsey Grammer and the temporal causality loop; and any number of other stories that have and haven’t been written.

It’s a setup that works with any character in any setting. There are tons of possibilities for ways that different people would deal with the situation, adapt to it, and ultimately try to solve it. It could be an entire genre unto itself.

Imagine if you had to keep reliving the same day until you wrote the best story in that genre.

Going through a bunch of notes I’ve taken in the last few months (using the brilliantly simple notes app on the iPod Touch) I came to one note that was a single word, with no other context: Slamball. I have no idea who mentioned this to me and persuaded me it was something worth noting to look up later, but I’m glad that they did. Slamball—as best I can describe it—is full-contact basketball, with trampolines.

Share and enjoy:

In Bruge: made of win.

(from Twitter, by txt)

Third day in a row out of work sick and I haven’t seen the Groundhog Day episode of Stargate SG-1 even once.

(from Twitter, by txt)

A few hours before Jonathan Coulton performed his very first gig in the UK ever (And the first outside the states, I believe), he bought a Tenori-on which is apparently only available over there.

This means we ended up being the first people to ever see him perform playing with a new geeky toy. It looked very much like this:

I also, briefly, met Aquarion.

We also ended up with covers of The Saturday Boy and “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time?” The latter of which doesn’t appear to have made it to YouTube yet. Most of the rest of the concert did, though

Being at home for only one weekend in a month means waiting a long time for a haircut. 11 people ahead of me.

(from Twitter, by txt)

Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Data constructs a female “android” to be his daughter? Shouldn’t she have been referred to as a “gynoid”? Either that or they should both be called “anthroids”.

Must invest in an electric razor I can bring in carry-on luggage. Part of Operation Look Less Hobo-ish.

(from Twitter, by txt)