News You Can Bruise for 2004 September 20

Went to Herbivore again, and had the lentil loaf. Okay, but not as good as I'd been hoping.

I bought a UPS a while ago at a yard sale for $10, and I thought it was a pretty good bargain. But then it got lazy or something, because it embarked on a campaign designed to get me to stop using it. Every once in a while it would pretend the power had gone off and beep, beep, beep. Real annoying. The only way to get it to stop was to push the button on the front, which... turned off the power. So instead of a machine that protected my computer in the event of power outages, it was a machine that simulated localized power outages affecting only my computer.

Since I'm not afraid of power outages due to ext3, it's now sitting on my computer room floor enjoying an undeserved retirement. That's the story of the deadbeat UPS.

Neal Stephenson defends the endings of his books from ending-naysayers like myself by saying that his endings are written to conform to his ideas of a good ending, not ours. Okay, fair enough. He's the writer. But that leaves unanswered the question: what is his idea of a good ending?

If we can learn to take Stephenson's works on their own terms, our appreciation of them can only be enhanced. But his aesthetics are in this respect foreign to mine, or there wouldn't be a problem (this is especially bizarre because in most other respects his aesthetics are aligned with mine). So what is the deal?