In Pursuit of Mysteries

Maoomancy

At least one or two of my coworkers have no heard my opinion of the new be-all and end-all of divination methods: Maoomancy.

Maoomancy is similar to Bibliomancy where a question is asked and then the Christian Bible is opened to a random passage. This passage contains the universe’s pointer to the answer to the question. Sort of a Christian Magic Eight Ball, it seems. There are variations with dictionaries but they aren’t nearly as fun.

Maoomancy does the same thing but using a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book as the source of Wisdom. Chairman Mao knows all, he’s dead, and as a former dictator, is an open source (heh) of endless derision from certain people. In any case, since I actually own a copy of Mao’s book (don’t ask!), it works for me.

Today, at the War Team meeting for my team at work, I asked the discarnate spirit of Chairman Mao if we would ship our next item within schedule. He replied:

“At the present stage, the period of building socialism, the classes, strata and social groups which favour, support and work for the cause of socialist construction all come within the category of the people, while the social forces and groups which resist the socialist revolution and are hostile to or sabotage socialist construction are all enemies of the people.”

The Inventor of “Wiki” Works at Microsoft

I have a small Wiki set up for one of the spiritual groups that I work with and I’m starting to maintain one at my work. They are fairly fun and I enjoy the group collaboration aspect of it as social software. I found this at the Seattle PI at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/158020_msftnotebook26.html for sharing.

Microsoft Notebook: Wiki pioneer planted the seed and watched it grow

By TODD BISHOP
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

To Microsoft’s roster of employees, add the inventor of the wiki.

A wiki? Unless you’re heavily into the Internet, chances are you’re wondering what the heck that is.

		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Ward Cunningham brings his knowledge of patterns as problem solvers to Microsoft’s Prescriptive Architecture Guidance group.

The wiki concept was created by Ward Cunningham, who joined Microsoft last month after working as a consultant to the company. Cunningham set out in 1995 to create a unique online site for people involved in technical aspects of a type of software development known as object-oriented programming.

A wiki is a computer program that lets people around the world collaborate to create and update Web pages. The resulting collections of pages are also known as wikis. But there’s more to it than that. Anyone who reads a wiki — yes, anyone — can also easily make changes, corrections and additions, create whole new pages, and even correct the way the wiki is organized.

“It took a while for this to catch on because it sounded so unusual, but I’ve now got 25,000 pages about programming up on that site,” Cunningham said last week.

(Read the rest)

The Claw of the Conciliator

I finished the Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe last night. That’s the second of his Book of the New Son series (of four). After I read these four, I’m going to read The Urth of the New Sun, then the four Books of the Long Sun followed by the three Books of the Short Sun.

Damn, and here I thought that Frank Herbert had written the longest series in the world with his Dune books. These twelve books of Wolfe’s will be my reading for a while but I am greatly enjoying them. I read the first few as a teen but I wasn’t really in a position to enjoy them or the style of the writing at the time. Teens aren’t known for catching anything subtle (nor am I, really) but these books have slender strands woven all through them.

Luckily, a friend also lent me his copy of the the Lexicon Urthus, which is a dictionary of all of the obscure terminology that Wolfe uses throughout the series. I generally catch the Gnosstic, Latin and Kabbalistic references but not many of the others. The lexicon will probably be of great aid ahead.