This site listed the best jobs in America. My job is Systems Engineer, which is #1, although I think of myself as a Software Developer – #12. I spent 15 years at Lockheed as an IT Manager, listed at #5. I also work from time to time as a an evening College Professor listed at #3.

In any case, I have a good profession. Sometimes I complain, but I really like coding for a living. If I could do my job without any contact with humans I could be happy.

The Best Jobs In America.

Just five days left to submit your Hugo nomination – please be kind ad add The Nigerian Soul by Keith P. Graham at Atomjack as one of your choices.

If you voted already you can resubmit you ballot with any changes. Only the most recent ballot is used.

I voted today.

I will be interesting to see how the voting comes out. There is precious little excitement about the nomination process. Not only is my story never mentioned, there are only a few dozen blogs that actually discuss voting or suggest titles. Most discussion is about Avatar or District 9. I can understand why out of millions of SF fans, some categories get less than a dozen nominations. I could not find anyone nominating a Novella.

I voted for Finlay’s Novelette because it was the only Novelette that I’ve read in the last few years and was good enough to get a nomination. I am sure there were others, but I rarely read the pro zines and it was only by luck that I read the issue he was in.

I voted for Moon, just because it was less commercial than the other films and was closer to what I think of as real SF.

I voted for Fred Pohl and Steve Davidson for best fan writers because, well, they are the best fan writers.

I threw in a few of the good folks at SamsDot, Tyree and J, because they are good folks, but I have not read any of their current crop of zines and books. I don’t think they qualify because the rules might say something about pro rates or minimum circulation numbers. The rules tend conspire against the small press.

I voted for John Shirley’s Bleak History. This was not only a good book by an author that I enjoy reading, but it was the kind of book that deserves to read by more people. I am hoping it gets a nomination so that people learn about it. John, however, did seemed reluctant to promote himself when I contacted him about the Hugo voting. Perhaps he has been there before and didn’t want to be disappointed or else he felt it was unseemly, as in the Dickinson poem:

“To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

The nominations will be announced in the next month or so. It will interesting to see how many votes my choices get. I figure 3 or 4 for myself and maybe 6 or 8 for Steve. Fred Pohl should be a shoe-in. Shirley’s book will get at least two (Erica and me). I wonder how many SF fans joined or attended Worldcon and out of those how many will vote.

Brandon Mcconnell makes incredible space landscape designs using spray paint. You can see some of them at his website Spacepaintings.com.

He also sells instructional DVDs that show how to use his techniques. There are galleries of the designs by his students on the website and some are very good.

The video below shows Brandon’s technique. He creates a painting in 38 seconds.

I heard from a friend and colleague who has retired to Florida. I thought Florida was too hot and humid for survival the couple of times that I was there.

I don’t want to go south when I retire.

My friend really enjoys Pickle Ball. I does look like fun. I wonder if they will have Pickle Ball in northern Maine when I retire to start writing my Novels?

PickleBall.com (Paddle Game Mini-Tennis Outdoor Fun).

John sent me this:

“While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.”

Mark Twain

This video claims that it is a trailer for the last Sci-Fi movie. We can only hope.

SCIENCE FICTION IS DEAD | Science Fiction Video Resources.

Each year the bee farms in Georgia announce the earliest possible date for bee shipments. Each year the date is delayed because of weather.

The first weather related bee delay has been announced.

My bee packages are now due to arrive in West Nyack on April 2nd, 2010.

AZApiaries.com » Package Bee & Nuc Delivery Dates.

I am 6′3″, tall but well within the range of normal. The last time I flew, I had my knees under my chin for the whole trip because there was no room for me in the little bitty space they give people in coach. I always asked for the emergency exit seat, but you don’t often get one.

Luckily, I no longer work at a job where I have to fly places two weeks out of every month.

With luck, I will never have to fly again. I won’t pay an extra $60 for a normal human size seat. I will take the train or drive, and if I can’t, I’ll stay home.

I miss my trips to Chicago, Austin, San Francisco and DC, but I am older now and I can’t sit all folded up for several hours anymore.

Continental to let coach customers buy more space.

Eric sent me this:

J. Erwine (a newly expectant Dad) has announced that The Martian Wave Science Fiction magazine is now available. I don’t remember if I get a free copy or not.

My story The Reefs of Jove is in it. The story is about adventure while exploring the high atmosphere of Jupiter in a dirigible. The cover could almost be an illustration of part of the story.

I can hardly wait to see a copy. Sorry, the story is not available online. I wonder if I could ask  J. would put it up on the SamsDot site is a kind of teaser for the magazine?

Here is the lineup:

Stories:
Steve De Beer: Adaptor
Tyree Campbell: Somewhere With Mornings
Dan Thompson: Prize Crew
Keith P. Graham: The Reefs of Jove
Patty Jansen: Luminescence
Bret Tallman: Into the Silence Flies a Moth
Rick Novy: The Pillars of Europa
Lawrence Dagstine: The Great Martian Depression

poems:
Shelly Bryant: Bypassed
Justin Bohardt: The Barren Wastes
s.c. virtes: another pit for sale
Marge Simon: A Hollander’s Secret Weapon: 1609
Marge Simon: Hindsight

The Martian Wave Magazines.

Free Book Giveaway

I have several thousand books that I have either read or have decided not to read. I bought a huge collection last summer at a garage sale of books from the 1950s. My brother bought me about 150 hard cover books at another garage sale. I also bought about 500 books at eBay big lot auctions. I have many duplicates and many more that I have read and won’t read again.

I’ve decided to give away some books. I am doing this to 1) make room on my shelves and 2) get more readers to my blog and web pages. Although I intend to sell some books on eBay, it is fun to give a few away, as well. I will try to pick a variety of sub-genres each week to accommodate different tastes.

The rules are:

1. One entry per email and street. Please don’t try to get more than one book at a time.
2. You are limited to one book a month unless nobody else wants a book.
3. I pay the cheapest postage available. If you live outside the US, I will not pay more than $5. (And I don’t want to pay that.) Media Mail takes up to two weeks in the US. Surface mail can take more than a month to Europe or Australia.
4. If you want express, airmail, or anything other than Media Mail or cheap surface mail, you can send me the difference via paypal.
5. I am using old used shipping envelopes. I do not pay for delivery confirmation.
6. All books are in used as-is condition. All books are read, some have spent time in my pocket, some may have pizza sauce stains. On the other hand, some of these books are more than 50 years old. Conditions varies from pretty good to just readable.
7. No substitutions, returns or complaints. If you don’t like the book, pass it on to someone else.
8. Allergies:  I have 7 cats – there WILL be cat hair.
9. In return for a a book I would appreciate a back-link to my blog or one of my pages, or a comment on another blog with a reference, or you can email three friends about the site. (One of the reasons for the giveaway is to increase readership.)
10. All these conditions will be met or Erica will place a Black Irish Curse on you, and you don’t want that!

I will manually edit the results and get rid of spam and duplicates. The program will then randomly pick three winners. I will then email you to check that everything is right before I ship. If the email bounces, I’ll try again with someone else.

Please check off one of the books and put your email and snail mail address below. I will email everyone with the results, other than that, I won’t spam you.

This weeks books are:

Second paperback edition from 1960. Great condition. This is one of the best books by one of the great writers of Science Fiction. Great cover art by Richard Powers. Brain Wave by Poul Anderson, 1954

Good military action adventure. Whoever owned this read it several times. It is dogeared from being carried around in my coat pocket. There are several other books in the series and I’ll throw in the other two I have if you win this. The Helmsman, by Bill Baldwin, 1985

Early Piers Anthony first edition. Good condition. Still stiff. A little frayed around the edges, but otherwise near mint. I like these early works of his. Rings of Fire by Piers Anthony, 1974

Please provide the following information and press the Button. (* means required)

Your Name*
Your Address*
City, State, ZIP*
Country
Your email*

Giveaway Closes March 14, about 9PM EST. Books will be mailed during the following Week.

If you screw something up, just resubmit – I’ll try to figure it out.

The Toshiba Qosmio that Justine found in the closet of lost technology is dying. It is sitting on my lap now as I type and making horrible moaning noises. I am guessing that the fan is clogged with cat hair. The laptop is hot and burns my legs.

I don’t have good luck with taking these things apart or I would try to clear out the cat hair.

I have a feeling that I will be looking for a new machine real soon.

I went to Zazzle.com and made a T-shirt out of one of my designs.

At $32 plus shipping, I doubt if anyone will by it. I found a place in Connecticut that will make 100 shirts for $250. I could sell a whole lot more shirts at $3 than I could at $32.

The Screenwriter Consortium is a group of film industry professionals who are interested in promoting Latino related scripts – called Latino Heart. If you have a script that meets their requirements, you can be assured of access to a core group of insiders who buy scripts out of the Consortium.

It is difficult to get a script noticed in an industry where several hundred scripts per day are submitted to film studios, producers, directors and well placed hair stylists.

Requirements:
Latino-themed story
Latino protagonist
Strong secondary Latino character(s)
Latin America/Spain/U.S. Latino neighborhood location(s)

Examples:
Scarface (Latino-themed)
Predator (Location)
Up In Smoke (Latino protagonist)
La Bamba (Latino-themed)
Clear & Present Danger (Location/Strong secondary character)
Romacing The Stone (Location/Strong secondary character)
Selena (Latino-themed)
Carlito’s Way (Latino-themed)
Man On Fire (Latino-themed)
Mambo Kings (Latino-themed)
Proof Of Life (Location)
Before Night Falls (Latino-themed)
Revenge (Location/Strong secondary character)
Stand And Deliver (Latino-themed)
From Dusk Till Dawn (Location)

Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, has a script idea. Literally tens of thousands of people take a stab at writing a script every year. If you have one that fits in with the Screenwriter Consortium Latino Heart idea, then email them a PDF of your script now.

Screenwriter Consortium :: We Listen To Our Audience.

Steve Davidson found a review of Avatar written by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells Reviews Cameron’s AVATAR | The Crotchety Old Fan.

Juno Books is an imprint of Pocket Books, owned by Simon & Schuster that publishes fantasy books with a strong female protagonist. Their main thrust is Urban Fantasy with a female heroine.

from the Juno Books guidelines:

Juno is currently looking for novels from 80,000 to 100,000 words in length. We are interested in fantasy featuring a strong female protagonist set in a contemporary (or a very few years in the future) world quite like ours except for the intersection/transgression of the numinous (that which is “wholly other”) with/upon the mundane. This world can be open (“magic”, the “supernatural” is known to exist) or closed (where “otherness” is concealed from common knowledge).

Rarely does a major publisher openly ask for submissions. Usually they act like they don’t want your book. All of you Nanowrimo people with a novel or two sitting around, now is the time to submit your novel. Even better, they only take email submissions.

Juno Books.

The buses aren’t running and Germonds Road is covered with snow. I have shoveled the front walk and last night I cleaned out the front of the driveway and moved the truck so it is positioned to get out on the road. It does not look safe, though, so I am not going to work and I will lose a day’s pay.

Max and Willie’s vet bills have cost us about $10,000 recently and losing a day’s pay really hurts.

I just joined Mippin.com, a website that takes your blog’s feed and converts it to a mobile site. It supports a bunch of mobile devices and it lets you monetize the link using admob.

I like this. It took about 30 seconds to get my blog on mobile.

This is the link to the mobile version of this blog:

Last week I decided to ask a dozen SF bloggers to add my blog to their blog rolls. I picked some big, popular blogs, all of them Google Page Rank of 5 or better.  Getting links from high ranked websites is a way to improve traffic and raise your own website’s value.

All of the websites had a large list of blogs on their front page. Some of their blog roll links were famous, and some of them obscure. My websites fit in well with the others as I often discuss SF subjects.

Not one – NOT ONE – responded to my polite request.

When the revolution comes, they’ll pay! I’ll get my comeuppance. We’ll see who laughs last.

(My dingy cubicle resounds with fiendish laughter.).

Over the last couple of weeks I have received several letters asking details about websites that I maintain. Since the demise of FreeNameAStar, I am reluctant to give any information out. I don’t want to lose any more websites to the “Men in Suits”. I am suspicious that the inquiries from students, historians and people writing books are fronts for Suites.

I will be dropping a bunch of sites and moving my original content back to the big sites. I don’t need the hassle and most of these sites don’t make as much as $20 a year.

Over the weekend someone reported a bug in one of the WordPress plugins that I wrote. The latest source plus many of my programming tools are on my work machine, but not my home PC. I fretted about it all weekend. It took only a few minutes to find and fix the bug, and I feel better now. It was a very obscure bug and required an odd set of actions for it to appear, but I want to eventually make money writing plugins and I don’t want any negative ratings on my current efforts.

Another bug appeared in bbPress, the forum software from the people who made WordPress. This is nastier than the bug in my code, and I eventually had to make a workaround for it because I could not discover the cause of the problem. I fixed this with a change to the htaccess file, which is hardly a fix. I will report the issue to the bbPress forums. bbPress is in its infancy and still needs lots of work before it is as bullet proof as WordPress.

At least my stuff I do for the County is working without crashing. I released a new version Friday and it went into production over the weekend and I have had no reports of problems. You can see it at the Westchester County Contracts Search page. This is a very small window on the Contract Management system that I wrote. It was  made for public access to the data.

Grace Hopper’s Notebook showing the first computer bug.

I got it into my head that I should make some SF designs for T-shirts or posters. I pulled out my super duper clip art library and these are the results of 10 minutes work.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the first Air to Ground radio message.

A gray tabby named Kiddo became the first cat to cross the Atlantic Ocean by dirigible. The cat was an accidental stowaway on the dirigible. Kiddo was a total pain in the neck and made his displeasure known for being locked in a small room that moved violently in the wind. The cat scratched and yowled and made a mess everywhere.

The dirigible was the first to ever have radio equipment and the very first message from an aircraft to the ground was: Roy, come and get this goddamn cat!

I wonder if I can find anyone who wants to go see this with me. After all, I like Science Fiction.

On 3/5/10, NGR NYC takes a trip to the future with Naked Girls Reading SCIENCE FICTION starring Nasty Canasta, with Madame Rosebud, Miss Tickle, Sapphire Jones, and more.

via Pinchbottom: Naked Girls Reading.

I am not sure how this happened to appear in my browser.

My friend Skip’s daughter Samantha has a really nice store for her Jewelry on Etsy.

Samantha’s Jewlery

The computer BBS, distant ancestor to web sites, was born this day in 1978.

In 1982 I took a job with the original Western Union, corp. – the one that used to send telegrams. They had cool tech that employees were encouraged to explore, such as a Xerox Star workstation based on the famous Sun GUI. (I wrote a short story using one of the first WYSIWYG word processors on it. I found the story the other day.)

A PC appeared at the job, one of the first in the country, with one single sided floppy drive (180,000 bytes), 48k of memory and a 300 baud modem. I bought a box of ten floppy diskettes ($30), and I patiently typed the TTY communications program into it, and I was able to connect to a BBS system in Chicago. It was Ward Christensen’s first BBS. I was hooked.

Within a year I bought my own PC and learned to program it. A career began.

The most fun I’ve ever had was cruising the BBS’s. The wonder of it all was amazing. I communicated with a small community from all around the world. The internet is billions of people, but the BBS world was numbered in the hundreds in 1982. I knew everyone and everyone knew me.

The internet is a crowded, but somehow lonely place, compared to the BBS systems of the early 1980s.

Feb. 16, 1978: Bulletin Board Goes Electronic | This Day In Tech | Wired.com.

I’ve know that I’ve missed going gallivanting on the weekends. I haven’t been looking forward to the weekends like I do in the summer. I haven’t gone garage sailing in a while and the flea markets won’t open for another two months. February 15th is middle of the winter and I will spend boring weekends at home for weeks.

I found myself searching TV listings for a Star Trek episode. There hasn’t been a new Trek episode on TV for years and I miss it. I have calculated the small but finite possibility that there is a Trek episode that I missed. I live in the hope that I will be surprised with a totally new episode of Voyager or Next Generation. There is even the tiny possibility that might see an Original Series episode that I some how missed in the last 45 years.

There is no Trek on TV that I can find.

This is the long cold teatime of my soul.

I downloaded Twilight and Twilight Saga, New Moon and burned the DVDs. Erica and I watched the first one last night.

Gag me with a spoon.

The story was derivative drivel. The acting was flat bordering on creepy. I did not like, sympathize with, or understand the characters at all.

I will not be watching the next movie.

I don’t understand the eroticism of vampires. I have read Stoker’s Dracula three times and I think it is great. I read Interview with a Vampire, though, and it was just creepy with an unclean kind of kinkiness as a theme. Twilight was just insipid.

I filed my taxes today. This is totally not in my basic procrastinating character. I usually wait until April 15th even if I know I’ll be getting money back.

Erica is sending money now to our IRA’s. If you wait until April 15 the price of mutual funds goes through the roof because all of the IRA deposits drive things up. Buy now when the stock market is lower and get a better deal. Even if you won’t file until April, send in your $6,000 now! If you can’t send in the full IRA amount, deposit something, anything, when you get a chance.