The miniature goat named Lenore – owned by a the family of actor Jake T. Austin, 13, of Wizards of Waverly Place – was discovered missing on Thursday morning.
This happened a few houses down the street from my home in West Nyack. I didn’t know that any celebrities lived that close.
A few months ago my Mom had her wallet taken from her pocketbook while shopping. This was very traumatic for my mother who felt that it was her own fault. She felt that she was old and a little scattered and not paying attention. When the thieves bumped her to get her wallet she even apologized. I told her at the time that stupid thieves like this will eventually get caught. They keep repeating the same risky act and sooner or later their luck will run out. I told her that it was not a bad thing to go through life without a paranoid attitude. She shouldn’t spend her whole life worrying about being cheated or robbed. An occasional stolen wallet is a small price to pay for enjoying your life.
Sergeant Cummings of the Clarkstown Police was very nice to my mother. He followed through with her on every stage of the investigation. Last night Sergeant Cummings called Mom last night to tell her that the pickpockets had been caught and were in Jail in Union City New Jersey. They were on video tape stealing from my mother, but were also on tape doing the same thing at a mall upstate and in several New Jersey malls. They were tracked down because the detectives in these communities worked together, pooling their information. The thieves were arrested and large amounts of drugs were confiscated at the same time. These bad guys will certainly spend some time in vacation at the State’s expense.
It is a bad thing to be the victim of a crime. You feel violated. Knowing that the bad guys will pay for their violation, though, takes a little of the sting out of it. My mother is thrilled and feels vindicated. Sergeant Cummings and the other law enforcement people that put this case together have made her very happy. Good Job!
My good friend and colleague Koch (I can’t pronounce his real name) graduated with PhD Doctorate in Professional Science (DPS) in Computing last weekend. His picture was in the paper. He’s the one having a good time. Koch works on the other side of the partition and we often have coffee together.
I did another Squidoo Lens today. It is a rehash of one of my blog earlier entries.
You know the drill. Click on the link below even if you don’t give a hoot about buying a flat screen TV. I need the clicks in my insane quest to make a million dollars on the internet.
Just a reminder. The Heinlein Short Story Contest closes one minute after midnight June 1. If you have a story, ship it off NOW!!! They take email entries. (That means that you have to press the send button in May.)
I sent off a story, The Window Washer Murder, that I’d almost forgotten about. When I started writing stories, about five years ago, I wrote a number of stories about a robot detective named Mark Denker. One of these appeared in Aoife’s Kiss and several others wound up eventually on low end zines. Robot detectives are a tough sell, it seems. I gave up on this story, although it was the best of the bunch. It is full of ideas borrowed from Heinlein, in fact I found a line in the story that was lifted (unintentionally) from The Door Into Summer. I reworded it to keep the Heinlein-esque idea without being a direct quote.
The Heinlein contest will report by the end of the year, so I expect I will have a summer and fall of chewed fingernails. Some big name authors have entered, so my own little story probably won’t be able to climb out of the slush. Luckily, Spider Robinson will probably be a judge, so my story won’t have to compete with one of his. No one writes more like Heinlein than Spider.
Someone at St. Jane’s registered more than 50 stars for their graduating class. I home that this is a trend. I don’t make any money off of these, but the word of mouth advertising is priceless.
St. Jane is a coed Pre-K-8 Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
This is a job for Systems and Network Analyst/Programmer, something that I could do. It is for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, based nearby. The hitch is that it requires approximately 5 months per year at sea with 2-3 month cruises.
I am afraid that I might be seasick. I don’t think I would like being away from home for two and three months at a time. I have never been on any boat for more than a few hours. My brother tells horror stories about fishing junkets where he was deathly sick the whole time.
I almost pressed the “apply for this job” button. It was tempting. I have read many a seafaring yarn and I would love to try it, but this is no yarn. I did apply for a similar landlubber job and if I were to get that job, I might just volunteer for a trip once I scoped things out.
My Dad used to laugh when people talk about the panic caused by Orson Wells’s dramatization of the War of the Worlds. He would listen to Mercury Theater with his Father, brother and sister. When the dramatized news flashes about the Martians landing in New Jersey, not far from where he lived, were broadcast no one thought for a moment that it was real. He told me that the poor individuals who panicked were idiots.
There is a “Cold Case” episode on TV right now that claims that there was widespread panic. According to my father, the show was not even that believable. Wells had a tendency to be overly dramatic and the broadcast was so over the top that nobody would have believed it. Only a handful of people actually panicked and they were very embarrassed when they realized the truth.
“We really thought it was the end of the world”, says a character in the TV show. That’s because you are an idiot, my father would have said.
I’ve been downloading these fan built Original Series Star Trek episodes as torrents and burning them to DVD and then bringing them to Poker. The poker boys demanded that I stop it before their eyes burned out of their sockets. These episodes are way beyond dreadful with some of the worst direction and acting that I’ve ever seen.
They are, however great fun, and I can overlook the poor production to see the underlying love that went into them.
You can view them online now at scifi.dragonfly.com. Warning, you must have a good fast line to watch them. They are BIG. You need a big pipe to keep the video moving smoothly. I watch them at work, but I have to use earphones and keep some legitimate project on the screen so people can’t tell what I am doing.
If you will remember, I accidentally discovered Edd Cartier’s home on a garage sale outing last year. I have since started collecting Edd Cartier’s art and I thought that I would stop by again and say hello one of these weekends.
I just read that Georgina C. Cartier, Edd’s wife, passed away last week. I am very sorry to hear this, not because I knew her, but that I thought that her son, Dean Cartier was a good guy. As you grow older you slowly lose many of your friends and relatives. Dean and I are of that age and I know how it feels to lose a parent.
The obituary at the above link is quite good and obviously written with love by Dean, who is a writer.
She especially loved her family, her cats and her home, Pinecone Cottage.
I also read where Edd himself is confined to a wheel chair and in a nursing home. I am kicking myself for not going down to see him earlier.
I have just been informed of a new internet Sales Tax regulation in New York. It is titled: New Presumption Applicable to Definition of Sales Tax Vendor. The key word here is presumptive. The interpretation by New York State is to presume that a sale is taxable based on a convoluted reasoning that no reasonable person could ever arrive at in a million years.
Here’s what they are saying. If a New York Resident mentions a web site in another state, and that web site makes sales to New York residents, then the sale is presumed to have originated in New York and the sale is taxable.
Right now, the sale is not taxable unless the company doing the selling maintains a brick and mortar presence in New York.
For instance: I am a New York Resident and I own a domain name. I keep a blog on a server in Germany under that domain. If I put a link link on the blog to a company in California that sells paper clips and a New York Resident buys some of these paper clips, New York State wants the sales tax, even if no one has ever even read my blog.
I certainly hope that this is squashed immediately. It affects me, because affiliate links on my we pages go to an affiliate company that refers the links to the catalog page of another company that will now have to pay and collect sales tax. It would be simpler for the company to drop all New York State residents and not charge sales tax for New York deliveries.
If you buy their reasoning, everyone who sells on eBay to a New York resident will have to charge and pay sales tax if there is only one New York resident who has a link to eBay on their web site.
In my continual struggle to make a million dollars off the internet, I wrote a few little articles on how use CSS style to spice up squidoo pages. I don’t expect anyone to actually care about there since only Squidoo users would even know what I am talking about.
What I would like you to do is to click on each of the three links below. I need a few clicks to keep the pages alive or else squidoo drops them.
Because we feed the birds, there are a variety of small warm blooded creatures who live on the fallen seed. Once in a while they make it though the old crumbling cellar walls.
Erica managed to catch Willie as he ran off with a captive. It is Willie’s job to keep the house clear of vermin and he takes his job seriously. The greatest thing a cat can do is catch a mouse, at least as far as a cat is concerned.
I try to rescue any creatures that I feel might have some life left in them. I then transport them out to the cemetery and hope they have enough sense not to return. I imagine that by the time I get home, though, there won’t be anything left to rescue.
I get emails from Rockland Community College, even though I am not currently teaching a class right now. Here’s one for all of my Rockland Readers from the Mad Maven of Mulch. If you attend, you get a Mulch Bin to create your very own pile of rotten stuff.
Greetings Fellow Planetary Stewards! In response to many inquiries I have arranged to have Cornell Cooperative Extension present a composting class on campus on Tuesday, June 3 at 3:00 PM. The specific room has yet to be determined but I will let all those who sign up for the class know well in advance. You’ll see the process your yard and food waste goes through on the way to becoming plant food. You’ll learn how to improve your carbon footprint by eliminating putresables (things that rot ) as we like to call them from your waste stream and return them to Mother Nature. AND……..at the end of the class you get to take home your very own compost maker suitable for backyards everywhere! There is one catch, however. In order to receive the bin you must be a Rockland County resident and show id to that effect. It has to do with the grant Cooperative extension got to put on the program and give out the bins. Soooooooo, anyone interested in the class please send me an e-mail by May 29th. I need to let Cooperative Extension know how many will be attending. Thanks, and Happy Eco Trails to All Mad Maven of Mulch
I took some stuff that I wrote for AstoundingTales.com and reworked it into a Squidoo lens. I am having some good luck with these lenses. They actually make a buck or two a month. This doesn’t sound like much, but some of my sites have thousands of pages and I average, even at the most prosperous site, about 10 cents a page per month.
I distilled all of the writing advice I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) and made 17 steps. Some of these are obvious to anyone who has been writing, but the Squidoo lenses get lots of hits from the search engines.
F&SF, one of the best Magazines out there has a special rate for bloggers. Their idea is to create some buzz, so they give a nice yearly rate to bloggers. The price is about $7 less than their regular subscription rate and cheaper even than those magazine houses that advertise cheap rates for new subscribers.
If you write Spec-Fic and want to sell it, it stands to reason that you need to read a magazine from time to time. F&SF is one of the best places to send you stuff because they answer in under a week, even though you’d have to have a very good story to get considered. If you want to improve your chances, you ought to know what kind of stories they are buying. Personally, I find it difficult to write to a certain target style or mode – I write what I write. I’ve got one of their blogger copies and I’m reading it and I should have some reviews of stories in the next few days. Reading the mag at least helps me with seeing what ideas might be appropriate for F&SF.
I forget the name of the editor who yelled at a writer who thought his stories weren’t good enough for a magazine. “Who are you to do my job?” was the response. Only the editor knows when a story is good enough or not. I suffer from almost terminal fear of rejection, and don’t like the submission process. I will often submit to a softer market where I think I have a better chance rather than risk another reject. I wind up thinking that I should have tried harder. Now, although I don’t write that much, when I finish a story I make sure it gets a “Does Not Grab” from F&SF before I send it out to the easier sites.
I Went over to Mom’s house. I had the camera so I took some pictures of stuff on the wall while I was waiting for her to get off the phone.
This was Larry and me. I’m around 6 and Larry is about 4.
Next is a picture of my Great Great Grandmother, Fanny Fay Mansfield.
And here is a picture of the Nyack Semi-Pro baseball team some time in the 1890s. Alexander Galbraith, my great grandfather is the only one without a mustache.
The good news is that I found a place that still has free air. The tire was not quite flat, so I filled it and so far it holds air.
I live in dread of being stuck on the center span of the TZ bridge. If it didn’t happen with Maude (my 83 Blue Chevy truck) or Ralph (my 69 red Chevy truck), I hope it won’t happen with my current (unnamed) Blue Ford Truck, even though it has 177,000 miles on it and is fading fast. I’ve been crossing the bridge every weekday since 1986, except for a year working on Wall Street and a month or two of unemployment.
I really should name the Blue truck. She’s been decent to me and she stood up well until the tree fell on her last month.
I am posting this from a nice piece of software from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer. It allows you to use a nice editor instead of the JavaScript html editors that Blogger and other blog packages use. It works nicely. It doesn’t scramble your html and it lets you put images on the page where you want without having to hand code the tags.
The only bad thing is the title doesn’t let you add a link to it so you have to edit the entry again from blogger.
I shows the blog entry using the style of your blog so you can see how it looks while you are typing. It also spell checks with the word dictionary so it knows about my technical words already.
I like it. Normally Microsoft is the enemy, but this is nice.
“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”
—Confucius
I recently tried to listen to the Analects of Confucius, but I could not get far with it. This brand of oriental wisdom is interesting on first read, but then you think: how the hell does this affect my life? How often do you look for a black cat in a dark room when there is no cat there? Even metaphorically, this is not something that I do often enough to warrant a maxim.
Perhaps it should be re-written:
The hardest thing of all is to Google a complex search phrase, especially if a word is misspelled.
—Keith
This makes more sense, but still not all not anywhere near the hardest thing in life.
My immediate need is for an example using MyEclipse to access a JNDI database connection. MyEclipse is a Java tool and it is woefully ignorant of JNDI connections on the embedded Tomcat server. It looks like the only way to do this is to hand craft the XML file. This crap is supposed to make programming easier, not harder. No search phrase that I tried seems to come up with an answer. Talk about your black cats in a dark room!
Cory Doctorow has his book Little Brother available for free download. This seems to work for Cory. The Making Light blog praises the book, but then again, they are in the book selling business. It is the experience of several big names that a free download results in more sales because the online reading experience sucks. I downloaded the PDF version and I found the two column format unreadable. After I scrolled through the dozen or more pages of self-advertising I tried reading the story and the constant twitching of the scroll bars in order to read frustrated me quickly. I am guessing that the text and html versions are much better. My reasoning was that the PDF version would contain the most polished presentation. I was wrong.
Maybe on a book reader the stuff would present better.
Robert J. Sawyer has been discussing book appliances. I am not sure that these are a good idea, either. The Kindle ($400) locks you out of most free content (although there is a hack), and the iRex iLiad ($700) and Sony Reader PRS-500 ($250) are nothing more than book shaped computers that lack the ability to anything but display books. It would be far more efficient to buy a Dell Inspiron for $500 (or wait until the Vostro goes on sale for $399, again), load up mobi-reader software and acrobat reader and you will have a machine that can surf the web and do email in addition to presenting books.
If you must, start with the Franklin eBookman ($80 on Amazon). It is small and light, but readable and the price is right. Cory’s book is available in eBookman format in a few places.
GVG posted the slush pile for May 3 and 5. (click to get big picture) He had already taken 6 off the pile. By my count there are about 50 subs there. I guess you have to be very very good to float up to the top of a pile like that.
If they are getting 25 to 30 subs a day, they can’t be reading every story to the end – it’s physically impossible. A good editor will skim the first page and make a decision to flush the story or keep checking. The editor might skip to the end and see how the money shot works out, or if the writing is compelling he might read the story straight through.
When you sub to F&SF there are several “code” phrases in the rejection. The phrase “didn’t grab my interest” means that GVG or JJA did not make it through the first page. “Didn’t hold” means it went further. “Nice writing here” means one of them read the whole thing. They are all rejections. I usually get the “Didn’t grab” and once I got a “Didn’t hold”.
A few years ago, Erica and I went on a day trip and became thoroughly lost in western New Jersey. We stopped at an antiques mall and I purchased a framed page from a 19th century magazine of a Genii. It was by Sidney H. Sime. I did a web search at the time, but I found very little information.
I did not think about it and the picture is somewhere in the attic. I came across some illustrations for Lord Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter and I recognized the artist. Sime is making something of a comeback.
I want to find the picture and scan it, but it may be buried too deep.
Here is a montage that someone did for youtube. These are black and white for the most part. My magazine page is in color.
One of the people on one of the boards that I check had this story.
I was wearing a shirt with a guitar on it at dinner tonight, and this hillbilly family asked me if the guitar pictured was Elvis’s guitar.
So, of course I said ” only a guitar player would ask that !”. thinking it was a good conversation started.
Wow .. For the next 15 minutes .. they didn’t shut up!
This family of four, who barely had a full set of teeth among them, gave this long oral history of “Elvis Aaron Presley Jr” (did you know E has a son out of wedlock?) which they know as a long time family friend (did I mention that the 45 year old son sitting with them had a Elvis hair dew and side burns .. keep singing passages of E songs?). They produced this video on the son’s cell phone of Araon’ Jr. singing with *dad* …
They assured me that E is alive, and they have met him in 1980’s after his death. The *mother* sang with E during the 1970’s in gospel churches around Memphis at that time and they had become friends.
what’ch think ?
This is why I think it is good to be alive. Wonderful things like this keep happening in the world. I think that reality exists for no other reason than to keep me entertained.
I was getting complaints that I did not respond to my email. I discovered that somewhere along the line I had turned off the kpgraham@harpamps.com and kpgraham@jt30.com. When I turned them back on, I started getting a few emails, but I also started receiving over 400 spam messages a day. My spam filters got almost all of it, but I still have to browse the spam to see if there is anything that was misclassified.
I wend back to JT30.com and Harpamps.com and I searched for Mailto: and the javascript that I created to obsfucate the email and I replaced them with a link to a contact.php page. The page I created will mail me if a human actually fills out the form and clicks submit. I have a captcha image to verify the humanity and I strip out html before I mail it.
Now I will only get human mail, hopefully. I have shut off the bad emails again, making them output to null. Spammers will waste their time mailing to me using these emails.
If you want the very simple php code that does this, download the zip file in the link below. You just need to change the verbiage on the page and the email address in the code so that you receive the mail and not me.
Subterranean Press has a teleplay by Robert Heinlein available for reading on their site. Anyone who calls Heinlein a sexist should read the original story.
You should not be surprised that a Science Fiction writer, targeting a predominantly male, mostly over thirty educated audience would say that women can’t contribute in a meaningful way to the exploration of space. Women in space are not only important, but essential.
Only Heinlein could have written that women and men have worked side by side for as long as there’s been a human species. It is not only natural, but part of our makeup.
The teleplay, though, plays up the sex angle and leaves out Heinlein’s philosophical views on the subject. Make sure that you read the original story to get the full impact of this ground breaking story.
F&SF, one of the best Magazines out there has a special rate for bloggers. Their idea is to create some buzz, so they give a nice yearly rate to bloggers. The price is about $7 less than their regular subscription rate and cheaper even than those magazine houses that advertise cheap rates for new subscribers.
