This fine fellow used to live across the street, but the people moved away. He’s been living under the tarp that covers the wood pile.

Recently he he has decided that we are acceptable people and has moved in with us, rather than just mooching our food outside.

E. Jim has a similar situation with a cat they call Boots. I have too many damn cats as it is, but Hermie is a sweetheart. He follows Erica around and sleeps with us on the bed. The other cats could care less about us, but Hermie needs lovin’ all the time.

I guess we’ll keep him, although I’ve asked the other cats to vote one of their number out of the house.

I have received disparaging words from an unnamed sister-in-law about book reviews on my blog, so this will be brief.

I have always been a fan of Greg Bear, in spite of his novels being too long. The Infinity Concerto; not so much. I prefer hard science and I believe that Bear writes hard science fiction better than fantasy.

The basic story of the Infinity Concerto is that a boy enters the world of Fairy based loosely on Celtic mythology. Bear tries his best to create hard rules, but in a magical world that is difficult. I amused myself by deciding that the third law of thermodynamics didn’t hold in the land of the Sidhe, and then stopped thinking about science.

In a world where nothing is impossible, nothing is very interesting. I felt that Bear continually fabricated a new solution out of thin air whenever the protagonist got in trouble.

The book was well written with good characters and some interesting ideas, but was not my cup of SF. I am, however, reading the sequel, The Magic Serpent. There are entirely too many words where nothing much happens, but I want to find out how the plots all come together. I’ll have a review of The Magic Serpent by early next week. I may move these book reviews to another blog to satisfy in-laws only interested in cat pictures.

I am still on the "B" author row of my collection of unread books. The holidays have cut into my reading time. I am spending all of my spare moments on programming projects. I expect to have my iPhone app done any day now.

I managed to convert a story to eReader format. I was able to download it to the free eReader app that I downloaded from the Apple App Store.

Next I need to add formatting and some cover art. The simple program that I found doesn’t really let you do anything. The default eReader font is a little small.

Free eReader Stories

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are asteroids that will pass very close to earth. The link is to the list ordered in ascending distance order. Aphophos will pass Earth at about 21,000 miles in the year 2029. This is very close, and I think will be very scary. I will be 78 years old then. There’s another close one in 2027 when I am 76.

The top three asteroids on the list will pass within the orbit of the moon. I hope that they have done a calculation so that we will know if one of them hits the moon. Splash from a lunar impact could be almost as dangerous as the asteroid hitting Earth.

(The distances are in Astronomical units (AU). 1 AU is approximately the mean distance of the earth from the sun = 149597870 km = 92955810 miles.)

PHA Close Approaches To The Earth

I am saddened to learn that Edd Cartier, one of the great artists of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, passed away on Christmas Day.

I met Edd quite by accident when he and his son were having a garage sale. I was lucky enough to buy some of his work and get it signed and personalized. I have since exchanged email with his sons a few times.

After I met the great man I began seeking out and collecting his art work. I have a shelf of old magazines and illustrated books with Edd’s fantastic drawings.

The photo is Edd Cartier the day I discovered him.

I hate this whole grow old and die thing. It does not seem right that the world should lose a talent like Edd Cartier. He lived a long and rich life, but still, the world is a poorer place without him.

Robert J. Sawyer, a darn good SF writer, coincidentally posted about using the iPhone as an eBook reader today. He seems to like it a lot. I downloaded the iPhone eReader app today and I am going to download the conversion utility next.

e. Jim pointed it out to me. I had already read it this morning, but it didn’t sink in. Thanks, Jim.

This iPhone thing is going to keep me busy.

Robert J. Sawyer – post: eReader on the iPhone

Every once in a while Justine cleans out her closet, and I get a shot at some neat pieces of old hardware that she doesn’t want anymore.

Justine, Erica and I went down to New York City to do the Christmas Dinner thing at the NY Athletic Club on Central park South. It was, as usual, very classy, although this time, it seemed a little raucous. This may be because we had a 12:30 seating, and there were lots of kids running around the ballroom.

We started with champagne and I had the Salmon. (I was turkeyed out, and I don’t eat beef, now). Everything was good.

On the way home Justine handed over a computer bag from her Closet of Lost Technology. When I got home I discovered a MacBook Air, an older Apple iPhone, and a fancy Blackberry phone (no charger).

I am not normally an Apple guy, although I got used to the Mac OS when I was teaching. These are very, neat toys, however, and I’ve already thought of ways to put them to use.

First, iPhone apps are extremely hot and if you can program using the iPhone’s arcane SDK you can name your own price. iPhone programmer is the top paying job in my field right now, so I downloaded the SDK and I am going through the tutorials. I should be able to write an real app before New Years Day, and after that I can see if I can pick up a few gigs.

One good thing about having the MacBook Air is that the SDK requires a Mac to run it (my only Apple at the moment is a ten year old Blueberry Mac). I will have to puzzle out the Mac OS and connect to the internet so I can install the SDK on the Air. I will be able to design my apps on other computers, compile them on the MacBook and then test them on the iPhone.

Another interesting use of the iPhone is that you can convert stories to the the eReader format and upload them to the iTunes store, where they sell well. I read somewhere that readers are downloading 10,000 stories a month in eReader format for the iPhone. At 99 cents a story, I might be able to make some money. The conversion utilities are all free so I am going to give it try.

The iPhone has a little time left on it, and I have been getting Justine’s phone calls. It runs out some time in January, so I have a window to do some testing. After that I will probably hook it up with a goPhone plan at $5 a month, just for testing. I don’t make many calls, and I can’t see myself using the iphone to check email that often. I have another cell phone that I want to convert over to pay-as-you-go, but I think that I might just retire that phone and go with the iPhone.

I hate these time wasters, but it’s Friday at work and there is no one here to keep tabs on me.

I am not Kirk! Please, no! Anyone but Kirk!

I want to get more into Astronomy. I had some experience with Google sky so I created some databases and connected them to images. I have about 250,000 stars and their locations. I also made some nice pages of things like the messier objects, the Herschel 400 and the Arp peculiar Galaxies.

I am also working on the NGC list of galaxies.

Databases is what I do best.

Click on it and explore the Messier Objects, they are very cool!

Star Finder

Justine asked to see her birdhouse so I took some pictures in the snow. We have a dozen birdhouses on the property. I kept finding new ones, but I didn’t walk too far in the back. We have six inches of snow.

I took a couple of days off, but it snowed today and I was mostly stuck inside all day. I’ve done a little, putting up lights and wreaths and I am going to see if I can find the tree lights, next.

I went outside briefly and took some pictures. I am trying to embed a picasa slide show:

I am cleaning out the various cameras here. I put some of them on a Picasa album here:

From writer Adrienne Ray: A Newdy Wootist one who believes in the world according to the media.

This would be a person who thinks that reality is anything that appears on TV – the only correct science is that which is expressed in the media. It is a faith in the sitcoms, soap operas, reality TV shows, and MTV DJs over and above pre-TV religion or science.

Either I am spelling it wrong or Adrienne misspelled it. The phrase does not Google, but it is such an interesting sounding expression that I have no doubts that it will appear on BoingBoing.net in the next few weeks as the latest internet Wortverbindung.

Wortverbindung is an interesting word all by itself. It might mean Link Word, phrase, or Word Combination, but it seems to describe well the little phrases that weave in and out of the web zeitgeist.

I picked this up for a quarter and I have been dipping into it while waiting in the car. It is not worth reading from end to end. I can’t believe that anyone ever put much credence in Rhine. He likes to confuse anecdotal evidence with scientific method. Rhine never gives hard numbers from what I read, and his approach to studying ESP seems naive.

Rhine and the Duke experiments are often referred to in Science Fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr. seems to have bought into Rhine hook, line, and sinker.

A quick look on Wikipedia tells that some of Rhine’s assistants fudged the data so it would look better. If there is ever a scientific study of ESP it would have to be done much differently than the Duke experiments. Rhine’s results have never been duplicated. He only published his good results, and those are suspect.

I bought this dog-eared book at a garage sale a few weeks ago for a dollar. Lord Dunsany is a unique writer. If you read the book Stardust by Neil Gaiman (or even saw the hacked movie version), you would get an idea of what a Dunsany book is about. My edition of The Charwoman’s Shadow was published in 1926. Dunsany was already popular then, because of The King of Elfland’s Daughter, considered his masterpiece (and nearly the same story as Gaimon’s Stardust).

In the 1920s, Branch’s Jurgen in the US, and Eddison’s adult fairy tales in England were best sellers. These are richly written fantasies that also have a real world message. Readers in the 1920s would not have objected to reading a fantasy story that bordered on being a fairy tale.

Dunsany wrote his books with green ink using a quill pen that he would cut by hand. His wife typed out the stories. All of his books and stories are first drafts because he is supposed to have never rewritten or revised any of his work.

Dunsany’s language is absolutely wonderful. Here are the first two paragraphs Charwoman’s Shadow:

Picture a summer evening somber and sweet over Spain, the glittering sheen of leaves fading to soberer colors, the sky in the west all soft, and mysterious as low music, and in the east like a frown. Picture the Golden Age past its wonderful zenith, and westering now towards its setting.

In such a time of day and time of year, and in such a time of history, a young man was traveling on foot on a Spanish road, from a village well-nigh unknown, towards the gloom and grandeur of mountains. And as he traveled a wind rising up with the fall of day flapped his cloak hugely about him.

I missed getting off of my bus once, because I was involved in the unique plot. Dunsany is an extremely resourceful writer. A few times he seems to get a little lost pulling together his plot points, and here and there a paragraph will go on for a page or two while he explains some minor intricacy, but these go by quick. The denouement wanders a bit as it brings all of the threads together, but this is made up for with the wonderful ending, which describes the end of a golden age of magic.

I don’t think anyone reads Lord Dunsany anymore. This is a great loss.

Erica caught the last 10 seconds of me cutting down our tree up in Rock City, NY.

We chose a Balsam this year because of the wonderful smell. This one had pine cones all over it so it is very different from the tree you’d buy at the local gas station. If you have the chance you should cut down a tree for Christmas. It is a very cool experience. There was no snow this year. I always like watching the kids running around like crazy trying to find the best tree. Tree cutting is a real kid’s thing. (Good for me because I am just a big kid).

That’s not just my hat. That is the real shape of my head.

It turns out the Wall Street Tree came from Central Nyack, as far as I can tell. The link tells the story. The Fassler’s were one of Central Nyack’s old families and I went to Hilltop Elementary with Debby Fassler. My brother, Larry, was always good friends with the Fassler family, especially the grandfather, who had lots of stories about the area.

I think I knew the tree. I’ll have to drive by the next time I go see my mother to see if there is a stump there.

Central Nyack was always Nyack proper’s poor relation. Growing up there, many of the roads were dirt or gravel. Some of the houses had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing. It has become popular now to leave off the “central” in order to be associated with the hoity-toid Nyack crowd.

The Claussen Chaos: Pops’ Tree is on Wall Street!

We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Next Tuesday is Philip K. Dick’s birthday. Philip K. Dick fans are known as Dick-Heads, although many of us qualify for that appellation even without the PKD association.

The blogger known as Total Dick-Head is putting on a radio program from pirate cat radio 87.9 FM in the Bay Area tonight. It is from 10pm to midnight in San Francisco, so that would be 1am to 3am for real people. I’d like to stay up and listen because it sounds like there is going to be some great stuff, but I will be asleep long before that. I am hoping that there will be a podcast available so the rest of the world can listen.

If you don’t know Philip K. Dick then you really don’t know Dick.

Total Dick-Head: Somebody’s Got a Birthday Coming Up!

For my FreeNameAStar.com site, I created a printable couple of pages with information about the star. I am hoping to increase the value of the site by making a whole packet that can be printed and given as a present.

I added a poem, which I like, at the end of the package. It goes like this:

Stars and the Soul

by Henry Van Dyke

To Charles A. Young, Astronomer

"Two things," the wise man said, "fill me with awe:
The starry heavens and the moral law."
Nay, add another wonder to thy roll, —
The living marvel of the human soul!

The world has brought the laurel-leaves to crown
The star-discoverer’s name with high renown;
Accept the flower of love we lay with these
For influence sweeter than the Pleiades!

I think it is a good poem for my star site.

My FreeNameAStar site got into Martin Lewis’s top five presents for under a fiver (must be UK, in US we’d say five bucks, five spot, or a finn). He sent me 441 visitors. Yesterday I registered over 300 stars (about three times more than usual) and made about $50 more than I have been averaging. Thanks Martin!

Please check out his site and give click this delicious.com bookmark. His traffic is my traffic.

Festive Fivers: Top Christmas presents under a fiver…

This collection of James Blish’s stories published in 1959 is very disappointing. I enjoyed Blish’s Cities in Flight series. Blish is probably known best for the collection of Star Trek TOS adaptations that he did. He took the Original Series plots and turned them into 11 volumes of very good short stories. He also wrote Spock Must Die! which was the first Star Trek Novels, and one of the best.

Blish’s short story Surface Tension is one of my favorite all time short stories.

The stories in Galactic Cluster for the most part don’t make the grade. Time after time I would read one of these stories and think that I must have missed something, read the last few pages again and decide that Blish just screwed up the story. There are quit a few of these what-the? moments in the collection. Some of the stories are just technical exploration of an idea with a few forgettable characters thrown in. Once in a while the story line was compelling, but usually the story fizzles.

This is a shame because Blish’s Cities in Flight books and the Seedling Stars collection are much much better. Even the Trek adaptations are better.

I’m still on the B shelf and probably will be well into January. I am reading a few books that I picked up in garage sales, next. These golden age of SF books are great, but I need a change.

We’ve all used Google maps to get around. Google maps can also overlay aerial photographs, and you can link to Google Earth to see pictures at street level.

Google also has Google sky that allows you to view the stars. I fooled with this briefly when it came out and didn’t get anywhere with it. I was able to use the Google Earth API to make Points-of-interest files for my GPS device. I finally got Google Sky working correctly with FreeNameAStar.com.

Here is the secret. Instead of Longitude and Latitude, you have to use the sky equivalents of Right Ascension and Declination. The Sky coordinates start at zero at the Vernal equinox. The big difference in Google Sky, is that it uses a view as though you were looking down at earth so the Right Ascension is the mirror image of the standard astronomical right ascension.

I have to convert the radians stored on the database into degrees, and then I have to subtract the right ascension from 180, giving it backwards from the vernal equinox. Pretty tricky!

I now embed an actual photograph of the star from Google Sky in each Star’s web page.

I went to the movies over the weekend for the first time in several years. Larry and I went to see Cadillac Records the story of Muddy Waters and Chess Studios. I loved it. This is just about the only movie that I can remember where there was real applause at the end. (Picture at left is the real Little Walter at Theresa’s just before he died.)

I have to say that I am a great fan of Muddy and Little Walter, so I knew most of the story already, and I was aware that the movie was a dramatization, and in many places not historically correct. I may have been the only person in the audience who has played Little Walter’s Juke many hundreds of times, much of it at half speed, trying to get all of the nuances down. When the screen version came up, all I could think is that’s not Walter. It was damn good harp playing, though.

The movie recounts the time when the greatest musicians of what was called Race Music, broke out of the race charts and crossed over into the white pop charts. It is a vehicle for Beyonce to play the vivacious and beautiful Etta James. I had heard the name Beyonce before, but that kind of music is not my music and I had no idea who she was. By the end of the movie, I was in love. Beyonce did some pretty fair acting, and she nailed the Etta James songs. I would know because I have spend hours listening to Etta, as I have all of the Chess discography. There have been some criticism on the nets of her performance, but I can’t find fault. It is not Etta, but her interpretation captures the essential feel of the wonderful Etta James. I would not have wanted Beyonce to just mimic the way Etta sang, there is too much of that in blues. Beyonce has taken the classics and moved them up a level.

Probably for economic reasons all of the performances of the classic songs are redone by modern musicians. I would have preferred if they had used the original versions and there was no reason not to do this except for the movie to make more money. There’s a funny scene, though where they are making fun of Howling Wolf’s sideman Hubert Sumlin. The real Sumlin is sitting, playing guitar next to the actor who is playing him.

One thing that I hope happens is that young black musicians discover their blues roots. Black music has returned to the days of the Race charts. Chuck Berry and Etta James crossed over, but modern Rap and Hip Hop has crossed back, producing music targeted for a largely black audience.

The roots of modern rock, jazz and pop is the blues that came out of Chess Studios. It is my sincere hope that the movie Cadillac Records will remind people of this and music will be enjoyed because it is good and not because it is associated with small racial or sociological group.

There was one bad thing about the movie experience, and that was that my brother Larry bought the tickets and asked for a Senior Citizen discount. Damned if the low IQ teen thing selling tickets didn’t give it to him. I am too young to get the senior citizen discount. Really, I am!

Forrest J Ackerman died Thursday. Probably for real this time, but with Forrie, you can’t be sure.

The New York Stock Exchange Christmas Tree came from Nyack. Does anyone know where in Nyack? I can’t find any reference to it in any of my Google searches.

Aretha sang. There’s a couple of videos on the nyse.com site.

85th Annual NYSE Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony

It’s going to snow this weekend and it is bitter cold out. It is time to switch my computer’s desktop wallpaper. (Save the image to your disk. In windows, right click anywhere on the desktop, click properties, click desktop tab and then browse for the new image.)

This is an image from a couple of years ago of Gracie looking forlornly at the snow covering up her nice summer lawn. It gets lots of hits from Google Image search on this, so I am guessing that it must appear in other places around the nets.

You can get your won Gracie picture for your desktop by clicking the image or going here.

http://www.cthreepo.com/blog/dec31/catsnow3.jpg

I’ll start out by saying that I enjoyed this book.

I am not a great fan of Military SF. Having narrowly avoided the draft for Viet Nam and having had friends die in mismanaged wars, I really don’t like plots where large numbers of people kill large numbers of people.

The Helmsman, Like Weber’s Honor Harrington series, is a rehash of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower character. Hornblower was the subject of 11 novels that follow the career of a naval officer during the Napoleonic wars from his start as a midshipman up to the end of his life as a retired admiral. The key parts of the series which are always copied are, 1) his rise to fame from humble roots through courage, intelligence and luck, 2) his (nearly) hopeless love affair with the aristocratic Lady Barbara, 3) his loyal companions (many of whom were killed), and 4) Hornblower’s absolute integrity.

The Helmsman, Wolf Brim, has all of these elements, as does Weber’s Harrington. I stopped reading the Weber books because the politics became ponderous, I am hoping that this does not happen to the Baldwin’s Helmsman books.

As a Hornblower pastiche (homage, copy, clone?), The Helmsman is not really science fiction. It takes a little more than spaceships and ray guns to make a science fiction story. The book was just a transposition of 19th century naval warfare to distant future space warfare. Tall masted ships turn into star ships, sails into FTL drives and cannons into energy weapons. In the thousands of years that man has been in space, ships are still steered by many men by pushing buttons and turning dials and pulling on levers. Either technology stops developing in the next few years or Baldwin is very wrong about the future. Calling a cannon an Ion blaster, or coffee Raktijino, or a rabbit a smeerp, does not make a story science fiction, but I’ve argued this before.

I think that writing stories about the Napoleonic wars is too difficult, so writers who want to continue the Hornblower saga find it easier to cast their stories in the far future where they don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of sailing a ship and firing a cannon. This isn’t a bad thing as long as you don’t start calling it real Science Fiction.

My grandfather and I shared our love for C.S. Forester’s books. I gave him an old three volume set of the first novels just before he died and he read them all twice. I got them back after they cleaned out his apartment and I enjoy dipping into them from time to time knowing that granddad read the same words on the same page.

I cannot find any reason not to like the Helmsman. I think that I have more in the series so I may be reading another one soon. (I am still on the top two shelves of my new books, which is mostly author’s starting with A and B.)

My friend and coworker Koch was in a terrible car accident. He was hurt badly and is in intensive care. I hope he gets well soon.

Anyone looking for a part time job with decent pay might be interested. I understand census work is pretty simple and low pressure. You can pick up $400 a week for up to 12 weeks for simply wandering around with a clipboard, usually in your home town.

You’d can get to RCC and check it out, but can also apply on the census website. This for the 2010 census, but the work starts in the spring of 2009.

Kathy Bookman, from the U.S. Census Bureau will be in the Atrium, Cultural Arts Center tomorrow, Dec. 4, 2008 from 10am-2pm for the following positions:

Recruitment Assistants
Crew Leaders
Field Staff

Starting salaries range from $18-$20/hr for part time work.

Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa by Ed Buryn, 1971.

I’ve been dipping into this book, sampling a chapter here and there. I bought it for 25 cents last weekend because the last sentence of the intro was "Can you dig it?"

It’s been a long time since I had long hair and counted myself a freak, but I can wax nostalgic about my hippy days. This book lets me dream a few psychedelic memories and recall that at one time I wanted to bum around Europe. I sent my dollar to the Youth Hostel organization and got back my little booklet. I plotted on a map of Europe the cities that I wanted to see and made note of where I could sleep for free or under a dollar.

Of course, I have to work during the summer to pay for college and richer but less cool friends returned from Europe with exciting stories of doing the things that I thought I might have done. Life gets in the way of having a life sometimes. I’ve never been off North America and my only foreign adventures involve brief trips to Tijuana and Toronto.

Vagabonding is a loose collection of bad essays on travel and is only good when Buryn forgets what he is doing and wanders down some interesting sidetrack or gets lost in a story of his travels. The book looks like a travel guide, but works much better as a travelogue and I wish that Ed had stuck with the stories and stopped trying to give advice on how to travel. He is a natural born story teller, drifting off into almost poetic tales, but he insists on adding all of the practical guide book things and he pretty much sucks at that stuff. Not that he gives bad advice, but it makes me skip ahead looking for more stories.

As a travel guide, I expect that it is so dated that it is fairly useless. As a crystallized moment, it is a great read, and brings me right back to 1970 as though I haven’t been living a dull short-haired life these last 38 years.

Ed is around and creating. He has a neglected blog, which might be a good place to start. Ed doesn’t have much a web presence, although there are many references to him. This book seems to have changed the course of a few lives over the years.