I read Black Glass, by John Shirley. It’s not for those that like their reading easy, or their music and beer lite. Follow the link to the review.

Read my review of John Shirley’s Black Glass

Jim Shannon lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Lately he has been in the process of adopting a homeless cat that he and his wife have named Boots. In his last post he took a picture of the weather channel showing the temperature forecast. It was -31° Celsius, which is -23.8° Fahrenheit. That’s cold.

I thought it was bad here with the mercury dropping below 10°F some nights.

Boots prefers to be outside sometimes, and jumps off of their balcony – 12 feet into the snow. When I had an apartment on the second floor, we had a cat who would jump down, but not when the temperature was cold enough to freeze you in a few seconds. I shouldn’t be worried as the cat has pulled this before, but still!

I hope Boots is all right.

Also, if I lived in a place that went down to 23.8 below zero, I would seriously consider a move several hundred miles southward. I don’t mind it when it is cold, but this is COLD!!!!!!

Blog – ejim

A senator from Iowa has told Microsoft to layoff the foreign workers first and keep the red blooded Americans.

As a programmer who has suffered layoffs and cuts in pay because of lower paid H-1B visa workers from India and China, I am watching this Issue, closely.

I have seen first hand how difficult it is for H-1B workers to get and keep a job. It is amazingly hard for them to get their green card. I sympathize with them. Working side by side with my Chinese and Indian friends, I understand their problems. They are truly Americans in spirit, fleeing poverty to come for a chance at the American Dream. Most say they’ll go back someday, but the only time they ever do is if their visa’s run out.

On the other hand, I have worked in shops where I was the only American born programmer out of dozens. The schools in the U.S. tend to produce graduates suited for flipping burgers and nothing else. I am largely self taught, augmented by advanced college courses that I paid for myself. I currently do not know anyone born in America, who has my background and can write programs. (I know of them, but they are several orders removed from me and I do not interact with them.)

There is a part of me that thinks that H-1B visa workers should be laid off before any Green card or citizens are laid off, but there is also the part that understands what it means to these pilgrims to come here and embrace the American Ideal.

Schools should concentrate on producing technically competent graduates, and business should be not laying off any H-1B workers until there is someone to replace them.

Senator questions, prods Microsoft on inclusion of H-1B workers in layoffs

I’ve spent the last two weeks tramping through Middle Earth. (Listening to mp3s on Justine’s iPhone.) Gollum just fell into the crack of doom and I’ve had it with Hobbits for another year. I have read or listened to LOTR probably over 100 times. There was a time, 20 years ago, that I know I passed the 50 count just on reading. At that time I obtained the tapes and listened two or three times a year as I commuted to work. I since found the audio in MP3 format.

I can get back to reading, again. I have rediscovered the simple pleasures of reading since I started taking the bus in the morning. My six months’ bus anniversary came and passed without celebration (I was still bummed about Christmas.)

Monday I start reading Black Glass, by John Shirley. This is billed as Shirley’s Lost Cyberpunk Novel. I like Shirley’s Science Fiction and I am a Cyberpunk kind of guy. Last Year I read Shirley’s Demons, and a couple of months ago I read an old copy of City Come a Walking by Shirley, and I thought it was excellent. I should reread his Eclipse books, since it has been a few years. I went through the link above and got a signed copy of Black Glass at the regular price, although I was raped on shipping. Media mail should have been about $1.50 not $6.50.

Erica gets all of these alerts from FreeCycle.org. It is a network of Yahoo groups mailing lists that people use to give stuff away, or in my case, get free stuff.

Once a day I get a forward from here with some tempting bit of free stuff. Mostly the good stuff is gone before she answers the message, but we’ve picked up one or two good things.

This is a Wanted message that appeared on Freecycle. Erica thought it was interesting, and so do I.

Wanted to keep or borrow.

Halloween decoration with motion sensor (the kind that moves or makes noise when you approach it).

I need to teach my husband a lesson about smoking in the attic behind my back. He quit but is having little relapses when he thinks I am sleeping.

This ought to scare the s_ _ t out of him. = )

It doesn’t sound like he really quit. All he did was stop smoking when his wife was looking. I am not sure the motion sensor will be much help.

I have a group of about 20 websites that I click “open in tabs” every morning in order to get my news fix. I just added the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Weekly Science Updates to the list. This is mostly an extract from news sources, but has some interesting articles and factoids.

My other science morning links are Space & Astronomy News, Uncertain Principles and Dynamics of Cats (yes it’s a science blog). The rest of the morning links are blogs, job searches, general news and Li’l Abner.

I’ve been getting hits on my star finder site for this object. It turns out that this is a Quasar. It is the most distance object that an amateur astronomer can view with an inexpensive telescope.

That tail going down and to the right is 200,000 light years long.

Star Finder 3C 273 PGC41121

Every once in a while I apply for a job at NASA. It is one of the few places that I would take a cut in pay to join.

I’ve hear that they will be doing some hiring soon. NASA certainly will get some economic stimulus funds in the coming year. Unfortunately it seems all the jobs are in Houston or DC. I have yet to see any telecommute NASA jobs show up on the list.

I am usually not worried about my current job, but I am reading in the news about some cities laying off contractors, so I should be thinking about my next gig.

NASA Jobs

I’ve cleaned up and spell checked the character sheet system that I wrote. I’ve added some historical and social items that E. Jim suggested. It seems to be be the most comprehensive sheet that I’ve been able to find by googling. I did not include things like “favorite color” – there has to be a limit.

I have an idea that a page describing how the character relates to the story could be useful, but I think that it may be superfluous, since the author already has the characters’ rolls in mind before any character sheets are started.

I also added a way for users to save their sheets in a little database (I use my own db system – not mysql).

Now I have no excuse. I am forced to actually use this to create the character that was giving me trouble in the “Reefs of Jupiter” story I was writing. I want to have it finished when J. Erwine starts reading for the New Martian Wave. I hope to have three stories with space exploration themes soon, and I am hoping he’ll accept one of them.

Character Sheet

The old Lincoln dealership in Central Nyack, near the thruway overpass is now a burger joint. The burgers look good. It’s too bad that I gave up beef nearly a year ago.

It must be lunch time, because my mouth is watering and my stomach grumbling.

I guess I’ll go out and get a salad.

Sigh…

First Taste: Nyack Burger Hop

My friend Eric, who plays guitar with Frankie D. & the Boys, had his 15 seconds of fame when the local cable news channel featured him playing at one of the Nyack inaugural balls.

If I had known he was going to be there I might have been able to sneak in without paying the $30.

Is that one of Larry’s Fender Telecaster guitars?

YouTube – Frankie D. & The Boys @ The Nyack Center’s Inaugural Ball 01/20/09 – News 12 Hudson Valley Story

I tried to watch the Inauguration Speech on the computer with streaming video and the tech failed miserably. Either the flow from the feeds was overloaded or else the local office network was. In any case I could not get anything but a word here and there.

I would predict that in four years we might have faster lines with more technology.

I did read the speech and I thought that it was very good. I am not sure how Obama can bring about the change that he is talking about. The lawmakers are still the same old con artists that were in last year. Obama can lead, but will they follow? I certainly hope so.

A couple of years agi I started writing an automated character sheet to document fictional characters. I wanted to change the character in a story that I am writing so I found it and finished it.

It collects a bunch of information about a character and even does a couple of psychological profiles. It produces a single page character summary that you can copy into your story work in progress pages.

I did it very quickly and it has no formatting. Some of the information it collects is not that interesting, and I keep thinking of new things to add. I am hoping that users will start sending me ideas for features so that by the time I get around to polishing it up, it will be a real useful tool.

One thing I have to do is make a way to save the character for later retrieval. Right now all the information is kept in a cookie, which expires in a day or so.

Character Sheet

A 1987 nuclear device orbited by the Soviets is spewing radioactive debris. This has to be a good source of story ideas. I can see a modern techno-thriller based on this, or even a golden age type story. The solution to this problem must be technological, but an equally intriguing political aspect might be good for a story.

I would write it from the viewpoint of the cosmonaut that is sent up to investigate and boost it to a higher orbit.

It would be extra nice if there were an alien curled up inside the satellite, nibbling on the insulated wiring.

Old Nuclear-Powered Soviet Satellite Acts Up

Privy diggers find and excavate old outhouses. Before there were dumps, people tossed their garbage in abandoned privies. Also things fell out of people’s pockets. Old privies have hundreds of old bottles in them. 150 year old bottles are highly collectable and good examples can go for hundreds of dollars. Privy digging is associated with bottle collecting, but privy diggers also find coins, keys, false teeth, and the occasional silver cup.

Larry used to subscribe to a newsletter called Privy Digger Journal, which I wish he could find. I’d like to scan them.

Here is a cool link to an interview with a couple of privy diggers.

Privy Digging is one of the things that I’d like to do after I retire. Nyack has to have some incredible privies. I know of three that were on my property, and I’d like to try my hand at those. I have a mostly written story called the Privy Digger’s tale about modern privy diggers who have a very lovecraftian encounter at the bottom of a privy.

I saw this this morning. It is a nice start to a cold day. I enjoyed it quite a bit (once past the silly start). Good song, well done – with a ukulele!

I used my GThread automatic blogging software to create a Bee Keeping Digest. There are no posts yet. It takes a while for Google to start sending the updates. As soon as I get an update or so you will see the entries.

I am seriously considering starting a hive in the spring. Erica sent me a link to a beekeeping site where they hold a class. For $95 you build a beehive and they show you how to set it up with bees. The place is an hour and a half north of here and it takes 9 hours on a Saturday.

I want to go and I will discuss it with Erica.

Justine, my mother and brothers think that I am insane for wanting to keep bees. Well, maybe I am.

I just received some pictures from Robert Fassler. He writes:

I found your Blog about our tree and you mentioned you knew my half sister Debbie (lives in stony point now) and your brother knew my grandfather. I thought you might be interested in what the tree was in 1965 when it was transplanted from Birchardville PA where I live now to West Nyack, Where we used to live.

I just got off the phone with Jim O’Sullivan from O’Sullivans tree service that did the work and transported the tree to Wall St. The tree was taken down and brought back to his yard on western highway. I’m going down sometime this week (a 3 hour drive from here) to pick up the logs from the tree. I plan on hiring a wood carver to make different shapes and artistic items from the logs to give to family members as a souvenir of this interesting story.

Tree in 1965. It is the one next to the driveway. (Click to see larger image).

This was the tree in 2008.

One of the advantages of living in Nyack as a kid was that the area had a rich cultural history. I can remember being at a picnic and asking who the old people were that were singing folk songs. "Oh, that’s the Weavers. They’re communists."

Pete Seeger is still going strong and they are going to preview the Pete Seeger documentary "The Power of Song" at Riverspace in Nyack in two weeks, Friday, Jan. 23. It costs $30 so I might not make it, but it is indeed tempting.

I finished this on the bus this morning. It was a very good read and Barzman is an interesting writer. Check the review.

Need work? Here’s a job that pays $150,000 (AUD). This job is a caretaker for an Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Bring your own bathing suit. It seems to be an entertainment position and they might be looking for an actor/spokesperson.

The Best Job In The World

I loaded my MP3 files of Lord of the Rings onto Justine’s iPhone, and I will be living in Middle Earth for the next couple of weeks. I will get back to reading books as soon as this mental vacation is over.

I used the image cutter at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis to make a Google Earth interface for a large map of Middle Earth that I found.

It split it up into 5000 or so small images and will finish uploading in about an hour. In the mean time, the map will only partially load.

The splitter software creates the html file used to display it. The only drawback is that you have to override the Java default memory usage to make it work for very large images.

Command line that I finally used was:

java -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -jar “GMapImageCutter.jar”

Middle Earth Viewer

The house was too warm last night. The heat is working much better, although not balanced. It seems to only do one zone at a time and I am fiddling with the thermostats to set the heat on and off in different areas to keep the house comfortable. Last night it was a little cool downstairs, but comfortable. Upstairs was actually too warm, after a couple of weeks of being 62°. I am going to go on Google and see if there is a home thermostat with built in wifi and the ability to program from a remote site.

My brother Larry broke down and paid for cable internet. He got all three, Cable, Phone and Internet for the $99 package deal. It works for him because Mom can get on the phone to her sister in Florida and do $20 of gossiping without thinking. He is actually saving money. I have been collecting cheap wireless routers with the idea of flashing them with a super router software and reselling them on the internet, but I never have time. I gave him one that I bought for a $1. He no longer has to aim his antenna out the window at a weak signal to an open router. He is amazed at his speed and for the first time he can surf YouTube. He is taking lessons from a guitar player from Croatia that he says is the best teacher he’s ever had. Mom has rediscovered Turner Classic Movies and Larry says that she has been watching black and white movies 12 hours a day.

Electric Spec held my story “RepFix” for vote. They keep, so they say, about 20 stories and pick a few from these for the next issue. I submitted to Electric Spec because I saw Tyree Campbell there. If Tyree is submitting there then they might like my stuff because Tyree often accepts my stories. I read on the SamsDot discussion area that Tyree has also been held for a vote. At this moment our stories are duking it out in a cyber death match chamber.

My blogging software has made considerable progress. I still need to add all the standard blog features like rss, archiving, comments, pings, image upload, and link backs. This will be a lot of work. I have to do security next. I spent several days over the holidays working on this, but everyone is back into “work” mode here and the adult supervision has started again, so I may not get to it for a little while.

Koch called me. He is home, but goes to physical therapy at Burk three times a week. He has three vertebra fused in his neck and he can’t turn his head from side to side. He is feeling much better and says that he is coming back to work in a few weeks. If I were him, I would take this as a sign to retire and collect disability. He sent me his son’s laptop, which is so full of viruses and spyware that it stopped booting. He wants me to format the disk and reinstall XP. I will try to get to it one night this week.

I started working on my iPhone app. I discovered that to actually test on the iPhone I would have to pay Apple a $99 registration fee to be a certified developer. I have been testing the sample code apps on their emulator. I guess if I ever get my apps written that I will have to pay the fee.

The Home Inspection course that I wanted to take has been discontinued. It might not have worked out anyway because to be a certified inspector you have to have 40 hours of experience working with another certified inspector or else a PE license. I want to go back to school, but I am not sure what course to take. I don’t think that I want to take any more computer courses, unless it is for something fun. I am way over educated for what I do. I would like to have a fall back career in case the bottom falls out of programming. I don’t want to go back to work in the City.

These are such time wasters. I just created a new widget for one of my other projects, but I found this along the way.

I reviewed Poul Anderson’s Orbit Unlimited on the Books Read Blog.

I am writing my own blogging software that you can reach from the site. I haven’t written the security part yet, so don’t mess it up.

Orbit Unlimited

I got the part and put it in the boiler and the heat came on. The house is still chilly, but it is warming up.

While I stayed up all night tending the woodstove these last two nights, I did a little calculating. Wood costs about 50 cents a billet (billet=chunk of split log). 400 billets to a cord. My woodstove is old and the gasket came off. I bought a new one, but didn’t get around to replacing it, so the woodstove is not very efficient. It burned about a billet an hour. If I had a new gasket, figure less by as much as half

The woodstove costs 50 cents an hour and can heat our small house, about 1000 square feet on the first floor and 600 square feet on the second floor. I built the second floor and it is over insulated, so it is easy to heat.

I figure that the woodstove is putting out the equivalent of 3 kilowatts so that at 13 cents per kwh, it would be cheaper to use an electric heater to do the same work. (I found the 13 cents per kwh on the internet and I am not confident in the figure.)

With an airtight stove the wood is cheaper than electricity, but without the gasket the electric heater is cheaper.

Yesterday, my two year old fancy high efficiency boiler died. The heat has been erratic for a couple of days and the house has been cold. I thought that the circulation pump had failed so I bought another one at almost $200. A little while later I looked at the boiler’s computer display to check that the water was getting hot and I saw the "F05" error flashing. The manual says this is because the output temperature is over 250 degrees. The real reason is that the thermister (usually spelled thermistor, but the part you order has an er at the end) has failed showing the temperature as high, even though the temperature is low.

I had to spend $27 for the the thermister plus the cost of overnighting it.

Last year, I had the exact same problem. This thermister fails once a year. While it is failing the heat is erratic, but there is no way to tell what the cause is. It is an easy fix once it finally dies, but the last time it took two weeks and several emails with the Peerless Pinnacle engineers to figure our which thermister to change and what exactly the "F05" error meant. I ordered two thermisters and I am thinking that I should have bought 5 or 6.

This appears to be a serious design flaw in these boilers, and if I had known about it I would have gone with another brand. Now I am stuck with an expensive boiler that needs fixing constantly. I feel sorry for people who have to hire a plumber to do this.

On top of everything I had to sit up next to the woodstove last night to keep the house warm and prevent the pipes, cats and people from freezing. I got maybe two hours sleep and my back is killing me. I’ve been in meetings all morning where I could not stop yawning.

My story Speed Trap is back. Now it owns 25 rejections. It’s the story of a car alarm that is way too good at it’s job. It’s violent, dark, cerebral and not really spec-fic enough for magazines that seem to want feminist zombie stories. I’ll file it away for another few months. Maybe I could rewrite it with another plot line. Maybe the alarm shouldn’t win. This started as a story about a house alarm that kept killing Johovah’s witnesses. I didn’t write it because I figured that wouldn’t go over big, but looking back, I might have sold that story.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is changing their publishing schedule to 6 times a year from 11 times a year. The new issues will be bigger, but not twice as big.

This makes sense on one level, because it saves the publisher money in print and postage costs. On another level, the readership is getting less fiction per year.

A few writers will not be able to sell to F&SF because they will publish fewer stories each year so it is bad news for those trying to break into the pro markets.

I recently tried to read an issue of F&SF. It was mostly not to my taste. I wanted to review it, but I could not find enough positive things to say about it. Not that it was bad, but I just did not enjoy the stories as much as used to. Magazines tend to have a variety of stories in order to appeal to different tastes and as a result no one likes all of the stories and often I don’t like any of them.

I have some ideas about how a major Spec-Fic zine can leverage its current circulation in order to increase the paid readership. I will have to write up an article some day. Unfortunately there is not much money in the reading public.

F&SF to change publishing schedule

I am putting the book stuff in a separate section to make Justine happy. Right now it is just a list. I have to make it a real blog with comments and stuff, but that can wait a bit. I still have some html issues, which I hope will be worked out by the time you get to read this.

Books Read – Serpent Mage by Greg Bear